Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Read Online Free

faded, and all that remained was the stark gray of the walls, the closet and desk, and his bed – and opposite that, a dark corner with a pile of blankets on the floor, and something else.
    “Oh man…” he said, out loud and to no one in particular.
    Except that he got an answer, a quiet whine from the corner, where the German Shepherd sat looking at him from its new makeshift bed of blankets.
    Wesley slowly relaxed and smiled as he looked over at the scraggy dog, sitting there with its head cocked to one side, as it had a number of times before. It was almost a questioning look, as though it were asking him something. He would have loved to know what it was thinking – to somehow read, telepathically, what was on the dog’s mind. He was sure there was a lot of story behind those eyes.
    How did you survive for so long out there? he wondered, eyeing the faint line of scars that ran across the dog’s head. It had to have been another dog, or maybe even a croc or a grizzly, or something. The dog would be dead if it was a zombie that injured her.
    “How did you do it?” he asked aloud, and yet again the dog’s head went up, and tilted to one side as she gave a quiet sniff.
    Two years, or at least the majority of that time, the dog, who had no name tag, had survived in Virginia Beach. Where almost every living human had fallen to the dead, this dog had somehow managed to make it through. Wesley wondered if she had spent most of her time hidden away on the boat they’d escaped on, only venturing out into the city to scavenge for food. There had been plenty of signs of that scavenging when he’d gone down below, even for the brief moment he was there. Empty packets of food were strewn across the floor, all of them torn open rather than opened carefully.
    The dog had certainly been there a while.
    “Did your owner live on the boat?” he asked, watching her eyes for any sign of understanding, but those piercing brown orbs gave little away, and she merely sniffed again and laid her head on her paws, peering back at him in return.
    “Right,” he said. “Well, I suppose we ought to give you a name, don’t you think?”
    The dog sat up at that, and licked her lips.
    “Oh, yeah, maybe breakfast before that. Look, you stay here. I need to go and take a shower, scrub away some more of the nastiness from the battle.”
    He stood up, stretched, then nearly sat down again. Every muscle in his body complained, even in places he didn’t know he had them. But his legs were the worst, across the thighs. Hours of holding that hose down, crouching to push the weight forward, must have stretched his thigh muscles beyond their limits. He moaned.
    “God, I’m like an old man,” he said with a laugh. How many other people were feeling like this, still? Most of them, he guessed. Then his mind drifted to the hundreds who didn’t feel a thing, the ones lost in the battle, and this forced him to stand, stretch, and start moving toward the desk in the corner, where he had unceremoniously dumped most of his clothes before stumbling into bed.
    After the battle, and after all the celebrations were over, which in themselves had gone on for some time, a lot of people had drifted off to find somewhere to sleep, but the ship still had to be run. And now that the crew had yet again dropped in number, that meant no rest for some, not yet. Wesley had spent four more hours, along with nearly everyone from the Captain’s in-extremis force, clearing the deck. Mostly that had meant more hose work, this time with water instead of the foam, which was by then completely depleted. God help them if they had a fire.
    By the time Wesley fell into bed, he was sick of the sight of the damned foam, and zombie body parts. The stink on the flight deck hadn’t hit him until they were cleaning it. He hadn’t noticed the funk of thousands of dead, and the acid reek of the foam during the battle, but afterward, when his heart rate slowed, and his senses started