The Other Brother (Snow and Ash Book 3) (28 page)

Time to me is a forgotten concept. There are no more clocks, and there isn’t enough sun to mark the passage of morning to afternoon. We have what seems like endless dark time; obviously that’s when it’s too dark to see. Eventually it grows light enough that it could be a Pre-Ash day, if that day had a blizzard in progress, three inches of snow falling an hour, and heavy sooty-looking clouds. Light by Ash standards; ugly for Pre-Ash world.

My socks are soaked through, and my feet are freezing. I get tired of looking out for taints, soldiers, and other random threats, so I duck into the ruins of a convenience store. It’s picked clean, of course. Even some of the shelves are gone. I slide under the counter.

Only then do I collapse my head in my hands and let the shaking begin.

He let me go.

Whoever he is, he’s the best human friend I ever had. The only friend since the Ash began, and he’ll probably shoot me next time.

Who are these soldiers and why are they hunting us? Are they American? I’m not even sure if there is an America anymore. Probably not when you figure no one’s come to help us in the years since they bombed Charlotte. All I know is a bunch of heavily armed military types showed up a couple months ago and took over an old block of apartments. They also set up a couple dozen prefab buildings, all in just a few weeks’ time. Once the building stopped, the soldiers started shooting everyone—even non-cannibals like me.

Every so often I catch the soft
crunch
of footsteps. Hearing is my best sense. I can pick up a cat’s purr a block away. Well, maybe I’m not that good, but there’s not much that escapes me. I stay where I am until the fall of dark is halfway complete. Only then do I risk going home.

Home is the shattered remnants of an old church. When they bombed Charlotte, they didn’t seem to mind what they hit so long as they destroyed it. The only things they didn’t bomb were the high-rise towers. I squeeze past a narrow opening between two fallen walls, pick my way along the twists and turns in the rubble until I find the basement stairs. Most of the basement is fine, actually. No light so far inside, but I’ve grown used to that. When I first found the place, I scored some candles. They’re long since gone, of course, but I’ve replaced them with LED lights powered by copper wire, nails, and bottle caps of water—you know, homemade batteries. My home is not the open basement. It’s the wreckage in the corner. Part of the upper floor collapsed into the first floor, which dropped heavy stonework and concrete slabs all the way to the basement. I slip through another crack, and there he is waiting for me. Charlie. The only one I trust, the only one I love. I draw the black-out curtain across the crack and power a couple lights.

Charlie meows anxiously, trots past my pathetic garden of vegetables, and drops a rat at my feet.

“Good boy!” I speak softly, but immediately he begins to purr. I stroke his thick coat before I pick him up and hold him to my heart. After I drop a couple of kisses on top of his head, I set him free and plop down beside him. I divvy up the treat. The meat goes to me and everything else to Charlie. He seems to find this a fair arrangement because he keeps coming back. If he wasn’t feeding me like I was his kitten, I’d have starved a long time ago. But even with this meat and the few scraps of broccoli, squash, and kale I grow under the LEDs, it’s not enough. I’m pretty much a thousand calories from starving to death at any given time. These days there aren’t many scraps of food to be found. Every crevice has been searched, every can of tuna claimed. There are only two places where I know there’s food. The taints have it—plenty of it, but don’t eat what they call food. The soldiers, now—their garbage is filled with food wrappers and empty cans. They have
real
food. It would almost be worth breaking into one of their apartments to see what I could get. It’d be no more dangerous than anything else I do. Every day I face the chance of getting eaten by the taints, shot by the soldiers, or starving to death. I’d rather die fast than little by little.

I build a tiny fire. Charlie meows at the scent of roasting meat, and I worry that the smell will attract someone. As hungry as I am, though, I risk it. After the feast I dig out my diary and write about that soldier with the five o’clock shadow. He could easily have shot me. Why didn’t he?

Eight folded blankets make up my pallet; I lie down and pull six more over me. Nightmares invade my sleep pretty much every night, and sometimes I scream. In a world where survival depends on my ability to go unnoticed, this is not a good thing. Before Charlie settles over my chest, I gag myself with several strips of cloth I keep in the box beside my bed. This is Charlie’s cue to make bread on my tummy and offer me his butt.
 

Who
are
these soldiers? Who sent them, and why are they killing us? It’s not for the meat. Sometimes they just leave the bodies where they lay. I clutch Charlie closer, and he squirms. I’m worried. And hungry, so very hungry.

I hope you enjoyed your preview of Five O’Clock Shadow, another Stand Alone novel in the Snow and Ash Series.
 
This title will be available for pre-buy on July 30, 2016.
 
Books 1 and 2,
The General’s Daughter
 
and
 
Stolen Melody
,
are
already available for purchase.

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