A Little More Dead Read Online Free

protest.
    “We’ll be fine,” he cut her off, tapping
the nylon holster strapped around his right thigh. “We’re not carrying Nerf
guns here. Try to get some rest for tomorrow. We’ll need it.”
    Carla’s jaw came unhinged. Her eyes
toured the others before falling back on Paul. “That’s your plan? Board up the
window?”
    His face soured. “Do you really want to
drag your two boys out there into the dark? The cold? It’s suicide and you know it!” He paused to lower his
voice. “Look, I get it. I don’t want to stay here either, but we probably just
took out the closest neighbors around. We will be fine. I promise.”
    Other than an incredulous huff, Carla
didn’t respond. She planted a kiss on her boys’ stocking caps, bravely staving
off the tears for their sake. She reminded Paul of his own mom. After he and Sophia
abandoned their dream home to rescue his mom on the way out of town, his mother
had been panic-stricken as well. What mom wouldn’t be? Then she got sick. So sick,
she didn’t even want to crochet anymore and she loved to crochet! With her cat
softly growling under the bed, he remembered her telling him about the flu shot
she got at the pharmacy the day before. Two days later, she shut her eyes and
stopped breathing, the cat still hiding beneath the bed.
    Hiding like they are now, with the Devil
snapping at their heels.
    Paul turned his attention back to the
window, wondering if there were others like them out there. He shuddered when
he thought about out there because out
there is where the full moon cast tangled shadows of withered branches upon the
pearl white snow. Out there, even the shadows reached for you. His glowing
reflection swallowed thickly in the glass. During the first few days of the
pandemic, the majority of the zombies they’d seen on the news were children and
the elderly, which played perfectly into Paul’s flu-shot theory. When the
government and medical communities started dishing out H1N1 warnings like white
cake at a wedding reception, the young and the old had been the first to get in
line. They’d also been the first to turn, but that was changing. Case in point:
The repairman, who was probably close to thirty-five.
    Paul took the family portrait into the
kitchen, trying to piece together a grisly puzzle in his mind that, in the end,
would never make a lick of difference. It didn’t matter what caused it because
it was too late to stop it now. That ship had sailed. He held the picture over
the broken window to check the fit, staring into the father’s probing eyes. With
some nails and a hammer he found in the basement, Paul attached the portrait over
the broken window with the family facing outside. The picture wouldn’t stop
much but the wind from getting in but it was nice not to have to look into those
eyes anymore.
    Back in the living room, he knelt next
to Sophia in the recliner and placed a hand on her leg. His swollen brain
searched through endless combinations of reassuring words, each one sounding
worse than the one before it. “Hey, you know you had to do that right?”
    She stared past him with unfocused eyes,
lower lip quivering. “He was just a little boy,” she said faintly, wiping a
tear from her cheek with the back of her glove.
    “He used to be, baby, but he was gone
before we got here. One of us could’ve been killed or infected if you hadn’t protected
us like that.” In spite of his careful choice of words, they still fell on deaf
ears. Paul hung his head. They would need her back in the game by morning or
next time they might not be so lucky.

 
 
 
 
    Chapter Four

 
 
 
 
 
    After setting the dead kid behind a
small garden shed, Paul and Dan took a long look around with the moonlight
reflecting off the freshly fallen snow. Not counting the monsters hiding in the
shadows, it was beautiful. Peaceful. From here you
would never know the industrialized world was busy collapsing.
    Dan jerked his head to a swath of