Headshots - Battlefield Z series book 11 Chapter excerpt

HEADSHOTS

a Battlefield Z series

Ben Taylor stood on the grassy knoll a couple hundred yards from the Dallas Book Depository and stared at the road below him.

He wondered how JFK would have dealt with zombies.

The spot of one of America’s downfalls was a tourist trap now. At least it had been up until the Z plague swept the nation.

Taylor had thought about making for one of the Coasts and the proposed border walls before they sealed off the interior of the country in an attempt to contain the spread.

He didn’t know if it worked.

He got on the front of a government bus that was supposed to carry refugees to the wall.

Someone turned Z on the bus before they got outside of Rockwall and Taylor escaped out of the back.

Emergency exit indeed.

“You got any movement?”

A man squatted next to him on the knoll. Rat.

That was his name, or at least how he introduced himself.

“Call me Rat,” he held out a hand and they shook on it.

Fast friends were easy to come by these days, especially if they didn’t try to kill you in the first couple of hours.

Taylor wasn’t sure which was worse, the survivors or the walking dead.

He was one of the lucky ones.

He guessed Rat had been too.

The wind gusted and tugged at the corners of the jacket he wore. It was hot as hell in the summer sunshine but with the Z around, he wasn’t going to take it off.

Survivors wore covering now, head to toe, if they wanted to stay surviving.

He shook his head and smirked.

The wind blew a scattering of paper across the knoll.

Before, he would have had an internal monologue about littering and the environment. People were just so thoughtless.

Now, he couldn’t give a crap about it.

One of the pieces of paper caught against his leg. He reached down a gloved hand and snatched it before it swirled away.

It was a black and white actor’s headshot. Someone had marked the photograph with a bullseye on the forehead of the smiling white male, mid-thirties, coiffed and paint brushed to perfection.

“Know him?” Rat asked.

“Maybe in another life.

“Did you kill him, man?”

He said it with the casual air of someone who has had to do it too often. Too many times to count, and way too many times to care.

Taylor glanced down at the picture and let it go. It lifted off in the breeze, twirled a couple of times and slid under the overpass out of sight.

“Maybe.”

Taylor had killed a few people too. More than he cared to count, though sometimes he saw their faces at night.

Not the zombies, but others who survived.

He and Rat had hooked up a couple of weeks ago, a strength in numbers arrangement that evolved into a friendship based on surviving.

That’s what he was good at.

Surviving.

“I did my neighbors . . . after you know? That som’ bitch stole my hedge clippers, so it kind of felt right.”

He giggled through his nose. It wasn’t as annoying as it had been the first ten times Taylor heard it.

Rat kind of grew on him, once he realized the awful jokes and sick sense of humor were the man’s way of coping.

They had been in a few firefights together and Rat held it together like a champ.

A champ with no training, but then Taylor knew everything there was to know about tactics and warfare that any one person could get from watching war movies and seasons of BAND OF BROTHERS.

“Let’s keep moving.”

He held a hand down and pulled Rat out of his squat. They stood there a minute stretching and getting ready, ears up for anything out of the ordinary.

Ordinary was a relative term now.

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