Race to Refuge Read Online Free PDF

her arm again and hit the key fob to unlock the car. “Ginny, do you trust me?”
    It was a rhetorical question. I knew she did. I was her big brother. What’s more, we had the kind of relationship where she looked up to me. I’d never ragged on her, never done any of that stupid sibling stuff. We were good, Ginny and I.
    She nodded.
    “I’m going to explain everything to you. There’s something bad going on. But right now, we’ve got to get in the car and get out of here, okay?”
    As we got into the car, I could see a group of people walking toward the middle school and it felt like something big was stuck in my throat. Because they weren’t people at all—they were lurching and silently munching as they walked to the school.
    “Ginny, can you call the school?” I asked, pushing my phone at her. “Tell them that there’s a report of some dangerous armed men heading toward the school and that lockdown is recommended.”
    Ginny took the phone, looking up the school’s phone number. She hesitated as I sped to the exit. “But they’ll think I’m pranking them. They’ll know I’m a kid. They might even know who’s calling. And I don’t see any armed men.”
    “They won’t believe me if I tell them the truth. It’s better to give them something more believable…like armed men. Besides, it’s not a prank, and we might save a bunch of lives.” Probably not, but at least I wouldn’t feel guilty about not having tried. “If you dial the number, I’ll talk to them,” I said. I was driving as fast as I could now.
    “Shouldn’t we just call the police?” asked Ginny. Her voice was thin with stress.
    “They’re busy.” Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were passing us on the right and the left as we drove, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Busy, and completely overwhelmed.
    She took a deep, shaky breath and dialed. Then she put the phone on speaker and wordlessly held it toward my face.
    I cleared my throat, trying for that deeper voice again. As soon as the woman from the school office picked up, I said steadily, “Please put the school on lockdown. There is a group of armed men approaching the school. This is not a joke.” Then I hung up.
    Ginny looked at me with wide eyes. Then she gave a shaky laugh. “You sounded so grown up.”
    “I keep telling you that those weekly vocabulary words you get for homework are the most important thing to learn.” My voice was light but I pressed harder on the accelerator. Everywhere around us I saw wrecks, emergency vehicles, and more lurching strangers.

Chapter Six
    Charlie
    The main problems with driving the ambulance around were that it was impossible to maneuver in heavy traffic, that these poor victims kept trying to flag me down for help, and that the thing sucked down gas like a Slurpee. I needed to ditch it. Ideally, I needed to ditch it and trade it for my motorcycle. That thing would zip through traffic like a song, use a fraction of the gas, and nobody would be trying to get me to help them.
    It was killing me not to stop and help. That was the whole reason I changed jobs and became a paramedic to begin with. Right now, right here, I was in no position to help. I had no weapon. Plus, we were all quickly becoming vastly outnumbered in a short period of time. The city was no place to hang out during a zombie outbreak.
    I drove up to my street. I’ll admit that there are some neighbors that I’m not wild about. The guy that leaves his dog outside to bark all day while he’s at work—that’s very annoying. And then there’s the neighbor who leaves his trash dumpster out on the street for days after the garbage man has emptied it. Just roll it back to the house, dude. It’s not that big of a deal. People are lazy.
    But even though I wasn’t crazy about these neighbors to begin with, I definitely liked them a lot less when they’d turned into zombies. Maybe they disliked me too, because when these neighbor-zombies spotted me in the