Resurrection: A Zombie Novel Read Online Free

last. Her memories were just barely below the threshold of consciousness.
    She looked at the body in the rearview mirror. It did not appear to be moving or even twitching. The man was already covered in blood and gore before Frank hit him. Aside from the fact that he no longer moved, he looked no worse now than he did when he ran out of the trees.
    “Can we stop for a second?” Annie said.
    “What for?” Frank said.
    “No,” Hughes said.
    “I want to go back and get a closer look at that man,” she said.
    “He wasn’t a man,” Hughes said. “Not anymore. He was one of those things.”
    He wasn’t a thing .
    “Infected or not,” Annie said, “he was a man.”
    Hughes said nothing.
    “We can’t stop here, Annie,” Frank said. “The truck’s noise attracts them. We’re damn lucky none of them followed us to the sporting-goods store. And anyway you don’t want to get too close to even the dead ones. Bodily fluids and all that.”
    She needed to study that body, but she didn’t know why. Probably just her brain-lock trying to resolve itself. Her memory, her knowledge and understanding of the insanity all around her, was trying to punch its way out through whatever barrier had been put in place. Stopping to think and scrutinizing things might help, but Frank wouldn’t stop, and Hughes wouldn’t let him stop if he wanted to.
    They rounded a few more corners and arrived at the outskirts of another town, the kind of outskirts that look exactly like outskirts everywhere in the country. Gas stations, fast-food joints, used-car lots, Jiffy Lubes. The place had been torn to pieces just like the last town they passed through, but here the streets were entirely empty of cars. Everyone had evacuated.
    Trash, branches, leaves, debris and broken glass covered the streets, the sidewalks, and the parking lots. A pickup truck had smashed into an electrical pole. What looked like a used-car lot had exploded and burned to the ground. Dead bodies—bones, mostly—were strewn all over the place. The windows of a Burger King were covered with nailed-up boards blackened by fire.
    Was the Burger King boarded up to keep people out or to keep people in? Why had the car lot burned down?
    Though the details weren’t familiar, the brushstrokes were. She was certain she’d never been there before, but she felt a sense of déjà vu coming over her. Something was banging inside her head and trying to get out. Something of earthshaking significance. She could feel it, like a just-forgotten dream on the other side of the mist.
    Why couldn’t she remember? There was a reason she went into brain-lock. Something had happened to her. Something that didn’t happen to Hughes or to Frank.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Kyle Trager stared while Parker cleaned his guns. Parker had parts from three handguns greased up and spread out before him on the counter of the checkout aisle, the one nearest the grocery store’s door where there was more light.
    “We should shove off tomorrow,” Kyle said. “Get a boat and head up to one of the islands.”
    Parker set down a pistol and his oil rag. “None of us has seen a better place than where we are right now. It’s secure and our food will last months.”
    They were holed up in a well-stocked grocery store in a medium-size suburban-looking town just off the interstate. A nearby lumberyard provided all the wood and nails they needed to board up the windows and fortify the front and back doors. They had no electricity, but plenty to eat.
    “We’re only safe here,” Kyle said, “until we get attacked by 200 of those things at the same time. We’ll never be safe on the mainland. We need an island.”
    “Those things aren’t going to last,” Parker said. “Winter is coming and they’re running out of food. We stay here, wait for them to start dying off, and then we can go to your little island.”
    Kyle’s group of five had only cohered a week or so earlier. He and Frank were traveling together