Afterburn: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

filled him with a nameless fear—it was too still and dead. No lawn mowers, no bicyclists, no postal carriers or UPS drivers or stay-at-home mothers pushing baby carriages.
    The only movement was the driver with the bleeding scalp, who now knelt with his face to the sky. Lars headed toward the man, cautious, his analytical mind clicking through plausible reasons for what was happening. But the list kept ending in random impressions that didn’t add up.
    He called to the man, who made no response. When Lars reached down to help, the man looked at him. It was the eyes that immediately told Lars that something was wrong—not just something, but everything . Those eyes were like furnaces, boiling with yellow and red, made all the more terrible by the blood pouring down the man’s face. The man reached up with an arm that was so twisted it must’ve been severely broken, but his fingers closed on Lars’s T-shirt and yanked him close, mouth opening to bite him.
    All the evidence yielded a firm solution: Run.
    He ran to his Honda, which had the keys in the ignition because it was that kind of neighborhood. The car didn’t start, didn’t even click or turn over, and by the time he gave up, the fiery-eyed man was pounding on the window. Lars rolled out the passenger side and sprinted down the sidewalk.
    He didn’t stop running until he reached the school. The playground was littered with bodies, but there were also screams and shrieks as some children attacked others. Lars ran to his wife’s classroom, knocking over a couple of children in the hall whose eyes didn’t look right, but before he could enter, he saw his daughter.
    Annelise stood in the doorway, blood staining the floral print of her summer dress, hands caked with gore. He said her name, like a question, not quite believing it was her. Her ice-blue Scandinavian eyes were gone, replaced by twin hells.
    And beyond the door, just inside the room, a stocking-sheathed leg stretched across the floor tiles. Beside the foot was one of his wife’s wedge sandals. Spotted with red.
    He bellowed in rage, panic, fear, and a sorrow so deep he couldn’t give it a name. Before he could decide what to do, more children gathered in the doorway. All of them with those horrifying eyes.
    Run.
    He knew he was a coward, but he couldn’t help it. His wife was dead and that thing couldn’t have been his daughter.
    So he ran until he finally figured out what had happened. Mostly by finding others, piecing together the failure of the power grid, the piles of bodies, and the strange actions of those not-quite-human creatures. In those early days, running was interspersed with hiding and praying and occasionally killing. That was the “mutant” part of his “Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my” mantra.
    The monsters came sometime during the second year, when Lars joined a small group of survivors that planned to head for Atlanta, figuring the Centers for Disease Control would have some kind of answer. They hadn’t even made it fifty miles from Asheville when disaster struck. Since Zaps had apparently banded together in large cities and were rarely seen anymore, the group felt safe traveling in the open to make better time. Besides, all of them were armed with the best civilian firepower on the planet.
    But as they crossed a bridge one April morning, when the mists hung heavy over the river valley, a deep roar resonated in the distance. As the group debated the source of the noise, it came again, this time much closer. Before they could decide on a course of action, the decision was made for them—one of their number was seized and yanked over the side of the bridge with a great splashing and squealing.
    The motion was so swift and sinuous that Lars only got a glimpse of the massive limb. It was a slick, suckered tentacle. Several people opened fire, no doubt hitting the poor woman who was plucked from the human world and dragged into a horror show. Lars didn’t stick around to