Deadlocked 5 by A.R. Wise Read Free Book Online Page B

familiar with buildings like this because I generally avoided them. It had four smokestacks, and the central building was at least fifty feet tall, with only a spat tering of tiny windows along its otherwise flat walls. The elements had ravaged the construction and large chunks of siding had been stripped away, exposing steel beams beneath that looked skeletal in the flashing lighting. The fence was strung with loops of razor wire and corrugated metal walls lined the outer portion. Animals had wormed their way into several openings, but I noticed recent repairs that revealed their youth by shimmering in the light.
    Who would take up residence at an industrial park?
    Survivors desperately tried to form new societies after the apocalypse. Large groups of people banded together and took back entire towns all across the western United States. They would secure a portion of a city, fence it off, and then set about determining the way their new union would survive. Many of these colonies broke apart due to internal bickering, but many more were able to establish a strong foundation for what they hoped would become the seed of a new civilization. For the better part of the first decade, I found solace in several of these newly established colonies. I traveled between them, hitching rides with trade caravans that operated between some of the larger townships. Despite the horror that we'd witnessed, there was exuberance among the Reds back then. They actually thought things would get better in time. They were wrong.
    Once the mutated zombies began to appear, we discovered that life would never be easy again. This second wave of the disease created walking dead that were immune to the bacterial growth that killed the original zombies, the ones we'd begun calling 'Poppers' due to their propensity for internal hemorrhages. The mutated zombies could live indefinitely as long as they fed, but unlike the Poppers, the new zombies, which we called 'Greys' due to their distinctive skin color, were happy to feed on animals if necessary.
    The Greys descended upon the towns slowly at first, but their numbers grew at a frightening rate. The lights and sound of a living colony attracted them, and they were desperate to get in. Many towns did an admirable job of protecting themselves from the invasion, but then the original virus reappeared. Suddenly, as the towns were trying to keep the Greys out, the virus demolished them from the inside out.
    A few forts have managed to survive, but the vast majority of the larger, fortified towns have long since fallen. These days it was easier to keep moving. The Greys are slow, and they travel in packs, which means they're easy to avoid if you don't stay in one place for too long. The virus that causes the Poppers seems to require that people stay in one place for a long time to get started, which also made a nomadic lifestyle attractive. That's why this industrial park, which had clearly been used as a permanent home for someone, was an anomaly.
    I followed the fence around to what had once been a parking lot. The side of the fence was scorched, and the plants on my side of it looked young, as if they'd sprouted within the past month or two. When I rounded the corner of the fence and stepped onto the concrete parking lot I noticed that the signs of scorching marred the ground there as well. Every six feet there was a hole cut in the bottom of the fence that a metal pipe was pushed through. I knelt down and stuck my finger into one of the pipes and discovered a thick, black residue. I sniffed it and realized it was a fuel of some type. This fence was a trap. Anything that was drawn to it could be set aflame by an innovative delivery system of accelerant.
    The fence connected to the building that five vehicles, each covered by a tarp, were parked in fron t of, but there was also a gate closer to me that was partially open and led into a second paved lot. I felt exposed and vulnerable as I snuck along the edge of