Days Gone Bad Read Online Free PDF Page A

cylinders. I stacked three of the logs in my left arm, grabbed the axe with my right hand, and headed for the stump just to the east of the cabin.
    After butchering the first log to kindling, I got my rhythm back. I hadn’t chopped wood at the cabin in almost ten years. What was I, sixteen or seventeen back then? Zola used to call it punishment. I laughed to myself. I was too stupid at the time to realize she was using it to help me work off some rage and frustration after a few of our training sessions gone wrong.
    As the axe came down again and the fourth log split seamlessly down the middle with a satisfying crack, I remembered …
     
    “You see it boy?”
    I nodded while my eyes stayed locked on the shimmering ribbon around the body. It was an old hunter. His body was decomposed badly enough I couldn’t even begin to tell what killed him.
    The aura was a slow, twining span of black and white, well balanced and lacking the fuel of hatred, or stress, or pain, or love, or any other human emotion the living have. It was an aura of the dead.
    “The dead have power. It may not be of great use to most of them, but it will be of great use to you.”
    I was only half listening to my master. I could see where bits of the aura should have anchored to the body. More out of boredom than anything else, I focused a tiny needle of power to hook the aura back into place at the root chakra, the base of his spine, and the crown chakra at the top of his head.
    Before I could do anything else, the aura flared blood red and I screamed as the body pulled a knee under itself, pushed off the ground, and leaned back against the tree. It should have fallen apart, but it didn’t. My gaze met those hollow sockets where only decay and maggots should have been. The empty depths of infinity stared back.
    “What did you do, boy!” From the corner of my eye I could see Zola scrambling for something in her cloak.
    The body screamed, though there was no throat left for the air to pass through. The vacant eye sockets flared with a deep blue light. I couldn’t hear the scream anymore; it was replaced by a slow, dark, laugh. A chill wracked my body to its core.
    Zola dove at the abomination. Literally dove. I saw a flash of silver as she rammed something into its right eye socket.
    Something escaped from the wound in a red haze. The aura snapped back into the even black and white flow of the dead. It was still anchored to the body, and the body was still standing, staring at nothing.
    I, however, stared slack-jawed at my master. She claimed to have been over eighty, but there was obviously something else going on. No one should have been able to move that fast at eighty, or seventy, or thirty for that matter.
    Zola’s gaze wandered up and down the body, and then she grimaced. “Well, boy, Ah guess today you’re going to learn how to deal with zombies. Go get the axe.”
     
    I carried a pile of firewood through the door in both arms, laughing.
    “What’s so amusing, boy?” Zola said as she cocked an eyebrow. She stood close to the wood stove.
    “I was thinking about the hunter. Do you remember that?”
    She raised her eyebrows slowly, her forehead crinkled and her eyes smiled. “Of course Ah do, Damian. How could any teacher forget such stupidity?”
    I shrugged and smiled, setting the firewood beside the stove. Well, she did have a point.
    “It is odd you should bring up the hunter.”
    I added two logs to the black woodstove and shut the creaky stove front.
    “You remember the shard Ah thrust into the creature?”
    I nodded. “Yeah, the one with the binding ward worked into it.”
    “You have a good memory.”
    “Well, that kind of thing is hard to forget.”
    She nodded and her hand flexed on the head of her knobby cane. “That is much like our new problem.”
    We stood in the darkness, only the dim moonlight and the orange flicker of the wood stove giving us light in the small living room. The cabin filled with the smell of burning