Kiera Hudson & The Lethal Infected Read Online Free Page B

and you, kid.”
    “But are we really here?” I asked, needing to know if this was just a dream or something more.
    “We’re both asleep in different wheres and whens from each other, but I dream about you a lot, Kiera,” Jack started to explain, curling his long fingers around mine and guiding me down onto the bench. The more I dream about you, the stronger the connection grows.”
    “I saw you just a few nights ago,” I told him, remembering my own dream that I’d had about him. You were sitting and cooling your feet in a stream.”
    “I wasn’t cooling my feet, I was washing the blood off,” he said.
    “Blood?” I whispered. “Are you still killing?”
    “Are you?” he came back, his smile thin.
    I thought of the Leshy I had recently killed.
    As if being able to read my mind, Jack said, “The men I killed were bad men. It was them or me, and you should know me well enough by now to know it ain’t ever gonna be me. Fuck the rest of them.”
    “You might look different – younger – but you still have that mean streak,” I said.
    “There ain’t nothing mean about wanting to protect the ones you love,” Jack said. “You should know that better than most, Kiera.”
    Did he know what I’d done to protect the people I loved the most? I wondered. “So this is a dream?” I asked him.
    “Something similar to it,” he said, pulling his baseball cap down as if protecting his eyes from the glare of the sun. I looked out across the barren land that surrounded the desolate station on all sides. The only thing I could see, other than the flat plain of arid, cracked earth, was two sets of railway tracks snaking away into the distance. They looked rusty and old and I doubted any trains had passed over them in many years.
    “So if this isn’t a dream, what is it then?” I asked.
    “Beats the shit out of me,” he shrugged.
    “Do you think the cracks are coming back?” I asked, my heart starting to race. Had my unhappiness at losing Potter already started to tear the world apart? “Do you think we can be together like this because we’ve slipped through the cracks?”
    “There are no cracks, not that I know of,” Jack said, taking the bandana from around his throat and using it to wipe away the sweat that covered his forehead. “There are no Elders in the where and when I got pushed into. There is plenty of other fucked up stuff, but no Elders.”
    “How can we be like this then?” I asked, fearing that I might just wake up at any minute.
    “Maybe we’re not really together at all?” he said. “Perhaps this is all just a big dream…”
    “A dream that we’re both sharing in different wheres and whens,” I said, my mind trying to figure it out.
    “Perhaps,” Jack said thoughtfully, re-knotting the bandana about his neck.
    “Can we stay?” I asked, presuming that Jack had all the answers.
    He looked at me. “You’re dead in my where and when, as I suspect I’m dead in yours.”
    “How did I die?” I asked, then quickly added. “Actually, I don’t think I want to know.”
    “Good, because I wasn’t gonna tell you anyway,” Jack grinned. “Besides, not only are we in different layers, they are also far apart.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “I think I’m hundreds of years ahead of you,” Jack said.
    “How can you be so sure?” I said, raising my hand again to shield it from a gust of sand blown up by the wind.
    “Because you died a long time ago in this place,” Jack said. “There’s a statue of you…”
    “A statue?” I frowned. “Why is there a statue of me?”
    “You and Potter became legends,” Jack said, rubbing his whiskered chin. “Now things must have been pretty fucked up if that fuck-wit Potter became a legend. Maybe he won a prize for being the biggest nob-head in this layer…”
    “Potter?” I gasped. “Potter is here?”
    “He’s dead,” Jack said. “Both of you are.”
    “How do you know this if it all happened many years ago?” I