Evergreen (Book 4): Nuclear Summer

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Nuclear Summer

  Evergreen Book 4

  Matthew S. Cox

  Nuclear Summer

  Evergreen Book 4

  © 2019 Matthew S. Cox

  All Rights Reserved

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead in the aftermath of nuclear war is coincidental. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author aside from quotes in reviews.

  Cover & interior art by: Alexandria Thompson

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-950738-12-0

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-950738-13-7

  Contents

  1. Summer Vacation

  2. Crimes of the Old West

  3. Optimism

  4. In The Moment

  5. Slacker Life

  6. The Old World

  7. Explorers

  8. Bad Guys

  9. Bad Dreams

  10. Absolution

  11. Tracks

  12. Coping

  13. Combat Patrol

  14. Delivery Run

  15. Abnormal World

  16. A Good Place

  17. Role Model

  18. Glowing

  19. Dangerous Stuff

  20. Smart

  21. Precious

  22. Judgement

  23. Important

  24. Stranded

  25. Permission

  26. Ms. Tiller

  27. A Rough World

  28. Kriley Pond

  29. Best Interest

  30. Fire and Brimstone

  31. A New Freckle

  32. Growing Up

  33. Little Nightmare

  34. Schrodinger’s Normal

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other books by Matthew S. Cox

  1

  Summer Vacation

  Acceptance that the world irrevocably changed hadn’t come easy, but it also made the weight on Harper’s shoulders feel a bit more manageable. She occasionally daydreamed about waking up from an apocalyptic bad dream and finding her life back to normal, but only as idle fantasy rather than sincere hope. The people who had been in power really had lost their minds; her parents—and an uncountable number of others—really had lost their lives.

  And everyone lost their futures, or more accurately, had their futures drastically altered. Only the dead really lost their future. Harper still had her life, such as it was. She also had a little sister and two more siblings to look after. None of them would ever go to high school or college. Lorelei would probably never truly understand what college even was. On the other hand, they wouldn’t end up in a nine-to-five job either, slaving away to make someone else rich. Despite the condition of the world, the notion of falling in love and having a family hadn’t been destroyed, only changed. Gone was any dream of finding a nice quiet house in a neighborhood that had good schools and nice lawns. Having access to any sort of organized school would be rare enough. No one would care how good they were. What little medical care existed would largely be gone in only a few years.

  Evergreen had two doctors and a former military corpsman, but they could do only so much in the absence of real medicine and supplies. Future generations would have to make do with people learning how to be doctors the way tradesmen learned, working alongside a real doctor. By the time Madison had a grandchild—if she lived long enough—no one who attended a genuine medical school would remain alive. At least, not in the US. If any trace of the modern world remained intact, Harper figured it would be in a country that none of the superpowers believed significant enough to nuke. Of course, the vast amounts of dust kicked up into the atmosphere by the bombardment could easily spread ruin over the entire globe.

  The handful of actual farmers who helped get the crops going in Evergreen noted that the weather had cooled a little, but not as much as everyone feared possible. It seemed, at least for the time being, the Earth had avoided a full nuclear winter.

  Harper wandered along a row of squat, broad-leafed plants, as best she could remember, turnips. Every so often, she tried to pick out Madison, Jonathan, or Lorelei’s voices from the din of people all over the farm. School had been out for a few weeks, but the kids didn’t end up having all day every day to themselves. It bothered her somewhat that children as young as eleven had been put to work. Of course, it wasn’t as if some shifty company exploited them—they worked on the farm, learning how to survive and feed themselves. Cliff said something about summer break originating due to kids needing to help out on their family farms a long time ago. He’d been kinda fuzzy on exactly when it evolved from school closing down for agriculture to the summer break she’d grown up looking forward to every year.

  “Guess we’ve gone in a circle…” Harper idly kicked at a turnip leaf, then sighed at the shotgun in her hands.

  Lorelei, or anyone under age eleven, didn’t need to be on the farm. In her case, she tagged along to be near her siblings, and spent much of her time zooming around exploring, saying hello to chickens and the handful of cows. At first, Harper wondered how a kid could be so content without television, video games, or tablets… but then she remembered the dismal life that the girl had before the bombardment. Her mother had little money and less desire to spend it on fancy toys. The woman barely bought the child clothes, wasting most of her income on drugs.

  A few other smaller children roamed the farm as well, some finding it fun to feed the chickens. One little boy was morbidly terrified of the birds and kept running away screaming as though a velociraptor chased him. Teens and adults did the heavy work while the tweens tended to pick vegetables, hunt down weeds, or learn from the farmers.

  While Harper had also come to the farm to work, her job didn’t involve vegetables or animals. Well, it might involve animals, but not the good kind. As part of the militia, she had to keep an eye out for anyone who might be a danger to Evergreen or its citizens. Outsiders had already attacked the farm once, a raid that ended with Logan hospitalized after taking a bullet to the lung. That attack ended the notion of this farm being a nice trip to the countryside like when her parents had taken them to pick pumpkins for Halloween.

  People could show up at any minute to attack.

  Harper turned in place, staring out over the swath of land to the left of Route 74 at the northern end of Evergreen. A warm July sun thickened the air, a light breeze making the taller plants waver like ripples in an ocean of green. Here and there, bugs zipped back and forth, and she even spotted the occasional sparrow or whatever gliding overhead. Water spritzing from a leaky irrigation pipe near the potatoes sprayed a rainbow into the air.

  If not for it being beside the highway on formerly empty land, the farm would’ve felt normal, no different than if she’d gone out into the sticks. Another glaring difference: not one tiny bit of machinery operated here. No tractors, tillers, or whatever they called those huge things. All the work here had to be done by hand.

  Does that make it a giant garden instead of a farm? Eh, maybe not. They had farms before machines.

  She hoped the majority of outsiders inclined to raid the farm would be there to steal food rather than hurt or abduct anyone. Thus far, the Lawless—or the ‘blue gang’ as she initially knew them—hadn’t ventured far enough away from Denver to make an appearance in Evergreen. At least, not that anyone noticed. Perhaps they had come close enough to observe and decided against challenging the militia. More likely, they’d contented themselves with controlling Denver and didn’t want to risk being too far from their territory.

  Despite having no desire to go back there, the thought that her childhood home had become a playground for murderous thugs got under her skin lik
e a small splinter she couldn’t get to. For seventeen years, that house had been her sanctuary. Until the war, she never could have imagined it becoming dangerous or a place she wouldn’t want to be.

  Unfortunately, even if the Lawless died out, she couldn’t return. Not only did the backyard contain the graves of her parents—thanks to Cliff and some other militia people—the house itself held far too many memories that she wanted to preserve as happy. Seeing her former home broken and ruined would turn it into too much of a metaphor for what happened to her future.

  Someday, she would go visit her parents’ graves, but not until after Madison had grown up. Harper caught herself sliding into worry that her sister’s future adulthood wasn’t guaranteed. Granted, even before society collapsed, no child really enjoyed a 100% survival rate, but few people in the US gave much thought to all the various ways life could go wrong—until it did. Without real hospitals and modern medicine, disease and infection became deadly. No kid would be hit by a moving car again for a long damn time, but the civilized world didn’t usually have roving bands of armed people willing to kill each other for food.

  Raiders most likely wouldn’t try to kill the young or unarmed, but crossfire didn’t care who got in its way.

  Amid the din of people calling out to each other or the occasional laugh of a child, the sun crept across a sky still hazed from the aftereffects of war. The impenetrable dust clouds everyone feared hadn’t shown up to block off all daylight, but the war did have a noticeable effect on the temperature. Despite it being late July, the heat hadn’t yet become too punishing.

  “Could be cooler up here. Maybe the Lawless down there in the city are too hot to move.”

  She frowned at herself for wanting to shoot more of them, but like visiting home, a quest for revenge would be a needless risk of her life. Besides, being forced to shoot someone in self-defense didn’t cause the same level of guilt as actively hunting a person down with the intent to kill them. Barring one exception, she’d killed only to protect herself, Madison, or others from an imminent attack. The outlier, a man who’d suffered a fatal dose of radiation poisoning, had been an act of mercy.

  The memory of that barely alive, swollen man made her shiver. He would have died in hours, anyway. Whatever substance he’d exposed himself to already killed him, Harper merely spared him a few hours of misery. That thought sent her careening down another morbid mental debate. If anyone here got cancer, they would die. Dr. Tegan Hale or Dr. Arjan Khan might try to use their x-ray machine against tumors, but this place had nothing even close to chemo or real cancer-fighting drugs. And the way the solar panels had been lately, they could go days without power… so the x-ray machine might not even work.

  If someone became terminally ill with no hope to save them, at what point would it become humane to end their suffering? People in the 1800s didn’t euthanize the sick. They put them in sanatoriums to suffer in company. Ugh, I hope TB doesn’t come back. Harper paused in her patrol, closed her eyes, and mentally wrapped her siblings up in metaphorical bubble packing to keep them safe.

  “So many things could go wrong in so many different ways, thinking about it is going to drive me crazy.” She sighed out her nose. “People back then didn’t constantly worry about it. I shouldn’t either. ’Course, they probably thought cancer to be a witch’s curse or something. They wouldn’t have known it hopeless. It’s kinda hard to worry about stuff you don’t know about or understand.”

  A trio of twentysomething men went by, carrying digging tools. All nodded at her in greeting as they went by, heading out to the northwest end of the planted area to expand the field. She waved back at them, no longer feeling strange when adults treated her like an equal. That had been one of the strangest parts of acclimating to life here. Even before she turned eighteen, as soon as she’d joined the militia, most everyone gave her the same respect as any other grown-up. Could be because she’d killed people or maybe due to her earning Walter Holman’s trust. The people likely assumed if he considered her good enough for the militia, they would, too.

  In another world, I’d be hanging out with my friends at the pool on a day like this. We would’ve graduated high school a couple weeks ago and been worrying ourselves nuts over college. Harper looked down, again kicking a random turnip leaf on the way by. One by one, she thought of her friends who she hadn’t seen since before the bombardment: Christina, Andrea, and Veronica. Harper tried to guess which school they’d have gone to. Andrea, definitely, would have remained close to home. The others probably would’ve attended out-of-state colleges and stayed wherever they went after graduation. Most likely, she wouldn’t have seen them much after graduation, anyway. Her mother always used to talk about all the friends she rarely got to see.

  Her friends Renee and Darci had—miraculously—turned up. Renee, she’d stumbled across by chance, finding her among a group of Lawless who had essentially abducted her and forced her to join. Darci, she’d found a few hours’ ride north in a survivors’ camp run by the Army at Eldorado Springs. There, she’d also chanced upon Madison’s friend Eva and the girl’s mother. Few things depressed Harper as much as that squalid, overcrowded camp. Hopefully, the Army would figure out a better way to feed and house everyone soon.

  Despite the gloom that hung in the background of every idle thought, two things kept her spirits reasonably high considering the state of everything. One, Logan had mostly recovered from being shot. The doctors still hadn’t let him go back to work on the farm or do anything stressful, so he’d been staffing one of the food-distribution tables at the quartermaster’s building, putting bundles together, and so on. Maybe if he did well, they’d let him stay there.

  The second thing that kept Harper’s spirits high was Madison. For the better part of the last month, her little sister had been back to her old self. Mostly. She no longer stressed out about school or dance class or gymnastics or whatever other activity ate up her time. This new existence with no homework, no adults telling her she had to be at X place at five on the dot for a class, or practice so many hours at home each night, allowed her to relax. The slower pace of life eliminated the bratty streak that often surfaced when Madison found herself having no free time, racing to wolf down some quick microwave meal between scheduled activities. That Madison had not once yelled at or even scowled at Harper in the ten months since the war stood out as the biggest difference from before.

  Though, Harper would happily go back to that life if at all possible. Having screaming arguments with her kid sister a couple times a week would be a small price to pay for their parents—and the other millions of people—not to be dead.

  Still, Madison’s personality now came close enough to how she’d been before her extracurricular activities stacked up into unmanageable territory that Harper felt hopeful. Her sister hadn’t been permanently damaged mentally by what happened—or at least not permanently crippled. She couldn’t claim anyone hadn’t suffered some degree of mental damage, especially herself. Nightmares of blasting a guy’s face into a spray of gore inside a Walmart never plagued her before the bombs dropped.

  She reached the end of the turnips and hooked a left, walking down a large dirt ‘road’. Dozens of crop rows stretched out on either side of the maybe ten-foot-wide passage. Perhaps since the guys in charge of the farm had been actual farmers before the war, they’d planned things out to make room for tractors and farm equipment. Mechanized farm tools had long since stopped working due to a lack of gasoline. Rafael worked on biodiesel, but engines designed for gasoline wouldn’t handle it, and he’d said something about it putting greater wear on engine gaskets or something like that. Also, using crops for fuel instead of food hadn’t gone over too well with some people. At least not until they had an ample surplus and no one worried about one bad cold snap making everyone starve.

  Basically, no one yet knew if the biodiesel project would ever work.

  Harper didn’t worry too much about that. Not like she wanted to travel long distances.
In fact, the city having no usable vehicles put a definitive end to far-reaching scavenging trips. This, she considered a good thing for entirely selfish reasons. It meant she wouldn’t need to go out of town away from her family. Granted, the down side to that would be that if they decided to go scavenging, it would turn into a multiple day extended camping trip rather than a few hours’ on the road.

  A tall man in a yellow ball cap went by in the other direction carrying feed buckets. He nodded, muttered, “Hey,” and kept on going. She vaguely recalled his name as Steve. He hadn’t been in Evergreen long, but she remembered him because he’d been checking her out. Though he looked a little older than her, early twenties maybe. Surprisingly, once he noticed Logan with her, he stopped trying to catch her eye. The first she’d seen the guy had been the July Fourth event the city council put together. It hadn’t been much of a celebration per se, but Anne-Marie and Walter wanted to do something at least, so they’d had another giant communal meal.

  The Fourth passed almost three weeks ago, having only slightly more fanfare than an ordinary day. Some people didn’t want to call attention to the day because the ‘country was gone.’ Others got fired up at that, screamed about America being a concept more than physical space. A few fights broke out, but no one had been seriously injured. Walter strongly encouraged people not to fire handguns in lieu of fireworks to save ammunition for life-and-death situations. Naturally, a few idiots still tried to kill clouds, but it hadn’t been widespread. Harper couldn’t figure out what bothered her more—that ‘don’t waste ammo because you might need it to protect yourself’ was a true statement, or that such a statement had more success than telling people not to shoot into the sky because falling bullets could kill people.