Trail of Tears Read Online Free Page B

of a dream came to her again as
she was carried helplessly along.
    Ten feet.
    She wasn’t going to make it. She just wasn’t
strong enough. Her feet were suddenly lifted from the ground and
she lost all purchase on the ground and was carried past the
corridor. She threw her hands desperately towards the safety of the
small inlet as though she could fly or carve a path to safety. Her
heart hammered in her small chest, her mind filled with panic as
the corridor passed by. Suddenly, something gripped her arm. The
grip was so strong that she tried to wrench herself free but she
couldn’t pull loose. She also couldn’t see who had a hold of her,
but she put everything into trying to free herself. She clawed at
the arm with her free hand, feeling her nails bite into the hand
that held her. The grip never loosened. She felt herself being
pulled relentlessly to the right against the flow of people. She
was struck a number of times by elbows and feet but the grip on her
arm never relented and slowly she was pulled towards the inlet. She
finally stopped struggling once she realised what was happening.
Someone was pulling her to safety.
     
    * * *
     
    The three shadows slipped through the ruins
unseen. The main force was still successfully distracting the
humans and it was easy to slip around their defences. From his
vantage the thing that had once been Justin Stewart smiled, though
there was no humour in the action. In the five years since he had
made his choice and joined the thralls his humanity had eroded away
completely. Not that he had ever shown much humanity during his
life. Life hadn’t exactly been kind to him either, so he didn’t
think he owed it anything. He had been born to a drug-addicted
mother and his first month of life had been spent screaming as he
had been weaned off the drugs his mother had pumped into him from
her body.
    His mother had died shortly after his birth
and the system had taken control of his fate. He had passed through
a number of families but had never settled. His propensity for
addiction had never left him. He had craved attention, food
anything to try and fill the hole. He had never understood exactly
what it was but nothing seemed to satisfy him. As he grew so too
did his gnawing hunger. He was cruel, dominating, and never spent
long enough in one place to address the pain that existed within
him. Instead he fed the pain with excess and finally with the very
drugs that had killed his mother.
    When the vampires had come he had been in
prison screaming as his system was, once again, being weaned from
drugs. It was like he was being reborn. The vampires had offered
him everything society had denied him and he had embraced it body
and soul.
    He watched the families run from the dance
floor, women and teenage boys leading children into the lighted
entrance to their homes while others, women and men, picked up
their weapons and headed towards the fighting.
    He signalled for his men to follow and he
left the shadows and made his way towards the entrance. They had
been searching a long time for this group of humans. His mouth
began to salivate at the thought of the rewards they would receive
for discovering the humans that had caused so much trouble for his
masters. He did not feel any compunction about what he was about to
do. He no longer considered himself to be human so why should he
care what happened to them.
    He looked down the lit corridor and saw the
mass of frightened humans as they struggled to get to safety.
Stewart pulled a grenade from his belt and held two fingers up to
his men. They pulled their own grenades from their belts, pulled
the pins, and threw them far into the lit corridor. They moved to
the side and waited for the explosions. The ground shook and the
screams began. Stewart moved into the corridor and made his way
through the carnage firing calmly at anything that moved.
     
    * * *
     
    Something was wrong. April felt the floor
shudder and people’s faces shifted in an