The Dead Won't Die Read Free

mess, and the world around him started to swirl. He grew dizzy and fell over. He woke with his head in Kelly’s lap. Chelsea was next to her. Lester Brooks was pressing a series of white tabs onto his face and arms and chest. Jacob could feel electricity move over his skin, prickling at his hair.
    Brooks was looking at a flat black device that looked like a small TV. “Left arm is broken in four places. Two broken ribs. Internal bleeding. Brain swelling. Massive infection from the injuries on his arms.” He put the device down. “Your friend is in some serious pain. We’ll need to get his fever down right away.”
    â€œYou can help him?” Kelly asked.
    â€œOh yes. He’ll be in bed for a while, but we can patch him, no problem.” He touched the device on his throat. “Brooks three-ninety, requesting extraction. We have three packages. Have a medic standing by for our arrival.”
    A few moments later a dust cloud appeared on the road. Jacob rallied enough to sit up and stare in amazement at the gigantic ten-wheeled armored vehicle that rolled through the ruins, crushing zombies in its path before finally pulling up next to them.
    Brooks opened the back door to the vehicle and helped them inside one after another. When Jacob was seated and buckled in, Brooks said, “We’ll get that arm fixed up for you in a bit.”
    Jacob nodded. “Thanks.”
    â€œHang on,” Brooks told them. “It gets a little bumpy out here.”
    He closed the door and the vehicle took off.
    Jacob leaned his head against the window and watched the ruins of Little Rock slip into the distance. The armored vehicle trundled through the abandoned city, causing Jacob to sway in his seat. In places the streets were black rivers seething with bodies. In others, ivy climbed the sides of buildings, creating green canyons through the past glory of man.
    And what of glory?
    It made him think of Sheriff Taylor, the man who had meant so much to him, and so much to Arbella, gone now, dead and rotting in the sun on some nameless street in a small town a million miles away.
    He thought, too, of Bree. She’d been so young and so devastatingly gorgeous, yet the only image of her he could hold in his mind was of her slipping to the grass under a hail of bullets. She had, in his memory at least, seemed almost grateful to receive them.
    But mostly he thought of Nick.
    He watched a solitary zombie lumber down the road, reaching for their vehicle even though it was much too far away to put its hands on them, and he thought of the time he’d had with his dearest friend. He felt heartsick at all that had happened. He had loved Nick as a brother. For all the tension that had run under the surface of their friendship since that fight twenty years earlier, they had been the best of friends, and Jacob couldn’t shake the memory of the tears running down Nick’s face right before he pulled the trigger. What had he cried for? Was it out of remorse? Or for what had happened to their friendship? Or was it simply for his own life?
    Jacob looked across the darkened cabin of the armored transport. Chelsea had her eyes closed, a blanket pulled up under her chin. It didn’t look to Jacob like she was sleeping, more like she was trying to wipe the last seven years from her mind.
    Next to him, Kelly was looking out the window, tears rolling down her cheeks.
    Jacob looked away. Though this journey of theirs was really just beginning, in so many ways, it was the end of the man he’d thought himself to be.

C HAPTER 1
    Jacob woke to a pretty girl dressed in white standing over him.
    â€œBree?” he said, his voice sounding weak and raspy, like he hadn’t used it in a very long time.
    He coughed, and the pain that shot down his left side was so blindingly intense he cried out.
    â€œEasy,” the girl said. “Don’t try to move. You’re hurt pretty bad.”
    She held up some kind