LEFT BEHIND FOR DEAD - Zombie Outbreak by Nathan Kingsley Page A

barrel sitting near the street in a small empty town and I almost shot her head off. I had the shotgun pumped and my finger on the trigger.
                  “Whoa, cowboy!” she yelled, crawling out one long leg at a time and standing before me barefooted in her blue jeans and halter, her breasts spilling out all over.
                  “You shouldn't be scaring people like that, you'll get yourself killed,” I said.
                  “Only cowboys shoot without thinking.” She shook her tumbling red hair and pulled it on top of her head before pushing a ball cap down over it. “So where you headed?”
                  I thought that might be the question of the year. Where was I going? Where were any of us going? The infection had spread so far inland from the East Coast I'd heard it was just now taking over California and Oregon and Washington state. Where were we heading, indeed?
                  “I don't know,” I mumbled.
                  “I've got kin in Texas.” She joined me in the street and taking my elbow, got me walking alongside her.
                  “Are they infected?”
                  “I won't know until I get there, will I? It's not like the phone companies are working. Do you miss them?”
                  “What?”
                  “Cell phones. I had an iPhone and it was like my lifeline. When it stopped working that's when I knew the world had ended, really ended.”
                  I ignored her prattling. Iphones. She was just a silly woman and I wished I'd never met her, even if her breasts were truly astounding.
                  That night we stayed together in a farmhouse in an open field. Around midnight it began to rain, the drops striking the windows like fingers tapping. I even checked to be sure we hadn't been followed and the dead waited outside.
                  “You're jumpy. What's your name? I'm Naddy, that's short for Nadine.”
                  “Craig.”
                  “That's an old name. I don't think I've ever known a Craig.”
                  “It's not an old name at all.”
                  “What makes you so all-fired hateful?” She rested her head on her hands and stared at me. She was right, I had felt foul for days.
                  “My friends left me back outside of Houma. They just...left me.”
                  “Why'd they do that?”
                  “I guess they thought I was going to be dead meat and took off. I'd known them since I was eleven years old.”
                  “That's a big suck,” she said. “My dad left me.”
                  Surprised, I looked at her. She didn't look so sad as perplexed. “Your own father left you?”
                  She nodded, sitting up straight on the old sofa left in the otherwise bare room. “Middle of the night, four months ago. While I was sleeping.”
                  “Maybe...maybe he wandered out and got taken away.”
                  “No, I found his footprints and there weren't any others beside them. He went alone. On down they road, as everyone says today. On down the road.”
                  Now I felt sorry I'd been so surly with Naddy. It was one hell of a difference being left behind by your friends and being left behind by your dad.
                  I pulled a tin of sardines from my backpack and we sat together on the sofa and shared it. Even my fingers smelled of fish. “I wish I could wash up,” I said. “I feel like dirt is caked on my skin. We haven't slowed down since leaving North Carolina.”
                  “You don't look so bad,” she said. “Come over here.”
                  She lay back on the sofa and patted her large