The Breadwinner Trilogy (Book 1): The Breadwinner Read Online Free Page B

the steps of his luxurious cedar deck in his sweatpants with the oversized and swollen bite mark on his left shoulder.  Samson fiddled with the lock and tossed it aside.  Will always left the key in the padlock.  What’s the point of even locking the thing up Samson would wonder any time he had been over his friend’s house for a cocktail or a barbecue.  He tossed the lock to the grass at his feet and swung the door open.  Bingo.  Samson entered the shed and grinned at the stack of boards in front of him.  Picking up two pieces of plywood in each hand, he turned around to begin stacking them in the yard.  “Holy shit.”  Samson muttered to himself and dropped what was in his hands.  Will had begun to shamble toward him.  Lifeless, yet still moving, still growling.  His eyes were vacant and cold, his mouth hung open and blood had crusted onto the sides.  Samson slowly lowered himself and picked up one of the pieces of thin wood, he knew what he had to do.  Faster than Will could react, Samson ran to him and swung the plywood up, striking Will underneath his chin with the corner in an uppercut like fashion.  The blow knocked Will back and down to the perfectly green grass he had just been standing on.  Aiming the corner of the plywood with a swift precision, Samson rammed the corner of it over and over again into Will’s forehead.  Blood splattered and stained Samson’s clothes, the sickening crack after crack of his friend’s skull filling his ears.  Finally on about the tenth blow to the head, Samson realized Will had stopped moving, stopped groaning.  He angrily launched his makeshift weapon down onto the body of his dead friend, exhaling loudly with a grunt.  He looked up and away from the bloody mess toward the open sliding door that led inside Will’s house.  He thought of his friend’s wife and wondered if Tracy was still alive somewhere in that house.  He climbed the porch steps and slammed the sliding door shut.
    Every time he passed Will’s house he thought of that day.  Thought of his body, still rotting in his yard, and his wife, either dead or aimlessly shambling about in some room with no purpose.  Just another house I can’t steal food from, Samson thought as he passed the guard house and exited to his right out of Franklin Woods.  Town was to the left, deeper into the community of Franklin, and the bay was to his right.  Town was useless to him after his last few trips.  The only building he felt like he hadn’t carefully snuck around in was the high school and he had no intention of checking it out.  Since finding Al he hadn’t seen a soul that was alive and he’d exhausted the small town’s resources between Franklin Woods and Paradise Bay in just a short while.  The disadvantages of beach town living, nothing here in the off season.
    The city, beyond the borders of their quaint area, ten miles away, was not an option.  “What are you, stupid?  You’ll never come back!  And then what would we do without you?”  Moira would scream, always shrill, always wild, anytime he brought it up.  Samson often wished he had the balls to just go, just go to the city and never come home.  What was the point anymore?  But then he would remember the children, and he knew he couldn’t leave them with Moira like that.  It wasn’t that Samson hated Moira, he just had always known what he was to her, a wallet.  And now, in the wake of what the world had become, he was less than a wallet, he was a grocery bag.  The thought of it made him bitter with each passing day.  How she would admire not only herself, but all her material possessions and the house that she lived in and how she truly believed status or class still mattered.  Every single time she would look in a mirror and smile at herself, Samson wished he could smash her pretty little face into it.  He imagined the shards of glass embedded in her flawless skin, her shiny blonde hair tainted with blood.
    Trudging