Infection Z (Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

my sister. My frigging family. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”
    Newbie lifted his heavy hands. Pressed them against Hayden’s chest. He stared down at Hayden. “Don’t. You don’t want to fight here. Believe me.”
    Hayden backed away and turned to his sister. He stepped over the remains of the dead they’d been burning and grabbed his sister’s skinny arm again. “You stay inside in future. You stay—”
    “Oh piss off, Hayden.”
    Clarice’s words surprised Hayden. He’d never heard her swear at him. They never argued, not really. They didn’t even bicker much as kids, probably because they were bound together by the collective loss of their older sister.
    “I’m just looking out for—”
    “I don’t know what frigging guilt complex you have going on inside your head, but you’re right to be feeling it.”
    Sarah stepped up to Clarice. “Hun, leave it.”
    “No, I won’t leave it,” she said, pushing Sarah’s hand away. She looked Hayden right in his eyes. “All my late teens I’ve had to deal with disappointment after disappointment from you, bro. I’ve had to go through things alone because you were too damned lazy to show up. I’ve had to struggle through my exams, sleep on park benches because I was too scared to go home drunk to Mum and Dad, all because I didn’t have a brother there I could rely on.”
    “Don’t you dare blame your drink and drug problems on me.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of blaming them on you. But the fact is, you could have been there, Hay. And not just for me. You could’ve been there when Dad needed help retiling the kitchen. You could’ve been there when Mum had a seizure and needed some extra company in A&E.”
    “A seizure? When did she—”
    “Exactly, Hayden. Exactly. So whatever guilt problems or responsibility bullshit you’ve got going on, don’t take them out on me. I stepped out of these fences. I took that risk. That was my bad. But it’s not for you to criticise like I’m some kind of disobedient child.”
    She turned and walked back through the gates at the front of the bunker.
    Then, she stopped. Turned around. Looked at Hayden with tearful eyes. “I don’t know exactly what happened in that bedroom with Mum and Dad. I don’t envy what you had to do. But you stepped up. Whatever you had to do, you stepped up. But this man I’m seeing now … I’m seeing nothing more than a coward. A controlling coward. Don’t be that man, brother. Don’t be that person. You’ve isolated enough people in your lifetime to know when to stop.”
    She turned and walked up the grassy verge towards the bunker.
    Hayden watched her disappear, and although he’d saved her, he saw her drifting further and further away, just like everyone involved with him did eventually.

Six
    H ayden gathered the fallen bodies of the zombies and set them on fire a few hundred metres away from the bunker.
    He didn’t like being out here on his own. The leafless branches of the trees scraped together and made noises like groans, voices. And there was the knowledge that zombies walked these woods. They had to do to reach the bunker in the first place.
    But the undead had to be burned. If they didn’t burn them, there was a strong possibility their rotting bodies would harbour and pass on some nasty diseases.
    And if not, it still made sense to burn the bodies because it was the only way of truly ensuring the undead stayed dead. It took neck damage to deal with them. But sometimes the neck damage was difficult. Sometimes they had to be burned away completely before truly stopping them, and even then their fingers or toes kept on twitching way after their skin and muscle had crumbled to ashes.
    Hayden dropped the match on the pile of six bodies in the middle of the open area. It was far away enough from the trees that there wouldn’t be much risk of a forest fire. Or shit—maybe he was just making that up as he went along. There was a lot of that, now. In a world