Snareville by David Youngquist Read Free Book Online

much more than that. Princeton seems to be mostly Zeds. We’re okay down in the valley, and we've made contact with the Mennonites. They’re okay, too. Other than that, there’s not much left.”
    Tony slowed as he stacked a flat full of bottled water. “God. We didn’t know. We couldn’t get out. I couldn’t raise anyone on the radio, and no one was broadcasting. We lost power four weeks ago. Haven’t heard anything since.”
    We were just about finished. Oil was done, fluids were topped off, and trucks were loaded. Someone lifted a corner of the plastic on the doors behind us. The deaders were still out there, but not packed in quite so tight. We checked the windows in front of us. It looked clear. Good thing the bastards didn’t have much brains left.
    I pulled a box of shotgun shells out of the stack in the back of my truck and handed it to Tony for his riot gun. His pistol was a different caliber than mine, so we couldn’t fix that.
    “ Load up. We’re going out. I’m gonna need every gun on hand. Keep it loaded. Head shots only, unless you can bust a hip and put the thing down. We don’t do body shots.”
    Tony looked at me kind of funny and started to say something. I interrupted.
    “ This is my platoon, Tony. I give the orders. Like it or not, there’s no law left. You can either fight with us, or you can go be a gardener or build fences when we get back to Snareville, but right now, I need guns.”
    He frowned, but he nodded. I laid out the plan with the rest of the crew. The first two trucks would make the swing to the right out the doors and block the Zeds from the back of the store. The second two trucks would pull out, wait for a couple people on the ground to close the garage doors, then load them up and pull out of the lot across the curb. My truck would play tail-end Charlie. We’d cover the rear. We'd leave the opposite way we came in, which meant a lot of off-street driving. Everyone had the four-wheel-drive locked in. We were ready.
    As soon as the back doors started to go up, the chains rattled. For a quick second, the Zeds stopped moaning. The guys on the doors pulled as fast as they could. We didn’t need them open all ten feet. I only wanted enough room to get out. The moans started again, and I could tell the direction had shifted. The deaders came our way.
    Bill swung out to the right. John followed. The trucks stopped nose to tail across the small paved area that lent access to the back of the store. There was the swarm.
    We opened up on them from less than fifty yards. Shotguns, rifles, pistols—everyone threw rounds into the wall of rotted bodies. Heads exploded; body parts sheared away. Still, they came. Tony dropped a fast mover. The kid looked no more than twelve, but he was determined to get up in the bed of the truck. Tony swung the barrel down and pulled the trigger, and the kid’s head evaporated. Momentum slammed the corpse into the tailgate. It left a black smear across the red paint before it rolled away. Tony paused for a moment.
    “ Don’t stop!” I shouted. “Pour it on!”
    Tony went back to work. He thumbed shells into the bottom of his gun to feed it as he shot and pumped. I swept the field with my AR. Some shots I picked. Others just passed through Zeds and moved on to the horizon. One magazine went dry. I dropped it, slapped another into place, and kept shooting.
    I heard the garage doors drop into place. I glanced over as my two ground guys started to climb into the backs of the trucks. Then I saw the pack of fast movers running up from the dock.
    I shifted the red dot of my Aim-point sight to the head of the first deader. One squeeze of the trigger, and the corpse dropped. I moved to the next. I wasn’t fast enough.
    They balled up on Mike and dragged him off the back of his ride. Tony turned to help, but they were too far away for his shotgun to do much good. The trucks sped past me. I heard Mike scream my name. I saw his hand stretched out from the