Crusade (Eden Book 2) by Tony Monchinski Read Free Book Online Page B

know where we could find one?”
     
    “As a matter of fact, yeah . Obviously no one’s driven it for a long, long time, so the battery’s dead and the tires are probably—”
     
    “Can you show it to me tomorrow? I know a little about cars and trucks.”
     
    “No kidding?”
     
    “My father owned a fleet of taxis and limousines. He did most of the maintenance work himself until he made enough money to pay other people to do it for him. He raised my brothers and me to be comfortable around automobiles.”
     
    “That’s good. That’s great . I don’t even know how to change my oil. Not that I have a car anymore. I mean, I guess I do, if it’s still there but… Sorry, I’m rambling. You’re the first…you’re one of the first people I’ve talked to in a long time.”
     
    “Kevin, listen to me. I know it was bad here. I’ve seen this before. But now it’s going to be better. It’s up to you and everyone else here to work together to make it better.”
     
    “Yeah, I…that’s the other reason I came here. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”
     
    She nodded. “Where do you want to go?”
     
    “Well, I…don’t laugh, I mean, I know I’m as thin as a stick right now and look like something the wind could knock over, but…”
     
    Nadjia waited.
     
    “…but I wanted to go with you, and with him.” He nodded into the darkness.
     
    She sat quietly across from him for awhile, then said, “If you come with us, do you understand what you’ll face? If you stay here, you might have a shot at something—I don’t know—something more normal , more like the old life you knew. If you come with us…”
     
    “They destroyed my life, my wife and my kids.” He looked out the window into the night as he spoke. “They destroyed my family, my friends, everything. And I want to destroy them. I want to destroy them all.”
     
    She smiled at him. Her beauty in the glow of the kerosene lamp brought him back to the room.
     
    “Revenge isn’t enough. These things can’t understand your vengeance. They don’t care. They wait and eat and that’s all they do, and they won’t stop until every single one of us is gone. Unless we destroy every single one of them.”
     
    “I understand that.”
     
    “Understanding…that isn’t enough. You can’t run on revenge for ever. That fuel will run out. I know.” She looked away. “What we do…this isn’t…I have a few more fights left in me, but that’s it. Then I have to stop or this will kill me. When you do this, it changes you. I can’t explain how, but it saps you of your humanity. Does that make any sense?”
     
    “What about him?” Kevin chin-nodded into the dark.
     
    “Bear…” Nadjia considered for a moment. “Bear will never give up.”
     
    “Then I will fight with him.”
     
    “Kevin, I do what I do because it seems like the right thing to do. This is a war. You know the term Jihad ? Yes? I never understood that word until…But now that’s how I see this. I will fight for as long as I can, but I know my fight can’t continue forever. There are so many of them, Kevin, so many.”
     
    “Nadjia, I’m not religious. I have no god. But you and him—you kill zombies. So I’ll stand with you.”
     
    “You need to think this through,” she counseled. “Get a few good meals in you and think it over. We’ll stay through the day after tomorrow, and by then if you still want to accompany us, I’ll brook no dissent.”
     
    After awhile he rose.
     
    “I have to go. Earlier tonight, one of the survivors…one of us got bitten.”
     
    Bear’s voice came from the dark of the room beyond. “What happened?”
     
    “We were dragging bodies off to the fire…Robert… One of the zombies wasn’t dead. It latched on and bit him on his side before we…before we could destroy it.”
     
    “Is he still alive?”
     
    “Yeah, but he’s bad. He won’t last the night. I have to go and…and be with him.”
     
    “How well do