Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    We each have our jobs and we’re used to doing them by now. We’ll switch after a while to keep alert and make sure we don’t get motion sick from keeping our focus at a set distance. But for now, it’s nice.
    The warmth of the changing season is welcome. This past winter was harsh and long, our spring wet and unpleasantly cool. It’s only been in the last month that things have begun to get better and today, it’s positively balmy. I learned that word from one of the romance books I’ve been snitching from our stash in the office. I like that word and I especially like the way it feels in real life.
    A couple of deaders attached to the rusting hulk of a car on the side of the road barely move as we pass them by. They’re yucky ones, no eyes and mouths little more than raw gray holes in their faces. Cars aren’t usually too attractive to them but this one was wrecked and must have caught fire at some point. Those incidents burned or peeled off enough paint to make the metal attractive and they are latched onto it like ticks onto skin. They almost seem to be melting into the ground right where they are, and I doubt they could get up and come after us even if we danced around naked waving a bowl of blood in their faces.
    I don’t see anything that would bother me in any direction. There’s not so much as a single wisp of smoke, though I would expect any small groups of humans to be like us and limit fires to times when it would be difficult to spot any evidence of smoke. There are no screams—human or otherwise—and no life to be seen except birds wheeling in the sky. The birds dominate the world around us instead of humans now.
    Once we hit the downtown area, we have to be careful again, so we both slow down and watch everything. Car glass, window glass and bottle glass vie with each other to puncture our tires. Blinds rattle behind broken windows and the noises make us flinch and keep our hands near our weapons. Ragged streamers of old curtains flutter and draw our eyes. Downtown can be dangerous and we react—or overreact—accordingly. Even with so few in-betweeners around, I’ve never been downtown without at least one scary encounter that involves head smashing.
    A groaning sound drifts on the wind toward us. We both hear it at the same time, whispering, “Incoming,” to each other in tandem. We both let our bikes slow so that we can get a bead on where the in-betweener might be, and then stop once he comes into view. If possible, we always try to take down in-betweeners when we come across them, even if they aren’t a specific threat at that instant in time. No one likes a free-range in-betweener.
    The in-betweener looks like a member of the last group of humans we interacted with. If he is, then his fellows are now caged alongside Emily, being fed and watered to varying degrees in anticipation of our success. Test subjects, as it were. And if we’re not successful, well, it’s not like I’ll feel bad about killing them twice. We knew there had to be at least one more of them—an extra pack and bedroll gave that away. If this is the man, then he is the only one we couldn’t catch.
    He’s not a huge man, or rather, I should say that he wasn’t a huge man. Now, he’s not a man at all. He’s an in-betweener, his heart restarted after death by his nanites but not before his brain lacked oxygen for some period of time. Given that he’s still got an arrow sticking out of his chest, I’m thinking he went a long time without it. I’m not sure how they do it, but even with a bullet or an arrow passing right through the heart, the nanites somehow heal it most of the time, building tissue around the intruding object and fixing the constant leaks. It’s a mystery.
    He looks like crap. Way worse than his friends. He’s probably finding it difficult to get food since the birds are hard to catch and all he has is whatever instincts are left inside his brain. And he’s gone from gray to almost