Eaters (Book 2): The Resistance Read Online Free

'Stickers' were ready to dispatch any Eaters that managed to wander through with their diseased brains still intact. Thankfully, Mark had never worked as a Sticker, but guarding a baiting station was dangerous too. The stations were on the outskirts of the compound and not as well fortified as the fort. From rooftop positions, sharpshooters worked as guards, ready to thin the numbers if they entered the station in herds too thick to dispatch in an orderly fashion inside. There was always a chance that a baiting station could be overwhelmed and guards on top could be trapped with no way to get down and escape.
    "The load was thick. They needed the help."
    Cheryl un-wrapped his scarred hands from her waist and turned around to face him looking past the craggy scars on his face and up into his blue eyes. "Every time you do a shift at a station, I never know if you're coming back."
    "I could say the same for you, at least today. I heard it got pretty hairy in the moat."
    She flashed back to her last minutes of the battle. Bodies piled upon bodies, and the bloody, snarling faces and clawing fingers just inches away from her ledge—if they had breached it, she couldn't say for sure if she'd have been able to get back inside the building fast enough to prevent getting eaten alive. "Yeah, it did. I've never seen so many incoming at once. There were hundreds of them."
    "I'm going to a meeting tomorrow about how to fortify the building better."
    "What else can they do? They thought this place was impenetrable, but after today…"
    "They're talking about building more baiting stations, adding bayonets to the rifles, making the moat deeper, or surrounding the entire fort with thicker rolls of razor wire to slow them down."
    "Slow them down? That won't help much if the bullets run out. They're giving me less and less ammo each week. I was down to my last magazine today."
    "You should go to a Combatives refresher. You haven't been to one in a couple of months."
    "It definitely wouldn’t hurt."
    New recruits to the patrol units were taught Combatives before they were allowed to move on to rifle training. She'd been through the program twice. In each class they had to master submission techniques such as chokeholds, preventing and escaping mounts, and most importantly—how to avoid getting bitten. That sort of muscle memory could be critical if a weapon failed. Like all patrol volunteers she'd received a rationed vaccine dose before training commenced, but it wasn't one hundred percent effective, and it was useless once an Eater latched on to you and started gnawing off parts of your body. Mark hadn't taken the vaccine back in Afghanistan when it was offered to him in the experimental stage, and after he'd contracted the virus, he'd gotten it too late to prevent the necrotizing effects on his skin. She still loved him though, pockmarks and all, and remembered daily how lucky she was that he was still alive.
    "You know what I wish?"
    "What?" she asked as he pulled her down to the bed.
    "I wish you'd get off of patrol duty all together and find a job inside. You could teach or work in one of the shops…"
    "Boring."
    "Full time in the garden?"
    She shook her head. "They don't need as much help in the gardens now, because they've had to scale back the crops due to the water shortage."
    "What about working in the kitchen? You always were a good cook."
    "Thanks. But actually…I'm thinking about keeping my current job and going on another safari ."
    "What? He said, running his fingers through her hair. "Why?"
    "A safari pays a thousand work credits, and it beats sitting around between patrol shifts.
    "Jeez…Cheryl. I don't want you to go into town. It's too dangerous."
    "My decision."
    "I think you've got a death wish."
    "No." Her bottom lip quivered as she buried her face in her hands. "I really don't.  I just want—"
    "Oh…here we go." A spark seemed to flare up in his eyes. "You're one woman. You can't change the state of the world. So,