Outbreak (Book 2): The Mutation Read Free Page A

volunteers. As Wilder ran into the barn, the men waited until the zombies followed him in, then slammed the doors shut and secured them with battery-powered nail guns. In the far corner of the barn was a small trapdoor cut into the side of the barn. After Wilder safely exited the hidden door, another volunteer secured it and then everyone had seconds to run like hell.
    “Now now now! ” Wilder yelled into his headset at Butsko.
    Butsko didn’t hesitate. With the press of a button, the barn imploded as the thermite bombs detonated, trapping the infected inside and instantly raising the heat. Small streams of molten iron jettisoned from the bombs, searing through infected flesh and melting through metal containers of gasoline and propane tanks found all over the barn. The tanks created a secondary explosion, ensuring there wouldn’t be any infected survivors.
    Wilder lay on the ground and caught his breath while the volunteers kept their eyes on the barn. The barn might’ve been burning hotter than Hell in August, but they’d seen infected people escape infernos like this before. The first few times they’d tested this strategy, they didn’t think to implode the building in on itself. The results ended with flying, flaming infected people landing hundreds of feet away from the blast zone.
    “Come in, Wilder! ” Butsko barked into his headset. “Is everyone safe? Is the bread toasted?”
    “We got ‘em all, Colonel, ” Wilder responded as he caught his breath.
    “Good job, soldier, ” Butsko said, like a proud father.
    “Seems we’re getting less and less of the bastards each time we do this, ” Wilder reported.
    “I was thinking the same thing, ” Butsko said. “They keep getting smarter.”
    “And faster, ” Wilder said as he rubbed out a cramp in his calf muscle. “I think we need a new trick.”
    “Come on in and I’ll buy you a drink, ” Butsko said.
    “You’re on.”
    Wilder called out to the volunteers and asked them if everything was clear. All three of them gave him the thumbs up and he knew it would be safe to leave. The barn was in an open field, and they could let it burn to ashes without having to worry about setting a secondary fire.
    Besides—there was no way any of the infected would walk out of that inferno. Fire had proven to be the best method of killing the bastards. Butsko called it the “complete destruction of the organism ” approach. The only way to ensure that those things were destroyed, really destroyed, was to reduce them to little piles of ash. The original approach was to destroy the brain, but some hard lessons were learned. Shooting a zombie in the head would definitely stop them, but given enough time, the nanites repaired the brain enough to restore motor functions. Thousands of soldiers over the last two years were killed and infected as seemingly dead zombies attacked them after coming back to... what... life? Decapitation and fire were the only ways to ensure true death.
    After the barn burned for a few more hours, more volunteers would head into the barn with armed soldiers to ensure there was nothing left. If anything in the barn resembled more than a heap of ashes, the volunteers would hit it with a flamethrower. The idea was to create remains that even a fly wouldn’t buzz around.
     
    4
     
    Will to Heal Center
    Spicewood, Texas
     
    Walton “Walt ” Moses sat back in his office chair with a long sigh as he rubbed his eyes. He had been at it for a long time now, and just couldn’t make the pieces fit together.
    “What I wouldn’t give for the internet, ” Walt said out loud as he took a gulp of the bitter, cold coffee.
    The internet had gone dark about a year ago. Walt hadn’t been surprised, especially not in the area he was in. Spicewood, Texas wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. The internet had been sketchy at best even before the end of the world. But the research he was trying to conduct would benefit greatly from some outside