In The End Box Set | Books 1-3 Stevens, GJ (story books to read TXT) 📖

I would not die for the sake of a sprain. The faces of the undead spurred me on.

Running, I felt relief as I heard Alex land with a huff of air and the slap of her feet. As I turned, she launched the rifle through the air toward me, her attention turning to leaning over the fence before I’d caught the rifle midway with my left.

Indecision took hold of me for a moment as the crowd were about to pass the house and enter the garden, the stench of the sewer amplifying to catch in my lungs.

With a quick glance to Alex, I saw her struggling to pull the ladder from the other garden and over the tall fence. I let the rifle down to the flagstones and gripped the baseball bat with both my hands, raising it high over my head and took two steps forward.

Two creatures led the advance, shoulder to shoulder between the house and the wooden fence. Others stumbled and fell at their back.

I kept my stare on the tall woman to the right. I watched the barrel of fat around her midriff, her belly button on show through a rip in her shirt. My gaze traced the fabric open from her chest bone to her hips, following a scored, jagged line along her pale skin.

One, I said in my head and moved my gaze to avoid her impassive snarl.

Two. I counted in silence, turning my look to the man tall at her side. His arms were outstretched and his milky white eyes fixed on mine until something drew me to his fingers pointed in different, unnatural directions.

“Three”, I said, this time letting it go with volume. I raised the bat higher, stretching out the muscles in my arms whilst trying not to think of who these people had been.

On the fourth number counted in my head, I swung down with all my breath. With the bat flying through the air I couldn’t stop myself from imagining who they were before their first death.

The middle-aged mother of two, her children were doctors, one with a kid of her own on the way, fell to the floor as the wood bounced from the front of her skull to send a shiver along the ash.

The young bank clerk who’d lived with his wife and two point four kids seemed relieved when the bat returned from its lift to crack his skull open. His eyes fell closed as blood and lumps of flesh sprayed out with a sound like a melon shattering against the ground.

As the mother whose birthday it would have been tomorrow rose to her feet, I issued a second swing and she went the same way as the guy while I tried to scrub their made-up lives from my memory.

Raising the bat with blood dripping in an arc as I pulled up, my gaze fixed on the next two in line, the fairy tale of their lives already forming when the car alarms took up again in near unison.

The front two kept up their advance, but the outnumbered crowd at their backs took a slow turn, their arms pointing back out towards the road.

I twisted, racing to Alex who was at the next fence, holding the ladder ready for me to climb with the rifle shouldered over her back.

We were in the last garden before the alarms silenced and relieved to see the teeming mass of creatures were dispersing in all directions but towards us.

Alex peeled from my side, shoving the rifle from her shoulder as I peered over the last wooden fence, welcoming the thin smell of creosote cutting through the sewerage taste.

There it stood all alone. The van I’d wanted to get back to all this time.

There it was, a little dirty with red smears and new finger-sized holes near the ladder fixed to the back door, which gave me concern for the safety of its contents.

Still, there it was, a short run from the other side of the fence, with only a handful of creatures who hadn’t made the journey towards the alarms.

An unfamiliar electronic song rang off from the road and I turned, catching Alex relaxing the rifle down, a wide smile gleaming across her mouth.

Up the ladder before she reached my side, I watched the backs of the last few humanlike creatures receding.

My breath paused and eyelids batted as I saw the carpet of bodies scattered across the tarmac, the shock soon replaced with a guilt-laced struggle to silence my rising joy when I saw the discarded pistols, fingers gripped around the triggers and the rifles. Real rifles loaded with dead killing bullets.

I knew I’d become desensitised to the worst. I knew my training, my prior experience of what I had called horror, took me further from the person I wanted to be.

Alex took hold of the ladder and pulled me back into the moment. I landed on bent knees in a spot I’d hastily picked out between two bodies I was desperate to consider someone’s people.

Shaking away the battle in my head and the pain in my ankle, I focused on the goal. There would be time to work out how I felt. To work out if I was a bad person or if my experiences had killed my humanity, but only if I took action now for those I could still warn and save.

Arriving at the passenger door, I stretched out my fingers and pulled the cold handle. I knew already the locked door would hold firm.

I closed my eyes and my head filled with Toni in the flash of gunfire. She held out the keys in her hand as a patch of red grew around her chest, a smile widening on her face.

77

“Step aside,” came Alex’s breathy whisper at my back.

“No,” I said, regretting the volume as