Read The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree for Free Online

up off the ground and insp ect my pack.  The pellets have torn a small hole in the canvas.  If I hadn’t moved forward when I did, she probably would have been close enough to smoke me.  I smile as I think about her scurrying back to her friends.  I pick up my rifle and make sure I have everything important.  I put her pistol bullets in my pocket.
    Looking back towards her direction, I yell off into the forest, “Missed me, missed me, now ya gotta kiss me.”
    I grimace quietly and look at my arm again.   “Fucking Christ.  My mother always warned me about talking to strange women with shotguns.”  I need to find a place to hole up, clean up.  Infection will kill me as quick as anything. 
    I look around me.   If I had any sense, I’d trek straight north of here and then west.  Maybe make for the Rocky Mountains and leave Goldilocks to play with her friends at the fort until the three or more bears come home and eat their stupid asses. 
    “But if I had any sense at all, I’d of shot her on sight and kept going.   You know better,” I tell myself as I pick myself up off the ground.  “It’s like Grandma used to say, ‘Don’t be stupid all your life.’”
    The compound can’t be far from here.  I put my pack on my good shoulder.  I check the chamber of the rifle and begin picking my way through the underbrush.  She wasn’t a pointy-eared green Neptunian woman, but she wasn’t half bad either.

Chapter 5:  Twist and Shout
     
    “Find tracks, follow tracks, get hit by train,” I say to myself as I follow the woman’s trail through the forest.  It’s the punch line to an old joke about three hunters.  First one finds deer tracks, follows them, gets a deer.  Second one, an elk.  Third one… yeah… well… you get the idea.  I figure most of the time, the punch line is funnier by itself.  For instance, So the farmer says to the salesman, ‘But I don’t have a daughter!’  See what I mean?
    Gut-buster.
    I’m not sure why I’m following her.  The sky overhead is growing darker and more menacing.  The air is yellow again and what I can see of the horizon is dark green.   It isn’t exactly nuclear winter like they said it would be on the news but it is damn strange weather to be sure.  I can’t remember how many kilotons of crap got blown into the stratosphere by that rock that landed in the Atlantic, but it has been a long time since the sun came out.
    I’m still in the woods and it is a bad, bad place to be if a twister drops down.  A flash of lightning hits close enough to make me duck.  Having all of these trees around kind of sucks for lightning too. 
    I see a smudged boot print on the edge of a puddle.  The leaves on the ground leading away from it are disturbed in evenly paced gaps, far enough apart to indicate running.  “I’d run too if I were chasing me,” I say softly.  I take off after her, moving quickly but quietly.  The electricity in the air stokes my adrenaline and I slide between the trees and around the bushes like an electron sliding along the wire of a hot cattle fence.  If she had invited me to come with her, I would have said hell no.  But after taking a shot at me, I’m running after her like a starving man called to a free chicken dinner.
    The tracks are closer together now.  She’s run out of air.  I slow my pace as well.  She probably knows I’m following.  “And should that concern me?” I ask myself.  I stop for a moment and look around me.  What the hell am I doing?  “You need to get laid , buddy,” I tell myself.  But she waited for the Zed kids to get close enough before unloading on them with the birdshot, why shoot me from so far away if she wanted to kill me? 
    Another blast of lightning hits close and the first few heavy drops of rain hit the leaves around me.  I can see the clouds moving overhead at great speeds but it is perfectly calm on the ground.  The sound of the raindrops should be enough to cover the