Gray (Book 3) by Lou Cadle Read Free Book Online Page A

then they were put in the center of the tent, with a box of four people around them, and the rifles stowed out of their reach.
    It was crowded, and strangely humid with all the exhalations of six people, but not nearly as warm as a snow cave. She and Benjamin, surrounded as they were, were probably the warmest of the group, but she was uncomfortably cold. Benjamin tried to keep his bad arm out of everyone’s way, but she heard him bite off a pained noise when it was jostled as everyone tried to settle in to a more comfortable position.
    The scents of unfamiliar people were disturbing, triggering some animal sense of danger that kept her from drifting off to sleep despite being exhausted. She was the last of them to fall asleep, and as she did, she worried what tomorrow would bring. The worry tainted her dreams, and she woke up twice in the night with pounding heart and the bitter taste of fear in her mouth.
     
    In the morning she and Benjamin shared their second MRE—too salty and too sweet, by turns—and drank a hot drink each, sharing the one tin cup they had. Benjamin wanted his with sugar, and when he was done with the cup, she tried the cocoa mix. It was bitter—rancid, she thought—but she gulped it down anyway.
    Again, there was a meeting about them, but as it was after sunrise, the strangers sent the two of them several yards off and had the discussion around the fire. She and Benjamin weren’t near their supplies, so they weren’t going to run with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
    “Do you think they’re deciding whether to kill us or not?” Coral asked Benjamin, speaking barely above a whisper.
    “I think they would have already, had that been their plan,” he said.
    “And not wasted food on us first,” she said.
    “I suspect they’re debating whether to let us go or take us to their home base.”
    “Do you think they’ll give us a choice?”
    “That, I can’t say. What I can say is this. Without the rifle, we don’t stand a chance of surviving out here alone.” He glanced over at the others. “Not for long.”
    She put her back to them. “They won’t hand it back loaded and turn their backs.”
    “No,” he said. “By the way. You and I—we’re married?”
    She felt herself blushing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to discuss it with you, and it was the best I could do at the moment. The thought was, I won’t let another group of crazies separate us.”
    “I’m not complaining. It was quick thinking. But I am a little amused.”
    “Maybe I should learn your last name. And your middle name. And birthday. And parents’ names. In case they quiz me, it seems like stuff a wife would know.”
    He shook his head. “They won’t ask.” He tugged her jacket so he could look right at her. “They want you, not me.”
    “I hope not for what the Seed wanted me for.”
    “No. They want a doctor, that’s obvious. There must be a lot of them.”
    “I’m not a doctor,” she said.
    “You’ll do until a better one comes along.”
    “I’m terrified they’ll ask me to—I don’t know. Take out an appendix. Deliver a baby.”
    “You could do either.”
    She took an involuntary step back. “I could not!”
    “Shh. Better you than no one. You’re still thinking old-world.”
    She still shook her head. “I’d kill someone by operating on them.”
    “Do you know where the appendix is?”
    “Well, sure,” she said, pointing to her own.
    “You’re way ahead of most of us, then.”
    “But still,” she said. And then she snorted a laugh at her next thought, which she shared with him. “I thought, but I could lose my right to be licensed!”
    “Yep, see? Old-world thinking.”
    “It is. But I don’t want to kill anyone. I wouldn’t even want to kill one of the cultists through medical malpractice. That’s just wrong.”
    “You’ll do your best for these people. If you want to help them, that is”
    Coral tried to imagine cutting open an abdomen. Clamping off blood