Read Apocalyptica (Book 3): Ran for Free Online Page B

zombie attack. By that I don’t mean one or two wandered across the property since that happened every other day or so. No, this was a largish herd of them. I guess they got tired of being hungry in town when all the easy prey dried up. It wasn’t much of a surprise they’d managed to find us. They seemed unnaturally talented at locating people.
    I’d run inside a few minutes earlier, feeling a fit coming on. Carla had explained my occasional absences away as kidney problems, though I found out later from Maria that she’d said I had a spastic bladder, and while I wasn’t thrilled to have my fictional difficulties with urination a topic of discussion, it did give me cover to go sit in the tub and twitch freely.
    I actually did go to the bathroom when it was over, and I was just rubbing some sanitizer on my hands when the alarm sounded. The alarm in question was Nikola, who could smell zombies coming long before we could see or hear them. The weird way my house sat back off the road and the screen of trees in the distance made it just as hard for us to see out as it made it hard for others to see in.
    Grabbing my holstered Springfield from the edge of the sink, I only slowed for a second in the bedroom to throw my motorcycle jacket on. It wasn’t armor, but the hard plastic plates and dense nylon offered decent protection.
    I stood by the front door as everyone streamed in. We were all working on construction projects of one kind or another. I’d been helping put together raised beds for food with Maria and the other women.
    When the last of them came inside, Nikola followed. He stood on the scuffed linoleum, body tense and curly tail wagging. I closed the door—now with the same bars on its window as every other window in the house—and pointed at it. “Stand guard,” I ordered.
    Nik backed up and sat down facing the door, his eyes locked on it intently. Everyone but Carla, who was surely working down in the bunker, looked confused.
    “What’s a dog going to do?” Shane asked as he pulled off his work gloves.
    “He gave you warning,” I said lightly. “So there’s that. Also, if something manages to get through that door, which is unlikely unless zombies have somehow managed to learn to work together in the use of a battering ram, he’ll kill it. Or die trying.” The thought of my dog dying bothered me way more than I would ever admit out loud, but in this case I wasn’t fussed. Zombies were strong, and they scratched and bit a lot, but Nikola was a hundred and twenty pounds of predator designed by nature to fuck up the day of anything human size or smaller. He was fast, strong, and a few bites would only piss him off.
    I grabbed the weird baseball bat we’d picked up at the police station and threw it over my shoulder. “You guys hang tight. I’m gonna go take a look at what we’re dealing with. I’ll call Jem and Tony back if we need the help.”
    This elicited a collection of reactions ranging from stark disbelief to, in the case of little Connor, outright awe. I shot the boy a wink before disappearing into what had once been the storage closet between the common bathroom and the guest bedroom.
    Tony had installed roof access and a ladder here, which meant he cut a big-ass hole in my roof. In fairness, it was a pretty good job; the homemade hatch locked from the inside and was sealed tight against the weather. Score one for living in a flat-topped trailer.
    The scene outside was not ideal.
    “What’s it look like?” a muffled voice asked through the closed hatch.
    I sighed and shouted back, “Pretty bad.”
    Though it was hard to count since I could only make the zombies out through the screen of trees separating my property from the road, there had to be thirty of them at least. They were clearly not on a flyby, either. Every one of them had turned toward the house and was trying to make their way through the trees.
    I hefted the bat, feeling the reassuring mass of it resist my muscles. I