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

Columbia.  Maybe Ecuador.  What have they got, two, three dozen kinds of poisonous snakes?  Eyelash vipers.  Some kind of hog-nose viper.  Those colorful coral snakes with the rings.  Nothing else comes to my numb mind; except the stuff that can eat you.  Leopards.  Crocs.  Anacondas that couldn’t squeeze their fat asses through a car tire, but bet your own fat ass, they can be two feet away from you and you’d never see them. 
    I get up off my own ass. 
    Stepping toward a pile of wreckage, I shake, angry with myself, mad for being happy to be alive.  What was I thinking?  What the fuck was I thinking? 
    I look around.  Full light.  Endless.  It just goes on and on forever in every direction.  I want to sit again.  But I know what my jolted brain will do—it will squeeze more strange shit out.
    To business:  We need to not get eaten, firstly.  Let’s get some more guns, more ammo; all that we can find.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 7
     
     
     
    My brain feels better now that all the hope is out of it.  Besides, we have planned for this very thing.  If it all dissolves to watery shit, we gather guns, then survivors.  In that order.  Then we build some kind of compound.
    I’m not even sure about that last part.
    I hobble toward some Kevlar vests.  Three of them.  Kick them together.  That is more or less precisely when I discover my pinky toe is broken and start roaring, my fist in my mouth.  Have to get over it.  Have to act.   Others are scavenging now.   Good.
    “Anything that shoots.” I yell over to them. 
    “No shit,” says Highway. 
    He and Biggs are draped in ammo belts.  Biggs is big, some un-ironic fate life as given, even stronger than his looks.  Like, he’s a mighty sum’bitch.  He’s got on another Kevlar vest, plated.  He pulls it open, looks at the wound in his belly, instantly regretting it.  For the next seven or eight seconds, he closes his eyes.   It will be nastier before it improves.  He knows this.  But knowing this is hardly a tonic.  Already, the smell is worsening. 
    Breathing like a woman giving birth, he hobbles to dump the ammo in a pile. 
    I see Pip.  Mean-looking redhead.  He’s got no pants but he’s holding a single bar of gold.  It is difficult work, not telling him to drop it, and it is incredibly worrisome to see the thin smile of shock on his face.  He is shaking as though he’s hurting like fifteen hells but grasping that shit like a maniac.  Staring at it.  His face is screaming silently:  It’s mine . 
    Actually it is mine.  Was.  I had found it up in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  It had been just a yellow brick in the middle of I65.  I had not known the value of gold before then, hadn’t known what it did to the heart.  In your hands it is the most useful of all useless things.  A lust saved for when all lust is lost.  Gold had been the furthest thing from my head.  Until I saw it.  It had dumbed me.  I had not even been wise enough to fear a trap.  I had stopped, picked it up.  Only later did I realize how fortunate, foolish I had been.
    I’m not asking that mean-looking bastard for it back. 
    Then I see he’s got something else.  A can of Diet Coke, of all damn things.  Unopened after a nose dive into the jungle.  I want that too.  The absurdity cups my balls with feathery little hands a moment, then Pip looks at Biggs, and the mean-looking bastard pops open the can and offers it to him. 
    Biggs kills it.  Dickhead.
    Then Pip grabs a tactical shotgun by the barrel, pulls it out of a small puddle, a bandolier of shells, a knife, some crackers, and a crushed, nineteen-year-old pack of Marlboro.  Good.  He looks around one last time.  He’s fine.  Just needs some pants on his butt.
    There’s not much else that wasn’t part of the plane once.
    But shit, there’s Gilli.  Gilli’s alive.  He’s brought some helmets and a mask.  They call this the Sunset War.  Like we’re just shit out of