Live Free or Die Complete Series Boxed Set: Age Of Madness - A Kurtherian Gambit Series Hayley Lawson (ebook reader play store .TXT) 📖

men’s faces. None of them were giving anything away. If they not going to give me the answer I want, I’ll just have to get out of them myself.

Terrier grabbed the closest man by his throat, lifting him off his feet. “Was it you?”

“No,” the man spluttered.

Terrier threw him to the floor and moved on to the next. Each one said no, but then he didn’t expect any of them to admit it. He did it to put the fear of God into them and to see if anyone reacted differently, which he hoped Mama Lou and Peter would have noticed.

Mama Lou interjected. “Terrier, that’s enough.”

Terrier dropped the man he was throttling. “I was done anyway.” He looked down at the men on the floor. “You fuckers had better stay there, or I won’t be so gentle next time.”

“That was gentle?” one of the men murmured to the man next to him.

Mama Lou, Peter, and Terrier stepped away for a moment.

“Was that really necessary?” Mama Lou asked Terrier.

Terrier raised his eyebrow. “’It’s not like these bastards don’t deserve it. Did you notice any of them acting oddly? You know…guilty?”

Mama Lou smiled at him. “Nice thinking.”

Terrier nodded. “So?”

Peter grinned. “They were all too busy shitting themselves because they thought Terrier was going to kill one of them. I actually thought he was too.” He hated the way the men down here treated the women just as much as Terrier and Mama Lou did.

Terrier and Mama Lou didn’t see Peter as one of Afana’s guards. He was more like part of the family. Theirs was a weird family, for sure. But what family was normal?

“I thought I was going to as well,” Terrier admitted.

“We all want to kill them, but let’s stay focused. Did anyone look like they did it?” Mama Lou asked.

They looked back at the men. A few of them looked guilty…or was that scared? Others looked bored and annoyed.

“It’s hard to tell,” Mama Lou said, and everyone agreed. “I’m going to make a list of their names so we can keep track of them.”

Mama Lou’s parents had taught her to read and write when she was young. Then Afana’s men had killed them and brought her here to the bunker.

She prided herself on passing that skill on to all the women and kids who lived on Level Six. Most of the men didn’t keep up their skills when they left the level so they forgot how—use it or lose it.

Mama Lou made sure she didn’t lose it. She often wished she’d access to books like she’d had at her home before the bunker. Her family’s walls had been lined with them, passed down from generation to generation. They were more precious than gold or rubies.

Those books held the history of the world, of a time before all the wars. It was a time which Mama Lou hoped to see again—if they made it through the disease outbreak and this damn killer on the loose.

She hoped that making a list would help solve the crime. The problem was going to be narrowing down the list of suspects. Anyone on the list could have committed the atrocity since they were almost all perverts. There were only a few good guys in the bunker, including Peter, Terrier, and Ryder. Some of the other men had something approaching a normal-ish relationship with some of the women on Level Six.

Mama Lou dreamed about leaving the bunker and maybe—just maybe—finding a man who could handle all of her. She smiled at the thought.

“Is there any food down here?” one of the men asked, interrupting her fantasy.

She looked at his face, it was Freddie. She made a mark on her list next to where she’d written his name. He was normal height, with white skin that was smeared with oil from his work as a grease monkey. His t-shirt was stained, and he had black hair. He looked very much like the other men in the bunker. Like a douchebag.

“Yes, Freddie, we do. We will get you some food,” Mama Lou told him. She raised her voice to address the men as she walked away. “You are free to move around. Just stay away from the women’s sleeping areas and the kids’ rooms. If I see any of you in those areas, I’ll feed you to Vera.”

Mama Lou finished her list, and the three of them watched as the men walked away. She watched them intently to see if any of them did anything to reveal that they had killed Eva and the other girls, but the culprit wasn’t giving anything away.

“Keep your eyes on them,” Mama Lou told Terrier and Peter.

General Murray had left his son Martin to watch over Advisor George while he checked out Level Five. He came across a commotion in one of the tunnels where the men slept.

Murray marched over to the men. “Hey, Shane, what’s going on?” he asked.

There was someone on the floor in a puddle of his own blood—Justin. Doc was working on his wounds in an attempt to stop the bleeding.

General Murray was smaller than Shane, but not by much, and he knew how vicious the head traitor-hunter was. He would cheerfully kill someone for the slightest offense. It was well known among the men that if you pissed Shane off your head might end up in Afana’s collection, traitor or not.

Murray wasn’t scared of him. He’d come across a lot of jerks like him over the years. It was better to pretend to stay on their good side. Then when they crossed the line, you made sure it was the last line they ever crossed.

Murray’s hand rested on his gun, which was his usual pose whenever he spoke to a non-general. Murray moved his hand off the gun butt to signal to Shane that they had no issues.

You kept your friends close and your enemies closer in this place.

Shane lumbered over from where Justin lay to report to Murray. “Shit’s gone crazy. What the