Read Online In Constant Fear by Peter Liney - Free Book Online Page A

she finally finished, when she’d said all she wanted to say, she lapsed back into silence with no ceremony whatsoever. If you’d nodded off on the back seat and just woken up, you wouldn’t’ve known anything had taken place.
    She hadn’t had to tell me and I think she knew that, but I guess she’d wanted to get the story out, and being Gigi she’d made it all very matter-of-fact, like a long, articulated shrug. Or maybe she felt she owed it to me ’cuz we were on our way back to the City, ’cuz she knew how much I needed to trust her.
    Not that I made a big thing of it. It was what it was and both of us knew that; no matter how long we lingered over it, it would never entirely sit right for either of us. I mean, the thing about human nature is that despite what some people tell ya, very few of us are one hundred percent good or bad, and Gigi’s a perfect example: when she’s in the light, you’re not sure what’s going on in the shadow; and when she’s in the dark, you wonder where that glow’s coming from. I mean, I had to trust her, that was all there was to it . . . but I had to keep an eye on her, too.
    It took us more than three hours to reach the highway, and when we did, we were in for a bit of a shock. The power strip wasn’t working. Well, I say it wasn’t working, when I checked, it was working—it just wouldn’t connect to us . I didn’t know why; maybe there was something wrong with the limo’s reader, or perhaps Doctor Simon had withdrawn the credit? Though I’d always thought he’d try to maintain any link with us he could, no matter how tenuous—well, not “us,” exactly, more Lena—and now, of course, little Thomas.
    With Jimmy having taken out most of its technology, the limo wasn’t talking to me or telling me what was going on, but theread-out indicated we had less than a gallon of gas in the tank and would fail to reach the City by eighty-eight point three miles, though it had no answer to my question about where we might find more.
    That didn’t leave us with too many options: either we went as far as we could and then walked the rest, or tried hitching—which I didn’t have a great deal of faith in, being as there were so few vehicles around. The only other possible alternative was to call on a few private dwellings and see if they had any gas.
    We tried a couple of likely-looking smallholdings—being as I reckoned they’d be more likely to keep a store—but they’d been abandoned and stripped of anything of value.
    “You gotta go where no one else’s been,” Gigi told me. “Outta sight of the road.”
    She was right, of course: all this stuff left in full view of everyone, like the occasional discarded vehicle—someone was bound to have checked it out. The next track that headed off the road and out into nowhere, I ventured down, taking it slowly, lurching left and right, trying to ignore a slight grinding noise coming from the back suspension.
    It must’ve been the best part of three-quarters of a mile before we got to the farmhouse, but it was the same story all over again: the place’d been abandoned, ransacked, and Mother Nature was already starting to get to work, having her way with the upstart interlopers.
    We gave it a quick once-over but there was nothing so I returned to the road, drove another couple of miles, then tried again, this time finding the homestead even further down the track.
    The good thing was that this one wasn’t deserted; the bad thing was that the residents weren’t all that friendly. Even before we’d come to a halt they’d started shooting, sending bullets ricocheting off the limo’s reinforced body. I reversed back as rapidly as I could, spun around when I had enough room, and got outta there a helluva lot quicker than I went in.
    “You okay?” I asked Gigi.
    She nodded, glancing over at the fuel read-out, obviously as worried as I was.
    By the time that we got back to the road, the limo was flashing up that we had