A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2) by Daniel Humphreys

Author:Daniel Humphreys [Humphreys, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

April 7, 2018

On the Mississippi River

Z-Day + 171

The loss of Richard shouldn’t have made such a severe impact on their ability to carry on, but it had. With three sets of hands instead of four, they still should have been able to unload the Humvee and stock the boat, but none of them had been able to muster much of an effort. As though by some unspoken agreement, they left the lion’s share of their loot in the truck. All they brought back with them across the river were two backpacks of medicine and their weapons. Try as he might, Sandy couldn’t put the reason for it into words.

That lack of understanding, he was coming to realize, was a limitation of his own life experience. No matter how much he tried to react to events around him in a logical matter, that wasn’t always the way that other people reacted. It was, in a very real sense, a severe vestige of his own social awkwardness. He was the only child of parents who themselves were only children.

Up until the outbreak, the major influences in my life were still alive. Older, but still kicking. He straightened up in the boat as a realization hit him. Hell, I’ve never even been to a funeral.

Now, though, his parents, friends, and his neighbors were all liable to be dead. And despite the shame that coursed through him, he couldn’t muster more than numbed fatigue at the very thought of it.

You killed a man. You should feel something.

It was a semantic argument. Sandy had pulled the trigger, but Richard was already dying. Was it a good thing or a bad thing to help someone to go out on their own terms? Would it have been less offensive to wait until the infection rendered his friend into a cannibalistic beast?

He shook the troubling thoughts away like a horse shooing a fly. That internal debate was a road he didn’t need to go down on. He’d have to deal with it at some point, maybe, but introspection was a luxury for people who slept in safety.

“Are we going to talk about what just happened?” Kendra blurted. Sandy glanced back over his shoulder. Jason shook his head and kept steering the boat toward the opposite bank. “I know we haven’t been out in the world much since it happened, but that was some fucked up shit, Sandy. Have you seen anything like that before?”

In his haze, he hadn’t considered it, but he understood her question immediately. The infected inside of the pharmacy had acted well beyond the range of what he’d observed as standard behavior. They’d resisted the call to react to noise, they’d utilized stealth and cooperative tactics, and now that he thought about it, there’d been something off about the way they moved. Less stumbling drunk and more agile.

“No,” he admitted. “There’s precedent, though. The same infection will impact people of different ages more, or less, severely. That’s why you see recommendations for the young and the elderly to receive certain vaccines.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.