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

most opportunities for starting over again. We also realized that this was where many people were probably still at since this was where the medical center was, as well as the bar, the fire department, and the mercantile. They actually had a mercantile. I wondered, with a smirk, if the Olsens from Little House on the Prairie worked there.
    From First St, we located Cooper and painted our double lines, then doubled back until First ended at Hannaford. At Hannaford we would take the wall west along Lewis until it met Ordway where we would go south some more. We would have to take the wall off the road here, mostly to preserve housing areas, but not by a whole lot. We all agreed that not one of us would want to see a wall on their street when they walked out the front door.
    There was a small school on the southwest side of town that I wanted to make sure was inside our walls so we could use it as a multipurpose building, even if we didn't use it as an actual school. We would be able to use some of the classrooms as storage rooms for the farming we planned on doing there. Next to the school, there was a football field that I could see crops going into nicely. Tanya and Kristen were going to be in love.
    From Ordway, we took the wall plans east to School Street and cut across empty space until we hit Shannon. From there, we went east until we were where we started at Elliot. From there, we connected the loop to Cooper by using a dirt road that sat between two large homes. It seemed to be a lot of driving around, but the trip odometer on the truck when we traced the intended wall route said that we were only going to be securing one and a half miles worth of perimeter. This made me excited. I could wrap my mind around that. Now that we had our plan worked out on where we were going to live, we had to make the area worth living in; we had to make sure that the houses were empty. I wasn't worried about the living anymore, with how many times we drove up and down the streets, if this hadn't been a ghost town, someone would have stepped out to challenge us by then.
    We started on the southwest side of town, next to the school. Even though we were all certain the houses had no more living people in them, we still made ourselves known at the front door by knocking and calling out for people. There was always that chance that some little old lady was hiding out in her home, too frightened to come to the door. We knocked, listened, and opened the door, being extra careful to not wake the dead with a lot of excess noise. Some doors were locked, and one of the group would shimmy through an open window, almost always a bathroom window. Whoever went in hurried to the front door, and unlocked it, and we went through the house. Sometimes those of us waiting outside heard shots fired before the door was opened, but usually there was nothing. Most of the time, when we found a zombie, it was trapped in a bedroom behind a closed door. It was like they were bit, felt like crap, and went to bed where they died and reanimated. Something as complex as a door knob was a perfect barrier, as impenetrable as Fort Knox.
    I was reminded the hard way that not all of the victims were adults, when I opened a bedroom door in one house and came face to face with a young blonde haired girl, not more than eight-years-old. She was still in her pajamas, a pink tank top and polka-dotted pants, and half starved. Her cheek bones jutted out at high angles, her collar bones were prominent, and her arms were skeletal, covered with gray, cracked, leathery skin. She lifted her arms towards me; her bony hands trembled in anticipation. I pulled my long blade from its sheath, choosing to listen to the soft whoosh of metal against leather over the little girl's moans. I lifted the knife high above my head and pushed it through the top of her skull, and the momentum of the swing sunk to the middle of her head and stopped right between her cloudy, sunken eyes. The sound of the