Undead at Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

right.
    “What the hell’s going
on then?” he asked. She seemed to know the answers, so maybe she had this one.
    She shook her head.
“I’m not sure. It seems like everything has gone dead at the same moment.”
    She turned to him, but
her gaze was drawn up and over his shoulder. Her eyes went wide. He started to
turn, but then realised he didn’t need to as five fighter jets flew low overhead,
their roar trailing behind them. In an instant they were gone, leaving behind a
rush of wind and an almighty noise. He watched them head out over the fields,
bank sharply and head straight back. He tracked them, raising his hands over
his ears to baffle the noise of their passage, and watched as trails of smoke
detached themselves from under the wings of the planes and sped away. Moments
later there were several explosions in the distant field beyond the place where
the helicopter had come down. The noise reached him first, and then the trees
bent towards them and a hot, smoky wind rushed over him, making his eyes sting
and the air rush from his lungs.
    He heard Nicola
coughing next to him, and tried to open his eyes to see what was happening.
    He eased them open a
painful crack and saw that the trees which had screened the field from view
were now denuded and on fire. Tiny tinkerbells of flame drifted towards him as
the leaves were consumed. Beyond them he could see nothing but fire engulfing
the whole landscape.
    Tony didn’t stop to
think. He didn’t say a word. He simply turned and ran.

Seven
     
     
    As Nicola stood,
holding Alyssa’s hand and looking at the silent cars, she could hear nothing
but the crackling of flames from the still-burning truck and the confused
voices of deprived motorists, a phrase went through her head: Electro-magnetic
pulse . It wasn’t the kind of thing she would normally know. She was a
historian, not a scientist. But Rob had watched enough sci-fi and action movies
for her to have picked up the term. Hell, the concept was now so mainstream they even used it in Ocean’s Eleven . It
was what happened when a nuclear bomb went off. It sent out a kind of wave that
fried electrical circuitry. Normally it wasn’t an issue because the circuitry
was fried in other ways too, or so irradiated that
no-one would want to use it for thousands of years. That would be one way of
getting brain cancer from a cellphone, she mused. Even as she was thinking
this, she marvelled at the fact that she was standing in the midst of the
insanity that her day had become and was still thinking so clearly.
    Tony was asking her
what had happened and she was saying she didn’t know even as these thoughts
were going through her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell him, it was
more that she had the feeling that he wouldn’t hear her if she did. He seemed
like a nice enough guy , but – No. Actually, he didn’t
seem that nice. He reminded her a lot of Rob. He was
so caught up himself that he didn’t care about anyone else.
    He had started
ordering her around, telling her to abandon the wounded, telling her to give
him a ride to a rental place, and she had simply acquiesced. She had slipped
back into the person that Rob had moulded her into without so much as a thought. She hated that it had been so easy for her to give in to
him. And even more she hated that it had felt comfortable, like slipping into
old shoes.
    So, maybe she wouldn’t
tell him what was going on. Maybe she would keep it to herself and let him work
it out if he could. Let’s see how capable he was without other people around to
look after him.
    She turned to him,
intending to press him for answers, to make him take some
responsibility for what was happening to them, but her words were stillborn.
She watched as an arrow-head of planes swooped low over the trees and passed
over their heads in a deafening rush of wind. She felt Alyssa snatch her hand
away, needing both of them to cover her ears. Nicola did the same, swivelling
to watch the