The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) Read Online Free PDF

view out the window.
    Over Yellowstone, we saw great zombie herds half-dressed in their summer clothes, roaming amongst the buffalo in the heavy snow. In Northern Idaho, it was a still-smoldering city that greeted us.
    It was weird. We knew the zombies were down there. We fought them all the time. We knew the cities had burned, had been bombed, we’d been witness to that too. But from the air, it was worse. It was stark proof that our universe had been materially changed. It was stark proof that even if we ‘saved’ the world, it would never be the same again.
    Dave shut his eyes and refused to look after a certain point, but I kept staring, soaking every bit of carnage in as we moved closer and closer to Seattle.
    And when we reached it?
    “Oh my God, David,” I murmured, grabbing his jacket sleeve to force him to look out the window.
    We came in from a northern approach, flying directly over the city in a route the National Guard would have once shot us down because of. Thanks to Brian, we had the best view anyone had ever had of what happened here less than a year ago. A year that felt like a lifetime.
    Many of the downtown high-rises that had once surged into the cloudy sky had been burned all the way to the street by the bombings. Others were partially demolished. The few that remained were nothing more than skeletal remnants of a life we’d once lived. The glass was broken out of them, they listed to the left or right from impact.
    Even the Space Needle, a once proud vision of the future in the 1962 World’s Fair, was obliterated. The top part of the tower, the swirling, space-like disk, had broken off and the column of metal that once held it was bent over in half, teetering gingerly on God knew how little metal.
    “Jesus,” Dave breathed as he leaned over my shoulder to look. “It’s all gone.”
    “They bombed Seattle by the end of the first couple of days,” Brian said around his headset. “Downtown was hit the worst. We’ll be landing at Boeing Field, it’s closer than the old airport. From there we’ll take a helicopter. You’ll see that some of the areas outside of downtown weren’t hit as hard.”
    I suppose it was meant to make us feel better. It really didn’t. I reached out to take Dave’s hand and we were silent for the rest of the journey.

Chapter Four
    Spare the Shotgun, Spoil the Zombie
     
    Less than an hour after our arrival in the city we had fled the summer before, the helicopter landed in the middle of what students used to call Red Square on the campus of University of Washington. They’d used red bricks when they built it, hence the name. Although during the outbreak, where this had been ground zero of the attack, news reports had shown it running red with something else.
    But now, surprisingly, it was pretty free of any remnants of the zombie outbreak. The winter rains had washed the brick clean and someone had tidied up the bodies over the months.
    Dave reached up to help me down from the helicopter as Brian cut the engines and did whatever pilot-y things were necessary. I stood next to The Kid and Nicole and Dave and looked at the campus. Aside from the emptiness and a few broken windows here and there, it didn’t look much different than it had when I attended UW years ago.
    “They didn’t bomb here?” I asked in wonder as I stared at mostly pristine buildings, including the big library in the square. It hadn’t even been touched.
    “No,” Nicole said as she motioned us to follow her. “I don’t know what other experiments were going on here under the guise of university projects, but judging from some of the things we’ve heard since our arrival, disturbing them was apparently seen as a
bad
thing to do.”
    “Something worse than zombies?” Dave asked in disbelief.
    Nicole shrugged and I shook my head. “Awesome.”
    She led us through the winding paths of the campus, but I noticed she didn’t have a gun out (unlike me, Ms. Always Prepared). She wasn’t