Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise by Shawn Chesser

Author:Shawn Chesser [Chesser, Shawn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Zombies
Publisher: Morbid Press
Published: 2018-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

For Tony, the walk from 4WTC to the Broad Street Station where he always caught the Jamaican Line to Queens truly was a trudge. But not in the sense of the word where one is following a purposeful course with a clear terminus worth getting to. Not today. For Tony, who had just witnessed something no human should ever have to, this was the solemn slog variety of trudge. The type of leaden-footed trek that saw him navigating pedestrian-choked sidewalks, crossing streets teeming with tourists and people going to work on a weekend, and then boarding a subway car packed in like a sardine only to be delivered not to a mansion in the Hamptons but to a small one-bedroom apartment full of dust-covered mementos, ghosts of squandered opportunities, and solemn memories of days gone by.

What was in reality a two-minute walk covering all of four blocks ended up taking Tony fifteen minutes to complete. And when he made it to the bottom of the Broad Street Station stairs and was wrapped in the embrace of the cool air circulating the subterranean subway stop, his train arrived almost instantaneously.

Aboard the car were people coming home from jobs similar to his, only conducted during off hours, of which, in New York City, there were very few. There was only a small sliver of time during which he felt the city was idle. The time between when the bars closed and sunrise. Shadow workers is what he called the folks who kept the city alive while the majority of her nearly nine million citizens were snugged away in their beds.

He took a seat across from a woman dressed in khakis and a light-blue Polo shirt. She had a heavy winter coat slung over one arm. She was still wearing a plastic nametag that read Charlotte. Below her name, emblazoned in red, was the name of the outfit she worked for. Merry Maids might have sounded good to a focus group; however, the bags under Charlotte’s eyes, coupled with her downturned mouth, told a different story. Just when Tony had finished his quick recon of the car and parked his gaze dead ahead, Charlotte furrowed her brow and pointed at the air above his head.

Realizing he was still in uniform, armed with his Taser and sidearm and wearing a hat indoors—a no-no to the older set—Tony acknowledged her with a nod, concealed his weapons with his windbreaker, and removed the ball cap.

Peering down at the hat sitting in his lap, Tony saw the true source of Charlotte’s dismay. There, stuck to the mesh portion of the ball cap, was a silver-dollar-sized shard of skull with several inches of his dead friend’s brunette locks still attached to the pale flap of scalp clinging to it. He guessed it had hitched a ride there when he embraced the dead woman. It had been a spur of the moment gesture that came on the heels of him kneeling next to her body and seeing straightaway she was dead.

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.