August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand by Tyler Lahey Read Free Book Online Page A

with supplies for an overnight operation. Tents, food, more weapons. You know the drill. Just like we practiced.”
    Mike trotted off, his eyes hunting the crowd for the candidates he wanted. Jaxton wheeled, and acknowledged the crowd that had gathered below him and on the roof above. Nearly three hundred souls in the valley, all depending on him for their survival. It was he who had led them to this place originally, and he who had welcomed them all with open arms. It was he who had taken down the Lieutenant. It was he who had urged them to hold the valley, rather than attempt to run west, ahead of the Hordes. And it was he who would now be their salvation in the final hour.
     

Chapter Seven
    The Western Ravine
     
    “Keep fucking shooting!” Viera screeched. She fumbled with another arrow and cursed, dropping it. Controlling her breath, she raised her bow. The sun’s demise cast brilliant, dancing shadows on the ravine, and made it hell on her poor eyesight. She paused over an advancing infected form, and released her fingers. The arrow flew far wide, and she grasped her cramping arm. Viera sank to her knees and scrambled sweaty fingers in her quiver. In despair, she launched it against a tree, empty.
    “I’m out! Are you out!? I’m out!” Malcolm wailed, as the infected advanced over the piles of their own dead. There had never been this many. Never. Where were the men from the Citadel?
    More than three dozen torn and bloodied bodies littered the ravine at random intervals, prickled with colorful barbs. The closest laid no more than fifteen feet away, its stench wafting on the breeze. A husky inhuman snarling filled the ravine’s rocky embrace, and two more infected stalked into view, advancing to a quick trot. Viera flung wild eyes to her flanks, where the other two archers loosed another desperate volley. They were hitting one out of every three shots.
    “Where is the Lion?! Where the fuck did Billy go? Is there another flare? Fire another! Fire another god damnit!!” Malcolm screamed, the veins on his narrow head bulging.
    Viera fumbled with the final cartridge in her rucksack, finally slipping it into the tube. Raising it skyward, the flare gun belched. Twin pillars of red and black smoke soared two hundred feet into the sky.
    “They should be here by now!!”
    A snarling infected woman closed within ten feet before she took a round through the skull. Todd hefted his sniper rifle, slid the bolt back and loaded another bullet. He shifted in his treetop hunting stand. “I’ve got three left,” he said calmly, his voice drifting down from the perch.
    “Malcolm, look!” Viera pleaded. Malcolm wrenched his eyes away from the fore and his heart pounded. There was another flare, several miles away to the south. “There’s another! It’s the fucking horde!”
    “We’ve gotta get outta here!” Malcolm screamed. He saw more infected hastening down the chute, stumbling over the corpses of their allies a stone’s throw away.
    Malcolm saw Viera drop her bow and run, even as he heard Todd cursing her cowardice from his lofty perch. The sniper rifle cracked again, and again. The other Wolf archers were gone, but the rifle snapped once more. The weapon clacked: empty.
    Todd cursed quietly to himself, twenty feet off the ground, as he saw the final guard fleeing back into the valley. Todd shifted his hips, annoyed at the painful metal seat. “They don’t make these damn things for comfort, do they?” He looked up absent-mindedly, and saw the infected closing to him. He grunted. The ravine had fallen. Squinting in the dusk, he saw the stream become a river of rotting flesh.
    His spine tickled at the sound of scratching, and he looked below his metal stand, to the base of the oak. Four infected were dragging their broken fingernails on the wood, their bloodshot eyes fixed on his own. He chuckled. The ladder was right beside them, but their diminished mental faculties could not comprehend its usage. Todd leaned