Read Undead Rain (Book 2): Storm for Free Online Page B

clear of the herd. While the other three grabbed their rucksacks and opened their doors, I hesitated, my trembling hand on the door handle. There was no choice. If I stayed in the vehicle, I would be toast.
    I opened the door with as much force as I could, sending a zombie staggering backwards, and came out swinging my bat wildly. The sound of the wood thwacking into zombie heads was sickening. The stench of rotted flesh was overpowering. The sound of the nasties’ hungry moans made the hairs on my arms and neck stand on end.
    I concentrated on the stretch of clear road past the herd. I swung at anything that came near me. The zombies at the rear of the Jeep realised their prey was out of the vehicle, exposed and vulnerable, and tried to crowd closer to us, jostling with each other in their eagerness to tear into our flesh with teeth and nails.
    I swung the bat wildly, trying to clear a path to that sweet patch of clear road ahead. For every zombie I knocked over, another replaced it instantly.  
    At one point, I felt a hand rake down my back and I thought I had been scratched, infected, but the nasty’s nails didn’t penetrate my hoodie. I was lucky but I knew my luck wouldn’t hold out much longer. There were too many of them.
    The road ahead might as well be a thousand miles away.
    I tripped over a body and went down hard, feeling a flare of pain in my shoulder as it hit the hard road.
    A dozen blue-skinned monsters stood above me, ready to tear into the video-gaming geek who was lucky to have lived this long in the zombie apocalypse.  
    Then everything became light, sound and heat. A light so bright it burned my eyes, a sound so loud it deafened me, and a heat so intense it seared my skin.

nine
    nine
    I rolled onto my stomach, feeling the rough road beneath my fingers. The only sound I could hear was a constant whine in my head. My ears felt like they had been stuffed with wool. My skin felt tender, like I had been burned by the sun. I staggered to my feet unsteadily. The Cherokee was a flaming tangle of white metal and broken glass. Angry flames and black smoke plumed from the remains of the roof.
    The zombies around me had been destroyed by the blast. They lay on the road like blue-skinned rag dolls. There was a stench of cooking meat in the air and I gagged, trying not to be sick. I didn’t have time to be sick. Most of the herd, the nasties that had been far enough away from the Cherokee, were still “alive”. They shambled towards me.  
    A hand grabbed my shoulder from behind and I whirled, bat ready. It was Jax. Black dirt smeared her face but she looked otherwise intact. She said something to me but I couldn’t hear anything over the whine. She pulled me off the road and into the trees. Tanya and Sam were waiting for us there.
    We ran.
    After a few minutes, I was out of breath. The whine in my head was still there but now I could hear other sounds as well, muffled but definitely there. Tanya and Sam speaking. The crunch of twigs beneath our boots. My own laboured breathing and the sound of my rapid heartbeat.
    I slowed to a stumbling pace and let them get ahead of me. There was no way I could keep up. Story of my life. Always lagging behind everyone else. My stumbling jog slowed to a walk. I could barely breathe, never mind run. At least my hearing was improving with each passing minute. The whine had faded into a dull background noise.
    I made my way through the forest at my own pace, unable to do anything else, and was surprised when I found Tanya, Jax and Sam waiting for me.
    “You okay?” Jax asked as I reached them.
    I nodded. “I can’t…move very fast.”
    “We’ll take a breather here,” Tanya said. She sat down on a fallen log.
    I did the same, sitting on the ground and leaning back against a tree trunk. “What are your stories?” I asked. “You all seem to know how to handle yourselves.”
    “We’ve been in some tricky situations before all this shit went down,” Tanya said. “I