Free Red Hammer: Voodoo Plague Book 4 by Dirk Patton Page B

man had to say.  Their mom got
frightened and begged their daddy to take them away to somewhere safe, but he
said there wasn’t nowhere safe anymore.  He said that the monsters were
everywhere and the river was all that was keeping them safe and they couldn’t leave
it.
    It wasn’t long before the first monsters showed up.  It was
late evening and the girls were playing in front of the gas station while their
parents sat watching.  Madison was playing a game of hop scotch and when she
hopped out of the last block and looked up, there were three men walking down
the road in her direction.  The men were still down the road a short distance,
a small stand of trees screening them from their parents’ view.  It wasn’t
uncommon to see field hands walking long distances in the area, so Madison
didn’t pay any attention to them and went back to her game.
    Back and forth she went, happy with how well she was doing. 
She had just started another game when Lindsey screamed.  The three men were
much closer now, just coming around the edge of the trees, and when Madison
looked up she screamed too.  One of them was missing most of his face, bone and
teeth clearly visible in the evening light.  Their mother started screaming and
running to protect them while their father dashed into the small office and
grabbed the shotgun he kept under the counter.  Gathered up in their mother’s
arms they started crying as she hustled them to safety, crying harder when they
heard the booms of their daddy’s gun.
    After that they weren’t allowed to play outside any more. 
There was a small two room shack behind the gas station which was where they
lived, and their mother stayed there with them while their father kept watch
from the office.  They never saw any more monsters, but every day or two they
would hear their daddy’s shotgun and their mother would start praying that he
was OK.  Then, two days ago, the bad men came.
    There were six of them, and peeking out through a crack in
the wall the girls recognized the Sheriff who had come by and upset their daddy
so much.  There was a lot of shouting and the men pointed guns at their parents
and made then climb into the back of one of their pick-ups.  The girls, crying,
had stayed hidden in the shack like their mother told them.  They watched as
the trucks drove away, two men sitting in back with shotguns pointed at their
daddy.  There hadn’t been much food left in the shack and they had finished it
off quickly, wandering out to the office to search for more.
    The girls sat on either side of her, Madison finally lying
down and putting her head in Rachel’s lap.  Rachel was shocked and saddened by
their story.  She knew racism was still alive and well in the world, probably
would be as long as there were humans that weren’t identical to each other, but
never dreamed that there were men who would take advantage of the situation to
start enslaving other men.  Where the hell was John?  Why hadn’t he found her
yet?
    Gently stroking the child’s hair as she drifted off to
sleep, Rachel cursed the circumstances that had separated her from John.  These
innocent little girls needed his help, and she just needed him.  At first Madison
started softly snoring, Lindsey soon falling asleep with her head resting on
Rachel’s shoulder.  It wasn’t long before Rachel’s eyes grew heavy and she
joined them in a dream haunted sleep.  Dog was aware that all of them were
sleeping, but he didn’t take his eyes off the windows that looked out at the
road.  Remaining still and silent, he watched the small pack of infected males
approach from the east and stumble slowly past the turn-in to the small gas
station.

13
     
    Little Rock Air Force Base outside Little Rock, Arkansas was
a hive of activity, despite having been nearly decimated by the second outbreak
a few days ago.  I was just arriving from West Memphis on a Black Hawk that would
take a few minutes to refuel before heading