Dominion of the Damned Read Online Free PDF Page A

one, aren’t you?” Esme raised a hand and traced her finger down Hannah’s cheek. Then she grabbed Hannah’s face, nails digging painfully into her cheeks. She ripped Hannah’s shirt open and grabbed the tray. Handing it to Doctor Konstantin, she said, “This one’s going to bear watching.” She released her grip, and Hannah pulled her shirt closed and rubbed her face. Her hand came away with blood on it.
    Esme turned to Konstantin. “Don’t get any ideas about making her your pet.” She turned to leave, but as she passed him, she paused to add, “And don’t tell me how to run my camp. Save the reassuring doctor act for your own little project. It’s wasted here.”
    The doctor glared after Esme as she left, then went to the cabinet and brought some alcohol and cotton swabs over to Hannah’s bed. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling up a stool. “Esme always feels she has something to prove.” He dipped a swab into the bottle of alcohol and reached for Hannah’s face. When she jerked away from his touch, he paused. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. Let me see what she did to you.” When Hannah still hesitated, he added, “Please?”
    She held still, and let him examine her face. His fingers were cool, but much gentler than Esme’s had been. She flinched as he cleaned the first cut.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is going to sting a little.”
    “What are you?” she asked. “Those things out there... are you some kind of mutation?” Did you come back from that? part of her wanted to ask, even though part of her didn’t want to think about what that would have meant.
    He kept working on her face as he answered. “Not exactly. I think they might actually be a mutated form of us. We have our similarities... we both come back after being significantly dead, we both require human tissue for sustenance. But vampires tend to be much better conversationalists.” He grinned.
    Hannah didn’t smile back. “Vampires. Naturally.” She shook her head. “I guess there’s really nothing that shocks me anymore.”
    He finished treating her and sat back on his stool, regarding her. “What’s your story, Hannah Jordan? What is it that makes you such a survivor?”
    “You want to know my story?” she asked. When he nodded, she said, “Then get me my brother. Bring him to me safe and healthy, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
    He tilted his head and regarded her for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

FOUR

    As a pair of guards escorted her through a series of barred gates and corridors, it became clear that they had brought her to a literal prison. Instead of prison guard uniforms, her escorts wore the same black combat fatigues that her captors had worn, and the only weapons they carried were non-lethal; tazers and dart guns and pepper spray, intended more for enforcing cooperation than anything else.
    They led her to a cell block, where people milled about in open cells, all of them dressed in orange prison jumpsuits. Hannah began to fear that she was being thrust into a prison full of convicts, but there was a mix of men and women, old and young. Those that looked at her did so with haunted eyes that showed no hint of violence. Only submission.
    They stopped outside an open cell, and one of the guards rapped on the bars. Inside, a plump, middle-aged woman looked up from an improvised desk made of an old door resting on top of cement blocks. Her eyes sparkled with interest as she took in Hannah, but filled with wariness as they turned to her guards.
    “We have a newcomer.”
    They handed her a clipboard. She nodded and waved Hannah over to the desk. “Come here, girl.” She scanned the clipboard, and grunted. “New folks are a lot fewer and farther between, these days. Where’d you come from?” She spoke with the rasp of a longtime smoker, and her skin looked like freckled leather. Her red hair, short and wiry, had