Back From The Dead: My Apocalypse Level-up System novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Hostage

Conroy's POV

They chained my ankle to a fuel pump and gave me a bucket of water.

It was a fair deal for a hostage.

The depot stood on the north road, a fenced yard with six steel tanks, a loading dock and a grain elevator behind it.

The boss's people left me alone.

His daughter did not.

She sat on an upturned crate ten feet away, hugging a stuffed rabbit, and watched me for most of the morning.

"Are you Devon's boyfriend?" she asked.

"No."

"Do you want to be?"

"Yes."

She nodded as if I had said something sensible and went back to the rabbit.

In my first life, I never got to be anyone's boyfriend.

I stood on an overpass with a rifle and watched a woman I didn't know die slowly in the road.

I could not reach her, and I could not stand to hear it any longer, and I fired.

Then I carried her face for the rest of a life that lasted another fourteen months.

At noon the man with the shaking rifle came and squatted in front of me.

"Your girl's late," he said.

"She said afternoon."

"She'll come with fuel, and the nurse, and everything the boss wants. And she'll stand there while I take her down, because you're chained to my pump."

I looked at him.

His hands were not shaking now.

"You're not the boss," I said.

"Not yet."

I heard the engine before he did.

Devon's truck rolled into the yard at one, with the nurse beside her and the back full of barrels.

She climbed out with the short rifle on her shoulder and looked around the yard once.

Then she looked at me, and her eyes went to the chain, and I watched her decide.

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