Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

off.”
    “What’s he saying?” Brandon said.
    “I’m not sure.” John asked him to clarify , after which the man burst into tears.
    “He’s gone crazy,” Brandon observed, offering his clinical assessment.
    John scanned the forest on either side of the road, then up ahead and behind them. There was no sign of anyone else. He opened the door and stepped out. His gut told him this wasn’t an ambush, since it hardly seemed reasonable that a man would wait for a vehicle to come along in a post-EMP world.
    “Take the AR and cover me from here,” he told the boy , who did so by leaning slightly out the passenger window.
    It was one thing being sure this wasn’t an ambush, but another thing altogether not taking the proper precautions in case he was wrong.
    The man in the middle of the road was still sobbing. His clothes were ripped and it was clear someone had beaten him, possibly even left him for dead.
    “You’re bleeding,” John said.
    “My son,” the man said. “I’m looking for my son.”
    “Where did you leave him?”
    A string of drool ran down his chin. “I didn’t. He was taken from me.”
    Chills ran down John’s spine. He checked his surr oundings again, to calm the creeping feeling that they were being watched.
    “Do you know who did this to you?”
    The man nodded.
    “Okay, come with us.”
    He ushered the man into the back of the truck, checking him quickly for knives or weapons and finding none.
    A second later they were off again, rolling down Carson Hill Road with a million questions coursing through John’s head. He still wasn’t sure what the source of the man’s wound was, or if the blood was even his. Sitting in the back, the man pulled his hand down over his face in an effort to clean away the tears and dribble.
    “What’s your name ?” John asked.
    He drew in a deep breath. “Gary Bertolino. Thank you for stopping to help. Seems decent people are getting scarcer and scarcer these days.”
    “I couldn’t just leave a bloodied man on the side of the road. Where are you from , Gary?” John wondered if perhaps the man had been in one of the waves of golden horders who’d fled the city.
    “I have a house in Oneida and a cabin on Owens Ridge. Once the lights went out and the cars stopped working, my wife and son and I packed a few supplies together and made our way east.”
    “You walked here from Oneida?”
    Gary shook his head. He was a skinny man who floated in his clothes and moving his head only accentuated the impression. “We rode our bikes. It wasn’t further than twenty miles or so and I knew our cabin would be as safe a place as any to ride out the storm. Least, I thought it would be.” His face crumpled with fresh tears.
    “I need you to hold it together for me , Gary. We’ve lost people too and I need your help to figure out who did this.”
    Gary was pawing at the blood on his shirt as though he were seeing it for the first time. “All I know is that a bunch of men in trucks came onto our property and told us to hand over our firearms.”
    “What?”
    “Yessir. They waved around a piece of paper that looked official enough. Had the president’s seal on it. You know that thing on the carpet in the Oval Office?”
    “Yeah, I know it.”
    “Well, these guys looked real official, wearing black cargo pants and armed to the teeth. Said the governor for this district had sent them to disarm the local population by order of the president.”
    “ Governor for this district,” John spat, hating the way the words sounded. “That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
    “ You said it. I told them as much too. They replied that I could keep one pistol and fifty rounds of ammo. ‘How am I gonna hunt?’ That’s what I asked them. And you know what they said? ‘That’s what the pistol’s for.’ You ever tried hunting with a pistol?”
    John shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”
    “Course not, ’cause I can see you’ve got a good head on your