These Dead Lands: Immolation Read Online Free PDF

stumble as often as they did during the day. He had noticed the same in New York City, but when he mentioned it to his fellow officers, they couldn’t make any more sense of it than he could.
    Day came, and the area was still thick with zombies. The task force had no choice. They fired up the Humvees and drove right through the small horde surrounding the tiny clearing. They made it back to the rural road that haphazardly paralleled Interstate 81 and weaved their way around individual ghouls that shambled across the blacktop. Several of the grotesqueries turned at the sound of the engines, and a few runners even charged at them. But their attacks were thwarted by the Humvees’ thick bumpers, and in the end, shattered remnants of humanity were left sprawled across the road, writhing in fetid pools of black ichor.
    By midafternoon of the second day, they had picked their away around Watertown, just outside of Fort Drum. Parts of the town had burned, but other areas looked untouched, almost pristine. Several trailers emblazoned with the acronym FEMA were visible, and Hastings figured Watertown had been evacuated. He had no idea if everyone had made it out.
    Fort Drum hadn’t been so lucky.
    The majority of the post had been razed almost to the ground, just as Master Sergeant Slater had said. Smoking remains of aircraft were scattered across the airfield, and the housing communities that surrounded the center of the post had been consumed by a conflagration that had been so huge it must have been visible even from orbit. Surrounding the installation were piles and piles and piles of bodies, more than Hastings could count, more than he had ever seen in one place at one time, outside of that final desperate night in New York City. Many of them were burned, but most were not. Some of them still stirred, flopping about restlessly. Their moans were carried by the slight breeze that, fortunately, kept the full force of the stench from reaching them.
    “Fuck, man,” Guerra said, standing in the cupola of the Humvee behind Hastings. “Fuck, that crazy bastard was right . Drum’s … gone , man.”
    Hastings stared through his binoculars, looking at where he believed his house would have been located. Only smoking rubble was left; his home had been obliterated by the firestorm, converted to ash and charred wood and blackened brick.
    Scotty. Terry.
    He couldn’t catch his breath, and the vision of the destruction he saw through his field glasses swam and broke up.
    Scotty. Terry.
    Scotty was only three years old, a tow-headed little ruffian with a devil-may-care grin and bright blue eyes that always twinkled, his mother’s eyes. He had her hair too, but he had Hastings’s nose and chiseled chin, and Hastings had known that Scotty would someday be one hell of a heartbreaker.
    His thirty-four-year-old wife, Terry, was tall with a slender frame, a natural athlete who had been a track star in high school and a state champion swimmer in college. She’d dreamed of competing in the Olympics and had even tried out once, only to be weeded out in the selection process. She swore she’d go back and try again, but then she met Hastings, and then they got married, and then she was pregnant with Scotty, and then…
    “I see the field house.” Ballantine was right beside him, looking through his own binoculars. “It’s surrounded by FEMA trailers. Looks like a tent city had been set up around it. That must’ve been where they relocated all the dependents and other civilians after they shrank the perimeter.”
    Hastings cleared his throat and blinked away the tears, which was no easy feat since he felt as if his heart had just been skewered by a freezing icepick. He swung his glasses over to where Ballantine was looking and saw the bulky outline of the field house. It hadn’t been burned, but the windows were shattered. A handful of zombies were picking their way through the debris. Just like Hastings and his men, the reekers were