The Vault (A Farm Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

indefinitely on a population this large. But the Ticks ate their way through it in less than a day. Far less, based on how badly the bodies are already decomposing.
    This is the scene that awaits me when I return to El Corazon. I don’t want anything sneaking up on me, so I park a couple blocks away from the square and walk in. I hope to get a sense of where the Ticks are—something I would never be able to do from the moving car.
    When I climb out of the car, Chuy hops out after me. I point back to the front seat. “Stay.”
    He just looks at me.
    “Whatever.” Maybe I would be able to make him obey, but I have bigger things to worry about. “I don’t like dogs,” I remind him. “And if you lag behind, I’ll leave you here.”
    He must understand, because he falls in step beside me, close enough that his fur brushes against the backs of my fingers as I walk. It’s weirdly comforting, as I face the scene before me, the senseless death. The waste of precious resources. I don’t mourn the people. They were their own kind of monsters. But I’m disgusted nevertheless.
    Beside me, Chuy stops, his fur bristling, in the same moment my own internal warning bells go off. We are not alone.
    Sebastian is still alive. I can hear his buzz in the air. Faint, low. Weak. But still there.
    And of course there are the Ticks, too. They have not traveled on, even though they are out of food. They are too sated to bother moving. I work my way through town, stopping every once in a while to triangulate their position. They’re in a house. Outside the square. Maybe more than one. It’s still day, so they are sleeping. I can’t get a sense of how many there are, which probably means there are too many for me to easily take on.
    Which means I will try to deal with Sebastian first. The devil I know before the monsters I don’t.
    The stench of day-old blood churns my gut. I would retch, but my stomach is empty. I haven’t eaten since I killed the girl outside the Farm. Soon the air is thick with flies, and their buzzing drowns out the hum of the Ticks where they sleep. A block from the square and the buzz is like a roar in the air, overpowering even Sebastian’s sounds.
    I can only hope he is where I left him, pinned to the ground on the green by the gazebo. If he has managed to free himself and crawl away, I don’t know how I’ll find him.
    I keep waiting for my vampire berserker rage to kick in. For the fury that dances along my nerves and lights my blood. I keep waiting for it to guide me to him, but it doesn’t.
    What if it’s gone? What if he’s gone?
    I can’t hear him anymore over the buzz of the flies. I can’t feel his presence. No pulsing anger driving me to ferret him out. To stab him through the heart and rip him limb from limb. Not even a tingle of annoyance.
    Is he dead?
    In the time it’s taken me to walk through El Corazon, has he died?
    Something like grief hits me. How is that possible? How can I grieve for someone that I barely knew? How can I mourn him when I haven’t even mourned the life I had before him?
    My pace quickens. I run the last block, which is better anyway, because then I don’t have to see the carnage and waste. I round a corner, nearly stumble on a body, but catch myself before I can fall and then I’m leaping over the patches of ground where the bodies are too thick to walk through. Did anyone in town make it? Anyone at all?
    I slow down as I reach the center square, dread pulling at my feet. There on the green, beneath the sprawling live oak, I can see the two bodies. Roberto’s petite and headless body is sprawled out. In life, he was as fragile and as lovely as an angel. Or maybe one of Tolkien’s elves. Now he is headless and lifeless. I can’t make myself look at him, knowing that when I die—someday in the distant future—this is how I will go.
    It’s Sebastian’s body I’ve come to see or save if I can.
    He is still there, as I somehow knew he would be, the stake I thrust