Live (NOLA Zombie Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  LIVE | NOLA Zombie Series Book 3

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Synopsis

  LIVE by Gillian Zane

  NOLA Zombie Book Three

  NOLA Zombie Series Book 3

  Quote

  ONE | Denial 101

  TWO | Self-Control is for Pussies

  THREE | Fox holes and Assholes

  FOUR | A Good Perv is a Dead Perv

  Five | Dead Bodies

  Six | Flipping The Shit

  Seven | Stupid is as Stupid Always Will Be

  Eight | Sun Shines on a Dog's Ass

  Nine | Mystery Meat & Maniacs

  Ten | Two Half-Wits & One Sex Toy

  Eleven | Pants on the Ground

  Twelve | Choose to Live

  Thirteen | Neighborly

  Fourteen | Dumb Cagers & Apocalypse Meth Cookers

  Fifteen | Useful Eco-Friendly Dead People

  Sixteen | Just Torture

  Seventeen | The New Normal

  Eighteen | House Bitch

  Nineteen | The Art of Obedience

  Twenty | Waterboarding for Dummies

  Twenty-One | No One’s Property

  Twenty-Two | MJ Services

  Twenty-Three | Murphey’s Law

  Twenty-Four | You Say Tomato

  Twenty-Five | Positive Reinforcements

  Twenty-Six | They All Die

  Twenty-Seven | Epileptic Poodle

  Twenty-Eight | Engage

  Twenty-Nine | Dumb and Quiet

  Thirty | Eradication is the Goal

  Thirty-One | Adios Amigo

  Thirty-Two | Overdosing with Satan Himself

  Thirty-Three | Martinez

  Thirty-Four | The Little Girl’s Room

  Thirty-Five | Box of Biker Bullshit

  Thirty-Six | Debauchery and Parasites

  Thirty-Seven | Waiting

  Thirty-Eight | The Surprise Army

  Thirty-Nine | Nightmare Ending

  Forty | Welcome Back Alexis

  Forty-One | Bad Venereal Diseases

  Forty-Two | The Anti-Damsel

  Forty-Three | About Fucking Time

  Forty-Four | Thousand Yard Stare

  Forty-FIve | Clarity

  Forty-Six | The Better Man

  Forty-Seven | Liquid Coping Method

  Forty-Eight | Grow A Pair

  Forty-Nine | Progress

  Fifty | Sleeping Beauty

  Fifty-One | Playing Dirty

  Fifty-Two | Giving In

  Fifty-Three | Douchebaggery & Zombie Juice

  Fifty-Four | Better Than A Finger

  Fifty-Five | Supposed to Be

  Fifty-Six | Need You Too

  Fifty-Seven | The Morning After

  Fifty-Eight | Enjoy the Warm Fuzzies

  Fifty-Nine | Sanctuary Be Damned

  Sixty | Oohrah

  Sixty-One | Supposed to Be

  Sixty-Two | Well, Shit

  Sixty-Three | Chances Are

  Sixty-Four | Small World

  Sixty-Five | Alexis Out

  Thank you for reading!

  About the Author

  Sneak Peek at JUSTICE

  Justice by Gillian Zane

  LIVE | NOLA Zombie Series Book 3

  To my favorite cousin and favorite cousin in-law,

  you ladies rock my face!

  Copyright

  A PARAJUNKEE PUBLISHING eBOOK

  LIVE. Copyright © 2015 by Gillian Zane. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover Design by Rachel Rivera

  Editing by Raw Books Editing Services

  www.romance.rocks

  [email protected]

  ::: created in the USA :::

  Synopsis

  THE NOLA Zombie Series

  LIVE by Gillian Zane | Book 3

  LIVE | The Third and Final Book in the best-selling NOLA Zombie series by Gillian Zane.

  Alexis, Blake and Zach survived the zombie apocalypse but found a new enemy to fight.

  Alexis has been taken and Zach and Blake are desperate to find her. The men are pretty certain they know who took Alexis, but finding them will be a daunting task. There are millions of places to hide in the swamps of Southern Louisiana but Zach and Blake will not stop until they’ve searched every one of them. Alexis will be returned to them if it’s the last thing they do. Falling back on their military training, the men have no choice but to succeed, or risk losing Alexis forever.

  It’s a race against the clock…

  The problem is that the group that took Alexis didn’t keep her. They sold her. She’s now the property of the Southern Clan, a fate worse than death. The undead still roam the streets of New Orleans. S-Island mourns the loss of one of its own and the NOLA Zombie series comes to a stunning conclusion. You don’t want to miss a second of this action-packed series ender…

  Be warned, there will be monsters, living and dead, there will be very intense sex scenes, between two men and one woman, and there will be violence galore.

  LIVE by Gillian Zane

  NOLA Zombie Book Three

  ONE | Denial 101

  BLAKE

  It took ten minutes to figure out something was wrong. I should have fucking seen it. I should have been paying attention. I saw the look Clara was directing at us. I saw her get up and follow Alexis down the hallway. I just didn’t think that Clara would have the stones to pull off something like this. She was such a behind-the-scenes operator. She never got her hands dirty.

  It took me by surprise and I don’t like surprises.

  I just sat there waiting on an emotional high because of what we had accomplished today and what might happen tonight. No alarm bells, the hyper-awareness that I’m so proud of failed me. Of all the times, of all the situations!

  Four tours, four official tours at least–don’t get me started on unofficial ones–and I didn’t sense the danger staring me right in the face. Danger from an enemy that I had brought to our gates. I had brought her in. I had given her a free pass.

  Bubba was the one that alerted us, fucking Bubba was the only one paying attention. He came barreling through the front doors like an enraged bull. His hollering caused everyone to jump to their feet scared and on alert. The first thought in my mind was that we were under attack. He had been grabbing a smoke outside and saw the entire thing or at least the part where the SUV rammed the gates of our compound and headed off to God knows where.

  “Who’s missing? I need a headcount now!” Zach yelled when Bubba ran in and reported the breach.

  “I think it was Alexis who was driving, and she had someone else with her,” Bubba panted.

  Everyone had been at the party except the four on guard duty and they all radioed in confirming they were still at their posts. It was obvious there were only two missing from the party as we milled around counting heads.

  “Alexis and Clara,” Baby shouted after she had made a circuit around the room. I knew this, but the confirmation was crippling.

  “Get a vehicle loaded up, Hannah, I want you and Romeo fully armed with us. Grab the spotlights,” I yelled. “Now!” I reiterated when she stalled and looked to Zach. Six months away and now she second guessed me, deferring to Zach, fuck.

  “You can’t go out at night, Blake. You don’t know what you’ll find out there.” Grace Peters walked up to me
.

  I didn’t need arguments. I didn’t need resistance. I needed action. I said nothing to her and whatever was visible on my face had her stepping back and grabbing her husband by the arm as if to protect him. I wasn’t going to take her husband with me. I don’t know why she would even get involved in this situation.

  I needed to find Alexis now. Day, night, nothing mattered but finding out what was going on. I needed to know why Alexis would have rammed the gates and taken off with Clara. Why would she have done that?

  What would have made her do this? Did Clara threaten her with something or did she take Clara to get rid of her? I couldn’t believe either scenario.

  “We have no other choice. It’s either now or we might as well write them both off as dead,” I said through clenched teeth when Cole Peters tried to take his wife’s side, arguing about the lack of visibility.

  “Hannah, Romeo, you down?” I didn’t want to force anyone to go out at night, but I was going with or without them. Both of them nodded in the affirmative.

  “Fall out, two minutes,” Zach called, and I rushed upstairs and quickly slipped on my arm guards, thick leather jacket, and random pieces of bite-proof armor. I armed myself quickly, slipping enough ammo and weapons to take down an army into my many pockets and holsters. I was back down in the cafeteria in less than 60 seconds and in under two minutes we were sliding into the SUV with Zach behind the wheel.

  He stopped long enough to shout to Martinez, who was about to go on guard duty, “Get the gate fixed STAT!” Then he tore off, gravel shooting out from the tires as he raced to the bridge.

  Zach followed the most logical path in a slow methodical pace. We drove up the main drag and Baby and I shined the spotlights on the marsh next to the road, looking for any sign of the missing SUV. We found nothing, nothing at all. When we hit Highway 90, we had two choices, left or right, to New Orleans or Mississippi. Which way would she have gone? Who was in control, Clara or Lex?

  All these questions stormed around in my head, but it came down to one…who was in control?

  It had to be Clara. Alexis wouldn’t have done this; Clara was the unstable element in this equation. It was the only logical conclusion. Her actions had been illogical and erratic for the past year and had only increased in oddness since we got to the compound. She claimed it was because of her pregnancy and the miscarriage, something about postpartum, a fact I doubted. I had begun to doubt the pregnancy altogether on the trip back from Houston. She would have said anything to get me to Texas. It took going out there, unfortunately, to realize this. The fact that she continued with her charade even after the infection happened showed how off-base she was. She would have done and said anything to get me to go to her and now that she didn’t get her way she was taking it out on Alexis, the easiest person to blame.

  It rang true. My instincts never lied.

  “Right,” I called to Zach. “She would have gone right.” She knew about the men we had tangled with earlier; it was the most convenient out for her. Blame them, play the victim, something she was really good at.

  It took us ten minutes to find the SUV. It was crashed into a guard rail, the keys still in the ignition. I jumped out of the vehicle, gun drawn, but there was no sign of life. We were maybe twenty minutes behind them, but they were both gone. Hannah had the spotlight and was shining it on the ground around the SUV. The driver’s door was open, and there was glass all over the ground. I had Baby point the spotlight at the ground by my feet.

  “Shit,” I cursed.

  Scattered on the ground was glass from the passenger side window and I could see the unmistakable red tint of blood. I looked into the vehicle and saw a casing on the floor of the driver’s side. I picked it up. It looked like it was from a 9-millimeter round. It obviously discharged in the vehicle and blew out the driver side window. What was the blood from? The driver fell out of the car and bled onto the glass from a wound sustained by the shot fired? It wasn’t a lot of blood, the injury must not be that bad. It was hard to tell. Now the question was, who was driving? Who fired the weapon? Who was hit?

  Bubba had said he thought it was Alexis driving.

  “Blake, look at this,” Zach said from the passenger seat. I went around to his side and immediately noticed the dark wet stain on the cloth seats. The seats were a dark gray, so on first glance it could be anything, water, piss…I ran my finger through it and it came back red.

  “That’s a lot of fucking blood,” I said. The seat was saturated. It was a lot more blood than what was outside mixed in with the glass.

  “The shot came from the passenger seat, but it looks like the passenger sustained the most damage.”

  “Got something out here,” Baby called, her light pointed at the road. I quickly walked from around the vehicle to the middle of the highway. There was more blood and Alexis’s knife, coated in blood, was just lying there on the asphalt. There was a piece of material on the ground. I recognized it immediately as coming from her shirt.

  “There are tire tracks over here,” Romeo called. He had been scanning the area with the other spotlight. “It looks like they turned around and headed east.”

  “Shit, what the-” Romeo yelled, and his light clattered to the ground.

  I holstered my gun and withdrew my machete from the homemade case I had rigged at my hip and rushed to Romeo’s side. There were three Z’s coming at us. One was on him, yanking at his thick clothing. I dispatched the first one, the one closest to me; it was a male, and it only took one slice to cut in deep enough to take him out. The blade went in cleanly and I yanked it out without any resistance, wiping the blood off on my jeans.

  I turned and saw Baby had her spotlight up and was shining it on the area surrounding us. Romeo had taken out the other two.

  “Are any of them her?” Zach called, desperation evident in his voice.

  That idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. But now, after Zach voiced it, the thought overtook me, my breath hitched in my chest, panic flooded my system. Was this what a panic attack felt like? I shined my light on the three dead Z’s that lay at my feet. They weren’t fresh. Their flesh was decomposed so badly that they were hardly recognizable as human. Their eye sockets were gaping holes; their lips were eaten away and their noses were only a fleshy mound of cartilage. She wasn’t one of them.

  “She’s not one of them.” I put a hand reassuringly on Zach’s shoulder as he walked up to me. He was shaking. I could feel the trembling through my gloved hand. I had served two tours with Zach and I’d never seen him break a sweat, much less physically react to a situation. Zach was always cool and collected, an ice man compared to the other Raiders and myself. I had felt like some emo douche next to him, all fucked up over Clara and her bullshit, and now with Alexis and this stupid crap between us. My off-the-cuff emotions were always getting me in a bind. Zach had been the voice of logic and reason, and now he was about to tumble over the edge. It was sobering.

  “What the fuck did that bitch do to her?” His voice was tight, and it came out in a growl.

  “We don’t know if this was Clara,” I said. I was used to defending her. It was second nature even though I knew it had to be her. She had to be behind this.

  “You’re a fucking idiot.” He turned to face me and there was pure hatred in his eyes, so much so that I stepped back. I didn’t want to see that hate directed at me. This was Zach. The same Zach who had my back for the last eight years that we had known each other, who always set my ass straight without so much as a raised voice.

  “You’re right.” I held up my hands in a “we come in peace” gesture to placate him. His hands were clenched in fists like he wanted to hit something and I didn't want that something to be me. “It had to be Clara. She must have forced Lex out here, but someone else got them…” I backpedaled, not enjoying having to back down, but I couldn’t make excuses for Clara anymore. My instincts told me she masterminded this. I didn’t like admitting to Zach that my ex was responsible for it though. This was a
person that I had brought into our sanctuary. This was all my fault.

  I did this.

  I fucked up again and Lex was probably going to die because of my stupidity.

  Fuck. Fuck.

  The feeling was too much. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned around, slamming my fist into the side of the wrecked SUV. The pain in my fist shot sweet clarity through me. She couldn’t die. I wouldn't let her die.