Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel) Read Free

listening to their loved ones pounding on the door with rotting fists…
    Okay, brain, that’s enough of that, thank you very much.
    I gave myself a mental shake. The horror show in front of me was more than enough. I didn’t need to create another one in my imagination. Drawing a bead on a target, I pulled the trigger.
    At least the movies hadn’t lied about how to permakill zombies. Shoot ’em in the head. Destroy the brain. Or the stem, or the whatever-the-heck portion controlled the reptile functions. It would have totally sucked if that had turned out to be bullshit, while the rest of the zombocalypse proved to be true.
    But it
did
work, and if you were creative, there were many ways and many weapons you could use to put them back in the grave, once and for all. Luckily for us, the more zombies we killed, the more creative we tended to get.
    Thus ended the upside to the zombie outbreak.
    “Why are there so many of them up here on the roof?” I wondered aloud. As soon as I spoke, I shot Tony a look and said, “If you say ‘because this was once a very important place to them,’ I will hit you.”
    Tony smirked, but kept his mouth shut.
    “They were probably attracted to the sound of the helicopter when it took off yesterday morning,” Nathan said as he put a round through the head of a Ruth Gordon look-alike. “Guess nothing better came along to distract them.”
    My jaw tightened.
    We’d survived a chopper crash, fought our way through a zombie-infested San Francisco to UCSF, and found the hidden DZN lab. We’d lost five people along the way, but we’d made it—only to be ambushed upon our arrival. Gabriel had been hustled off at gunpoint by the proverbial men in black, and I was pretty sure they were the same bastards who’d sabotaged our helicopters, plus raided and burned down our lab at Big Red.
    Whoever it was, they didn’t see a problem with the spreading plague—and if our suspicions were correct, they were spreading it deliberately.
    Why anyone would do that was beyond my comprehension… but then again, I have difficulty with the concept of fracking and GMOs in the food supply, so I probably wasn’t the best person to analyze the motives of psychopaths.
    What really bugged me was that someone involved had a personal grudge against yours truly. When someone points a gun at you and says they, “have a present for you from a old friend,” you can bet your ass it’s not a candygram. Plus they knew my name.
    That’s never a good sign.
    More senior zombies stumbled through the door across the rooftop. I heard shots coming from the interior of the building, the comforting sound of the rest of our team doing their jobs. The bastards who’d ambushed us had wedged as many stairwell doors open as they could on both sides, making sure we’d have plenty of walking dead to play with.
    Bastards.
Did I mention that?
    Luckily we had plenty of ammo. We couldn’t clear the entire medical center—it would be suicide to try—but a few floors? Piece o’ cake.
    At least that’s what I kept telling myself, because my spirits couldn’t afford to sink any lower. Losing Kai had been bad enough, but when Mack died, it had ripped the heart out of our team—especially Lil, who was conspicuously absent from the current bout of zombie carnage. It was the sort of thing that typically made her dance with glee.
    And Gabriel… it’d been like a punch in the gut when that helicopter took off, and when we were told we weren’t going after him, well, I hadn’t exactly handled it gracefully. Having to cool my heels was a special circle of hell.
    Right now, though, I had a job to do. A messy, smelly, and totally cathartic job.
    “Um, Ash?”
    Tony’s voice brought me back to the present—which included a frail-looking octogenarian in a hospital gown, pieces of flesh caught in its dentures and bite marks oozing black fluid from its arms. I capped it right away, the barrel of my M4 only a foot or so away from its