Star Drawn Saga (Book 1): Death Among The Dead: A Zombie Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

may not have been able to contract whatever transformed the living into one of the Dead, after all that could only be contracted through a bite and could take anything from a few hours to a few days to take hold, but nonetheless there were plenty of other opportunistic nasties out there just waiting to infect you.
    ‘Careless,’ she repeated, roughly tugging on the other glove.
    ‘Now,’ she continued, moving her now protected hands from one position to the next.
    Once she was satisfied on her grip she yanked the already gaping ribs further apart with a sharp tug. Try as she might to ignore the wet cracking sound of broken bones shifting, Fran couldn’t help but take notice of the unbelievable rancid odour that rushed up from the exposed rotting flesh within.
    ‘Christ!’ she coughed, only just resisting the urge to gag as she quickly turned her face away.
    Blinking away the tears that stung her eyes, Fran pulled herself together and went back to the task of releasing Star’s trapped hoof. Within seconds and almost as if on cue, Star raised her front leg, slipping it free of the putrid mess she had stepping into.
    ‘There you go,’ said Fran, wiping the worst of the gore from the poor beast’s leg.
    It was only when Fran grabbed hold the carcass to pull it over to the side of the road that she noticed that the legs of the Dead man had been reduced to little more than gnawed bone clothed in a tatter of denim rags.
    ‘Well that explains that then,’ she mumbled to herself, tossing the raggedy collection of lifeless bones to its final resting place at the base of a large hawthorn bush.
    With no leg muscles to support him, the pathetic cadaver must have clawed its way along the road, hand over fist, until it unfortunately found itself right in front of Star and her crashing hooves.
    ‘Right, let’s get you cleaned up,’ murmured Fran, giving Star’s thick muscular neck a friendly pat as she walked past her to the cart.
    Pulling off her gloves, she slapped them repeatedly against the side of the cart one at a time in an attempt to remove the worst of the stinking gore still clinging to them. Only once she was satisfied they were as clean as she could get them did she jamb them back into her waistband and open the hatch in front of her.
    Their cart, much like all others she had come across since the Dead arrived to happily knock Man from the top of the food chain, was basically a box on wheels. Made from planks of wood, the walls and the flat roof each had an access hatch built into it that could be secured from the inside; while dotted seemingly randomly across the walls ‘spyholes’ with sliding covers had also been cut to allow the living to view the outside world undetected as they travelled. The only wall that did not have these spyholes was in fact the front one and, in contrast, this had a single thin horizontal channel cut into it. This ‘viewing slit’ not only enabled the driver to see where they were going while still hiding them from the Dead but also gave him access to the reins of the horse pulling them.
    After pulling open one of the side hatches, Fran climbed into the cart and started to pull aside a few of the spyhole covers, allowing more light into the dim interior to aid her search among their meagre belongs for something to clean up Star’s scrapes.
    ‘Now, where… are… you?’ Fran mumbled to herself, lifting up the hinged lid of a long box that served as one of the two benches running either side of the cart.
    Pushing aside weapons, clothes and what was left of their food supply, Fran at last found the plastic bottle she was looking for.
    ‘Just enough,’ she mused, shaking the bottle of bleach to hear the small amount of liquid sloshing inside. ‘And this… and… this… and this,’ she continued, quickly grabbing bottle of boiled water, a scrap of clean-ish looking fabric and a plastic container that had once been an ice cream tub.
    Jumping back out through the hatch, Fran