Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Read Online Free Page A

later he was zippering through the maze of
static Humvees and MRAPs. He crabbed between a pair of Cougars, their slab
sides painted desert tan, each towering two-and-a-half-feet over his head.
After navigating by guess and happenstance he emerged from the steel canyon,
pressed the unlock button on the alarm fob, and listened hard for the tone.
Hearing the soft beep, he vectored towards it, hitting the button two more
times before finally finding the truck without a name. Back in Portland, before
the dead had come back to life, upending everything he had known as normal,
Raven had taken it upon herself and named their Toyota Sequoia the Silver
Beast ; her inspiration derived from a cartoon about a girl named Maggie and
her docile pet monster she called the Ferocious Beast. Seeing her smiling face
in his mind’s eye, he made a mental note to challenge her to coin a similarly
suitable name for the Ford.
    Cade popped the door, grasped the grab handle, and climbed
into the seat, hauling the pair of crutches in after. He slipped the key in the
ignition and the Ford fired right up, its throaty exhaust notes banging off the
armored military vehicles parked on either side. What about ‘Old
Faithful ,’ he thought to himself. Then, a second later, the image of
Jasper’s truck belching steam and trying to die on the South Dakota Interstate
popped into his head, instantly nixing that idea.
    It took two tries, forwarding and reversing while cutting
the wheel by a few degrees, before he was able to extricate the rig. Finally he
goosed the throttle and with the truck belching grey exhaust sped from the
parking lot. But instead of going straight, and much to the surprise of First
Sergeant Andreasen and the others manning the gate, he turned left and rolled
up tight to the hurricane fencing and motioned the first sergeant over.
    After a quick exchange with the newest member of the Cade
Grayson fan club, and a sour look from the soldier whose job it was to lower
the mobile bridge system, he was outside the wire and on his way.
    With the image of the bridge folding away in his rearview,
Cade turned right out of FOB Bastion and drove on for a short while to the ‘T’
intersection he recalled from the night before where another right turn was
necessary. Then, keeping a steady forty miles per hour, he maneuvered the Ford
along a meandering stretch of 10 1/2 Road for almost a mile, dodging small
groups of Zs and wondering the entire way, why, with so much open range, the
CDOT bothered with fractions when naming their streets. As quickly as the
conundrum had come to him, it diminished in importance when he came upon U-13,
a north/south two-lane splitting Mack to the west and Loma to the east. He
ground the Ford to a hard stop on the debris-littered blacktop just as Beeson
had done the night before. He sat there for a beat staring dead ahead, past the
sign reading Loma Population 1,296 , and recalled the colonel’s words. Unlucky
thirteen, Greg had said, referring to the road by its newly earned name.Then, eyes misting over, shoulders slumped from carrying the added weight
of the newly fallen, the usually unflappable Special Forces officer had added
in a low and chilling tone, ‘ We don’t go beyond thirteen ... Loma belongs to
the dead.’
    Hearing those words again in his former mentor’s voice, with
the same inflection and cadence, stirred within Cade a healthy dose of fear
which in turn produced a much needed surge of adrenaline.
    Heeding the colonel’s warning, Cade cranked the wheel left
and proceeded down U-13, passing by wide open tracts of browned grass and
tilled dirt, their neglect obviously underway well before the dead began to
walk. A mile later, with the subdivision of houses he’d spotted the night
before shimmering in the distance, he saw a mass of staggering Zs blocking the
two-lane shoulder to shoulder. For a brief second he entertained the notion of
speeding up and sending them flying like so many bowling pins, until