The Reanimates (Book 3): The Escape Read Online Free PDF

muscle dangling off of the hardware of braces and broken wires that had to be poking them in the cheeks like a splinter that refused to come out. I stepped away from the picture, and wandered listlessly around the living room. I ran my hand on the back of the love seat that acted as a border in the living room, creating a forced walk-way to the kitchen. Little porcelain figurines sat on shelves of a cabinet in the corner next to the television. Soccer cleats were left discarded in the hall, the mud that clung to it in a game dried to a hardened paste. Each item was a clue into the lives of the people that were. Each was a reminder that we were imposing on a graveyard.
    It was a necessary evil, what we were doing. We were alive and we needed to be here. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that we were going to be erasing them, erasing every house of the past. We were going to put everyone's belongings in a pile someplace and riffle through them on an as needed basis. Yes, I was grateful that there were clothes for Drew when he got older, but they were once this boy's. That was the reality of the situation; a necessary evil. It didn't bother me in Scipio, why did it bother me now? I wondered if the dramatic feeling was just from being tired. We were all so tired. I thought about how in Scipio, we were there as a stopping point with no intention of staying put. We weren't going to have to deal with any day to day reminders of the lives that were gone. This was about to be our home, not just a hit and run town. I reminded myself that we were just moving in. This was no different than moving into a new house. When you moved in to a house you saw the wallpaper that was left behind. The wallpaper didn't make the house someone else's, it was just there. Same here. That was what I made myself remember, the things weren't these people nor were they ghosts of them, they were just things.
    I turned to the guys, and found them securing the windows by moving tall furniture in front of the openings or placing doors taken from other rooms over the sliding glass. When the last nail was buried into the wood, we were almost ready to start the door to door clearing.
    The first order of business was to decide what streets we would use as the border of our town. With Trent and I in the cab, and Tyreese and Lucas standing up in the bed of our pickup to find a better view of our surroundings, we drove around to get our bearings. We made several loops around this small place to best figure out where we would have the easiest time building. We stopped the truck after our sixth run around and talked about the best places to mark.
    Highway 89, named Elliot in this town, was the main road through town, and Cooper ran parallel to it on the east side of the town. We planned on keeping the main highway intact and accessible via gates, but we also wanted to leave other routes around our town open for travel if we didn't feel secure letting others into our safe zone. When we came to the intersection where Elliot and Cooper crossed one another, Trent stopped the truck and climbed out of the driver's side door. He opened the extended cab door behind him and started to rummage through a few bags that were tossed in the back until he found a can of day glow pink spray paint. He shook the can as he walked to the spot in the road, the small glass marble that agitated the paint clanking loudly in the cylinder. He bent over, and with a snake like hiss of paint, marked the place where they would build a guard house to direct people through the town or to the alternate route of Cooper.
    Trent came back to the truck, pulled the shift lever into drive with a clunk, and slowly took off down Elliot. When we found Shannon St, Trent painted a pair of double lines across Elliot to mark where the walls would go. We drove forward, and at First St, he marked the road once again. Elliot was where the life of the town was, and it was on the north end that we saw there were the