Stone Soldiers 6: Armageddon Z Read Free

yet."
    Carol and Kenji nodded and quickly informed the others. They were a rag tag band of survivors—David, the old man who like so many others now found himself a widower. Lisa and her son Chris, friends of Shane before the world went to hell. Earl, the bullet-necked black man built like a linebacker but as gentle a giant as one would ever meet. Eight lost souls, traveling together, trying desperately to get out of the Contaminated Zone before they too succumbed to the plague turning so many millions into walking corpses.
    The group kept crouched low, hiding behind parked cars, working their way through the parking lot of the small airport. They circled around, steering well clear of the main terminal building. They kept the fence surrounding the airport be tween them and the many hangars and warehouses to either side of the terminal building. Eventually, they reached wide, grassy plains.
    Shane used a wire cutter to sever the few strands of barbed wire between them and the runway.
    "Risers!" Earl whispered. He was looking out, over the runway, toward the airport terminal, through a pair of binoculars.
    Shane took the binoculars and looked through them. There were dozens of the monsters, just standing there, waiting.
    "He was right," he said, passing the binoculars to Ben.
    "Now what?" Ben said after quickly looking for himself. "We have no cover here—sun'll be up in a few hours. What do we do?"
    Kenji was about to speak when he heard something. He looked up, the others doing the same. Far overhead, barely standing out against the night sky, a plane of some kind was passing over.
    Kenji checked his watch. It was them.
    "Just watch," he said.
    Shapes came down out of the dark sky—the four skydivers Kenji had seen the last time he made it this far. As before, they c ut away from their parachutes well before they hit the ground. Carol hissed between her teeth, expecting them to crash painfully against the pavement.
    Instead, the soldiers landed almost gracefully, then unlimbered their machineguns and began methodically firing.
    This time the battle progressed differently. The risers that had chased Kenji and his friends inside the terminal his last time through here, were this time still outside. They quickly swarmed the soldiers, despite the precise fire of the machine guns.
    But again, the soldiers would not be moved. Risers began to fly this way and that, propelled away from the soldiers with great force. Many landed on broken legs and couldn't move. Others bounced when they hit the ground, already dead from the brute strength the soldiers had unleashed against them.
    Where before the soldiers had used mainly gunfire to stop their undead enemies, this time they used crushing, super-human strength. The battle raged for several minutes, Kenji's astonished friends taking t urns to watch through the binoculars.
    When it was finally over, Kenji stood up. "See, I told you."
    He was nearly bowled over by the gust of wind thrown down by a huge military transport plane passing overhead. The plane touched down on the long runway running parallel to the terminal. It was a four-engined, propeller-driven C-130 transport.
    As Kenji and his friends watched, the plane slowed then turned and taxied over to the opposite side of the airport. Turning slowly around, it lowered a ramp toward a s mall hangar nearby.
    "Look! Another one!" Chris yelled, pointing up.
    Sure enough, barely visible in the dark sky overhead, the survivors saw another four-engined plane circling the airport, only a thousand feet up. It was all black like the plane that had landed.
    "You people!" a voice rang out.
    The group all nearly jumped out of their skins and turned toward the voice. It was one of the soldiers. He had sprinted right to their location, despite the long grass they had been hiding in.
    "We're human!" Shan e said, raising his hands, and his shotgun, over his head. "We have women and children."
    "Don't just stand there, let's shake a leg, people!"