Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse by Nicholas Ryan Read Free Book Online

outrage.
    “You just took off into the dark, you son-of-a-bitch!” Jed hissed. “You just left us.”
    I shook my head – then realized that in the darkness, shaking my head was a useless gesture. “I didn’t leave you,” I said. “I just moved before I had time to change my mind. I thought you two were right behind me.”
    I heard Harrigan’s voice, sharp and tense, loom out of the night. “Well we weren’t,” he said. “You should have waited, Mitch. That was stupid. Next time, wait until we’re ready. And make sure we know what you’re doing. I don’t want to go through that again,” he said, and there was an ominous tone of warning and suppressed violence in his words that left me in no doubt that he too had been frightened, and that I should not take Harrigan’s Christian nature of benign benevolence for granted. He was letting me know that he was a nice guy – because he chose to be.
    A warning.
    I got to my feet, and groped like a blind man in the dark until I felt Harrigan’s shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “I gave us all a fright. It won’t happen again.”
    Harrigan might have said something – I’m not sure, but if he did, his words were drowned out by the sharp sound of Jed suddenly crying out in horror. He was standing on the other side of me. I felt the rub of his shoulder and his rigid tension. “Jesus Christ! Look at that!”
    My head snapped round, and I peered over the top of the fence.
    My body went ice cold.
    I had to screw my eyes into n arrow slits against the maniacal shriek of the beaten wind, but that didn’t diminish the horror.
    The land beyond the fence was clear. It might have been a suburban park , but the grass was long and swaying in the night. It stretched for maybe two hundred yards, and then the ground began to rise gradually to a hilly crest that was built out by suburban homes.
    The hill was on fire.
    I could see at least a dozen buildings ablaze, the flames flickering into the night sky, as if lashing out in anger at the rain. I couldn’t see smoke, but I could smell it in the air, and the burning skyline created a red-orange backlight that gave me a view clear across to the far side of the park.
    In the night sky – not fifty feet from the fence – was the dark shape of the helicopter. It was very low, the skids beneath the fuselage seeming to scrape and slash at the grass as the craft swayed perilously from side to side. But even so close, and even with the fire blazing across the distant hills, still the helicopter’s shape was dull and blurred, and I realized it was because the helicopter had been painted black.
    I felt Harrigan suddenly squeeze my arm, and his grip was vice-like and painful.
    “We ’ve got problems,” he said.
    I frowned, not understanding – and then saw a blur of movement in the distance.
    I stared for long seconds . The rain was a grey misting curtain that beat down in a vertical haze. But through it – right on the edge of the field, I suddenly saw several shapes. They moved like ghostly apparitions, seeming to hover and undulate through the driving squalls. The shapes were lit by the glow of the fire, but it was an uncertain light, and it took me many moments before I suddenly realized what I was seeing.
    There was at least a dozen of them – a dozen undead – drifting through the long grass of the field, drawn towards the sound of the helicopter, and moving in a long ragged line, like a pack of wolves stalking a wounded prey.
    I heard movement in the dark beside me and I glanced sideways. It was Jed, his big muscled frame hanging against the fence and peering into the night – seeing the horror that I was seeing, and, by the sound of his voice, feeling the same fear.
    “We can’t fight them all off.”
    “I know,” I agreed. “Not with a couple of pistols and a crow-bar.”
    I tore my eyes back to the bucking, swaying shape of the helicopter. “If he doesn’t try to land now, they’ll be on him before we can rescue