Dragon City by James Axler Read Free Book Online Page B

had a protrusion at the center of his forehead, a little ridge the size of a knuckle, resting between and slightly above his eyebrows.
    Farrell had made the connection straight away, but still he checked Sinclair’s forehead as he lay in the grass.
    “Conversion is preferred,” the man explained in a tone so neutral it was as if he were discussing paint.
    “To embrace his love is glory,” the woman added.
    “I’ve only met him once,” Sinclair said dispiritedly.
    Fuck! Farrell’s heart pounded against his chest, throbbing in his eardrums even as he twisted himself on the scrub and tried to run. Sinclair had it, too, that same telltale lump like a single measle or a boil about to erupt. She had always had it, all the time they had been together. And while he had been worrying himself to an early grave, she had been pumping iron and doing sit-ups, toning her already perfect body into a weapon for her new master. All of this, Farrell thought as he struggled to his feet and began to run back toward the house.
    It was a second—less than that—and Farrell was sprinting across the overgrown lawn, Sinclair behind him pulling her gun up to take a shot at him. Farrell ran, the world blurring as the adrenaline blasted through his system like a nuclear explosion. He heard the gunshot, heard the man call out at the same time, ducked his head automatically as he ran.
    They had taught lessons in survival technique at Cerberus. Edwards had instructed him in basic hand-to-hand combat on the expanse of dirt outside the rollback door of the redoubt; Sinclair herself had shown him how to load a pistol. A hundred instructions and pieces of advice raced through Farrell’s mind at that moment, as the .38 bullet cut through the air past him and embedded itself in the scarred frontage of the ancient house in a blossoming burst of ruined masonry. What was it Edwards had said?
    “If someone pulls a gun on you, get the hell out of there and don’t look back.”
    Yeah, something like that, anyway, Farrell thought as he ran in an evasive zigzag pattern toward the house.
    Behind him, Sinclair pulled the trigger a second time, aiming her blast at Farrell’s rapidly retreating form. The loud report of the gun echoed in the empty street, and Farrell dropped, crumpling to the ground like a felled oak.
    “He’s still alive,” the man in the robes insisted as he scurried toward the fallen figure.
    Farrell was more than alive; he wasn’t even wounded. Just as Sinclair’s shot had blasted from her pistol he had caught his foot on something hidden in the long grass and tumbled to the ground, the bullet shrieking its angry trail over his head. Lying there now, Farrell looked all around him as he tried to scramble away. The grass was so long that it hid his prone form. And there, less than a foot from his right leg, he spotted the thing that had tripped him—it was a rusted old exhaust pipe, caught up in a tangle of grass and sod. The pipe was perhaps eighteen inches in length and about an inch and a half across. His mind racing, Farrell grasped for the pipe and yanked it from the earth as he drove his body forward toward the house once again. Rusty pipe in hand, Farrell powered onward to the house, keeping his head ducked and his body bent.
    “He’s running,” Farrell heard a woman shout, but he couldn’t discern if that was Sinclair or the woman in the robe. It didn’t matter now, as he was at the door to the house, launching himself at the wooden barricade and powering into the sudden darkness of the hallway beyond.
    He had lived in this house for forty-two days, knew every ghastly, rotting inch of it. As footsteps clattered on the porch behind him, Farrell darted left into the living room that ran one half the length of the building.
    Something had happened to Sinclair, he realized, something that had maybe been there since before they had gone into hiding. That spot on her head, it was his mark—Ullikummis’s. Farrell had heard rumors