Read The Remaining: Trust: A Novella for Free Online Page A

They only had time for quick, decisive action. He had to keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
    Muzzle flash again.
    Abe fired at it, five shots.
    Someone screamed. The sound elated him.
    Got him! Got that motherfucker!
    He reached a body lying facedown. A young man—that was all Abe registered. Maybe he was dead; maybe he was alive. Maybe Abe had tagged him, or maybe it had been one of the Blackhawk gunners, or maybe it had been the grenade. He still held an M4 carbine. He could have been a threat. Abe didn’t stop to determine. He kicked away the rifle and put a bullet into the back of the skull to make sure.
    Abe felt something smack his helmet, and then something punched him in the chest.
    Holy shit…
    Someone about ten yards in front of him, standing there in the gloom, backlit by the daylight behind him. Pointing a pistol at Abe, his feet dancing. Something that Abe called “happy feet,” which was a bit of a misnomer. When someone was so terrified that they could not decide whether to continue fighting or flee, their legs would dance around, caught in indecision.
    Abe was still coming at him. He fired once, then felt the bolt lock back, and the next reflexive trigger pull was just empty movement. The man before him stumbled back and Abe thought he had caught him in the chest, but he was far from dead. He was raising the pistol again. Abe was close, and getting closer. He dropped the rifle, let the sling carry it down to his weak side as he grabbed his sidearm.
    Abe came within arm’s distance. He juked left off the X, slapped out at the man’s pistol coming up. The pistol swung away, firing impotently into the haze. Abe was in close now, and he tucked his own pistol up tightly into his body as he bore down on the terrified man. Then he thrust out, pulling the pistol back just before it touched the man’s clavicle, and then fired three shots in a downward trajectory, each one punching through the bottom of the man’s neck and traveling down through his body where they punched through organs and vertebrae and the pelvic bone and came out through the man’s leg, groin, and anus.
    He toppled to the ground, structurally unsound.
    The look on the dead man’s face was one of fear and confusion.
    Just like the young man before him, Abe kicked the pistol from his grip and finished him.
    Abe stood there over him and coughed, his chest feeling raw. He forced himself to bring the pistol up, scan around for any additional threats. He registered a few more bodies on the ground. None of them was moving. There were no immediate threats.
    He felt a hand on his shoulder. “You good?”
    Abe still held his pistol punched out, twisting from side to side, scanning more out of reflex than anything else. His weak hand left his weapon and went first to his head. He felt the divot in his helmet, but it was shallow. Just a glancing blow. Then he touched his chest, aiming for where it ached, but his finger hit his front chicken plate. Felt the little pieces of the smashed projectile still caught up between the fabric and the plate.
    Abe coughed again. “I’m good. I’m good. It hit the plate.” He turned to the soldier. “Who’s got comms?” As he said it, he looked out the bank of windows to the southern end of the bridge and could see the crowd of tattered, ungodly souls scrambling over the barricade of cars at the bottom.
    The soldier jerked his thumb behind them. “Sarge.”
    Abe sprinted back down the hall, over the bodies of men he had not seen at first. There were at least five or six of them. He jumped onto the desk and quickly but gingerly negotiated the broken glass around the frame. Once outside, he could hear the noise of the infected between the beat of helicopter rotors—the grating, screaming, screeching noise that Abe had come to hate so much.
    He grabbed the ladder and hauled up it. “Sergeant!” he yelled as he climbed. “Sergeant!”
    He reached the top. The sergeant was crouched over the wounded soldier,