The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse by Peter Meredith Read Free Book Online Page B

their backs it got serious indeed.
    PFC Peters ' unit dropped along a twenty-mile stretch of Okeechobee Road and was told to form one continuous line and not to let anyone across it. The orders were of such a vague nature that on that first day they didn't know which way to face. By the third day they had things worked out and they faced east toward the lights of the city, and on the fourth evening, they began to turn back their first stragglers.
    “ You don't understand,” a man said in a pleading voice. “The dead have risen. They're walking around eating people!”
    They shooed him away, but he was replaced by others who said the same sorts of things and soon rumors went up and down the line like fire before the wind. Peters had the second guard shift on the sixth night of their deployment and he had never been more afraid.
    In the dark things moved and whispered and rifle fire broke out occasionally. Mostly it was one sided with dug in paratroopers firing blindly at imagined monsters, however twice fire was returned and Peters hunkered down when that happened. Near the end of his shift screaming began, running across the night air to freeze his bones. It was about a hundred yards away and then came more rifle fire a long pop, pop, pop and then silence.
    Even after his shift Peters didn 't sleep a wink that night. Gradually it came to be that guards were needed more in the daytime than at night since very few could sleep when the sun sank and the night came alive and the guns flicked little flashes of light.
    On the eighth day the line went through a major shift. Rumor had it that huge sections of the line south of the city had been overrun. Men were shifted southward and their lines were stretched thinly. On the tenth day it happened again. This time whole companies were yanked to fill gaps that had sprung up and the men around him were further away. That day Peters shot his first zombie.
    It was near evening when the thing came stumbling right at his foxhole. Not knowing what it was exactly, Peters stood to show the woman that he had a gun. “Go back!” he yelled. “This is a restricted area. You can't come through here.” The woman didn't listen and kept on coming and so Peters fired a warning shot.
    “ You're going to have to shoot her,” a friend said from the next foxhole as the woman neared. “But don't worry. It won't matter much, since she's already dead.”
    “ Shoot her quick!” a sergeant called from two foxholes down. “She's got the disease!”
    This did it for Peters. He brought the M16 to his shoulder aimed for center mass and fired a single round. The grey-skinned woman went down and no one said a word, while Peters felt the immediate weight of guilt, which vanished in a flash as she got back up again.
    “ What the fuck?” Peters swore. “I hit her. I hit her square in the chest!” Quickly he brought the gun up, flicked the selector switch to 3-round burst and put three more into her. When she got up a second time at least ten of the soldiers in the foxholes around him fired on her, and this time she stayed down.
    When the story of the woman made its way up and down the line, the fear among the soldiers grew to such a degree that gunfire became the norm that night. Anything that moved was shot at: leaves and birds sometimes, people at others and zombies when they came their way. But mostly bullets were fired at imaginary enemies and by the thirteenth day many soldiers were low on ammo and what was left had to be distributed among them.
    “ When are we going to be resupplied?” Peters asked his sergeant. This earned him a shrug. “And what about artillery? Shouldn't we have some mortars at least?”
    “ Nope,” the buck sergeant answered. “Rules of engagement: no artillery, no air power. If you can't identify what you're shooting at then you can't shoot.”
    “ But you can't tell what they are until they're right up on us!”
    The sergeant s pat in the dirt and said, “Yup. It's