Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Read Online Free Page A

morphed into
hungry sounding guttural moans.
    Five feet.
    He imagined their crooked fingers kneading the air and the
hairs on his neck sprang to attention. And though already chilled to the bone,
gooseflesh rippled like an electric current up his ribcage.
    Still he didn’t move. He felt alive now more than ever.
    Three feet, now.
    Excitement building, his body shivered against the
stiffening wind. Finally, with the calls of the dead in his ear and his toned
muscles under incredible tension, he spun counter-clockwise, straightened his
arms and locked his elbows, bringing the nearly invisible blade—now horizontal
and reflecting sky—around like a natural extension of his body. Breaking his
wrists just before impact enabled the razor-sharp edge to cleave cleanly
through two skulls and enter a third before coming to rest against the female
cadaver’s ethmoid bone. She had been big in life, and her twice-dead weight nearly
ripped the weapon from the man’s calloused hands as gravity instantly yanked
all two-hundred-plus pounds of her vertically to the pavement.
    Three things happened near simultaneously as the man
backpedaled left, still in control of the wildly vibrating blade. First off,
the initial victim of his roundhouse, suddenly minus the top third of its
skull, staggered forward, the final impulses sent from the now-bisected brain
urging pustule-covered arms to grasp the meat that was no longer occupying the
last place registered in its dead gaze. A fraction of a second after the first
to meet the blade—arms outstretched, crooked fingers still blindly probing thin
air—crumpled to the pavement, the rotten interloper to its right, bald head
cleaved clean through on a forty-five from ear to crown, tumbled sideways over
the plus-sized corpse, the energy from it meeting the ground still rippling
through its decay-ravaged blubber.
    Three down, three to go , crossed his mind even as he
was acting on muscle memory and dropping them one at a time behind three
efficient downward strokes, separated by a barely perceptible right to left
pivot, and only a half heartbeat’s time between each lethal blow.

Chapter 3
     
     
    On the LCD screen in the F-650, north/south-running State
Route 16 was represented by a thick yellow line intersected by eastbound 39. As
soon as Cade turned north onto the straight stretch of two-lane, he saw a sign
indicating 16 would soon turn into Main Street, which bisected the
blink-and-you’d-miss-it town of Woodruff. On the screen, the name change was
already indicated in blue font and, like seedlings growing in time-lapse
photography, smaller yellow lines representing side streets began sprouting
left and right off the main drag.
    He drove on for a few blocks and, seeing nothing but a
burned-out mom and pop store and fields in the distance, shrouded by a gray
haze of falling snow, he decided to double back and work his way east, starting
with the nearest cross street.
    He made a quick U-turn and, nearing East Center Street,
turned his attention to a mid-sized passenger car that had been pushed up onto
the curb. It was wedged tight nose first between a light pole and a mature oak,
the latter doing considerable damage to the passenger side and creasing a sharp
V into the roofline. The sheet metal reflecting the image of Cade’s ride was
dented and dirty and scratches marred the once-shiny black paint. There was a
long dead corpse behind the wheel, its skeletal hands still clutched the
misshapen steering wheel and, like a big white tongue, the deflated airbag
draped from the torn leather housing and onto the unfortunate victim’s lap. And
speaking to the considerable forces that delivered the large Cadillac DTS and
driver to their final resting place, all of the glass in the doors was blown
out and it sat on four flat tires. On the ground, refracting the newly fallen
snow and looking oddly out of place, shards of safety glass thrown under the
vehicle’s rockers and bumpers sparkled and shimmered