Dead Of Winter (The Rift Book II) by Robert J. Duperre, Jesse David Young Read Free Book Online

forget their face a moment later.
    Around they went, introducing themselves while raising their right hand in salutation.
    “Hector Conseca , from right here in the glorious state of Virginia .”
    “Luis Rivera. Missouri .”
    “ Stanley Clark , New Mexico .”
    The banter flowed fast and easy with the preambles finished. The group told Horace of the first time they met, which happened to be in a roadside diner off the Richmond Beltway. Each took turns telling parts of the story.
    They’d been random strangers, detached from both the world and each other, when they happened to wind up at the same place for a bite to eat. Disaster struck soon after. The invading Wraiths (“Fleshies,” insisted Corky) ripped through the diner, slaughtering everyone in sight. Hector, who’d been the short-order cook, charged the nasty bugger who’d latched onto Corky’s back and gouged it with a butcher knife. Stan was there with his wife, the first casualty of the melee. He told his chapter with tears on the cusp of overflowing their ducts. Luis and Larry were in the bathroom. They dropped to the floor and tried to wedge their adult bodies into the disgusting area behind the bathroom stalls for protection before gathering enough courage to crawl across the shit-stained linoleum floor and book it out the kitchen’s back door.
    Dennis, the silver fox, had the most amazing story of all. According to all in attendance, he took two bullets in the shoulder and one sliced off the lower half of his ear when the window beside him exploded. (“And I just wanted to dive into my hotcakes and grits,” he said while he pulled up his shirt and showed Horace the two crusted-over holes just below his left armpit.) He collapsed and slid beneath the table. For more than a few lost seconds he lay there in shock, unable to comprehend what went on around him.
    “One of those bastards fell in front of me,” he said. “I didn’t even think about it after that. My face and chest were on fire, but I didn’t care. I grabbed the gun the thing’d dropped and stood up. I hadn’t held a rifle since the Reserves, and that was a long damn time ago, but I just shot and shot and shot, in every direction. I caught the fuckers by surprise, I tell ya. They didn’t know what hit ’ em .”
    Dennis’s actions created the window of opportunity that the remaining four required. With confusion ruling the day, Dennis, Corky, Hector, and Stan followed, without prior knowledge, the path taken by Luis and Larry before them: out the kitchen door, past dumpsters that stunk of overly-greased waste, and into the surrounding cover of trees.
    “And that’s where we met,” said Dennis. “Out beyond the forest, right by the freeway. We was alone and scared shitless.” He patted Larry on the shoulder, who smiled in response. “We’ve been best of buds ever since. Brothers, really.”
    “That’s an amazing story,” Horace said, “but where does your young soldier friend come in?”
    “Oh, Dougie,” sighed Corky. “He showed up about two weeks ago, I think. It’s hard to keep track of time nowadays. It was a few miles from here. We were hiding in an old barn and then here he comes, walking through the woods and freezing his ass off. The kid looked miserable as all hell, but I’ll be damned if I never seen anyone put on a face as fucking hard as he does. We offered him a dry place to hang his boots. I guess he just kinda ended up staying with us. Not like he had anywhere else to go.”
    “He might be wound a bit tight,” added Luis, “but he’s a good kid. Plus, he’s a caballero . Even with ole Dennis’s divine intervention in the diner, none a us really know how to protect ourselves, you know, with guns and stuff.”
    “Plus, I think he needs us as much as we need him,” said Dennis. His Bayou drawl was starting to make itself known; his I’s were coming out like protracted ah’s . “But I don’t think he’d ever admit it. Like Corky said, he’s a