A Little More Dead Read Online Free Page A

bushy
pines. “Did you hear that?”
    “No,” Paul replied, pulling his coat up
over his neck and jogging for the backdoor like vampires might swoop down next.
And at this point, anything was possible. Once back inside the kitchen, they locked
the door and tried shaking off the cold clinging to their clothes like smoke.
    “I can’t feel my fingers anymore,” Dan
said, removing his gloves and blowing into his cupped hands. “I’m serious, man.
This shit hurts.”
    “Let me see.” Paul lit up Dan’s hands
with the flashlight, examining his fingertips for signs of frostbite. “Do you wanna go turn the heat on in the Jeep for a few minutes?
Thaw out some more water while you’re in there.”
    “By myself? No thanks.” He
rubbed his hands together. “Plus we’re low on gas.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Paul whispered. “Why
didn’t you tell me?”
    “Because we were kind of busy rescuing a
family, and it was getting dark. We’ll siphon something in the morning.”
    Paul nodded and went back into the
kitchen to mop a towel around the bloodstained floor with his snowy boot. Dan
grabbed more towels from a linen closet and helped Paul rub red circles into
the cracked flooring. They worked in silence, listening to Carla tell Sophia
she was a divorced thirty-six year-old who had watched two neighbors murder her
parents right before her very eyes.
    “That is horrible,” Sophia said softly.
    Paul stopped the towel. It was good to
hear her consoling voice again.
    “My parents used to play bridge with
them every week too!” Carla laughed like she was recalling some funny moment at
the grocery store earlier in the week. “My ex lives in California and after the
phones went dead I had no idea what to do. Hell, even Bill O’Reilly had no idea
what to do, which was a first!” She punctuated the statement with another
nervous cackle that made Paul and Dan swap a heavy glance. Carla’s laughter faded
into a thick lull. The wind whistled in the silence stretching between the two
rooms and when Carla resumed her horrid tale she spoke in a much graver tone,
one that sent chills down Paul’s spine.
    “By the time we worked up the courage to
leave my parents’ house, those things were all over the place. Luckily,
my mom’s minivan was parked inside the garage.” She paused for a passing
sniffle. “And thanks to my dad, bless his heart, that man never let a vehicle get under half a tank. Said it was irresponsible, but
personally I think he was obsessive-compulsive. Either way, the power was out
and the garage door wouldn’t open so I drove through it. The boys were
screaming so loud I thought my head was going to explode.”
    Paul surveyed the kitchen floor they’d
managed to reduce to a pink spot, wondering how many other people got lucky
like Carla and her boys. There had to be others who parked in the right spot,
or owned the right fence, or had the right weapons. It was in the odds.
    “It felt like we were running over
telephone poles when I backed down the driveway,” Carla continued in a cold
whisper. “But they weren’t telephone poles; they were my parents’ neighbors and
friends.” She clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling her words. “Some of them younger than Matthew.”
    Paul kicked the bloody towel off to the
side and checked the solar powered G-Shock on his wrist. It’d been one hour
since the repairman and no one else had followed in his lumbering tracks. They
would spend the night in the living room on pillows and blankets, together. In this
world, no one goes alone. Paul’s biggest fear was a group of the undead surrounding
them while they slept, entombing them inside the farmhouse with its dusty standard-definition
TV and Hummel figurines. In anticipation of just such a scenario, he parked the
Jeep in a ready-to-go position outside the back door. If more than a handful or
two showed up at once, they would carve a path to the rig and take their
chances elsewhere. It was all about increasing the