Thick Black Theory by Chogan Swan

Author:Chogan Swan [Swan, Chogan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-30T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23 — Filled In

When the third shiver of cold rippled through her body, Kaitlin swam to the ladder and climbed back to the patio. Relaxed now, she dribbled soap on her hands and worked it through her hair, squeezing it into the thick locks at the top and working out to the ends before letting them hang down her back.

With a few more drops of soap on her hands, she worked up lather all over her body then rinsed her hands and pulled Blondie from her gun belt, flicking the blade open.

“You can start from ‘the day the music died’,” she said, sitting on the bench and crossing her legs. Without bothering to test Blondie’s edge, she skimmed the blade across her shins and calves, flicking off the soap and tiny stubble of red hair that had accumulated on them over the last week.

Drew—making it a point to keep his eyes on the lookout around them and well away from Kaitlin’s body while he talked—skimmed through meeting Ayleana when she, Amber and Kest treated him for dehydration and heat stroke. After which, they’d left him to recover in a prepper’s dream of a hideout to wait for Daniels.

Kaitlin added more water and lather to her underarms and removed the stubble there as well while he recounted Daniels showing up and the first day’s journey. It was then they first encountered the new mania sweeping the Southeast—blowing up bridges to keep people from moving into territory where new-formed power groups were staking claim.

Kaitlin, wrung out her Tedeschi Trucks t-shirt over the spillway then worked it through her hair so it would pick up some of the soap. She dropped it back in the bucket and repeated the procedure with her sports bra.

Drew’s account of how they’d zigzagged across Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, fighting off vicious, or desperate people and dodging militia groups and municipalities who were ‘taking emergency measures’ made her realize just how fragmented the nation had become. All that anger pointed in the wrong direction—other victims.

Of course that started long before this, didn’t it?

Kaitlin used her cargo shorts to scrub her torso, elbows, knees and feet then put the shorts back in the bucket. After a few more sloshes, she deemed the clothes ready for rinsing and wrung the water from them. She lifted the bucket overhead and poured the water over her hair, rinsing the lather from her body in a flood that sluiced across the sandstone platform and drained into the creek below the dam.

Once again, she hauled water from the pool to rinse her clothes and body while Drew reported on cities in chaos all the way south to Baton Rouge where the US military held sizeable territory. There, they’d used Daniels’ military connections to, finally, cross the Mississippi River.

“Are you finished?” Drew said.

“No, I have to do my workout then a final rinse. You still have to tell me about Lousiana and East Texas. But why don’t you take a drink of water first. You’re starting to get hoarse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.