Schism Read Online Free

below. Immediately seeing the sky, she helped her brother hoist the remaining sails while Andy undocked the boat.
    Rain began to fall as they passed over the westernmost tunnel of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, but the winds propelled the sailboat up the Bay faster than predicted. As the storm quelled hours later, the mouth of the Potomac came into view. Still, it was hard to tell exactly where they were.
    “There’re too many of these stupid inlets!” Andy yelled while shoving the map aside.
    “This has to be it,” Charlie decided.
    “How do you know?”
    “Based on the distance we’ve travelled today, this has to be the Potomac.”
    “So why don’t we dock and see for sure?” Morgan suggested.
    Upon finding a large enough pier, they anchored once again, and after walking inland almost a mile, they discovered through various street signs that they were in a town called Reedville.
    Charlie retrieved the map from his back pocket. “Ha, I was right!” he exclaimed and pointed out where they were.
    Morgan spotted a pickup truck parked on the side of a nearby road and wandered toward it. The handlebars of several bikes were visible over the side wall of the truck bed. She peered in at the driver’s side, but the tinted windows prevented getting a good look. She tried the door handle and it opened. “Bloody hell!” She jumped back and covered her face.
    Andy and Charlie ran towards her. Arriving first, Andy took one look inside the truck and recoiled. Morgan was already yards away, retching into the grass. Andy rushed over to her and pulled her long hair away from her face.
    Meanwhile, Charlie inched toward the truck, his face contorted in an expression of horror. With one hand, he covered his nose. A horrendously decomposed body sat in the driver’s seat, the seatbelt still buckled over what remained of the person’s lap. It wasn’t a virus victim; there would have been nothing but the dry bones of a skeleton. This was a more recent death. Maggots crawled in and out of the mouth, nostrils, and other orifices. The state of decay of the corpse was such that Charlie could not determine its sex. Looking down beyond the torso, he noticed something else. “It’s got no legs!”
    “What?” Andy called back. She returned to the truck and peered inside. Sure enough, there was nothing hanging below the edge of the seat. There was, however, a large pool of dried blood on the floor mat and a single shell casing from a bullet stuck to it. Pinching her nose, she reached inside and picked up the shell with her free hand while careful to avoid touching anything else.
    “Maybe he—or she—killed themselves?” Charlie guessed.
    “But how can you drive without legs?”
    “Maybe a wild animal got inside after…it was already dead.”
    Andy made a face at the gruesome suggestion and noted the open window in the back seat on the other side of the truck. “Something could’ve crawled in, but it wouldn’t have eaten the leg bones too.”
    By now Morgan had recovered and was examining the contents in the open truck bed. “There’s four bikes back here. And a tire pump. And a gun of some kind,” she reported.
    “Excellent!” Andy yelled back. “At least we won’t have to walk everywhere. Are there any bullets?”
    “Yeah, looks like a few boxes.”
    “Great. Now if only this truck starts and there’s gas, we’re in business.”
    “Andy, I’m not riding in a truck that’s had a dead body rotting inside!” Morgan protested.
    Ignoring her friend, Andy looked around and spotted a large tree branch resting in the grass by the road. She retrieved it and entered the truck through the passenger’s door. Using the thick end of the branch, she pushed the corpse out of the truck with a mighty shove as Charlie jumped out of the way before it hit the ground. She tossed the branch outside and leaned in further to discover that the keys were in the ignition. “It’s a stick shift. Charlie, press down on the