Zombie Wake Read Online Free Page A

couldn't fault
his logic.
    Three hours later found the two of
us kneeling in a 16-foot long canoe paddling up stream. It was a fairly bright
night with an almost full moon. I could hear the mosquitoes and feel them on my
face. Even worse were the clouds of lake flies. While harmless, the insects
swarm over the water in the evenings so thick that anyone who goes to lake fly
country has to quickly get used to inhaling bugs. They get in your eyes, ears,
nose and mouth.
    Ulric was
up front, leaving me to the steering. The canoe was difficult to manage and I
found that I worked hard and didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. After
what seemed like hours, Ulric hissed at me to stop. I
noticed for the first time that there was a glow ahead. It looked like the
headlights of a vehicle on the shore of the channel. Ulric motioned at me to keep silent and pointed toward the vehicle.
    As we bobbed in the water about 60
yards off shore, I saw armed men getting out of the vehicle. It looked like a
military truck. I heard doors open and slam shut. The men walked to the front
of the truck and spread out in the glow of the headlights. The truck was
parallel to the channel’s bank with the lights shining upstream. It was then
that I noticed there were people walking towards the soldiers. They were still
pretty far away and were barely visible. I recall thinking that they didn't
look quite right. They seemed uncoordinated and walked with a drunken
stupor—sort of a shuffle with their shoulders slumped and their head
down. I was just about the say something to Ulric when he turned, looked at me in an intense way and held his index finger to his
lips. The look in Ulric's eyes gave me pause.
    Then the loud voice of a soldier
shouted an order in Swahili. Ulric turned at the
sound of the shouting just as the four soldiers started shooting their rifles.
I watched in shock as they calmly and almost robotically gunned down the people
on the bank. The shooting lasted for 20 or 30 seconds and then it stopped.
There was a silent pause, and then one of the soldiers walked forward drawing a
pistol from his belt. The man walked from corpse to corpse and fired one round
into the head of each of his victims.
    “If you like breathing, you better
keep quiet,” Ulric whispered. Somehow he got me to
help him turn that damn canoe around and get the hell out of there. We both
agreed that we saw nothing and that we would never speak about it again.

Pulling the Trigger

7
    I pulled the trigger. Plum Thumb's
hand splattered first. I shot again. His head exploded the instant I heard the
metal shell ting against the wood plank somewhere behind me. The whole event
seemed, somehow, to precede the sound of the actual shots. Boom. Boom. It was
done. He dropped. I felt a breeze against my face when tooth beak flapped her
wings, swooping into the midst of the slimy pool now dripping through the
planks. She scooped a piece of grey, white and black into her pouch and
returned to my side. The odor, a musty smell, burned my nose, turned my stomach
and pushed me three steps back and into the wet night of the bus accident.
    I couldn't place it that night. I
thought it was fresh skunk spray mixed with my adrenalin-induced heightened
senses. It hit me as I stood in the mud watching a victim in the creek flounder
half inside the submerged vehicle. He was a trooper, a survivor...the survivor.
I silently celebrated as Joe and Dylan secured him to a harness and
methodically worked against the fast moving water, pulling him to the safety of
the dark morass. I learned later that he was not the driver of the golden
crumpled automobile but was thrown from the bus and pinned between the water
and the sedan. The smell increased my motivation to get the man back to the
road and I relayed through dispatch to the Fire captain for assistance with the
hillside transfer.
    The scent, skunk and rotten fish,
was inescapable. I wondered if the smell was what drew tooth beak to the
remnants. It