Lethal Seasons (A Changed World Book 1) Read Free Page A

slumped with a sigh. “How can people be so short sighted? What could a young woman have done to deserve being shot?”
    Nick pushed his tray to one side. “The virus didn't change the fact that some people are flat out crazy,” he said gently. He and Angus were old enough to remember the time before, when cities had police forces fighting violence of all kinds. When gangs killed indiscriminately and there were recreational poisons that people chose to put in their bodies. “I checked around. No one saw the murder. No one missed the girl.”
    “We would have missed her,” Angus snapped back indignantly.
    Nick nodded. Angus's settlement was a utopia compared to some of the places he'd seen. They had a Council and a Watch. People took care of one another. It was all because of the tone Angus set, thoughtful, gentle, caring man that he was. Nick had seen settlements that were little more than refugee camps, a few that were run with cold, military precision and others that were run by self-appointed tyrants. It was a new system, and the bugs hadn't been worked out, yet. A touch of anarchy that worried Nick. Why wasn’t there anyone supervising the creation of settlements and med centers?
    “She wouldn't have been shot here,” Nick assured him. “Clarkeston is big. Spread out. They don't have a watch, and their council is shoddy. She lived at the edge of the population zone. It was down the street from an address I tracked down. The front door was off its hinges on an otherwise nice house. I went in to check and saw the body. When I went to report it to Clarkeston’s council, they said they already knew. A family tried to move into the house and only went close enough to smell it. They reported the death, but that settlement doesn’t have anyone to look into stuff like that.”
    “Why would a young girl be alone?” Angus was persistent in his questioning.
    “Why are any of us alone, Angus?” Nick couldn't keep the sadness out of his voice. All the deaths behind him, all the lost loved ones he carried in his heart weighed heavily on him at times like this.
    “We're not, Nicky.” Angus grabbed his arm and squeezed gently. “We have each other. We have all these others,” he said gesturing outward. “Good people that care about us.”
    “Yes. Sorry. Seeing some of these other places gets me down.”
    “It's hard.” Angus patted him. “Hard to see how stupid and petty we still are when our very existence depends on cooperation.”
    Nick pulled a small bundle out of his pack. “I think this is hers. I found it in a bedroom.” He unwrapped a silk scarf to show several small notebooks.
    “Where is the poor girl now?”
    “I buried her.”
    “Thank you, Nicky. Always a gentleman. Poor child.” Angus took the top notebook and flipped through it. “Do we even know her name?”
    “I haven’t had time to look through them.” He didn’t say that just holding those books had brought on such deep depression that he’d wasted the afternoon staring into space and mourning the loss of a sweet young girl who liked to scribble in notebooks. Nor the cold fear he’d felt when he’d looked through the one that was dog-eared and grubby. Nick left Angus paging through the notebooks and took his tray to the kitchen.
    “How is it out there?” Martin Asbury leaned against the wall by the dish station. Dark haired and dark eyed, he radiated strength. The head of the Watch asked the same question every time Nick returned. In a time when last names were cast off or reinvented, Martin had taken on the fashion of using a dead city as his last name. Asbury Park, like much of the coast was under water and had been for decades. It was a way to remember what nature had taken away. Nick doubted there were many people still alive that remembered the Jersey shore, white sand beaches and lazy days sunbathing. His mother had told him about it. Lying in the sun sounded like a quick death of hyperthermia and sun poisoning to