Savages Read Online Free Page B

web belt on the floor behind the counter and poked my head in the storage room. “Sam?”
    Samantha Walcott, physician’s assistant, stood up and faced me. She was in her early fifties, over six feet tall, lean, weathered, and hard as an iron chisel. “What?” she snapped.
    “I’m here to help.”
    “Take these,” she handed me a bundle of clear plastic bags. “Bandages. Give them out to the nurses, then head to the gate and help the guardsmen look for wounded.”
    “Where’s Allison?”
    “Busy.” Sam turned around and began sorting through boxes again. I was dismissed.
    I went back to the parking lot. More bodies came in on carts, on horseback, in the Sheriff Department’s lone electric vehicle, on litters born by weary, frightened townsfolk. Some of the wounded walked themselves in, bleeding and limping and crying out in pain. A boy of no more than fifteen stumbled, fell, and was still. A nurse ran to him and checked his pulse, then rolled him over. There was a piece of shrapnel the length of a man’s forearm protruding from his chest. His eyes were wide open and fixed, glassy, lifeless. The nurse closed his eyes, dragged his body into the grass, and moved on.
    Nurses took the bandages from me. When my arms were empty, I ran for the north gate.
     
    *****
     
    Mayor Stone’s paranoia was Hollow Rock’s saving grace.
    I remember once going to see her at town hall on some small matter of public affairs she had asked me to look into. As I entered her office, she sat facing a window, feet perch on the sill, silhouetted in warm morning light. She turned when she heard me knock and asked me to sit down.
    “Something on your mind, Elizabeth?” I asked.
    “There’s always something on my mind.”
    “What’s the topic of the day?”
    “The wall,” she said.
    “What about it?”
    She laced her fingers over her stomach. “Too many people in this town take it for granted. Especially on the north side of town where it’s all concrete and steel. I look at the wall and I think about the Outbreak. I think about all the military hardware leftover from units that were overrun. I think about grenades, and bombs, and rocket launchers, not to mention all the materials that can be used to make improvised explosives. All just lying around waiting to be snatched up. I think about that, and I think about the Alliance, and the ROC, and all the raiders and marauders and assorted scum out there, and I think about how easy it would be to plant something ugly and volatile against the wall and watch from a good safe distance while it lit up the night. I think about that, and I wonder what we would do if it ever happened.”
    “I’ve lost sleep a few nights dwelling on that subject myself.”
    She spun around in her chair. “Did your contemplations yield any useful insights?”
    I looked down at my fingernails. “The way things are going, I don’t think it’s a question of if , Liz. It’s a question of when. And how bad. You should talk to Ethan Thompson about it.”
    “Why Thompson?”
    “He told me a war story once about a place back in North Carolina called Steel City. Went there to stop some lunatic from leading a horde around and attacking small settlements. Ask him about the layout of Steel City. Might give you some ideas.”
    She nodded twice, turned back to the window, and looked steadily toward the east wall while I gave her my report.
    I did not get much sleep that night.
     
    *****
     
    By two in the afternoon on the day of the attack, everyone that could be saved had been. Forty-eight people lost their lives, including Private Fuller, a sheriff’s deputy on the force less than a month, and two men from Second Platoon on duty at the main gate when the first shells hit. In less than ten minutes, a small band of ROC suicide troops had killed more than twice as many people as the Free Legion did in over a year of raids.
    I was filthy, sweaty, and exhausted by the time I helped pull the last of the bodies out