Read Online The Society (A Broken World Book 1) by Dean Murray - Free Book Online

the shadows, quietly working my way deeper into my target's territory. My face was already shifting back to the one I'd worn into the city. Within five minutes the swelling would start to go back down. My ribs and the bones in my leg were going to take longer than that, but I'd just successfully completed the first phase of my mission.
     
     

Chapter 6
     
    I knew from my briefing that the warlord who controlled this stretch of the city was a guy named Brennan. Interestingly enough, the streets were much less dirty and cluttered in Brennan's territory than they'd been inside of Piter's. It was still nothing like the city back home, but it was obvious that an effort was being made to clean up the refuse left behind from decades of bombing and neglect.
    Under other circumstances I would have been overjoyed. I was invulnerable to nearly every virus, parasite and bacteria known to mankind, but that didn't mean that I liked the idea of living in what amounted to a garbage dump. Despite that, as I walked through the flickering lighting of the city I found myself wishing that Brennan didn't run quite as tight a ship. The lack of shanties meant that there were fewer places to hide.
    Luckily things got a little less orderly within a few blocks of the border I'd just left. I found the remains of a plywood shanty that looked abandoned and pulled a couple of the sheets of wood over me. It was too cold to sleep very deeply, but it got me out of sight and gave me time off of my feet so my bones would have a chance to heal.
    The sun rising was one of the more welcome sights I could remember seeing. I pulled myself to my feet and started working my way deeper into Brennan's territory.
    One of the first rules anyone living under the equivalent to martial law learned was to keep your head down once the shooting started, but there was still a chance that someone had gotten a look at me when I'd taken out the guard after jumping out of Piter's building. It was a loose end that I didn't like—something that I couldn't control—but all the reports I'd read indicated that the technology base inside of the city was fragmented.
    There were no televisions and only a few aging radios for receiving centralized announcements. With no telephones or other forms of wired communication, most of the information flow was carried the old-fashioned way—by foot.
    That meant the further I could get away from the incident, the less likely it was that it was going to come back to haunt me. Besides, I didn't know exactly where Brennan had set up his headquarters, but it was going to be roughly in the center of his territory.
    The street signs had all been scavenged and used for other purposes decades ago, but it wasn't like I was trying to follow a set of directions or anything. I counted blocks, figuring that once I knew exactly how far Brennan's territory ran from south to north, I could measure the distance the other direction and then work out where his headquarters was likely to be located.
    I was shocked to see how much the streets changed over the course of just three more blocks. They went from looking like the site of an industrial chemical spill, to clean and rubble-free. Even more astonishing was the gleaming wall that ran through the middle of the road a few blocks deeper in from that.
    None of that had been in my briefings. Either this was a new development or my trainers had been keeping it from me. Neither possibility was particularly comforting.
    I meant to keep moving once I saw the wall, to act as though it wasn't a surprise, but my feet ground to a stop despite my best intentions. I knew that it made me stand out, that it made me a potential target for Brennan's enforcers, but I just couldn't help it. This was too much like civilization—the last thing I'd been told to expect in one of the grubber cities.
    "You must be a new arrival."
    I spun around in the direction of the voice, hands up as though expecting an attack, but the woman who'd