Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 9): Frayed Read Online Free Page B

as he let his foot off the
brake and started the truck moving again.
    Half a block south of the mangled luxury car, Cade’s eye was
drawn right to the waist-high hedge paralleling the sidewalk and separating an
automotive shop from Main Street. Something about the entire run looked odd, like
it had been trampled recently. From the corner of Center to the block’s
midpoint, the dense, squared-off shrub angled sharply away from the street, and
the snow that dusted everything else—nonexistent.
    On the expansive but nearly empty parking lot to the lee
side of the shrubs, a dozen or so cars waiting for service they would never
receive were pushed up tight against what appeared to be the shop’s office and
an adjacent rollup door, which was battered and bowing inward.
    Cade stopped the truck, swung his gaze back to the road, and
suddenly the cause of the damage dawned on him. Where he was sitting, Main and
Center, was the chokepoint on the dead’s migratory route where State
Route 16 narrowed, and the roaming hordes, due to their size and mass capable
of moving vehicles and shoving houses off their foundations, came against the
most resistance. Further scrutiny revealed more damage from the shambling
masses. A trio of power poles on the east side of Main were leaning away from
the street at about the same angle as the hedges opposite them. The lines once
supplying power to the fix-it shop and nearby business were all stretched
laser-straight overhead under great tension and looked as if they might give
way at any moment. Cade’s eyes touched upon the sidewalk and he couldn’t decide
if the upheaved concrete at the base of the poles was keeping them from
toppling completely or if the taut supply lines were doing the job. At any
rate, sitting in the idling truck anywhere near the listing poles was asking for
a Darwin Award, so he continued on and hooked the next left at Center.
    A little baffled that so far he hadn’t spotted a single Z in
downtown Woodruff, he drove walking-speed east for a full block. At the next
intersection, he spied the business where Brook’s foraging foray had nearly
been derailed. The words on the shingle hanging over the front door read, “Back
in the Saddle Rehab.” Although he knew the major details of the ill-fated stop
just off of Main Street, he’d been spared the minor ones, the first of which he
now found to be false advertising, because it was here where Wilson had been
nearly bucked out of the reversing Raptor and into the arms of the dead.
And it was also here where Chief was bit in the saddle, so to speak.
    Secondly, the building looked much smaller in person than
Wilson’s description of it. It struck Cade as more residence than
business. Just a little two-story house on a quarter of the block surrounded by
a big unimproved parking lot. A sea of gravel, in fact. Therefore, Cade decided
to swing by on his way out of town to procure the items on the list he presumed
would be there. A quick in-and-out. Crossing T’s and dotting I’s.
    Two minutes.
    Tops.
    Cade scanned all points of the compass and still nothing was
moving. Seeing that Woodruff suddenly ended three blocks east, he brought the
Steiners up and swept his gaze over a cluster of buildings just up the road
beyond the edge of town.
    On a knuckle of land and set back south of the road were a
trio of prefabbed homes. The unremarkable single-story items were made from two
halves constructed someplace else, trucked here, and then hemmed up on site.
They were placed on side by side lots and had identical snow-covered driveways
leading up from the road to flatly graded rectangles all white with snow and
large enough to accommodate a pair of vehicles. Probably a family plat divided
for siblings, Cade guessed.
    He snatched up the CB and hailed Seth, who for the day was
acting as Chief of Security, a position created by Duncan not only to instill a
certain sense of pride in the job, but also to make the solitary experience
attractive