We Will Rise: An Adrian's Undead Diary Novel (Lockey vs the Apocalypse Book 2) Carl Meadows (red queen ebook txt) 📖

and climbing? Throw on a hoodie. Feeling cold? Throw on a hoodie. Feeling like shit about yourself? Throw on a hoodie. Can’t be bothered wearing a bra today? On with the hoodie. Just want to lounge all day and make no effort while you eat ice cream? Yep. Hoodie.

The hoodie is the Swiss army knife of comfort clothing.

After three years of shitty office jobs slowly destroying my soul, I moved into more blue-collar roles. I worked in factories, which I hated because it was just a different monotonous routine and fucking loud, and as we know, I am something of a social animal. Being unable to shoot the shit to help pass the grind of a working day was even more soul-destroying than staring at a spreadsheet containing data I just didn’t give a shit about.

Eventually I ended up working in a warehouse, and I found my place a bit more there. I started working shifts, and that gave me better freedom in the summer months. Working four days on, four days off, followed by four nights on, and four nights off, suited me way better. I had time in daylight to run free or go the fight gym and work out my angst on the bags and sparring in the ring. If I needed extra shifts for money to buy or replace stuff, they were there. It didn’t stimulate me mentally, but the banter in the warehouse was more fun and filled with hours of piss-taking, which was way better than dealing with petty office politics.

Of course, you still had to deal with irritating supervisors who went mental with a tiny sliver of power over other human beings and delighted in making your life miserable, but that’s par for the course in any job. Some of the heat I got was my own doing, in fairness. I was forever shortening my supervisor’s name to Dick, which he didn’t seem to like.

Mind you, that’s probably because his name was Robert.

It wasn’t great money, but for where I was in my life at this point, it suited me far more than the daily drudge I’d been enduring.

I finally managed to save up enough for a deposit on a rented flat of my own. I’d been living in a shared house with three freaks up to this point, so when I moved in, it was the greatest feeling in the world.

When you’ve been bounced between foster and group homes all your life, and then resided in shared dormitories in university, followed by shared housing with strangers, I cannot express how amazing that first night in my own flat was. It was a single bedroom, with a tiny bathroom, and a singular open living room-kitchen area, but it was mine. I wasn’t wondering if one of the freaks was trying to pick the lock to my door so they could rummage through my underwear while I was at work, trying to sneak a creepy look at me in the shower, or stealing my shit out of the fridge that clearly had my bloody name written on it in permanent marker. I was three months away from my twenty-sixth birthday (which is May, in case you were wondering, Freya) and I had my first true taste of real freedom.

Four months after moving into my own little private slice of heaven, the world went and shat itself, and here we are.

On that day, I was on my first day off after a stretch of four nights in. It’s hard to get your body clock in any kind of circadian rhythm, as you’re always fucking about with it, so I was still asleep when a commotion in the building woke me up around 11am.

I live on the top floor of a three-storey building. There are four flats on each floor, much like that apartment block Nate and I discovered untold horrors in, but the residences were on a much smaller scale. There were no balconies either, though the flats above ground level had large patio-door style windows with a little guard rail just above waist-height, so you could open it wide in the summer and let the breeze in. The walls were like paper as well, so if someone banged the front door of the building, or their own apartment door, the whole god damn building would hear it. Still, it was a small price to pay and for the most part, I was lucky that the people in my building were mostly conscientious about not being arseholes.

I was used to a banging door now and again, or the dull thump of hip-hop bass from the stoner bell end living below me in number eight.

I was not, however, prepared for the screaming I heard both outside the building, and within it on the ground floor. It was heart-stopping, being woken like that. In nothing but my pants and a tee, I flicked open my bedroom window blinds, swung the window wide, and stuck my head out, peering down into the bright morning with sleep-bleary eyes.

It took only a second for them to snap wide.

A paramedic, in his green uniform, was sat on the small patch of grass just outside the building, being tended by his frantic female colleague. His right arm was a mess, a blood-covered ruin with a ragged chunk torn clean out of his bicep. I think an artery must have torn because the blood was everywhere, pumping out in gouts as his friend desperately applied a tourniquet to slow the bleed. He did not look well, I could see that much, even from my elevation.

There were a few other people hanging out their own windows, asking what was happening, getting irate with the clearly distressed paramedics as one of them was trying to save the life of the other.

People can be such fucking assholes, Freya.

Here was a first responder with an obvious life-threatening injury, his colleague – and probably friend – was desperately trying to save his life, and