Free DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) by Andrew Seiple Page A

flow of traffic with only a slight hitch.
    Martin was quiet the whole ride back, as was Bunny. Also, when I felt the last of the adrenaline fade and the fatigue hit, the pain wasn’t half as bad as I feared. It was pretty much a win-win situation all the way around.
    Even better, Bunny was still breathing when we pulled up to the warehouse gate. I hopped out, undid the locks, and gritted my teeth as the fabric of the blouse flecked and ripped away scabs. Yeah, this was getting old.
    I opened up the front doors, after shutting down several defenses, then climbed back into the car and drove it directly inside.
    “Bunny, can you walk?”
    I glanced over at her. She was out. “That’s a no then,” I muttered.
    “Lemme go get changed before I haul her out,” Martin said. “Don’t want blood all over these good clothes.”
    I reached over, felt her pulse. It took me three tries, and it was hard to tell if it was good or bad. It was still there, though, so that was something. “Hurry,” I told Martin.
    He did, coming back in his prison clothes and hoisting her as gently as he could. Under the lights, her bald head gleamed with perspiration, and the dark stains of blood soaked all up and down her jacket and pants, from where she’d twisted in the seat.
    “Motherfucker,” was Martin’s assessment of the situation. “Uh. This ain’t good.”
    “The words ‘no’ and ‘shit’ seem to go together for Dire’s response,” I said, heading to a control panel and bringing a couple of track-mounted arms whirring over above the car.
    “She needs a hospital.”
    “She said no,” I replied. “Do you know first aid?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Good, that’s more than Dire does. Take her up and do what you can. If she dies it’s not on us.”
    “You don’t know first aid? Supergenius like you?”
    “No time to explain. You do that, Dire will take care of the car’s tracker before it gets reported stolen.”
    “Oh shit, right. On it.” He adjusted his grip around the thin woman, and moved as gently as he could up the stairs.
    Something I’d learned when I’d been on the run, and scavenging components where I could get them, was that most remote-enabled cars came with a VIN tracker. On a regular basis they’d send their signature through the same broadcast channels they drew power from. Their broadcasting patterns varied by the type of car and whether or not the owner cared to adjust it. The more expensive ones checked in every ten minutes. A caddy? Hard to say.
    Also, regardless of how often they sent the signal, it didn’t matter much if there wasn’t anyone around to listen to it. Again, for all but the most expensive cars, most owners didn’t care enough to pay the fees to have it constantly monitored. But once this one was reported stolen, the police precincts would start monitoring the frequencies for its VIN broadcast. Once found, they could pinpoint the location with a little searching.
    It was a decent anti-theft device, mainly due to the fact that most VIN trackers were either camouflaged pretty well as other internal components, or so embedded into the infrastructure that it’d break the car irrevocably to remove them.
    But I was good with engineering. And it didn’t take long to locate, remove, and disable the tracker. After which, I commanded the arms to start breaking down the car into parts. It was too distinctive to risk using again, and I could put the raw materials to good use. I checked my still-active scanner, just to make sure, and it reported no activity from the car’s tracker, now or within the last half-hour that I’d been driving it. We were clear.
    Before the stripping got too far, I retrieved my belongings, paused, and retrieved Bunny’s shotgun as well. It turned out to be a sawed-off twelve-gauge, more of a scattergun really. I figured she’d want it back if she lived, so I brought it with me as I paced up the stairs, and opened the door to the living area.
    I found to my annoyance