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

find out what swam below the bridge. Once again, he fled, this time back to Asheville.
    He kept mostly to himself after that, figuring the predators that roamed the countryside were more likely to prey on a herd—and by then he thought of humans as little more than the world’s livestock. Even though the Zaps remained a remote threat, those new creatures of tooth and claw and wing and beak were constant and immediate danger.
    A quiet scouting mission could end in some flapping monstrosity soaring down from above and sending talons deep into flesh. A restless night’s sleep could end with a cold-blooded boa coiling around your warmth and squeezing away your final breath. A trip to the creek to replenish water supplies could end with fingers severed by a finned, bubble-eyed phantasm.
    What he couldn’t kill, he ran from. But solitude proved to be even worse than the risk of playing bait, and he eventually sought out other survivors again. They were few and far between. He found a slightly crazed woman who reminded him a little of his late wife, and he took what comfort he could while helping her stay fed and sheltered and unconsumed.
    They took up residence in a bank, sleeping in a ransacked vault at night, using the piles of bills as bedding. Lars’s dirty-blonde beard grew down to his chest, and he took to carrying a double-bladed ax like some ancient Viking explorer.
    They found others and soon moved to Memorial Mission Hospital, which sat on the hill and allowed them to monitor much of the city. They cleared one wing of bodies, sanitized it as best they could, and slept on operating tables and railed beds. Their group grew to a dozen, and Lars’s surrogate wife grew fat with child, much to his horror.
    But when winter came and great frosted and furry beasts padded silently across the snow, food grew short. When another group took refuge in the hospital, they all talked of reclaiming the world in the spring even as they grew thin and pale and weak amid January’s cruelty.
    And so it came that one night, Lars stirred awake to see a silhouette in his room, revealed only by the moonlight reflected off of snow. A blade glinted above him, and he rolled away just as the blow struck the woman beside him. Lars reached under his pillow where he kept a Glock.
    As she gurgled and spat blood, he discovered more people filled the room, searching for his hidden stash of canned food. He emptied his clip before he could even identify them, and amid the stench of gunpowder and steaming guts, he dressed and searched the rest of the wing.
    All of them were dead.
    Humans were murderers.
    There was no hope, no reprieve, no salvation.
    There was only running.
    His feet conveyed him along I-40 and its stream of stranded vehicles, into rest stops and roadside diners, along forest footpaths and rutted dirt roads that were already in the process of vanishing and returning to nature. He hid whenever he saw other people, although such occasions grew rarer and rarer.
    He became cunning at evading the creatures that roamed the land, fighting them only when necessary, and then only the small ones. Some of them, if they looked particularly mammalian, he would butcher and roast over flames, wondering if the meat would poison him.
    Or change him.
    But no change could be worse than what the world had already inflicted upon him. His mutation was complete, his evolution present in the taut strength of his legs and the scars on his hands, his wildness in sync with the unnatural things that flitted and swam and skittered all around him.
    Which led him to this dark night. Lars didn’t know the month, although autumn’s sweet secret decay was in the air, and he didn’t know the year because he’d long since stopped counting. He could barely remember his wife’s name, or the giddy highs of the dot-com boom, or the taste of strawberry milkshake. But through it all, he could never forget Annelise and those scalding cauldrons in her face. And that was the