Eaters (Book 2): The Resistance Read Online Free Page A

it's about time you stopped trying!"
    "I know," she whined. "I just don't want to sit on my butt around here, waiting for the worst. When I go on a raid, it's helping. And let's just say it's fulfilling my female scavenging instinct, kind of like going to the grocery store…like in the old days." And if…in the process… she could do her part to clean up a part of the city and work towards her dream of living in a house, raising a family, living a normal life…
    "What if they raid an occupied house again?"
    Cheryl's teeth clenched, remembering the time some yahoos from her unit had burst into a boarded-up home, waving guns and demanding any food the terrified family had stashed away. They had a toddler-aged girl and a mangy dog, both starved so thin they seemed like paper cutouts. She'd returned with another unit two days later to find the family and give them some food, but they had disappeared. "That won't happen again. It's against policy. Those guys got banned from future safaris."
    "I guess I can't stop you, but you know how I feel about it."
    "And you know how I feel about you taking shifts in baiting stations."
    "Touché," Mark said as he stretched out on the bed, his fee dangling off the bottom edge. "Come here." He grabbed her hand and pulled her towards him.
    She pulled back, holding him off so she could remove her tactical vest. Then, feeling hot and sweaty, and a bit naughty, she unbuttoned her shirt too. He watched with an amused smile as she also removed her bra, straddled his legs, and let her breasts dangle over him.
    "You're an evil temptress," he said, reaching up with both hands.
    "I'd prefer irresistible temptress."
    "That too."
    She leaned down and gave him a soft, wet kiss on his salty neck. "Sure we have enough time?"
    "Before what?"
    "I thought there was supposed to be an evacuation drill this afternoon," she said, running her fingers through the tangle of hair his chest.
    "It was cancelled, because of the attack."
    Evacuation. The word itself was ominous, because Cheryl couldn't imagine where so many people would go…or how they could get there—wherever there was. Life at Fort San Manuel was no Shangri-La, but being cocooned in this isolated community was a vacation compared to the horrors that awaited them in the outside world.
    She tried to put her fears out of her mind and refocus her mind on Mark's stirring body underneath her. Still half-dressed, they began the passionate melding of their bodies, mingling their sweat, the soot of gunpowder, and the acrid scent of adrenaline that still oozed out of their pores from the day's earlier events. When it got too hot to bear being a scrap of fabric coming between them, she began to peel her cargo shorts off. Then, one glance down at the long scar running up her right thigh ruined her mood.
    "Still bothers you, doesn't it?" Mark asked, leaning up on an elbow.
    "It looks like hell."
    "It might…if it was on someone else's leg." He sat up and fluttered a line of kisses down the thin reddish crevice, twelve inches long. "To me, that scar means you survived. Without reaching the top of that fence, you might not be here."
    Cheryl closed her eyes, trying to focus on the sensation of Mark's warm lips working on other parts of her leg, but every time she saw the scar, it made her shudder as she remembered how she'd gotten it.
    It had happened on her last day of bike patrol around the perimeter of the fort. On that afternoon, over three weeks ago, her unit was on their fourth circle of the fort underneath a blazing hot sun when she decided to take a drink out of her canteen. She dropped back and let the other two riders go on ahead, figuring that the day had been quiet so far and knowing she'd only be a second. As she took a swig, she spotted a scorpion on a rock just a few inches from her foot. Having endured an incredibly painful and incapacitating sting from one during her journey south to Tucson, she instantly yelped and jumped away. Her feet tangled up