Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2) Read Free

weren’t kind or good, either. Except to their own kind.
    He felt something running down his cheek. He lifted his bony hand and wiped it. His hand came away wet. Don’t worry, Jer, he said to himself. Ellie is coming. They’ll send her and the others and the stuff.
    He was standing in the middle of pasture so rough that Sam Baahuhd, the estate’s headman in the old days, would have had a fit if he’d seen it. Jeremy looked around the weedy plot behind him, wondering where the back door of the shelter was. He’d built a huge bomb shelter under this field. The shelter was as big as a small town and as far below the surface as the sea was from the cliff top, hundreds of feet. It was equipped to last a couple thousand years, if its inhabitants were clever.
    They should have been very clever. The shelter was built with the intention of housing an international community of scientists, scholars, and philosophers. One hundred of Earth’s best and brightest were supposed to go down there, preparing to build a perfect society when the radiation cleared. But the disaster came so fast that the scientists and scholars couldn’t get to the estate.
    Jeremy had ended up giving the place to the people who lived and worked in the mansion’s stables and fields. Ninety-three villagers plus Arthur, his driver and an undercover commando, locked themselves in after he and the others left for Ellie’s home.
    He could see no sign of the shelter or the estate. The stone mansion was gone. He looked for some evidence of a foundation. Nothing but grass. He couldn’t find the rear exit of the bomb shelter, a concrete pipe that had stuck out of the ground a couple of feet.
    Had the people down there survived? They could have died of hunger or disease. They could have left ages ago.
    Massive trees spotted around wide grasslands had replaced the mansion’s cultivated gardens. The huge trees were exactly like California’s valley oaks. Some of the old giants he’d seen at his mom’s Santa Barbara estate had trunks four feet across. Their leafy heads spanned a hundred feet. These trees were at least as large.
    They were strange, too. The oaks that lived around there in the old days were skinny-trunked. They grew very close to each other. Bright green and leafy, the Hamptons’ native oak forests were nothing like the wide-open savannahs surrounding him.
    Jeremy poked around where he thought the back entrance to the shelter had been. A lump in the ground might be it, but he was shivering too much to explore. He’d have to look for the village tomorrow. The light was fading. He needed to find a place to spend the night. And then he heard a sound he recognized, even though he’d never heard it before. The drawn out wailing of many canine voices came from the forest to the west. Intertwining howls. Those were wolves, not dogs.
    The wolves howled again, coming closer.
     
    That’s when the nerve block wore off. They weren’t sending Ellie or anything else. He’d been a pain in the ass on Ellie’s planet, so they spit him back.
    They’d sentenced him to death.

3
    Making his way across the meadow, Jeremy scanned the forest for a tree that forked low enough for him to climb. OK. There was one. Something was standing in the grass at its base. He stopped, staring.
    It was a dog, a definite dog, not a wolf. A modified dog, heading in the direction of wolf, but not yet there. As he got closer, she wagged her tail. She was a bitch; her swollen teats said she had puppies. She raised one paw and dropped her head the way Sam’s hound dogs had when he approached.
    “Hi, sweetie,” he said. She rolled over onto her back. She had the mottled coat of one of Sam Baahuhd’s hunting dogs. Her ears were neither up nor down, not floppy hound dog ears, but not pointed jackal or wolf ears, either.
    “Are you Flossie? Flossie’s granddaughter?” That would have been many hundreds of generations in the past, he knew.
    The bitch stood up and yipped, motioning