This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sit there. 
    They took the world from us when they took the transmitter.  They could check the flight path if the radar happened to be working.  It’s too horrible to allow into my mind that it wouldn’t be.  But.  You know.  Too horrible to admit the hard facts:  Resources aren’t plentiful enough to fly out for eight or ten guys. 
    Who knows.  Maybe they will.  No idea. 
    Jagger’s leg is starting to cramp.  I look at his face, you can tell it’s about to lock up rigid as steel, but he can do nothing to ease it.  Low blood pressure from so much bleeding.  He loses his balance and instinctively, he braces himself against a knot of small trees.  I think he’s going to cry.  Could be worse, I remind myself.  They took what they did.  Screw it.  They could have taken everything else, and nothing came of it but more exhaustion and wounds that were not as deep as they felt when they first stabbed us.  And they left us some rifles.
    Unless.  If they poisoned us.  No.  We’d feel it by now; there’s nothing subtle or slow-acting about the jungle.  I stare at the clouds a moment.  Every gasp is bringing less air.  
    Then, I thank them; in stark terror, I thank them:  Twenty or two dozen naked, rotting Indian zombies, well-muscled.  They are coming, crossing the debri fields like excited apes, their calls and growls like the sounds of bulls being castrated. 
    “Fuck,” I whisper, a giant fist of pain squeezing my lower back.  “ Company .”
    Everyone crouches, gathering weapons.  Six of us, taking position.
    “Where are they?”
    “My nine.”
    Nausea is starting to balloon in my chest, and they come.  The cold shock of pain crumpling the faces of the men.  I almost fall backward on top of my own leg as I put the M4’s scope to my eye.  A film is all over it.  
    Instead I instinct-sight the onrush. 
    Shado coming, boys, whooping, rushing on all fours.  My fist balls around the gun, and the undead give a shaky, loud squall with a noise that still slams you no matter how often you hear it.  There is a massive pain, like a bolt of magma shooting from my knees to my neck as I open fire.
    For a pair of shivering moments, all is noise.  
    They begin to shiver under the rain of bullets and as the ammo slams them, the trees behind them get red, as red as the ground under them.  Then splotchy blackness.  They begin to fall, ever moving, their “breathing” like hiccups now and you seem them crawling away, big flaps of corded meat splayed open on their torsos, feet, craniums.  Then the limbs fall both from the trees and from the rotten, fungal beasts.  Some crawl yet.  The moment is stretching into a murder of eons before we are, one by one, laying off the triggers.
    We draw real breaths.
    Hard to tell the zombies from the men at this point.  When the shaking slows, a wave of agony presses through my body, washing away the denser hurt as I sit on my butt and heft the SOPMOD M4 over my shoulder.
    I look and see the socks that somehow I thought was a portrait of my grandmother.  I think of my father.  He was already old when I was born.  He had served, right at the onset, when we tried to stomp them out in India.  Not one real idea of what we were dealing with just yet.  My father, and your father, possessed the odd talent of being the strongest and the weakest person we ever knew.  That is nature.  And that shit is all around us.  Nature.  Half the species on the planet.  I look at some movement in the leaf-litter at my feet.  Some sort of brown and orange beetle.  I can crush it without trying, but sit on it, who knows.  Maybe that little bastard can make you feel like you just took a bullet to the ass.  I don’t know shit about it.  Except avoid anything that’s pinching, stinging, or biting.  Maybe it wouldn’t hurt.  Maybe it kills you.  Maybe it’s a scorpion.  Or a bright frog.  A vine.  The spiders are every-damn-where.  Pretty sure we’re in