Free Pickers 1: The Find by Garth Owen Page B

her fist and unwrapped the soft material that had padded it and protected her fingers. He was conscious, more or less, and groaning with the beating she had inflicted on him. Taking the knife from his belt, she held it to his throat as she knelt behind him. "I'm going to turn you over and take all your weapons. Don't try anything stupid now."
    "Biff!" he mumbled, spitting blood, but he didn't make any hostile moves, and both his hands were in plain view. As Maxine pulled him over onto his back, pain closed his eyes tight and turned his mouth into a twisted grimace.
    The bandoleers across the injured man's chest gave up a large collection of throwing stars, knuckle dusters and other items. Maxine kept some of them, and threw the rest across the room. He had even more weaponry concealed in the pockets of his trousers and strapped to his boots. When she had disarmed him, and taken anything interesting, Maxine held the knife to his throat again. She thought about it, and removed the knife, putting it into her bag. "I'm not going to kill you. I'm not that kind of person." His expression reminded her that he had just seen her kill three of his friends. "Really. You looked like a Scouting party. Are there any more?"
    He was young, and might have been attractive with all the grime removed. And if he hadn't been more than willing to rape and kill her minutes earlier. She could see thoughts of defiance shaping his features, but they cleared away after a mere moment. He nodded. "How many?" This, he wasn't going to tell her, and she let him have that little victory. "They'll find you. Probably. Maybe I'll leave them a sign."
    Wounded as he was, it might not be such a mercy to let him live. The raider gang he rolled with likely wouldn't give him any support. They might just kill him or, worse, take him a few miles away and dump him somewhere to die. But Maxine didn't do cold blooded murder, and, as her father said, where there was life, there was hope.
    Keeping an eye on him, just in case, Maxine went through the same disarming process with the harpooned guy. He provided a leather satchel that was a useful supplement to her own bag, and she worked her way quickly around the room, picking the items worth salvaging from the rich peoples' status symbols. The guy with the broken jaw and busted knee had passed out whilst she did this, so she just left him where he was and headed down the stairs. Fully loaded already, she didn't go through the pockets of the bodies on the lower level.

* * *
    Two levels below the atrium, Maxine's sister and brother in law were doing the job they had broken into the bunker for.
    Tony stared at the door to the server room. "Did you hear a scream?" he asked.
    "No. But if there was one, it would just be Maxine doing her job." Veronique said. She pulled another drive from the rack and slid it into a compartment in the bag they'd made specially. "And if she's having to do her job, that means we don't have long to finish ours."
    "I know, I know. Anyway, I'm two ahead of you. I have a little time to spend worrying." Tony was clearing disks out of another cabinet. They didn't know which, if any, held the information they sought, so they were taking them all. This was the last of the drives he had to remove, so he zipped his bag up and carried it over to the trailer behind his ATV.
    Veronique removed the last of her assigned drives, zipped up her bag and put it in the back of her own trailer. "If there weren't so many damned raiders in the area, I would love to go through this complex room by room and strip it of everything of use."
    "And bury those poor bastards next door." They had opened the wrong door first and found a pile of a dozen or so- it was hard to tell exactly with them all stacked up- corpses. It appeared that most of them had been shot, who by was a mystery they'd have to leave unsolved.
    Tony led the way back up the tunnel, his electric motored ATV running nearly silently. Apart from the rumble of tyres on