Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

pileups of cars and bodies cautiously, she turned her eyes to the horizon. There was, at least, a chance—a chance of survivors, a chance there would be someone out there.
    She just hoped she wasn’t too late.
     

 
~8~
     
     
    Dez Fox
     
     
     
    It took half an hour for the swarm of dead to pass by. It felt like ten hours. Biel huddled down with the kids, both giving and taking comfort, while Dez crouched by the front of the bus and peered out through a peephole. Some of the dead came down the road from the direction of the rescue station. More soldiers, but also quite a few ordinary folk. Farmers and people dressed in whatever clothes they wore when they died. There was no uniformity to what the citizens wore either, nor was there any particular variety. In movies about the end of the world there were usually people dressed as clowns, as nuns, as bakers, as convenience store clerks. Like that. Each different so that the filmmakers could make some kind of statement. Not here. These zombies were just people. Unique in that they had each been an individual with a life, a future, a past, an identity, but turned homogenous in death. They were all hungry, all torn, all ragged, all beginning to rot, all undead.
    And all of them would have battered their way through the cracked windows of the old school bus if they knew what was inside. From the oldest to the youngest, the strongest to the weakest, they would become an attacking army. Only the rotting flesh of their own kind made them pass by without pausing, without noticing, without knowing.
    These thoughts shambled through Dez’s mind with the same slow, deliberate gait as the zombies. She had never been the top student in her class, except in the Army and the police academy. In school she’d been a C student cruising the edges of frequent suspension and likely expulsion. But that did not mean she was not a thinker. The long hours of the nights since the fall of man had given her so much time to brood and ponder that she now considered herself a philosopher on the nature and specifics of the apocalypse. A new field of study and one in which she could hold her own as an expert against anyone.
    That thought, though, made her immediately think of Billy Trout. He’d broken the story of the rogue bioweapon that had caused all this. His live broadcasts, placed on YouTube and blasted through social media, had focused the eyes of the world on Stebbins County. His pleas for mercy had kept the town from being thoroughly sterilized, including the school where the last of the living had been hiding. And, afterward, when the convoy of busses had set out, he stopped several times each day to give updates on the fall.
    This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse.
    It had almost been a joke except that no one thought it was funny.
    Where was Billy? He was the real thinker. He was the one who had always been in touch with his emotions. More so than Dez, who’d always mocked him for it.
    She would give so much to have him back here right now. To hear his voice, even if he was saying something that made her mad. She’d even sit through a whole day of his liberal politics if it meant having him back. If it meant knowing he was alive.
    Damn.
    Outside a last zombie staggered out of the woods, a fat woman walking on a shattered foot, limping slower than the others, straggling behind.
    “Come on you stupid cow,” muttered Dez, too quiet even for the huddled kids to hear.
    The dead woman fell to her knees, took an excruciating time getting back to her feet, walked five steps, fell, got up. Rinse repeat.
    It took nearly fifteen minutes for the crippled corpse to walk to the crest of the hill.
    Dez relaxed by very slow degrees. She went to the back of the bus to watch the lame zombie vanish over the hill, then to the front again to make sure that one really was the last.
    It was.
    For now, at least.
    The children sat in silence, none of them visibly reacting the end of the