Avalon The Retreat:
The Reconstruction - Book Three
New – Revised – Rewritten - Edited
L. Michael Rusin
Avalon: Beyond The Retreat Book Three of the Avalon Series New and Revised
This Book is Copyrighted © 2012, 2018
All rights reserved 2012, 2018. L. Michael Rusin
Cover Illustration Copyright © 2018 by L. Michael Rusin
Cover design by Calvin Cahail, Sabertooth Book Services [email protected]
Editing by Bob Brashears
Consulting by Bish Wheeler
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or in any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the author.
Foreword
America is no longer the land of milk and honey. The United States has fallen. She is challenged with the prospect of near total destruction. Three-fifths of the country remains viable. In the past, two terrorist bombs, detonated at two major cities on the East Coast of the U.S., leave them in near total ruin and inundated with a killing radiation. There is nothing alive in those cities except an occasional rodent or insect. The rodents eventually die, but the insects thrive. The country is going through radical changes on every level of society. On the West Coast, and parts of the East Coast, whole sections of territory have been taken over by “feudal” gangs preying on the weak and vulnerable.
In an attempt to capitalize on an already dire situation, China and Russia launched a series of unexpected sneak attacks, with missiles and bombs, in an attempt to take over what was left of the United States. The intent was to preserve as much of the infrastructure as possible, but with enough destruction to assure a successful invasion by ground troops. The initial nuclear fallout killed millions of people and continued to eradicate the population for many months afterward in specific areas, while the center of the U.S. was left untouched.
At the onset, China’s explanation for the attack was, “The lawful repossession of a country owing us more than three trillion dollars.” They believed their loans were going to be forfeited and they intended to collect by taking over the country in order to satisfy that debt. Once China launched the initial attack on the U.S. the loans were nullified.
Russia seized the opportunity to ally with China and to help conquer a weakened United States to resolve an extended grudge, a century-long-standing goal to conquer their arch enemy and set into motion a solution to the hatred that was an obstacle to their quest of worldwide national conquest. They realized long ago to engage the U.S. in a war was not to their advantage and the possibility of failure on a monumental scale was probable. By joining China, they finally had the opportunity. They would divide up the country and make it into what they long dreamed of. Here was their opportunity and they took it. Other countries with a hatred for the U.S. joined in and America stood nearly alone. The exceptions were England, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. They stood strong with the U.S. The rest of the world either turned their backs on America or joined in the fight against her.
Families became homeless, children were orphaned, and the basic human mode of survival was put in place. The people who survived the attacks wandered in search of food, shelter, and safety. Many of the stragglers became captives destined for the new era of slavery instituted by the better-armed and stronger people in a society that had a lack of compassion for others. Many died. The lethal effects of radiation poisoning, invisible, and not apparent until the victims were beyond saving, took its toll. When all was said and done, the death toll from radiation exposure was in the hundreds of millions worldwide and continued killing for months. Starvation, deprivation of essentials, and brutality aimed at the helpless stragglers took its toll. With untreated illnesses and the loss of basic sanitation, the dead littered every conceivable area on the planet; a plague resulted. Its roots embedded in the unseen killers of the past. The Plague that killed millions in the ancient past mutated suddenly, becoming a virulent, fast-moving killer; traveling with a speed unimaginable. The few that were contaminated and survived were scarce, with most of those who were infected, dying in as little as a couple of hours, while others suffered horribly for a day or more before finally succumbing to the disease.
Those who studied diseases determined it was contracted by inhaling the contaminated breath of infected individuals, or by coming into direct contact with infected individuals, often times from the liquids ejected from open sores. It was believed any contact with an infected individual, be it clothing or flesh, would infect people in the population. That belief proved to be correct.
The symptoms of the Plague were expressed first with headaches, accompanied by bright red pustule sores that covered the entire body in a matter of an hour or less, and a burning horrendous fever. The sores filled with mucus and pus. Those unfortunate enough to witness the process and survive described the evolution of the pustules as going from bright red to festering yellow and purple sores that burst open suddenly, emitting a foul-smelling liquid.
The stench from the sores brought on an uncontrollable bout of vomiting. Usually, if you could smell the odor you were infected. Within days of the first manifestations of the disease, people died by the hundreds of thousands. Those who were not infected barricaded themselves away from what was left of the general population. That proved to be fruitless. They died behind locked doors.
The disease swept the planet quickly, carried silently by those who thought they were escaping it as they boarded fast airliners and many onto ships. Of the hundreds of millions that became infected, only a small percentage survived. Many of those survivors suffered permanent disfigurement while others lost control of certain nerves and muscle functions.
These disfigurements were worn with pride as badges of courage and determination. They had survived a ferocious killer, unprecedented in all of human history. Not even history’s great tsunamis, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions could be measured against this enemy which had harvested much of the world’s human population. As a result of the great Plague, at the end of World War III, the earth’s population was reduced from slightly over seven billion to less than twenty-one million in as little as two months. It stopped as suddenly as it started. It was as if the gods had taken pity on the inhabitants of the earth. There were simply no more deaths attributed to the merciless killer after a month of its manifesting itself. Skeletons were recovered in the most seemingly innocuous places, for years after. The finding of remains became so commonplace, people simply discarded the bones with no thought or regard for the person that had once inhabited the skeleton. There were too many of them. Regard for human life changed as people’s sensibilities became immune to the death that surrounded them, and a realization of how precious an opportunity to live had become; nearly a religious belief to some.
A new Bogeyman arose as starvation ran rampant, and the food supply dwindled away to virtually nothing. Panic set in as realizations impacted food production, which became practically non-existent—at least during this period. Sporadic cannibalism took root in some societies where irreverent survivors scoffed at law and order, where the rudimentary civilized rule of man was reduced to a base philosophy of “survival of the fittest.” Starvation compelled many to acts unthinkable.
Slavery became a means to an end. Someone had to do the work, and women were a common target for the most menial jobs. The more grueling work needed muscle and brute force, so the we
akest of the men were enslaved to perform the heavier duties. The strong were sold at a hefty price. Almost immediately gangs formed and initiated the practice of capturing and enslaving the survivors. The ruthlessness of these acts sent people into hiding for fear of enslavement, or worse, death. Rape, murder and many more atrocious crimes became common occurrences. Might rule these areas, and the strong become slave masters.
Old prejudices were reignited and those who had hate for a particular race, or ethnicity, took advantage of the new commerce. Not everyone accepted it, but many simply turned a blind eye toward the practice and offered no resistance to a business that was now tolerable, profitable, and filled a need.
Few machines were serviceable. Electricity, and the means to produce it, was limited. Fuel to run the machines that manufactured it needed maintenance, and the fuel to run those machines was hard to come by, the parts to keep them running were no longer being produced, so plundering other machines was a constant. In the past, before the war, the word for slavery was called electricity. In today’s world, it was live human beings where electricity was hardly available. The slave trade blossomed.
Feudal kingdoms sprung up from Florida to California and anywhere in between where a strong and ruthless leader was able to structure a group of men who would be feared enough to garner supporters, to follow, and not offer a serious challenge. These leaders leaped up anywhere there was a population that survived all that was thrown at them. They formed groups who followed these new leaders. In some instances, these groups grew into armies. Any stragglers found along the way were either enslaved or assimilated into the group. Strength in numbers became a way of living, and the larger groups preyed on the weak.
Food became the new commodity and was hard to come by; especially in the larger groups. They had many more mouths to feed. The old and infirm died off quickly. In some area’s groups banded together to try to survive. The luxuries of living in a modern society with easily accessible food, drinking water, safety, and medical aid ended overnight.
When the war ended, life became a day-to-day struggle. Some of the survivors refused to succumb to lawlessness and began implementing innovations to bring back a semblance of lost law and order.
Ram pumps were constructed and placed into service, using the head pressure of falling water to power them and lift water to higher ground. Waterwheels were built, and wells were dug. It was a return to an age of technology that existed before electricity was invented and incorporated as a normal everyday convenience. Almost everything was done by hand and brute force in this new world. People adapted, and they survived. The production of food was a primary motivating factor, along with strength in numbers, and brute force to the maintenance of a territory.
Gardens flourished without chemical fertilizers in areas where fallout was not a concern. Long-term preservation methods for food became a necessity for conserving these vital commodities for future consumption. What was once taken for granted, and wasted carelessly, became one of the primary necessities, allowing what was left of the world’s inhabitants to exist and rebuild societies. Natural gas and propane were replaced with methane.
People traded secrets of herbal remedies to treat the sick. Gasification, through the process of using wood smoke to create a combustible product, was used to run machines without petroleum fuels. Warehouses, where products had been stored were plundered and looted. Whole trains left to rust on the tracks were also looted. Ships in the harbors, navigable rivers, and other waterways were stripped. Police stations, National Guard armories and military bases that had been abandoned were raided. Weapons were at a premium along with the ammunition to fire them. Many groups mirrored the people of Avalon and the mountain town of Fitch, forming small coalitions for the purpose of protection, as well as a sense of community.
There were some survival groups that, like those people at the Avalon retreat, had prepared ahead of time for such a disaster and were able to exist with a relative semblance of dignity and comfort. Many others eked out an existence much like the dirt farmers of the American plains more than a century before.
A few of the men with military experience went out in search of survivors and, as they made their way, they met up with some stalwart, stouthearted souls. That is not to say they didn’t meet up with a few of the outlaws who were preying on the masses to further their own evil purposes. Firefights broke out between groups. Thus, began this saga of those individuals who survived man’s inhumanity to mankind. It is a new world. Filled with love, hope, and the ambition to rebuild what was once the envy of the world. This is a story of that rebuilding. It is a story essentially of hope.
This is the culmination of the Avalon trilogy. Book three describes the perseverance, the preservation of humanity, a search for peace, and the efforts of many to bring back the principals which at one time made America a bastion of freedom the rest of the world looked toward.
Dedication
My deepest thanks to my wife, and my soul mate, Nancy.
Throughout the ordeal I put her through asking her to read things I write has got to be more than she can bear most of the time, but she does it. I thank her for her patience, the never-ending tantrums when I am torn away from my writing to do something I don’t want to do, but I do.
To my friend Bob Brashears who does an excellent job of proofing and editing for me and makes me sound smarter than I am.
To my friend Calvin Cahail for his expertise and suggestions for my covers. He is a gem.
To my long-time friend Bish Wheeler who keeps me focused when I shoot off into the ozone with ideas that initially seem rational but aren’t. to all my friends in my Writers’ Group. To one and all my deepest and most humble thanks and I do appreciate you haven’t abandoned me
Chapter 1
Scavengers
Randy Stewart licked his cracked and dehydrated lips as he studied the bikers down below him in the small secluded valley surrounded by rock strewn rolling hills. Trees were scattered liberally in speckled patterns. Shirley, his wife, bumped up close to him causing him to refocus on the slavers he was studying intently through his binoculars. His jaw muscle tightened with a touch of aggravation at the interruption and the necessity to refocus. He didn’t say anything.
“What are they doing?”
She asked him softly as he studied the small dots moving around as if they were ants and not people.
“Not much,”
Without any emotion he continued to watch the large group.
“I think they’re going to be moving on by the looks of things.”
In a few more minutes one of them got up on a large rock and began talking to the rest of them. He looked big. Randy couldn’t hear what was being said, but the guy was animated as he spoke and moved around furiously, his arms flailing about in irate gestures. The talk lasted for about ten minutes and then the big man got off the rock and walked over to a motorcycle, started it up, and jetted away toward the northeast in a cloud of dust.
The rest of the bikers fell in line by threes, fives, and as many as eight—all riding close together. The man in front was joined by eight riders, four on each side of him and slightly behind, the rest made a line on both sides of the lead figure. It was a massive group of people. Even from the distance between them Randy heard the roar of hundreds of motorcycles revving up and heading away. In a few minutes they were gone, and it was silent.
They all appeared to be heavily armed. Each of them had a handgun or two, and Randy saw a number of rifles that appeared to be AK-47s or M-16s, but he couldn’t be sure because of the distance.
There were knives and sidearms, and a few had LAWs rockets on their backs. Most of them had bandoliers of ammo over their shoulders and chests that sparkled when the sun glinted off the brass.
He also saw what he assumed were grenades strapped to their chests. These guys were well-armed, and on their way to places unknown. Coming up from behind the lead motorcycles were several pickups with canopies on them.
“We’ll follow them and see where they’re going.”
Still no emotion. It was a matter of fact statement and without any reply expected,
“We have to find some food soon…”
His voice trailed as if he were thinking about what to do next.
“If there’s that many men…”
Still evaluating his thoughts, turning to his wife, son, and daughter,
“And I saw a lot of women with them too…there has to be some food. Probably a great deal of it by the size of that gang. I make them out to be three or four hundred. I can’t be exact because they were all moving around or were bunched together. It was hard to get a count but I’m sure there are at least that many, maybe more.”
It was said in a stoic manner that didn’t warrant any discussion. No one responded. Then Shirley asked,
“Do you think that’s a good idea, to approach them?”
There was concern; he sensed the caution and fear in her voice.
“They could be big trouble for us.”
Her voice was melodic, and he always loved to hear her speak, even when it was this serious. It was one of the attractions that drew him to her initially those years ago. He still loved the sound of it.
He looked into her eyes. She was breathing rhythmically. Pausing to formulate a response, hunching his shoulders a bit,
“We don’t have much choice, Shirl.”
Her eyes were a beautiful gray, and when she blinked her full eyelashes gave her face an exceptional beauty.
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