The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Read Free Page A

jeans and ridiculous purple crocs on his feet.
    His entire aspect was both confusing and pathetic. He looked like a nerd who had, for once, decided against giving over his lunch money. He was tense and nervous. His body was a quivering spring and his untrained finger was already on the trigger of his M4. He stood, poised for action but he was practically the only one.
    Almost all of the sixty three people in the large barn had taken a collective step back at Brad’s approach. They stared at him as if he was greater than all of them combined. On his black horse, with his wings tall and stiff in the morning breeze he seemed a giant. There was silence after the little man’s grand proclamation; the hodge-podge group cowered.
    Brad made sure to hold the contemptuous sneer on his lips.
    It was obvious the little man with purple shoes was unimpressed with Brad. He ran his eyes over the wings on Brad’s back and saw they were only made of white silk, pulled tight over a wire frame, and his armor, which had been so dazzling before, was simply worked aluminum plating. It would repel teeth and the scabby claws of the zombies, but even a small caliber bullet would pierce it. He also took in the spear, seeing that it was more of a herding tool rather than a weapon of war. Lastly, the little man raised what was left of his right eyebrow as he glanced at Brad’s bolt action rifle strapped to his saddle—it wasn’t a good weapon for close action.
    “We fight!” the little man cried again, louder. Had there been crickets in the barn they would have been heard to chirp. Confused, he looked back to see only three of his friends ready to go and one was a little girl! A deep-chested soldier and a striking blonde woman were the other two; the rest looked to be hiding behind their weapons instead of presenting them in a warlike manner.
    Brad chuckled, gazing at them as they shook with fear. “If you fight, then you die,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”
    The tall blonde woman calmly took the binoculars from a skinny punk of a girl and gave another glance at the horde of zombies behind Brad. “There’s not many of the humans, Neil. I can only see three of them from this doorway. I’d bet there aren’t more than twenty of the riders all told.”
    “Only twenty?” Brad scoffed. “I have more men than that surrounding you. And besides, we have enough grey meat to tear this barn down and kill the lot of you. Your name is Neil? Well, Neil, you have only two choices in the matter. Submit or die.”
    “We will not submit and nor will we allow our belongings to be plundered,” Neil replied, stepping forward aggressively, only to step back again as the horse swung its large head around towards him. “We are all armed and you can rest assured that we will give a fine account of ourselves. If you think you have encountered a weak group, you are mistaken, sir. So go back to your friends and let them know that we plan on fighting to the death.”
    This did not sit well with the rest of the group. There were whisperings and a general murmur of negativity sprang up. “We should bargain with them,” a man with slicked hair and a pinched, nervous face, said.
    Neil looked to be thinking this over when the little girl standing at his side said: “No, that’s wrong, Fred.” She wore a yellow sundress which was wrinkled to such a degree that it might have been made out of paper fetched from a trash can and unballed before being cut to fit a little girl. On her feet were ancient Keds; they had been white at one time. Now they were dingy with river water, mud, and yesterday’s Oklahoma dust. Her fly-away brown hair was lightened by the first rays of the sun and strewn with the hay she had picked up in sleep. The rider and horse seemed not to have affected her at all.
    At her words, the whisperings and the general murmur died away. “We should not bargain with him,” she continued in her little girl voice. “We should kill him,