These Dead Lands: Immolation Read Online Free PDF Page A

be more items worth taking with them, like the contents of a vending machine or two.
    “Movement,” Ballantine said dully. “I count about, uh, twelve reekers heading up the street.”
    Hastings spun and saw the gaggle of walking corpses stumbling toward their position. They were still a good two hundred meters away and didn’t appear to have seen them yet, but that wouldn’t last for long. In the distance, more figures came into view, their shapes distorted by the heat rising off the road.
    “Okay, let’s roll,” Hastings said.
    *
    The remainder of Task Force Manhattan cut across to Pennsylvania and then trekked north to the Army fort that lay a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Sticking to the back roads, the two Humvees made poor time but didn’t encounter any zombie infestations they couldn’t either go around or just blast right through. While suppression weapons like the MK19 and the M2 .50 caliber heavy machinegun weren’t as capable against the reekers as the soldiers would have liked, they could still slow the zombies down and cause some serious confusion among their stinking ranks—especially the grenade launcher. It blasted reekers apart, and even though some of those parts still retained enough instinct to want to kill and feed, separating the zombies’ heads from the rest of their anatomy made that an unlikely prospect. Any zombies that survived the attack were thrown aside by the speeding Humvees or crushed beneath their knobbed tires.
    They had to stop and refuel once, after they had crossed over into New York. Despite being home to New York City, the Empire State’s western half wasn’t densely populated. In fact, outside of the small cities, it was absolutely rural. That made finding fuel a little problematic, but they eventually came across a cargo truck that had rolled over into a ditch. The vehicle’s grille and bumper were covered with a thick layer of gore, and judging by the smears of crusted black liquid and the remains of several zombies—some of which were still trying to move despite severe damage to their limbs—the vehicle’s driver had been smashing his way through a dense crowd of reekers before finally losing control and crashing into the drainage ditch. The blood-flecked interior of the cab told the rest of the story.
    The truck’s left saddle tank was about a third full, and Tharinger bled it dry. After they transferred the fuel to the Humvees, Tharinger poked a hole in the underside of the right tank, intending to drain it, but nothing was left. The side they couldn’t see had likely been torn open once the vehicle left the road, and the precious diesel had bled out.
    Oddly, the truck’s fiberglass cargo box had been torn asunder during the rollover, revealing the battered remains of a Lamborghini Reventón. Hastings shook his head. If he recalled correctly, only twenty-seven had been made, at a price of almost nine hundred thousand dollars each. Whoever had been driving the truck was either a car thief who had thought it was his lucky day, or a serious collector who just couldn’t part with his pride and joy.
    They moved on, leaving the destroyed relic of a world that had once been behind them.
    That night, they huddled inside their armored Humvees, secure in the knowledge that the carnivorous corpses couldn’t get to them even if they were discovered. The men took turns on watch, examining the forested nightscape outside through night vision goggles. Reekers did stumble past the Humvees, their eyes wide and staring in the darkness. The soldiers remained still inside their vehicles, and the corpses paid them no mind. Even the zombies that stumbled onto the vehicles simply picked their way past and disappeared into the night.
    Hastings had the idea that the reekers were more active at night. Even though they didn’t have enough sense to further investigate the presence of two armored vehicles, their strides seemed more purposeful, and they didn’t seem to