LZR-1143: Infection by Bryan James Read Free Book Online Page A

once in his directly, slammed her foot on the accelerator. The car powered backward, the small engine humming in surprise. The creature fell forward, suddenly bereft of his support, sprawling forward into our now vacant space.
    “Son of a bitch!” Kate screamed, more startled than angry, throwing the car into first and accelerating forward, into the hunched-over figure.
    I braced myself against the back of both front seats, arms flying from my sides and elbows locking in anticipation of impact. Not against the target, but against the wall behind him.
    The front fender caught him in the jaw, just as the head turned ignorantly upwards to meet the coming challenge. The head was separated from the body instantly, landing prominently on the hood of the car and rolling off to the side. I caught a fleeting image of the blank stare and then secondary impact. Kate slammed the brakes as soon as the decapitation had been achieved, but given the fifteen feet or so of lead space she had used to accelerate, it looked like we needed at least three feet of braking space. We had two.
    We all jerked forward as the airbags in the front seat deployed, and the car came to a stop, the front end crumpling back slightly into the engine compartment. The airbags abruptly deflated. I peeled my fingers from their grips on the front seats, and looked to both sides groggily. Fred and Erica had both hit the seats in front of them, but they looked fine. Kate shook her head and looked back at us. I tentatively reached up to touch my forehead, feeling the warm sensation of blood heating my fingers as I did. They came away sticky and red from a small laceration above my right eye. A single tear of blood dripped off my eyebrow as Kate turned around.
    “Shit. Look at your head. Sorry about that, I… ”
    Whatever she was going to say was interrupted by the shattering of glass on the passenger side of the back seat. I turned to the sight of Erica’s head being pulled violently back over the shards of remaining glass, and a mouth firmly attaching itself to her jugular, clamping down firmly as she screamed, blood spraying against the roof of the car in spurts. Two more creatures followed her attacker, stymied in their own approach only by the narrow passage afforded between our car and the adjoining vehicle, which pathway was currently blocked by the dining intruder.
    I grabbed the hair of the creature and tried to dislodge its toothy grip. Erica continued to struggle, her scream now garbled by the intrusion of teeth into her larynx; hair matted with crusted blood fell across her face, as the intruder’s head ground slowly against her neck. In frustration, I balled my fist, striking the back of the creature’s head as hard as I could and forcing it from its meal. I grabbed the hair on the top of Erica’s forehead, pulling her head back into the car as forcefully as possible.
    “Drive!” I screamed, as her head snapped forward, tears streaming from her eyes, and her lifeblood pooling in the hollow of her neck and trickling down her torso, relocating to a stain of widening moisture on the chest of her scrubs. Her attacker’s hand was still clamped on the back of her neck as the ignition stuttered, catching on the third try, and the car rocketed backwards.
    Erica screamed again as her neck became the prize in a tug of war between the creature and the car, the latter prevailing only as the creature’s arm was sheared off at the shoulder, our car slamming its side into the adjoining SUV and scraping the thing off on the corner of the monstrous vehicle. I pressed my hand against her neck, which was a fountain of blood, as Kate navigated the rows of parked cars and sped toward the exit.
    The engine was protesting too much, stammering when given gas; steam rose faintly from the crumpled front end, ghosting past the front window in a modest but constant trail of condensation. No-Name was crouched bravely against the now limp airbag, having distanced himself