Plague Of The Revenants Read Online Free Page A

equation. Some of the other inmates talked of escape, but escape to what? There was nothing out there except the undead, nothing except burned out buildings and crashed cars, the stench of death and the darkest despair. Back in the cells all I had done was listen to the radio. I had heard the reports from other countries that were hit first and I knew that once things got to this stage it was all over.
    I remember the first one I killed. It was brought in buried beneath the others and unloaded from the dumper truck. We came forward with our shovels, myself and another prisoner named Royce who I had been paired up with. We started reaching down, picking them up on either side and throwing them into the pit. Unfortunately for Royce he was on the head end, didn’t see the ravenous jaws snap up towards him until it was too late and after that the piercing scream as the thing buried its teeth into his arm, the spurt of blood. I jumped back, raised my shovel and swung it towards the revenant without hesitation, sharp end first. The blade of my spade connected hard with the revenant’s scalp, slicing it clean in half. The creature’s jaws froze and it died without another sound. Meanwhile Royce’s scream were clear for all to hear. I bent down beside him and ripped a piece off my t-shirt to use as a tourniquet, started to wrap it around his wound. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Or perhaps not,” came a voice behind me. The shot whizzed past my neck, severing the hairs, and smashed into the dead centre of Royce’s forehead. I leapt up, spun around to face Blake. “Nicely done, Grant,” said the warden with a thin smile. “Except next time try not to get too sentimental over the bitten, eh? I’ve never seen it end well yet.”
    So it went on for over a week. I could see it was hopeless and was sure the government must have seen it too, presuming the government still existed at that point. Somebody must have been coordinating the lorries which still drew up outside the stadium full of bodies. There were more bodies than we could cope with and no more space to bury them. Those who tried to point this out were shot. I could see at once the law was now entirely in the hands of Blake. Of the one hundred and fifty inmates who had started out just forty now remained. Even the guards had been virtually enslaved as Blake asserted his dominance over the whole affair. I wondered why he stayed here, why he didn’t just take off by himself. I supposed it was because there were no more safe havens, or perhaps he was simply biding his time.
    Soon I could sense a mounting unease amongst the guards. They were talking amongst themselves, ignoring both the bodies and ourselves. I started hearing words like ‘swarm.’ After ten days I started noticing even more ominous signs. Survivors no longer came up clamouring to be let in. The aggressive shouts of the pursuing revenants from outside were replaced with a low and steady moan as they patrolled the streets without stimulus. The trucks pulled up less frequently. Discipline broke down. It was now not only prisoners that went missing in the night and what is more us inmates were increasingly left to our own devices and not being worked so hard.

One morning we woke up to find the fences groaning with the weight of a multitude of the undead bearing down on top of it.
“This is the endgame, Grant,” said Blake, coming up to me and laying a comradely hand on my shoulder. “There won’t be any more trucks coming through; I’ve been radioing headquarters for two days now. Nothing.”
“So what are we going to do?” I asked him.
“As for you, you’ll serve your sentence as it was supposed to be served,” replied Blake with a thin smile.
“What do you mean?”
“You were sentenced to die in captivity,” purred the warden. “And die in captivity is exactly what you’re going to do. Whether you turn and become one of them, well that may be up