The Last Revenant (Book 1): The Crash Read Online Free PDF

grabbed my driver’s license on a whim. Everything else I had was useless.
    By the time I stepped outside, Martha was gone. I looked around and tried to keep the sun out of my eyes, but all I saw were a series of white tents like the one that I had been in. I felt like an ant stuck in a checkerboard.
    The man in the suit looked down at me, already having put on a pair of sunglasses. “Don’t you worry about Martha. There’ll be plenty of time for you to thank her later.” He held out his hand. “The name’s Ryan, by the way.”
    I could see a gold wedding band on one of his fingers. There was still a small tan line in front as it had slipped closer towards his knuckle over time. He must have been human, after all. I shook his hand.
    “I promise you’ll be safe here, Jessica. I have men patrolling the perimeter every hour.”
    Just like the guy I shot earlier?
    He peered down at me through the lenses. He must have known what I was thinking. “They told me what had happened, by the way.”
    I couldn’t see his eyes, but for some reason it intensified my guilt.
    “He’ll be fine. Fact of the matter is, they should have never raised their weapons. You were delirious, alone, scared, and it just made a dangerous situation even worse.”
    I looked past his face, not really sure how to respond to that, but he gestured towards a dirt path.
    “Please, after you.”
    Out of everything that could have bothered me, the only thing I thought about was that he had called me by my whole name. My little sister had seen to that. I was utterly conditioned to hate it. When we had both been younger and she had been too cute for her own good, she could never pronounce it right. ‘Tess’ had always stuck. Even my friends and family were used to it. Sarah's vengeance would not be bound by neither time nor space.
    I followed Ryan along a barbed wire fence and instantly regretted peering through the chain links to see the vast fields that I thought I had gotten away from, while on our other side were rows after rows of the same tents. We stopped at another one, this one twice as big as the rest, and he led me inside. It looked like an empty mess hall with tables and chairs barely organized into columns. It was always felt strange for me to walk into a place like that when it was meant for so much more. I just felt like the last person on earth.
    Ryan walked around and pulled a chair out for me in the middle of the room, holding his arms out to either side. “Welcome to Camp Maxwell.”
    I could feel my heart skip a beat. It was exactly what Zach and I had been looking for. I had to fight the words out and clear my throat. It was still too dry and felt like gravel. “Where is everyone?”
    “Fucked if I know. They were gone by the time we got here. Didn’t stop them from leaving most of their shit behind, though.”
    I slid into a seat as he went off to the side and searched through a few crates. Coming to terms with the idea that Zach had gotten me so far alive only to be too late was daunting. “Did you find anyone else?” I could feel the question hang like a loose thread as I waited for Ryan to come back with his arms full.
    “No.” He flopped plastic bags and water bottles down on the table in front of me. “But I’m guessing this was all military, maybe FEMA. It would explain the MRE’s, the tents, everything.”
    “Why'd they leave?”
    He shrugged. “My guess? They’re cowards. They couldn’t take the heat or stand up to clean their own mess.” He offered me food and a bottle, and stared as I inhaled a prepackaged muffin and took the longest, most amazing drink of water in my life.
    I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. As far as I was concerned, acting feminine or chivalrous went out the window with paying taxes, but I still had to talk to people. At least a little. “I don’t know...” I tried to think of something else to say without making prolonged eye contact, but I didn’t want to tell him that I