Free Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3) by S.P. Durnin Page B

the module; two at the communications station, two on a small slightly raised platform, and a navigator’s seat in front beside the driver’s position. The latter pair of seats were currently occupied by a very pretty, green-haired girl around the age of twenty, and a burly, older man who looked to be in his late sixties or seventies. Both were cursing up a storm as they argued how to best optimize the transport’s interior, hopefully providing their group with more space.
    “Bee, I don’t want that stupid-ass thing up here in the cab with us!” the man fumed. “We hit any major problems—like say havin’ to take the Mimi off-road for a bit—then it’ll just bounce around the compartment, an’ I don’ wanna get smacked in the damn face with it while I’m drivin’!”
    “You’re getting really fucking whiny as you get older, Uncle George.” The young woman brushed a few strands out of her face that had escaped one of her pair of long, green pig-tails. “Fine. I’ll lag-bolt my I-Home to the dash. That way you won’t have to worry about your precious nose being broken again , okay? Jeez.”
    “And just what’s wrong with the music on my cassette tapes?” George demanded.
    “Um. It’s older than dirt? Like you? And all of it sucks?”
    The older man shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re related.”
    Kat suppressed a giggle as Rae coughed politely, which caused the bickering pair to swivel their chairs around. “Guys? I thought you might want to know Kat and the others are back and they found a survivor. This is Mel. Can the two of you save the wrangling for Dr. Phil and take a minute to say hello?”
    The man snorted, fished inside the breast pocket of his shirt for a moment, and then pulled out a cigar. He put it between his teeth and lit it with a wooden match. That he stuck to life against his cheek . The fragrant smell of Cuban tobacco wafted through the cabin to tickle Mel’s nose, but it was an oddly comforting aroma. Then the rough looking man studied her for a minute.
    “Hi’ya kid.” He said finally. “Don’t mind us. Me and the niece here don’t agree on much—”
    “That’san understatement.” The green-haired girl grumbled.
    “— but , you show me a family that don’t argue? I’ll show you one that only sees each other every so often. Like say once a year. During the holidays or somethin’.” He rose and stuck out a sandpaper rough hand for Mel to shake. “I’m George Foster, United States Navy. Retired now, thanks to our smelly-ass friends walking around out there.”
    George was a stocky, muscular man of average height, with a head-full of close-trimmed, long-gone-to-gray hair. He wasn’t fat by any means, he simply had the beefy look prominent in some males after a hard life full of sweat and physical exertion. Foster still had a thick chest, along with large biceps that bulged under his Army-green undershirt, and the man’s scarred forearms were rock hard. He’d been Jake’s landlord and owned the building the journalist had lived it, prior to the outbreak. That had only been his cover though. George Montgomery Foster was what those in the military called a “fixer”.
    Fixers maintained the countries secure safe-houses. They also worked both within the United States and abroad with Special Forces units around the globe. After a career in the Navy, George had leapt at the chance to keep “killin’ things an’ breakin’ people” as he put it, and become a domestic operative. He’d taken part in some of the dirtiest, most dangerous missions the US Government could devise, and had killed more scumbags than most would like to believe freely walked the face of the Earth at any
given moment.
    Mel smiled meekly and shook his hand. “Hi. Um. Yeah.”
    “So you been alone out there, kid?” He asked, not really noticing how uncomfortable the girl was around new people after months of terror-punctuated isolation. “No family? Nobody else?”
    The teen shook