Read The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead for Free Online Page A

plan,
incase they get in here.”
    Jenny chewed her bottom lip. 
“We’ll think on it,” she said.  “Right now, I want to eat.”
Jeff smiled, his stomach growling.  He watched her for a moment as she got
some hamburger meat out of the fridge, wondering for a second how long the
electricity would last.  Mostly, though, he stared at her, the way her body
moved, the way her fingers molded the meat into patties, the curve of her hips
and weight of her breasts.  He’d never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.
    “I’m going to go look out back,”
he said, breaking his own spell.  “See if I can come up with something.”
She nodded and he left her there, the zombies outside scratching on the glass
and moaning with their own brand of hunger.
    Jeff stopped at the closed
bathroom door.  There was still the matter of Bill.  He had to go.  Jeff knew
he’d have to do it, that Jenny would never do anything on her own.  If this was
to be done, it had to be done by him.
    He looked through Jenny’s closet
and found a set of white sheets that looked a little old and worn.  He carried
the sheet into the bathroom and gazed down at Bill, looking up at him.  Jeff
averted his gaze.  Even though to him, Bill was just a thing, it still bothered
him what he was going to do
    Jeff popped the sheet open and let
it unfurl to the floor.  He wanted to do this and do it quickly.  He bent over
Bill and shoved one edge of the sheet as far under the corpse as possible.  He
pushed the material until he’d worked it all the way through to the other
side.  The whole time, Bill moaned into his sock but still couldn’t move.  His
flesh felt weird to the touch, kind of soft and fatty, like it was a
marshmallow over an open campfire, just about to turn gooey.  Jeff had to shut
his mouth to hold the vomit back.  And the stench!  When he got under the body
and separated it from the bottom of the tub, the worst smell he’d ever sniffed
smashed his nose and this time he did vomit, bile and stomach acid burning the
back of his throat.  He turned to the side and let loose into the toilet. 
    Jeff ran some cold water in the
sink and splashed his face.  He rinsed out his mouth and looked down at Bill
and shook his head.
    “Sorry about this,” he said.  Bill
didn’t seem to notice.   Jeff folded the rest of the sheet over top of Bill and
tucked it under him.  He lifted the dead body by the shoulders—its face now
covered by the sheet—and kept wrapping the sheet over until it was nearly done
at the top.  Then he bent to the legs and did the same thing, gathering the
rest of the material and wrapping it until it was tight.  That left the area
around the stomach a little loose, but that was alright. 
    Sweating, Jeff stepped from the
bathtub.  Bill was there, under the sheet, like a rag-tag mummy.  Now came the
hard part.
    Jeff was no body-builder.  He
worked out occasionally at the gym, but most of his exercise came from jogging,
so he wasn’t yoked by any means, but he also wasn’t a coach potato.  It took
him a couple of tries to haul Bill up out of the tub completely, but when he
finally did, he threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and stumbled into
the hall and the bedroom.  He could feel Bill’s head, under the sheet, moving
around, his jaws snapping open and shut around the sock, trying to bit him
through the sheet.  Jeff managed to open the door to the porch without
dropping Bill and stagger out.  From this vantage point, he could see out over
the street that ran by the apartment complex and across to the small shopping
center just a block away.  The streets teemed with the living dead, stumbling
past the abandoned Kinko’s and Starbucks and Walgreen’s.  He took a look around
and wondered if maybe him and Jenny were the only living people around.   It
was late afternoon, the sun fading in the west and the sky the most brilliant
orange he’d seen in a long time.  The dead, oblivious to