Bloodlands Read Online Free PDF Page B

coverage.”
    “What I’m saying is that this place probably won’t be any more private than others, come the future.”
    “ You’ve remained unscathed,” Gabriel said.
    I wouldn’t get into personal stuff with him. “Supposedly,” I said, still trying to scare him off, “Stamp heard about the so-called serenity, just like you. And the water, too.”
    “Stamp?”
    I nodded. “Johnson Stamp probably sent that goon you just chased away.”
    It looked like Gabriel was turning the name over in his mind. Then he seemed to store it away and move on. “At any rate, I came out here to see if this was what I’ve been needing in life. I might be mistaken, though, based on the trouble that’s already greeted me.”
    “You mean those injuries?” I motioned toward his healing face, injecting the right amount of suspicion into my voice.
    Gabriel nodded, and when Chaplin tilted his head in sympathy, the man laughed, reaching out to pet the dog. Chaplin, of course, reveled in it.
    Affection whore, I thought, trying not to feel envious, because Chaplin had always been my friend.
    “How I got bloodied up is an involved tale.” Gabriel cleared his throat, as if losing the words. “I was only resting out of the sunlight when they found me, just before dark was about to slant down.”
    Folks hardly went outside here without heat suits—which he didn’t seem to own—during the day anymore. The weather could be that hellish, but probably that was why he’d been resting out of the light and traveling by night.
    “The next thing I knew,” he said, “I was yanked out of my cave and roughed up for straying onto someone’s claimed property.”
    “You couldn’t see who it was?”
    “Not with the scarlet in my eyes.”
    The reference to red made me dig my nails into my palms. Blood, attacks. Bad guys everywhere, even in the places you least expected them to be.
    “This stinks of Stamp’s guys,” I said. “Word has it they’ll mess with anyone they find on the surface round here. Their boss doesn’t seem to exercise much control over them.”
    “So you don’t go out there often.” Gabriel was rubbing Chaplin’s neck, bringing the dog to the throes of ecstasy.
    “Only a few of my neighbors do—unless we’re gathered somewhere else.”
    I jerked my chin toward the east wall, where more visz screens showcased the sparse common area in a cavern not far from my home. Everyone had a tunnel leading there, although few had been using them to meet in the open.
    Not until lately.
    Propping himself up to see better, Gabriel stopped petting Chaplin for a moment. The dog scratched out a paw in entreaty, and our guest grinned, then resumed his work, much to the whore’s satisfaction.
    Unable to watch much more, I went over to a screen that showed a middle-aged woman and a stocky, dark-haired man near the same age sitting at a rickety crate table. Zel Hopkins and Sammy Ramos, two fellow Badlanders who’d recently started to venture into the common area since Stamp’s arrival. Unlike with the outside visz lenses, Stamp hadn’t found this secluded gathering spot yet, so Sammy and Zel obviously felt secure in meeting there tonight.
    I turned up the volume; doing so would automatically lower the feeds from the other viszes.
    The sound of chatter emerged from the speaker. Earlier, when I’d been listening in, they’d talked about how one of Stamp’s guys—a spindly-legged youth whom Zel had nicknamed “Twiggy”—had been slaughtered last night. I’d turned down the sound, not wanting to hear more because it revved up something vengeful and bloodthirsty in me.
    Bad guys getting their due. A reckoning. Justice.
    I lowered the volume again. “This is the common area. Back when we all found each other and decided to settle in a tight community, Dad connected viszes to this spot where a few Badlanders used to gather. They stopped meeting for a while”—here, I took care to keep myself controlled and subtle, even if Chaplin