Dragon City Read Online Free PDF

Program of Unification had brought humanity back from the brink of extinction. There were pathways through those jungles, hidden routes that Ohio Blue and her men knew, ways to reach all of these forgotten little corners of middle America that had been largely ignored since the nukecaust.
    Sinclair and Farrell had holed up in one of the broken buildings, choosing the place with the strongest walls and traipsing back and forth to furnish it as best they could from the bombed-out remains of the other houses in the street. Ohio’s people visited every three or four days, bringing with them parcels of food, some of it fresh but much of it tinned or dried goods, cured meats that would keep despite the lack of refrigeration or power in the ruined shack. The place itself smelled like the cloying atmosphere of a hothouse, as if they were living in an arboretum. Mold grew a dark greenish-brown up the walls, and some kind of fungus had taken over the bathroom, pretty violet spores popping and bursting from the walls, ceiling and floor the first time Sinclair had pushed open the door. After that, they had left the room shut, and converted what had once been a downstairs home office into a latrine.
    In the forty-two days that they had been here, Farrell and Sinclair had barely spoken. They were both in shock, and both were quite unable to comprehend what was going on around them. Days had passed where not more than two words would be grunted between them. Farrell took to staring through the gap in the boarded window at the front of the house, watching the churned-up street as if waiting for a parade to arrive, some kind of parade that only the Devil himself could bring. Ex-military, Sela Sinclair lost herself in a punishing fitness regime, exercising obsessively, well into the night. At least, she thought, if we do get attacked I’ll stand a chance.
    She was doing push-ups, listening to the sound of distant drums, when Farrell called her to the window.
    “Sela? Come quick, look.”
    Sinclair expelled a hard breath as she curtailed her routine, wiping sweat from her neck and underarms on a dirt-stained towel as she made her way across the cramped front room, boards creaking as she walked.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    Farrell sat motionless at the window, and the sunlight painted a single stripe across the bridge of his nose where it cut through the gap in the boards. “Someone’s coming, I think,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
    Sinclair looked at him, the way his body had become more like skin wrapping over bones these past few weeks. “Blue’s people?” she asked as she stepped closer to the gap in the window and peered outside.
    Farrell shook his head briefly. “I don’t think so. See there? Look.”
    Sinclair peered through the gap in the window, feeling the thin draft of air stabbing against her face with the constancy of a knife. It was late morning out there, the bright sun burning against the ruined landscape. Bushes and ferns lined the center strip of the old road, their leaves fluttering in the breeze. One clutch of bushes rustled, and Sinclair watched as a white cat came bounding out of them chasing after some insect or other, its prey’s wings glistening with the rainbow sheen of oil on water as it took flight.
    It was quiet after that, quiet and still, but Sinclair could still hear the noise of the drums.
    “You hear that?” Sinclair asked, tilting her head unconsciously, the way a dog might. “Music.”
    To her it sounded like the drumbeats of a marching band on parade, and it sounded real distant. It was like hearing the ocean before you could see it, that constant batting noise as the waves crashed against the shore, the heartbeat of the world.
    Farrell looked at her, eyes narrowed. “I don’t hear anything,” he admitted with confusion. They had been holed up here for more than a month now and he had noticed how sometimes Sinclair would stop and listen to something he couldn’t hear;