Savages Read Online Free PDF Page B

that it was not nearly that long. He worked in the dark digging tunnels and starving, they said. That part was mostly true. He entered a tournament where men were forced to fight to the death. He won, they said, and that was how he earned the Legion’s trust. It was not to the death, I told them. Although in truth, I did accidentally kill a man. And I never actually earned the Legion’s trust, they were always suspicious of me. I just managed to play the charade long enough for Gabriel Garrett to find me and get me away from them. Without him, none of what followed would have been possible.
    No one outside of Delta Squad quite knew what to make of me. He must be CIA, or what’s left of it, they said. Some kind of spook, anyway. Or maybe he is part of the Phoenix Initiative—they must have a militant wing. People trained to deal with the kinds of unconventional threats that arise in a post-apocalyptic world. I tried to dispel these rumors, but soldiers like to talk, and nothing spreads slower than the truth. The man they described was actually a lot more like Gabriel than me, but good luck convincing anyone of that.
    The truth is Gabriel taught me everything I know. I learned a little hand-to-hand stuff on my own, but it was Gabe who showed me how to really make myself dangerous. To turn my body into a weapon. To shoot, to use a blade, to make and disarm explosives. He taught me combat tactics, close quarters fighting, how to employ a variety of weapons, and, most importantly, the art of the sniper. I was well renowned among Echo Company for my marksmanship. They may not have fully trusted me, but they had no qualms about letting me help them out of bad situations. If I showed up at the enlisted club on base, I could always count on someone buying my first drink. Usually someone whose life I had saved at one point or another.
    But outside a small circle of close friends, the soldiers did not consider me as one of their own. I was an interloper, a sometimes useful outsider who had a tendency to show up when needed and then go away. Mostly, they knew me for my business interests. G&R Transport and Salvage was one of the most successful ventures in Tennessee. Or anywhere, for that matter. Almost every soldier in Echo Company had an account with us. I ran the company’s operations, for the most part, while my best friend and business partner, Gabriel, supervised the Hollow Rock General Store, the customer-facing part of G&R.
    Retail was only part of our business. Most of our money—or trade, as it had come to be known when money disappeared—came from wholesale and business-to-business transactions. And the military, specifically Echo Company, was our biggest customer. As a result, I was privy to knowledge of secret operations most civilians never knew about. And because of my martial skills, I participated in some of these missions on a contract basis.
    It was illegal for soldiers to scavenge for salvage—not that this rule stopped them—but the prohibition against scavenging did not extend to informing civilian salvage companies as to the location of trade goods spotted in the field. Nor did it prohibit salvagers from buying fuel from the military at discount prices, reserving municipal transport vehicles, and bartering found goods to the Army. If a soldier’s information turned out to be significantly profitable, there were no rules against paying them a finder’s fee. And even when I traded what I found at a steep bargain compared to value, it was still profitable because the salvage business has very low overhead. A good arrangement all around.
    As I thought of this, running on weary legs, the tall brown grass gave way to a gravel path leading from Hollow Rock to the main gate at Fort McCray. I trotted along, keeping pace with the soldiers ahead of me, boots crunching over half-buried rocks. Near a grove of trees, a small ghoul emerged from the treeline and moved quickly toward me.
    A little one , I had time to