The Last of the Freemen Read Online Free Page B

foot with the other.  “I needed that formula.  He could starve.”
    “He won't starve.”  Harm took his hat off and scratched his head.  “Finding baby formula won’t be easy, but it can be done.  In the meantime, I know where we can get some milk.”
    “You mean from the black market?”
    “If that’s what you want to call it.  You could just as well call it the free market.”
    “But isn’t that dangerous?”
    “What isn't?”
    He drove back the way they had entered the city, and as they again passed the decrepit building painted with Cull graffiti, Erin recalled the story he had told scarcely an hour before.
    “Was it you who wrote ‘Cull freaks wear pink undies’ over there?”
    He glanced at her guardedly in the rear-view mirror.
    “You have to vent sometimes,” he said with a shrug.  “Probably, it doesn't make any difference.  But for a couple of days, some people going by here, they got to see that not everyone is afraid.  I can’t stop what's happening, but I can give them the finger.  And hope that others do it, too.”
    “You did more than that back there.  I'm still shaking.”
    “Yeah, well, we got lucky.  Luck got us through that as much as anything.”
    “Are you a former commando or something?”
    “No.”
    “I mean, Cull warriors are supposed to be invincible.”
    “That’s what you people believe, isn’t it?  They’re invincible, except maybe against somebody trained by the government.  It’s nonsense.”  He shook his head despondently.  “You saw for yourself why nobody survives.”
    “I suppose I did. It's just hard to believe, even seeing it. I don't want to believe that the police were helping them.  And it doesn’t make sense.  It seems like so much extra effort to use the Culls, when people are already scared.”
    “It’s how they operate. The government could slaughter people outright, and make them obey.  But then people wouldn't believe that government, even a corrupt one, is better than nothing.  People would stop supporting it, even if they wouldn't fight it openly.  If enough do that, their system fails.
    “So they’ll show the surveillance video on the news, but they’ll edit it so you don’t see anyone fighting back.  And people will see the death and gore and stay terrified, and go along with more martial law, more warrantless house searches. The governor, he’ll make another speech saying how great the gun confiscation was, just imagine what the Culls would do with guns.  And you people, at least too many of you, you’ll go along with it, and keep paying your taxes, and using their shyster money, doing what they tell you to do.  Pay and obey.  You make it so easy for them.”
    “Us people?”
    He shook his head.  “Never mind.”
    “What did you mean by that?”
    “You people, like you, or that fella who escaped with us.  Decent folks, maybe, but you accept the system, even when you know it's corrupt.”
    She folded her arms and looked askance. “So you're saying I'm the same as an old man who probably never went to college?”
    “You’re not that different.  I'll bet you both watch television and believe in government.”
    “I have a Master’s degree.”
    “Yeah?  In what?”
    “Art history.”
    “A lot of good it's doing you.”
    “That's not fair. I had a good job, an interesting job, until my husband’s politics got me fired.  I was a curator at the Regional Multicultural Museum. Granted, it didn't involve much art history. I dealt mostly with modern cultural artifacts. But I had to find a job somewhere when Hugh dragged me up here, and they were so impressed that I had worked at the Brooklyn Museum -”
    “You never wondered,” Harm interrupted, “why the governor’s shock troops can sniff out small-time black marketers and kick their doors in, but somehow they can't find a bunch of bald, tattooed nut-jobs?”
    “I try not to think about things that upset me.  Life has enough