In the Dead: Volume 1 Read Free Page B

wanted to be protected.”
    Zander shot her a look over his shoulder. Shit man, there was a lot about this old lady he was totally shocked to find out.
    “ And what about this guy?” He raised the shotgun higher.
    Carrie sighed. “I took it off a dead security guard on my way to Mom’s apartment after the outbreak started. And the thin amount of ammo we have left. By the way, shoot accurately because we don’t have a lot of ammo.”
    Zander shot her a look. “So I gathered. Man, I wish this was a video game.”
    Carrie snorted out a laugh. “Isn’t it? Scary stairwell, only two guns and three people, not to mention the freaking zombies .”
    “ Yeah, yeah,” Zander sighed. “But in a video game you can set the ammo to infinite.”
    “ That would be nice,” Mrs. Floyd said with a sigh or her own.
    “ And I’d also have double D boobs,” Carrie said. “But wishing for that is as useless as wishing for infinite ammo.”
    Zander glanced back and tried not to be too obvious about checking Carrie out. Her boobs looked fine to him, but he doubted bringing that up would win him points with either woman. And Mrs. Floyd had that skillet, after all.
    Luckily he didn’t have to come up with a reply because there was a noise in the stairwell. Unfortunately, the noise was the faint moaning of people. Plural. Well, maybe not people. Zombies.
    “ Oh my God,” Zander couldn’t help but mutter. “Oh my God, oh my God.”
    “ It’s okay,” Carrie whispered from above. “You’re going to be fine. Just aim for the head. Don’t get bitten.”
    “ Great. Good advice,” Zander said through clenched teeth as he peeked down through the spiraling stairs below and caught a glimpse of their prey (and their predator, but that was another story).
    There were ten of them, gathered up together in the middle of the stairs between the sixth and seventh floors. They swayed back and forth, drooling and grumbling in a nonsensical collection of terrible sounds that were hardly even human.
    Zander hadn’t seen any of them so close before and his stomach turned. They were people, but not people anymore. Monsters in t-shirts and jeans and one even had a purse still bouncing around on her shoulder against her side. The same side that had a huge bite mark in it. He could see the white bones of her ribs through the hole.
    “ Why are they stopped?” Mrs. Floyd asked as she peered over his shoulder.
    He leaned slightly to the left at a pile of debris in the way of the zombies. “Looks like someone set up some dining chairs or something to block them.”
    Zander examined the situation. He was put to mind of the first Bonewrecker . There had been a similar situation in that game, with a bunch of monsters barely blocked from the hero and his band of survivors. How had he gotten out of that mess?
    “ Carrie, give me that Glock,” he whispered.
    She stepped around her mom and held out the gun. They traded. “Why?”
    He lined the site up on the head of one of the zombies. “The shotgun is great, but I want to use something with more precision.”
    He swallowed. The person down there, he could tell she was sick. Her grey skin, black drool, empty, red eyes were all so damn creepy. But the person was still… human… ish. She was wearing a University of Washington Huskies t-shirt that had been two sizes too small in life. Her blonde hair was dirty, but still pulled back in a loose ponytail. A few days ago, she’d probably been pretty hot.
    “ What are you waiting for?” Carrie hissed.
    He shook his head. “I’ve never shot a person before. I’ve never shot anything before that wasn’t, you know, computer rendered.”
    Carrie stared at him and nodded. “I know. At first it was hard for me, too. But that thing down there, all those things… they aren’t human. And they’ll kill us in a heartbeat if they get to us before we take them out.”
    He met her eyes for a minute and then nodded. “Yeah.”
    This time when he raised the