Apocalyptica (Book 2): Ran Read Free Page A

get as close to it as he can.”
    If this bothered or confused Carla, the woman didn’t show it. Instead she nodded sharply and rolled the window up as she turned to pass on the information.
    I rarely put my trust in other people. Not in a misanthropic way; I don’t hate people as a class. I simply lack whatever structure or chemical some brains have that results in the ability to thoughtlessly assume other people will come through.
    Adversity is a pressure cooker able to fuse the elements of trust into something new, even if it’s brittle. The insane twenty-four hours I’d spent surviving with Jem spawned that seed crystal, apparently, because I didn’t hesitate. I reached deep down and hauled out every watt of energy my body could muster and ran like a scalded dog.
    I thought my legs were going to burst into flame when I reached the bed of the pickup, and in the fraction of a second between the act of lifting my foot toward the rear bumper and my boot finding purchase, I realized I had no idea what was in the bed. There could be half a dozen zombies laying in a puppy pile, just waiting for some dumbass to fling themselves in.
    The permutations flashed through my head in a flare of incomplete possibilities, ranging from gnashing cannibal death to tripping on a bunch of random junk possibly littering the bed.
    My boot met bumper and I slapped armored gloves over the tailgate, hauling myself up with the manic energy of someone who very much does not want to die, and especially not in a stupid way. I planted my other foot on the top of the tailgate and pushed with everything I had, not bothering to look down for a nanosecond.
    I landed on the diamond-plate toolbox and stepped onto the roof. The Jeep rolled past two seconds later and I casually stepped onto its roof.
    Then Newton had something to say about it re: objects in motion and objects at rest. I wasn’t exactly at rest, but the Jeep was moving way faster than me.
    My legs were jerked out from under me, and only a frantic scramble for the luggage rack kept me from that stupid death I was trying so hard to avoid.
    After a breather and thirty seconds of berating myself I carefully turned myself around on the roof and got flat onto my stomach. Surface area sufficiently spread out enough to keep me from sliding—and desperately hoping Jem didn’t have to brake hard—I locked my feet against the luggage rack and pulled my gun.
    The Jeep did buck a little when I killed the first stowaway zombie hitching a free ride on my trailer. Shooting from the top of a moving vehicle was way easier than I’d have thought. I give you that my targets and I weren’t moving relative to each other, but I’d still have thought the tiny bumps and jolts of driving would have made it harder than it was.
    I picked off all of them in short order, my ears ringing from the shots. Should have remembered to put in my earplugs.
    We drifted back out onto the county roads, dragging our train of zombies behind in a race with a widening lead. I stayed there for a few miles, Jem content to create a safe distance and me content to watch the bodies recede into it.
    One rescue down. If the rest were this easy, I’d be dead before lunch.
     

10
     
     
     
     
    The second name on our list, Randall Kallenburg, wasn’t just dead when we found him, he was super dead. I didn’t say that out loud, not wanting to make light of Jem’s grief, but Randall was the most dead I’ve ever seen a person. And I’m counting every horror movie in my extensive viewing history.
    We didn’t even have to get close to his place to know. The front door of the pleasant old apartment building was ripped halfway off its hinges, a sight that filled me with a vague sense of dread I couldn’t nail down. Every window in the place was broken, and shredded bodies lay like fallen dominoes across the yard. Most of them were eaten, but Randall’s body was the worst of the lot.
    He had been eaten and ripped apart, though I’m not