Plague of the Undead Read Online Free

at least half a dozen times for fighting and public intoxication. Roberts was tangled in a nest of heavy hoses and wires, like a man wrestling with a giant snake.
    Jacob ran over to him and helped him climb loose of the hoses. “Go that way,” he said, pointing with his gun toward the wall.
    “What the hell, man? What is this shit?”
    “Go!” Jacob said. “Get moving!”
    Some people, even when it’s for their own good, just won’t take orders. Jacob had just pulled him from a muddy pit of hoses. He could see the zombies closing in around him. But all the kid heard was a cop telling him what to do. It was like his mind switched off. He bowed up like he wanted to fight him. Jacob turned and shot two of the things in the head, felling them at his feet. That was what it took to knock some sense into Roberts. He scrambled out of the mass of the hoses, the horror plain on his face.
    “Go!” Jacob yelled. “Get to the wall!”
    In the mud were the two zombies he’d just put down.
    The others moaned as they closed in around him. But Jacob didn’t move. He was still staring at the two zombies he’d put down. He’d never seen any so badly decomposed before. There barely seemed to be enough muscle tissue remaining to haul the things around.
    A muddy hand fell on his back, grabbing at his shirt.
    Jacob yelled and spun away from it, breaking the zombie’s fingers as he twisted.
    He tripped over a hose and nearly fell. His right foot came down hard in the mud and he sank up to his calf. From the wall he heard people screaming, and all around him, the bloodcurdling moans of the dead.
    Mired in the freshly turned river soil, Jacob pulled on his leg with everything he had. “Come on, come on!” he muttered.
    One more pull and he was free, his foot coming loose without his boot. But there was no time to go back for it. The workers were gathering at the base of the wall, pushing the ladder back into place. Most of the zombie herd was closing in on Jacob’s position, but a few were making their way toward the panicked group of workers. He had to cover them.
    Jacob ran for the wall. The workers were shoving each other and yelling.
    “One at a time,” Jacob said. “Move quickly. I’ll cover you.”
    He stepped away from the crowd, putting himself between the wall and the approaching zombies. There were more than he’d first thought, sixty or seventy at least. Most were still recognizable as men or women, but some were barely more than skeletons, with only scraps of muddy cloth left of their clothes.
    Jacob looked down at the pistol in his hand and tried to remember how many shots he had left. There hadn’t been enough ammunition for him to top off his magazine before he went in to work, and he’d fired four rounds already.
    “You guys need to hurry up!” he yelled over his shoulder at the workers.
    They were climbing the ladder three at a time now, and Jacob could see it shaking and bowing under their weight.
    He turned back to the approaching zombies, took a deep breath, and shot the two nearest him. A third put on a sudden burst of speed and charged out of the herd. Startled, Jacob wheeled on the woman and fired without aiming. The bullet hit the top of her head and made it snap back, so that she was looking up at the sky. A wet chunk of her scalp flew out behind her. She stopped in her tracks, and then slowly lowered her gaze on Jacob again.
    For the second time that morning, he froze.
    Her eyes were dead and empty, yet somehow lit with an insane and insatiable rage. Or was it hunger? He couldn’t say for sure. He only knew that her eyes held him transfixed, like a rabbit caught by a snake’s stare.
    Shouting from above shook him loose of the thing’s stare.
    He glanced up and back. The last of the workers were on the ladder now, and Jim Laymon was motioning for him to come up.
    “We got sharpshooters on the way,” he said.
    Jacob didn’t need to be told twice. He turned back to the woman he’d just shot,