Tainted Future (The Rememdium Series Book 3) Read Online Free

him to the brink of madness. The other three creatures closed the gap fast, so he popped them each in the head, dropping them in less than two seconds.
    When he took aim at the one on Karla, he was successful the second time.
    Unfortunately, he was too late. The creature had bitten a large chunk of flesh from Karla’s calf muscle.
    He’d ran to her side, yanking off his jacket to use as a tourniquet. Cooper wrapped her leg and tried to calm Karla down. She’d been in a complete state of panic. He finally convinced Karla to stop screaming and picked her up off the ground. He made it to the passenger door, opened it, set his wife on the seat, and then she screamed again. “Cooper! Look out!”
    He’d spun around and noticed another corpse rounding the back of the store. Cooper grabbed his weapon and fired, but nothing happened.
    He was out of bullets.
    “Shit!”
    He’d secured Karla in the seat then shut the door. His hands shook while fumbling around for the extra clip in his jacket pocket. The frigid air numbed his exposed fingers to the point they were nearly useless.
    Cooper moved away from the SUV, hoping to draw the corpse away from Karla. It worked. Fresh clip inserted, Cooper fired and the body collapsed in a heap less than ten feet away.
    He’d run back to check on Karla, and that’s when Cooper’s life changed.
    His once beautiful wife was gone. Black, dead eyes stared back at him, the lovely, sweet lips that used to kiss him with passion, were pulled back into a snarl. She’d jumped out of the SUV and landed on top of him, growling, hissing, clawing at his face.
    In the midst of overwhelming sorrow and shock, Cooper had no choice. His sobs were drowned out by the sound of gunfire as he blew a hole in his beloved wife’s head.
    “Can’t do this now! Fall apart later!”
    Cooper refused to dwell any longer on the carnage he’d created seconds before. To bring his focus back, he slammed his head into the metal doorjamb several times. The impacts weren’t hard enough to knock him out, yet enough to ring his bell and clear his thoughts. With each smack, he repeated, “Charlie and Charlene. Charlie and Charlene. Got to get home and make sure they’re safe.”
    The idea to smack some survival sense back to the forefront of his thoughts, worked. He couldn’t stand outside, weeping and puking like a child, any longer. Though no longer young children, the twins were only twenty-two, and they needed their remaining parent to keep them safe.
    “Yeah, like I did such a good job of keepin’ Karla alive,” Cooper muttered. With one last smack of his head, he dislodged the thoughts of his incompetency of being protector of his wife. “No, get it together and think, fool! Stand out here any longer and I’ll just attract more of those things. I’m the Chief of Malvern Police Department for God’s sakes! Act like a man and move your ass!”
    Cooper needed more gas. He assumed a generator kept the pumps and lights on since every other place previously passed didn’t have any power. A click from the gas pump, signaling the tank was full, brought Cooper out of his funk. After putting the nozzle back, he paused.
    “Think. Calm down and think. Stop lookin’ at what I just did and plan ahead!”
    Knowing he had more than a thousand miles to go before making it back home to Arkansas—alone because he’d just shot and killed what used to be his lovely wife—Cooper trudged through the snow toward the door to the station. He reasoned if the power grid was down way up here in the mountains, it was probably down everywhere. Finding working gas stations along the way would probably be impossible, so Cooper decided to look for anything inside the store he could use to fill up with gas.
    He welcomed the distraction—any distraction—to keep from going insane.
    Cooper found four, empty gas containers inside on the shelves. After taking them outside, he returned to the store and grabbed several plastic bags from the