Like a panther, lean and swift, Theresa pushed off with one foot and sailed across the three- yard gap between rooftops, landing lightly on the other side.
Quentin followed her lead, leaping right after her.
The moment they cleared the gap, the rooftop door of the building they’d left behind burst
open.
Four or five zombies clawed their way through the broken iron gate, lurching forward with jerking heads and staggering limbs.
But these creatures weren’t like the ones Theresa had faced outside.
Their skin wasn’t the usual sickly gray–brown. Instead, it was a poisonous–looking shade of green, as if their flesh had been steeped in toxins.
Each face was a mask of decay: gray–white eyes bulging from reddened sockets, looking ready to spill out at any moment.
From behind a sagging clothesline, a green zombie lunged at her, its jaws gaping wide, its claws slicing the air as it thrashed toward her.
Steel sang.
A long blade flashed into her hand, striking straight through the creature’s skull.
Its head split open, and a gleaming stone clattered free.
The rest was carnage. The zombie’s brain matter spilled like a smashed curdled pudding, stringy and wet, spattering across the rooftop in thick, foul clumps.
It wasn’t like the remains she usually saw.
Most zombies, after four years of rot, had shriveled brains that yielded only a thin seep of fluid when crushed. At most, they spattered a bit of dried gore.
But this one looked as if it had only just died.
And yet its body told a different story–limbs decayed, flesh shrunk, the unmistakable husk of something long dead.
Could the chemical factories here have poisoned the people so deeply that, once turned, they became this green breed?
1/3
There was no time to dwell on it.
Finished
A flood of zombies poured from the opposite rooftop, leaping after her in wave after wave. Theresa hooked the gleamstone off the ground with her blade and tossed it to Quentin. “Keep it safe.”
Then she gripped her weapon and bolted forward.
The rooftops around her rose and fell in uneven tiers. Some had laundry poles jutting from them, others sported glassy sunrooms or crude add–ons cobbled together from scrap, while a few pitched sharply like old gable roofs.
Theresa bounded across them without pause, her feet finding purchase where most would falter.
Behind her, the horde shrieked and groaned, their guttural cries scraping against the air. They flailed their arms and legs in a wild, jerking pursuit, stumbling after her through the maze of rooftops.
But her speed and sudden changes of direction were too much.
One by one, they fell—some plummeting between buildings mid–leap, others losing her trail entirely in the confusion of twisting rooftops.
After nearly ten minutes of running, Theresa had shaken off most of them.
The streets below began to thin, the crush of the city giving way to wider gaps and sparser blocks.
She had left the core zombie zone behind.
Now her view opened wide.
A vast plaza stretched before her, dominated by a massive sign: Firestone North Railway Station.
“Beautiful, which way now?” Quentin caught up at her side, slightly breathless.
Theresa’s eyes lit up the moment she saw the station.
According to the locator, their target was inside a tower next to the South Bus Station. And the South Bus Station was close to the South Railway Station.
“Follow the tracks,” she said without hesitation.
Cutting straight through the city would be shorter, but it meant plowing through hordes of
zombies. The rail line would take longer, but it was safer.
Verify captcha to read the content
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: The Undead and Unstoppable Apocalyptic Queen