The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Army that you didn’t go after marauders with half measures. You didn’t just hit them and hope they would learn their lesson. These were people who didn’t back down from a fight. Didn’t run away. Didn’t get intimidated by the occasional strafing run or mortar bombardment. If a platoon was sent to take down known marauders, it wasn’t just a police action. It wasn’t just an effort to bring them to heel.
    It was total annihilation.
    Kill them all, root and branch, or die in the attempt. And dying wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. More than once, entire platoons had limped back to Fort Bragg decimated and in shambles, most of their men dead or dying of wounds or infection. Contrary to what all the strategists had predicted, the marauders were becoming increasingly well-armed. Unexplainably, alarmingly so. They were determined, these insurgents and raiders, and they were getting better at their craft. And out there, across that cracked veneer of dead civilization, was an unknown number of them.
    Waiting. Plotting. 
    Ethan stood near the wall, his face close to the chill, gently blowing air outside and stared out the narrow window as the U-trac slowly rattled along. He searched rooftops for movement, eyes narrowed, jaw constantly working. He searched the tall grass for the telltale streaks of lighter brown that would indicate someone having passed through recently. He breathed in deeply through his nose, trying to catch the acrid odor of wood smoke born on the wind. He listened for the crack of distant rifles echoing across the low, gently rolling hills. But mostly he simply watched, gaze unfocused, never letting his eyes rest on one spot for too long, determined to spot trouble if it was out there. He rested his head against one thick forearm, and for long into the morning, he watched.
    He watched, and he worried.

FIVE
     
    The swarm happened the way planets happen. Slowly, and over time, but inexorable. When the sun finally began to fade, from the corner of my eye, I noticed the presence of others like me.
    Well, whether they were really like me is open to debate, but I can say for sure they were dead people. Ones who forgot that death is supposed to be a state of motionless finality. This particular group was anything but restful, ambulating with drunken grace toward the same distant signal to which my own battered form gravitated.
    At first, I was alone. Or rather, alone with myself if that makes sense. After trying long enough, I'd discovered a way to keep my brain occupied, only to have that lovely vacancy shattered by the grinding shuffle of other walking corpses.
    I couldn't see much, but there was no missing the intense focus on their faces. It wasn't a look shouting intelligence or cunning, it was base. As bestial as they come. The most basic human need...no, the most basic need, period.
    Hunger.
    Deep and grisly.
    When I first woke up , it was in the middle of my body feeding itself. I shuddered at the memory, as crisp and clear as the rest, but there was no shared sense of desire with it. Now, however, half a day had passed, and the dire change that drove my physiology to crave the flesh of human beings was demanding fresh material to work with.
    For the first time, I felt it. There was an odd twinning in my perception as the reptile part o f me imagined biting through soft skin, no more odd than having an egg and a slice of bacon. The first, powerful reaction was one of benign normality. The sense that all was as it should be.
    Then the intellectual reaction happened, and I screamed inside my skull.
    In a desperate bid to ignore the hunger, I tried to take in my surroundings. Anything interesting, anything at all to take my mind away from the gnawing urge. The urge to gnaw.
    I—or rather, my body—wandered, and as our feet ate up the miles , others appeared. Some of them were freshly dead, so new that if it weren't for the glaze over their eyes and the drunken lurch of their movements, you