The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 4) by Luke Duffy Read Free Book Online Page A

smile and a shrug of her shoulders, her eyes remaining focussed on the wall of blackness around them.
    “Yeah, he always has been, and he seems to be getting worse.”
    “He’s like one of those grumpy old men that every street had when we were kids with a huge collection of confiscated footballs in his shed.”
    Tina laughed, picturing Ron in that exact same light, snatching away anything that landed in his garden, and refusing to hand it back to the pleading children of the neighbourhood. They both fell silent again, lost in their own thoughts for a while.
    “You’re worried about them, aren’t you?”
    “Al and Tommy, you mean?” Tina clarified, knowing that she did not really need to. “Yeah, I don’t like the waiting and not knowing.”
    A sudden gust of cold wind wafted towards them, hitting the base of the wall and travelling up over the parapet. Both of them grimaced at the foul stink that the breeze carried and the discomfort they felt against their exposed flesh. In unison, they hunched their shoulders and stuffed their hands into their pockets.
    “They’re the best we have,” Gary continued in a reassuring voice, hoping to put Tina’s mind at ease.
    Despite her efforts, he had always been able to see beyond her façade of cold indifference. They all could.
    “They know what they’re doing better than any of us,” he continued. “They’ve been out there a million times.”
    “That’s what worries me.” She turned and looked at him.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Look around you, Gary. All we have left are semi-trained civilians and a few of the original platoon that was assigned to the base. The rest are gone, dead, including the pilots. Those two lunatics out there are our best hope, and if they don’t come back, we’re fucked.”
    Gary watched her, thinking on her words and understanding that without Al and Tommy, it would be virtually impossible for them to make it through the wilderness. Finally, he shrugged, clearing his throat and stomping his feet against the steel grates of the walkway.
    “I think you worry too much, boss. I’m sure they’re both just fine.”

 
    3
     
    “Fuck,” Al howled, squeezing back on the trigger. It was more of an instinct than a consciously thought out reaction.
    With a burst of rapid flashes, the first of his rounds spewed from the barrel of his rifle, ripping through the space between him and the ghouls that were standing in the doorway. Pieces of shelving fragmented as the hot, metal slugs punched through them, sending up chunks of jagged aluminium in all directions. Others thwacked into the walls and the window frames, flinging clods of mouldy plaster and rotten wood through the air. In the glow of the eruptions, the face of the approaching corpse was highlighted for a split second, its head instantly snapping backwards as one of the bullets punched a hole through its face and into its skull, spattering the remains of its decomposed brains across the shelves behind it. It veered off to the side, dropping to its knees, and then smashing face first into the floor.
    In the restricted space of the store, the report of the rifle fire was painfully loud, causing the air pressure to change violently despite the suppressor attached to the barrel of Al’s rifle. More shots exploded from close by as Tommy stepped into the fight, moving to the right of Al and creating a base of fire from where they would attempt to batter back the crowd before they came too close. More heads shattered as the speeding bullets ploughed through them, sending up clouds of fragmented bone and putrefied brains into the atmosphere of the shop. Already, the smell of rotted blood, fetid internal organs, and cordite was rapidly mixing into a noxious stench, stinging at the eyes of the living. The corpses continued to drop.
    “Cover the right,” Al screamed as he loosed off another volley of shots. “They’re coming through the fucking windows. Cover the right, Tommy.”
    Tommy turned