Read Online Moriah by Tony Monchinski - Free Book Online

keep her close. When Cosmo’s wife had died, he continued to visit, and as Cosmo’s sons grew he brought them along and she inducted them upon the path of carnal knowledge. She was already an old woman then, but she gladly served. In return, they brought her wild game and, in the winter, cords of wood to heat her one-room shanty.
    She sat outside her home on a stool, her back to one of the log posts, a corn-cob pipe in her puckered mouth. She twirled a chin hair around an arthritic index finger.
    She knew someone was there before they announced themselves.
    “Well then who is it come to visit Maude?” she asked by way of greeting.
    “Where’s my father, Maude?”
    Chase . She’d known the boy, his person, since his birth; known him in a different sense since the time he was ten. She knew his physical attributes and irregularities from when she’d had sight, from the touch of her hands on his body, and she did not think of them as deformities. What stood out most for her about Cosmo’s son was not his distorted appearance, which she could no longer view herself, but the clarity of his thought, the lucidity of his mind. His was the sharpest and therefore most dangerous intellect among Cosmo’s many children, capable of turning the white-hot rage on and off when it suited him.
    “Maude,” Chase repeated, “where’s my father?”
    He’d been away hunting, missing the events that had transpired in the past days.
    “He’s gone looking for some fools, Chase.”
    “How long?”
    “Better part of a week, I figure. You been to the house?”
    “Yeah, I been to the house. Winslow…” She wasn’t sure, but she thought his voice cracked when he spoke his brother’s name.
    “Poor little Winslow,” she murmured in sympathy. “What you thinkin’ of doin’, Chase?”
    “I’m goin’, gonna find dad, hope he ain’t finished the job first before I get there.”
    “You leave tomorrow morning you’ll catch up to ‘em in a day or two I bet. Why’nt you stay and keep an old lady company?”
    “I’m leaving now, Maude. I should be with my brothers.”
    “You ain’t like them boys, Chase,” she said, and it was true because he wasn’t. He was less animal, and at the same time so much more dangerous. “Stay. Let ‘em do whatever it is they gonna do. They be back soon enough.”
    But he was gone. She could tell that without seeing. She couldn’t care less about the men and women Cosmo and his children pursued, though she hoped for their sakes Cosmo had taken care of business before Chase showed up.
     
    * * *
     
    Riley rested in the tent she’d woken up in earlier that day. She sat in a folding wooden chair at a folding wooden table. She’d slept a little more and then she was wide awake and thought it was better to be seated with her thoughts than lying down with them.
    She’d couldn’t get Anthony out of her mind. Her brother. Dead. It still made no sense. Anthony was the whole reason they’d come out here.
    Ev and Troi. Riley wondered if they were still alive. How could they be? Could they have gotten away like she did? Maybe the red-haired girl and the others had only followed her? Maybe they’d found Thomas and the other man dead and were worked up into such a furor that they abandoned their hunt, ignoring Ev and Troi, chasing only Riley? She wanted to think so, but Riley did not.
    She opened the book they had said was Bear’s. It was his book, but he hadn’t written in it or anything. It was some guy’s depressing story of being trapped as the zombie outbreak unfolded. Riley couldn’t imagine what life had been like for people at that time. Her father had lived through it, but he never spoke of it.
These people she was with were intent on leaving for Africa in the next day or so. They hadn’t asked her to come. Riley didn’t want to go anyway. She wanted to get home, wanted to recover. And then she wanted to come back out here and find the people responsible for Anthony’s death. She wanted