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World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

It's the book world war Z fr pdf drive

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zombie’s head before five others pulled him to the floor.

Then…a pounding at the door. My door. This…[shakes his fist] bom-bombom-bom…from the

bottom, near the floor. I heard the thing groaning outside. I heard other noises, too, from the other

apartments. These were my neighbors, the people I’d always tried to avoid, whose faces and

names I could barely remember. They were screaming, pleading, struggling, and sobbing. I heard

one voice, either a young woman or a child on the floor above me, calling someone by name,

begging them to stop. But the voice was swallowed in a chorus of moans. The banging at my door

became louder. More siafu had shown up. I tried to move the living room furniture against the

door. It was a waste of effort. Our apartment was, by your standards, pretty bare. The door began

to crack. I could see its hinges straining. I figured I had maybe a few minutes to escape.

Escape? But if the door was jammed…

Out the window, onto the balcony of the apartment below. I thought I could tie bedsheets into a

rope…[smiles sheepishly]…I’d heard about it from an otaku who studied American prison breaks.

It would be the first time I ever applied any of my archived knowledge.

Fortunately the linen held. I climbed out of my apartment and started to lower myself down to

the apartment below. Immediately my muscles started cramping. I’d never paid much attention to

them and now they were reaping their revenge. I struggled to control my motions, and to not think

about the fact that I was nineteen floors up. The wind was terrible, hot and dry from all the fires. A

gust picked me up and slammed me against the side of the building. I bounced off the concrete and

almost lost my grip. I could feel the bottom of my feet bumping against the balcony’s railing and it

took all the courage I had to relax enough to climb down just those few extra feet. I landed on my

ass, panting and coughing from the smoke. I could hear sounds from my apartment above, the dead

that had broken through the front door. I looked up at my balcony and saw a head, the one-eyed

siafu was squeezing himself through the opening between the rail and the balcony floor. It hung

there for a moment, half out, half in, then gave another lurch toward me and slid over the side. I’ll

never forget that it was still reaching for me as it fell, this nightmare flash of it suspended in

midair, arms out, hanging eyeball now flying upward against its forehead.

I could hear the other siafu groaning on the balcony above and turned to see if there were any in

this apartment with me. Fortunately, I saw that the front door had been barricaded like mine.

However, unlike mine, there weren’t any sounds of attackers outside. I was also comforted by the

layer of ash on the carpet. It was deep and unbroken, telling me that no one or nothing had walked

across this floor for a couple days. For a moment I thought I might be alone, and then I noticed the

smell.

I slid the bathroom door open and was blown back by this invisible, putrid cloud. The woman was

in her tub. She had slit her wrists, long, vertical slices along the arteries to make sure the job was

done right. Her name was Reiko. She was the only neighbor I’d made any effort to know. She was a

high-priced hostess at a club for foreign businessmen. I’d always fantasized about what she’d look

like naked. Now I knew.

Strangely enough, what bothered me most was that I didn’t know any prayers for the dead. I’d

forgotten what my grandparents had tried to teach me as a little kid, rejected it as obsolete data.

It was a shame, how out of touch I was with my heritage. All I could do was stand there like an idiot

and whisper an awkward apology for taking some of her sheets.

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