Refugees from the Righteous Horde (Toxic World Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

on the hilt. Two others took the opportunity to sit down as well. The rest stopped and looked back at them. Jeb and Leonard exchanged glances. They walked back to the wounded man. He had a decent pair of boots. He saw them coming and scrambled to his feet.
    “I’m OK, let’s go!” he said in a weak voice.
    Leonard looked disappointed. Jeb could tell he was the kind who killed for the fun of it. While Jeb himself had done more than his share of killing, he only did it to get something he needed. Thrill killing only marked you out as a psycho, and people got rid of psychos, just like he’d probably have to get rid of Leonard sooner or later.
    Jeb studied him a moment longer before turning back toward New City.
    It was going to be a long, hard, dangerous slog, but Jeb’s heart lightened a bit to be heading back to that place. When they had taken over the town outside New City’s walls, he had gotten a good look at it. As they tore apart buildings to make ladders to scale the walls and rafts to get around them, he had seen that the residents lived far more comfortably than any other place he’d ever been. There were frame houses that looked like pictures from the Old Times, and even the poorest shacks looked cozy compared to the cold ground and campfire that had been his home for most of his life.
    When he was a kid he had lived in a frame house full of furniture too, and standing in one again had pulled at something deep inside him. But that life was long, long ago. He had done too much in the long years since then for him think of that playful child as being the same person.
    There had been more to amaze him. While all food and important possessions had been stored within New City’s walls, enough things had been left behind to show that these people had something more than what it takes to survive. Cutlery. Furniture. Hell, some houses even had curtains on the windows.
    Electricity too. It was shut off, of course. The technicians in the Righteous Horde pulled up the power lines and found they led to New City. Scouts who went around the cove and studied New City with binoculars said they had solar panels and a tidal generator.
    Civilization , Jeb thought . A fucking civilization. If we’d won we’d have been sitting pretty all winter and The Pure One would have had the beginnings of an empire. Who knows how much we could have conquered? I could have really been somebody. Risen to bodyguard, hell, general!
    But they had lost, mowed down by a pair of machine guns and scores of rifles. Burnt by firebombs. Then the machete men rioted, refusing to charge into that killing field again.
    One nearly cut my head off before I capped him. And now I’m out here.
    Despite where that left him, he felt a bit glad that New City had won. They’d built so much they deserved to keep it.
    Jeb dismissed that thought as unworthy of him.
    Don’t get soft , he told himself . Get soft and you’ll get dead. If Leonard doesn’t kill you, those New City fucks will.
     
     

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    The guards gave them back their shoes the next morning. Abe Weissman told Susanna and the other porters it had been for their own safety. They had been part of the Righteous Horde, and while Abe and his friends wanted to help, they had to make sure they wouldn’t try anything.
    Susanna wasn’t sure what she and the others would have tried exactly. Attack healthy men and women bearing guns? Susanna wondered if taking their shoes had been to keep them from running away.
    Run where?
    After breakfast they had another long day of walking toward the mountains. Susanna was able to stay on her feet for a time but soon needed to lie back on the stretcher. At about noon they met another column of New City residents, leading another ragged bunch of former porters. The two columns sat down together for lunch.
    A familiar face in the other group made Susanna walk over.
    “Donna, good to see you’re alive,” she said.
    The woman looked up, sunken