by Amy Braun
He knocked my hand away and slugged me in the jaw. Nearly dislocated the damn thing. My head was sill spinning when another punch collided with my right cheek and snapped my head to the side. Two hits smashed into my ribs and stomach, winding me.
Ryland’s enormous hand curled around my throat and yanked my head back to the wall. He bashed my head against it, squeezing my throat closed.
“You need to stop assuming you’re special,” he growled. “I brought you in because I saw something in you. A strength to survive. You could be someone great if you quit thinking you’re the only one who has it rough. You want those boys to respect you? Do something to earn their respect. Show that old farmer where his place is.”
Show him his place. Beat him to a pulp. They were the same thing in Ryland’s mind. I’d heard about Davy and his stubbornness when it came to his farm. He was tough to be sure, but he was fair. He didn’t form allegiances to one marauder Clan, because he knew everyone was equally desperate. He gave some to us, some to other Clans, and some of the underground colonies when they came up for Scavenging Day. Secluding him to us alone would make dozens of survivors suffer.
More than that, I didn’t have it in me to hurt an innocent old man doing his best in a broken world. Ryland had toughened me up, but I kept my morals in place. I would never break them, no matter what he did to me.
“No,” I rasped out.
Ryland scowled harshly, then jabbed me in the face. My sight flashed black for a split second. I had to blink white spots out of my vision when I did manage to open my eyes again. Ryland plowed his knee into my stomach and hurled me onto the ground. He walked toward his desk, making sure to step on my back and dig in his heel. I gritted my teeth and pushed myself up.
“Benson!” Ryland bellowed.
The door burst open a second later. Feet shuffled and someone whimpered. I turned my head and froze when I saw Benson enter the room with Stanner and Dylan. Both men were holding Sonya tight in their arms. Her blonde hair was a twisted mess around her head, though it did little to obscure the red mark on left cheek, the split of her lip, and the tears on her eyes. I pushed to my feet and started to go to her. The slow click of a flintlock wheel stopped me. I looked over my shoulder. With his thick shoulders, cold steel eyes, and a loaded gun with a ready finger on the trigger, Ryland looked exactly like the killer he was.
“I wasn’t making a request, Nash,” the Stray Dog captain told me. “You will do this. I won’t kill you since you’re in your prime, but her?”
Ryland pointed the gun at Sonya. She tried to twist away from the men holding her, and failed. She started to cry.
“Whores are replaceable. And this slut’s been passed around so many times her novelty’s worn out.”
“Nash, please!”
Sonya’s begging crushed my heart. The last time I’d seen someone so terrified, my little sister had been dying.
I couldn’t let that happen to Sonya. She taught me how to stay humane instead of rabid. She was kind to me. She showed me what love could feel like, even if she wasn’t the one for me. More than that, she was my only friend. I couldn’t lose her so brutally. I would never recover if I did.
“You have three seconds to decide. One.”
He really was giving me no choice. Sonya’s cries reminded me of my first beating in the Crater. I’d begged Ryland to let me go, and gotten a smack in the jaw for my troubles. I spent that night crying out every tear I had alone in the corner of the den with no one to comfort me. I hadn’t cried again after that.
Seeing Sonya weep so openly, knowing how close to death she was, rekindled those memories of hopelessness and fear. We both knew Ryland would kill her without hesitation. He never made idle threats.
“Two–”
“All right!” I burst. “All right. I’ll do it.”
Ryland lowered the pistol. My chin dropped to my chest. The captain’s hand clamped on my shoulder and squeezed painfully.
“Good answer, Nash. And don’t worry. You might enjoy this job. After all, you could use a vacation from the Crater.”
Chapter 4
It had been almost three months since I saw the surface of Westraven. I couldn’t say I missed it.
Nothing stood upright. The proud metal towers and glorious white stone buildings were now quickly fading memories. The collapsed ruin was much more familiar.
Heaps of rock lay strewn across the roads and sidewalks, covering the ground in what looked like clumpy snow. Shops with burned siding and shattered windows gaped like horrified faces. A few spots of road were splattered with dried, dust-covered blood.
But it was the silence that put the shiver in my spine and the tension in my gut.
No wind, no distant voices, no scrabbling rats moving over stones. I felt like the last man alive in a dead world.
I pulled up the collar of my ragged greatcoat and looked at the monstrosity hanging in the sky.
The mother ship of the Hellions, the formidable Behemoth, hung in the thick grey clouds. Swirls of black smoke churned from the exhaust pipes at the stern like a toxic cloud. The main ship was a man-o’-war built from corrugated metal and heavy gears. Spikes jutted from its sides along with four rows of cannon guns. Lashed under the main ship with heavy chains was a docking bay where the Hellion skiffs sat until they decided the beasts decided they were hungry.
From so far down, I couldn’t tell if the raiding ships were docked or not. Ivan, one of the snipers on the Barren’s wall, said he hadn’t seen anything. I didn’t trust him, but for now I would take his word and tell myself that Russ had been lying about the Hellion’s new daylight tactic. Best to get this over as soon as possible.
Refusing to look at the splintered concrete and fractured rebar wall at my back, or the tarnished cannons still mounting the structure that used to be seventy feet tall before it was shot to pieces in The Storm, I started crossing the empty space of the Barren into the western part of the city.
Before The Storm, the Barren had been called Dovercourt. Circled by ten miles of stone and cement, topped with watchtowers, cannons, and flags, it had been the perfect area for Westraven’s military elite to live with their families. I was the son of merchants, but I remembered seeing the air shows and military parades. The Sky Guard would race their sloops through cloudless blue skies, perform training and combat drills, tell stories of epic battles against marauders, and celebrate with feasts fit for kings. Dovercourt had once been a small city in its own right. My family didn’t live in it, but even we were proud to have such a respected garrison.
After all, not even the marauders had been able to defeat the Sky Guard. We thought nothing could.
Not until The Storm.
Dovercourt had been one of the first Districts to be hit. The Hellions seemed to know that retaliation would be possible, and they wanted to eliminate any threats as fast as they could. No matter how grim the thought was, I couldn’t deny that the monsters had been brutally efficient.
The seventy-foot wall surrounding the district was covered with holes like pock-marks, the scars of cannon fire from the Behemoth. Any major gaps were re-filled with serrated rebar and broken flagpoles that jutted out like misplaced daggers. Two remaining watchtowers remained, though their cannons had never been used.
As I walked toward the wall, I cast a quick glance at the space where the Sky Guard troops had lived with their families. The lovingly built houses were now heaps of broken wood, shattered glass, and crushed brick. Most of those materials were taken by the Stray Dogs and other small marauder Clans hiding in the Barren. I didn’t know what they did with the bodies of the dead, because there was no trace of them, or any blood for that matter. It was like a force of nature had swept in, shattered the houses, and erased any trace of life that had once been in this wide, open space.
I got chills just thinking about the fate of the tens of thousands of people that had lived here.
When I reached the closest wall of crumbled debris, I was able to push the memori
es from my mind. Climbing over it was easy, though I was careful to avoid the sharp pieces of metal and rebar that would slice me open if I fell the wrong way. At least Ryland hadn’t laid any kind of explosives down. There were a few places that the Hellions no longer bothered to raid, and the Barren was one of them. There was no need for traps to be set.
I hoped that wouldn’t change any time soon.
The walk to the farm would take all day. All major traveling vessels were had been shot down during The Storm, and any kind of small ship would either be stolen or seen as a target for Hellions. So I left the Barren behind and trudged through the broken city, trying to think about my destination, and not the memories threatening to surface.
But every step I took reminded me of a life long gone. The mechanics shop where my father did some of his best trading. The bakery where my mother would buy sweet rolls once a week. The market square where I won Marley a stuffed bear during the carnival for the Drafter Showcase.
The fountain statue that collapsed on Colby and crushed his legs, leaving him defenseless when the Hellions reached him.
I shook my head and walked faster, pushing the memory as far back as I could. I had to pay attention. A quick glance to the sky told me the skiffs hadn’t left the Behemoth, but that didn’t mean I was safe.
After the devastation of The Storm settled, most of the survivors did whatever was necessary to reclaim their lives. Others sought pure and simple power. Electricians took control of the substations to reroute energy to their underground empires. Even Ryland was forced to negotiate with them as he worked to regain his foothold in the Barren.
In a way, the marauders had it the worst. They were never ones to give control easily, and they couldn’t take revenge against Robertson Kendric and his famous Wanderer Clan. Rumour was that he and his sadistic son Davin followed the explorers to find the Breach, and something had happened that spurred the Hellions into rage. When they followed the marauders and explorers back through the Breach, the Kendric Clan was among the first to fall. The marauders were grounded and forced to disperse, unable to give the Wanderers the punishment they deserved.
After The Storm, the rest of us became desperate. Food, tools, gadgets, clothing, and weapons were snatched up and hidden. As stores got lower and lower, survivors were forced to find alternatives. Offering service and slavery to those who had abundant resources. Killing others for what they had. Some people were even said to have resorted to cannibalism.
Those who died in the early years found the easy way out. The rest of us did our best with the scraps left behind.
I sighed and scrubbed a hand over my face. Thinking of the Westraven and Aon’s sorry states and my own problems wouldn’t change anything. The best I could do was find Davy, and think of a way to persuade him without using my fists.
***
My feet and legs were aching by the time I reached the farm.
After hours of straight walking, the buildings and rubble became less prominent. The cracked concrete under my feet stretched to an open patch of concrete, stopping at a single free- standing structure in the middle of it.
All the farms in Westraven were self-sustaining and capable of producing more than one product. In front of me was a fifty-foot wide structure made of foggy glass and dented metal. The top half of the farm was constructed of windows and topped with cracked, black solar panels. It was hard to see from the corner of the building I was hiding behind, but I could have sworn I saw green plants and wheat struggling to grow beyond the windows. With so little sunlight, I doubted that many of the plants were getting the light they needed. Most of them were probably shrivelled and drooping. The vegetables and barley growing inside the greenhouse would be small and meagre at best.
The lower half of the farm was made of battered sheet metal. It had no windows, so I didn’t know what was hiding inside of it. I wondered if Davy managed to keep some livestock behind those walls. That would have been a miracle, but if there were cows or sheep in the farm, they had to be dangerously unhealthy. If humans were struggling to find food, the animals were starving.
Next to the farm was a large metal water tower. Its stilted legs were had probably been blasted away during The Storm, making rebuilding virtually impossible under the eye of the Hellions and the Behemoth. So rather than being rebuilt to stand, a series of thick metal pipes were fastened to both halves of the farm. The rainy season wouldn’t hit Westraven for another couple months, but when it did, the rain would fill the top of the water tower and slip through the pipes into the greenhouse and the lower half of the farm. Maybe it would be enough to save whatever Davy was trying to grow and produce in there.
Maybe. But probably not. Whatever he did wasn’t going to be enough to save the people dying in the ruined city.
And it wasn’t as though anyone could simply walk onto Davy’s property. He knew his resources were beyond valuable, so he took precautions. A twenty-foot wire fence surrounded his property, topped with coils of sharply pronged barbed wire. A series of black boxes lined the fence, thick wires tracing down the siding to the ground. They must have held some kind of electric charge, probably set in place by an Electrician’s colony, no doubt a trade-off for a portion of whatever food Davy managed to grow.
I could only imagine the pressure the old man endured from every corner of the starving city. This was the largest, still working farm I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t help but pity Davy. My eyes found a small, two story wooden shack that must serve as Davy’s actual home. How he managed all of this alone was a mystery.
Especially since he was only a hundred feet from the barricades.
Set by the Hellions as soon as the Behemoth crippled the Sky Guard to keep their food from escaping, the iron wall cut off any view of the horizon and the country beyond. Angry spikes jutted out from the metal, which had unwashed blood smeared over parts of its surface.
It was possible to climb the barricade, but the trick was crossing the open space before Hellions spotted you. Over the years, people stopped trying to get over. The Hellions would see anyone running there now as a welcome chase and an easy kill.
But as I looked at the cloudy sky over the metal wall, the temptation called to me.
I wanted to do it. Or try, at the very least. There was nothing for me here. No family, no friends, no girl, no purpose… But I couldn’t leave.
My thoughts trailed to Sonya. Her terrified face and heartbreaking cries. The way she would be tortured when I didn’t come back, just because Ryland and his brute squad would want someone to take their aggression out on. Even if I died out here, they would do worse to her. Not coming back from a mission meant failure and suffering. I couldn’t do that to her. I didn’t love Sonya anymore, but she was my friend. I would never forgive myself if she suffered because of me.
I snickered. Champion of the Crater, hulking warrior, crewman for the Stray Dogs, I thought, and a bleeding heart all the same.
Knowing time was against me and an innocent life was on the line, I steeled myself to cross the property line. I had no idea where Davy was, though I assumed his house was a safe place to start looking.
Just as I was about to step out into open space, the front door on the lowest left corner of the barn opened and two men exited. I slunk back behind the crumpled building and narrowed my eyes to get a better look at them.
Davy was easy to recognize. Short and round with age-speckled skin and wispy white hair, he moved with agility and confidence. Even dressed in black rubber boots and blue coveralls stained with soil, grease, and other dark splotches I didn’t want to think about, Davy held his chin high. A man proud of his work, no doubt.
The man walking beside him with a bulky wooden crate couldn’t have been more opposite. A full foot taller and at least fifty years younger, he could only be described as a rogue. He wore a sooty leather jacket lined with fraying grey piping and spotted with tarnished buttons. It must have belonged to a military officer once, because the boy was too young to be a soldier
of the Sky Guard. Under the jacket he wore a white tunic loosely tucked into black pants, the edges hidden by a brown belt that secured a flintlock pistol to his right hip and a curved cutlass to his left. Messy chestnut hair sat on top of his head. I couldn’t see his face, but something about him screamed trouble.
