Read Online Dead Earth: The Green Dawn by Mark Justice - Free Book Online Page A

away.
    “You see,” Jubal said, “She’s...”
    “We have a corpse here. Everyone stand back
while we remove it from the car.”
    The soldier farthest from the door approached
to help his partner. Jubal stepped in front of him, risking harm
and not caring one fucking bit, and bent to his mother. He placed
two fingers against her neck, momentarily unconcerned about the
damned blisters or boils or whatever they were on her neck.
    His mother was dead.
    A heavy hand landed on Jubal’s shoulder.
“Move away from the car, officer. We must quarantine the body.”
    Quarantine?
    Jubal stood in shock as the two soldiers
walked past him, carrying his mother between them towards the
silver tent at the side of the highway. Fiona stared at him through
the window with tears running down her cheeks.
    Jubal sprinted after the two soldiers, who
still hadn’t reached the quarantine tent yet.
    Three other soldiers, who had been policing
the nearby area, saw him and ran over, blocking his path.
    “I want to see my mother,” Jubal said, hand
falling instinctively to his Glock.
    Three barrels lifted, pointing straight at
him.
    “Throw that gun down, officer, or we will
shoot to kill. This is not a threat; it’s a fact.”
    Jubal reluctantly drew his Glock with two
fingers and flung it toward the soldiers. One of them swooped his
hand down, scooped it up and stuck it in his belt.
    From the direction of the quarantine tent, a
shot rang out.
    Jubal lunged at the men blocking him,
attempting to break their line, but they expertly grabbed his arms
and pulled him to the ground.
    “No! They shot her. They shot my mother!
Let...me...go!”
    The three men held Jubal on the ground while
he continued to struggle. One planted his knee in Jubal’s chest,
cutting off his breath.
    Jubal looked up into the soldiers’ blank
helmeted faces, looking for sympathy or mercy, but all he saw was
his own reflection. A man in agony and despair.
    “Mister,” said a soldier. “You have two
choices: go back home or die.”
    Jubal stopped struggling.
    Suddenly Fiona was there. “Please, leave him
alone. We’ll go back. Just let him up.”
    The soldier who had his knee on Jubal’s chest
rose. “You better hope so, ma’am. We don’t have time to fuck around
here.”
    The men released Jubal, who stood up,
brushing off the backs of his legs. He suddenly felt very empty and
tired.
    “How bad is it?” Fiona asked the soldiers.
“What’s happening in Carlsbad?”
    “Ma’am,” a soldier said. “Carlsbad is
dead.”
    Under the careful watch of the soldiers,
Jubal shuffled back to the cruiser like a man defeated, with Fiona
in tow.
    Fiona placed her hand gently on Jubal’s
shoulder, but he shrugged it off. When his mother had died,
something within himself had died along with her. And now the
government had her corpse, probably keeping it for dissection
instead of a proper funeral. And how would he ever retrieve her
body for burial?
    The world had gone mad and it seemed
civilization was fucked.
    He allowed Fiona to lead him back to the
cruiser. She took him to the passenger side of the car, and said,
“Keys.” He didn’t question her. He handed over the key ring, then
slumped into the passenger seat.
    The gunshot still echoed in his mind.
    They shot his mother. They said she was dead
and they shot her anyway.
    You know why.
    No. He didn’t want that disturbing
picture in his head.
    They shot her because she was becoming one of
them.
    “No,” Jubal whispered.
    The dead army.
    Fiona looked his way, but didn’t speak. He
knew she wanted to find a way to comfort him, as he had tried to do
for her after Renee Spencer died. That moment seemed to have
happened months ago. Fiona turned the car around and headed back
toward Serenity.
    Maybe she couldn’t find the words; she was
likely still in shock herself.
    Jubal closed his eyes and tried to think of a
time—was it just a day ago?—when the sky wasn’t green and corpses
didn’t rise from the