Read The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) for Free Online Page A

took the Cessna onto the runway and tried it out, but takeoff was always a challenge he couldn't quite grasp. They worked on CB radios with powerful antennae and tried to tune in AM frequencies transmitted from Europe, but nothing came. Perhaps everyone was dead there too.
    So they studied, trained, and soon enough they flew. Peters got the craft up in the air and even managed to land it, soon becoming expert. At first he took looping circles round the airfield, with Abigail down below cheering him on, but soon she joined him in the cockpit as copilot and they undertook longer journeys.
    They didn't go to Denmark, because the Atlantic crossing seemed too a dangerous challenge, and probably everyone was dead there too, so instead they flew around America. They marked off airfields on a map and joined them up with the jigsaw line of their passage, always watching the gray hordes pass by underneath. There was nothing quite so peaceful as soaring through the clouds above them, perhaps the only plane still flying in the entire world.
    They made love at 10,000 feet with the autopilot on. Anna grimaced at this point in the story, but I waved her down. They made a home base for themselves on an airstrip by a beautiful alligator lagoon in Florida. Some days they did nothing but laze around in hammocks, watching gadflies and hummingbirds buzz around the giant lizards below. Other days they took off on long rambling 'holidays' on a gleaming silver airboat that felt a lot like flying, racing through swamps and rushes-filled creeks. Other times they'd take off in the Cessna, seeing the USA, sometimes flying out over the Atlantic for hundreds of miles in the hopes of seeing a ship somewhere.
    They never did. Happy years passed and they wanted for little, becoming used to sharing the world with only each other. They fell into rarely speaking though they were always together. It felt like slowly guiding the world into nothingness, becoming custodians as the human race's batteries gradually ran down and Earth was left for the birds and the bugs.
    Then Julio came.
    It was night when he crept into their house, and they were sleeping side by side. He must have shot them with sedative darts, because when they roused they were in the back of the same white panel van they'd ultimately escaped in.
    Julio took them to a hole in the ground in Maine, where there was a hallway of horrors with a great red beast at the end, lined with wailing victims. He chained them up, ignoring their pleas and explaining that he was only doing what had to be done.
    "It's for your own good," he'd often said, one of his favorite lines. As he raped Abigail the first few times, before he lost interest, he would say it along with other variations on the theme. As he whipped them both, and beat them, and stubbed burning embers out on their skin just to punctuate his day, he told them it was a punishment and it wasn't really their fault.
    He blamed people they'd never heard of, though he acted as if they must have known them. "You really haven't read the comic?" he'd ask. "It's so good. Complete bullshit, but Amo's very talented."
    He held it up for them to read. He pointed out all the major characters in the story. "It's for them that you're dying," he said. "It's their fault."
    So Peters came to hate the comic and the characters in it too, because hating only Julio wasn't enough. He hated Amo and Lara and Anna, just as he was told to. The horrors visited upon him and his love were too much for words, and soon she stopped speaking completely. Still they had each other, gazing into each other's eyes across the hall, and that was something.
    It could only have been months, though it was clear the others lined along the filthy hallway's walls had been there much longer. Some barely looked human anymore. Some of them droned in low, terrifying unison at times, craning their whip-thin necks toward the red beast in the glass at the chamber's end, like they were worshipping some