World of Ashes Read Online Free Page B

taking zombies to a hospital. “Smorgasbord” might be a good description.
    Ethan flew past the coral, wishing he hadn’t seen it. Keith opened the door once to hit a zombie and laughed hysterically. “I’ve always wanted to do that.” He said when he was done laughing long enough to catch his breath. If that was what tripped his trigger, Ethan figured, let him have it. There were worse ways to spend the apocalypse.
                  Checkpoints were at every overpass over Interstate 44. The Gray Summit staging area was just as abandoned as any other, ash drifting in the wind, but thinner as they got farther from the city. Ethan stopped the truck and watched through a hunting scope for hidden elements, dead or alive. They saw nothing and after their approach collected several more boxes of ammunition left in a supply tent. Radios were left on in the command post, and computers displayed Blue Force Tracker information that basically outlined the fact that there were no more “Blue” forces in the area. Just Red.
    T he speakers on the radios were either humming, hissing, or broadcasting the moans of the undead operators on the other end. One radio let them listen to an air traffic controller in charge of directing planes and choppers out of the Sullivan, St. Clair, and Cuba airports to… somewhere. The destination was in code, and neither knew how to decipher it. The evacuation was going, but to where? Only every other word was audible, but “Green Zone” was repeated several times, giving some false ray of hope.
                  "We'll stick to the back roads until we get there. We stop for no one we don’t have to, especially not for other Soldiers, I don’t trust them not to turn us in or try to pull rank. We want to go back on our own terms if we have to, not because we're made too. Agreed?"
    "Absolutely." Keith nodded , his eyes as wide as Ethan’s while they listened to the dead consume their world. Ammunition loaded, Ethan continued driving through the remains of a town he’d once known well. They didn't see a single living soul until the Twin Bridges Underpass that split from I-44 toward the college town of Union. Local's had already overrun and taken control of the Army’s TCP there, using what had once been a Harley Davidson store and it’s dilapidated storage facility as forward observation and gun positions.
    How in the hell had the Army lost accountability of so many weapons? Ethan mused. Things had to have gone from bad, to worse, to full a blown clusterfuck. The Army had been obsessed with keeping track of every weapon and every bullet for as long as Ethan could remember. He’d spent countless hours “policing” expended brass in grassy fields and foxholes that had been there since M1 Garands were in service.               Punishments for misplacing a weapon could be severe, unless of course you were an officer, then everyone had to politely pretend they didn’t know you’d been whackin’ it in the porta-shitter, forgot your 9mm when it fell out of your holster because you couldn’t get comfortable for that final push, and the Indian KBR worker cleaning up after your gross ass found your weapon hours later. If the Army had lost this much equipment some officer somewhere was covering his ass like he was Fresh Fish at Ft. Leavenworth.
    Unable to avoid the checkpoint now that they’d been spotted, Ethan slowed to a stop so they could talk to a gangly looking kid in florescent yellow “Sk8er” shoes and a soot gray hoodie. His hair was dirty and dangling in his face, white iPod headphones were dangling from his neck and he didn’t seem very concerned with camouflage. The kid was armed with a .308 hunting rifle and an expensive scope he probably didn’t even know how to use. Ethan had, unfortunately, been a Military Policeman once upon a lifetime ago and was astonished at how brazenly the kid just walked up to the truck and stuck his face right up the