The Dying & The Dead 2 by Jack Jewis Read Free Book Online

with the horse. We could have
broken him.”
     
    Charles patted his horse on the head.
“Ken won’t break for anyone. He’s a stubborn old git. That’s why we get on so
well.”
     
    “I don’t mind walking,” said Heather.
     
    She meant it too. Back before the
outbreak, Heather loved nothing more than a hike across green pastures. The
smell of the grass, the blowing of the breeze. The feeling that when you were
in nature, everything was right with the world.
     
    Things couldn’t have been more
different. Nature was reclaiming the things that man had built, but it wasn’t
using green grass or bright flowers to do it. Instead it was vines twisting
over metal, weeds straining and spreading across the streets. It seemed like
something was seeping across Heather’s mind, too. A network of roots that fed
anxiety into her brain. She couldn’t stop thinking about Kim and Eric. Where
were they? Where was the train taking them?
     
    She knew what the Capita did. When she
was a teacher, she had seen Charles Bull take a girl from her class. Jenny had
been immune, and somehow the Capita found out. When the bounty hunter led her
away Heather knew she should have done something, but the truth was that she
was scared. Now Jenny was gone, and it was more than likely that her daughter
and Eric had been taken to the same place.
     
    “I don’t like the idea of you walking
when there’s a perfectly good horse there,” said Max. “I don’t care if it’s
stubborn. You deal with it the same way you deal with stubborn people. You
grind them down.”
     
    “Like I said, I don’t mind it.”
     
    Charles tugged on Ken’s reins and pulled
him away from the weeds he was chewing. “It’s not the miles that are the
problem anyway,” he said. “It’s the things that follow you when you walk them.”
     
    “Like what?” said Heather.
     
    “You’re looking for Kim, yes? Help me
help you. I need to get to my daughter, too.”
     
    She had heard that Charles had a
daughter, but somehow she never believed it. He was such an uncaring man; an
emotional void where anything happy was sucked in and the joy was stripped away.
She couldn’t imagine him taking care of someone else.
     
    “You’re bullshitting,” said Max.
     
    “Hand me my things and I’ll prove it,”
said Charles.
     
    “I’ve spent enough time with you to know
not to believe the garbage that comes out of your mouth. Heather, when we get
to Kiele I’ll get you a horse. One that actually walks. And then you can go
find Kim and Eric.”
     
    Charles’s mouth was hidden behind his
mask. It was a standard issue, this time. He used to wear a mask that smothered
his face. It was made of leather and had a long beak producing from his nose,
making him look like a plague doctor from the fourteenth century. Max had taken
it off him and put it with the rest of Charles’s things in his saddlebag. “I
can’t look at him wearing it ,” he had told Heather.
     
    Despite not being able to see his mouth,
Heather knew from the shape of his eyes that Charles was smiling.
     
    “You don’t trust me?” he said. “Rich
words coming from a man who spent three years pretending to be someone else. Where
were your family while you lived in the Dome, Max? What were they doing while
you were playing soldier and drinking and whoring?”
     
    Max gave him a stern look. He snapped
his saddle bag shut.
     
    “I never went whoring.”
     
    The mischief grew behind Charles’s eyes.
     
    “And what about all the Darwin’s
Children you helped me round up? What of the things they do to them in the
Capita’s dungeons? You knew what we did, and you helped me put them there.”
     
    “It was for a bigger cause. I don’t have
any regrets.”
     
    “What’s your daughter’s name?” asked
Heather.
     
    “Lilly,” said Charles.
     
    She shook her head. “I wasn’t asking
you.”
     
    Max unzipped his coat. The midday sun
had broken through the clouds and cast pale yellow over