Spirits of the Earth: The Complete Series: (A Post-Apocalyptic Series Box Set: Books 1-3) by Milo Fowler (paper ebook reader .TXT) 📕

creating a barrier to impede the progress of the hordes still on the way. If we can slow them down enough in their advance, we should be able to dispatch the ones who climb over without being overwhelmed by their numbers. In theory, anyway.

"How many?" I cast over my shoulder as three more daemons lunge my way.

Shechara swings her empty rifle like a baseball bat, crushing daemon skulls with a vengeance. We work together, sending the slain creatures toward Samson's macabre pile.

"I can't count them. They keep coming." She seems resigned to the fact that we're going to die in here.

"We will survive this." I make eye contact with her, but her gaze is vacant, her face spattered with blood. I wish I hadn't told her to save a round. A bullet to the brain would be better than dying at the hands of these monsters, but only as a last resort. "We will survive!"

She screams as a blow lands between my shoulder blades, driving me to the concrete. The daemon wields Samson's fallen rifle, swinging it downward like an axe, aiming to crack open my skull. I roll to the side, and the stock crashes against the floor centimeters away from its target. Two others fall upon me, biting at the air in front of my face as I hold them off. Their eyes bulge fiercely, excitedly. They know they have me. The one with the rifle uses it to pin my left forearm to the ground. I swing my right, punching and slashing at their hideous faces. One manages to grab hold of my wrist with both hands, and I'm unable to wrest it free. They grunt loudly in victory. Then they close in on my exposed torso with fangs bared for feasting.

I grit my teeth and pull my legs up, thrusting with my right heel. It makes contact, striking the pouch-like chin of the one holding my wrist. The impact stuns it for a moment, and I jerk my right hand free, using my claws to slice through its hamstring. With a garbled wail, it falls to one knee. The other one dives at my throat, but a shot rings out. The bullet punctures the back of its head with a burst of blood, sending it to the floor in a heap. The one with the rifle turns on Shechara, and she pulls the trigger again. But there is no round in the chamber this time, and it clicks empty. The daemon grunts something like a laugh and brandishes the rifle overhead, prepared to strike.

I heave myself upward and lash out with both hands, tearing open the thick flesh on the daemon's back. It drops the rifle instantly and collapses, screaming, into my open arms. I grasp its deformed head and prepare to break its neck quickly—

A light pulses near its collarbone, red, the same as before. The daemon struggles against me, but I hold it still, incapacitated, its arms dangling uselessly.

"Shechara, look." She stares at me, but I'm not certain she sees anything. She may be in shock. "Look here. What do you see?"

She doesn't approach. She doesn't need to. "A red light."

What could it be?

"While I'm honored—" Samson grunts as he beats a daemon senseless with its own severed limbs. "—that you apparently think I can take on all these freaks by myself—" He plants his fist through the gaping face of another. "It'd be awful nice if you could lend a hand or two!"

I break the daemon's neck and watch the light dim to black. Then I join my brother. The stack of bodies now extends the full width of the tunnel, over a meter high. The daemons continue to clamber over it as if driven by some unseen force, unhindered by the havoc they meet on our side.

"You'd think they would get the idea—" He rips the head off one of them and winces in the sudden spray. "—that coming this way is a really bad idea."

I slash through the next two that descend upon us. "I don't believe they're acting on their own volition." I shove the bodies away.

He scowls at me, then tears apart the next three daemons in quick succession. "What do you mean?"

"They're being controlled." Shechara stands beside us with a thin strip of metal in her hand, blood covering her fingers. "Somehow." She points at what looks like a micro-transmitter of some kind. The blinking light.

"They're all wearing those things?"

She nods. "Around their necks." She reaches toward one of the bodies stacked before us and pries away the fold of rotten hide at the base of its neck. The steel collar is clear to see.

Samson curses, staring at the device. Absently, he breaks the neck of a daemon that drops in on us. "So... Who's pulling the strings?"

"One guess," I manage, tugging my claws free of a fresh corpse.

"Captain Freakshow." He nods. "What kind of jerk-off does...this?" He gestures at the collar with both hands. "I mean, if he wanted to kill us, he had plenty of opportunity while we were in that weird-ass apartment."

"I don't believe that to be his intention here. I don't know what he wants, but his men made no attempt to shoot us down when we escaped. It was as if they wanted us to head down this tunnel." I keep my voice low. Willard said he couldn't hear us through his radio-speaker, but to say I don't trust him at this point would be a serious understatement.

"Why would he keep us alive only to trap us in here?" Shechara stares at the collar in her hand.

"He's testing us," I say aloud before I have a chance to weigh my words.

Samson takes out the next pair of daemons with a single right hook that shatters their jaws like a train crashing through glass. "Testing? For what?"

I don't know. But I have a feeling Willard somehow knows about our gifts, even though he and his men don't seem to exhibit any themselves. His talk