Cities of the Dead: Winters of Discontent Read Free Page B

different.
Coordinated. He got out of the truck and walked up to wall, pulling
his pistol from its holster and looking through the rest of the
horde, trying to figure out if anything was afoot. The horde simply
stared at him and pressed against the barricade.
    Dexter turned his attention back to
the lone zombie in the business suit, its hair long gone, the skin
atop the skull stretched thin and revealing the bone of the skull
beneath. It should be dead, long dead, as no human could live so
frail and thin, but it stared at him and managed something akin to
a snarl, drool trickling out of it ’ s mouth. It knew it had him,
Dexter thought as he watched it. It knew it had won. Dexter raised
his pistol, aimed down the sights, and squeezed. The
zombie ’ s head split open like a cantaloupe and the body collapsed in
a heap. Like so many others before it. He turned and looked at the
horde and nothing had changed. He shrugged inwardly and walked back
to his house.
    “ How ’ d it go? ” Carly asked as he sat down on a bench in the foyer and pulled
his boots off.
    “ About as well as
you ’ d
expect, I guess. We ’ ll see if it
holds. ”
    “ I
can ’ t
believe the others left us, ” Carly said, her voice low and almost mad. The last
year had taught them not to mourn for long the loss of a friend.
Getting to know someone was a risk not to be taken
lightly.
    Dexter made a small “ what can you
do? ” gesture with
his hands and gave her a small smile of understanding.
    “ Let ’ s get to the bedroom, ” he said after a long moment, giving her a small
wink and a smile. “ We might have an interesting day ahead of
us. ”
    The first rays of light broke through the eastern
window of the bedroom and woke Dexter up, as usual. He slipped out
of the warmth of the bed and into the bone-chilling cold of the
bedroom, the fire downstairs long out. He dressed quickly and
headed downstairs and noticed his son stacking wood into the
fireplace.
    “ You ’ re up early, ” Dexter said.
    “ I had to go the
bathroom, ” Ben said
over his shoulder.
    Dexter crossed the room to the bay window and parted
the curtains a half inch, peeking through them down the road at the
front gate.
    Which was deserted.
    “ What
the? ”
    “ What is it,
Dad? ”
    “ They ’ re gone already. ”
    “ The
undead? ”
    “ Yeah. ”
    Outside, Dexter held his rifle at
the ready as he approached the gate, the sky above blue and devoid
of clouds. He puffed out clouds of air as he crunched through the
snow, listening through the snow-silenced stillness of the world
for the sounds of the undead. Nothing. The snow on the other side
of the gate had been trampled down and turned into mud that had
frozen solid overnight, and only the bodies of those
they ’ d
killed the day before remained. He walked the perimeter around the
twenty-three homes in the gated community and found nothing on the
other side but leafless trees and snow. What had he missed while he
slept through it all?
    And then, for the first time in weeks, he saw a deer
in the woods. A hundred yards off, standing still. He raised the
rifle and looked through the scope at the animal, a young buck with
maybe three points. He lifted his head up and scanned the
surrounding area, again, looking for undead walkers, and saw
nothing. He sighted the animal again, paused, and remembered his
rule about creating loud noises in the compound. Then, he squeezed
the trigger.
    The animal fell over. Then got onto
its feet and stumbled about, taking steps this way and that before
heading deeper into the woods. A second shot would take it down,
but would be unwise if there were dead nearby. One shot was
difficult to trace an origin point, but two shots could confirm a
direction. He lowered the rifle and headed to the house.
He ’ d
track it down later in the day, when he was equipped to clean it.
Right now, it was time to lay low and wait the situation
out.
    “ I heard a
shot, ” Carly said
as Dexter sat down and