Max Quick: The Bane of the Bondsman (Max Quick Series Book 3) by Jeffrey Mark

Author:Jeffrey, Mark [Jeffrey, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT DAY was a day of wind and sun.

The air had a bite to it, a sharpness, a tang, like the snap of a ripe apple. And the wind was utterly brutal, driven by the round red sun that sizzled in the deep blue above. It drilled into Max, penetrating every layer of clothing he wore. In response, he pulled his hoodie up over his head and tied it tight — but even this didn’t make a difference. The cold sought him out, soaked into his very bones.

Before long, however, the forest ended abruptly, dumping Max out onto fresh pavement. A tar road snaked up the edge of a mountainside. He could see the Nurvenback Ridge in the distance: he was now well outside of the boundaries of Camp Griswold and had entered another region of mountains not on the map.

Max pushed his burning legs forward: up, up the mountain road for several long hours. The clouded deeps above were unnaturally huge here in this place. So were the peaks on either side. Jagged jigsaws of rock sliced the sky.

The air was sharp and cold. And thin! Max breathed in gasped, ragged breaths. Part of that was exertion of walking up the steady and steep incline for hours, of course. But it was also the altitude.

The whole earth seemed tilted here.

Thankfully he soon reached the quaint village of Raffle’s Pass, just as Romani had promised. It was filled with austere cottages and stores. Old stacked bricks and semi-crooked wooden buildings were everywhere — as well as the smell of fire and crackling logs.

Yet, the Bondsman’s influence did not seem to soak Raffle’s Pass as completely as other places he had seen, Max thought. And that gave him some hope. Apart from the color drained from the fabric of reality itself, this might have been a normal, small American town from the original timeline.

Nevertheless, Max pulled up his hoodie so that it covered much of his face. He wasn’t going to take any chances on being recognized.

Not to say that Bondsman’s influence wasn’t here, of course. His masked, logo-ized golden face looked down from street signs, billboards and windows. And there, just before the treeline, the rotating hoops of one of the mini-Machines spun and pulsed like a mad heart, making Max wince with his newly-sensitized vision.

He entered a small convenience store called The Raffle Quartermaster.

He asked the woman who worked there where he was. No, not the name of the town now. He wanted to know what it had been called before the time of the Bondsman. Max suspected all the towns had changed their names — he was trying to get a bearing on where in the United States he might actually be.

“What ever do you mean?” the woman said loudly and nervously, looking around the store. “It’s never had another name! It’s always been called Raffle’s Pass!”

The lie in her voice hit Max like a shriek. It cut through his eardrum like the sharp warble of a siren.

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