Jenny Undead (The Thirteen: Book One) Read Online Free PDF Page B

head was
already starting to ache and her ears throb by the time she reached
the pole. She stood in front of the rotter, which alternated
between shrieking and snapping his teeth at her. His skin was
greasy and rotting away, his eyes shriveled and white, a putrid
smell coming off of him that made Jenny's stomach churn.
    She'd been seeing these everywhere: Rotters
strung up like they were being crucified. It was sick, but Jenny
was sure there was some point being made if she thought about it
long enough. This one had his hands bound behind him with strips of
leather. His ankles, too. Holding him up on the pole were three
huge metal spikes right through the rotter's chest. Black liquid
had soaked into a ragged button-up shirt where the spikes had
pierced him. Jenny wondered if it hurt him. Could the undead feel
pain?
    She looked around to see if anyone was watching.
Righteous women weren't supposed to touch weapons. She could just
put him out of his misery. And everyone else's misery. Just as she
started to hike up her skirt for her knife, the gruesome face
stopped screaming. It just stared blankly for a few seconds,
unblinking and slack-jawed. Jenny took a step back, shocked. The
head started screaming again as she backed against the side of the
building.
    She thought the rotter looked familiar, but she
hadn't expected this. The face, under all the rot and dried blood
and hate-filled shrieks, was one she knew very well. He might be a
zombie now, but that face used to belong to someone else. Her
grandfather, Dr. Frank Bierce.
    Jenny stared at his dead eyes, no colder than
they had been in life. Her hand tightened, still gripping the
handle of the knife. She pulled it out and held it in front of her.
This man had caused her so much pain. He had forced her to flee
from her family in the first place. If Jenny thought about it,
everything could be attributed to him. Her being here, pretending
to be someone she wasn't. People said the plague had really been
his fault and not her mother's. She believed that. He would release
a pathogen into the wild just to study it. And her mother had been
too terrified to do anything but follow him.
    And here he was, staring at Jenny between
screams, snapping gray teeth just to get a taste of her. He wasn't
human any longer. Jenny ground her teeth together. Her heart
hammered in her ears. She could still feel him cutting into her
flesh, after all the anesthesia was gone. Continuing with the
experiment. She still woke up screaming sometimes. Jenny took a
step toward him. He couldn't hurt her anymore. She took another
step and was nose to nose with his face. She narrowed her eyes.
    “I wish I'd been the one to kill you, you
son of a bitch,” she whispered. Then she brought the knife
down on his skull. With a sound like a rotten melon, the knife
plunged down to the hilt. And for the first time since she had
arrived at the Underground, there was silence.
    Jenny slipped in the station door and swiftly
replaced the slabs of wood that blocked the door to outsiders. The
lobby was piled high with rotting bodies and she fought her gag
reflex. All the windows had long since been blacked out or boarded
up, but there was a crack in the wall if you knew where to look.
Jenny peered out and looked out at the limp figure on the pole,
squinting. What had she done? It couldn't be a coincidence that she
had weaseled her way into a Thumper camp and her grandfather's corpse had
appeared at the same time. Was this a trap? If the Righteous were
crucifying the rotters, it stood to reason that Joshua could have
put the old man up there. And if Joshua did that, then perhaps he
was doing it for a reason.
    She didn't see how Joshua could know they had
been related. Not even her closest friends knew her last name. Even
when they did, they didn't think she was one of those Hawkins.
In the ten years since her mother had
unleashed a disease no one understood or had any defenses for, and
in the five years since the last