Emma: Part Three Read Online Free PDF Page B

the cement. “I used my clothes and tried to push it all back inside, but I’m not sure it worked.”
    “You did the right thing.” Max was impressed by the way she had remained calm throughout this entire ordeal.
    “Here.” Butch, his voice tight with pain, tossed a package at them. “It’s a chem-light. It won’t be much help, but she’ll be able to see enough.”
    “Thanks.” Leila smiled back at him before tearing into the package with her teeth and snapping the chem-light in half. The eerie yellow-green glow lit up her face. She clamped the light stick between her teeth and started digging through the first aid kit.
    Together, they wrapped and packed the gaping slash in Butler’s belly. It was bloody, miserable work, and in the back of his mind, Max knew it was too late. Leila’s expression told him she knew the man was too far gone, but she didn’t stop working. Like him, she wanted to try. Butler deserved that.
    “Found it,” Chloe announced as she dragged a heavy bag of supplies back to their location. She held a battery-operated lantern in the other. Her ax was resting on top of the heavy bag. Grim nosed at the nylon duffel in search of food but Chloe waved him away from it. “Get!”
    “You can stay with your soldier.” Leila wiped at her hands with a couple of packaged wipes. “I’ll deal with the other one.”
    “The other one has a name,” Butch said with a groan.
    “I know.” She knelt down beside him and started working on his injured thigh. “I just don’t care.”
    “Harsh.” Butch hissed when she ripped open his cargo pants with a sharp knife she’d plucked from a sheath on her hip and started prodding the wound with her fingers.
    “Smart,” she countered. “Men like you? You’re trouble. I have no interest in getting to know any of you. You’re all just cyborgs to me.”
    Butch laughed darkly at that but kept still as Leila bandaged his wounds. Chloe handed out water and then turned the cranks on the battery-operated lanterns while they waited for the bombing to end and the all clear to sound. Max slid down to his ass and stretched out his legs next to Butler. He couldn’t get a read on Butler’s med chip. It had been too badly damaged. Gripping the soldier’s hand, he kept his fingers on the man’s thready pulse and listened to the increasingly ragged and weak breaths escaping his throat.
    When Leila was finished, she sat on the other side of Butler and took his free hand. For all her talk about not getting close to cyborgs, she seemed unable to let Butler die without showing him kindness or warmth. Watching her with his dying soldier, he thought of her brother. The boy was dead, and she didn’t even know it. Unless Chloe let it slip, he didn’t plan to say a word. The last thing he needed was for her to breakdown.
    “Tell me about the tunnels,” he said, his voice low as Chloe talked quietly with Butch.
    “Back before the war—years before the war—they used to run drugs up from Mexico through these tunnels.” Leila reached out for Grim as her grizzly beast belly-crawled toward her. “After the war, people hid out here. They survived like moles for years, but eventually, the food ran out and the drought hit and then it started.”
    “It?”
    “They ate each other,” Chloe piped up from a few feet away. “They started with the old people and worked their way down until there wasn’t any fresh meat left. That’s when they started farming their food.”
    Max wrinkled his nose with distaste. “Farming?”
    “Like hogs,” Chloe explained. “They kept the young women penned up and used them for—well—you know. The ones who couldn’t get pregnant? They went to the slaughter.”
    “That way,” Leila indicated with a wave of the chem-light, “you can still see the old farrowing pens.”
    He frowned. “Farrowing pens?”
    “Hogs,” Leila explained. “The pens where they birth hogs are called farrowing pens. That’s basically how they treated