Forest Empire: Survival in a Dystopian World (BONES BOOK TWO 2)

by Jim Rudnick

  “Hold it a sec,” he said and tucked the compass away. He stepped into the water on a rock just below the surface and reached down against the up-current edge of that big rock. He grabbed the object and pulled it out of the creek, and it emptied itself of water as he held it up.

  “Can … can of oil it says on the side—and it’s airplane oil. Least that’s what the can says, and it had tables on the side showing vapor phase coking and elastomer compatibility test results too. I know a bit about this kind of item—and it’s for an airplane engine,” he said, turning the can over and over to empty it completely.

  “Don’t see any airplanes in the creek,” Jon said.

  Everyone was deep in thought and silent until Sue spoke up.

  “Back on the hike, I’d say …” she said.

  Javor dropped the can back into the creek, and the current tossed it around and upside down as it went downstream and away from them. “New can though,” he added as he took the lead once again and aimed them north.

  More trees, what a surprise, he thought. Once again a stand of heavy white spruces lay ahead like a wall of needles they couldn’t even see through. As he pushed through the branches, he stepped out and stopped. Behind him, Bruce bumped into him and called out, “Halt,” and the ones behind him did just that.

  Moving off to one side, Javor yelled back, “Come on through,” and the rest of the mission team pushed through and stood in a clearing.

  “A big clearing,” Javor said to himself as he looked around. At least two hundred yards long by about a hundred yards wide, the clearing was just grass and weeds, which had been cut recently as he could see clods of cut stalks in piles near the edges of the clearing on one side. The creek they’d just passed by was on the far left side of the clearing, and they could hear it gurgling as the current moved down over the rocky course.

  But close by, here at the southern edge of the clearing, there was a large set of four huge poles, each about a foot across stuck in the ground. Every ten feet or so, there were wooden connecting two-by-fours, locking the four poles together all the way up to the top of the poles about forty feet or so. From the top hung a huge braided set of ropes that had smaller connecting loops that ran all the way from the top to the bottom, like a ladder of some sort, meant to be climbable all thought. There was little else to see on this structure

  Sue said, “This is like to hold something up—or down, I’d say?”

  Jon nodded. “We had something similar back in Shorecroft that we used to hold satellite dishes—before the bombs, of course. You just climb up the tower, make any needed adjustments, and then climb back down.”

  That got more nods.

  “But, who the hell uses satellites anymore,” Wayne asked, and that got some shrugs.

  Javor said, “But what is more interesting is that this area here—the whole area—has been recently trimmed. And wouldn’t eight-plus years of normal forest growth have filled up this empty area much more than what we see? My point is that whatever this is—it’s in use, I’d say.”

  Everyone contemplated Javor’s observation for a few minutes.

  Sue nodded and took a few photos of the area, and they all walked toward the far side of the clearing. About halfway across the clearing off on the right side, very close to the bubbling creek, were a large number of stumps and a large fire-pit too that still had burned remains of previous fires in the bottom. Someone had raided the creek for the stones that circled the fire-pit, and others had found some trees to cut to make seats out of stumps, which were placed all around the campfire pit.

  “Someone used this recently—the rains of just a couple of days ago had washed the burned remains down in the fire-pit, I’d say,” Javor noted.

  They continued to walk on, and once they reached the far edge, Wayne took point and they moved off once again in single file through the dense boreal forest ... always heading north.

  #####

  As the woman tilted her large plastic pot holding good drinkable water, the arrow went right through it and into her chest. She gasped and looked down at the arrow that had just pierced a lung and tried to call out, but she fell against the well pump in the middle of the small village and was hardly noticed.

  Around her, kids played with toys as other moms were working on dinner inside their huts. Two men were standing guard and should have been more alert, but instead they were sitting on a log at the edge of the village, just chatting. As one of them reached down to pick up his canteen, an arrow ripped through the air and speared his canteen right into the ground.

  Rising, he screamed, “Slavers,” and in less than a minute, he and his guard friend were grabbed, hog-tied, and left on the ground. The attackers moved through the village, tying up almost everybody and letting some just run off.

  Older women were of no value to them, so they were allowed to run away.

  All the men, though there were few, were all tied up and kept.

  Children had to be older, and most were not except for the two girls—twins it looked like to the slavers—with golden hair and young bodies. They were in the first flush of womanhood—a fact that was not lost to the slavers. The girls would fetch a very handsome price, and they gathered up all their captured villagers.

  Thirteen men and the twins were shackled together in a string of chains, each having a wrist on the long chain that was immobile.

  The slavers also went through the village huts and homes; they took whatever they might want or need. Food was important and they broke into the hanging lockers to take dried fish and elk as well.

  They had learned not to burn down the villages they raided, as the returning villagers would then need to move their homes, and it was easier to attack a village if you knew where it was. Burned villages, therefore, were not in their plans, and they did take the time to put out the one or two small cooking fires they’d found in a few huts.

  The slaver leader checked the chains; all the new captives were secure. He faced them all and said in a calm voice, “Do nothing to try to escape, and you will live. Do nothing to earn our interest, and you will live. In less than a week, we will meet up with disciples of the Forest Empire who will take over and transport you northwards where your futures lie. You are slaves as of now, get used to it—or die.”

  The twins were crying most of the way the first day they were force walked northward. One of the men, a skinny one who had some homemade tattoos on his arms, tried to jump away from the group when they were crossing a river. Two of the slavers held him down in the water until the thrashing stopped. One of them unhooked the lock around that man’s wrist, and he floated face down with the current taking him downriver.

  Every day, they hiked and didn’t stop except for a break every three hours for about ten minutes or so. The captors were not mean nor for that matter did they go out of their way to hurt or embarrass or make their slaves’ lives more uncomfortable. They were in the business of finding, capturing, and then transporting their slaves to the Forest Empire. Their job was as simple as that.

  At the end of the ninth day, with almost a hundred miles behind them, the path ahead changed from a narrow path through the heavy pine forest and opened up in a very large clearing.

  Ahead of them was something that got immediate attention from the slaves as they all looked over and up and up and up.

  Moored to a large set of huge poles driven into the ground was a floater—an all-black blimp more than three hundred feet long. Where it was moored, against the large pole, a group of robed figures was climbing down the ladder there, and they walked over to greet the slavers and talk.

  “Glad you’re on time,” one of the robed men said, and for a few minutes, they compared notes on the hike, the weather, the chance of rain coming later today, and more.

  One of the robed men went down the chained line of slaves, taking a photo of each of them and making some notes on his tablet. After a half hour of cataloging the new slaves, he came back to join the rest. He handed the tablet to
his leader and waited for him to digest the information about the new slaves.

  The leader looked down at the tablet and then up at the man whose tablet he held. He shook his head and then went over to stand in front of the long line of the new slaves. He paid attention only to the twins—the two blonde girls who were going to be women in a very short time. He looked at them, and he went right up to each, touched their hair, slid a hand over their breasts, and grasped a hip on each of them. Then he smiled.

  “We will be more than glad to accept this new batch of slaves—and I can tell you that we will pay a full double rate for each of these young blonde women. Happily,” he said, and then he handed the tablet back to his man.

  There were some more conversations as some of the robed men slowly got the slaves unchained one by one, led them over to the ladder, and forced them up and into the floater. At the top of the ladder, they were manhandled by waiting robed figures who took them one by one to their lockups within the ship.

  As the slavers turned and walked away, the last robed man on the ground looked up at the floater and smiled. The two beautiful women in his latest batch of bought slaves would mean the prime disciple would be a happy, happy leader with their addition to the autumn equinox chief sacrifices…

  #####

  The white granite quarry lay a bit more than three miles from Empire City. Used now for hundreds of years before the Boathi bombs had fallen, now, it was used as much if not more. Three teams of slaves, each on their own shifts, days, afternoons, and nights, cut the white granite from the quarry, trying to hit their quotas. When the quotas were met, the slaves were fed. When the quotas were not met, there was pain and no meal at the end of the day.

  Today was like any other day—well, afternoon really, Tina thought as she once again went down the same lineup of wedges all the way back to the first one on this block. “Blocks were split,” she said to herself, using the same stupid voice as her shift foreman had used, “by driving wedges into the holes drilled to use by the splitters.” That’s what I am, a splitter, and I am good at it.

  At least that’s what made her speak up earlier about this block. It had an almost unseen line running parallel to the string of forty holes that now had those wedges inserted. It was her job to go from number one to number forty, tapping each with the same effort using her heavy steel hammer. Each went down only a small fraction of an inch each time it was struck.

  Some blocks took about a hundred hammer blows, and others took more.

  This one, she knew, would be much less, and she was right. On her thirty-seventh smack, the block split—but not down the perfectly straight line of the drilled holes and wedges. Instead, as she knew it would, the stone split on that fracture line, and the odd-shaped third of the stone slid off and fell to the ground. She stood up and put down the hammer on the remaining top of the ruined block. She blew the whistle around her neck to call over the foreman, and she stood still waiting for him to arrive.

  Five minutes later, a disciple walked over and stood there looking. He studied the piece of the block that had sheared off and ruined the whole block. He looked at her and said, “How many?”

  She answered, “Late thirties …” and she could not meet his eyes.

  “You’re responsible, of course, no food today. You should also get five lashes,” he said as he looked across the quarry at the Shieldsman standing there, “but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt—you did warn me about this a few hours ago. So instead of pain, you’ll be training a new slave moving up from labor to becoming a splitter. They’re to get the same training you did—and I want them ready to go on to their own blocks in three days.

  “Now get those wedges working and split off the block—I’ll see if I can find a way to cut it down to use it elsewhere. But I can’t fix the numbers—your shift team is down one block. You’ll have to make it up, no excuses …” He turned to walk away.

  Around Tina, there were hundreds of slaves, all working on the marking and cutting of blocks of white granite. Others moved then with those huge rollers over to the road that led back to Empire City and the new pyramid. The quarry was behind in the cutting and supply of the white granite stones to pike up on the pyramid to make it bigger and taller and, of course, to finish it.

  #####

  The prime disciple nodded to his chief acolyte and said, “Time. Find Disciple Anqas and send him in.”

  In the small audience room, things were much less formal than in the big public room. There, he had to sit on the only chair in the room, up on a dais, people requested an audience, and it was so formal. But it was necessary to show the citizens of the Empire how things were run at the top of the heap. He almost smiled at that as he sat around the circular table pushed over to one side of the room.

  Until the new pyramid was complete and built as a structure, the chief builder had said he had no idea when the interior areas would be completed. That was where the new much bigger public audience room would be, and from his list of rooms to be built, he had also asked for a larger small audience room too.

  Today, he had not even looked over at the stack of reports from the chief builder; well, that was a bit of a lie. He could see the stack, and it was about the usual twenty or thirty pages, but they’d say much the same thing as the ones yesterday had said. Not enough slaves to get the completed pyramid up and built by the autumn equinox for the Games.

  He sighed.

  If there was one thing he’d grown tired of, it was the excuses of not enough slaves for the job to be done.

  He reached for his glass on the table and took a sip of the water. He only ever drank water, and there was always a pitcher of same nearby. It was water from the river at the side of the new pyramid, and he was proud to be one of the few in the Empire who really liked the water they had at their feet. He sipped. Cold … had to be cold … and still it could have been colder.

  He motioned to an acolyte, who stood against the wall, and then pointed at the pitcher. The acolyte jumped to fetch new colder water.

  “I am Disciple Anqas, Prime Disciple … I was summoned to meet with you…” the younger man said. Dressed in the traditional black robe of the disciple class of citizens, the man was thin, calm, and even servile to his prime disciple.

  He nodded to the younger man and said, “Tell me once again about the seizure of that tablet … tell me everything you remember and you experienced …”

  Anqas looked at him and tilted his head. “But Prime, my report covered all of that. Is there something that you want to know specifically?” he said.

  The prime disciple looked at him and shook his head.

  Angas continued. “What I can tell you is that we found them with the tablet that gave us their location as the Empire Network showed us where it was. We did see that it had moved about seventy miles or so, northeast in direction from where it had sat for over a month. That was the town of Maxwell. We used floater U-3 to get on our way once the tablet began to move, thinking that it perhaps was in danger of being read by someone who should not learn our secrets.

  “We came upon the group that had it—they called themselves a cadre—and they were in the Regime—in Arlington, as we all know. We have had some dealings with them over the past four or five years, and we all know that this Regime is made up of non-believers. They will never prosper here on Ceti4 …” he said, his voice taut.

  “The Forest Empire and the Regime know each other,” the prime disciple said to himself, and while there was no real hate between them, there was no love either. Each stayed in their own areas, and each ignored the other.

  He looked back at Disciple Anqas and smiled. “And what else can you tell me? For instance, who was actually carrying the tablet—and when you asked for it, what did they say?”

  Anqas nodded and said, “We found them during the nighttime, Prime. We quickly got their watch guard out of commission by putting a simple arrow into his arm. We also had to club one or two others, but they didn’t put up much of
a battle. We got the tablet—I believe Disciple Norq went with the woman who was the leader of this cadre into the truck that they were camping around under the interstate. She had the tablet in her bag, and it was in the truck. Most likely better sleeping than the bare ground. We got the tablet and it was easy to see that it was still locked behind the old owner’s password security. I did check and it worked fine—easy to see too because the lights were on from the truck. We took their weapons—all of them—and then we left them. We did get them to swear that they would not follow us, and we did backtrack on our way to the floater to make sure that they kept their word. We raised ship and were back here in less than ten days, Prime.”

  He looked at Anqas and said, “Lights? The truck that they were camping beside had lights that lit up? Did that not make you think at all how is that possible?” he asked.

  Disciple Anqas froze. He said nothing, but a moment later, he nodded. “Yes, I did not mention that in my report, Prime. I am sorry about that error—I never even thought that the lights meant anything. My report was in error, Prime … I am so, so sorry, Prime.” His voice was hoarse, low, and meek. He had made a mistake and the prime disciple had found that out.

  “Do you wonder how I know about those lights, Anqas?” he said.

  As Anqas nodded, the prime disciple answered, his voice loud and accusing. “Because your other disciples, all of them, said that the truck had its lights on—only your report failed to mention that. Is this the kind of attention to detail that I should come to expect from one of my disciple class mission team leaders? Is it, Anqas?”

  Anqas shook his head violently from side to side. “Not ever, Prime Disciple—it was just a mistake for me to not mention that fact ... a mistake is all it was. It will never happen again, Prime—never!” he said forcefully. His face was white, and his eyes dilated wide open.