The Day After Never - Purgatory Road (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller - Book 2) Read Free Page A

won’t do anything rash while I’m gone. The three of you need to stick together and cooperate if you’re going to survive.”
    Sierra bristled at his tone, but her expression softened at the obvious concern in his words. She nodded in silent agreement and reached out to touch his hand. A small chill ran up Lucas’s spine at a flash of the Eye of Providence tattoo on her arm. The swelling and redness of infection that had accompanied her chest wound had all but gone, from what he could see around the dressing. His gaze drifted to Eve and her matching tattoo, and he was filled with a cold foreboding that even the midday heat couldn’t completely banish.
    Tango, freshly fed and watered, followed the trail south toward the foothills where Lucas had discovered Sierra and Eve. Lucas knew he wouldn’t be able to make it by nightfall and had already decided on where he would spend the evening, his knowledge of the area substantial from his repeated forays tracking feral mustangs.
    As he rode, the big stallion’s steady hoofbeats thudding with the regularity of a metronome, he thought about the obvious challenges facing him. While nothing was impossible, in reality he was going to have to cover a lot of ground in a hostile wasteland in the hopes of finding a needle in a haystack, all on behalf of a woman about whom he knew precious little and was conflicted about trusting – as well as how he felt about her. She was definitely attractive, with high cheekbones and a challenging stubbornness to her frank countenance that would have had him in hot water under other circumstances.
    “Like you aren’t in the soup now,” he muttered.
    Eve had also captivated him with her composure and the odd, almost adult maturity in her reactions that was as unusual as anything he’d seen. Then again, you could write what he knew about children on a grain of rice. Even so, he sensed there was something special about her, immunity to the virus notwithstanding.
    High ribbons of clouds were streaking the cinnamon sky like colored smoke when he set up camp near a spit of sand that jutted into the bend of a creek. The lazy rush of shallow water over smooth stones burbled musically as he rigged his tripwires along the perimeter and tied a glittering chrome spoon to ten yards of monofilament fishing line. Before the sun had dropped behind the foothills, the hand line stiffened with a decent-sized trout, and Lucas finished his day with fresh fish roasted over a small fire while Tango refreshed himself from the brook.
    When darkness fell, Lucas stamped out the remains of his fire and unfurled his bedroll onto the riparian slope, the glowing streak of a comet’s flare-out providing celestial pyrotechnics as he lay down beneath the night sky. The few trees along the stream’s course rustled in the breeze, and Lucas smiled to himself – it could have been worse, he reasoned. The reaction was barely formed when a wave of melancholy washed over him at the losses he’d suffered over the last week: his grandfather, Bear, his friends in Loving…
    He shook off the morose thoughts. His philosophy of survival was to focus only on the present. The past was over and unchangeable, the future unknowable and not guaranteed to even arrive, which left him with the here and now.
    And his pursuit of a pipe dream on behalf of an enigmatic beauty.
    Lucas drifted to sleep with his hand on his M4, with visions of Sierra’s eyes for company and the whisper of the stream’s passage for his lullaby.
    Several hours later he started awake, M4 clutched to his chest. Ten feet away, Tango stamped his front hooves again with a snort. The stallion had detected danger. Instantly awake, Lucas switched on the rifle’s Exelis night vision scope and peered through it at a glowing green nightscape, taking his time to scan the surroundings, searching for movement or any hint of whatever had spooked the horse.
    There.
    Bushes rustling maybe sixty yards away, on the far side of the