Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller by John Evans

capabilities.
    Shepherd saw Riley, Malachi and Snacks Douglas run from the barracks and start blazing away at the invaders on the west. They didn’t know some were coming from the north, too. That was Shepherd’s responsibility but he was giving some thought to abandoning it.
    His gaze flicked to the stone walls surrounding the farmhouse. The last line of defense. He might make it if he dropped the flamethrower and ran. But the feeders were converging on it from all sides. Could he get someone to open the gate for him before the mob hit? There were already figures there, clawing at the bricks.
    Shepherd saw Ace go down, cursing, beneath a wave of slavering teeth and nails. Looked like that gun he loved so much had jammed.  
    Shepherd’s gaze flicked back to the north. His perimeter. The zombies from the forest were approaching the trench, a veritable wall in their own right. But this barrier was built from rotting flesh.
    Some of it dry as kindling.  
    He thought about Gena and his dad, sleeping and vulnerable in the farmhouse. If he went out guns blazing it would be a good death. That was kind of a relief. He’d always feared that in the end he’d try to weasel out of the heroic last stand he and the other guys liked to imagine, but now the moment was here and he had a flamethrower.
    “Fuck it,” Shepherd said, lifting the barrel and pulling the trigger. Pressurized gasoline sprayed from the nozzle more than a hundred feet, igniting as it left the barrel and saturating the advancing horde with incendiary liquid.
    Shepherd’ weapon was devastating enough that he could actually submerge his fear for a moment and enjoy the row of human-shaped torches lighting up the night, and even entertain the hope that his sacrifice might reduce the invaders’ numbers enough to make a difference. Maybe he’d buy just enough time for his family to make an improbable getaway.
    Shepherd strafed the mob, left and right. Clothes blazed, sagging flesh cooked, and drier, dessicated bodies turned to ash. Most of the feeders only made it a few steps after being immolated. Flaming skeletons collapsed twenty to thirty feet before reaching the trench.
    “Who wants some barbeque!” he roared, giddy and alive. Then he saw a figure standing motionless amongst the zombies. Facing him. Too still, too poised to be one of them. And was that a rifle in his hands?
    Shepherd didn’t have time to wonder why the zombies weren’t attacking the figure. In fact, he decided to take cover a moment too late. He heard the shot before he felt it but suddenly he was collapsing, flamethrower still blazing. High-caliber bullets had torn through his body in multiple places. Before he died, he realized that he was setting his own legs ablaze, but the agony only flared there for an instant before darkness came.
    His last thought was that this guy was going to end them all.
     

C HAPTER S IX

    THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

    JAMES VOSKUIL CRAMMED his hands into the pockets of his cashmere overcoat and tried to ignore the night’s chill.  
    The urban movie-house had attracted a sparse crowd to its ticket window. The customers were on edge, many eyes roving warily up and down the street and over each other.  
    Voskuil found himself thinking about Lena Gladden. She was intensely attractive, but on this occasion his thoughts were not idle fantasies of storage closet assignations. (Those idylls frequently involved Lena tied up so that Voskuil could perform various unnecessary diagnostics on her.).
    Rather, his mind turned to her behavior of late. Questionable health certificates. Her unseemly effort with the obvious euthanasia case. The woman had always seemed a little on the soft side, but had he failed to notice this kind of slip-up before? She was definitely putting his side business at risk. An audit of the facility was sure to find traces of his entrepreneurial efforts.  
    Voskuil felt owed a million dollars a year to do this job, so a little extra was the least he