Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land) Read Online Free

for the next bad thing to happen. I took to ranging, further and further afield, I found a boat moored nearby, I rowed around the lake, as much to vent the some pent up frustration as to explore. Time was running out...

    Lungs were burning, old lungs which had seen better days many years ago.

    Then, about a week after the fight with the freak of the many arms I went on a wide range over the hills to see what I could see, I took Mac with me, usually I took Zachary but my younger son was becoming jealous, besides, he need to learn what was out there just as much as his older sibling. It was high summer and the green and pleasant land had become just that, bathed in light and teeming with life.
    The trees were the cadavers of nature, except they had the good grace to die and decay away before being resurrected in a different form and a different time, unlike the victims of the Deathwalker Virus, dead who did not know they were so, who clung to life with lifeless fingers, driven by a dark purpose that even they did not know.
    Despite the heat and the sun I could not help but note the hazy field in the sky, a grey tinge to the glorious blue of the before times. I'd watched plenty of documentaries and disaster movies which talked about a nuclear winter, but a nightmare described and not witnessed is a nightmare that is hard to recognise for what it is. Is this as they had described? Would this be the last summer as the heavens slowly filled with the ash and dust of the world. I had no idea, it could go on the list of such.

    Stretched and stringy muscles filled with acid. He was not built for this kind of punishment. But he must keep going. He must survive for just a few moments more, because each moment is valuable, though moment is a footstep which exacts a heavy toll on the life span of he who runs.

    I didn't know it when I got up this morning but today would be the day when an event would come to pass. Life is not a straight line, life is a memory which we are forgetting even as we live it. Events occur which sent us spinning this way and that, they are not so much stepping stones, for they trip us as often as they aid us along the way.
    Walking along with Mac I was reminded of many walks which we'd taken when he was a young boy, I used to take them out alone sometimes for I wanted my children to know that though we were whole as a family, each of them had my love and my time as individuals. As we gazed over the Lake District national park I caught hold of such a thread of recollection, I closed my eyes and followed it back in time, I breathed deep the warm air of the Summer and I almost forgot, I came so close to peace, then I heard the cry for help and the horror descended, the grey film of dust that hung above us choked off the blue sky of memory.

    From what have I escaped? I have traded one nightmare for another. My heart beats as if to deafen me. Ah, and I am done, the last of my strength fades from me. Even as I collapse down into the shelter of the shade I can hear their slavering maws coming for me. But alas, it seems I have a few moments more to treasure, for a few rays of determined light do pierce down through the ceiling of the trees, and through them I see the living, a man and a boy, a father and a son.

    We are insane. This is a very bad move. The arrogant part of me thinks that we are driven by nobility, some desire to preserve life. The realistic part of me knows that I am doing this out of combination of bloodlust and desperation. The anger which was unleashed during Greg's demise has not abated, it rests sometimes but it has been born and will be denied life by no will that I possess. Also, you never know who you might end up saving in this kind of world.
    There are about a dozen cadavers in all bearing down on the old man who has collapsed into a sweating gasping heap on the floor. It is a group that we would normally have hidden from, too big to handle with just the two of us. What kind of idiot would