Read Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 for Free Online

to
have to split up.”
    My eyes go wide and I can’t believe Kenji
just said what he said. “What? You want us to split up? No way. No goddamn way.
Nothing ever good happens when we split up.”
    “People die when we split up,” Jack says.
“People go missing when we split up. I nearly got everyone killed when I ran
off.”
    “I got bitten when we split up,” Maria
adds.
    Kenji points to Jack’s bloodied leg. “Jack
isn’t going to make it. He can’t walk. He won’t be able to keep up.”
    “I can,” Jack says, lying to us, standing
up straighter. “I can make it. I won’t slow you down.”
    “You won’t slow us down on purpose,” Kenji
says. “But you will slow us down. And
we can’t afford that. Not in the desert. We’ll die of thirst.”
    No one wants to split up. We all know how
dangerous it is. And we all know how much stronger we are as a group. We know
this. We keep promising each other that we’ll stick together.
    And we keep breaking this promise.
    “So what the hell do you suggest we do?”
Kim asks.
    Kenji lowers his head. He doesn’t like this
plan any more than the rest of us. But he knows this is a necessary decision.
“Like I said, we’ll have to split up. Some of us will have to travel to the
town. Some of us will have to stay here.”
    “Here?” Maria asks. “In the chopper? With
the corpse of Doctor Hunter and four other dead bodies? Are you mad?”
    “The chopper will provide shelter from the
sun. You’ll have water. Food. It’s not much, but it’s enough to survive on for
a few days. Enough for us to get help and come back for you.”
    “So who goes?” Maria asks. “Who stays?”
    Good question.
    Who wants to volunteer to walk off into a
never ending desert?
    Who wants to become so dehydrated and
sunburnt that they begin to lose their mind?
    And who wants to stay behind, not knowing
if anyone will ever come back for you?
    I don’t like these terrible choices, but
this is it. These are our only two options.
    So the only question is, the only thing
left to decide is… who goes? Who stays?
    I put my hand up because I don’t know why.
“I’ll go. I’ve done it before. I can do it again.”
    Kenji volunteers as well.
    And Sarah has to go. She’s the only one who
knows the way. She’s the only one who knows where this town is. She’s the only
one who knows the name of it.
    And Jack is the only one who has to stay.
    Kim and Maria will watch over him.
    No one wanted to split up. But in the end,
we all knew we had to. Sarah estimated that it will take three or four days to
get to the town. Maybe more. But once we were there, we could get a car and
come back in less than a day.
    So we say our goodbyes. We say them
quickly.
    We split the food and water we found in the
chopper evenly. This is not a lot. The soldiers only packed the bare minimum.
We found a few survival packs in the storage lockers of the chopper. And not
much else.
    We also relieved the dead soldiers of their
weapons.
    Four rifles. Three handguns.
    There is one handgun missing.
    And I think to myself that this means the
man in the gas mask took one of the handguns when he escaped.
    But why didn’t he take a rifle?
    Why didn’t he take more ammunition?
    He
didn’t want them. Because he doesn’t see himself as a killer. He sees himself
as a savior.
    And even though he definitely knows how to
use a gun, he is not interested in these old weapons.
    I shake my head.
    We leave most of the ammo with Kim, Jack
and Maria.
    Kenji says if they are attacked, if the
worst happens, they’ll need to defend the chopper like a castle. Like they are
under siege. Because Jack won’t be able to run. And this means they’ll need
ammo.
    Of the four rifles and three handguns, we
leave two rifles and two hand guns with Kim, Jack and Maria. And the majority
of the ammunition.
    We take the rest.
    Sarah only has a handgun. A small amount of
bullets. She doesn’t mind.
    Kenji and I have a rifle each, but only two
magazines.