Madness Rules - 04 Read Online Free PDF Page A

candle.”
    “That sounds … nice,” she said, making a funny face.
    He smiled and ruffled her hair.
    “We’ll figure something out.”
    She smiled too. “Okay.” She looked up at the huge touring bike sitting on the back of the truck. “What should we do with that?”
    “We keep it.”
    “Why?”
    “Insurance, in case we break down or run out of gas. It’s got two seats and enough room for our packs.”
    “But aren’t motorcycles dangerous?”
    He laughed. “We’re wandering a wasteland of zombies, criminals, and wild animals and you’re worried about a motorcycle.”
    “Aha! So they are zombies.”
    “Just a figure of speech.”
    He swung the truck door open and climbed in, fumbling with the ring of keys until he found the right one. Samantha climbed up beside him. He gave the key a turn and, after a moment, the engine turned over. The fuel gauge was barely above the empty line.
    “We’re not going to get far unless we can find some gas.”
    She bounced up and down on the seat a few times.
    “I don’t like this truck, anyway,” she said. “The springs are poking me in the butt.”
    “So quit bouncing on them.”
    “I’m just saying that it’s not as comfortable as our last car.”
    “Maybe not, but it’s better than a tractor. Baby steps, darlin’.”
    Tanner popped the truck into gear, and they eased out of the gravel parking lot.
    CHAPTER
    3
    Lincoln Pike stared at himself in the small cabin mirror. His reflection was clear but slightly warped because of a bow in the polished glass.
    “President Lincoln Pike,” he said in a regal voice, as if introducing himself to a room full of admiring subjects. He liked the sound of it. President Lincoln Pike . It sort of rolled off the tongue like a witty compliment to a beautiful woman.
    He smoothed back his mane of salt and pepper hair, admiring its thickness and vitality. His mother had told him that a man with a full head of hair will go places that a bald one will not. And by God, she had been right. He had gone all the way to the top. Admittedly, it was to the top of a nation that was a shadow of its former self, but that in no way took from his ascension. He was, at least in his own mind, the most important and powerful man alive.
    He closed his eyes for a moment, replaying the past week. His spy, and clandestine lover, Yumi Tanaka, had murdered President Rosalyn Glass. Cut her throat, as he had heard it told. Pike couldn’t imagine why Yumi had done something so drastic. She had always hated President Glass, but she also understood that killing her would be the end of everything they had built together. All he could surmise was that Yumi’s actions must have been driven by necessity. That likely meant that she had killed the president to protect him. Yumi was, if nothing else, loyal to a fault.
    He had desperately wanted to see the president’s butchered body but could never quite find a way to make the request without it sounding weird, disturbed even. Then without warning, General Carr had had the body cremated and her ashes dumped from a military C130 like sewage from a jetliner—which in retrospect, seemed fitting enough.
    Pike had, however, gone to see Yumi’s corpse in Mount Weather’s small morgue. Her cold body lay stretched out, naked under a white sheet, and he remembered feeling embarrassed for her. But shame was not the only thing he felt. There was also pain that reached deep into his gut. Only with her passing did he really begin to understand how important she had been to him. Yumi was quite simply the love of his life. She was an evil bitch to be sure, but she was his evil bitch.
    General Carr had choked the life out of his beloved. Oh sure, the doctors had some complicated terms for the rupturing of her trachea, but the hard truth was that when Carr was finished, her throat looked like a crumpled soda can. He remembered gently touching the purple indents of the general’s fingers on her soft flesh and wondering whether