Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Read Online Free Page A

the person yet through the screen of trees, but in a moment our paths would intersect at the front gate. As the footsteps neared, I felt a strong, instinctive impulse to hide but limited it to stopping well short of the fence.
    Now I could hear other footsteps trailing the first. I pictured a whole gaggle of runners, a cross-country team sprinting by in their shorts as if nothing was wrong. God, that would be good. I was shaking.
    The first runner came into view, really moving, and it took me a moment to recognize my own mother. I just watched stupidly as a blue woman—her face the bruised color of a sparrow chick—ran deliriously toward me, dress flapping. Her open mouth was an obscene black hole. Then it clicked: That housecoat . . .
    “M-mummy?” I cried, stumbling backward.
    As she attempted to lunge over the fence, her dress became entangled in the hooked wires, and she fell. Senseless with shock and grief, I cried out and jumped to help her, but froze again at the sight of her rolling and heaving in the dirt like a wild animal. She was so blue , blue as someone in the throes of strangulation . . . but she was not choking. All the while she struggled to get loose, the huge black pupils of her glaring eyes were fixed on me. It was such a manic, predatory look that I shrank back with fear. Then the dress gave way like a shed skin.
    I don’t remember screaming or running or anything else that happened for the next few seconds, but somehow I wound up crouched in the trailer, gasping for breath, with my back against the front door. The door rattled in its frame. I must have been in shock, because the strongest feeling I had was that I was late and my mother would be worried.
    Once when I was in fourth grade, I had been so late coming home that she called the police. Some other girls and I had been holding a kind of séance in a churchyard, having convinced ourselves that the statues of saints moved when we weren’t looking . We even gave offerings of pocket change. But then some less-credulous older boys showed up and spoiled the illusion.
    The door stopped shuddering, and the thing outside leaped off the stoop to circle around back. The back door. I ran into the kitchen just in time to see my mother yank the screen off its hinges and smash the little window high in the door. Her whole arm snaked through, heedless of broken glass, a crablike blue hand skittering in search of the lock. Half her terrible face was visible in the opening, the mad dilated eye bulging with furious greed.
    Weeping, I jammed a chair under the doorknob, and shakily said, “Mum, stop.” I couldn’t look at her.
    “Lulu,” she grunted. “Lulu help. Help Mummy, Lulu. Come out.” Her voice was guttural, masculine. The sound of it made my hair prickle like static electricity.
    “Mum, please,” I wailed. “It’s me! Try to remember. Try. ”
    Her efforts became more frenzied, but it was no use—she couldn’t reach the knob. Her arm withdrew like an eel, and I lost sight of her. Heart racing, I looked out the window over the sink just in time to catch a blur vanishing around the front of the house. There was a loud crash of breaking glass—the living-room window. Forcing myself to move, I arrived there just in time to see not only my mother but two more frenetic human monsters floundering in over the high windowsill. One of them had no eyes. It was a freakish feat of agility, this squirming invasion, and in a way it cleared my head, because it was nothing my real mother could have ever done in her wildest dreams.
    Flying on pure instinct, I barely spared them a glance as I rushed past and into the first door off the hall. I half shut myself in the bathroom before I realized the knob was missing, then lunged for the next nearest door, one that opened on a shelved linen closet packed with canned goods and emergency supplies. Damn it! Footsteps pounded toward me—the little daylight filtering through from the living room was suddenly blocked