Bloodlands Read Online Free PDF

. . . I didn’t want to give name to it. But something lingered in the way he was watching me.
    And what did he see exactly? A tallish twenty-three-year-old woman with red hair sawed off to the jaw by frequent knife cutting for the ease of care, her eyes narrowed in eternal distrust and self-loathing. A flinty hostess sheathed in dusty garb and an impregnable attitude.
    His smile . . . For some reason, I thought it meant that he appreciated the way I looked. It made me want to peer into my rarely used mirror to see what he saw, to discern if I’d changed somehow since the last time I’d checked. It’d been a long time since anyone had told me I was pretty.
    I glanced away from the stranger . . . Gabriel. With harsh reluctance, I tucked my revolver into its holster. Then I fixed my gaze right back on him, letting him know that even though there was one less gun in his face, I’d still have it handy.
    Chaplin woofed softly. He was chiding me for being prickly.
    Hell, since when had he gone lax? Oh, yeah—right when the stranger had shown up.
    “I look forward to the rest of your story, Mr. Gabriel,” I said, prickly indeed.
    “Just . . .” The stranger’s smile disappeared. “. . . Gabriel.”
    “At the risk of keeping you awake, can you at least tell me why you’re in the New Badlands, in the middle of the nowheres? It’s not on many itineraries.”
    He sighed, as if willing to give up this one last inch. “I’ve been passing through what’s left of the States for . . . well, it’d be about twenty-five months now. After everything that’s gone down the last twenty-odd years . . .” He paused. “I lost my family in the epidemic way back when, and though I haven’t been wandering all that long, I never did find any place to root since they died. Not with substitute families, not with anything much.”
    The mosquito epidemic. I softened at this; a lot of people had lost their loved ones then. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Afterward, everything fell apart. But you already know.”
    A burn stung my throat. I knew.
    His words were weighed with something I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I didn’t want to, anyway, since Gabriel wouldn’t be round long enough for it to matter.
    “I guess I’ve been . . . searching . . . for a while, even when I stayed in one place. Now I think I’ve found somewhere quiet—what people call the New Badlands since the original ones were wiped away by that freak earthquake that came before the West Coast attack. I suppose the name of this place had a noble ring to it for me.” Slowly, he slipped his flask into the bag, then kept one hand on it. “But more importantly, I heard there might be a chance for survival and keeping to myself out here.”
    This wasn’t good. The community had taken in stragglers before, but it’d been closed off to any more newcomers for about a year now. Circumstances—our very existences—had . . . well, required it. It didn’t matter if Gabriel turned out to be the greatest man in history or not, he wouldn’t be invited to stay.
    Then the bigger implications of what he was saying barreled into my brain: Just how much had he heard about the New Badlands? How many others out there knew that there were dwellers here, and when would they be coming, too?
    My skin bristled with its hair standing on end. Gabriel. Dangerous.
    I tried to let him know that this was no paradise. “Since word is that the government went bankrupt during all that economic sanction trouble with India, we heard that there haven’t been U.S. satellite sweeps here.” That was the most recent update from the last visitor we had, anyway, but I didn’t want to talk about her. “We heard rumors of mercenary investors from different parts of the globe bailing out our treasury, and we’ve been fearing that the sweeps will start up again.”
    “Those rumors about the investors are true enough, though I don’t know if the government’s secured any satellite