Resurrection (Eden Book 3) by Tony Monchinski Page B

three bandits, about what they said and did and what she did.
    Thomas looked at the girl before him. She wasn’t much—a little wisp of a thing really. People’d been underestimating Little Red since day one, and Little Red had been defying their expectations—oftentimes to deadly effect—ever since. Thomas knew he’d underestimated her when they’d met, when he’d rescued her from those folks. He loved this girl like a daughter, and admired her something awful.
    And he knew she was fiercely loyal to him, to their camp.
    It had been Red’s idea, taking Mac out in the woods like that. Thomas hadn’t liked being put in the position. If it was up to him, he probably would have killed MacKenzie. But Little Red had talked to him, and what she said had made sense to his old ears. They were down to a hundred and seventy five souls, about two thirds of them women and children. Zed and the hostiles weren’t the issue these days, not the way they’d once been. The cancers were taking their toll, though. The sick and dying had overtaken the number of healthy being born. And of those being born, you had to figure one in three was going to be suffering, marked by the radiation in some way.
    There was nothing worse than losing a child. Thomas knew this firsthand. Well, he thought, admiring Little Red, he had this girl. He had his Tommy. And he had Johnny, Phil, and Merv, and all the special needs they carried between the three of them. He had old friends like Gammon. And he had this camp.
    Thomas said something quietly. Red didn’t quite catch it, so she asked him what he’d said.
    “I said its sad is all. It’s sad that after all…” he gestured with upturned palms to the wider world around them “… this , after all this, we still can’t trust our own kind. I mean, zombies? I expect them to try and eat us, right? That’s what they do. But human beings?” Thomas shook his head. “And three women no less?” Thomas couldn’t believe it, but he did.
    “Yeah, but they were bull dykes.”
    “Bull dykes?” The old man laughed. “Where’d you hear that term?”
    “I don’t know. I picked it up somewhere. Gammon maybe.”
    “You’re a pip, you know that?”
    Red shrugged. He’d called her a pip before. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she knew he meant it well. Thomas had his names for her. Pip. Ishkabibble. Other things.
    “But I won’t lie,” Thomas continued, and Little Red knew— here it comes . The fatherly spiel. “I worry about you when you’re out there.”
    “I’m a big girl.”
    Thomas looked her up and down with one eye, exaggeratedly.
    “No, you’re really not.”
    She sneered. “You know what I mean.”
    “You might be the toughest person in this camp,” Thomas granted, “but that don’t mean I can’t worry about you. It’s a bad world out there. It’ll hurt you every chance it gets. I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
    “Something bad always happens to us.” There was a moment of silence as she and Thomas thought of the dozens of friends they’d lost. Lost to zombies, lost to hostiles, lost to plague and disease and the cancers. “None of us is long for this world.”
    “My only hope…” admitted Thomas, and he had told Red this before, “…is that I don’t outlive you and Tommy.”
    “You always say that.”
    “Because it’s true.”
    “You’re a tough old man. Who taught me everything I know?”
    “I taught you everything I know, Red. But I didn’t teach you everything you know.”
    “I’ve been out there for three nights. I could really use a shower and some sleep. And you’ve got me here listening to the mawkish reverie of an old man.”
    Thomas pointed a finger at her. “I can say that to you because I can’t say it to Tommy.”
    “Don’t underestimate Tommy. He’s made of sturdier stuff than you think.”
    “I know what my boy is made of, and I don’t underestimate him. I worry about him. That’s all. Him and you, the boys,