Reanimated Readz Read Online Free PDF

kids, Conner,” he sneers. “Look at who we selected. You, with your dad drunk every night in the trailer park. You think, with his criminal record, he’s going to go running to the cops the first night you don’t come home? And it wasn’t the first night, was it, Conner? You’re looking at nearly sixteen absences this year alone, three suspensions. He probably just figures you’re staying with a friend until the semester’s over.”
    Well, he’s got a point there. Fingers and thumbs would have to start showing up in our mailbox for Dad to think something was wrong. That is, if he’s checked the mail in the last two weeks.
    “But those other kids?” I wail. “Chip Wailing? Garrett and Angela? They’ve got folks, right? You can’t just—”
    “Chip lives with his single mom and five other kids, who all have files with the local cops an inch thick. Chip does, too. We arranged for an officer to stop by and inform Chip’s mom he’d be spending the remainder of the semester in juvie. She didn’t look too surprised. Garrett and Angela are both orphans who stay over at the Meriwether Home for Wayward Boys and Girls. Nobody’s come looking for them and, chances are, no one ever will. And by the time they do, well, Project Z will be over and no one will ever find them. Face it, kid. The government knows what it’s doing. This ain’t the first time they’ve tried out this little experiment. I hear it won’t be the last.”
    I look from Creed to the camera. The red light is staring back at me, unblinking. By the time I turn back to Creed, he’s taken the stun gun off the table. I groan and slump in my chair.
    Whatever hope I had, of the drugs working, of being “rehabilitated,” as Creed called it, of getting out of here, fade into mist. If this was all a setup, a joke, an experiment, then that means…I’m alive. I’ve never been dead. Not even for a day, not even for a minute.
    “But the Thugs?” I bite out, suddenly inspired. “They’re zombies, right? I mean, the government can’t afford actors that good, can they?”
    “The Thugs, as you guys call them, are zombies. Real zombies from the Gallup Gulch outbreak last year. They’re on loan from the Department of Undead Security and, when this experiment is over, they’ll be returned to the DUS until they figure out where to locate the next experiment, the next Project Z.”
    “So there are zombies then?” I ask, almost…hopefully.
    “Yeah,” he chuckles. “There are. Imagine that. Only, you’re not one of them.”
    “The Fugs?”
    He looks at me, momentarily confused. I realize he wouldn’t know the term. It’s slang, our slang. “The homeless people you told us to attack, for their brains?”
    “They’re homeless, like you said. People like you. People nobody would miss if one day they just…disappeared.”
    “W-w-what will happen to them, now?”
    He laughs. Bellows is more like it. “Kid, I just told you you’re human, that you’ve been murdering innocent civilians for over fourteen days and you’re worried about saving the last few stragglers? They’re killing them, as we speak. Chip and Garrett and Angela.
    “And when they’re done with their little meal, when they’ve chewed up the last of the evidence, well that’s when I’ll tell them the same thing I’m telling you, and then I’ll—”
    The bile comes then, hot and green. A projectile stream of brain chunks and blood and shame covers Creed’s face like red-hot slime at some theme park stage show and fills his mouth as he sputters in shock.
    He stands, stumbles, falls back over his chair and I’m on him, chewing and gnawing before he can wipe his eyes clean of my puke. There is no time for stun guns or walkie-talkies now, only my blind, driving rage. I bite a chunk out of his throat and feel the blood gush against my cold, gray skin. I bite off his ear, chomp on his bald spot and chew, chew, until my teeth hit bone. Then I keep chewing.
    I feed on his brains, I