Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse Read Online Free Page A

couldn’t see anything except a sliver of Fourth Street near the industrial park building. Looked like twenty or thirty people fighting off a horde of zombies while cutting through the chain link fence somebody put up the week before. It wasn’t a real good fence, just one of those temporary kinds they put up around construction sites to keep kids and homeless people from getting hurt or stealing tools. And so Steve can’t sue them for negligence.
    That’s when a security guard came running out of the self-storage locker building and began waving for the people to go away. There was no way to hear anything from the roof of the bar, but you could tell the guard was trying to get them to stop and go away, and he didn’t care about the zombies making their way down the street toward the group of people on the outside of his fence. But they ignored him and managed to cut the chain locking the gate and the entire group rushed in, pushing him off to the side. Then a couple of mini-vans and some dirt bikes drove through the gate before everyone pushed them closed and shot some of the zombies on the outside of the fence. Since then, nothing. But you hear the dirt bikes riding up and down the railroad tracks every so often.
    In fact, there are a lot of people still in town. You see them up on the rooftops during the day, acting like guards. And everyone has the same idea, too: scavenge. But that’s almost as dangerous as the zombies, because if you try to get into a house that’s got people in it, you can get yourself shot.
    I was out with Carla working up the alley between Grove and Bush streets when we saw two older guys trying to pry open the back door to a house when someone from inside just shot through the door and hit the guy with the pry bar. The guy stumbled around the backyard for a minute while his buddy shouted at the people in the house about murdering his friend instead of just telling them to go away. But nobody inside said anything, and the shot guy collapsed in the back yard while the other guy cut through the space between some houses and disappeared onto Grove Street.
    Carla and I had to start hustling because if there’s one thing that will bring zombies, it’s the sound of something loud like a gun. Del said he thinks any manmade sound will bring them, because if you watch the zombies on Fourth Street, they can tell the dirt bikes are running and will start walking down to the tracks. Sure enough, before we made it to Rambo Street on the way back to the bar there were a dozen zombies coming up around the corner from Ford Street, shuffling right at us. Slow pokes, so Carla and I were able to run through some back yards and up a couple of streets until we came to Desimone’s Café.
    That’s where Mom and Dad would go sometimes on something they called “Date Night.” It had a restaurant in the back that served Italian food, and a bar in the front that still lets people smoke cigarettes, and my parents both smoke, so they like to go there. Valerie, Marsha, Del and Lester all smoked cigarettes, too, until about two days after we got into the bar and they all ran out. Now, the only cigarettes left in town are in the Wawa, and nobody’s stupid enough to try and get into it.
    Desimone’s was burnt-out when we walked by, and there were maybe ten zombie bodies on the sidewalk outside, a couple of them pretty burned up. We peeked inside the building, but there was nobody in there, just charred furniture and broken glass. The place was fine just a couple of days earlier, when I went by it with Carla on my way to check and see if my Dad had come back, yet. He hadn’t - the house was still locked - and we had to run like hell from some fast zombies that had been standing behind some trees in the lawn of Our Mother of Sorrows Church.
    There ought to be a way to figure out the fast zombies from the slow ones, but so far nobody can do it. They all just stand there moaning or shuffle slowly around until they have a