Left to Darkness by Craig Saunders

Author:Craig Saunders [Saunders, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781940544830
Amazon: 1940544831
Goodreads: 25963275
Publisher: DarkFuse
Published: 2015-07-20T14:00:00+00:00

37

A few minutes later, Frank was breathing hard with sweat pouring through his tattered shirt. He was sore all over, too, but the good kind of sore. The honest kind a person gets from a job well done.

People pieces were strewn all around. Frank stood among them, swaying. He was about ready to pass out on his feet, but he knew more would come. He looked up from the slaughter to find his way, and found himself on his arse atop the little king’s torso. His head swam with fever and exhaustion and the dry, dirty air. His chest heaved as he struggled to breathe, to rise. His axe slipped from his hand. The haft of the axe was covered in blood and hair and other fluids.

Got to get up, Frank. Got to keep going. Got to…

“You look like a man who could murder a cigarette,” said a voice to his right. Instantly, the slippery axe was in Frank’s left hand again, drawn back over his head. Ready as ever.

But it was just an old guy sitting on a rare unburned tire. Just out of reach of Frank’s weapon. Naked as the day he’d been born, a kind of unabashed nakedness, like this was the old man’s natural state, like he’d look out of place with clothes on.

That’s…weird, thought Frank. His mind felt slow, sluggish…half-dead, truth be told. But he wasn’t so far over into delirium that he thought for one moment the old naked guy was any kind of hallucination. There was something about the man that was…hyper-real.

The old guy had a good bit of stubble. Looked healthy, not strong. About normal for an old guy, Frank reckoned.

Smoker, though. Taking chances. Frank almost laughed at his own thought process. What the fuck? Worrying about the old guy’s chances of cancer?

Plus, you know…old naked guy in the middle of a dead city, smoking a cigarette like nothing mattered, grinning at a man with one hand who held a bloody axe in the rough center of a circle of mutilated corpses.

Careful, Frank’s rare mind cautioned. Time to be really, really, fucking careful. He lowered the axe, because if the old guy wasn’t worried about the scenario, then Frank knew he sure as shit better be.

“Smoke or not?” offered the guy a second time. The guy’s teeth, Frank noted, were perfectly white.

Strike two, thought Frank, despite his fever.

Either this is some deep delirium trip, or something’s rotten in Denmark.

Frank’s childhood had been steeped in superstition, religion, folklore.

Old naked guy, untouched in the middle of Armageddon? Staring at a man holding an axe in the middle of a pile of bodies and body parts, not even looking at those bodies? Casual, unafraid…clean?

It stank, all right.

Have a care, he thought again.

“Thanks for the offer,” said Frank. “Don’t smoke, though. Bad for your health.”

“Everyone’s got something, though, right? Gotta have a vice.”

“Vice? I don’t think so,” said Frank. He shrugged. What’s a vice, after all? Something you take pleasure from, while others try to make

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