Read Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) for Free Online Page B

behind my back.
    I was beginning to feel like an outsider again, and I didn’t like it. We had all been through a lot together, so why couldn’t’ we be friends? Maybe I was too naive; in the old world, the world before the living dead had appeared, people like Sam and Tanya would never be friends with someone like me. We were too different.
    But I had assumed that in this new world, that could change because we all had something in common: we were survivors.
    A shot cracked the air behind us. I whirled around to see Sam standing in a firing position with the MP5 braced against his shoulder. One of the zombies that had been following us collapsed to the ground.
    “Head shot” Sam said proudly. “Right between the eyes.”
    “You idiot,” I said. “You’re going to bring every nasty in the area down on us.”
    “Shut up, man.”
    “Alex is right,” Tanya said to Sam. “The more noise we make, the more trouble we’re going to find ourselves in.”
    He shrugged, lowering the weapon.
    I heard a sound like a bee buzzing past my face before a bullet slammed into the wall. The sound of a gunshot reached us seconds later
    “Get down,” I shouted.
    A second bullet hit the wall, cracking into the rocks. I waited to hear the shot so I could gauge where it was coming from.
    “It’s coming from the house,” Jax said when the sound reached us.
    Muzzle flash appeared in an upstairs window. A bullet thudded into the ground somewhere near Tanya’s face. We scrambled over the stone wall quickly. As I landed on the opposite side, I glanced over my shoulder. Some of the zombies, seeing us go over the wall, had shambled through the open gate so they were on the same side as us.
    “Zombies heading this way,” Johnny said.
    We began to crawl beside the wall, away from the zombies. No more shots came from the farmhouse; whoever was in there shooting at us, was smart enough not to waste bullets when they couldn’t see us.
    A short distance ahead, a second wall bisected the wall we were following at a ninety-degree angle. If we tried to go over it, we would expose ourselves to the mystery shooter. If we stopped, the zombies would reach us.
    We scrambled up against the second wall, putting our backs against it so that we faced the advancing horde.
    Tanya readied her MP5. Sam began shooting. When Tanya was locked and loaded, she joined him in spraying bullets at the zombies. They went down easily enough when they were hit in the head, but I couldn’t help wondering how many more were going to arrive when they heard all the noise the guns were making. Sam and Tanya were probably making a bad situation worse by tearing up the night with bullets.
    After a brief burst of muzzle flash and ear cracking bangs from the assault rifles, the zombies on this side of the wall lay unmoving in the grass.
    “What now?” Jax asked no one in particular.
    We were pinned here. If we left the safety of the wall, we would become targets for the shooter in the farmhouse.
    My peripheral vision caught a movement in the darkness. I turned to glance into the field we were sitting in, and my heart began hammering.
    Three figures were running toward us. In the starlight, I could just make out the camouflage pattern of their army uniforms.
    “We need to move,” I said. “Hybrids.”

Chapter Nine
    S am and Tanya turned their weapons on the hybrids, but as soon as they began firing, the hybrids dropped to the ground and came scuttling through the grass on all fours like spiders, presenting smaller targets. And they were crawling fast.
    “We have to go over the wall,” I said. “The only safe place around here is that house.”
    “There’s a guy in there trying to kill us,” Tanya reminded me.
    “I’d rather face a human being with a gun than deal with…that,” I said, nodding at the approaching hybrids.
    “Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s go. We’re making a run for the farmhouse. Sam, lay down some cover fire.”
    Sam leaned over the wall and