Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer Read Online Free PDF Page A

slipping off of the wall’s gritty edge.
    The Ogre and the Harpy. The Ogre and the Harpy.
    Going off the side of the building was a terrible, shitty, awful choice, with an infinitesimally small chance of being alive at the bottom. But no matter how fast my brain spun, there was no other way. Once those clutching white fingers caught my clothes, my chances of continuing life would hit absolute zero.
    Infinitesimally small looked good.
    I squeezed my hands and tried to bunch the taut nylon into something easier to hang on to as my legs flailed out over the drop. Before I had time to hope for the best, gravity seized me and pulled me madly toward the sidewalk far below.
    I held on to the banner as tightly as I could, but the nylon slipped rapidly through my grasp, friction heating and tearing my skin. To put a damper on my acceleration, I pulled my feet in to squeeze the mesh between the rubber soles of my boots.
    I started to slow. I had half a thought that I might live.
    My boots hit something solid and kicked my feet out to the sides. Before I could shit my pants at that surprise, my hands caught onto a round metal rod sewn into the bottom edge of the banner, and I came to a joint-rending halt, hanging twenty feet above the ground.
    “Holy shit!”
    I was alive?
    Frustrated shrieks cascaded down.
    I looked up. “Oh no!”
    One was climbing over the wall.
    Like a fish on a line, I wriggled my body to swing the banner and out it went. Then back. Not far enough.
    A White fell past me, grabbing at my boots, screaming not out of fear, but out of frustration for my being beyond her grasp. She hit the sidewalk in a sickening combination of thump and splat. The banner swung out further, then back.
    Trying to time the rhythm of my bodily gyrations to the slow rhythm of the banner’s swing, I went way out over the sidewalk just as another infected woman came sliding down the center of the sloping banner. Her weight helped push it back toward the garage. She missed me by five feet when she slipped past with just enough of an arc to drop her past the sidewalk and into the grass with a sound of breaking bones wrapped in tearing flesh.
    On the backswing, I flew into the gap be tween the second and third floors. Suddenly, with concrete just four or five feet below me, I let go. I landed roughly, bruising knees and scraping elbows. My weapons clattered on the floor as I rolled but my sling didn’t slip off. My Glock stayed in its holder. Only my machete slipped away.
    The few infected running through the second level looked at me but didn’t slow. The party was upstairs. Any White with ears could hear that.
    With bloody, jittery hands, I gathered my machete and crawled to a shaded corner where my breath wheezed out in a nervous rattle. The coolness of the concrete offered what comfort it could while I assimilated the fact that due to little more than luck, I’d just lived through that ordeal. My heart started to slow and my nerves began the long process of winding back down.
    I ventured a look down at my torn, blistered hands and thanked the virus that most sensations of pain were in my past. The hands were still functional, but they’d need attention, and soon. Such was the latest price I paid for my life.
    Camouflaged in gleaming white skin, crusty bloodstains, and body odor, in that moment I exhibited none of the noisy behaviors of the tasty immune. The infected continuing through the second floor ignored me. I leaned my head against the wall, and for a moment, closed my eyes. Exhaustion was knocking at the door.
    I was emotionally drained, empty, as lost as I’d felt before I tried to fill the hole in my heart with the murder of Mark’s proxies. After so many years of being the dog that Dan kicked, couldn’t violence cure my rage, salve my sadness just once?
    Residual adrenaline coursed through my veins. My hands were unsteady. I needed time to regroup. I breathed in hot, smoky air. I smelled blood and cordite.
    The angry yowls