Origins (The Wasteland Chronicles, #2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

assassinated the two guys holding Lisa hostage.”
    Samuel smiled and shook his head. “You need to watch out for that one, Alex.”
    I frowned. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”
    Samuel ignored my question. “And Lisa?”
    “She’s fine,” I said. “She seems a bit quiet, though. Pretty much your type all around.”
    Samuel chuckled. “I guess we’ll see about that later. And Makara?”
    “She’s fine, too. She didn’t look happy about Anna getting all the glory.”
    Samuel shrugged and took another bite of stew.
    “Char mentioned something about a Great Blight,” I said. “What is that?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the biggest obstacle we face reaching Bunker One. Hundreds of miles of old-growth Blight. I bet the monsters in the Great Blight will make Kari look like someone’s lost pet.”
    It was hard to imagine any monster getting bigger than Kari. That giant had been at least three times the size of a normal human, but at least we had escaped her.
    “Great,” I said. “Tell me, why are we going through that? Char mentioned something called crawlers, and from the way he described them, I’m thinking we need to come up with an alternate route.”
    “That’s the way we have to go,” Samuel said. “Nothing we can do about that. We’ll just have to hope the Recon is faster. We have the turret and thousands of rounds of ammunition if things get dicey.”
    “Hopefully, that’s enough,” I said. “How’s the shoulder?”
    “Feels like hell,” Samuel said. “But I’ll manage. I’ve been doing some prelim scouting.”
    Samuel reached for his bedside table and picked up a tattered, folded piece of paper. He unfolded it, revealing a map of the United States, along with its cities and highways. Several points on the map had been marked already – mostly in the Mojave area. In thick, red marker, a line had been drawn from Raider Bluff to Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
    “I’ve been considering the most efficient route to Bunker One,” Samuel said. “We’ll be taking I-40 east most of the way. As we travel further east, it will get drier and drier. Our first obstacle will be a giant desert called the Boundless. Most who try to traverse it aren’t heard from again. Then again, most don’t have a Recon at their disposal. There will be a lot of empty, uninhabited land. And mountains. Lots and lots of mountains. But as long as we stick to the line of the old highway, getting there shouldn’t be an issue. We’ll take plenty of food and water; water both for drinking and to recharge the hydrogen cells. My main worry is the Great Blight – which starts somewhere in New Mexico.”
    “How do we get through that?”
    “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what to expect. It’s not as if we have satellite imagery of the Great Blight, so everything is up in the air once we make the border. No one even knows where it begins, exactly. All the same, we have to go through it, all the way to Cheyenne.”
    I thought of the Blight that Makara and I went through while trying to find the entrance to Bunker 114. It was hard to imagine hundreds of miles of it at a stretch. The xenovirus would have had a chance to evolve a lot of deadly monsters in an ecosystem like that.
    “Somewhere in there is the city of Albuquerque,” Samuel said. “There, the road turns north. We’ll be taking I-25 almost all the rest of the way to Cheyenne. After that, it gets a bit trickier. We’ll have to find the right roads to make it to Bunker One. If we’re lucky, we’ll find some signs pointing the way. If not, we always have a compass and landmarks to go by.”
    “How long should all that take?”
    Samuel shrugged. “In the Old World, two days at most. Now, who knows? It could take anywhere from a week to a month.”
    Anna charged into the room, out of breath.
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    “You won’t believe this, but it isn’t over.”
    “What isn’t?” Samuel asked.
    “There were a group of