The Wanderers by Permuted Press Read Free Book Online Page B

the dragging walk of the living dead from that of the wounded who tried to stagger away.
    Moreover, one of destiny’s dark plans desired that one of the trains was to transport several merchandise trains; and although most of them were textile, the ones in the back contained sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide. The container cars remarkably withstood the head-on collision and still resisted the next ten minutes, but they finally overflowed and the contents mixed, forming a large acid lake that emitted enormous toxic clouds. The invisible cloud propagated, swept by a soft autumn breeze. It caused a bothersome throat itch that became unbearable in a few seconds; afterwards it brought on a burning sensation in the chest, and in less than two minutes, it burned the lungs. Those who inhaled the poison ended up coughing blood, incapable of doing nothing other than falling, writhing, to the floor. Then respiratory collapse would overcome them, either due to lung failure or the lack of air due to throats closing and glands swelling.
    In less than half an hour, eighty percent of the population of Ronda had succumbed. Approximately two hours later, most of them walked again, impervious to their dysfunctional lungs and wounds. They finished off the few survivors that were left.
    In La Indiana, about three miles away from Ronda, where the Spanish Legion had its headquarters, the news came with the urgent and firm order to cooperate immediately and completely. They chartered trucks containing a total of eighty troops, all of them wearing masks and gas filters. The suits worked, but the legionnaires were not prepared to face a horde of zombies and the rescue operation became a massacre.
    At the same moment in which one of the living dead ripped out the last of the intestines of a young legionary named Ramon Gonzalez, the wind suddenly changed. It began to blow energetically from the east, spreading the toxic cloud. Death arrived to the Legion’s headquarters, in the shape of a throat itch, some four minutes later. Many of the young men survived the chemical poison and managed to escape the clutches of their comrades once they had opened their eyes after death; they lived their own adventures traveling to the north, trying to survive the madness that had dominated the whole world, but such was the end of the Ronda barracks.
    On a Thursday at 12:20 a.m., the government was declaring a State of Emergency in the entirety of the Spanish territory, and presenting the Chamber of Deputies a report stating a Siege of State. It was a formality without much repercussion: by then, the basic communication channels were already severely damaged. The nation was broken, and dying.
     

Chapter 9
    It was the 24th of October, and Juan Aranda was facing the end of the world. He was twenty-five years old, although he looked much older. The marine breeze made his long, curly black hair flutter, and his gray eyes were looking at some undetermined point in the horizon. The beach stretched around him, made up of sand as cold and gray as the ocean. The waves crashed against the rocks and piles of reeds and the smell of salt flooded his lungs like an invigorating balsam. Blessed aroma, he thought, so far from the putrid stench of the city. He slowly inhaled a cleansing breath. Seagulls soared across the leaden sky. Juan asked himself if they could also be affected, as all of the people around him, but as far as he could see, all of them acted normally.
    He liked the beach because the living dead were never there. Sitting on his little 2005 Honda Foreman with four-wheel drive, he asked himself why. On the beach they moved even slower; the sand made them trip, but it was still strange that he had never found one because they usually were everywhere: inside every building, in each street, in open fields. He recalled the wanderer —that’s what he called them—he had found in the enormous drain pipe that led fluvial waters to the sea. He had found it on a bright