Into the Badlands Read Online Free Page A

untouched for years. This was good. The basement smelled musty and dank, as if the air around them had absorbed the stagnant history of the past three years.
    The pair entered into a small, unfinished room, framed in with the same partially finished walls. Jim stayed close behind in the darkness so as to not get separated. If there was one thing they had learned it was that staying together was critical to their survival.
    Three years ago, when the infection quickly became a global pandemic, virtually all the survivors fled to the coasts like rats from a sinking ship. At the time, Dave and Sandy had been married for only a month. Living close to the eastern shoreline they had little distance to travel to make it to the coast and settle into what they thought would be only a temporary shelter.
    Weeks became months, then months became years. The infected didn't die off as has been predicted. They adapted, learned to hunt, and the infection, although devastating psychologically, turned out not to be fatal. Some of them almost still seemed to possess at least some humanity, despite their behavior and appearance.
    Dave had openly disagreed with their border town’s leadership. He was outspoken, even vehement. A folly of youth, in retrospect. That attitude and behavior had landed him few supporters within the town. Once they struck up a friendship with Jim, who was openly gay, things went bad very quickly. Before long they were framed for theft of town supplies. Punishment was severe: expulsion into the land outside the town’s fences: into the Badlands. Dave couldn’t prove it, but he felt the town council had found a convenient way to get rid of three of their problems in one fell swoop.
    Once outside the town's fences the three outcasts found themselves wandering from one abandoned house to another, from grocery store to gas station, from truck stop to motel, all across an infected no man's land that had once been known as the Midwestern United States. If any form of government still existed it was absent from this dismal wasteland; the concept long ago forgotten, abandoned, or just dead. They survived for over a year on luck, teamwork, and determination.
    Now two-thirds of that team stood in the basement of a long-abandoned house, searching for anything that could be used to buy them another day in hell. Dave kept the flashlight trained on the path in front of him. He raised the beam, then stopped.
    In front of him, within the wooden skeleton of a room that would never be finished, an unknown tragedy had played out. Two corpses occupied the room; desiccated, frozen, slowly rotting, captured in the final scene of a macabre and horrible play. A woman, chained to the concrete wall, her head gone from the jaw up. The feeble beam cast by the flashlight showed dark stains on the wall behind her.
    A flick of the beam caught sight of another corpse; a man, sitting in a rocking chair. His head was gone; only a jagged stump and a partial jawbone remained.
    It didn't take long for Dave to understand what had happened; a husband carrying out a grim duty in the seclusion of a forgotten basement. She'd been infected; he hadn't. He'd ended her suffering, then he'd ended his own. Not a single person living knew this had even happened, this final act of bravery at the end of the world.
    “Holy shit,” Jim said quietly from behind him as he gazed upon the gruesome scene.
    “Yeah,” Dave replied.
    “Dave?” Sandy called from the top of the steps. “Is everything okay down there?”
    “We're fine,” Dave replied. “You?”
    “I'm getting nervous up here by myself. What'd you find down there?”
    After the horror they'd seen in the last house he wasn't sure if Sandy would be able to handle this too. “You might not want to see this.”
    A pause. “Oh no, not again.”
    “No, not that,” Dave replied, “but still, it's not pleasant.”
    Sandy hadn’t seemed to be able to adjust to life after the outbreak, much less life on the run