The Forever Man 6 - Dystopian Apocalypse Adventure: Book 6: Rebirth Read online

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 1

  Nathaniel had been with the group of ten men for three days now and parts of his memory were starting to come back to him. Blurred images viewed through the mists of uncertainty and self doubt.

  His name - Nathaniel. He was from America. A massive solar pulse. Someone called Tad. Short? A child? Romans? He remembered a time before the pulse. Flashes of memories involving mankind’s fall from civilization. The end of all modern amenities. Wholesale death and destruction. Disease and famine. Almost constant winter.

  At the moment his disjointed recollections provided more questions than answers but he didn’t allow himself to become frustrated, he reckoned that with time, things would make sense.

  The group of men that had found him lying unconscious in the snow were a hard looking, taciturn group but they had readily shared their food and tried to make him comfortable. They called him Nate, both because they preferred the shortened version of his name and also because he had a prominent scar on the back of his right hand. The scar was in the shape of a slightly flattened number 8. Hence, N8 – Nate.

  They had given him a rough woolen blanket to use as a cloak to cover his shredded clothing. Then they had given him the use of a horse to ride alongside them and a water canteen of his own.

  The horse was a sway back, spavined animal, only a few steps away from the knacker’s yard. Blind in one eye, yellow teeth ground to mere stumps and large patches of mange ravaged its tea colored coat of fur.

  It had no name.

  The horses that the other men rode were of much better quality. As was their clothing. They were dressed in a similar fashion. Leather trousers, thick woolen shirts, leather fur lined jackets, riding boots and western style hats.

  Likewise they carried similar weapons. Two long barreled hand guns and one bulky rifle each. Nate had only been with them for two nights and three days and, although he had worked out that the weapons did not take either cartridges or black powder, it was not clear to him how they did work and he had not had the opportunity to ask.

  The men also carried swords and daggers and it was obvious from the look of the well worn handles that they were weapons that had seen much use and were not carried for mere affectation.

  Many of them had cast a covetous eye on Nate’s axe but none had gone so far as to actually mention it.

  They ate twice a day, once at sunrise and once just before sundown. The meals were all identical and consisted of boiled soya protein with some sort of powdered stock.

  It was bland but still filling and nutritious.

  When they rode, little was said and they all rode with senses alert, always looking at the skyline and the landscape, checking for tracks and tell tale signs of ambush. At sundown, after the camp was made, dinner taken and sentry duty allocated, the men who were not on watch sat around the fire and drank a clear soya based spirit that both smelled and tasted like paint thinner.

  It was during these nightly campfire sojourns that Nate began to piece together where and, indeed, when he was.

  It was generally agreed amongst the men that Nate must have suffered some sort of physical trauma that had resulted in him losing his memory. Nate went along with this theory although, in his heart, he knew that this didn’t even come close to explaining his predicament. The flashes of memory that he did have seemed to have no bearing on either the time or place that he currently existed in.

  Nevertheless, the men had taken it to themselves to give Nate a potted version of the history of the land since the first pulse, or the Highlight Event as they called it.

  It had happened roughly six hundred years ago and the results seemed to reflect Nathaniel’s vague recollections of the event. Although, ironically, even though his memories were mere tarnished flashes, he knew more about the before times than these men did. This was not surprising, as the event had happened over eight generations ago. To them the modern world that had existed pre-pulse was more myth and legend than actual fact.

  Air travel, electricity and the internet were mere fuzzy stories of past technologies that were more historic rumor than significant fact. Tales told around camp fires at night akin to dragons and leprechauns and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  Be that as it may, it was universally agreed that mankind’s fall from grace was vast and irreversible. Unlike the United Kingdom, America had vastly more firearms and advanced weapons and thus the ensuing riots and gang wars and disputes resulted in an exponentially higher quantity of deaths than had occurred in a country where firearms barely existed.

  Within fifty years, the population of America had been decimated to the point where a mere seventy million Americans were left alive and the average life expectancy had dropped from seventy eight years to only forty two.

  And that was when the Highmen arrived.

  They appeared through a rent in the sky, hundreds of thousands of them, sweeping down a highway of light onto the soil of America. They escaped from a dying world – their sun was on the point of going supernova, forcing them to flee the planet of their ancestors.

  They had used the power of an ancient relic called the Arkane Stone to tear a hole in the time space continuum and escape to Earth and, upon arriving, the fissure sealed as the power in the Arkane Stone was mostly used up. Earth had been a random choice based solely on the fact that it was the only compatible planet that was within the radius of power wielded by the Arkane Stone.

  Upon arrival the vast population of Highmen, consisting of almost forty major houses, had fought amongst themselves for ascendency. The following wars lasted for over a hundred years and involved massive battles involving colossal amounts of weaponry, mainly the gigantic airships and armored land tanks that the aliens had brought with them. And, even though the Highmen had no interest in actually warring against the humans, hundreds of thousands were killed in the vast amounts of collateral damage that occurred during the many years of total war.

  The wars had finally come to a head when the Highmen started to use wholesale amounts of chemical weapons.

  The main culprit amongst the many various gasses was the one they called ‘Blight-gas’, an extremely virulent toxin that scorched the land, defoliating all plant life, killing all wild life and maiming and destroying both Hi
ghmen and humans alike.

  At the end of the Chem Wars another thirty million Americans had died and the average life expectancy had dropped again to a little over thirty five years.

  Moreover, Blight-gas had poisoned the very earth itself. From those days forth, nothing but scrubby thorn bushes and undernourished game could survive off the land. As well as this, it had caused fertility rates in humans to drop to a level that proved population growth to be virtually impossible. In a final act of perverted irony, millions of humans that had been exposed to the Blight-gas and who had miraculously survived, had been deformed beyond recognition. As had their progeny for time ever since.

  Hundreds of thousands of ex-humans roamed the Badlands of the interiors, gigantic, knobbled creatures with the raw intelligence of their ancestors but without their basic humanity.

  These perversions became known as Untouchables and they preyed relentlessly on both humans and Highmen alike, forming large marauding bands and attacking at any viable opportunity. Raiding like the Vikings of old, stealing and pillaging food and any useful materials that they could.

  After the chem-wars, the Highmen called a truce and formed themselves into six major houses.

  These houses took over the old cities of Newyork, Newleans, Dalas, Lostvega, Sanfrisco and Seatle. These cities were turned into vast citadels, walled by steel and protected by the Highmen’s massive steam powered ordnance, manned by groups of human soldiers referred to as Shieldmen.

  The interior of America was left a wasteland and the land in between the citadels supported scattered fortified villages and towns that housed the dwindling human population.

  Unfortunately none of this meant anything to Nathaniel.

  In fact, the more he tried to conjure up memories, the more different they were to the history that these men referred to as fact.

  He remembered large, gray skinned, pig-faced beings with no ears, slits for eyes and skin covered holes for noses. They had also been very well armed.

  When he asked Jethro, the defacto leader of the group, whether they knew anything about these beings, he had shaken his head.

  ‘Aint seen nothing like that in my born years,’ he has answered. ‘Although, to be fair, you may just be talking about my ex-wife. That woman be pig-ugly, pig-ignorant and pig-stupid. I concede that she was neither gray nor was she habitually well armed.’

  ‘Well you up and married her,’ joshed one of the men.

  Jethro spat into the fire. ‘That all be true. But then I also up and left her so that ought to count for something akin to common sense.’

  There was a general ripple of laughter that Nate joined in with. He liked the company of these men. They were simple, generous folk that lived life hard and fast and asked for no quarter. Jethro had explained to Nate that they made their living by trading between the smaller towns and villages as well as hiring themselves out to do odd jobs, manual labor, protection and also carrying mail between the outlying towns.

  Although Jethro never actually said so, it soon became apparent to Nate that the trading the men did was not strictly legal. To trade legally, one had to be licensed by the relevant authorities and a percentage of all trade had to be handed over to the said authorities in the form of tax.

  Nate concluded that his new friends were basically smugglers.

  It was also apparent that the smuggling trade was not very lucrative but it allowed them to scrape a living in what was a very harsh environment.

  ‘So,’ said Jethro. ‘You any good with that axe of yours?’

  Nate shrugged. ‘Not sure.’

  Jethro laughed. ‘Show me your hands.’

  Nate held them out and Jethro grabbed hold of them, took a close look and then rubbed his thumbs over Nate’s palms. ‘Well you may not remember but you have some serious calluses there. I reckon that you use that axe an awful lot. I suppose that it’ll come to you when you need it to.’

  ‘Maybe,’ responded Nate. ‘But I sure don’t remember anything about those.’ He pointed at Jethro’s sidearms. ‘I mean, I remember guns but I’m pretty sure that they looked different.’

  Jethro drew one of his pistols and held it up in front of Nate. ‘This be a Wesson Bros, single shot, pneumatic, fifty caliber pistol with a six inch barrel. Effective to about seventy five yards.’ He unclipped a metal bar that ran along the bottom of the barrel. ‘You pump this bar up and down,’ he demonstrated. ‘Do it about a hundred times to compress air into the reservoir which is in the handle. Then you clip the bar back, load the ball in the top and you are ready to go. We all carry at least two because it takes so long to reload.’

  Nate nodded his understanding. ‘And the rifles?’ He asked.

  ‘Well, we got two basic types here. My rifle is a top of the line Lewis and Clarke model twenty.’

  Jethro pulled the weapon out of its scabbard and rested it on his knees. It was four foot long and looked to weigh in at about ten pounds or so. It looked very similar to an old fashioned musket except that there was a steel tube shaped reservoir that ran underneath the barrel.

  ‘We call this a PCP or a pre-charged pneumatic rifle.’ Jethro pointed to a contraption that lay next to his saddlebag. It looked like some sort of hand pump. ‘You see that? That be the compressed air pump that you use to charge the rifle. You connect the hose to the valve in the reservoir and pump like crazy. Takes about a thousand strokes. About half an hour. Then you have this here magazine with ten by fifty caliber balls. You slot that in the top and you got ten shots. Range out to one hundred and fifty yards.’

  He handed the rifle to Nate who took it and aimed it at the sky, nestling the butt into his cheek and squinting through the rudimentary iron sights. It felt good in his hands. Right.

  He handed it back. ‘Nice. What’s the second type?’

  ‘It’s basically the cheaper version of this,’ answered Jethro. ‘Single shot, like the pistols. Still a good weapon.’

  ‘I take it that you need these because of the Untouchables?’ Questioned Nate.

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ countered Jethro. ‘Huge packs, maybe between fifty and two hundred plus. They attack groups of traders, convoys, villages, towns. They take food, valuables. They also take prisoners as slaves. It’s rumored that they eat their captives although I’ve never seen any actual proof of that. They battle like crazy people, show no mercy and always fight to the death.’

  Nathaniel raised an eyebrow and took a hit of some of the paint thinners soya liquor.

  Jethro called it an evening and he took to his blanket. Nate stayed up for a while, familiarizing himself with the working of Jethro’s pistol and rifle. After an hour or so, when he felt totally at ease with the weapons, he laid them next to Jethro and went to sleep himself.

  Chapter 2

  The group of men said their goodbyes in the same taciturn manner that they did everything. A brief, firm handshake and a low pitched expression of farewell. Turn and walk away.

  Jethro was the last to bid his adieu. He left Nathaniel with his blanket and five single unit steel coins. Enough currency to buy some food and perhaps a shared shelter for the night. It wasn’t much but, as a percentage of Jethro’s personal wealth, it was a great deal.

  Nate voiced his thanks and watched the men enter the citadel of Lostvega via the main gate, a fifty foot high steel edifice that opened wide enough for over a hundred men abreast to walk through.

  Nathaniel had already been told that he would not be allowed to enter the citadel on account of the fact that he was an Outlander, or a Non-citizen. In order to apply for citadel citizenship he would have to pay an advance of ten gold units, an impossibly large sum. And even then it could take many months to get a reply. Also, there was no guarantee of acceptance.

  He walked aimlessly through the vast throng that filled the area outside the main gates. Vendors plied their meager wares to those who were either arriving or leaving or, like Nate, were Outlanders and had come to the wall to trade or purchase goods.

 
At the edge of the dense crowd of humanity stood a row of twenty or so enormous vehicles. Gigantic oblong boxes constructed of raw steel plates and mounted on iron shod wheels. The wheels alone stood over twenty feet high and the box-like vehicles rose up another thirty feet higher. The vehicle itself was over one hundred and eighty feet in length.

  The sides featured rows of large rifle ports and on the top of the vehicles, next to a tall smoke stack, was an open turret. Inside the turret stood a weapon that looked to Nathaniel to be some sort of large Gatling gun, the major difference being the preponderance of pipes and tubes that sprouted from it like a patient on a steam-driven life support system. In front of that rose a glass bubble that must have been some sort of control center.

  Nate walked up to the steel box to take a closer look. On the side of the box he noticed a name, painted in red, “Gwendolyn”.

  He continued walking around the structure. The entire back of the vehicle was a huge ramp that had been lowered to provide easy access.

  Nate peered inside. The interior was basically one vast open room with overhead gantries and rows and rows of steel shelves. A gigantic warehouse on wheels. At the far end of the warehouse was a twenty foot high furnace and an even larger boiler. A group of six men were shoveling coal into the furnace’s open mouth and Nate could feel the heat from where he was standing.

  Queues of men with bales and boxes stamped past him, carrying goods into the cavernous interior. There an overseer with a whistle directed them to various different areas where they stacked the goods onto the multitude of steel shelves.

  ‘She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’

  Nathaniel turned to face the speaker. A short man who, at first appearance appeared to be plump. But, as Nate took a closer look, it became apparent that his bulk was more muscle than lard. A neck as thick as his head, a chest like a barrel and two legs that were each as wide as a child’s torso. On his bald head sat a battered black top hat and he sported a waxed moustache that stuck out almost a foot on either side of his face.

  ‘Very impressive,’ answered Nate. ‘Yours?’

  ‘To all intents and purposes,’ replied the thick set man. ‘As you know, humans can’t actually own a Landship, but I am the captain.’ The man stuck his hand out. ‘Tobias Richards.’