Read Crisis Event: Black Feast for Free Online

was being rational or not. All she knew was she hadn’t been this scared since she began this journey—not even when the coyotes or feral dogs were after her.
    Right now she was pee-your-pants terrified.
    The lightning and dust she was facing could kill her within the hour if she didn’t act immediately. But if she made a mistake and went into this town too fast she could be killed just as fast—with a heck of a lot of pain and terror involved. What she’d seen in the last five miles had convinced her of that.
    Nearly every farmhouse and trailer house and barn she’d seen along the little state highway had been burned out or shot so full of holes they weren’t a viable place to stop and rest.
    The only house that hadn’t been burned or blasted was six miles behind her, not far from where the cop had attacked her. The house sat far off the road and was surrounded by gray, dust-coated crops. A barn with a collapsed roof had sat off to the side of the house, but the roof of the house had been shoveled clean. A jeep and an old red tractor had also been free of dust.
    When Sadie had stopped to sight on the house with her rifle, she’d seen gun barrels bristling from nearly every window—eight guns in all—pointed right back at her. She’d given a wave and flashed a two-fingered peace sign and climbed back onto the bike.
    Not long after that she’d begun to see the bodies.
    Dozens of them, scattered along the highway, usually surrounded by dark stains in the dust on which they were resting.
    Some of the bodies were missing heads. Others were missing arms or legs. A few had been dismembered completely, leaving only a ribcage and scattered femur and humerus bones.
    A word she didn’t want to think about had begun to force its way into her consciousness, ever since she’d killed the cop. She didn’t know if she was prepared to face that horror now. Not with the black wall of death right in front of her—full of roiling dust and ash and vicious lightning she could no longer outrun.
    Yet everything in her told her to run from this little town—from the rising line of white smoke she was seeing on its far side, to the faint smell of decomposing bodies mixed with the sweet scent of cooking meat that was now wafting into her nostrils on the storm wind.
    There had been another Farm to Market road two miles back—one that would allow her to skirt Shanksborough and head west into the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area—a place almost guaranteed to be free of people. But she didn’t think she’d survive out in the storm—not even if she could get under the trees in some low area less prone to lightning strikes. If the wind was blowing hard at all the tent she’d rigged up the night before would get carried away like a straw in a tornado. She’d be suffocated or electrocuted.
    Sadie’s hair flapped across her respirator shield as she unslung her pack and untied the paracord securing her rifle. She’d made up her mind now, and there was nothing to do but go ahead with the plan she’d formed in the last few seconds.
    Lightning flashed overhead, and the constant rumble of thunder was overwhelmed by a sudden boom that then faded slowly to leave the rumble in place behind it.  
    According to the road signs she’d stopped and wiped clean in the past several miles, Shanksborough was the home of Blaine Technical College.
    Sadie had never heard of Blaine Technical College—or Shanksborough. But she needed to stop there. And not just for shelter.
    Big box stores and drugstores and convenience stores were probably all looted, and if they weren’t they were likely dangerous traps. But one place survivors might not have raided for useful supplies was a college science department.
    She’d already played out the possibilities for how things might have gone differently if she’d gone to Youngstown State.
    She might not have witnessed a murder, or become a murderer herself.
    She might not have needed to gas a pack of dogs, or have