Read Online Tankbread 02 Immortal by Paul Mannering - Free Book Online Page B

Else his full attention. “You killed Doctor Clay?”
    “Yes. He was already dead, though.”
    “Well yeah, but . . . damn girl. You are going to bring the shitstorm down on all of us.”
    “Good,” Else said.
    “Good for you maybe; you can fuck off back to where you came from. The rest of us have to put up with whatever punishment the Captain decrees.”
    “So do something about it,” Else replied.
    “We survive here by accepting the things we cannot change,” Eric insisted.
    “Who says you can’t change it?”
    “We live in peace here. We are protected. We have a safe place to live.”
    “But not a safe place to raise children.” Else straightened up as Eric flinched.
    “We all have to make sacrifices,” he muttered.
    “The children? All the children?”
    “Only the newborns, and they only take some of them. Maybe half. There are plenty of those. Not much else to do below decks, remember.” Eric tried to laugh and failed.
    “Do you know what they do with them?” Else asked. Eric couldn’t meet her eye.
    “They protect us, they let us live here.”
    “They let those people live in the dark. They let them live only so they can produce more children for the dead to feed on. Why don’t you fight back?” Else slammed a fist into her open palm. “Destroy every last fucking one of them!”
    “It’s not possible. You aren’t one of us. You can’t understand,” Eric said.
    “Oh and you are? Hiding out up here? Some bird-loving hermit living on tinned food and forgetting his own name.” Else stepped forward, getting in Eric’s personal space until he cringed backwards.
    “Just how . . . How do you think you are going to do anything?”
    Else shrugged. “Fighting these things is all I have ever known. They have taken everything from me. I’m going to take it back.”
    Eric stared at the floor and then nodded. “Okay, I want to show you something. But you have to keep quiet and don’t go running off.”
    “Sure.”
    “Another thing, that rifle. Leave it with me. If the crew sees you with a gun, they will tear you apart. Without it, they won’t look at you twice.”
    “I’ll be back for it. Don’t try to keep it,” Else said.
    “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Eric said. He exhaled with an exaggerated sigh as she laid the gun down on the small table.
    He closed and locked the door to his home behind them. Slipping under the hanging cans, they went back to the deck where the seabirds roosted. Else watched the birds circling and shrieking while Eric unlocked another door. “In here, quick,” he said.
    Behind the door was a shed that had once held pool cleaning chemicals and equipment. Now it was packed with an intricate-looking chemistry set of rubber tubes and glass beakers. Pots, pans, and scorched dishes were stacked on the floor. The air reeked of the acrid smell of chemicals.
    “What is this?” Else asked.
    “My lab,” Eric said with a tone of pride. “I’ve been experimenting with making explosives based on a mixture of nitric acid, glycerin, and lye.”
    Else nodded; her voracious reading appetite over the months included a range of science textbooks. “You get the nitric acid from guano, the glycerin from fish?”
    Eric nodded, brightening at the discovery of a fellow academic to talk about his projects with. “Yup, birds, fish, the occasional seal or dolphin. Depends on what I can scrounge from the fishermen.”
    “You burn wood for the lye?” Else asked, picking up a scorched pot in one hand.
    “Yes—scrounged timber panels, anything I can hook that floats in.” Eric opened an old refrigerator. “This is the result.”
    In an old bottle crate, nesting in padded sockets of cloth stuffed with bird feathers and foam cushion pieces, were bottles of oily looking fluid.
    “Boom,” Else whispered, peering closely.
    “Yeah . . . enough to blow this ship to pieces. I dunno why I bothered with it. Maybe cuz I figure they’ll come for me one day.”
    “Or because you know that