They Sawed Me Open, So I Stocked the End of the World novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Not Looking Away
The concrete shell stood alone on the east road, four floors of poured slab with no walls and no windows.
A developer had gone bankrupt on it years ago.
Now it was the only high ground for a mile, and the dead had come up from the ditches to circle it.
Jessa stopped the truck two hundred yards short and counted from the cab.
Eighty, ninety, more coming out of the trees.
On the third slab a man stood at the edge with a long knife, and she knew the line of his shoulders from this distance.
He had no rifle in his hands.
The rifle lay at the foot of the stairs, empty, with a heap of brass beside it.
He had spent every round he had to keep the herd here and not at the manor.
She got out and opened the back of the truck.
"Okay," she said, to nobody. "Level three. Be useful."
She closed her eyes, shifted into the space, and brought out two steel drums of diesel.
She rolled them down the road with her boot, kicked the first one over, and let the fuel run out across the gravel in a long black line between the truck and the dead.
Then she backed up fifteen yards, raised her left hand, and pushed.
The lightning was thin and blue and only a few feet long.
It was enough for diesel.
The fire went up with a roar, and a wall of orange stood across the road.
The dead on the near side kept coming into it, and the shapes fell where they walked.
She fed the line with the second drum until the whole east flank was burning, and then she ran.
She went up the stairs two at a time with her ribs shouting at her.
On the third slab, Corin turned at the sound of her boots.
His face was bruised from Rhys's fist, cut from the night, and gray with no sleep.
He stared at her and did not move.
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