Read 2nd Earth: Shortfall for Free Online

yesterday for the first time that everything was going to be okay from now on. I wish I could guarantee that for her, unfortunately we still have no idea what lies ahead for us.
     

4
    In the morning, the young men of our family and several of the girls tell Tim and me that the predators were looking around the building during the night, but no one tried to get in or anything. While we are eating breakfast one of the young ladies from the new family comes over and tells Dayna and me that there are some people outside the building looking around. We go to look and we recognize one of the young men who we took from the predators yesterday. Dayna and I go down and invite them up to our home. It is easy to see they are unsure of whether or not they should be here. The young man who we talked to yesterday starts saying that we offered for them to join us, they are curious to know if the offer still stands. We assure them it does, we invite them to join us and they are more than happy to do that. Tim and I want to go for more food today. Dayna refuses to stay home so we take some of the young men along with us and go looking for stores that we have not been to yet.
    Dayna and Charity tell us which directions they have lived because most of the food is already gone from the stores in that area. Of course they don’t remember much about canned goods because they didn’t know how to open them without ruining them. Apparently these are kind of nomads moving from place to place in the city wherever they can find food and shelter. It is beginning to sound like our fears are well founded. Even though there are not as many people using the food eventually it will run out and in the city there is not much chance to grow more. We don’t even know what month it is, heck we don’t even know what year this is. We decide to visit a couple of the stores from the area they used to live in just to see if there is anything salvageable. In the first store we find a couple dozen cans that are still sealed and in the second store there are about fifty. I ask if we should leave some for others, but the new members of our family assure me that most of the families or groups kind of stay in the same area. I ask them why they haven’t joined forces before this and they say they were always afraid to trust anyone before this.
    Dayna says that the predators have tried to join some of the other families pretending to be alone. She says she knows of one whole family that was wiped out by the predators after doing that. They all say that now they have seen that Tim and I are not afraid of the predators, and that the predators are actually afraid of us, so they want to be safe with us. We decide to look for some stores farther west of where we have been looking. Dayna tells me she has not come this far west before because she was over this way once and saw a mutant. I should have known this is going too easily, besides every science fiction movie I ever saw had some kind of mutant in it. There was even one really stupid movie that had killer tomatoes in it. I wouldn’t mind finding a giant mutated tomato. Actually it wouldn’t do much good because we don’t have any bread or mayonnaise to go with it. We find one store that hasn’t been wiped out yet, there are a few hundred jars of food and it looks like a couple thousand cans.
    We are loading the wagons with what we can carry, I am a little ways off from the others when I get hit from behind by what feels like a ton of bricks. Whatever or whoever it was hit me across the shoulders knocking me forward. I manage to stay on my feet and turn to see what hit me. Now I know what Dayna was talking about. I am facing a man who is at least a foot taller than me and must weigh a hundred pounds more. He looks a little surprised that he didn’t at least knock me down. If the predators are who he is used to fighting, I can see why he would be surprised. I am looking for a way out without going through him, but the