Generation Dead (Book 3): Beyond The Gates Read Online Free Page A

have been mostly intact.  His hair was gone, and his clothes were nearly completely rotted away.  All he had on were tattered jeans that had gaping holes in them from thigh to ankle, and a shirt that was torn away on one side, revealing dark grey skin underneath.  His face was nasty, though, with nearly all of the skin from his cheeks and chin ripped off. It was as if the top half of his head was fine, then it went completely skeletal.  I had seen some rough zombies in my time, but this guy was running to the front of the line.
    The other zombie was a woman, and she was in much better shape. Her color was mostly white, but bloodstains covered her legs and hands.  If I had to guess, she lay down somewhere, and the old guy got her legs first, biting her hands when she tried to fight him off.  Her black clothing was torn around her legs, revealing deep bites and tears.  Not a nice way to go.  Her face was clear, though, and it was easy to see she had been pretty when she was alive.  Now she was dead and coming after me, which made her ugly as hell in my book.  Her speed was better than the old guy, so she was going to have to be put down first.  As she advanced, I saw what made me want to let the two of them out.  Pinned to the shoulder of her shirt was a small piece of paper.
    I hadn’t seen that sort of thing before, and I didn’t have time to figure it out right now.  I backed up and put a fuel pump between myself and her.  She was making good progress, but she was single focused as zombies tended to be.  She kept her eyes on me and walked straight into the gap between the two pumps.  It was just large enough to let her in, but not large enough to let her through.  She bumped into the garbage can wedged in there, and with that distraction I slammed my ‘hawk into her head. She crumpled over the can and lay there, her arms dangling down.
    I didn’t give her any thought as I turned to face the other zombie.  He was a bit trickier, since he had been cooking for a while.  When zombies age, they tend to evolve a bit, and even develop some problem solving skills.  We’d all seen their crude ambushes and ability to manipulate doorknobs and such, so I figured Smiley here was no ordinary ghoul. That didn’t change the fact that I was going to kill him permanently, it just encouraged a little more caution.
    Smiley weaved around the pumps and walked towards me.  He kept his eyes on me, alternating looking at my face and my weapon.  That was new. I half wondered if he would duck if I swung at him, but I really didn’t care.  I waited until he got close, and I raised my weapon.  He looked up at it and missed the foot I planted in his chest, shoving him backwards and onto the ground.  His head smacked against the little concrete island that held the pumps, and that stunned him just long enough to let me bury the spike end of my tomahawk in his forehead.  His eyes rolled up and looked at it as he slumped back and died.
    Wiping my blade off, I went back to the other island and retrieved the piece of paper pinned to the woman’s shirt.  I couldn’t figure an explanation for it being there, just that it was curious.  Opening it up, I could see it wasn’t paper at all, but a kind of thin cloth.  On it was written:
    45-28-10
    117-12-7
    The numbers were neat and precise, like someone had taken great care to make sure they were legible and distinct. I had no idea what they meant or what they were for.  But somebody had thought them important enough to make sure they stood a chance of being found.
    “What do you have there?”
    I turned at the voice of my brother.  He was lounging by the road, and I was used to his sitting back and letting me deal with situations.  I knew he would have stepped in had he felt it necessary, but with just two zombies there wasn’t too much of a danger.  I would have done the same in his place.
    “Just a small piece of paper with some numbers on it,’ I said, holding it up