Deadlocked 5 Read Online Free PDF

disinfect utensils.
    'Greens' was the term used to refer to people born after the apocalypse, and 'Reds' were the ones born before. As time moved on, the world was running low on Reds.
    The Greens I traded with for the alcohol had been nice enough, and were eager to trade for the skins. They wanted me to stay with them and tried to convince me to partake in the 'Shine' I'd bought from them. I wasn't buying it for pleasure, unfortunately. My nomadic lifestyle prevented me from settling in any place long enough to make alcohol with any sort of regularity, making it far more precious to me than it was to others; certainly too precious to waste by drinking.
    I dabbed the potent alcohol onto a rag and cleaned my wound first. I didn't want to give the zombie's saliva enough time to seep into my blood. He didn't do much more than break the skin, but I wasn't going to take chances.
    Next, I pulled Stubs into my lap and flipped him on his right side so his wound faced up. He squiggled as I held him down and then yipped as I pressed the rag against his cuts. I had to pour a little more alcohol on it to clean the wound to the point where I could see how serious the infection had become. Luckily, it was fresh and only a slight infection had set in, but it was large enough that it needed stitches.
    Stubs finally got pissed off at me the first time I pushed the needle through his skin. He never bit me though, which was a surprise. He just quivered in my lap like some dying child succumbing to fever, and occasionally glanced up at me with angry eyes and bared teeth. When I was done, I set him down and he immediately began licking at his leg.
    "Don't," I said and tried to stop him. "You're going to pull the stitches out." He ignored me and went right back to licking them the second I let him loose.
    I shouldn't have wasted the stitches on him to begin with. I'd found them in a medical kit in the back of a decrepit ambulance a few months back and had been lucky enough not to need them until now. Most emergency vehicles had been scavenged through over a decade ago, and to find one with even a few strips of gauze and stitches left inside was nothing short of a miracle.
    Raiders and traders had long ago scavenged all the useful items out of most places. In the interest of keeping their economy strong, they burned down stores after they looted them to ensure that no one else ever found something useful there. Traders always insisted that they had no part in the burning of stores, and blamed the destruction on raiders, but I'd seen enough of them leaving smoldering ruins in my day to know differently. They were invested in ensuring they were the only ones that had an abundance of supplies.
    I was already keeping a tally in my head of the trade value that Stubs had cost me so far. The alcohol I'd used to clean his wound was worth at least a pelt, and the stitches could've been traded for a cup of berries or a shot glass of grain with most of the caravans I'd encountered recently.
    Stubs sneezed and looked at me as if shocked by the sound he'd made. He shook his head and then pawed at his ear before crawling on his belly across the bedroll to me.
    "I guess I could use someone to talk to." I picked him up and held him over my head. He snorted as he looked around, and then sneezed, sending a glop of snot down on my face. "But you're going to have to stop doing that, and you're going to have to learn how to be quiet too. I don't need some barking twerp giving me away everywhere I go. Got it?" I wiped my face off on my sleeve as I continued to hold the dog over me.
    He licked his nose and stared down at me with one of his eyes, the other looking somewhere off to the side. I set him on the floor and dug into my backpack again to retrieve a strip of salted beef that I'd wrapped in cheesecloth. I used the head of my wood cutting axe to slice off a piece of the meat and then bit it into a smaller piece that I threw to Stubs. It bounced off his face, proving