Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 3): Mitigation Book 3) by Sean Schubert Read Free Book Online Page A

either.
    With his hand, he signaled for Emma to start arcing to his left so that she could cover that side of the house-like building. After a couple more steps, he decided that he’d moved close enough.
    “We saw you over there,” he yelled. “C’mon out before someone gets hurt. We don’t mean anyone any harm. We were just looking around for food for the two of us. Like I said, c’mon out. If someone’s hiding over there and we get spooked, someone might get hurt and we don’t want that. Please show yourselves.”
    Perhaps it was the tone of his voice or maybe that he’d said please, regardless, it had worked. Showing both of his hands from behind the building first, a man slightly stooped with age and a lifetime of hard work emerged. His brown Carhartt coveralls were filthy and looked to be wet from his thighs down to his feet. They obviously were not ordinarily his because the ragged, frayed cuffs hung well-lower than his boots. He looked cold and hungry and, above all else, desperate. Emma, coming over closer to Neil, thought to herself that he resembled the souls that motorists would typically see on Anchorage street corners in days gone by. Then, as now, the first emotion that arose in her was pity.
    The bent old man stammered, “You folks just watch your step. My man has his rifle aimed at your chests. One wrong move and we’ll leave your bones to be picked over by the ravens.”
    Emma sniped, “I think most of the ravens are dead by now. You see any of them around lately?”
    Neil shot her a look, slowing his pace but continuing forward. There was something less than threatening about this man. The crowbar dangling from the man’s right hand seemed almost benign, a harmless prosthetic of utility. There was no danger about him. Of course, they had all thought the same about Maggie, so Neil remained somewhat on guard.
    A mere handful paces away from the man, Neil stopped to consider him. From there, Neil could see much more. The wispy strands of white across his scalp barely constituted a comb-over. The stubble on his cheeks and chin was thicker but equally as light as the hair on the top of his head. His eyes were dark beneath his glasses and the whites were more yellow than white from decades of coffee and tobacco use. He had the hard edges of working class living etched into the contours of his face. Neil was reminded of a latter day Robert Duvall when he looked at the man.
    Neil suggested to all of them, “I think we can all just settle down a bit here. I don’t think anyone wants any problems. There’s no need for anyone to get hurt.”
    Adjusting his grip on the crowbar as the tool became heavier at the end of his arm, the man said, “You don’t go tellin’ us what needs we have. Ain’t no one gonna tell me what I want. You make one wrong move and there’ll be trouble. You can count on that.”
    Neil asked him, “Is that what you want? By the looks of you, I’d say that you have a lot of needs. Maybe you were thinking that you could get the drop on some travelers. Maybe you were thinking that you could ambush some folks and take all that they had...maybe even take their lives while you were at it.”
    Neil looked at the Robert Duvall character in front of him and asked, “Is that what you want?”
    The old man slumped his shoulders forward and protested, “We ain’t bandits. We ain’t like the other folk still out here. How we know you ain’t neither? For all we know, that’s what you had on your mind too. We was just....”
    Neil suggested, “It’s hard to have this conversation with a rifle aimed at our chests. You think you can at least have ‘your man’ come out in the open?”
    “You tryin’ to get the drop on us? You askin’ for us to lower our guard? Maybe make us easier targets for the two of you?”
    Neil smiled, put the shotgun back on his shoulder, and said as he extended his hand, “No. I’m just asking for a little faith in each other.”
    The other man looked