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

dead. Instead, a series of images flashed
through his thoughts.
    His mother comforts him after he started a
fight with the tall girl who lived next door and received a busted
nose for his trouble. She tries to look concerned, yet every now
and then a smile slips through.
    His mother sits up all night next to his bed
when he shivers with a fever, frequently pressing a cold washcloth
against his forehead and murmuring silent prayers; he isn’t scared
but, rather, comforted by her presence.
    His mother, dead only a few minutes, stands
up and tears through the HAZMAT suit of the soldier nearest her and
chews through the man’s stomach. When she stands up her entire face
is covered with blood and small pieces of flesh and muscle. Rivers
of scarlet flow down into her empty, cold eyes.
    “Stop the car! Pull over!”
    Fiona stomped on the brake pedal, forcing
Jubal to throw up a hand to brace against the dashboard.
“What?”
    Before the car was completely stopped, Jubal
was out the door and throwing up on the blacktop. He fell to his
knees; it felt like his body tried to eject everything he had eaten
since he was twelve. When he was finally finished, he wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand and climbed to his feet, wincing at the
new soreness in his stomach.
    Fiona was standing next to the car, her arms
folded across her chest. She studied him with a look of exhausted
concern.
    She hugged him close and helped him into the
car again.
    When they were about a mile farther down the
road, she said, “Would it help to talk?”
    “No,” he said. But in less than a minute, he
blurted out, “My ma...they shot her. She was turning into one of
those things.” Jubal felt the hot tears fill his eyes. He turned
away from her and stared out the car window, blinking until he felt
like he wasn’t going to cry.
    Fiona placed a hand on his arm.
    “I loved her, too,” she said.
    He put his own hand over hers. In the midst
of this madness at least something good remained in his life. “I
know,” he said.
    She released his arm.
    “Fee?” he said. “When we were kids, why did
you punch me in the nose?”
    He turned to her in time to see the faint
smile play across her face. “You called me Stork Girl.”
    He remembered. Jubal had been a smart ass
when he was a kid. He had deserved that punch in the nose.
    “You always were a tough broad,” he said.
    “You bet your ass.”
    Jubal sighed. “I have to do something pretty
tough now and I could really use your help.”
    She took his hand. “We’ll be there in just a
few minutes.”
    Damon Ortega had been the second most
important man in Jubal’s life. He’d tried to be a good role model
for the boy, had taken him fishing, made sure he kept up his
studies. Damon had even been the one—at the request of Jubal’s
mother—to give the boy “the talk.” Jubal and Damon still laughed
about that one, about how the older man’s face quickly reddened and
stayed that way when he learned the depth of the boy’s
knowledge.
    “You can really do that?” Damon had
asked.
    Repeating that line never failed to make the
sheriff blush all over again.
    There were so many good memories, and some
that weren’t so pleasant. Like when Damon crawled into the tequila
bottle for a few months after his wife left him. That dark episode
culminated in an ugly night at Conchita’s when a drunken Sheriff
Ortega pulled out his service revolver and shouted incoherent
threats at a—thankfully—small group of townspeople. Pops and Red
had talked him down, taken the gun away from him and then poured a
gallon of coffee into him before driving him home. The next morning
Damon emptied every bottle in his house into the kitchen sink.
    There was no investigation, no charges filed.
Everyone knew Damon and the pain he was in. For his part, Damon
recognized his second chance and took it. The people of Serenity
took care of their own like they usually did. It was one of the
reasons Jubal never wished to live