Tall, Dark & Apocalyptic Read Free

is of no import. He cocked his head, fixing a round, black gaze on her. The button-like eyes sparkled with interest. “How many did you kill?”
    Yeira frowned. “A dozen I think. But more escaped through the portal when the Sorceri came crashing in. Shaking her head, Yeira stretched her legs and lowered to her feet. She sucked in a breath as blood rushed through her legs and numbness gave way under needles of pain. “It’s a miracle they manage to capture any of the dead ones. You can hear them coming a mile away.”
    The gnome turned away, shuffling across the tree house, toward his favorite chair. His stubby arms lifted as he walked, the impossibly long fingers quickly weaving his hair into its customary braid. “They have their purpose, Glowbug and you have yours.”
    She put one foot in front of the other, using the furniture for support, and followed him across the room. “They’re closed-minded bigots.”
    The gnome shrugged. “It is true.”
    She lowered herself into the nearest chair and sighed with relief. “If it weren’t for them I’d be much closer to finding and extinguishing her.”
    The Healer’s nimble fingers reached the straw-like ends of his hair and began to wrap the thick braid into a coil at the back of his small head. “You need the Sorceri to find and destroy the dark one, girl. Don’t forget it.”
    Yeira shook her head. “I can’t work with him.”
    “You must. You have no choice.”
    She pounded the arm of the chair with her fist. “How the hell am I supposed to work with a man who has granite between his ears?”
    The gnome’s fingers sparked and a long, silver pick appeared between them, which he quickly stabbed through the coil of hair to hold it at the base of his neck. He dropped his hands, grinning widely. “When faced with a chunk of granite, one must become a sculptor.”
    Yeira groaned, dropping her head back and covering her face with her hand. She just couldn’t work with Audie Kord to find the black witch. She’d kill him if she spent more than five minutes in his presence.
    Or kill herself.
    Either way she’d finally be shed of him. She sighed, knowing she couldn’t give up on her current quest.
    It was all that kept her from succumbing completely to self-hatred.
    ~ TD&A ~
    The Authority headquarters were housed in an abandoned prison on an island off the Southern coast of the land mass which used to be the United States of America. In the year 2090, the Asian continent crushed the “Infidel” of the West with a nuclear bomb. The bomb set off a horrific set of events, spreading quickly from the American continent until it touched every continent on Earth. By the time the final bomb was dropped, most of the surface of the Earth was a broken, smoldering mass of rubble and the remaining inhabitants had gone below the earth to avoid the poisoned residue left behind by the bombings. Once it was safe enough for them to return to the surface, the idea was met with great reluctance. In the decades since the world-wide war, most of the human race had taken comfort from their subterranean existence, and of those who emerged from the tunnels and caverns that had become reality for most of the population, none dared to return to the opulence of that earlier time.
    Gone were the towers of glass and metal and in their place were low-slung, mud-colored abodes that cowered over the landscape, their profiles too tailored to the geography to be easily seen from the roaming drones and air-vehicles in the sky above.
    With geographic boundaries and alliances virtually destroyed, governing bodies no longer recognized any of the treaties or agreements they’d previously operated under. The skies were forever thick with spy craft and opportunistic enemies looking to reduce the number and will of their adversaries.
    It was always a shock to Audie when he returned from one of the vibrant, simplistic earlier epochs to the one in the year 2130 where the Authority chose to sink its