Rising: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 4) Read online

  His eyes drifted across the land he'd called home for so long now; the pale green scrub, the mature oaks he'd planted himself which now struggled to survive against the drought, the orange kiss of the sun against the golden plain beyond his property and low undulating outline of the distant hills. They made this place familiar. They were the only things now.

  Lola and the children had offered him the chance to redeem himself. To protect, to love, to teach. Somehow they’d managed to rebuild a semblance of normalcy in their hidden Eden. Lola was a good soul who had never sought to supplant Marcus’s dead wife, Sylvia. Instead, she’d embraced the life Marcus had lived pre-Scourge, and encouraged him to talk about his memories, good and bad. She’d wanted him to understand that it was okay to be happy.

  Sawyer, Lola’s son, had been a solid young man. He’d been strong and a faithful hunting companion. He was wise beyond his years and Marcus had come to love him as he had his own son, Wes.

  Little Penny had just turned six, they thought, although there’d been no way to know for sure. Her mother, Ana, had died so unexpectedly, they’d never had the chance to learn much about the baby they’d essentially adopted. Marcus thought Penny looked just like her mom, at least what he remembered of her, but she’d become a miniature Lola. If she wasn’t asleep, Penny had followed Lola around at her hip. Her gestures, her inflection, her expressions all mimicked the woman she’d called Momma.

  Marcus tapped the sill and curled his fingers to look at his nails. They were stuffed with dirt from the backyard. He picked at them, thinking about the morbid task that had packed the dirt as an awful reminder.

  The breeze gusted and swirled through the open treehouse. Marcus shivered and pulled up the collar on his ragged denim coat. He slid to the trapdoor and gingerly climbed down the planks of wood he’d hammered to the oak’s sturdy trunk. He skipped the last rung and landed on the ground with a thud. The remnants of a dark stain on the blades of grass where he’d found Sawyer waved at him.

  For three weeks Marcus had spent every waking moment doing one of three things. He’d worked to heal his wounds, he’d mourned the loss of his family, and he fixated on the memory of the faces of the three men who’d forced him to spend time on the other two tasks.

  There was the man with the red beard, Barbas. His eyes were black and his beard long and stringy. The wiry tendrils stretched from his chin like a flame. His voice was coarse.

  Rasgado was the man with the scar decorating the length of his angular face. His Southern drawl carried with it the barb of an uneducated man who thought he knew more than he did. His breath smelled like sour milk.

  The stranger with the eye patch was called Cego. He’d somehow managed to stay fat in a place where most starved. His deep growl was unmistakable.

  Marcus dealt the faces in his mind like a deck of cards, shuffling one after the other. He had no idea who they were or why they’d come. He suspected they weren’t the work of the Dwellers. Otherwise they’d have told him that. There had been plenty of time for them to tell him while he lay dying.

  They’d mocked him and robbed him and killed his family without cause. It didn’t matter to Marcus who they were or their reason, if there was one, for ruining him. Marcus trudged back toward the barn, limping on his left leg, thanking them for giving him a reason to live and a life with nothing to lose.

  As the sun dipped beneath the horizon and the last of its light glowed orange to the west, Marcus swung open the barn door and crossed the floor to one of the drop-in storage freezers. He pulled up the lid and braced it with a short two-by-four. Digging into the bottom of the empty icebox, he wiped a layer of frost from one of the corners and revealed a white pull tab. He tugged on the tab and yanked free a false bottom, which he tossed to the side.

  Marcus balanced his weight on the edge of the freezer and reached deep to retrieve a large white pvc tube with caps on both ends. He heaved it from the freezer and leaned it against the side while he dove back into the icebox to pull out a second, smaller tube.

  Holding one tube in each hand, Marcus shuffled across the floor to the workbench he used to prep, clean, and load his weapons. He laid the tubes on the table and began unscrewing the caps. As he slanted the tubes at an angle the contents slid free. They included a dozen packages of desiccant to absorb any moisture that may have remained inside the tubes when sealing with the end caps.

  On the left side of the table was a large box of .30-06 ammunition. There were five hundred Berdan-primed steel-cased rounds in the box. Each one of them was like gold, a buried treasure Marcus had saved when all else failed.

  To the right of the box was a Springfield M1903 rifle in an A4 sniper configuration. It was the same type of weapon Ernest Hemingway had carried in Africa. Marcus had bought it at a gun show two years before the Scourge. It was remarkably accurate and good for large game.

  Sure, it didn’t have the rapid-fire capability of an AR or any semiautomatic rifle, but it was all he had left. It would do.

  The barrel and bolt were coated in grease, in addition to the desiccant, as an extra precaution. The rifle was prone to rusting otherwise, especially in a damp environment like a freezer.

  He patted the rifle, ran his fingers along its polished wood stock, and slid open a drawer underneath the table. He fished around in the mess and found a tube of gun solvent.

  Marcus slid the safety to the up position and the magazine selector to its center and slid out the bolt. Holding its weight in his hands, he twisted the back of the bolt and spun out the firing pin. It needed a fresh cleaning. Marcus tended to the weapon and reassembled it with ease.

  He opened the box of ammo and plucked a silver Mauser clip from the top. The clip held five of the large .30-06 rounds and enabled easy loading. He loaded the clip, dropped the cartridges into the weapon, slid the bolt closed, and flipped the safety into the “safe” position. To the left of the bolt, he thumbed the magazine cutoff selector to the “on” position, which would allow him to quickly unload the five rounds like a traditional rifle.

  The weapon had what Marcus liked to call “buttery smooth action”. The bolt moved almost flawlessly, especially for a weapon designed more than a century earlier. It was accurate up to six hundred yards, maybe a little farther depending on the skill of the person firing the weapon. While it wasn’t modern or sophisticated, the Springfield M1903A4 was a beautiful killing machine. Atop the Springfield was a fantastic scope. It was a Trijicon Variable Combat Optical Gunsight, whose optics could match the distance from which he was firing. At a close distance, he could use the scope without any magnification at all.

  Marcus left the weapon on the table and moved across the room, passing the twin cots that, for five years, had served as beds for Sawyer and Penny. He tried not to look at them. They were both unmade, as they’d been on that deadly morning three weeks earlier. He’d found Penny still tucked underneath the hand-knotted quilt Lola had made from old salvaged sweatshirts. He’d known before he’d tried to pick her up there was no use.

  Marcus brushed past the cots to one end of the large floor-to-ceiling storage rack he’d installed before the Scourge. It was more empty than full now, virtually devoid of food and bathroom comforts like two-ply toilet paper or quilted paper towels.

  All that was left were boxes of baking soda, jugs of white vinegar, tools, empty plastic water bottles, some remnant first aid supplies. The only thing edible on the shelves were two remaining jars of raw honey.

  Marcus snagged a large hiking pack from one of the shelves and unzipped it. He stuffed it with the first aid kits, a couple of the water bottles, a plastic baggie with activated carbon granules he’d been saving since the Scourge, a plastic-cased automotive tool kit, and both jars of honey. He plucked a few sheets of workshop paper towels from a box and stuffed them into the bag.

  Sidestepping along the shelving, he found a large mason jar and filled it with vinegar. At the opposite end of the barn closest to the freezer and the cots on which he and Lola slept were
some folded clothes. It was mostly T-shirts, jeans, and some undergarments they’d scavenged and washed clean. He stuffed what he could into the pack and then zipped it closed.

  His last stop was in the middle of the rack on the center shelf. He’d saved one last can of Zippo lighter fluid, a package of waterproof camping matches, and a flint spark torch igniter. They were next to a sleeping bag he wouldn’t take and a four-person tent that comfortably slept two. He reached for the fluid and the matches and, while he was at it, took a foldable camping pot. He jammed the pot into the pack, slung the pack over both shoulders, walked back to get his weapons, and left the barn for the last time. He shivered as he stepped outside and he pulled his denim collar up around his neck. The clouds had blown past Rising Star, Texas, taking with them the blanket of warmth they’d provide through the night. Nearing midnight, a quarter moon hung halfway up the black sky. Marcus inhaled the chill and shrugged the pack onto his back.

  He trudged through the crispy, knee-high grass to the garden, his boots crunching on the hardened soil. He sniffed past the chill and rubbed the cold from the tip of his nose, stepping across the rounded wood planks that framed the raised garden bed and into the softer, damp soil that coated the fruitful plot.

  The carrots and celery were ready for harvest, as was some of the spinach. He picked a half-dozen carrots and dropped them into the vinegar-filled mason jar. The celery and spinach he wrapped in one of the shop towels and tucked into the outside backpack pocket.

  Marcus wiped his hands on his pants and limped over to the small cemetery, which had more than doubled in size. There were five graves there now, all of them belonging to people Marcus had loved and whom he’d ultimately failed. He considered kneeling and praying. He thought about rekindling the conversations he’d long stopped having with Sylvia and Wesson.

  Lola had freed him of his hallucinogenic discussions with dead people and his need to personify his weapons. She’d taught him life belonged to the living and was only worth having if one looked forward instead of back. She’d been right and he’d liked not being tied to the past, to his misdeeds and shortcomings. He’d relished the hope and expectations that came with wondering what beauty, however relative, the future might hold.

  It would be easy for Marcus to forget what Lola had done for him and to slip back into the darkness of self-pity and mental flagellation. He didn’t. He said a quiet goodbye to the women and children and walked from the cemetery without turning back.

  The sun was low in the sky now, preparing to sink beneath the western horizon. He’d taken longer than planned to ready for his journey. Now was the time.

  Marcus trudged to the far side of the barn, limping from the bullet wound that had slugged his thigh but had missed nerves, blood vessels, and bone. The injury, which he’d cleaned almost obsessively to prevent infection, was healing. But the muscle was damaged and it would be a while before the wound didn’t moderately limit his endurance or speed.

  He reached the northwestern corner of the barn, where the natural gas generator was closest to the well access he’d negotiated with the company that drilled his property. It had been a lifesaver in more ways than one. What had seemed like a foolhardy payment for the riches under his land had been a post-Scourge boon.

  Marcus leaned his Springfield against the side of the building, picked up a pipe wrench, and applied it to the hookup that connected the generator to the barn. He turned the bright yellow valve perpendicular to the pipe and shut off the flow of gas. Then he cranked the wrench counterclockwise as hard as he could to loosen the connection at the nipple.

  Several hard turns and the fitting came undone. Marcus removed it, leaving an open-ended pipe facing the side of the building. Then he turned the yellow valve to restart the flow of natural gas from the generator. The strong, putrid odor of mercaptan billowed from the open pipe.

  He slung the rifle onto his shoulder and took a couple of steps back. Marcus took a breath through his mouth, trying to avoid the intensifying stench.

  Next to the generator, he had piled a tangled mess of dead branches, limbs, leaves, and the pulled weeds from the nearby garden. He’d been building the mound of debris for close to a week, dragging to it whatever he could carry or pull through the high grass.

  He uncapped the black can of Zippo lighter fluid, turned it on its side, and squeezed. A steady stream of the odorless liquid dousing the kindling and the ground around it. Marcus aimed the can at the side of the barn, painting it with the last of the fluid.

  He tossed the can into the pile, lit a match, and tossed it too. The kindling sparked and flickered before the flames grew, licking at the sky.

  He backed away quickly and hurried toward the fence line on the western edge of his property as the smoke blackened and chugged higher into the sky. By the time he’d reached the highway and turned west, the barn was ablaze.

  Five years earlier, when his house had burned, Marcus thought of it as an unrecoverable loss. This time, as what was left burned purposefully, Marcus saw it as a cleansing. The place he’d built for shelter and protection hadn’t turned out to be much of either.

  The undulating glow of the hungry flames caught his peripheral vision as he walked. The winter breeze carried the smoke and its sharp odor toward him, above his head, and across the highway. Marcus was a man without a family and without a home. He was unchained and unbridled. And more than anything, he was looking forward to what was coming, at what he would unleash on the unsuspecting men who were destined now to suffer his wrath.

  CHAPTER 3

  OCTOBER 21, 2042, 6:32 AM

  SCOURGE +10 YEARS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  Marcus couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. The clouds had threatened it repeatedly, but not delivered so much as spittle in weeks.

  The road was cracked and dry, in such disrepair he was almost thankful he was on foot. The potholes and uneven asphalt would be a danger to a horse. He reasoned it was a good thing the thugs had taken his with them when they’d left him for dead.

  The sun was behind him as he trudged eastward along Highway 36. It was low on the wavy horizon, barely tempering the coldest part of the day. The bolt-action Springfield was slung over his shoulder, a large pack strapped to his back, and he carried a Glock in his right hand. It was the only thing they’d left him, and it had only eight rounds in the magazine. One of them was already chambered.

  Marcus was fifteen miles from his house and about forty from his first destination. He didn’t know much about the world he’d abandoned for a second time, but Abilene was as close to a city as he was going to find. He might as well start there.

  He figured it was a twenty-hour walk with his limp. He’d go until dark, or until his legs protested, and then he’d camp for the night. If he cut north on 283 and came into town due west on Interstate 20, he’d pass by a small lake. He could get water there, assuming the drought hadn’t sucked it dry, and finish his hike the next day.

  The rising sun rose, warming the back of Marcus’s neck and his ears. His hair was cropped short and matched the scruff on his cheeks, chin, and neck. He’d taken a razor to his head during his convalescence. It was one less thing about which to worry.

  As he passed a low-slung building on his right, his muscles tensed. He didn’t like the idea of walking alone through a valley of abandoned buildings. There were too many places for people to hide, too many spots for an ambush. His eyes scanned the empty lot to his right. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, his index finger twitching alongside the Glock’s trigger guard.

  He’d reached the Dairy Queen on the corner of 36 and South Main when the stubble tingled on the back of his sun-kissed neck. There was someone watching him.

  Marcus caught a glimpse of movement to his left behind the old police department building, which sat catty-corner to the DQ. It was quick and only flashed for an instant in his peripheral vision, but Marcus was sure someone, or something, was there.

  For a
few steps he pretended as though he hadn’t seen it. He kept his gaze forward, his gait the same, as he trekked through the town. He’d moved past Avenue E, near the 7-Eleven, when he saw it again. He heard it too: feet shuttling across gravel.

  He quickly moved off the road and crouched behind a rusting gas pump under a dilapidated metal awning. There were two remaining pumps. From between them, Marcus saw the storefront and the gravel alleys that ran along either side of it.

  He swiftly slid the Glock into his holster and looped the rifle strap over his head, shrugged the backpack off his shoulders, and placed it on the ground in front of him. He lay down on his stomach, legs splayed for balance, and rested the rifle on the pack. Within seconds he had one eye to the scope and the Springfield ready to fire. The safety was in the fire position and the magazine cutoff selector was on.

  He blinked back a drop of sweat that trailed from a sudden bloom on his forehead. Through the scope he could see the remnants of the convenience store. The windows and doors were gone, save one untouched pane of glass to the right. The food racks and gondola shelves were toppled over, the glass doors to the refrigerators that lined the back of the store open or unhinged. There were signs of animals’ nests and droppings littering the space. Marcus panned the area, looking for any movement. He searched the spaces to either side of the single-story concrete structure.

  Then he saw it.

  Pressed against the wall, to the left side of the building, was a brown shoe. It nearly blended with the dirt and gravel, but a wisp of dust gave it away. Marcus adjusted the scope, let out a deep breath to settle himself and waited until the shoe moved. It was nearly imperceptible, but it moved. Somebody was there.

  A smirk crawled onto Marcus’s face, but disappeared as quickly. He was protected from the threat he could see but ridiculously exposed to anyone behind him. Instinctively he twisted his body and looked behind him toward the empty, weedy lot that stretched for most of the block. There was nothing behind him.