The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Read Online Free Page A

others kept their weapons at the ready. All had the same questions:
    Where was the government? Where were people? Where was food? Where was it safe?
    He pointed them south to Atlanta, while they warned him about going further north. They wasted their breath. She had gone north. Cassie. The murderer.
    Outside the little town of Braselton, Georgia, north of the CDC, he had found the Suburban she had stolen after killing Julia. It had been weathered by the winter, yet he had recognized it immediately by all the bullet holes. Three days later, just across the border into South Carolina he discovered where Cassie had squirreled herself away for at least part of the winter: a well constructed barn close to a medium sized farming community.
    It hadn't taken any of his skills in law enforcement to figure out it had been Cassie staying there. In her boredom she had scrawled messages of hate on almost every surface, with his name being one of the most pronounced.
    And now ten days later in the suburbs of Philadelphia he stood eyeing the snot. It was the third hint of humanity that he had come across in the last five days. Had she been here? Was that her shoeprint in dried mud by the front door? Were these her sooty fingerprints on the mantle? The snot on the wall had his gut telling him this was Cassie's handiwork; she had always been casually vulgar, and yet he had no way of really knowing if she'd been here.
    Still it was these faint rumors of her passing that kept him going north, though he had nearly abandoned the search after Washington DC. That city had been a running hell, one that even a demon such as Cassie would not have stomached. If there were humans left in that sad city, they were deep in its brick bowels and perhaps forever lost to the world.
    Phil adelphia was different. The zombies weren't nearly as numerous. Ram laid aside his axe and holstered his weapon before pulling out his battered Rand McNally. After marking his present location in red ink, he studied the map and its three red Xs, looking for a pattern. Each represented some sort of human activity, and if they all had been made by the same person then that person was clearly searching for something and not trying to bypass the city...but what were they searching for?
    Food? Weapons? A last vestige of humanity? These were what everyone was searching for, which didn't help him at all.
    "If I was Cassie where would I go?" Ram said and then sighed, turning the map. The flat cartoonish nature of it: streets in white, water in blue "other than city" in green, wasn't much help. He decided to get a better lay of the land and tromped up to the second floor where he spied a pull down ladder to an attic. Without thinking anything of it, he gave the hanging rope a sturdy yank.
    The stairs opened like a black mouth and out of it tumbled a pile of human corpses—they had been gnawed down to the bone, with little left but shreds of skin and tissue clinging to the remains. They rained down on him and the smell had him going dizzy.
    “Oh ...oh, that’s horrible,” he moaned. Gagging, he almost hurled up his breakfast, however, it was at that moment when the zombie which had done all the gnawing fell down the attic ladder, practically on top of him.
    It had once been the owner of the home; a man with a family , a large mortgage and a ballooning gut. Now it was a sly zombie with only nine teeth left in its dank mouth. Its skin was grey and aged: puckered, wrinkled, and fissured. Its claws, on the other hand, were long and sharp.
    As it fell , it flung out a hand and raked Ram, catching his shirt and shredding it at the neck. “Jesus!” he cried. One hand went to his neck, feeling the skin intact and breathing a sigh of relief, while his other hand casually went to his hip holster and pulled the Beretta housed there.
    He was too casual by half, while the zombie was far quicker than he expected. It looked to have come down in a jumbled heap, however it had landed in a crouch