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  BATTLE

  A Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure

  The Traveler Series Book Five

  Tom Abrahams

  A PITON PRESS BOOK

  BATTLE

  The Traveler Series Book Five

  © Tom Abrahams 2017. All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev

  Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

  Proofread by Pauline Nolet and Patricia Wilson

  Formatted by Stef McDaid at WriteIntoPrint.com

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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  WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS

  THE TRAVELER POST APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES

  HOME

  CANYON

  WALL

  RISING

  BATTLE

  THE SPACEMAN CHRONICLES POST-APOCALYPTIC THRILLERS

  SPACEMAN

  DESCENT

  RETROGRADE

  PERSEID COLLAPSE: PILGRIMAGE SERIES NOVELLAS

  CROSSING

  REFUGE

  ADVENT

  RED LINE: AN EXTINCTION CYCLE NOVEL

  POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES

  SEDITION

  INTENTION

  JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES

  ALLEGIANCE

  ALLEGIANCE BURNED

  HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  Excerpt from Red Line

  Acknowledgments

  For Courtney, Sam, & Luke

  My heroes

  “If everyone fought for their own convictions, there would be no war.”

  —Leo Tolstoy

  CHAPTER 1

  FEBRUARY 5, 2044, HIGH NOON

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  BAIRD, TEXAS

  “I’m getting too old for this,” Marcus Battle muttered under his breath.

  He wiggled his fingers above the grip of the Glock at his hip. His feet were shoulder width apart on the cracked, hole-riddled asphalt, and he straddled the faded single yellow line that ran through town. Despite the dry chill of a late West Texas winter, Marcus was in short sleeves. Sweat coated the back of his neck and under his arms.

  His muscles tensed and his focus sharpened on the target standing thirty yards from him in the street. He drew slow, even breaths.

  “You’re the one they used to call Mad Max,” sneered the target. “I heard tell of you all over the territory south of the wall.”

  Marcus positioned his shoulders over his toes. It was the best position from which to fire his weapon.

  “They say you ended the Cartel single-handedly,” said the target. “Turned your back on the Dwellers, got north of the wall, and came back to kill most of the Llano River Clan.”

  The target had the story mostly right. While there was a defiance in the man’s voice, there was also fear. Marcus could hear it as the man recounted the dime-store tales of Marcus Battle’s violent adventures. He was the most recent in a long succession of would-be sharks who’d circled Baird and dove into its waters in hopes of besting its legendary sheriff.

  Marcus wasn’t really the sheriff. There wasn’t such a thing south of the wall in the territory once known as Texas. But he’d found people to lead in the town of Baird. They’d wanted his help and he’d given it freely.

  For six months it had been easy. Until word got out. Things changed. Now, almost weekly, some young gun or guns came calling. They called out Marcus by name or reputation and demanded the chance to seek out glory.

  This one was tall and thin. His arms were comically long and his sleeves stopped short of his wrists. His baggy pants ended at his calves. “I also heard you ain’t got no family,” said the target, smiling. “You’re here ’cause your home is gone. They say you got nowhere to go and nobody to go to, so you’re here. That’s pathetic, if you ask me.”

  At first Marcus had tried to talk them out of their mission, to offer them refuge from the violence and unease that plagued the lawless, wild south. None of them accepted. One by one they’d failed in their quest and Marcus had buried them himself a mile outside town. Marcus’s fingers had blistered then thickened with calluses from the frequency of the work.

  The target adjusted his stance. His hand still hovered above the holster at his side. “I used to believe what they say!” he shouted. “I used to believe the stories. I thought you were a giant full of muscles!”

  Another body to put in the ground, Marcus thought.

  He rubbed the side of his thumb against his twitchy trigger finger.

  “You don’t look so tough,” said the target. “You look old. I ain’t impressed one b—”

  The nine-millimeter round drilled through the center of the challenger’s forehead and exploded out the back of his head. Marcus already had the Glock back in his holster and snapped shut by the time the silenced target went limp and collapsed to the ground face-first. His mouth was still open in the shape of a B when his brain stopped working and his heart stopped. He hadn’t drawn his weapon.

  “That was anticlimactic,” said Lou. She was up against the brick façade of a building to Marcus’s right. “You didn’t let him complete his thought.”

  Marcus sighed and scratched his beard. It was time to shave again. “I’d heard enough,” he said and closed the distance to Lou. “I half expected you to put a blade in him before I had a chance to fire.”

  Lou shrugged. She put a hand on one of the knives in her waistband. “I considered it,” she said. “He was a talkative one.”

  Marcus stepped up the curb onto the wide cement sidewalk that separated the street from the long rows of buildings lining both sides of the main boulevard that ran through the center of Baird. From the look of the place, it could have been 1894 as easily as it was 2044.

  Marcus moved next to Lou. “Just once,” he said, “I’d like for these punks to take me up on my offer of sanctuary, forgiven transgressions, et cetera. They’re too stubborn, too confident in their own abilities.”

  “Yeah,” Lou said, folding her arms across her chest, “but they only have to be better than you once. You have to be better than them every time.”

  Marcus rubbed his aching neck, digging his thumb into a knot below the back of his head. Lou was right. It only took one hotshot with a quicker draw, or one who decided to snipe him without warning.

  He nudged Lou with his shoulder. “Let’s hope that’s later rather than sooner,” he said. “You gonna help me with the body?”

  Lou looked at her empty wrist as if she wore a watch. She tapped it. “I guess so. I ain’t got nowhere else to be.”

  They dragged the body to the side of the street and loaded it into a wheelbarrow he kept next to a building they used as a jail for trespassers and ne’er-do-wells who didn’t rise to the level of an execu
tion. Lou grabbed a shovel leaning against the building and tossed it atop the dead man’s body.

  Marcus gripped the handles of the wheelbarrow, tilted it forward on its warped wheel, and pushed it towards the burial plots. It was a long mile to the burial ground. His leg ached. He worked hard not to limp against the pain.

  “Did you ever read War and Peace?” asked Lou as they reached the edge of town. She was playing with her knives, flipping one in each hand as she walked alongside Marcus.

  “The book?” asked Marcus.

  “No,” said Lou, “the musical.”

  Marcus adjusted his grip on the wheelbarrow and furrowed his brow. “Musical?”

  Lou shook her head. “Sheesh. Of course the book. You can’t read a musical, Marcus. Sometimes you amaze me.”

  Marcus puffed his chest. “Thank you,” he said. “My goal in life is to amaze Louise.”

  Lou scowled but ignored the sarcastic use of her full name. “My dad made me read it. He insisted it was a classic.”

  “You never told me your dad was sadistic,” said Marcus. “That book is long.”

  “Longer than some, not as long as others,” Lou said. “He said Tolstoy wrote a book without giving the story a hero. He was right. There really isn’t one. The characters kind of move around and interact without motivation even. Sometimes they can’t explain why they do what they do.”

  “Never read it,” said Marcus.

  Lou nodded. “Not surprised.”

  Marcus dropped the wheelbarrow and arched his back. He sucked in a deep breath of air and exhaled through puffed cheeks. He planted his hands on his hips, twisted from side to side as if doing simple calisthenics, and bent over to lift the wheelbarrow again. He motioned forward with his chin and led Lou closer to the burial ground.

  “He profiled several well-to-do families and how they coped with a changing society,” said Lou. She picked at her fingernails with a knife blade she’d drawn from her waistband. “A lot of the political stuff was over my head, but I got the gist.”

  Grunting, Marcus drove the dead weight up a rise in the thin dirt path he’d worn through the weeds and brush. “What’s the gist of this conversation?” he asked. “What’s your point?”

  “Why is it,” she asked without looking up from her fingers, “that no matter what kind of dirt you get trapped under your nails, it’s always the same dark gray color when you pick it out? It’s like the snot of the fingers.”

  Marcus ignored the question and repeated his own. “What’s with the talk about Tolstoy?”

  “I’m saying you don’t always have to be the hero, Marcus. For that matter, you don’t ever have to be the hero.”

  Marcus juggled the weight of the wheelbarrow, pushing harder against the rise. He was nearly at its end; then there would be a gentle slope leading all the way to the burial ground.

  Lou flicked the dirt off the end of a nail. “You put too much pressure on yourself is all I’m saying. The world doesn’t need heroes anymore, Marcus. It needs survivors.”

  Marcus stuck out his lower lip and blew the sweat on the tip of his nose. He reached the top of the rise and leaned back to control the dead weight moving downhill. His back protested, but he managed.

  “You don’t have to face off against every one of these punks who shows up trying to best you,” said Lou. “You could refuse. You could retire. You could—”

  “Put myself out to pasture?”

  Lou bounded down the hill with long strides. She caught up to Marcus and passed him, using her momentum to jog by the time she reached the bottom of the slope. She skidded to a stop and faced Marcus while he strained to control the load on the way down.

  “You said it,” she told him. “I wasn’t suggesting we sell your parts for glue. I was only saying the burden isn’t all on your shoulders. You have me. You have Rudy.”

  Marcus dropped the legs of the barrel into the weeds and rubbed his hands against his shirt. He walked to a nearby scrub oak and plucked a pickaxe from the dirt. He’d stored it there after his earlier kill two weeks ago. He crossed the short distance back to the wheelbarrow and Lou. She’d pulled out her second knife and was juggling both blades.

  “They’re getting more frequent,” said Marcus. “It feels like I was just here.”

  Lou kept her eyes on the blades as she flipped them into the air from one hand to another. “You were,” she said. “That’s my point. One of these days…”

  Marcus smirked and lowered the shovel to the ground. He scanned the plot for a good, clean spot to bury his latest suitor. He was running out of room. The field was covered with stone markers Marcus had laid at the head of every grave. Some of the rocks were large; others weren’t much bigger than a skipping stone. Each represented a man killed in the year since he’d agreed to become the de facto sheriff of Baird and the surrounding farms.

  He’d thwarted every threat so far, but as Marcus eyed the perfect spot to bury the latest of them and hoisted the shovel to start digging into the dry, cracked earth, he knew none of them had been serious. None of them had come with any support, let alone an army. They’d been stupid enough to come alone.

  Marcus slung the pick into the dirt several times to loosen the dirt. He tossed it aside, drove the shovel into the ground, and heaved out a spadeful of dirt. He repeated the move mechanically, load after load, until he’d dug a hole deep enough to stand inside. He stopped to take a swig of water from Lou’s canteen and thanked her.

  She was right. One of these days, somebody smart enough would bring reinforcements. They’d bring an army. And somebody would be digging his grave.

  CHAPTER 2

  FEBRUARY 5, 2044, 4:34 PM

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  KERRVILLE, TEXAS

  Each pushup hurt more than the last. Junior was up to one hundred and thirty when he stopped, his body posed in a straight plank above the ground beneath it. Sweat dripped from his face and neck. His arms shook with exhaustion, his chest burned, but he held his position.

  He envisioned the face of the man who’d brought him so much pain, so much sorrow, so many sleepless nights. A well of anger-laced adrenaline coursed through his body and he grunted, managing another twenty pushups before collapsing into the dirt.

  Junior lay there for several minutes. Then he rolled onto his back and mustered up the strength to sit up and push himself to his feet. He looked skyward. It was a bright day, warm for the hill country, and a steady breeze blew from the south. He reached one arm across his body and caught his elbow to pull it inward. He did the same with the other arm. The sore muscles in the backs of his arms stretched painfully and Junior clenched his jaw to mitigate the burn. He flapped his arms at his sides and rolled his neck from side to side.

  He looked down at one shoulder then the other, paying attention to the irregular keloid sprays that marked the spots of his injuries some sixteen months earlier. He rubbed one of them with his thumb. It was a miracle he’d survived the twin injuries, dealt minutes apart. Without antibiotics, most people would have died. Somehow, he’d staved off infection and lived.

  Again, the face of the man who’d hurt him appeared in his mind’s eye. It was the face that provided a constant source of inspiration as Junior pushed through the long days and nights of work he’d endured to repair his body and make it stronger.

  His boyish appearance and small stature belied his age. He was in his early twenties and was more than a year older than when he’d faced his enemy that one and only time.

  His rehabilitation had taken too long, but he knew he was finally ready for his mission. It was time to find the man who’d changed his life.

  Junior walked over to his horse, his legs tingling from his exercise, and pulled a shirt from one of two large saddlebags. He slipped it over his head, his muscles straining against the fabric. He rubbed his hands across his sweaty, shaved head and wiped them on the shirt.

  He ran his hand across the long gun in the saddle scabbard, letting his fingers trail along
the steel barrel. It might as well have been a sculpture as a weapon. Junior had run out of ammunition for the rifle and he hadn’t been able to find any to replace it. Still, he kept the weapon that had belonged to his father. It was identical to the FDE brown AR-10 he’d long carried before losing it the day he was shot in both arms. Someday he’d come across the jacketed lead and feed it into the beast. Someday.

  In the meantime, he had his twin single-action bone-handled Colt revolvers. They weren’t ideal, but he had ammunition for them. That made them priceless.

  He slid his hand underneath the dual-holstered belt he’d hung around the saddle horn and slapped it around his waist. It felt good there. Junior gripped the Colts, slid his fingers inside the trigger guards, dropped his hands down, and rolled the guns forward once before swinging them backwards into a spin. He spun them backwards several times, lifted his hands, and stopped the weapons into a flat aim directly in front of him.

  He spun them down and back again in perfect sync and slid them back into their holsters. He repeated the well-practiced move twice more.

  “You’d be dead three times over by the time you finished the move, Junior,” said a man, chuckling as he approached from behind. His hands were stained dark with blood. “It’s parlor tricks.”

  Junior slipped the guns into the holsters and looked over his shoulder at his compadre, Gil Grissom. He sneered at Gil and spat into the dirt in front of Grissom’s leather shoes.

  “Watch it,” said Grissom. “This is my last pair.”

  “It calms me,” said Junior.

  “Spitting on my shoes?”

  “No,” said Junior, “spinning the guns. It’s relaxing. Takes my mind off things.”

  Grissom dug the toe of his shoe and dragged it across the dirt. “Keep your relaxing off my shoes,” he said. “I got a rabbit. It’s over by the fire.”

  Junior ran a hand across his head and sniffed. He cleared his throat and hawked another wad of spit onto the ground at Grissom’s feet. “Come on. We got work to do.”