THEM (Season 1): Episode 3 Read Online Free PDF

agreement. “I suppose you’re right. Before the War, people from up north thought I talked funny, too. I have what’s known as a ‘Texas drawl.’ But I also found that some women from up north liked it, so it never much bothered me any.”
    The kid nodded. “I want to learn how to speak like Captain Perez. She sounds smart.”
    I chuckled at that. “Well, kid, there are worse things you could aspire to in a postapocalyptic world. Now, why don’t you eat some real food, before you get sick on sugar?”
    She crinkled her nose at me. “Aw, man, you’re no fun.”
    “Furthest thing from it, in fact.” I threw her some jerky and trail bread. “Now, eat this tasteless crap and be thankful we have real food.” She stuck her tongue out at me, and for a moment I chose to see her as just an innocent kid.
    - - -
    W ithin a few hours the rain had stopped and we decided to head out. Bobby hadn’t showed, and that had me worried, but not by much. He knew more or less where the Facility was located, so I suspected he’d catch up with us before nightfall. Gabby and I packed our horses and Donkey, and headed off in a southwesterly direction toward the heart of the installation. After a few miles, we turned off on a gravel road that ended at a gate. The fence was down beside the gate, so we went around it and continued on, roughly another half mile as the dirt track on the other side ended abruptly in an open area about fifty meters across. There was what looked like a sewer or drainage pond in the middle, with a largish metal building beside it. Odd thing to have in the middle of nowhere, but certainly not anything that would look out of the ordinary in a satellite image.
    Gabby led us up to a weathered and plain metal door at the front of the barnlike structure and dismounted. “Captain Perez says this is where we’re supposed to meet her. She showed me this place before she sent me off to find you.” The kid peered around like she expected the doc to step out from behind a tree at any minute. The fact that Captain Perez wasn’t here to greet us obviously had her worried.
    “Well, let’s look around a bit. She might be camped out somewhere near here, or maybe she left to scavenge supplies.” After securing the animals, I began a sweep around the drainage pond and building perimeter, and came across a trail around the backside of the building that started at what appeared to be an underground-access entrance. There were heavy metal doors made out of rusted diamond plate covering the entrance, and no visible means of unlocking or opening them. I tried to get my fingers under an edge to lift them, but they wouldn’t budge.
    Gabby appeared around the other side of the building, and a tilt of her head told me she hadn’t found anything. I waved her over and nodded at the door and the trail. “There aren’t any signs of recent activity here, so I’m starting to think that the doc never made it. And, she sure didn’t come in the way we came; otherwise we’d have seen her tracks.” I pointed at the trail that went off into the trees. “My best guess is that she normally comes in through here. Let’s take that trail and see where it leads.”
    We followed the trail for roughly a half mile, and it came out on an old gravel road that went in a more-or-less north-south direction. We followed it north, and within another mile I saw why Captain Perez never made it back to the Facility. From the tracks I found, it looked like she’d come this way and then abruptly turned tail and ran. A little further on I noticed her boot prints getting further and further apart; the heel strike and depth of the prints told me she was running from something. What exactly, I wasn’t sure yet.
    A few hundred yards further, her trail veered off into the woods. About fifty yards in, we found some 5.56 shell casings and a bit of blood. So, either she got hit, or she’d hit one of her pursuers. Based on the scattered shell casings that were