Stone Soldiers 1: Mythical Read Online Free

man’s back.
    The stranger turned around quickly. Now he had an angry look on his face.
    Josie nearly gasped. Not at the knife sticking out of the stranger’s back, but at the nickel-plated revolver Carlos had produced from somewhere. He held it in shaking hands, pointed at the stranger.
    “Freeze!” Carlos demanded, his voice cracking.
    The stranger became calm again. He started to raise his hands.
    Blam! Carlos fired the revolver in fear.
    Almost immediately, the stranger slapped his forehead with his right hand, as if squashing a mosquito.
    “Ow!” The stranger declared. He pulled his hand away slowly, revealing a minor wound, that only seeped a small amount of blood.
    The stranger lowered his hand, then opened it slowly. In his palm were the fragments of a bullet, and some blood. He was very surprised as the blood in his hand soaked into his palm and vanished.
    As Josie, Carlos and the others watched, the blood on the man’s forehead retreated back into his skin as well. His head wound slowly closed up, leaving behind only a faint, gray bruise.
    “That doesn’t seem normal,” the stranger remarked, dumping the bullet fragments from his hand.
                  Carlos panicked- then fired his pistol five more times.
                  Even with shaking hands and white knuckles, Carlos couldn’t miss at this range. His shots all hit the stranger’s bare chest. The bullets struck the dense flesh, tearing skin open but not managing to go more than a half-inch deep. Some fragments fell back out of the wounds after the firing stopped.
    The stranger looked down at his chest. Again, what little blood had escaped his skin seeped back inside the stranger. The flesh of the gunshot wounds pushed back out, dislodging bullet fragments and healing over.
    The stranger looked back at Carlos. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop doing that.”
     
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    After shooting the water-guzzling stranger in their camp, Carlos had decided on a different course of action. Running away.
                  It wasn’t that Carlos was a chicken. He didn’t consider himself afraid of most anything. But this wasn’t most anything. This was a bullet-proof man that had come back from the dead.
    That was definitely something to be scared of.
    Carlos felt better about his decision to run away when he looked out from behind the rock he had chosen as his hiding place and saw his friends all doing the same thing. Everybody had run away.                                                                                   
    Except Josie. And Logan.                            
    Carlos wasn’t surprised. Josie never really seemed to be afraid of anything. And Logan had been thrown through the air like a rag doll. He probably was in no condition to run.
    Now Carlos felt bad. Not bad enough to come out from behind his rock, but bad.
    ***
     
    Josie was amazed.
    Not because the stranger was still standing after being shot six times, but because of what was happening to him now. His wounds were healing.
    The head wound- which wasn’t very deep at all- had closed up. Josie had watched the blood on the wound soak back into the stranger’s head. Like he was a sponge. What she had first thought was a bruise she now realized was something else. A splotch of gray that faded back to flesh color.
    The chest wounds were different. Josie watched in fascination as the wounds swelled up from inside the stranger. Bullet fragments were slowly pushed out. What little blood had trickled down from the wounds soaked back into the stranger’s skin. Again, the wounds healed and turned stone-colored then back to flesh-colored.
    The stranger seemed surprised too. He had been staring at bullet fragments from his chest, held in the palm of his hand. Then he looked down and watched his chest wounds silently