Away From the Sun Read Online Free Page B

says, getting to his feet. Now he hears the sound of gunshots.  
    “Some don’t like the idea of prosperity,” Samuel says as he walks through the doorway. “Some find it very beneficial to keep the world as it is.”
    With that, they leave through the door across from me, and the four of us are alone, with the sound of guns blasting in the distance.

Chapter 2 - Mitch

    The motorcycle between my legs rumbles like thunder as I stare at the red traffic light, waiting for it to turn green. I don’t care that the engine is loud enough to wake the dead. I don’t worry about bandits hearing me. I choose to ride this thing and to stop at the light because it is a stark reminder of the world that used to be.
    Three years ago, no one went to hell. Hell came to us.
    I was just a kid then. A twenty-one-year-old barely out of college. I had plenty of dreams. Aspirations. I wanted to be something. Someone. I wanted to work my way up the ladder of success. I wanted to become famous with my accomplishments. No one could have told me that about a billion people just like myself had the same future in mind, only to be utterly disappointed the day after graduation.  
    A prospective architect found himself working on a construction crew, digging up ditches in the summer heat. A journalism student found herself writing obituaries part-time for a small-town newspaper, forced to live with her parents because the job didn’t pay her enough for rent. An artist, compelled to pursue the career of pouring drinks and listening to the problems of drunks, never thought he would become the closest thing to a psychologist these people would ever see.  
    All of us had been promised the world. All of us were deceived.
    The ones that did persevere enough to become the bright stars of deception, feeding into the lie that all of us can do it too, became so obsessed with money and power that greed and corruption became a way of life. Cheating on a spouse was flaunted. Love for thy neighbor was not even a concept to be considered. Murder wore the mask of lawsuits and complete annihilation of one’s assets. If you cannot kill your enemies, ruin them. Of course, actual murder was not uncommon either.  
    Perhaps the world we lived in and hell had already met long before the greyskins ever existed.  
    No one will say it, but I’m not afraid to: I think the greyskin virus was the best thing to ever happen to mankind. Do I wish things could have turned out differently? Yes. Do I wish that humanity would have come up with a different way to change? Of course. But it would never have happened. If history has taught us anything, it is that it takes a major disaster to change the way the masses look at life.  
    I’m not ignorant. I know that a lot of bad things have happened and that a lot of people have died. But there are no more bad people. Nor are there good ones. There are only survivors. The virus brought mankind to his knees and now we live by our basic instincts. We are no different from the animals.  
    I wait at a small intersection just outside the town of Sealy. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my group. We are here to take the town from the one that calls himself Shadowface. I’ve never seen him. I’ve only heard what our group leader, my father, has said about him—that he’s dangerous and needs to be stopped. From what we know, he’s trying to gain power by influencing all the towns and settlements from here all the way to Salem, and bring them under his control. It’s as if this Shadowface never learned the lesson that I did—that greed and power-hungry people caused all this in the first place. We don’t need one all-encompassing government. We don’t need to look toward one man or woman. Perhaps where I see man’s corruptive downfall, Shadowface sees opportunity.  
    Maybe this is the way he has chosen to survive. The way I choose to survive is to be the second in command of this tiny group. It is nameless, but I did hear