Lost in the Apocalypse Read Free Page B

held ghosts and ghouls and axe murderers.
    “It’s empty,” Robert called from the back. “No car’s been here in a while.” He could tell just by looking at the dirt driveway, Neil knew, and he thanked the stars once again that he had found Robert outside that fucking base.
    Forrest felt like years ago: not weeks. They had all been lucky to get out of there alive. Once they’d crossed the Colorado border into Kansas, they’d met groups of survivors who had heard all manner of rumors about what had really happened.
    Government experiments gone wrong, people had said. Others whispered about something in the water. Neil had his suspicions though. After what he had seen that morning, he knew what had caused this. Fucking side effects. He’d had all his shots, except for that one. The others in his group had all missed theirs, too. There had to be a reason for that. Fate, maybe. Maybe just coincidence. Either way, none of them had taken Artovax and none of them had been turned.
    Not yet.
    None of them had been bitten, though, and there was always time for that.
    They got out of the truck and walked to the little cabin. The front door was locked.
    “Check the windows,” Neil said. “Before we break in, let’s see if we can weasel one open or something.”
    “You thinking this is the place?” Butter came up to Neil and stood next to him, hands on hips, looking around the area. He knew Neil wanted a place to call home as much as all the rest of them. They’d been traveling for a month. They were tired.
    “Seems as good as any,” he commented. He ran a hand through his hair. Long. It was longer than he’d had it in years. Eight years in the Air Force and he’d gotten a haircut every three weeks the entire time. Now it had been almost six since his last cut and he felt shaggy and strange. In a world when everything was in chaos, it would be nice to have something stable, something reliable, something dependable he could count on.
    “Not visual from the road,” Butter commented, looking around. “And we can put the truck in the barn if we like.”
    “It’s not big,” Neil said, turning back to the cabin. “And one story.”
    “Don’t matter. We don’t need much room.”
    Kari and Cody came over. They had been walking the grounds, looking around the barn and the trees.
    “There’s a creek,” Kari said. “I could hear it from over there,” she pointed to the trees on the north side of the property. “Fresh water, probably. If we’re going to set up house, this could be as good a place as any.”
    “We’d have to build a fence,” Butter said. He had been talking about it for weeks: his fence. He wanted a tall one: five feet high, at least. He wanted barbed wire on the top or razor wire, if he could find it. Butter had big dreams for his fence, but Neil didn’t care. Butter could do what he liked.
    They heard the sound of a lock sliding and turned around to see Robert standing in the doorway to the cabin, a wide grin on his scarred face. No one had asked Robert where the scar had come from. Neil doubted he would tell them, anyway. Robert was the kind of man who held secrets close to his heart and he would take them to the grave. He didn’t care to hear whatever story Robert had fabricated for do-gooders or curious old women who wanted to know about the handsome man with the broken face, so he left Robert to himself.
    “Bathroom window was unlocked,” Robert said. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
     
     
     

Chapter 3              
     
    Emily managed to get a restless night's sleep before scouring the kitchen for food. She took some crackers and shoved some dried fruit in her backpack. Between shelves of rotten vegetables and moldy leftovers, she found a bottle of water and a can of soda in the fridge. The previous owners were gone, but they hadn’t left in a hurry. They had probably been at work when the infection first hit. Most people were. That's why there were still so many empty