More Fun with Zombies and Monster Trucks

Another clip from the forthcoming THE WRONG KIND OF DEAD, Book 3 in the SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER:

In a haze of tumbling limbs, squirting, stinking dead blood, gaping mouths widened with the swift caress of my blade, I find myself in a clear space. Agnes has made a point of clearing this side by rolling back and forth across it, and I find myself slipping on the crushed remains carpeting the ground here.

“Sir! Sir!”

I look up in time to see that the crowd has finally detached from Elyssa’s SUV, and are coming for the panting, tired guy trying to find a non-flesh-slimed spot of grass to stand on. The ones on the side closest on the other vehicles are turning away, too.

Good. Now the convoy can move. Except it’s waiting for Agnes, who’s still busy with all the ghouls pouring out of the trees on either side of the road. She’s coming towards me now, and it’s all I can do to navigate the slippery parts away from the mob advancing from our trucks, and the ones still coming from the other side.

Ethan and his people are doing a fine job exploding the skulls of the dead closest to them. There are so many, though. As the Xenocider/Mom’s Taxi pulls alongside the rope ladder falls and I find myself racing the corpses for a first grasp at the rungs. 

I grab a rung and climb as fast as I can on the twisty, shaky ladder. I’m almost jarred loose as the ladder is yanked abruptly at the bottom by an extraordinarily nimble woman in the remains of black power suit. With her natural rigor-mortis-strong death grip, she has no problems holding on. Or grabbing at my leg.

I pull myself up one more rung. I hardly have time to adjust my grip as I pull my panga. Her face contorts into a hiss I can almost hear over the sound of the engine; her yellow mummified arm reaches out as I lean back and swing down.

That reaching, grasping arm spins away into the cloud of dust surrounding the Xenocider’s right rear tire. With a strength borne of pure animal rage, the woman launches herself at me. My stroke bisects her eyes on the horizontal. For a moment I fear sticking the blade in her skull but she falls away, her one arm still reaching and grasping, her gore-blackened teeth and gums the last thing I see before the dust takes them, too.

I reach down and pull at the ladder below me. I’m already worn out from fighting that dead woman and I’d rather not have to deal with one more, let alone the three we’ve already passed over since I pulled up the ladder behind me. 

It’s only, what? Six more rungs up? It feels like six days and nights before I pull myself into the cockpit, my wife yelling into my ear, “You know, it’d be a lot easier if I could just turn loose with this flame cannon.”

Derek and Agnes acquire the Xenocider in GRACE AMONG THE DEAD, “A Tale of Love and Redemption, of the Living Dead and a Monster Truck.” Available in Kindle and in paperback from Severed Press.

Catch the beginning of Derek Grace’s adventures in the emergent Dark Resurrection in BLEEDING KANSAS, available in Bitter Dark, Dark, and Bitter Dark Translated into German.