The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 4) Read Online Free

wander out of sight, their sound continuing to reverberate through the avenues and along the narrow streets, but the immediate danger had gone. A few stragglers continued to stagger along, crawling and dragging themselves through the detritus on mangled limbs, but the street was now mostly empty, leaving a trail of discarded body parts in the wake of the swarm. Legs, arms, and even heads, were strewn throughout the area, having been torn from their owners as the reanimated corpses within the throng had jostled and pushed against one another.
    The two living men stepped out from the shadows and surveyed the aftermath of the decaying exodus with wonder and disgust.
    With a sigh of relief they continued, creeping along the street, and using the weather beaten vehicles as cover. A few metres further along, and they needed to side step a body that clawed at the pavement with its deteriorating fingertips while the remains of its internal organs trailed behind it in long strands, appearing like a black oil slick in the ghostly moonlight. The skin of its hands was worn to the bone, and with each rasping grasp at the hard concrete, it wore away more of its crumbling fingers.
    As it saw Al and Tommy appear in front of it, a hoarse gargle seeped from its torn throat. Its face turned up towards the two figures and its one remaining eye, black and lifeless, locked on to them as its jaw began to spring open and snap shut. It clutched at the ground with more vigour, attempting to drag itself along at a quicker pace to get within reaching distance of its prey, but it was no match for the two fast moving men.
    Al stepped to the side and raised his leg so that his thigh ran parallel to the ground and his heel hung poised above the creature’s head. For a second he stared down into the decaying eye, and in that fleeting moment imagined what the person below his boot may have once looked like. It was a habit that sometimes got the better of him when observing the poor victims of the plague. Despite their appearance and the danger, there were times when he could not help but remember that the vile creatures were actually once living people.
    The snarling corpse slithering along the roadside had been a man once upon a time. A living, breathing, thinking man with his own feelings and views on the world, and his own cares and concerns. He may have even had a family who loved and cared for him; had worried and searched endlessly for him when he had failed to return home. Al’s thoughts were fleeting, and the man beneath his boot once again became an inhuman monster that needed to be destroyed on sight without consideration of what it had once been.
    With all of his weight, he brought his foot down, driving the heel of his boot into the face of the dead man. He felt the bone break. The shock of the impact travelled the length of his leg, and as the skull was ground into the hard surface of the pavement, Al felt his leg come to a sudden stop. The head splintered and collapsed inwards, oozing out the black gloopy mess which was all that was left of the dead man’s thoughts and feelings.
    They continued on, carefully making their way through the destroyed and infested town towards their target. In the distance, they could still hear the crowd that had passed them by rampaging through the lanes and sweeping through the buildings.
    “Right at this next junction,” Al whispered to Tommy as they patrolled one behind the other, and hugging the shadows. “Then it should be there, on the opposite side of the road and at the far end.”
    “You sure it’ll still be there?”
    “Fucked if I know, but it’s where they were when we lost comms with them. Anyway, why wouldn’t it still be there? It’s not exactly a stack of newspaper.”
    Their mission had two objectives. One was to reach the bus depot, and once there, identify any vehicles that were still in working order and could be used to transport the rest of the survivors away from the FOB. The