Jake's Law: A Zombie Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

for Ingrid Bergman. He had once watched For Whom the Bell Tolls three times in a row just to gaze into her mesmerizing blue eyes.
    A sudden sound tore his mind from his daydream . He glanced down the canyon in alarm, but it was only the two roosters fighting for territory, not coyotes. Predators like coyotes and mountain lions were becoming more numerous and bolder and had made several attempts at his animals. The chickens quickly settled back down. It amazed him how much like chickens humans were. They staked out claims to small parcels of land and fought all comers for a few kernels of corn. That same lack of cooperation had doomed mankind. Now, the zombies ate humans like humans ate chickens. He wondered if they considered humans to be finger licking good.
    The temperature soared as the day wore on. By noon, his thermometer read 101. It was almost monsoon season, but he thought it would be weeks before the monsoons came, bringing with them a few clouds, a brief respite from the heat, and life-giving rain. He retreated to the relative coolness inside. He hadn’t installed air conditioning. That would have been too large a load for the solar panels, but he had fans. They moved sufficient air to keep the inside of the house comfortable. Part of the rear wall of the house was built into the solid cliff face, providing a heat sink that retained the heat of the day in the winter and the cool of the night in the summer.
    His roof-mounted solar panels provided electricity for a refrigerator to store food, but he kept his refrigerated supplies to a minimum in the event of several consecutive cloudy days. Mostly he used it for beer. A large pile of oak firewood chopped and split from trees higher up the slope was stacked beside the house. The wood fueled his fireplace, offering heat in the winter and doubling as a means of cooking if he ran out of propane for the stove.
    He pitied the survivors living on scraps and huddling in their homes afraid to venture out for supplies, but not enough to search them out and invite them to share his domain. He had prepared and they hadn’t. It wasn’t quite survival of the fittest, but it came damn close. Those in the large cities had fared worst. When supplies had stopped entering from outside, riots had broken out, then full-scale turf wars over limited resources. He had heard tales of cannibalism, but he didn’t know if they were true. However, determined people often did whatever was necessary to survive.
    By late afternoon, he had grown restless. The continued cloud of smoke over San Manuel disturbed him. He knew a few people still lived there, though he didn’t know how they managed to survive in a town filled with thousands of zombies. Probably less than that , he corrected himself. Many people had fled the city for imagined safety in the FEMA shelters set up in Phoenix and Tucson. Others had been killed by zombies, mostly infected loved ones they had refused to restrain, and a few had chosen suicide when they had become infected. By his estimate, less than a few hundred zombies remained in the area, enough to pose a considerable problem, since the only road out of the area led right through town. Too many to shoot .
    When he went among the zombies, he carried his R-15 450 Bushmaster. Its light weight made it portable. He had replaced the weapon’s original clip with an aftermarket thirty-round clip. The semi-automatic used the same .45 caliber 260-grain ammunition as his Remington Model 1911 R1 pistol, reducing the different types of ammo he needed to keep on hand. He had other weapons, like the Versa Max 12-gauge shotgun, but those two sufficed in most instances. He also carried a crossbow for silent killing. He had learned that noise attracted zombies. The Parker Concorde bow fired twenty-inch bolts like a rifle, complete with 3X scope and pistol grip. It cocked automatically at the push of a button, using a CO2 cartridge. It was a formidable weapon, saving the R-15 for difficult