Read Online The Rising Dead by Stella Green - Free Book Online Page B

time and I have made the worst mistakes you can imagine. If you really want to help people, stay away from them.”
    “What about the gas station?”
    “We were trapped. It was fight or die, and even then look what happened to that young couple. Just being around people gets them hurt.”
    The Stranger seemed to be freshly wounded by the past. He walked off into the desert. His frosty exterior hid deep misery. He didn’t take his rucksack, but Matt still wondered if he’d be back. There was now a spent, hollow quality to the man.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Matt wanted to help the Stranger, but he didn’t know how. Maybe someone knew words that could break through those walls of pain. Perhaps there was a way to convince the man he wasn’t to blame. The problem was that Matt had no idea what that was, so he waited outside on the lurching porch. He believed the Stranger’s guilt was due to Mr. Dark’s manipulations. While the Stranger was hidden by the shaman’s cloaking spell, the first village was slaughtered. Evil didn’t chase the Stranger to his village. It came on its own. They were likely to be the next target whatever the Stranger did. The barbaric and disgusting way the bodies were arranged was Mr. Dark’s attempt to destroy the Stranger with both horror and guilt.
    However, the Stranger was partially right. The people they cared about were in danger. Matt’s own experience with his buddy Andy back home and the Stranger’s story convinced him that leaving Deerpark had been the right call. There was no question that Mr. Dark liked to torture anyone close to them. It was best to help people and move on quickly. The idea of a family, a home with loved ones and friends, was an illusion that they had to give up. Not just for the sake of the other people, but for their own sanity, too. Mr. Dark used their attachments against them as a way to weaken them. His capacity for bloody, violent acts was bottomless.
    Mr. Dark created nightmares. Matt was sure these horrors were meant to break them. The Stranger might already be too damaged to continue fighting. Mutilating the villagers’ bodies was just the sort of move Mr. Dark excelled at. The Stranger could be apowerful partner in the battle against Mr. Dark, but not if he had been convinced that fighting only made things worse. Matt wasn’t immune to Mr. Dark’s tricks, either. Still, if Mr. Dark was planning elaborate attacks just to weaken them, they were a threat to him. If one of them was a threat, what about two working as a team? They had a power they didn’t understand yet. Maybe together they could find and destroy Mr. Dark.
    Matt knew he had to make the Stranger see the truth behind the manipulation. Some force had brought them together. There was a reason behind his wandering and the Stranger’s, too. He had been lucky too many times to believe it was random. When he needed to find Cheryl, he found Maria waiting inside the shack. Now he could free Cheryl and Maria’s sister at the same time. He knew that he had been led here somehow. He was meant to save them, and the Stranger was meant to help. Now he just had to figure out a way to convince the Stranger.
    A sliver of moon moved halfway across the star-filled sky, and the Stranger still had not returned. Matt began feeling for rusty old nails sticking out of the porch and then driving them back down with the end of his ax. There were at least a hundred, but he pounded them one by one, and as he did, the little deck began to straighten. Behind him the shack’s door creaked. In the doorway he could see Maria outlined by the candlelight. He stopped work. “We’ll leave in the morning.”
    She gasped. “Thank you.” There was quiet sobbing until, seeming embarrassed by her tears, she covered her face with her hands for a moment. When she took her hands away, the tears had stopped. “Where is the White Jaguar?”
    “We’re going without him.”
    “You want me to go instead of the White Jaguar?” She sounded