Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 5): Wrath Read Online Free Page A

never been there might think that was impossible. Africa had a reputation for being hot, not cold after all. Michelle knew what to expect though. Michelle had spent quite some time here before everything… happened. Researching, exploring, wandering the places man had tread on millennia ago. No matter how many mornings she’d spent shivering in the dampness, it never ceased wearing on her. Being cold to Michelle meant being miserable. Soul wrenching miserable.
    Humanity had begun here, and its unraveling had started here as well. Michelle knew because she’d witnessed the beginning of the end with her own eyes, only a few months prior. So much had changed since then.
    Her wakeup routine and the presence of the undead for example.
    The night prior Michelle had taken refuge inside a small van that was abandoned on the side of the road. The van’s fading yellow paint was cracked and pocked from top to bottom, showing angry red welts of rust. It had smelled powerfully of sweat and old leather when she found it, but she was exhausted, and the little dead boy with one arm didn’t object when she got inside to rest.
    The little dead boy, always walking ahead of her, never looking back. She’d tried to stop several times to see if he’d keep on walking without her, but he always stopped. He’d look back then, and come back to fetch her, as sure as the sun rises. Him and his pale white eyes, waiting for her to start putting her feet in front of each other again, one laborious step at a time. The only way to get his eyes off of her at that point was to walk behind him. Go the other way? Oh dear… that had been a terrible mistake.
    Any direction the dead boy wasn’t walking in was the wrong direction to walk. The rest of the dead were always in that direction. As long as she followed in his wake, the walking dead were nearly nonexistent. The few that they did come across he dismissed with a gentle wave of his one remaining hand, sending them walking off into the distance. He was her personal Moses, parting the proverbial undead Red Sea.  
    Such an appropriate comparison she realized.
    The little boy had appeared to her when she woke up the morning of June 23 rd in the Congo, hundreds of miles away by now. Michelle and her research partner Michael had traveled deep into the jungle at midnight to witness an ancient and primordial burial ceremony there. Something had happened. Something had gone wrong, as wrong as anything can possibly go.
    The temperature in the hidden glade had dropped sharply that night, and a foul taste had pervaded her senses. More powerful than just a smell, or a scent on the air, the slippery, metallic copper essence of blood had wormed its way inside her, and she knew something more powerful, more eternal than anything she’d dreamed possible had visited them.
    Speaking in a voice that seemed to penetrate her mind far more than just her ears, the voice issued a decree stating that humanity had failed, and we were to be judged by our dead. Michelle had nightmares even to this day about the looks on the faces of those gathered with them at the ceremony, bearing witness to the almighty’s judgment. They all knew deep down inside, deeper than the darkest recesses of their souls, that the end was nigh.
    Then, almost as a threat, the voice spoke to her and only her, and the words clung to her mind like black mold, sickening her thoughts. “Your people will earn their redemption, or all will suffer with me for eternity. YOU will bear witness to their trials Michelle Annabelle Lewis. YOU will tell all those that listen.”
    Despite a lifetime of religious study, and almost sixty days of walking amongst the dead since, she still didn’t know what that statement really meant. Was she a witness? What did that mean? Was she a prophet? It was the first and strongest thought in her head whenever she found herself obsessing over that night, and the cold voice in her head.
    Michelle couldn’t start another day like