Home: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 1) Read online

  Home

  A Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure

  The Traveler Series Book One

  Tom Abrahams

  A PITON PRESS BOOK

  Home

  The Traveler Series Book One

  © Tom Abrahams. All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev

  Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

  Proofread by Pauline Nolet

  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.

  http://tomabrahamsbooks.com

  Click here to join the free PREFERRED READER’S CLUB

  OTHER WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS

  MATTI HARROLD POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES

  SEDITION

  INTENTION (OCTOBER 2016)

  JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES

  ALLEGIANCE

  ALLEGIANCE BURNED

  HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE

  PERSEID COLLAPSE: PILGRIMAGE SERIES NOVELLAS

  CROSSING

  REFUGE

  ADVENT

  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 CANYON: THE TRAVELER SERIES BOOK TWO

  For my homies: Courtney, Sam, and Luke

  “The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.”

  —Noam Chomsky

  CHAPTER 1

  OCTOBER 12, 2037, 11:56 PM

  SCOURGE +5 YEARS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  Marcus Battle checked his scope. Though the green and black optics revealed nothing, he knew something—or someone—was out there. A trip alarm three hundred yards from his front gate told him he wasn’t alone.

  He was flat on his stomach thirteen feet in the air, hidden between the pine slat walls of his son’s oak-mounted treehouse. The muzzle of the twenty-inch barrel of his rifle rested at its edge in the middle of a wide gap at the corner.

  It provided Battle with both good reconnaissance and an excellent spot from which to stop intruders should they get too close. Intruders were always trying to get too close. He always stopped them.

  Battle fingered a piece of mint chewing gum from his breast pocket and popped it in his mouth. He checked the scope again. Nothing.

  He slipped his finger off the trigger of his DPMS Prairie Panther King’s Desert Shadow semiautomatic synthetic .223. He called the rifle “Inspector” after the lead character in the Pink Panther movies. He named all of his weapons after movie characters.

  Battle checked his watch. It was only nine o’clock. Until he identified the intruder or intruders, this would be a long night. Since the Scourge four years earlier, there were a lot of nights like these.

  He smacked his gum, relishing the mint. He tried to pop a bubble, but the piece was too small. The gum got stuck on the back of his front teeth and he had to flick it free with his tongue.

  Then he heard footsteps.

  Really, it was the sound of leaves rustling and crunching under the pressure of someone running. Somebody was sprinting toward his gate. He checked the scope, scanning the oak-dotted landscape that hid his property from the main highway.

  He shifted left and then right. Then he moved left again and saw a green figure moving swiftly toward the gate. It disappeared behind an oak and then flashed between two more. The darkness was a challenge with night-vision scopes. Too much light and they didn’t work; too little light and they didn’t work.

  Battle let out a long breath and touched his finger to the trigger. He pressed the rifle into his shoulder, tracking the intruder, anticipating its line to the gate.

  “As far as the east is from the west,” he whispered to himself, “so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”

  Battle set his jaw. He was about to pull the trigger when a woman screamed.

  “Help me!” she cried breathlessly, her plea echoing into the cloudless, moonless sky. “Help me, please!” The woman was running away from the gate now, parallel to the front fence that surrounded the central two acres of his property. She was running west, straight toward him.

  Battle knew this could be a trap. She could be bait intended to lure him from the security of his perch. Then, somewhere not far away, hidden amongst the oaks, men would lay in wait to pounce. Still, a voice in his head told him to wait before pulling the trigger.

  The closer the woman got to the treehouse, the more genuine her fear seemed to be. She was tripping over herself, unable to maintain her balance as she worked the fence line. The lack of moonlight made it nearly impossible to see anything without the scope.

  Further south amongst the oak trees, there was more rustling. There were at least two men running and grunting. One was running faster than the other. He called after the woman.

  “Get back here!” he growled. “You belong to me!”

  Battle shifted his weight and scanned left again, pulling into focus a bright green image. He saw the faster of the men on the gravel path outside the gate. He gripped a shotgun with both hands, like an infantryman, and had a handgun holstered on his right hip. His chest was heaving as he stood at the gate.

  “You can’t run!” he yelled. “I’m gonna get you. This time I’m cutting off a—”

  Thump! Thump!

  The seventy-seven-grain hollow-point bullets took one tenth of a second to drill through the man’s sternum once Battle pulled the trigger. Immediately expanding on impact to increase the damage, the bullets dropped him where he stood, still clutching his own rifle.

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Battle pulled his eye from the night scope to avoid the muzzle flashes’ blinding bursts of green light from the return fire. His eyes searched the darkness.

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  The bursts of white light were about seventy-five yards away and directly south of the treehouse. From the sound of the gunfire, Battle figured it was a .45 semiautomatic pistol. The magazine probably held ten or fifteen rounds.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  The slower man was either out of bullets or he had five more. It didn’t matter. The four bursts of light confirmed his position. He’d be dead in less than three seconds.

  Battle saw the final two flashes. He glanced in the scope and spotted movement against the side of an oak.

  Thump! Thump! Thump!

  Pop!

  The hollow points hit the man’s neck in a tight pattern near his collarbone. The shock of the impact caused an involuntary twitch, and he pulled the trigger of his Glock once as he hit the ground. The slug bore into the oak next to him.

  Battle listened to the quiet: no rustling, no wind, only the soft whimper of the woman. He elbowed his way to
a spot at the corner of the treehouse, where he could peer straight down. He pointed Inspector straight at her, his finger behind the trigger guard, and used the scope to find her.

  She was curled against the fence, her body as small as she could make it. Her face was buried beneath a long mop of hair. He could see her back heaving and trembling as she breathed. He took a deep breath, almost swallowing the gum, and made a judgment call.

  “Stay there!” he yelled down to her. “I’m coming to help you.”

  “No!” she called back, looking upward in the general direction of his voice. “No! Don’t, please.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he promised her and inched back into the treehouse. She repeated her lack of interest in his assistance. A moment ago she was asking for help, now she didn’t want it. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe she was bait. However, he’d cut the line and she was floating free.

  Battle dropped back onto his rear and unscrewed the bipod from the bottom of the rifle. He pushed himself to his feet, slinging Inspector over his back. He grabbed a pair of head-mounted thermal goggles and tucked his Sig Sauer P226 into his waistband. The Sig was nicknamed “McDunnough”, after Nic Cage’s character in Raising Arizona.

  Between the fifteen rounds left in Inspector’s magazine and the ten .357 bullets in McDunnough, he was loaded for bear, or whatever else he came across.

  At the trapdoor entrance on the western side of the eight-by-eight treehouse, Battle climbed down the pine planks nailed into the oak’s trunk. Rung by rung, he moved quickly and silently until he hit the leaves clustered on the ground. He was mere feet from her, but was separated by the five-foot-tall wooden picket fence that ran in a rectangle around his central two acres. Thick aluminum mesh, sturdier than chicken wire, filled the spaces between the pickets.

  “Just stay there,” Battle said in the most comforting voice he could muster. It had been years since he’d tried to comfort anyone but himself. “I’m going to come around through the gate. I’ll come around and help you inside.”

  “No,” she whimpered. Even a few feet from her it was hard to make out much more than the whip of her hair as she protested. “Please don’t.” Her voice trembled with a vibrato that under other circumstances might have made Battle laugh.

  Battle flipped the thermal goggles over his eyes and turned them on. Everything was awash in orange. Her pupils, pinpricks as they were, glowed back at him like a deer on the side of the road. Goosebumps rose on his neck. Her fear was palpable.

  “It’s okay,” he said, holding his hand up. “I won’t hurt you.”

  He marched toward the gate, his feet crunching the leaves as he stepped. The woman said something to him as he walked away, but it was warbled and unintelligible. He could only imagine what the men had done to her. He didn’t want to imagine it.

  At the gate, he opened a waist-high box and punched in a code. The wrought-iron gate hummed along its track as the motorized chain pulled it open.

  He stepped through the opening and knelt at the body of the running man. His eyes were fixed open and he stared back at Battle as he rummaged through the man’s pockets. He didn’t find much: a pack of Camel cigarettes, a lighter, a flask, and a box of shotgun shells.

  Battle checked the rifle, a gas-operated Browning Silver Hunter. He shook his head at the impracticality of the weapon in a post-Scourge world. It was beautiful, with a walnut stock and a satin finish. But it was a stupid weapon carried by what Battle imagined was a stupid man.

  He laid down the Browning, which he’d already decided he’d call “Lloyd” from the movie Dumb and Dumber, and checked the hip holster. It was empty.

  Empty?

  Battle closed his eyes and thought back to the moment he saw the holster from his position in the treehouse. It wasn’t empty, he was sure of it.

  He scrambled to his feet and started backing toward the gate. When he reached the threshold, he spun to reach for the access panel. But something solid and heavy crashed into the side of his head, knocking the optics from his eyes. Battle stumbled, momentarily dazed as another thick volley hit him in the side of the head and he tumbled to the ground, the weight of Inspector pulling him awkwardly to one side as he fell.

  He was on his side, the rifle half underneath his body, when a steel-toed boot slammed into his ribs. Battle tried scrambling away but wasn’t fast enough.

  “You killed my brother,” snarled the attacker, kneeling down with all of his weight onto Battle’s bruised ribs. “I’m gonna kill you.” Still leaning onto Battle, the attacker gripped his neck with his left hand and pushed a handgun into his cheek with his right.

  Battle’s right arm was pinned underneath his body, but his left arm was free. He whipped his hand to the small of his back, groping for McDunnough.

  “You’re like a bug on its back,” the attacker sneered, jabbing the muzzle at Battle’s face. “A little baby bug. Say goodbye, baby bug.”

  That taunt gave Battle the instant he needed to pull the Sig from his back and, in one fluid motion, jam it into the attacker’s chin and pull the trigger. The point-blank blast knocked him onto his back. Battle rolled over, sliding the rifle from his back as he got to his feet, and wiped the blood splatter from his face. He tucked the Sig into his waistband and stepped to the chinless attacker to kick the handgun from his cold, dead hand. Battle winced against the pain in his side, raising the rifle’s scope to his eye as he moved aggressively back to the woman.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, Inspector leveled at her head. “Why are you here?”

  “I—I—” She held her hands in front of her face.

  “Who are you?” Battle shoved the rifle at her. “Were you bait?”

  “Bait? No. No. Please.”

  “You asked for help, then you said no. Then I get jumped, almost killed. What do you want?”

  “I wanted help,” she whimpered. “I wanted help. They were chasing me. I escaped. They chased me. I escaped.” She shook her head, her hands still blocking her from the muzzle.

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re bad men,” she said. “Bad men.”

  “Why did you tell me not to help you?” Battle’s finger was on the trigger, his left eye pressed to the scope.

  “I knew you hadn’t killed all of them.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Two were chasing me. Two were farther behind.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there were four of them?”

  “Yes.”

  Battle spun around, his pulse quickening. He adjusted his grip on Inspector and scanned the tree line, his eye darting from oak to oak. Nothing. He spun back to check the woman.

  She still cowered against the fence, her hair and hands blocking her face.

  “Come with me.” He reached down and grabbed her arm, pulling her to her feet. “We need to move.”

  She hesitated. “I think I sprained my ankle.”

  “We’ll worry about it later. You need to cope.”

  At a pace that had her tripping over herself, Battle led her to the gate. He shoved her past the opening and, scanning the oaks, backed his way behind the gate. He thumbed the electronic lock and the tall wrought-iron fence slid past him, clanging as it locked into the closed position.

  “We need to get to the house.” He tugged her along the crushed gravel driveway toward the front door of the main house. She limped, almost hopping as she moved. She asked Battle to slow down. He ignored her.

  The drive split at the eastern edge of the house. Part of it continued straight back to the detached three-car garage. Battle followed the fork to the left, in front of the house. He pressed an electronic code on a panel at the front door and pushed on the heavy, solid mahogany wood.

  He stood in the entry, scanning the property one more time, and shut the door. He made a mental note of the weapons he’d left outside; Lloyd the rifle, and the 9mm that nearly killed him. He’d have to wait until daylight to retrieve them.

&n
bsp; “I’m going to search you,” he warned. “I’m not going to hurt you. I need to make sure you don’t have any weapons.”

  She didn’t respond. Her arms were folded across her chest. She was shivering and trying to keep weight off her bad ankle.

  “I need you to lower your arms,” he said. “I’m going to run the back of my hands along your body.”

  She dropped her arms and flinched when he touched her. He carefully searched her as he would any potential threat. Satisfied she was weapon-free, he turned his back on her and stepped back to the front door to flip a series of switches on the wall. The entryway and a long hallway lit with a soft yellow glow. He pressed some numbers on a keypad.

  “The alarm is now on,” alerted the monotone security system.

  He put his hand on the small of the woman’s back, leading her toward the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Both were filthy. Her feet were bare. Battle imagined she hadn’t bathed in a while.

  He helped her to the kitchen and punched the dimmer switch near the entry. He pointed to the lone barstool at a large white and gray granite island.

  He moved around to the opposite side of the island while she took a seat and swiveled to face him. She pulled her hair behind her ears using both hands and looked up at him.

  Battle set the rifle on the island in front of him, but kept his hands on it. He was a safe enough distance away from her should she try something, and still close enough to have a conversation.

  She was the first person in the house, other than him, in more than seventeen hundred days.

  CHAPTER 2

  AUGUST 5, 2032, 10:35 AM

  SCOURGE -2 MONTHS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  “You know you’re crazy.” Sylvia Battle stood at the bottom of the largest oak tree on their fifty acres. She was looking up at her husband and his latest creation. “He’s never going to come down from there.”

  Marcus Battle slung his canvas tool bag over his shoulder and sat on the edge of the trapdoor, his feet dangling. He’d just finished affixing the second hinge to the door.