August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand Read Free

the iron beasts, the warhorse insignia on their breasts.
    Jaxton waved at a cloud of little gnats looking for another meal in the summer sun. “She must not have seen much, to be so naïve.”
    Adira stiffened beside him. “Her family came up from the South. It’s medieval down there. There are hundreds of little warlords and factions fighting over limited supplies in the mountains and the bayou. Merciless.” Adira stopped to examine the faction’s lone sedan, a Dodge Charger outfitted with thin metal plate. She nodded approvingly to a mechanic.
    “Is it that different anywhere else?” Jaxton asked.
    Adira mounted the top of a freshly built wooden fence. “I like to think this valley is different. For us, for everyone who lives here. And sometimes, justice gets its due,” she finished stonily, looking over fields of farmers who toiled to bring in the next round of crops.
    Jaxton remained silent for a moment, before looking back towards the old high school, the Citadel. He remembered a rainy day, Adira’s broken body, and Terrence’s shattered face. “That wasn’t justice claiming anything. Justice doesn’t get the credit. That was you, seizing your own fate.”
    Adira sighed, and dropped her hand to her side, hoping Jaxton would notice. He did, and he clasped her hand tightly.
    “Do you think they’re real?”
    Jaxton looked away from her, towards more survivors training with compound hunting bows on a target range. “I think they’re real.”
    “What does it mean for us? What if they come to the valley?”
    Jaxton spat on the ground and Adira felt him squeeze her hand. “We’ll send them back over the ridges, as we’ve done a hundred times since the winter.”
    Adira waved distractedly to a team of workers pushing wheelbarrows of stone to the new dam. “We fight a few infected every week. Maybe five times, we’ve dealt with twenty at once. We’ve heard the whispers. There could be thousands traveling together, looking for another food source.”
    “We’re organized. We’re armed. There are hundreds of us now. Ten different settlements all linked back to here, to this high school. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, Adira.”
    Adira forced a smile, but her gut was churning with fear.
     
     
     
     
     
    North East of the Valley, The Church
     
     
    “They’re not real. The Hordes aren’t nothin’ but a rumor. Groups of infected in the thousands? Why would they even stick together like that?” Leeroy demanded, his pasty face stretching into a sneer.
    Bennett rose from his sleeping bag between the pews, and sniffed the foul air. They needed to scrub the blood from the wood. He kicked a flap of deerskin in disgust. “Why do you keep cutting the deer up inside the church? This is where we sleep,” he muttered to no one in particular. He took a look around the sagging church with dusty pews. This was a sad place for his exile.
    A rail thin man with wispy grey hair raised his finger in the dark church and began to speak. “They’re real. I’ve seen them. My wife and I, as I’ve said-“ Leeroy guffawed, interrupting the man, and wiped the sweat from his peach fuzz in the torchlight.
    “Leeroy, shut the fuck up,” Bennett demanded. “Go on, friend.”
    The old man resumed, wheezing for breath. Some of the others in the church stopped playing their board games and paused to listen. “We took a sailboat down from Nova Scotia. And you could see them, moving on the shorelines. Thousands and thousands. Lord above… the stench was so terrible, even miles offshore. The Hordes aren’t some fantasy, boy.”
    Leeroy cackled, obviously drunk. “So who’s our line of defense right now? We’ve got two middle schoolers at the top of the steeple with a wooden bow and arrow.”
    A short, squat woman wearing a thick denim dress adjusted the long torch in the middle of the wooden church. “God did not bring us here to die in this here valley. Everyone is here to rebuild in the name of the Lord, in His