Lawless (Lawless Saga Book 1)

by Tarah Benner

  “Wait,” said Lark, craning her neck to meet the woman’s gaze. “We’ll leave you alone, I swear. But first can you just tell us what the hell is going on?”

  Silence.

  “Why did everybody leave this place?” she asked. “What happened here?”

  The woman didn’t reply. For a moment, Lark worried that she might just decide to shoot them to simplify things, but she didn’t. If anything, the barrel of her gun drooped toward the floor.

  “You been livin’ under a rock or somethin’?”

  “Something like that.”

  The woman seemed to consider that for a moment, but then she straightened up and pointed her rifle at Soren. “I’m not buyin’ it. You’ve got two seconds to drop the gun and get outta here.”

  “Okay, okay!” said Lark, maintaining her hold on Denali and backing toward the door.

  In all the panic, she had a second to study the woman in the light. She looked a few years older than Lark, with shoulder-length black curls and smoldering eyes caked with dark makeup. Hardware gleamed from her nose and eyebrow, and she had a tattoo peeking out from the neck of her leather jacket.

  She certainly didn’t look like someone who ran a diner.

  “Let’s go,” Soren muttered, backing toward the door.

  The bell tinkled behind them as Soren pushed the door open, and the woman stepped out from behind the bar.

  “Wait!” she barked, lowering her shotgun. “Where did you come from anyway?”

  Lark hesitated. This felt like a trap.

  “Prison,” said Soren.

  The woman’s brows scrunched together, as if she were deciding whether or not she believed them.

  “What were you in for?”

  “Kidnapping my younger brother.”

  Lark sighed. “Murdering a rapist.”

  The woman paused, still unsure if they were the most honest idiots she’d ever encountered or the world’s worst liars.

  “Well, if that’s true, then let me be the first to break the bad news . . .”

  Lark sucked in a burst of air, waiting to hear that the ghost town, the sign in the market, and the doomsday newspaper had all been an elaborate joke.

  “Everybody left here . . . about nine months ago.” She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite meet her eyes.

  “Why?” asked Soren.

  “No food,” she said. “Crop yields have been fallin’ for years. The drought in California . . . Flooding along the Mississippi and the East Coast . . . What’s not under water is practically a dust bowl.”

  Lark and Soren exchanged a tense look.

  “Global warming, ya know?” she added, as though that explained everything. “Can you believe they thought it was all a big hoax?”

  “Did you know about this?” Lark asked Soren.

  He shook his head. “I knew things were getting bad when I went in, but I thought food prices had just gone up.”

  “They did,” snapped the woman. “’Til there wasn’t enough left to feed everybody. Not to mention half of Florida and New York City was underwater. They relocated fifteen million people, but it didn’t matter. People were starvin’ to death. The economy tanked.

  “The only big business left in New Mexico is GreenSeed, but they’ve been laying off workers for the last year and a half. Only reason they’re still around is ’cause they’re the ones that hold the patents for drought-resistant seed — super crops that are supposed to save us from all this.” She let out a derisive tsk, as though she thought the world was too far gone to save.

  Lark glanced at Soren and back to the woman. “How many people have died?”

  “No idea,” she said, pursing her lip. “Probably billions. They’re sayin’ this is the end.”

  “Is it?” asked Soren.

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “Put it this way . . . You, me, and the few people who’re smart enough to take care of themselves . . . We’re all that’s left of the U.S. of A.”

  Author’s Note

  Thank you so much for reading Lawless. If this is your first experience with one of my books, welcome. I know we’re going to have many wonderful end-of-world adventures together.

  If you’ve been reading my books for a while, thank you. I honestly couldn’t do what I do without your support and encouragement. Because of you, I get to spend my days doing what I love best, and for that I am eternally grateful.

  So many people helped me write this book in a very hands-on way, but there are also countless people who will never know how they helped me. Thank you to my wonderful beta readers, who offered up their knowledge on everything from farming to prison families. Thank you, Ben, who so lovingly poked holes in an early draft of this novel and helped me create a more realistic escape plan for Soren. Thank you to Jackie, my lovely editor and grammar wizard, and to Stanley and RoseMary, who introduced me to a world I never knew existed.

  For those of you who don’t know, Stanley Crawford is a writer and farmer who resides in Dixon, New Mexico. I had the immense pleasure of meeting him and his wife in 2015 when I rented a house on his farm through Airbnb. I’m sure Stanley doesn’t remember me, but his little garlic farm and the breathtaking region he calls home provided inspiration for the fictional town of Arroyo Verde and the love of the land that Lark embodies.

  Since then, I’ve only fallen more deeply in love with the American Southwest. There’s something about New Mexico in particular that feels wild and otherworldly, and each time that I’ve been there, I’ve felt as though my soul awakens.

  People often ask me where I get the ideas for my books, and on this rare occasion, I can actually recall the moment the idea for San Judas popped into my head. Ben and I were on a long drive back to Missouri in preparation for our move to Colorado, and the idea for a primitive prison community on the edge of the highway popped into my head. I wondered what it would be like to emerge from that community after years behind bars and find that the world had ended.

  Even before I started writing Lawless, I knew that I wanted to create a setting that was different from a traditional prison — a place without cells, exercise yards, or correctional officers. It came as a surprise to me that there were plenty of real-world prisons to draw inspiration from.

  Penal colonies are a fascinating yet often forgotten part of our history. While most people are aware that the British government sent thousands of convicts to Australia due to overcrowding in British prisons, most have no idea that the Brits sent more than 50,000 convicts to colonial America between 1718 and 1775. The French sent roughly 80,000 convicts to Devil’s Island, which is located on the North Atlantic coast of South America.

  Russia, China, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, the Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, and many more countries have used penal colonies at some point throughout their history. Even today, 1,500 convicts housed in Mexico’s Islas Marias Penal Colony live in individual dwellings grouped into camps around the island. Housing and utilities are provided at no cost, and each inmate is paid a small salary for his work on the island. Prisoners can even bring their families to the island once they’ve secured a job and established a pattern of good behavior. The entire operation is eighty percent self-sustaining.

  As I was writing Lawless, I tried to make San Judas as believable as possible. The flora and fauna mentioned in the book can all be found in New Mexico, and even the medicinal plants Lark gathers have been used for the purposes she mentions throughout the years (to varying degrees of effectiveness). Incidentally, I recently became obsessed with miniature goats, and so Finn’s job was born.

  It’s important to remember that San Judas is run as a private prison, which means the bottom line matters. This is one of the reasons I chose to power the facility with solar energy and give the inmates modest accommodations built with locally available materials.

  In Lawless, the costs to maintain San Judas are offset by the benefit of having a captive audience on which GreenSeed can test its products. And unfortunately, America has a dark (albeit re
cent) history of using prisoners as guinea pigs in dangerous experiments.

  In the 1940s, hundreds of inmates at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois were infected with malaria to test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs. In the 1960s, Dow Chemical Company commissioned tests of dioxin, a contaminant of Agent Orange, on seventy inmates at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. According to the World Health Organization, dioxins are highly toxic and can cause damage to the immune system, reproductive health problems, and cancer.

  While I don’t know of any modern-day U.S. prisons using inmates as test subjects, many corporations still profit from prisons and the cheap labor they provide. The food service, telecom, and healthcare industries are just a few that are making money from mass incarceration.

  Aramark Corporation supplies food for about 600 prisons in North America despite shortages and reports of unsanitary conditions (having maggots found in their food, for instance). Meanwhile, Global Tel Link can get away with charging inmates more than a dollar a minute to make a call because they don’t have to compete with other providers. Victoria’s Secret, JCPenney, Wal-Mart, Dell, and Starbucks are just a few companies that have used prison labor to pad their bottom line.

  Private prisons are another growing trend in the U.S., due in part to the dangerous overcrowding of America’s jails. Contracting with private companies allows prisons to be built cheaper and faster because corporations are not bothered with things like political pressure, environmental concerns, and rules that require governments to accept competing bids for projects. Most importantly, private companies do not require public approval to build their prisons.

  Behind overcrowding, cost is probably the biggest motivator for outsourcing aspects of prison management and construction. Public spending on prisons and jails has risen three times faster than spending on schools since 1990, and the cost to house an inmate for a year has outpaced the cost of educating an elementary school student in every single state.

  Proponents of privatization argue that corporations can house our prisoners more economically than the public sector can, but studies show that privatization only yields average savings of about one percent.

  Regardless of how you feel about privatization, the fact remains that the U.S. makes up less than five percent of the world’s population and is responsible for nearly twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. Even when compared to places with similar criminal-justice systems such as Europe, Canada, and Australia, the U.S. still exceeds other nations’ rates of incarceration by a lot.

  There are many reasons for this. The Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy cites harsher mandatory sentences in the U.S., higher rates of violent crime, the so-called “war on drugs,” and the lack of a social safety net.

  Since we lock up more people than any other country, you’d think we’d have mastered the rehabilitation process. Unfortunately, the U.S. has a recidivism rate of about seventy-six percent, meaning three-quarters of prisoners are rearrested within five years of their release. This is partially due to our criminal-justice system’s emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation.

  A penal system based on retribution seems normal to us after being brainwashed into thinking that our jails are full of dangerous, violent psychopaths, but it’s fundamentally different from the attitudes of other developed nations. (Perhaps they have fewer true-crime TV shows than we do.)

  Take Norway, for instance. Norway incarcerates people at a rate that is less than one-tenth of the U.S. incarceration rate, and its recidivism rate is only about twenty percent. Of course, Norway’s penal system is known for being one of the most humane in the world, and its prisons strive to maintain a high degree of normalcy for inmates.

  Halden Prison, a seventy-five-acre maximum security facility in Norway, is truly stranger than fiction. There are no guard towers, bars, or fences. Instead of cells or dormitories, inmates live in private rooms equipped with flat-screen TVs, showers, and refrigerators. Guards are encouraged to socialize with inmates over meals, and instead of a concrete exercise yard, prisoners are free to wander through the forest. The only sign that Halden is actually a prison is the twenty-five-foot wall surrounding the facility.

  Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think we should be using taxpayer dollars to buy Xboxes for prisoners, and I’m not suggesting that Norway’s philosophy is foolproof. The United States is an entirely different beast. Compared to other high-income nations, Americans are seven times more likely to die from violence, and our rate of gun-related murder is twenty-five times higher.

  I just use this real-world comparison to show that our way is not the only way. Nelson Mandela said it best when he said, “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Brutality begets brutality, and the appalling conditions within San Judas serve to illustrate how quickly things can deteriorate when we put profits above people and favor punishment over redemption.

  As much as I enjoyed creating San Judas and all the characters incarcerated there, Lawless isn’t really a story about prison — it’s a story about survival. The series explores what happens when society collapses, focusing on the people who pull through when it all goes to hell.

  I hope to shine a spotlight on issues that should be at the forefront of all our public debates and show what we will experience if we continue on our path of corporate greed and environmental destruction. The media circus surrounding the 2016 presidential election made me realize how little attention we give to the things that actually matter — things like food security, clean water, breathable air, and an atmosphere that will allow the earth to sustain human life for the foreseeable future.

  I realize that the ending of Lawless probably raised more questions than it answered, but I promise that the forces that caused the world to end will become clear in book two. This is an important story that I believe needs to be told, and I hope you will stick with me for the rest of the journey.

  If you enjoyed this book, please visit your favorite retailer and leave a review. Reviews help readers like you discover independent authors, and I really appreciate them. You can also pick up your copy of Lifeless, book two in the Lawless Saga.

  If you just can’t get enough of the series, make sure you sign up for my Reader Army to get updates on new books and gain access to exclusive Lawless bonus content. Your first email from me will include a link to the Lawless Fan Portal, which is jam-packed with awesome extras you can’t get anywhere else.

  Looking for your next great read? Check out more books by Tarah Benner:

  Lifeless

  Recon

  Exposure

  Outbreak

  Lockdown

  Annihilation

  Bound in Blood

  The Defectors

  Enemy Inside

  The Last Uprising

  Follow me on Twitter @TarahBenner.

  “Like” the books on Facebook.

  Connect at www.tarahbenner.com.

  Looking for a behind-the-scenes glimpse at Lark and Soren’s world?

  Check out the Lawless Fan Portal. It’s jam-packed with all sorts of fan extras, including character mugshots, a complete history of San Judas, my digital inspiration scrapbook, and the characters’ personal reading lists.

  To gain access, just sign up for my Reader Army. Your first email from me will include a link and a password to unlock pages and pages of special bonus material.