We’re close now.” “Close to what?” I asked. “To what passes for home these days.” I glanced over at him to read his expression, but he faced away from me staring out the window. I slowed the truck to a stop just before reaching the road he indicated. “Why are we stopping?” He asked. “You’re ...
The long, dark hours that night would have been unbearable for me as a living person, soaked to the skin and chilly as the air had to be. I say that without certainty because another of the important functions no longer in service was sensitivity to hot and cold. It was th...
It was a Leupold hunting scope, the kind thousands of people owned before the Outbreak. The accessories Gabe used to mount it to his AK could have been scavenged from virtually anywhere—very plausible if we ran into an Alliance or ROC patrol. He peered through it at the rendezvous point, looking ...
I peered through my scope to look at where Gabe had set up his hide. A thin grey fog hung low over the mountains, obscuring the hillside where he lay under a thick blanket of leaves and foliage. We’d both had ample time to set up our positions, and as usual Gabe blended in so seamlessly with the ...
They were capped in snow all year round. The rock underneath—schist, granite, how would I know what it was—never broke clear. In summer, the snows receded somewhat, shrank like frost on a windowpane, and then spread back again as summer moved into fall and winter. Lower down, the gray rock emerge...