The Reaper: No Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page B

out there, some much larger than others. Carefully he had cultivated contacts with these groups. Some he contacted himself, others his scouting parties had found. It was dangerous work without a doubt, but he had made deals and arrangements that would see his little empire expand. He wanted to be the Man. The man everyone came to when something was needed. It was simply supply and demand.
    He had carefully marked their locations on a special map he kept hidden. With that map was a notebook with each groups’ needs! Girls, farmhands, construction workers. The list was almost endless, and they paid in a variety of commodities including gold. Gold had value, after all, and when everything returned to normal, he would have a lot of gold. However, other commodities were equally important: percentages of crops; refurbished windmill generators for when gasoline was no longer available; hoarded medical supplies and doctors he would have access to; the list was endless.
    But not all new survivor communities were compliant. In fact, many had turned him or his men away at gunpoint. Some that did were too small to oppose his forces, and those he sent his boys after, cannon fodder first. They would beat them into submission, and then take the younger women and older children for labor or sexual slaves before killing the rest. Now, within a month of the crisis, he had accumulated an extensive list of communities that needed his services, and more that were interested, but had not committed yet. Everything was carefully written down in his notebook. After all, he needed to keep track of who needed what.
    Duane had been closely examining the bodies, and now he turned back to Ringo. "Most of them were killed by headshots. That's good shooting, professional."
    "Had to be those damn soldiers," Ringo said. Well over a week ago, one of his men had spotted a large convoy of survivors entering the city. With them had been a small group of soldiers with some really huge armored vehicles. They had occupied a group of industrial warehouses just south of town and after giving them a day, Ringo had gone visiting. That meeting had both gone well and not, for there were too many soldiers for his men to take on without a great many of them dying. The large guns mounted on those armored vehicles were crewed by men who looked ready to use them so Ringo had backed off, but not before arranging a truce. Leave each other alone and there would be no problems. Now it looked like the truce was broken, which infuriated Ringo.
    "But they agreed to leave us alone!"
    "I don't know what the fuck's going on, but let's talk to them. Gather up all the men." And with that, Ringo turned away to his waiting four-wheel drive truck, climbing in. It took only moments to call the rest of his men on the CBs, and within minutes he had over thirty vehicles lined up, all bristling with armed men as he instructed Duane to head to the military group’s position.
    Paris was not a large city, and less than five minutes later they were pulling into the parking lot of the industrial complex. One of the men in Ringo's truck bed was holding their white parley flag high overhead as they came to a stop two hundred yards away. Then, once his men had lined their vehicles up, Ringo directed Duane to drive forward, slowly, until they reached a point halfway to the foremost warehouse.
    Immediately two of the massive garage doors were raised, and Ringo found himself looking at the military vehicles with mounted guns, and armed soldiers standing to either side of them. One of those vehicles drove forward until it stopped twenty yards away, and a man exited from one of the rear doors. Ringo almost wished he had a grenade with him, as the door opened backward, what they called a suicide door, and tossing a grenade in would have been easy, but he'd used most they had acquired to create traps in the event they were attacked, and the others were back in his rooms at the cemetery.
    "What do you want!"