Into the River Lands (Darkness After Series Book 2) Read Free Page B

computer and electrical circuitry.  
    Mitch didn’t know if his parents’ connecting flight from New Orleans had landed before it happened or not. If it didn’t, his parents wouldn’t have had a chance. Though he tried not to think about it too often, this seemed the most likely explanation as time went on. Doug Henley was as good a woodsman and as dedicated a lawman as any man could be. Mitch knew that if he were alive, his dad would do everything in his power to stay that way and keep his mom safe too. And Mitch knew that aside from that, he would make it his mission to get back home to him and his little sister. Nothing would stop him from doing so, but seven months was a long time, even without transportation and even with all the obstacles anyone on the move would surely encounter. If they were okay, Mitch was sure they would have arrived long before now.  
    But until they got here, if they ever did, keeping his sister safe and protecting the house and livestock from marauding looters was Mitch’s responsibility. He was managing so far, but each new unknown, each new variable like this mysterious hunter who had wounded a deer so close to the house, was a potential threat to their safety that had to be investigated without delay.  
    With Jason carrying the AR-15, Mitch felt okay with his decision to stick to just his hunting bow as his main weapon. As he had proven more than once since law and order fell apart, the silence of his deadly arrows could offer great advantage in certain situations. But in case he got in a bind and needed a backup, he was also wearing his Ruger .357 Magnum revolver in a holster on his belt.  
    “I’m sure we’ll be back in time for lunch,” Mitch reassured his little sister as he kissed her on the cheek. Lisa was clearly unhappy that she couldn’t participate in this patrol to find the trespasser. No doubt she saw it as an exciting break in the day-to-day monotony of living on the isolated farm with no outside contact, no communication and little entertainment besides what they created for themselves. Mitch knew it had to be incredibly boring for his fourteen-year-old sister, but he figured Lisa and her best friend Stacy were coping with it better than most.  
    For Mitch, there was nothing boring about it. Even before the blackout, there was nothing he would rather do than roam the woods alone with his bow and arrows. Now he was doing that everyday, and not for recreation or diversion but as a way of life. He had turned seventeen in the intervening months since everything changed, and he’d taken to this new life with great enthusiasm. If not for his worry and sadness over his parents’ absence, Mitch could not have imagined a life he would enjoy more. For one thing, he no longer had to attend that hated school with its idiotic and petty rules and regulations. He didn’t have to worry about fitting into a teenage social stratum that he neither cared about nor understood. He didn’t have to live by clocks and bells, spend hours sitting on his butt at a stupid desk, or racking his brain trying to solve insanely complex algebra problems that he could see no use for in real life.  
    Mitch knew the electromagnetic pulse caused untold suffering and death, and undoubtedly affected millions of lives if not all the lives on the planet, but if nothing else good came of it, at least it had freed him from a way of life he never felt was right for him. Now he was livingthe fantasy he’d often entertained of going back in time—back to a time when all men lived by the weapons and the skills they carried with them when they set out each day into the forest to find what sustenance it provided. As always before a hunt, Mitch felt the tinge of excitement and anticipation as he strung his longbow and slung the deerskin quiver of cane-shafted arrows over his shoulder. As he strode across the yard with Jason close behind, he was eager to melt into the shadows of the trees where once again he