Free Rise of the Mare (Fall of Man Book 2) by Jacqueline Druga Page A

and
cried.
    “I’m so sorry this happened to your
parents. I am so sorry. I’m here though, I got ya,” he said.
    And he did.
    He told me I saved his life that day
because he was battling to the death, literally. He wanted to fight
until he died, and then he saw my parents die and he always told me
when he witnessed that he thought of me. I became his focus. He
tried to give me a normal life, but the circumstances hindered
that. I can say with certainty that the Battle of Exit 84B was not
one of those moments I wanted to live in any other time. The once
four lane highway was reduced to a single lane, if it could be
called that. There were bald spots amongst the green; our travel
down that single lane inhibited the growth, though everything else
was overgrown. Trees reached out across the road, forming a natural
tunnel. It was thick and high, and a part of me was worried that
the Day Stalkers would be concealed within.
    However, there were far too many and
they moved in droves. One big giant group.
    There were twenty of us.
    Davis raised his rifle. “Gentlemen,
wait until you have a clear shot and on my call, fire.
    It was only a few minutes, though it
seemed like longer for the first few Stalkers to appear. My finger
was on the trigger waiting. The plan was to shoot, take them down,
and keep taking them down.
    Mark was on the back of the truck
with a grenade launcher. He would fire into the center of the
group.
    “Hey, Davis!” Mark hollered out.
“There’s a ton of them!”
    “Define a ton.”
    “Hundreds.”
    Davis acknowledged it with little
worry. “Just wait for my call.”
    The large group neared closer and
then finally, Davis ordered us to shoot.
    They were nothing but slow moving,
easy targets.
    We took them out one by one and the
rest kept coming, all at the same pace. Some tripped over their
fallen cohorts, but for the most part, they all fell.
    Mark launched one, two, then three
grenades. Like toy soldiers or dominoes, the Day Stalkers fell.
Those who didn’t kept coming.
    Next to me, Davis lowered his
weapon.
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    “This is tiresome, not to mention
easy and boring.” He leaned his rifle against the truck and pulled
out a machete.
    He was going hand to hand, and when
the others saw Davis grab another weapon, so did they. I too
followed Davis into battle.
    A few men stayed back to man the guns
in case there was trouble.
    They weren’t even a challenge. We cut
through them like vines. Sometimes they were tough, but in the end
they all succumbed.
    Limbs sailed, heads rolled, blood
splattered.
    We cheered like Vikings.
    It was an orchestration of
superiority and we as men were superior over the Day Stalkers. No
matter how vulnerable we thought we were to them, we were human, we
had heart and soul. And like the battle of exit 84B, we would
remain superior as a race and win not only the remaining battles,
but the entire war against the beings that had subdued us far too
long.

TWENTY-THREE – VALA
     
    I had seen them on the episodes of ALF that I watched
while in the bunker, but never had I seen one up close. Apparently,
they are everywhere in the La Sveg As, City of the
Ancients.
    Iry called them showers. A pipe
emerges from the wall and ejects warm water onto you like rain. At
Iry’s home, the ceramic stall with the large frosted glass wall had
four pipes with big flat heads like sunflowers. The water flowered
warm and hot, and it felt great against my skin.
    The scantily clad human maidens
provided me with lavender soap, a liquid to cleanse my hair, and
then another liquid to soften it. They explained the procedure
since I was used to regular bathing.
    I was Iry’s chosen, and special one
and, though I hated the thought of it, I was assigned a chamber
maiden; her name was Samantha. She wasn’t old, but wasn’t quite as
young as me. She was a beautiful woman with flowing auburn hair
that shined like no other. I promised myself I would not ever treat
Samantha