Nightmare of the Dead: Rise of the Zombies Read Online Free PDF

fire thundered over the entire state of Mississippi and damned every man, woman, and child to a sudden death.
     
    ***
    She walked through the angles of fiery light that shattered the calm and peace of a land that seemed untouched, or perhaps it had been rendered invincible by the unreal world in which she found herself. The homicidal dusk bled sunlight out of the land and invaded Mississippi with a legion of infernal shadows that crept along slender blades of tall, wind-swept grass.
    The game players had anticipated she would destroy the creatures on the train. They seemed to be dependent on it; the train would have over-shot the town of Cedar Rock by several miles. It was clear that Doctor Lynch anticipated the conductor's death, as well as the deaths of others aboard the train, but what did they have in mind for her? Why did the doctor kill the soldiers on the train if he knew that she would live?
    Why did they steal her memory?
    A town that had likely been built as a sanctuary for rail workers who labored to repair the tracks that were damaged during the conflict, Cedar Rock was ghostly, with the only noise coming from the piano keys that were being hammered in the saloon. Freshly-painted signs above the general store, post office, sheriff's office and saloon , suggested that the town's builders had packed up and perhaps quit the town altogether when the war landed in Mississippi; the town wasn't on the map—Bannan's map had the name of the town written in neatly next to the railroad. Upright boards that served as the empty shells for incomplete buildings bordered the town's edges.
    A crowd of nine horses w as tethered near a trough in front of the saloon's boardwalk.
    Cedar Rock was the spitting image of a frontier town that would have been found west of the Mississippi River. It looked every bit a dusty retreat for cowboys looking to gamble, drink, and plot more deeds that could earn them every shred of notoriety. There were those who dreamt and wondered about the various gangs which roamed the lawless lands, territories monitored by a few mercenary sheriffs and townsfolk who were often as unsavory as the men they defended their livelihoods against.
    Bannan realized she was connected to that frontier, and she found Cedar Rock to be oddly comforting as she walked along its lone street. The loping, limping dog that clacked its nails across the saloon's boardwalk seemed a weathered animal, a refugee made out of grit and bone. The piano music drifting out of the saloon was accompanied by the rough laughter of drunken men. The rest of the town was deserted.
    Twilight followed Bannan through the saloon doors. The wrong keys on the piano were struck, and a group of heads turned toward the town's lone woman.
    A band of seven men wearing pistols and cowboy hats were huddled around the piano player, who was another likely member of their ragtag gang. They were dirty, uncouth men with sweaty, tan faces and dust on their boots. They eyed Bannan hungrily, each one of them imagining the travesties of the flesh they could visit upon her. She was alone, and everyone in the saloon knew it. The ir eyes moved up and down over her body without stopping. One of them cleared a dry throat. A shrill, childish chuckle erupted out of another's mouth.
    The ninth man lay on the floor; a bloody, beaten man with a thick orange beard beneath wincing blue eyes. He looked up at Bannan and spat a bloody tooth out of his mouth. "Bannan," he coughed, and then said, " Thought you were dead."
    Her breath caught in her throat. Was it true? Was that really her name?
    "She is."
    One man stepped out from the crowd. His spurs jangled, and the men stepped aside to let their unquestionable leader approach the intruder. She couldn't help but display the fingers at her hips near the holsters, but the undaunted figure stepped forward heedlessly.
    The black moustache and the heavy eyebrows over his eyes marked him as the man from her fragmented memory, the man on the