The Fields of Lemuria by Sam Sisavath Read Free Book Online Page A

probably didn’t rate very high on its list of “things to fear.”
    Keo thought about shooting it. He hadn’t had squirrel meat in months. The last time was when Levy shot a couple of the furry critters and brought them back to the house. They had made squirrel stew that night. The animal was surprisingly tasty, but then again, maybe it was just how Levy cooked it.
    Levy.
    When was the last time he actually thought about him in any detail? It had been a while, so long that he couldn’t recall.
    Levy was dead. Along with Lotte and Jill.
    What about Gillian? And Jordan and Mark? Rachel and her daughter, Christine?
    Are you still alive out there, Gillian? Are you still waiting for me, or have you given up?
    He wished he knew if she had ever made it to Santa Marie Island. His one comforting thought was that Jordan was with her, and she was as competent a survivor, man or woman, as Keo had come across since the end of the world. She had single-handedly kept her friends Mark and Jill alive for months. The only person he would have trusted Gillian’s life with more than Jordan was Norris, and Norris was…out there somewhere.
    Maybe dead. Maybe alive.
    Maybe. Too many maybes. That was the problem. That was always the problem. The uncertainty of it all. Where he was going, what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what the hell was happening out there in the rest of the world.
    But he couldn’t think of all that right now. He had to stay in the present. And right now, the present was precarious.
    He glanced down reflexively at his watch again: 7:39  p.m.
    Time flies when you’re sitting in a tree, having a staring contest with a squirrel…
    *
    He was thirty meters up from the ground, give or take a couple of meters. It hadn’t been an easy climb, but then his mom always did call him wonsungi (or “monkey,” as he later found out) for a reason. When you were an Army brat living on strange bases around the world, it helped to be able to entertain yourself. A tree was a lot easier to find and befriend.
    Now, as Keo looked down at the horde of undead things moving below him, he wished he had climbed just a little bit higher. Maybe all the way to the top. Fifty meters. Maybe sixty would have been about just right. Or higher…
    He stopped counting after the fiftieth creature glided under him and through the woods as if they didn’t even need to touch the ground. Of course, that was impossible. The bloodsuckers may be light on their feet, thanks to their skeletal frames and non-existent muscle mass, but they hadn’t mastered the ability of flight just yet.
    At least, as far as he knew.
    Who knew what they would be capable of in another year. Or ten years. Or a hundred. Could they even die? God knew they couldn’t be killed. He had seen plenty of them still moving even without a head. How was that even possible?
    Keo didn’t remember when he had stopped breathing, but he wasn’t aware of his chest rising and falling as he watched them flitting across the soft ground. If it was dark outside the park, it was nearly pitch-black inside, and all Keo could really make out were silhouetted, deformed monstrosities that shouldn’t exist but did. The loud crunch-crunch of leaves and the snap! of twigs were like hundreds of tiny firecrackers going off all at once.
    Bloodsuckers. Creatures. Things that shouldn’t be alive, but were.
    Where did they come from? Where were they hiding during the day? Some of them had to have been nesting inside the houses along the shoreline. How else could they have appeared so fast? The activity began almost as soon as night fell, the sound of their footsteps like stampeding animals getting louder as they got closer and their numbers swelled. At one point, he lost sight of the ground completely because there were so many of them, like a black ocean of tar swallowing up the world.
    Should have kept climbing…all the way to the moon…
    Mercifully, they were starting to thin out now, and he could