Read Last Stand on Zombie Island for Free Online Page B

her sideways into the open classroom.
    “Hey there, little miss ma’am. Are you ok?” he said, stooping over to get more on her level.
    The little girl did not answer and showed no sign that she heard Billy, much less cared about what he was saying.
    “What’s your name? Mine is Billy, Billy Harris. My son Wyatt goes to school here, have you seen him?”
    When he said his son’s name, it looked almost as if the little girl had a moment of recognition and she jerked her head ever so slightly. Billy reasoned to himself that she was in shock.
    “Daddy, what’s wrong with her neck?” Cat asked from behind him.
    “Do you know Wyatt? Wyatt Harris?” he asked again, in the same lilting voice that every parent had learned to use to seem non-threatening. He took a step towards the girl.
    She erupted into a leap, to rival the best lions in National Geographic nature films, right at Billy. Her arms outstretched as far as they could reach, fingers stabbing outward.
    Billy sidestepped and caught her midsection with his left knee, more by accident than anything else. This crumpled the child briefly and he immediately felt bad about it. As he pivoted to check on the girl now splayed out on the ground, she sprang up at him again, pulling at his t-shirt collar, trying to bite him like an angry shark just pulled into the boat.
    Billy craned his neck back as far as he could and arched his back to keep his throat from the snapping jaws of the bloody and bruised little girl. He had grown up getting in plenty of childhood fights and with the fire department once had to pull a schizophrenic pyromaniac out of his own blaze, but none of those incidents had prepared him for this.
    He grabbed the girl around the waist, half pulled, and then pushed, her body away from his, yet her grip still held vice-like on his shirt, pulling her ever closer to his face and throat. He could see into her eyes and there was no longer any white in them. Only a reddish-brown hue made up the deranged eyeballs looking back at him from behind the blood-soaked pigtails.
    Billy stiff-armed the deranged child as best he could with his left arm while he cocked his right into a fist and, wincing while he did so, slugged the little girl in his best imitation of a superman-punch. He made contact with the girl’s cheek just under her left eye, and even though he was sure at the last minute he pulled the punch a little, he still felt the thin bone just under her skin crack when he made contact.
    The little girl shook her head, grunted and then resumed her attack with scarcely less than a moment’s pause. Billy had half-decided to go for the .38, weighing heavy in his cargo pocket, when he saw Cat’s hands on the little girls pigtails from behind.
    “What is wrong with her?” Cat asked, pulling the little girls head almost straight back by the pigtails, like a cowboy reining in a horse.
    Billy took advantage of the momentary shift in weight to leverage the child off him, prying her hands off his shirt with his own. He kicked the girl away and Cat dropped her flat on her face on the hard tile below with a sickening wet thud. She lay there motionless.
    “What is wrong with her?” Cat asked again with blood on her face and shocked tears hot in her eyes.
    “I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out,” with that notion he registered the sounds of footsteps running down the hallway towards them.
    Exchanging looks, he grabbed Cat and pushed her back into Wyatt’s wrecked classroom, slamming and bolting the door behind them.
     
    ««—»»
     
    Sergeant Durham was in a flat run down the hallway of the elementary school. He had arrived just ahead of a county deputy sheriff and entered the school through the front door. The deputy followed his department protocol and remained at the front of the school to wait for backup to arrive. Durham, who was having protocol withdrawals of his own that day, could not contain himself and ran into the school. He only paused long