Last Stand on Zombie Island by Christopher L. Eger Read Free Book Online Page A

get them to answer.
    Billy and Cat explained briefly the experience they had had that morning, first Cat at the high school and then the two of them together so far at the Elementary school, to catch Durham up-to-date.
    Durham peered out of the window of the classroom to check on the pigtailed girl who had attacked Billy. She was nowhere to be found. Durham walked across the classroom and crumpled enough of the venetian blinds to look out into the parking lot to where he had left the deputy to wait for backup.
    What he saw he would have trouble believing if he had read it in a report.
     
    ««—»»
     
    Spud was, to put it mildly, shitting bricks. He had gotten up that morning and left the house to move some recently acquired goods. On the way to his parole-job doing fast lubes, he was arrested. That meant a parole violation and a return to the repeat offender segregation at Donaldson State Pen for about ten years. He once saw an inmate stabbed in the throat with a plastic spoon there for not being successful sneaking in dope through his wife’s ass.
    However, compared to the current situation, he would rather be in Donaldson. At least you had a fighting chance there.
    When he watched Sergeant Durham smoke those two maniacs that morning, he had fought a strong urge to piss his pants. There is nothing more helpless than being handcuffed in the back of a police car, and forced to be an eyewitness to a vicious double killing. To top it off, here he was at the school he had gone to just a dozen years ago, looking out the window to mutilated bodies.
    Just as they had arrived, Durham had told him to sit tight before running into the school with his shotgun.
    “Where the hell would I go?”
    He saw Durham disappear into the entry of the school and shortly afterwards saw a young girl in pigtails come running out as fast as she could toward the deputy.
    Her whole face was covered with red splotches and her purple neck bulged as she attacked the deputy. She was on top of him and his short scream further abbreviated in a gurgle. Spud half stood up in the back seat to get a better vantage of what was then happening on the ground. Horrified, he saw the little girl shove her fingers down past the deputy’s lips and into his mouth. First, she forced one tiny hand and then the second, all the way in past the wrist. He saw the deputy claw for the pistol at his side before his chest heaved and he stopped moving.
    Spud locked eyes with the pigtailed girl as she looked up from the deputy. She was sitting on his chest with her hands still down his throat almost to her elbows. He looked into her mottled eyes as she pulled a lump of apricot-colored hard flesh out of the stricken man’s throat and tossed it to the ground.
    Spud settled down into the seat as low as he could and tried to melt out of site. He willed his body to turn into jelly and simply puddle down the seat almost to the floorboards. Seconds ticked by with each heartbeat as he closed his eyes and willed the little monster to go away. He wondered with his eyes shut just what she had pulled out of the deputy. His larynx? His heart? Spud swallowed in an attempt to keep from becoming nauseous and prayed that Durham would be back to take him to a nice, safe, jail as soon as possible.
    He felt the thud on the car glass before he heard the sound. He refused to look and started to hyperventilate. It took him a full second, spread out over what seemed like a week, to figure out the next sound he heard. His brain searched the database of stored and catalogued sounds built-up over a lifetime of noises, and identified it.
    The door latch opening.
    Spud rotated his body around as if he was a six year old on a sit and spin again. His hands, handcuffed earlier, were useless behind his back. The rear door of the police car had no interior latch or lock. There was neither window control nor ashtray. All of those normal items were replaced on the police car by a smooth sheet of thick plastic. The