Warpath: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Read Online Free Page B

the
specter of a shattered femur or tibia puncturing one of the Ford’s tires and
ruining his day entered the equation. So at the last instant he braked hard
and, using the truck’s massive bumper like a cow-catcher, parted the rear
echelon and entered their midst at a little more than walking speed. Then after
enduring what seemed like a non-stop barrage of slapping palms and nails
screeching against the Ford’s sheet metal, he drove out the other end, tires
intact but with every nerve ending in his body suddenly ablaze.
    ***
    Less than a mile north and barely two minutes removed from
the encounter with the undead herd, Cade entered the Joshua tree-lined
subdivision and pulled parallel to the curb in front of a two-story Craftsman
nearly identical to his childhood home back in Portland.
    Nostalgia flooded his brain as he took in the sight for sore
eyes. Then he shifted his attention to the late-model mid-sized SUV he’d
spotted during the ride along with Beeson. It was parked on the long driveway
against the left side of the house and the real reason he’d undertaken the
self-centered excursion from FOB Bastion in the first place.
    Disregarding the forward shambling mob in his rearview, he
turned the wheel hard right and gunned the Ford over the curb. There was a
harsh squelch as the knobby tires gnashed through the crushed rock parking
strip and a shudder as he pulled a hard one-eighty and ground the rig to a halt
atop the front yard consisting mostly of prairie grasses and ground-hugging
cacti. Rattling the shifter into Park, he pulsed his window down and regarded
the sight that instantly took him back to Portland. As he relived that Z-Day
siege he could literally smell the stink of the dead as they surged through his
front plate window and rode the splintered glass into his family room. Sitting
there with the engine idling, he shuddered as Ike and Leo’s screams rolled
across the porch. Then he saw his neighbor Rawley taking the fight to the
creatures from his front stoop. The rifle fire clear as day as it rolled across
the street. There were long drawn out bursts and the dead falling and clunking
down both flights of steps.
    He took a deep breath of hot dry air. Feeling his heart rate
ebb, he removed his hat and swiped the newly forming sweat from his brow. For
a moment there , he thought, the whole thing seemed so real . Only the
drapes in this Craftsman were open and he could see nothing moving in the gloom
behind the still-intact double-paned windows. There were no screams or rifle
fire. All in all, inside and out, the mocha-brown-and-gray-trimmed house was
deathly quiet. And with no breeze to speak of, the stunted bushes bordering the
side fence and mature trees opposite them were statue-still, making the whole
scene—minus the putrefying monster banging around trapped inside the adjacent
fenced-in yard and the approaching group of Zs still a dozen blocks
distant—seem like something Norman Rockwell could have imagined.
    Killing the engine, he wondered briefly if the vivid
flashbacks he’d just experienced were what the doctors at Schriever had taken
to calling Post-Apocalyptic Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe , he
reasoned. But PATSD didn’t roll off the tongue the same. So he decided to chalk
it up to PTSD, call it a day, and be done with it. Son, nobody likes a
whiner , his dad had often said.
    And Dad was right. Decision made and behind him. Time to
forget the past and do what he had come here for in the first place. He looked
at the front door, which, like the one in Portland, was a sturdy design
constructed of wide oak planks running vertically and outfitted with an
antiqued brass pull and matching hinges. But sadly, destroying the illusion of
home, this front door had been defaced, spray-painted dead center with a
three-foot-tall white letter ‘ X.’ Noted in the top quadrant of the ‘ X’ in like color was the date the home had been searched. Cade did the math in his
head and determined that nine