Zombie Killers: Ice & Fire Read Online Free PDF

smoking in my hand. Jonesy put his weight into the pry bar, and the door popped open. I threw the flare down the stairwell and followed it in.
 

Chapter 10
    The flare I had just tossed down the stairwell fell about five feet then bounced back. Below me, in its sputtering glare, the entire stairwell was blocked by corpses. They had been jammed packed against the door, and as they rotted over that horrible, hot summer, they had collapsed in on themselves. My guess is that the door had been locked from the inside, something I confirmed from the lock that Jonesy’s prybar had popped out of the wood inside the door frame.
    We saw things like this a lot when entering towns and buildings that had succumbed to the Zombie Apocalypse. It wasn’t the Z”s that killed them, it was panic. If they had just kept their heads, maybe they could have figured out how to open the door and blockaded themselves on the roof until something else could be thought of. The smell wafting up from below confirmed something I had already suspected. There had been a serious fire down below, and all these people had packed in here and died of smoke inhalation. 
    When I had stopped short, seeing what was below me, the rest of the guys had piled up behind me and actually tripped over each other. I backed out slowly to avoid them. Jonesy was laughing as Ahmed helped Hernandez get back to his feet. “Way to go, noob!”
    “What’s up, Nick?” Doc asked. We circled the team to hold a conference.
    “Stairs below is packed with corpses. Probably they holed up in the building, thinking the stone walls meant safety. Someone got careless with a flame and there was a major fire.”
    “That doesn’t bode well for us finding useable machinery here.”
    “Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, we still have to get down. Break out the ropes.”
    We secured several ropes to the Air Conditioning units fixed to the roof, and dropped them over the sides, then snapped into rappelling harnesses. Jonesy and Doc went down first, going over the edge and down to the fourth floor windows. These they smashed out using a cloth over a baseball bat, to minimize the noise. I had sent these two down first, because pulling yourself in through a window isn’t like in the movies. You don’t just rappel down and swing in. More often than not, you’ll bounce off the window, or cut the hell out of yourself AND get stuck in the frames. Jonesy and Doc were the only two who had the brute strength to manhandle themselves quickly and quietly in through the windows. I waited while the y scouted out the floor below us.
    “Nick, looks like they tried to barricade the ground floor, like you thought. Bad fire. Everything is trashed.”
    “OK, we’ll come down and move to a different part of the plant, get settled in for the night and I’ll send my report to higher. Judging from the rest of the town, this place is a wash.” As I talked to him, the snow had cleared and we looked out over devastation. Most of the town had burned down to the ground. Only brick buildings still stood, and chimneys.
    Behind me I heard a commotion, then a yell. I turned in time to see Collaton catch a right hook across the face from Brit. He started to swing back at her, but Ahmed grabbed his arm, twisted it behind him, and dumped him on his ass in the snow. Brit was shaking the hand that she had punched him with, grimacing in pain. 
    “Do not put your hands on her again, do you understand me?” Collaton winced as Ahmed lifted up on his arm.
    “Sure, I get it, she’s your woman. You should have just said something.”
    “My woman? No, she is a soldier. Like you. Like me.”
    “OK, OK.”
    I looked at Brit’s hand, which had already started to swell.
    “Looks like you might have broken something. Next time, don’t use your hand. Use something harder. What happened?”
    “I was getting my harness on, asked him to tighten the straps, and he used that as an excuse to squeeze my ass. Next time, I’m going to shoot