Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 by James Harden Page B

asleep.
    Unfortunately, sleep does not last long
enough.
    It never does these days.
    The car comes to an abrupt stop, waking me.
I don’t think I was fully asleep, but I wasn’t fully awake. I had been in this
weird in-between state, half aware of my surroundings, half-asleep. One foot in
the dream world. One foot in the real world.
    “What is it?” I ask, rubbing my eyes,
shielding them from the setting sun. “What’s wrong?”
    My first instinct is that something is
wrong, even though I have been asleep, even though I have no idea what’s going
on. This is my first instinct because something is always wrong. Nothing is
ever right.
    Sarah leans forward, looking out the front
windshield. “Where are we?”
    Marko turns the engine off. “Need oil. Car won’t
make it otherwise.”
    “Plus, this place has got plenty of
supplies,” Billy adds. “Food. Medicine.”
    “What kind of mine site is it?” Kenji asks.
    “Wait,” I say. “This is a mine site?”
    “Yeah,” Marko answers. “I think it’s a coal
mine. But I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, the reason they’ve got so much stuff
on hand is because this particular mine relied one hundred percent on FIFO
workers. These are guys that fly in from all over the country, they work for
three weeks straight, and then fly out. They go home for a week. Rinse, repeat.
So all the workers, right? They all had to sleep and live on site. And that
means plenty of supplies for us. We’ve found some really good stuff here
before.”
    I remember Maria and I had come across a
guy who said he was a FIFO worker. We had found him in a barn in the middle of
nowhere. He was dying. He’d been attacked by a nano-swarm. He had just killed
his friend. A mercy killing. And for some reason, he felt the need to tell us
how he had lived his life. It was like this weird deathbed confession.
    He completely opened up to us, Maria and
me, to complete strangers. He even told us that he had cheated on his
girlfriend. I guess he had a guilty conscience.
    Anyway, after he had confessed his sins, he
died.
    I wonder if he’d worked at this mine site.
    “Where’s the actual mine pit?” I ask.
    “Well, according to that sign,” Marko says.
“It’s about a mile away.”
    “Have you checked it out?”
    “We’ve had a quick look at it. But we
haven’t actually driven down into the pit or anything like that. Why do you
ask?”
    “We found a mine site a while back,” I say.
“Smaller than this one, I think. But inside the mine pit, it was full of bones
and animal carcasses. And something else.”
    Marko takes the key out of the ignition and
opens his door. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing like that here.”
    He seems pretty confident that the mine is
actually deserted. And I guess it is. I mean, if it wasn’t, they would’ve been
attacked before. And they probably wouldn’t be so eager to get back here.
    “So what do we need?” Kenji asks.
    “Oil,” Marko says. “For the engine. Maybe
some fuel. If we can find any.”
    “Oil?” I ask. “Have we damaged the engine?
Is it overheated?”
    “Not yet,” Marko answers. “But if I keep
pushing the engine, it will over heat. And trust me, we do not want that. We’ve
still got a long way to go.”
    “And we don’t want to be walking around out
here,” Billy says.
    “If we can find anything else,” Marko adds. “If there’s anything left,
consider it a bonus.”
    Marko had driven the
car to the entrance of the mine’s grounds. We were in front of what used to be
a boom gate for both an entry point and an exit point. Both boom gates had been
snapped off.
    Next to the boom gate
is a solitary signpost with three signs, pointing in three different
directions. The actual mine pit was to our left, and the village, the living
quarters, were to our right. From what I could see, the village appeared to be
made up of demountable, temporary buildings. The cheapest possible
accommodation. The bare necessity. There was an airfield