Read Winchester Undead (Book 2): Winchester: Prey for Free Online

before they’d found the ancient but still-running van outside of the town of Athens. The fight they’d endured to clear that town was staggering, but they were beginning to get close to their destination. In the forty-nine days since the attack, Amanda estimated they’d traveled just over three hundred miles, and twenty-five of those days were spent covering short distances on foot.
    Originally the plan had been to travel north out of Little Rock and to I-40 towards Colorado, but the fighting was so intense that they were forced to travel south. The first few days after the attack and the oily chemical sprayed by the large flight of aircraft that passed overhead, the number of the undead grew exponentially. On the small highways found in the piney woods of east Texas, the number of undead seemed manageable, but near the Dallas/Fort Worth area the number of abandoned vehicles on the road and the shambling corpses increased starkly, sapping any positive outlook Amanda had still clung to.
    Clint pointed east. “If we take that road to the right we should be able to skirt around Corsicana, but I don’t think we’ll be able to skip having to travel on I-45. How much ammo do you have left?”
    Amanda looked at the M4 magazines in the carrier around her midsection, Johnson’s own armor carrier that was given to her just before Clint shot him. “About two hundred rounds.”
    “Shit. We’re probably going to need every last one of them.”
    Clint climbed into the driver’s seat, quickly joined in the passenger seat by Amanda. With the windshield missing, both of them were quickly soaked by the cold rain. Farm-to Market 1128, thankfully, was devoid of undead in the road, as was FM 3041—that is, until they reached the feeder road for I-45. Clint stopped the van, engine still running, and climbed onto the roof again with his binoculars.
    “Southbound is a damn parking lot. Looks like there was a wreck south of us, probably before the EMP hit. Northbound isn’t too bad, but I can see movement between the vehicles.”
    Amanda grimaced. Movement on the highway could only be the undead. Returning to the driver’s seat, Clint turned the van right, drove down the feeder road and onto the Interstate. They were able to drive around the disabled vehicles and the small groups of undead, but the driving was slow, about fifteen miles per hour, as they weaved from shoulder to shoulder to pass all the vehicles and walking corpses. Three vertical strands of cable separated the northbound and southbound lanes. Even though the cable was in place to prevent a vehicle from crossing the median and causing a head-on collision, it wasn’t effective at stopping the undead, but it did cause the walking corpses to fall face forward into the grass as they tried to walk through the median to follow the passing van.
    After the weeks of incredible hardship, Amanda giggled at the bodies tripping over the wire and no longer retaining the cognitive ability to even attempt to catch their fall. Each of the corpses broke its fall by planting its face into the dirt. Clint looked at Amanda suspiciously, believing—and rightly so—that she was beginning to have a bit of a mental breakdown.
    Thirty minutes of slow driving passed before Clint took the exit for FM 1126. The north Texas farmland, sparsely populated, left few people to be killed. Some of the homes they passed looked like they had wisps of smoke coming out of the chimneys. Amanda assumed survivors probably lived there, but after their last run-in with a survivor group, she simply did not trust them to be benign. Clint swerved the van around another group of undead as they turned onto Highway 287. Those were the last shambling undead that Amanda saw before they turned onto TX-34 and drove across a bridge spanning a small lake.
    Clint turned after the lake and followed the small road through the countryside. Neither of them spoke. Amanda curled up in her seat, shivering from the cold rain coming