Turned: A Spine-Chilling Young Adult Apocalyptic Fiction (The Undead Series, Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

town by tonight. The closest one from here is fifteen miles out. I don’t think anything is left of it, but we can find a spot to sleep safely and some food to get us through the night.”
    “I can walk,” I assured him. “You need to conserve your strength in case I get worse.”
    “Retta, I don’t know. Are you sure that’s the best thing to do?”
    “I promise, babe. You know I wouldn’t say anything I didn’t mean.” He nodded, set me down, and pulled a backpack from his arms. Then he pulled out an old but heavy pink sweatshirt with the words California Girl written on it in yellow.
    “Come here,” he said as he gently pulled the sweatshirt over my head. He had also brought me some running shoes, bright blue ones that used to be in style when the world was normal so long ago, and a pair of size five skinny jeans that were at least a size too big for my small and skinny frame.
    “I couldn’t find anything else,” he said. I giggled as I started to change from my dirty jeans into clean jeans in the middle of the woods without giving a damn. Who would see me anyway but a passing squirrel or raccoon? These days, being naked was the least of my concerns. I pulled my jeans down over my knees and grabbed the new jeans from the ground. As I put the last leg in my jeans and pulled them up over my waist, I realized I didn’t have any underwear on. I looked up and Jasper was staring at me down there, but not in a sexual way.
    “Retta...” he said as his mouth melted into a frown.
    “I didn’t want to tell you,” I said, embarrassed, as I buttoned the jeans.
    “He raped you?” Jasper said as he stepped over and held my face in his hands.
    “Yes,” I said, ashamed. “Yes, I’m sorry, Jasper. He chained my wrists and ankles to the bed and raped me. I tried to fight him…I always do…but he always wins. I didn’t want to tell you…I couldn’t.”
    I had managed to escape when Trent left to prepare for the weekly harvest. Apparently, Trent didn’t lock the handcuff on my right wrist all the way. So I managed to get my hand loose, find a safety pin in the drawer and pick the lock on my other wrist. However, I couldn’t get the cuffs on my ankles off so I found a switchblade in the drawer and sawed the wooden pole off of the bed to free my ankles. When I escaped, I snuck to Jasper’s quarters, and we ran away together.
    Jasper couldn’t take the news of the rape. He had no idea Trent was doing it. He released his hands from my face, spun around, and punched the tree beside him as hard as he could, as if it were Trent’s face. I saw the blood drip off of his hands.
    “I’m going back,” he said as he charged forward and his eyes filled with wetness. “I’m going to fucking kill that sick bastard.”
    “You’re going to leave me here?” I cried. I fell down to my knees and sobbed uncontrollably. “I was already left by one man, Jasper! Why would you do this to me? I can’t help what he did to me! I can’t. But if you leave me here now, I’m actually going to die!” Jasper lifted up his legs and kicked the tree. He wrapped his arms around it as if he were going to head butt it stopped short of his forehead going into the tree.
    “I’m not going to leave you, Retta,” he sobbed with his forehead still pressed up again the tree. “I’m not going to leave you, but I will come back here and murder this man once I get you to Paradise.”
    Paradise was the code name for Canada, something Jasper had told me that no one else was supposed to know. According to Jasper, it was the only country that was able to lock down its borders after the virus hit. Apparently, the Canadian government had been letting in survivors from surrounding countries for a while, until the population grew too large and they had to turn people away. Jasper’s old friend was one of the military men protecting the Canadian border in the state of Washington, along with thousands of other Canadian soldiers, and he promised