Free The Dead Saga (Book 3): Odium III by Claire C. Riley Page A

wait for him. We need to know what happened. If Hilary is okay and the baby…” Her words trailed off and she looked away shamefully.
    I bit my lip, wanting to say something nasty about Rachael, wanting to cuss and yell and kick and scream and throw a hissy fit, because this whole shitstorm just got a whole lot shittier. But I didn’t. It wouldn’t help anyone or anything, so I bit my lip, swallowed my tongue, and pulled up my big girl panties.
    “It might not even be them,” I replied instead.
    “Him.” She looked up at me. “It’s him. Grief makes you crazy—crazier than anything else can. This was Deacon’s doing, all right. I remember him as we left, and he was so angry—furious, even. All he cared about was saving her. If she’s dead, then…” She shook her head, not able to finish the sentence.
    “All right.” I said through a tight throat, nodding, the warm air inside the tent suddenly overwhelming. “It all seems too easy though, you know?”
    “Because we’ve actually found what we were looking for? Or should I say who we were looking for?”
    I nod. “Well, yeah. What are the chances of that?”
    “When the world’s population has been struck down to around twenty percent of what it originally was? I would say the chances are pretty fucking high actually.” Nova looks at me like I’m an idiot, but I still have the uneasy feeling in my gut.
    “I couldn’t find any marshmallows,” Joan whined as she came back into the tent looking sullen. “I tried everywhere.” She slumped back down in her seat, her head lolling to one side, and began snoring almost immediately.
    I blinked in surprise. “How the hell does she do that?” I mumbled.
    I heard Nova chuckle. “What’s there left to fear? She’s not even really here half the time, and she has no clue what’s going on.”
    “What do we do with her?” I asked as we made our way to the door.
    Nova glanced back at Joan. Already a thin line of saliva was beginning to trail down her chin again and I looked away, my stomach feeling queasy at the sight.
    “Leave her sleeping. She’ll be more of a problem if she’s awake and in the way.” She shrugged and pushed out of the tent door. “Besides, there’s no way we could keep her quiet.”
    “That’s true,” I agreed.
    We loaded up the truck with as many supplies as we could fit in it—clothes, ammo, food, medicine. It was a haul and a half, and if we made it back to base I knew that Zee and James would be arranging another scavenging mission to recover anything else that was left behind. As I looked around at the rotting, half-eaten bodies, I realized that pretty much everything was left. Everything but life. Guilt like I haven’t felt before embraced me. We’d left the base with good intentions—okay, and a little running away on my part—but with both Nova and I gone, and Mikey and Michael on a scavenge mission, the place didn’t have nearly enough people to protect it. If anything happened to the people there while we were gone, I would feel that pain for the rest of my life—however short that might be.
    *
    We had been hiding for several hours on the top wall overlooking the gate. Night had quickly fallen, and the rain continued to do so as well. It was cold—colder than cold, actually—and I was beginning to wonder if Crazy Pants hadn’t dreamt up the whole damn thing about an angry man coming back. Or maybe I was just hoping that she’d made it up so I could go get some rest somewhere. My teeth and jaw hurt from chattering so much. I was no superhero, and I really had no place being up there—especially since the noise my teeth were making was enough to wake the dead.
    No, seriously—several deaders had already tried to come into the compound, and Nova was adamant that it was because of all the noise I was making. She hadn’t even trusted me enough to go and kill them, since my hands didn’t want to work properly, the cold having worked into their bones.
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