Double Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

mostly gather at the shoreline till they get bored. A few might stumble out into the Hudson, but those dumb fucks don’t know how to navigate. They get stuck in the mud or pulled along by the current, and I just watch and wave. If I got to, I get in a dinghy and hang out in the middle of the river for a few hours.”
    But , they always asked, that doesn’t explain how you’re so well-fed.
    Carl laughed, then, and taught them his trick.
    A few hours later, they’d be cooked up over a fire. Parts of them dried for jerky. Bones saved for broth. Thigh meat in his belly.
    Guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do to survive.
    But it had been a while since he’d seen any survivors. He’d camped at this spot for a good six months now, because it was a great place to lure the living. He clung to the river’s rocky shore, yes, but right there—no, really, right over there by about fifty yards—was a helipad, and next to that, a parking lot.
    And beyond the parking lot was a hospital. Palisades Medical.
    People loved hospitals. Thought they were safe. Thought they could find medicine . What assholes. Hospital was the worst place to go during the apocalypse. Medical services were barely enough to handle the day-to-day of normal living. Carl once sliced open his thumb when he was preparing a pheasant for taxidermy (that was what he did in his former life, and what made him so good with the knife), and he waited in the emergency room for six hours. Bleeding on the floor. Nurse would come along periodically, drop a towel under his hand and collect the one she’d deposited an hour before—a towel soaked with red.
    If they couldn’t cope with a bleeding thumb, did people really think a hospital could handle the end of the world?
    Hospitals were the first place the military hit—flamethrowers in the hallway to cook the sick and make sure they didn’t come down with a bad case of the corpse-walk flu. Hospitals were the first place that looters hit, too. It was a goddamn charnel house in there. Burned bodies under sheets. A handful of rotters trapped in the hallways, fumbling around like idiots.
    And yet, survivors always showed up. Few got away from him. He offered them a meal: some fish, some cat jerky. Then he drugged them with the tranquilizers he found inside the Medical Center. Or, if he didn’t have the opportunity, he beat them over the head with a bat or stabbed them repeatedly. Death was death however it was achieved, and he found that drugging them made the meat a little goofy. Which was fun to eat, but it slowed him down.
    Still. By now Carl wondered exactly how many survivors were left out there. Last batch he saw come through here didn’t stop in the hospital: a big ol’ rickety RV came bouncing down River Road. They were here, then they were gone.
    Headed West, he suspected. Lots of survivors talked about heading West. They’d all heard the stories, and he guessed in a way it made sense. Midwest was the breadbasket of America, but was suspiciously devoid of people. Most of the country’s population lived at the country’s edges: East Coast, West Coast. Middle was a mushy nowhere wilderness. Iowa? Indiana? Arizona? Not a whole helluva lot out there. But people spread apart meant the sickness didn’t spread so fast. Gave people time. Let them get smart and prepared.
    Rumors went that the country’s breadbasket was a safe haven. That the country still ‘lived,’ now out there in the middle. Red States, triumphant.
    Whatever. Carl didn’t buy it. World was fucking ruined.
    Besides, this was his home. He’d rather die here with his belly full than live a full life as a resident of, what? Nebraska? Piss on that.
    The terrier behind him started to growl again as he let the cat’s internal organs plop down and splash into a pot he held beneath the dead kitty.
    “Pipe down, pooch,” Carl said, growling right back. Except in the evening light he could see the dog was no longer looking at him.
    The dog was staring