Dead Hunger II: The Gem Cardoza Chronicle by Eric A. Shelman Read Free Book Online

to go – were probably fifteen zombies.  They didn’t appear to have seen us yet, but from where we were I could see the overturned security jeep and the bodies of the guards that Flex and Hemp had killed on our first visit here. 
    They were nothing but skeletons now, but two zombies were still hunched over them, eating God knew what. 
    The rain had finally let up, which was good.  And without warning, the door to the Suburban opened and out stepped Charlie.
    “Flex, what the fuck!” I shouted into the walkie.
    “I didn’t tell her to do that, Gem!”
    I honked my horn, but Charlie didn’t look.  Instead she reached into her quiver and held six arrows in one hand, slapped one into the crossbow, aimed and fired.
    Dead hit.  Another.  Right through the eye.  The two zombies fell almost simultaneously.
    I heard machine gun fire and saw Hemp had joined her, but our friends were still outnumbered.  Hemp was focused on three of the creatures who were approaching my car.  With a determined look on his face, he swung that MP5 around with dead precision and exploded two of their heads in rapid succession.
    The third had reached the Crown Vic and was pounding on the door of the car, leaving bloody smears wherever its hands touched.  I almost fired right through the passenger side window, but Trina was beside me.  I struggled for a moment with what I should do.
    Its face smeared against the glass and its strange eyes hungered for the visual enticement that was the flesh of living, breathing humans.  God how I wanted to kill it.
    But as I pulled Trina’s face away from the creature and continued to stare through the glass, I saw Hemp running full speed toward it.  I wasn’t sure of his plan, but seconds later, with a flying kick, he knocked it back five feet.  It tumbled to the ground and as it tried to get up, Hemp stood over it and triggered a long burst of gunfire into its brain, rendering it a mass of bloody, meaty pulp.
    No sooner than this threat had been dealt with, I saw five more come around the corner of the building and move in, the eerie eye shine prevalent as they shambled toward where Hemp and Charlie were locked in battle.  Hemp was now preoccupied with two that were closer to Charlie, who had taken down three more but was too engaged to recapture her arrows.  She now had only three arrows remaining in her quiver.  She fired off another that plunged through the side of the head of one of the things that appeared to have been a nurse in a former life.  The creature dropped like a stone, dark congealed blood oozing from the wound.
    And now two more moved toward her.  She rushed toward one of the first ones she’d plugged, yanked the arrow out, locked it in and took out another dead walker.
    I held my breath watching her through the windshield, my hand on my Uzi.
    “Get down, Trina.  On the floor now!”
    Trina began to cry, and I said, “Honey, we’ll be okay.  Just get down, please.”
    She did.
    As I watched in horror, Charlie mounted another arrow and raised the sight to her eye.  She let the arrow fly and it shattered the cheekbone of what might have been a sixteen year old girl in a former life, now staggering along in one Van’s tennis shoe and a destroyed sock.  Its brain was not hit, however, for she kept walking toward Charlie.
    I’d had enough.
    “Flex, I’m going.  There are too many for them.”
    But I looked up and saw that Flex had already exited his truck and held the trigger of his K7 down, blowing the head clean off a former maintenance worker who still wore his tool pouch.  The muck and gore ran down his chest and filled the leather tool carrier with blood and flesh as the animal-human dropped to the pavement.
    I dropped the walkie on the seat of the car and said to Trina, “Stay put and lock the doors when Gemmy gets out, okay?”
    “Okay,” she said, her tears still flowing.
    Charlie had mounted another arrow and as the young girl in the single Van tennis shoe