Fall of Earth (Book 1): The Survivors of Bastion

by Will Hawthorne

  © 2016 Will Hawthorne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  The Survivors of Bastion

  Fall of Earth Book #1

  Will Hawthorne

  2016

  This work of written fiction is protected under the copyright laws of the United Kingdom and other countries throughout the world. Country of first publication: United Kingdom. Any unauthorized exhibition, distribution, or copying of this book or any part thereof may result in legal action. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this book are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

  No person or entity associated with this book received payment or anything of value, or entered into any agreement or connection with the depiction of tobacco products.

  Summary

  For a whole week we waited in the basement, listening to the world outside as it fell apart.

  When things went quiet and we ventured outside, everything had changed.

  Fifteen years after a fatal virus spreads across the Earth, almost driving humanity to extinction, the few that are immune have set up small communities in order to survive and thrive.

  Tom 'Tommy' Hadley has known nothing but this world since he was a young boy - now 22, he acts as the leader of the citizens of Bastion, a small community thriving in a suburb from the old world. In the aftermath of the world's end they have built Bastion into a place they can all call home. But things don't stay calm for long.

  When a man approaches Tommy from the forest outside of Bastion, delirious and covered in bite marks, his only reaction is to get the man help.

  But those bite marks didn't come from an animal, and it isn't long before Tommy and a small group of survivors find themselves on the run from a new type of infection, one that turns it's hosts into rabid versions of the humans they once knew.

  The Survivors of Bastion is a riveting tale of survival set against the backdrop of a fallen Earth.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One – One Day in Bastion

  Chapter One – Bastion

  Chapter Two – Fawn and Doe

  Chapter Three – Farm and Incident

  Chapter Four – Disposal and Return

  Chapter Five – Robbie and Henrietta

  Chapter Six – Banquet

  Chapter Seven – Night Work

  Part Two – Savages

  Chapter Eight – Treehouse

  Chapter Nine – We Have a Visitor

  Chapter Ten – Morgan

  Chapter Eleven – Knock Knock

  Chapter Twelve – In Ruins

  Chapter Thirteen – Outpost

  Chapter Fourteen – Rest

  Part Three - Gone

  Chapter Fifteen – On Foot

  Chapter Sixteen – Last Man Standing

  Chapter Seventeen – Lock and Key

  Chapter Eighteen - Before

  Chapter Nineteen - Massacre

  Chapter Twenty – Reunion

  Chapter Twenty One – One Month Later

  The Survivors of Bastion

  Fall of Earth Book One

  Prologue

  When I was a kid, before everything happened, I used to be pretty afraid of the dark. Well, nobody’s ever really afraid of the dark – they’re afraid of what’s in the dark, the unknown, the things that you can’t see. I didn’t know what was lurking there, and in my mind I used to make up all types of stories and ideas about what might be hiding there, in the places that I couldn’t see.

  The worst were the ghosts. They were spectres from the past, these old images of people long-dead but with unfinished business, and they would be waiting for me, ready to take me with them, back to the otherworldly place where they resided.

  One time I told my Dad about it before bed. I can still remember now what he said. Without looking up from his newspaper – because he was like that, nonchalant but caring – he said;

  ‘Trust me, Tommy. It ain’t those that are dead you wanna be worrying about. It’s them that are alive.’

  Well, not long after that those words became the most important I had ever heard in my life. They were for the longest time.

  Until that day, that is.

  That day so many years later, when everything changed.

  I don’t remember a whole lot about how everything originally went down, back when I was a little kid, but I’ll do my best to pick out the important bits. Some things in my mind are vivid – they’re sharp, clearer than anything I see these days, even now in my twenties. Other things, the things I want to remember but can’t, have had the empty bits filled in. Sometimes I wonder which parts my head filled in on it’s own and made up, so I can’t promise that all of this is accurate. Anyway.

  In the weeks leading up to the outbreak, there were scattered reports on the TV about this virus that had broken out in one of the Northern African countries. I couldn’t tell you which one, exactly, even after having been told the stories by those older than me in Bastion. Every one of them seems to remember a different country in equal stead – Mali, Chad, Algeria… At the time every news outlet seemed to be repeating every one of the country’s names.

  The older one’s in particular have told me that they originally laughed about it all. They said every few years another one of these stories would hit the news, and the media would keep repeating four-figure numbers about how many were dead, as if the apocalypse was nigh.

  I didn’t really find people dying to be all that funny.

  When it reached six figures and the CDC declared an international emergency, that was when they knew that this was for real.

  Nobody really cares about the troubles of others, even the troubles of other countries, until that trouble reaches your front doorstep. My family was no different. We kept our heads down and went about our ways and our business right up until the schools were shut indefinitely. When me and Robbie got in the car we were actually pretty excited. School’s cancelled, right? We might have stayed that way, too, until we saw the look on my mother’s face. Kids tend to base their reactions on however their parents are acting, or the presiding adult.

  My mother looked fucking terrified.

  On the way home sirens sounded, and a few cars drove past us much faster than they should have been going. We went into the basement, which was kept semi-tidy, and waited there for a little while before we heard the door open. My mother told us to stay where we were, Robbie and I, while she went upstairs. He was only three so he didn’t know any better, but I was seven and I knew something was up.

  I crept up the stairs, wincing every time the wood creaked beneath my feet, and about halfway to the top I heard my Dad’s voice. He was speaking really quickly.

  ‘Henrietta, listen to me-’

  The door was a little open, and when I glanced through I saw the figure of my father. It’s an image that has stayed vivid in my mind, and as long as I live I think it’s the one that I’ll remember him by.

  His dark hair was matted to the side with sweat, and his eyes looked at my mother with such intense ferocity the likes of which I had never seen him conjure up. He was dressed in his black shoes and trousers – his work gear – and his white shirt, which was smeared with messy red stains.

  ‘What’s all this bl
ood? Why are your knuckles so bruised?’

  ‘Listen to me-’

  I looked down at his hands, still clenched into fists, and saw that they were indeed discoloured and scuffed – one of his clenched hands wasn’t empty, though.

  He was holding a shopping basket in his hand, the kind you get from a store but you’re supposed to leave at the checkout when you pay. It was strange seeing this thing in our home, outside of it’s natural environment. It was filled to the brim with cans and tinned goods.

  ‘-we have to bar the door and get the kids into the basement… Where are Tom and Robbie?’

  ‘They’re already down there, Jack.’

  ‘Okay…’ He took a deep breath to try and calm himself, before looking out of the kitchen window to the street. ‘Go upstairs and get my gun, and all of the shells. I’ll go and grab the rest of the cans from the kitchen… And a knife… And the axe from the shed…’

  ‘An axe? What are you talking about? What’s going on out there?’

  ‘Just do what I say, Henrietta!’

  My mother was becoming teary eyed, but when my Dad shouted like that for some reason it made her stop and get some control over herself.

  I’ve never asked her why that change occurred in her. She doesn’t even know that I saw all of this, even now. Right then, though, she took a big breath and nodded at him, and they both took off in their respective directions, carrying out their jobs.

  I hurried back downstairs to look after Robbie, and a little while later they both followed. My Dad kept dashing back upstairs for various things; the TV, photo albums, bottles and glasses and containers of water that he stockpiled in the corner of the room.

  There was loads of it, until finally he sealed the basement door shut, and things went quiet.

  The first night was the worst. Looking back I knew that they were both trying to do what they could to look after us, to keep us calm and assure us that everything was all right. There were shouts and screams from above, some of them right on our street.

  Gunshots. Loud crashes of bricks being broken and that horrendous sound of metal being bent out of shape. Far away, an explosion sounding that we felt the vibrations of through the ceiling.

  My mother cried. My father cried. All of us cried.

  Little did I know that we were biding our time by my parents’ virtue, clinging to that one primal instinct that will forever remain with us no matter how far civilisation might have pushed at one point; survive. Everything else came second.

  But how do you survive against an enemy that you cannot see? It is one that creeps up on the unsuspecting and the most suspicious, that can strike you at any time with complete shamelessness.

  My Dad knew that all too well, so when he started to show the symptoms he said that he loved us and he was just going upstairs for a little while to see how things were.

  He took his gun, but we didn’t hear a shot, because he never fired one. He probably figured that my mother might need it at some point, because one extra bullet could make all the difference.

  My Dad stayed strong until the end, letting the virus take him and giving up the right to take his life by his own hand, so that we might be spared.

  A day later my mother went upstairs empty-handed and came back with the gun, and took the position of protector.

  She couldn’t protect us from the virus, though. It was something that we all waited for, my mother knowingly and Robbie and I having some feeling about.

  But it never came. We waited and waited, but we never got sick.

  After a few weeks, the noises upstairs stopped altogether. The electricity and the water had stopped days before, but now we were greeted with a new friend – silence.

  My mother finally went upstairs, the gun held steady in her hands as she opened the basement door. I saw daylight for the first time in weeks and, checking on Robbie who was sleeping soundly, I made my way back to the surface.

  Part One

  One Day in Bastion

  Chapter One

  Bastion

  I shuddered awake in the dim light of the dusky morning, the mattress creaking beneath me.

  The quiet mornings were something I had never gotten used to, even now, fifteen years on from the outbreak. Sleeping in the same house could do that to you, of course; the echoes of the past remained, and traits became attached to the places that I had known since I was a kid.

  I sat up in bed, looking about my dusty bedroom, which more often than not felt like some preserved relic of a bygone era… Which it was, in many ways. While I had ditched my red plastic drawing desk that seven year-old me had spent so many painstaking hours sat at, and downtuned my collection of toy cars to just a few of my favourites, some of these old toys still sat on a small shelf in my room.

  The rest were lined with useful things salvaged from the old world – books, mechanical parts, clothes, and those things that become oh-so important without you even realising until civilisation completely collapses.

  But we’ll get to that in a little while.

  I had slept in my clothes again – jeans and a scrubbed white t-shirt. Denim might have been a constant fashion staple from before but now it was more useful than ever – tough, durable and long-lasting, no matter how much the colours wore out.

  I rubbed my eyes and crossed to the window before opening the blinds and looking out over the street.

  Our street.

  The street I grew up on was originally called Bastille Avenue. As we met the others over time, the one’s who could be trusted, and the one’s who couldn’t who were no longer with us, we came to a decision regarding the section of the suburb. We lived in a small town that was at least an hour’s drive from a major city, mostly surrounded by rolling hills and countryside. Our suburb was remote, more remote than any we were familiar with, and considering that there were so few of us left in the country, if not the world as a whole, we decided to call that part of the suburb our home.

  Bastille sounded a little like Bastion – a bastion was something strong, something tactical and strategic that represented human logic at work, so that was what we decided to name our little community.

  Over time we met up with others, and things rarely ever went smoothly. In this new world of ours, were by our count more than 99.98% of the world’s previous population were dead, everybody’s own survival was the only thing on their minds. We couldn’t trust them, and as far as they were concerned they couldn’t trust us, even if we ourselves knew that we were reasonable people who would only kill if we were threatened.

  Steadily, though, we built up friendships and alliances. I had to grow up quickly, and this was something that wasn’t just encouraged by Henrietta; it was sparked by something innate in my mind.

  Now, Bastion was home to 48 people. We were a small community who lived in the houses left behind on Bastille Avenue, these old brick structures that had been left vacant since the outbreak of the virus.

  The street was quiet as I looked out over it, save for one person – Rubin, who was on shift as the interior night guard and about 15 minutes from his switchover so he could get some sleep. If it weren’t for the little touches, it might have looked the same as it had done fifteen years ago, but there were always some shadows that cast their impression over everything. Weeds grew from between the huge potholes and cracks in the road and the sidewalk, many of the front yards had been swapped out for small plantation gardens with fruits and vegetables surrounded by chicken wire, and there wasn’t a single car to speak of on any of the driveways.

  What cars we could find in the aftermath had been used to build the wall that surrounded Bastion. Hundreds had gone into the making of it, and with the help of the settlers that had steadily trickled in during those first few years we had managed to build it. Three cars high at the lowest point, the whole thing tracking around Bastion in a rough rectangle. While we only used one interior guard to patrol the houses and the streets at any one time, the exteriors were monitored at their four corne
rs by four individual guards from the community. Shifts were switched up regularly, but right now it was their job to monitor the outside of the wall for any signs of movement, even if it was a stray deer that had wandered into the nearby areas.

  From my window I could see Hayley on the westerly lookout, a book in her hand which she kept glancing down at for several minutes before looking back over before her periodically, and then repeating it.

  I watched her, and Rubin, and the street, for some time before returning to the room and getting changed into a set of work gear and grabbing my harvest bag from the end of my bed. I had a long trek and an even longer morning ahead of me… And that was before I got Carl out of bed.

  I headed into the hallway, hearing Robbie snoring from his room. Henrietta – I had interchangeably been calling my mother by mom and her first name for a long time, now, which she still chastised me for regularly – had always slept quietly. I pressed my ear against the bedroom door and eventually heard her steady, quiet breathing, making sure that she was still alive.

  This was my morning routine, checking that the two people who I needed most and who needed me most were well before beginning my day.

  I reached the front door, pulling on my boots and my coat before reaching beneath the hallway cabinet and unlocking the trunk beneath it. While my Dad’s gun was under my bed upstairs, something Henrietta had finally given up to me when she realised it could do some good in my hands, the gun I kept in the trunk was closer to something an ex-soldier might use for hunting, with a modified crosshair scope attachment. Rudy, who lived at number 74 and knew a few things about guns, had said that it was a something-or-other make, but the make didn’t matter a whole lot to me – not anymore. As long as we had enough rounds for the weapons that we held, and we knew how and when to fire them, that was the only thing that was important to me.

  Honestly, I had used it more for the scope than I would ever use it for the simple fact that it could kill whatever I pointed it at. Range and distance beyond the walls were a factor that could get you killed depending on what you were moving towards.