Revenence: Dead Silence, A Zombie Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

collapse beneath her.  Her hips swung erratically, her hair flailed around her as she whipped her head back and forth.  Shari approached her tentatively, conscientiously avoiding the cracks in the floor, each step deliberate.  The figure stopped cold, snapping her head in Shari's direction.  Those eyes are familar, Shari thought.  "Mom?" she said timidly, reaching out to touch her.  All at once, the flesh of the woman's upper face, her arms and back, her belly, her legs, all rotted away.  The figure she was now gawking at was nothing more than a skeleton with jerkied skin stretched over it.  The atrophied belly dancer raised its osseous hand, pointing into the next room.
    Shari carefully crossed into the room, a kitchen, which appeared to be a dilapidated version of the one in her childhood home.  On the table was the lovingly prepared feast, now spoiled, that she and her mother were to have made.  It was the one her family was supposed to be eating on Easter Sunday.  She walked up to the table, gazing into a cup of chai tea.  The milk swirled in the tea, and she watched as the pattern took on a familiar form...planet Earth.  As she continued peering into the cup, she saw a lit match fly through space, igniting the earth as it passed.  The blaze was extinguished after a moment, and as the smoke cleared Shari saw the green of the land masses and the blue of the oceans.  They were sparkling brilliantly, alive with color...color more vivid than any she had ever seen in her life.  She was jerked out of her reverie by a sinister laugh.  She looked behind her...the belly dancer was standing directly behind her.  She jumped, startled, and sank through the floorboards, falling into the dark basement below.
                 

      She awoke in the queen-size bed that sat in the corner near the balcony.  Fauna had spent the night in a recliner looking out the balcony doors, unable to rest.  A survivalist can't help but keep watch, she had told Shari.
    "You can keep an eye out tomorrow, return the favor while I sleep," she had said.  "You just rest.  You need it."
    Shari took her toothbrush and toothpaste from her duffel bag, which she had retrieved from the car the previous night before the sun had gone down.  She brushed her teeth and washed her face, then joined Fauna on the balcony, where she sat on a lounger looking through a pair of binoculars. 
    "Good morning," Shari said as she sat down in the other lounger.  "See anything?"
    "Nothin' good," Fauna replied.  "World fulla dangers out there."  She turned toward Shari.  "And it's time you start learnin' how to take care of yourself.  A girl's gotta be prepared to defend herself out there, now more than ever.  Today, I'm gonna give you your first bow lesson."
    "I'm in no position to argue," Shari said, surveying the surrounding countryside.  Thick, black smoke clouds were dotting the horizon, presumably from both car accidents and house fires.  She could only imagine the kind of chaos that was ensuing outside of the relative safety of Fauna's property, past the thick, crowded sentry of near-ancient hundred-foot-tall pines lining the road.  Her mind raced, thinking of what would happen in larger towns and cities, of what would happen to her friends and family.  She thought of the one who had called himself I_eat_libtards_for_breakfast , and supposed that if the zombies had hit Green Bay, there was a good chance he had made good on his name this morning.
    "I got a few earlier while you were asleep," Fauna informed her.
    "Zombies?" she inquired, wide-eyed.  Fauna nodded in confirmation.  Shari walked over to the balcony railing and looked down.  They were there, sure enough.  One was about twenty yards out, the other two about ten feet from the garage.  "Head shot," she said quietly, noting the arrows embedded in the craniums of the three bodies that lay sprawled on the ground.  "Is that what kills them?"
    Fauna nodded.  "I think