K. T. Swartz Read Online Free PDF Page B

the roof sloped to the ground. On the overpass ledge, they gathered. She counted them, and they all moaned incessantly. Fingers dragged at the concrete, left black streaks behind as their hunger urged them forward. Her hammer in one hand and her crowbar in the other, she hopped down to the platform. Behind her bike, the first zombie slammed into concrete with a sickening thud. Shock didn’t faze it; her hammer punching a neat hole through the back of its skull did, just as another landed headfirst onto the pavement. The splatter went in all directions, an abstract starburst around the corpse.
    Two fell, one right after the other, and they landed within easy reach of her crowbar and hammer. Their skulls split open. A shadow fell over her. She gasped, felt the vibration from the zombie’s landing. Fingers grabbed her pant leg. Teeth crushed her boot to her ankle. She speared the zombie through the head with her crowbar. In rapid succession, three more fell like fat, bloated raindrops. Rotten bodies wrapped in thin skin burst on impact. Only one stood.
    She slammed her hammer and crowbar into the zombie’s skull. The remaining four slid over the ledge. The train station’s roof caught one zombie under the chin. Impact peeled his skull straight back, as if it were a banana peel. Without his head and some of his spine, his body landed with a wet thump. The last three stumbled to their feet, but only two stayed upright. She lunged at one, driving the pointed end of the crowbar through the nasal cavity and into the brain. As the second closed the distance, she swung her hammer like a baseball bat. Vertebrae snapped. His head lolled to the side, but he still reached for her. She back-pedaled, swatting his hands aside. One more hit from the hammer knocked his skull from his shoulders.
    His body dropped; his head rolled away. She stood, gasping for breath. A faint moan filled the air. The last zombie lay on her stomach, fingers dragging at the ground. She grabbed her crowbar and buried it in the prostrate zombie’s skull. Arms outstretched, the zombie relaxed. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes. And just sucked air into her lungs.
     
    ‘Maybe I was an idiot taking on so many, but the risk I thought was worth it. Over and over I’ve seen other people just run, only to be overtaken later, when exhaustion hit. Zombies only stop moving when their brains do – or when they are too damaged to continue. All that is needed for a human to die is to be winded.
    As I stood there under that overpass – the one I’d driven over so often when I was younger – I couldn’t help but smile, then laugh. My giddiness was an infection just like the one that wiped everyone out. I’d just witnessed zombies fall off a bridge and die in the most gruesome ways possible. I wish I’d seen this fight from a distance, because it must have looked ridiculous.’
     
    • excerpt from August 24 th entry
     
    She biked away from the kill zone, along the tracks, to an elementary school her cousin used to go to; the playground swings squeaked in the breeze. She slowed, put her foot down to stop. As a kid, she’d played on those swings, climbed the monkey bars. She’d taken gymnastics there for a little while. And an urban legend was told that lightning had struck the school’s old clock tower and stopped its hands. She kicked off the gravel lot. Rode through town, to Maple Avenue, to a Chinese restaurant with a sordid past. Another small town legend said the mafia really owned it as a front. Maybe there was truth to it, maybe not, but that place – no matter how dead it appeared – never closed.
    Through the windows, shadows moved. She kept pedaling, to a railroad overpass. The exposed beams were the perfect place for another blood bag. Same as the first, she filled it up, cut the slit in it, and hung it high. Her pack felt a little lighter on her shoulders as she biked up the rise, away from the moans just starting by the Chinese restaurant.