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

of the circle.
    The big male charged after it, catching it. The others took corners and tore it to bits.
    Maintaining his calm, Jeremy walked away silently. The leader looked up. His eyes followed Jeremy as he walked slowly out of the forest, but he didn’t follow.
    “Holy shit!” Jeremy whispered when he was a sufficient distance away. He had no intention of going near the dogs again until he had a better idea of how to control them. He scratched his arm. And he wasn’t going to sleep with Flossie either.
    He put his hands on each side of his head, thinking. Something had to be left of the estate. A huge mansion and sprawling outbuildings, barns, and equipment sheds could not be totally swallowed up. He was crossing what he thought was the field behind the main barn.
    He turned around. The barn had to have been around here. Where? The oaks had infringed into the field, with denser trees in the distance. He wanted to scream. He was hungry and thirsty and his feet hurt.
    He curtailed his search as a basic need asserted itself. He had to admit that one of the nicest things about planet Earth was that he could piss wherever he wanted. On Ellie’s planet, the humans had to go through a whole rigmarole so the goldies didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t have a process of elimination. That said a lot about them: They were so uptight they didn’t even shit.
    He did, though. His stomach roiled from his rabbit dinner. Jeremy walked to a likely tree. “Do bears shit in the woods?” he asked the tree as he squatted. “Not to be offensive, old boy.”
    Squatting was a bit of providence: Ten feet from him, a pipe stuck a couple of inches out of the earth. It was an exhaust pipe. From what? The machine barn? The machine barn had housed farm equipment and a small mechanics’ shop. Plus everything that would be needed to set up a sawmill. Did that pipe lead to the barn? All he had to do was dig to find out.
     
    Hours went by. No food, no water. No shovel. He dug with his lily-soft hands and a branch he found that was straight enough to pulverize the soil. After breaking up the dirt, he scooped it out with his hands. His atrophied muscles trembled with the exertion. He wasn’t fit for this. He wasn’t fit for anything.
    Why couldn’t they have given him a shovel? If they didn’t want him to have his potentially-used-for-violence knife, how about at least a shovel?
    He would have wept when he finally reached a roof, but he was too dehydrated. Was it the roof of the equipment storage? He had no idea. He had to find a place to sleep and something to eat. It was early afternoon by now. If whatever was below him was empty, and if he could get through the old tin roof without cutting himself up, it might make him a good place to hole up. He giggled at the possibility, and then couldn’t stop laughing. Why did that seem funny?
     
    Much later, he’d dug out around the vent far enough to stand on the roof. He pulled up a corner of the metal by the exhaust flue and it peeled back the way he’d hoped it would. He made a big enough hole to slip through. First he stuck his branch into the opening and felt around, then threw pebbles in at various angles to try to determine what was down there. It was a room with plenty of space for him. One of the pebbles bounced off something that resounded with a metallic ping! Tools? Something really useful like an ancient truck with no fuel? His laughter had a hysterical edge.
    Jeremy shook with exhaustion. His lips were swollen and parched. But he had to get down there and back out. He had to get food or he’d die. He slipped through the opening and dropped to a dirt floor.
    It was the machine room. He could see some of the inside with the light from the hole in the ceiling. The metal walls didn’t look melted, just decayed. The walls on the northern and eastern sides were stone. That was the side that faced toward the nearby town of Jamayuh where the atomics would have originated. The