Jason Frost - Warlord 04 - Prisonland by Jason Frost - Warlord 04 Read Free Book Online

grass he’d been chewing. “I’ll take you as far as I decide I want to take you. The moment I cut you loose, you take off. Agreed?”
    She spit out her blade of grass and grinned. “Yeah, sure. Agreed.”
    “I’m serious.”
    “I can tell. Really, I’m very sensitive that way. You’d be surprised.”
    Eric shook his head, but couldn’t keep himself from smiling. “Which way did Dodd go?”
    D.B. put on her dark sunglasses and began walking around the campsite, peering through them at different directions, squinting over them. “My regular glasses were busted,” she explained. “These prescription sunglasses are all I’ve got left. Had them made extra dark because that looked so cool at the beach, you know, with all the guys wearing them that way and all. Only now I’m stuck with the miserable things. Like looking through the bottom of a frying pan.” She stopped, pointed. “He headed that way, but I saw him cut back and go north after a while.”
    North, Eric thought. Asgard. Damn.
    “Well, what are we waiting for?” D.B. asked, rolling up her sleeping bag.
    Eric stood up, his wet pants and shirt plastered coldly to his skin. “We’ll camp here until daylight. Start a fire and dry our clothes. Won’t help us any to catch pneumonia.” He wasn’t worried about himself, having marched through plenty of jungle swamps, but despite her tough talk and hardy fighting, she seemed a bit thin and pale.
    “Dry our clothes, huh?” she said skeptically. “You mean take ’em off, right?”
    “They dry faster that way, yeah.”
    She nodded. “Hey, a deal’s a deal, Professor. No need to go through this bullshit about drying our clothes. Unless it turns you on.” She pulled her T-shirt off and started unfastening her bra.
    “Thanks for the offer,” Eric said, walking away, “but I promised that bulldog I’d be true.” He ignored her and started gathering firewood.
    She shrugged, pulled her T-shirt back on, and began collecting dried branches. “I ought to warn you,” she said.
    “About what? You snore?”
    “Worse,” she said. “I sing.”
    Eric looked at her. “When you sleep?”
    “Oh, no, when I’m awake. It’s just that I do it a lot. Not just sing, but like I’ll even start talking in lyrics. I hope that won’t scare you or anything.”
    “I’ll try to keep my wits.”
    “Good, ’cause it used to freak my parents out a bit. See, I’m gonna be a singer. A professional. Way I figure, see, sooner or later this place is going to settle down some and people are going to want to hear some music again. We can’t get anything on the radio because of that stupid Long Beach Halo, and we don’t have enough electricity to play records, so that leaves it wide open for singers. I could wander from place to place and sing for people and they’d pay me. Like old time, uh, troopdoors.”
    “Troubadours,” Eric corrected.
    “Right. Those guys. Only thing is, it’s not easy to remember all those lyrics to all those songs, so I have to keep singing them or reciting them, you know, so I don’t forget. Like in that movie with Julie Christie where they kept burning books, but there was this secret society that memorized their favorite books so they wouldn’t be forgotten.”
    “Yeah. Fahreheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.”
    “It was a book too, huh?”
    Eric nodded.
    “Well, then you know what I mean. So when you hear me singing and reciting lyrics and stuff, don’t freak out, okay?”
    “I’ll hide my panic.”
    “Thanks.” She looked at him. “Only thing is, what if Linda Rondstadt’s still around here and she wants to do the same thing? And Joni Mitchell and Phoebe Snow and Laura Brannigan?”
    “Don’t worry,” Eric said with a grin. “They’re getting too old to travel.”
    “Yeah. That’s true.”
    Eric started the fire and arranged their clothing on poles. He sat with a blanket from the bedroll wrapped around him, she sat in the sleeping bag, pretending to be casual, but keeping