Instinct (2010) Read Online Free PDF

left his pop blind drunk on the porch, yet again, and never came back. He spent a couple of years hitching across the South, picking up odd jobs, easy to come by as his thick blond hair and arrogant eyes made him good-looking enough for middle-aged men of a certain leaning to pay ten dollars an hour just to have him in sight. He knew what was going on and didn’t see the harm in it, and if he was ever hard up he’d go back to some of those places, top up the cash, steal a few things and head off again.
    At sixteen he found himself drinking like his pop in a Mississippi roadhouse when a fat man decided to take him to task for looking shabby and steaming the place up with the smell of ‘barbecued shit’. Van Arenn was stubborn enough to give a little back, but just as it might have turned violent, a small, quiet figure walked up from his table in the shadows and told the fat man to lay off picking fights with people half hissize. When he was told to go fuck himself, the quiet man broke the fat man’s nose and wrist, leaving him screaming on his knees, then calmly returned to his table. He was wearing a Marine’s uniform, and that made a hell of an impression on David Van Arenn. Three days later, he had some good fake papers and a uniform of his own.
    So he and Garrett knew each other before they’d even met. They belonged to a not-very-exclusive club of teenage wasters who had fallen into the army, but they were both from the South so they liked hearing each other’s lilting drawl. When they found out they had both been dishonourably discharged for the same thing, well that just about sealed it.
    They had both gone AWOL to see their fathers one last time before they passed away. After years of rotgut whiskey, Tyler Van Arenn had at last beaten his liver into submission. His son was supposed to be preparing for an inspection before the arrival of the Australian Ambassador, but he wasn’t going to let that keep him from saying goodbye.
    Garrett’s daddy spent four days in a coma after his car was hit by the 4x4 of some drugged-up frat boys. She went AWOL from Camp Pendleton while delivering a printer to the admin block. She just drove right out of there, stopped twice for gas, and got to the hospital just in time to tell her daddy how much she loved him.
    Ordinarily, they would not have been discharged for what they had done. The US Marine Corps prefersto resort to the stockade before spending all that time training two excellent soldiers, only to see them leave. However, in this case the Pentagon needed candidates for MEROS and these two young orphans with otherwise spotless service records fit their needs like air fits a balloon.
    By 2159 hours the five soldiers were tucked into their seats, preparing their time killers and trying to find a position they could catch some sleep in. Exactly one minute later Madison closed the cargo doors and checked his instruments for take-off. He couldn’t tell what hurt more: his balls or the ant bites that covered his buttocks since he’d slumped to the ground right on top of their nest. He’d spent most of the last few hours scratching himself crazy and looking ahead to a very long and uncomfortable flight.
    The Spartan had been chosen for its load capacity and its ability to take off quickly and steeply from shorter runways, but it had also been modified in several ways to suit the needs of MEROS missions: temperature-controlled cargo bays had been installed to enable the transportation of live specimens; the engine had been overhauled to increase the top flying speed from 583 km/h to 792 km/h; and the fuel tank had been expanded so that the airplane had a range of over 8,000 miles.
    The turbines roared into life and soon became the deafening assault that made this everyone’s least favourite part of any mission. Once they were moving properly they could tune it out, and once they reachedtheir destination they could get to work. Until then, it was a case of holding on tight