Read Run: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller for Free Online

behind, and travelled south toward the freeway.
    “No plan survives contact with the enemy…” Rick said while shaking his head. 
    “Moltke the Elder,” Chris volunteered. 
    “What?” asked Rick. 
    “Moltke the Elder, he was the one who coined that phrase, he was a German Field Marshal.” 
    “Wow, bet you kicked butt on Jeopardy, huh?” 
    “I was a poli-sci major.” 
    Rick was confused. “Thought you were a computer guy?” 
    “I am. Do you know how hard it is to find a job with a political science degree? Computers were a hobby for me, and I turned my hobby into a career.”  
    Chris changed the subject, “There’s goo on you,” pointing to a nasty stain on Rick’s shirt. Chris rummaged through a duffle while they drove and came up with a multi-colored Hawaiian shirt. He gave the shirt to Rick, and when they had a second with no dead near, Rick stopped the car, carefully took off the ruined T-shirt, so as not to get any of the blood near his face, rolled the window down, and pitched it out. He grabbed some McDonalds’ napkins from the door pocket and wiped the offending material off of him. He pitched the soiled napkins out the window after the T-shirt, closed the window and donned the Hawaiian shirt. The whole event took less than a minute, and that was enough to see five infected coming at them from different directions. Rick shook his head and drove away. 
    Thick black smoke was billowing up from the street to the right, and as Rick crested the one of San Francisco’s many hilled streets, he could see the city was in shambles. At least four enormous fires raged in the heart of the city, with smaller ones dotting the outskirts. There were dozens of car crashes, and people seemed to be fleeing in all directions, some with luggage and small children in tow. Hundreds of shambling figures were lurching after any living human seen. How could it fall apart so fast? Rick thought. “My God…” Chris said, surveying the scene. At the bottom of the hill, there was a man with a shotgun shooting everything in sight. It was a pump-shotgun, and he had a box of shells at his feet. There were 8 bodies around him, and more were approaching. He was screaming something unintelligible as he fired. A bleeding woman ran up to him screaming for help, and he jacked a shell into the chamber and shot her in the left shoulder. She fell on her back, and then sat up, without her left arm. She looked at where her shoulder used to be and started screaming. The man shot her in the chest, and she flew back, now unmoving. The man stood over her firing into a group of about half a dozen infected. He got two before the weapon clicked empty. He tried to reload, but the rest of the creatures got to him and took him down. Rick didn’t want to get delay any longer, so he took a left and gunned it down the street. Chris looked back and was horrified to see the shot-gunned woman taking bites out of her own severed arm.
    They were on a wide street, with three story buildings on either side. A car had smacked into a utility pole ahead, shearing it in half, and had travelled a little farther into a fire hydrant. A geyser of water was shooting into the air, the water running down the hill. A live wire from the utility pole was spitting and sparking, just above the cascading water. “We can’t go this way,” Rick said, but when he looked in the mirror, he could see a crowd of twenty or so infected coming from behind. 
    “Hang on,” he yelled. “I’ve got to bust through!” Rick slammed the car into reverse, and moved cautiously backwards at about ten miles per hour.  
    “Why don’t you floor it and run them over?” begged Chris. 
    “Because if we hit them going too fast, we could lose control!”
    The Crown Vic smacked into the first of the infected and rolled easily over the body. As if to illustrate Rick’s point, the next two went up on the trunk, and the car slowed. The tires started to slip on something, and their