The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) Read Free Page B

air cyclers. This was crazy. So he was charging the battery? Did that mean he was doing experiments? Was he using her lab?
    That was enough.
    She stood up and strode without hesitation to the airlock door, pushing through the blowers that blasted polluting dust particles off her, through the inner door, and emerged into the lab.
    He stared at her with his mouth dropping open.
    "What the hell are you doing in my lab?" she demanded.
    A long moment passed. This man before her, with his thin cheeks and slight raspy beard, bright eyes and short-cropped dark hair, seemed more shocked than her. Perhaps that was fear in his eyes, though it was quickly followed by a certain resignation, sinking in.
    She recognized it. She'd seen it before in Amo, had felt it in herself, but she didn't have time to forestall it now. Abruptly the unreal feel of this bizarre, midnight meeting fell away, as from his loose jacket pocket the man drew a gun and pointed it at her face.
    Lots of images raced through her head in that moment, taking less than a second and coming like shells fired from an autocannon. She saw herself again in a yacht off Hawaii, held at gunpoint by the madwoman who'd killed her own son to 'end his suffering'. That feeling of power when she hadn't cared if she lived or died came back in a heady rush, though other feelings came with it.
    She saw Ravi curled asleep in their bed with his knees too high, blissfully unaware. She saw the look on Amo's face as he lied about what Salle had done, in the moment he decided that he would kill the bunker himself. She saw her own father's white eyes, flickering briefly back to brown as he died to save her from the red demon, and she saw Cerulean's lonely head, lying in a drift of snow in Julio's torture pit.
    The rage came easily after that, flowing through channels well carved and only delayed by three months of waiting. This was easy. This bastard in her lab, this idiot using her samples, was not going to hurt any of her people again.
    She raised her arm in an underhand lob and hurled the crowbar. It went spinning wildly over the worktop, crashing through the fragile titration apparatus and shattering glass into the man's face before plowing on to strike him solidly in the shoulder.
    The gun may have fired, she wasn't sure, but nothing hit her and she was already moving anyway, rounding the workbench. She snatched up two flasks and flung them at him as she ran; one struck him a hollow THUNK on the breastbone and drew a gasp, while the other sailed harmlessly over his head to smash loudly against an air-filtration pipe.
    She sprinted the last few steps barefoot over the smashed titration glass just as he leveled the gun again, then she was on him and her shoulder thumped into his gut. He was heavier but not by much, and her 100 pounds of speeding muscle carried him off his feet and into the air. For a split second they flew, then the ground rose up and walloped him in the back.
    Anna landed neatly on his chest and rolled up easily to straddle him. Up close his thin face was worn, pale as a zombie and haunted by the defeat he had to know was on him. She thrust two palm-first blows at his nose; one glanced off his cheek but the other caught him full on and shattered the cartilage flat with a red burst, like she'd just splatted a ripe tomato.
    He bucked and struggled to throw her off but he wasn't strong and Anna didn't give him the chance to gain leverage. With one hand she leaned over to secure the gun, holding it flat to the ground in his hand, while with the other she stabbed at his neck three times, driving the edge of her palm into his throat like she was karate-chopping a block of wood.
    On the second he gargled and began to choke as his airway crumpled inward, then the third blow fell in a frenzy and only made it worse.
    His grip on the gun faltered and his body began to spasm. Anna grabbed the weapon and rocked back off his chest to point the gun at his head. His face was already turning