Without Law 18 by Eric Vall (most difficult books to read .txt) 📗

stop her from fighting,” she said. “But I thought it might make you feel better to know that I have an extra eye on her, too.”

“It does,” I said with a smile. “Thank you.”

Anna leaned in and pressed her plump pink lips against mine for a few seconds, then she pulled away and flashed me a soft smile before she stood up and walked away.

I took a deep breath to clear my head. Anna had reminded me that while it’s okay for me to be protective over Tara, I wasn’t the only one looking out for her. I needed to trust the other girls to take care of her, too. And I needed to trust Tara to take care of herself. The platinum-blonde was stubborn, but I knew she wouldn’t do anything to intentionally hurt herself or the baby.

Another quick glance over the map, and I knew the spot we’d visited before was our only chance. We needed to somehow get the troops to that location, then we could attack from there. We had enough men and weapons to take out what was left of the Boston troops if we were able to trap them all.

It’d be like fish in a barrel. Maybe not quite that easy, but if we were in control of the situation, we’d be far more likely to win.

I rolled up the map and headed back down to the hold to put it in Paige’s backpack.

The brunette was working diligently to count everything down there, and she and Minji barely even seemed to notice me as I came down the ladder.

“How’s it going down here?” I asked.

“Pretty good,” Paige answered without looking up from what she was doing.

“We’ve tallied up all of the plasma guns,” Minji told me. “We’re onto the larger storage rooms now.”

“Oh, good.” I nodded.

“Where did you go?” Paige asked, and she glanced over at me with intense brown eyes.

“I just needed a little break,” I explained. “Still a little rattled from this morning.”

“Right,” the brunette sighed. “That was close.”

“It was,” I agreed, and I turned to Minji. “We know they’re in the area now, though. We’ll get you moved here tonight.”

“I brought a bag with some spare clothes,” she said with a nod. “I was figuring I would stay the night.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I put on my best work mode face. “So, what are we looking at as far as plasma guns?”

“There’s a hundred-and-five,” Minji said.

I whistled low. “Nice.”

“I thought so, too,” Paige chuckled. “They must have been backups. “There’s also about five-hundred replacement pods for them, not including the ones that are already in the guns.”

“How did you all count that many that fast?” I laughed.

“They’re all in those weird little briefcases like the ones we found in Boston.” Paige shrugged. “We just counted how many were in one, then we counted all of the cases. Easy peasy.”

“I’m glad I put you in charge of this,” I told her with an amused shake of my head. “How much more is there to tally?”

“Hm,” Paige said, and she looked around for a minute. “We’re onto the larger storage rooms now, and after we get them done we’ll only have other weapons that came with the ship.”

“Right.” I nodded and looked around. My mood lifted as I realized the score we had in front of us. “No matter how many we have already, this is still a great supply. We can do some serious damage with this stuff.”

“Not to mention the couple of small tanks we already had,” Paige reminded me.

“Yeah,” Minji said with a shake of her head. “I don’t know how you guys do it. You showed up with so many supplies, and then you got more in just a few days. And the weapons are impressive, but you had so much food and everything, too. I figured that everywhere had been ransacked by now. That’s how we got our supplies, we ransacked everywhere, even the places that had already been picked clean, just in case there was something left.”

“You all have a good bank of supplies,” Paige said. “Especially for scavenging them. You’re right, if we had tried that now, it wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere. We grew all of our supplies and canned them ourselves.”

“That’s amazing,” Minji said. “Your home must have some good land around it.”

“It does.” I nodded. “And we were lucky enough to have some farmers in our group.”

“That is lucky,” Minji chuckled. “I can’t even keep aloe vera alive, and it’s supposed to be one of the easiest plants ever.”

“You probably watered it too much,” Paige said.

“I didn’t even know that was possible,” Minji laughed. “It’s a plant, it loves water, right?”

“It’s a succulent,” Paige giggled. “You water them like once a month.”

“Oops,” Minji bit her lip and shook her head. “My bad.”

While the girls continued to chat about plants, I walked around the hold and looked at all the weapons we’d just acquired. There was enough plasma on the ship to blow the entire city up if we needed to, and while I didn’t think we’d use it all up soon, it would be nice to head down to Atlanta with plenty of ammunition.

I didn’t know how our boys were holding up, but if we arrived with this amount of destruction power, then it wouldn’t matter what they had, we’d be ready to take on the enemy troops there.

Even if there were a hundred-thousand men and only a thousand of us total, all we had to do was outsmart our opponent. The NK troops had proven that they were far from stupid, but everybody was susceptible to being fooled, especially if they thought they had the upperhand.

When people were winning was often when they underestimated their opponent.

“Don’t you think, Tav?” Paige asked.