Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories by Megan Crewe

Author:Megan Crewe [Crewe, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crewe Morris Creative
Published: 2014-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

If I was going to have time to get things under control, I needed to nip this latest stirring of unrest in the bud. So the next day I wandered over to the neighborhood that had once been known as Seaton Village, peering through the darkened and mostly smashed windows of the stores along Bloor Street, a medical face mask protruding from my jacket pocket—the pocket that didn’t hold my pistol. The Wardens were the only people in the city with proper masks to wear, since Michael had instructed us to hoard all the hospital supplies we could find. They served a second purpose as a visible warning to other survivors that this wasn’t someone they wanted to mess with. Or, in this particular case, as a signal I wanted passed on.

I’d just turned down one of the residential streets, ambling past boxy two-story homes along a road matted with unraked autumn leaves turned mushy by the spring melt, when a car roared down the street and swerved onto the sidewalk in front of me. I flinched backward before seeing the other pulling up behind me. My hand leapt to my gun. I’d expected some sort of reception, but not one quite this aggressive.

Trang leaned out the window of the car in front of me, smiling hard. “You looking for someone, Warden?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, gathering myself. My pulse was still thudding. “I was looking for you. We need to talk.”

“I’d say we need a little more than that,” he said. “It’s about time your boss found out exactly what kind of enemies he’s making.”

“No,” I said quickly. “Nathan’s an asshole, you won’t hear me arguing against that. But your group and ours can still keep the arrangement we’ve had working. I told you I’m handling Nate, and I am—it’s just a slow process. So I came to make a deal. You meet his new price, and I’ll see the extra payments get returned to you without him knowing, until I can talk him down again. Then he’s happy and you’re happy, and you don’t have to start some crusade that’ll leave all of us hurting.”

The more attention Nathan had been giving his private stash, the less he’d been checking on the public stockpile. I ought to be able to lift a few boxes and convey them over here without repercussions.

Trang made a scoffing sound. “He’s got you cringing like a kicked puppy, doesn’t he? We don’t tiptoe around that kind of disrespect. And I’ve got an idea your own people aren’t so eager to keep tiptoeing either.”

He didn’t say it outright, but at that moment I knew. The Strikers were making allies among the Wardens. I’d been seeing them and my colleagues as two separate issues, but if they joined forces to take Nathan down, that was two problems added up to one much bigger than the sum of their parts. Michael would lose the city completely. There was no question.

“The vaccine shipments will stop coming,” I said.

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