Rehabilitation: Romantic Dystopian (Unbelief Series Book 1)

by C. B. Stone

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Desperation

  Synopsis

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  Awakening- Chapter I

  Author Secrets

  Connect with C.B. Stone

  More by C.B. Stone

  C.B. Stone Books

  www.CBStoneBooks.com

  Copyright © 2014 by InkedPlot Media

  Copyright © 2014 by Author C.B. Stone

  Cover Art by Kellie Dennis at Book Cover by Design

  www.bookcoverbydesign.co.uk

  Cover photo by Shutterstock

  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 noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

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  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  This book is dedicated to God and my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to my family and friends. Without you all, life wouldn’t be nearly as colorful.

  John 14:12-14 ESV

  “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.

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  Synopsis:

  If you are a fan of books like The Hunger Games and Divergent and enjoy short reads, you will love book one in this fast-paced dystopian trilogy.

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  "My name is Sinna Reardon. I suppose deep down I'd like to believe God exists. But he doesn’t, not since the war. Most days I’m OK with that. Jacob calls me a pessimist, but I’m a realist. How can I Believe when a place like Rehabilitation and a regime like the Elite exist, dictating our every move?

  If God were so great, he’d do something. But he hasn’t. We’re forgotten. And that scares me, because it means I might have to do something myself..."

  Sinna has spent her life walking a fine line between breaking the rules and obeying them to a fault. In a Godless world where science and logic reign supreme and people are punished for Believing, are friendship and love reasons enough to abandon unbelief? Enough to put her faith in something bigger than herself?

  I

  The world’s changed. I don’t know this because I witnessed the change, or even because I felt it. No. This is all I’ve ever known, but I know it’s changed because I see what’s left behind.

  Destruction.

  Jacob is striding ahead of me, his strong back broad and straight, his steps sure and true. I often imagine he’s balancing the world on those shoulders. His unruly blond hair is brushing past the nape of his neck, and I know his ice blue eyes are laser focused as he makes his way through the rubble. He’s quiet, as am I, every step stealthy because though we know there aren’t any people out here anymore, there are other things.

  Dangerous things. We pick our feet up as we walk and make sure not to kick any of the debris surrounding us on accident. I grimace, eyes scanning the ground looking for anything that might be of value. The pack I carry slung across my shoulder is light at the moment, but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to find something useful today.

  Ahead of me, Jacob stills. He lifts a hand, signaling me to stop, then drops to his knees, crouching. I immediately follow suit, making myself as small and insignificant as I can, so whatever he’s spotted, won’t spot me. After several slow, quiet moments, hearing nothing but the sound of my breath as it clouds the air in front of me, I shuffle closer to Jacob.

  “What is it?” I whisper in a voice quiet enough I don’t think it’ll carry beyond us.

  He inclines his head in the direction in front of us. I squint, eyes searching along the cold terrain for the threat spurring us to crouch down out of sight. At first, I don’t see much beyond the norm. There isn’t anything visible other than the ruins of the Old World city. Then I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t notice it before, because its coloring matched the gray landscape around us, but now I see what has us stopped.

  “A cougar,” I mutter. The hairs on the nape of my neck rise and I suppress a shiver.

  The large animal’s gray fur looks mottled, missing patches here and there, striped by burns in others. It looks skinny, no doubt starving as are most things in the Old World. But I don’t need telling to know its teeth work just fine, regardless of its meager appearance.

  And its claws.

  We wait in silence, holding our breath and watching the mangy animal limp and sniff at the air. After a while, it finally decides it’s not going to find food or water in this area and lumbers off.

  We wait a few minutes more for it to disappear from view before we straighten back to full height. I shrug my shoulders as I do, trying to loosen muscles gone tight with nerves. I expel a puff of air, its smokey tendrils drifting off toward the sky like a lazy feather. “Guess it didn’t find anything good out here,” I mumble, then look over at Jacob, unable to hide the relief in my tone or my face. “We got lucky.”

  Jacob looks down at me, a small smile on his face. “Luck has nothing to do with it.” He winks.

  I roll my eyes and start moving, passing him before he takes the chance to start this conversation again. Maybe if I just ignore him, he'll get the hint and won’t start babbling on about fate and what not.

  “Don’t roll your eyes,” he chastises, his voice carrying with it a gentle laughing tone as he follows behind me. “It’s true.”

  Apparently, I am wrong about his babbling. I sigh. It doesn’t matter if I keep walking or not, he’s still going to bring it up.

  “Can’t we just keep moving?” I ask, my voice reflecting irritability as I try to derail the subject. But Jacob isn’t to be sidetracked.

  “We are moving,” he reminds me, laughter still coloring his voice.

  Which is true, we are, but that isn’t the point. I meant just moving, as in no talking to accompany it. I sigh again, the small crease indicating I’m cranky appearing between my brows. But Jacob is Jacob and he’ll keep instigating this conversation—no matter how dangerous it is—because it’s the type of man he is.

  That’s how much he... well, how important it is to him. I fr
own, a part of me proud he’s so firm in his beliefs, another part worried it will get him in trouble one day.

  “Think about it, Sinna,” he tells me, and I can hear the excitement in his voice. “What were we doing the first time we met?”

  I try not responding. Instead, I scan the area, looking for potential places that might hide things we can use or trade when we get home. It’s the main reason we’re out here anymore anyway, but it isn’t the first reason we came into the ruined city.

  “We were looking for a—”

  “There!” I point ahead of us, not caring I just interrupted him. In the distance, maybe a mile away, there’s a long building, the space of several Old World houses, and it’s about the height of three of them piled on top of one another.

  Jacob looks, bright eyes filled with hope as they search. Too late, I realize how my exclamation must have sounded to him. Sure enough, when he spots the building, his shoulders slump a little in disappointment and he lets out a sigh.

  “—a church,” he finishes. “We were looking for a church.”

  I feel guilty for getting his hopes up. Although we go out mostly now to find Old World items we can trade, Jacob still can’t resist keeping an eye out for that fabled church.

  “There aren’t any left Jacob.” My voice is quiet as I rest a gentle hand on his arm. “They were all destroyed after the War.”

  He only nods. I know he still dares to hope one survived, even though he knows the truth. I’m convinced that’s why, out of everything the Elite has banned since the War, belief is most dangerous in their view.

  You’ll do crazy things for what you believe, even when you know what you’re doing is pointless.

  “Let’s go,” I tell him.

  In perfect sync, we start moving toward the large building. I’m not sure what it is—maybe a school or a prison perhaps. Those are the buildings we find most often, and most of the stuff inside them is deteriorated beyond any recognition or value. But every once in a while we we get lucky and find something good.

  Personally, I hope it’s a hospital we’re walking toward. Hospitals always hide the good stuff. Drugs, antibiotics, and other medical things most people back home don’t possess and can’t get. A hospital would be best case scenario in my book.

  “Maybe it’s a library,” Jacob muses out loud. His voice is still saddened, but he’s trying to stay lighthearted and act as we always do on our trips into the Old World.

  “A library,” I scoff. “What about a hospital? Hospitals always have the best stuff.” My words escape unthinkingly, echoing my thoughts of moments ago.

  Jacob just shrugs. “Depends on what you’re looking for I guess.”

  I roll my eyes at him again and we fall back into easy silence. Libraries are okay, I admit to myself. I’m not sure I’d ever let on to Jacob though. Books are rare and hard to get your hands on. The only people who can print them anymore is the Elite and most of those are so filled with propaganda (and are flat out boring, if I’m being honest), people just aren’t interested in reading any of them.

  But Old World books are a different breed altogether. They’re filled with adventure, romance, and most dangerous of all (at least according to the Elite), Old World history. There’s a market for such books, albeit a narrow one. First, only people who can and do read want them. That narrows down buyers considerably. Then you need to find people willing to take a risk they’ve gotten their hands on a banned book. The list given out by the Elite containing banned books you can’t read is so long no one’s real positive exactly what’s on it. And to top it all off, you have to find someone who isn’t going to turn you in if you sell them a book.

  I know a few people who fit the profile, but they can’t buy books often and are only on the look out for specific ones, so I don’t much like making book runs.

  Jacob’s looking for a specific book, too. That’s why he’s so interested in the libraries. The thing is, the book he’s looking for is definitely banned. It’s the only one on the list that everyone knows it’s illegal to have.

  Worse than illegal in fact. Having it could land you in Rehabilitation. Or worse.

  Secretly, I hope he never finds the book he’s looking for. I don’t tell him this, but in my heart I hope for it every time we leave the safety of home.

  Please don’t let him find it.

  I’ve been in the lead, but Jacob takes over as we head toward the entrance. I can’t help but feel slightly annoyed at him for putting himself ahead of me. It’s not a jealousy thing. I know it’s about protecting me, his going ahead, but it annoys me no end that he thinks I need protecting.

  Nevertheless, I follow him up concrete steps toward the set of double doors. Jacob pauses right outside them. There’s a couple windows looking into the building, but they’re narrow and dirty, covered in years’ worth of dirt and grime. Inside, it’s impossible to see a thing.

  Jacob glances at me and raises his eyebrows in question. “What do I think?,” he asks me silently.

  I hesitate.

  Being out in the ruins of the Old World is dangerous for a lot of reasons, but the most pressing one right now is we don’t know what’s inside that building. It could house another wild cat like the one we saw earlier, or could be filled with toxic mold, or be ripe with some other unexpected danger.

  When we get inside the building though, it isn’t what either of us thought it would be. It isn’t filled with poisons or dangerous predators—at least, from what we can tell—but it also isn’t quite as exciting as we’d hoped. Instead, it’s a school. For younger kids it looks like. At least that’s what I think, based on the rotted and molding smiley faces plastered on the walls.

  “So much for the hospital,” I mutter, my voice echoing through the long hallway, sounding eerie.

  Jacob shrugs and acts as though it doesn’t matter, but I can tell he’s disappointed, too. He was really hoping for a library. Or a church. I mentally sigh, my innate worry for him rising up again.

  “There might still be something good,” he says with a smile.

  I shake my head at him, amused. “Ever the optimist.”

  Together we walk down the hall, our steps cautious. Debris taking the form of everything from bricks to shoes to scraps of old, shredded clothing litters the ground. We’re treading lightly, because although it doesn’t look like anything is here, we know better than to assume there isn’t. I glance at the doors along either side of the hallway and cringe back, trying to put more distance between them and myself. There are large X’s on some of the them. Both Jacob and I avoid these automatically. There aren’t any history books that talk about the Old World and the Last War much, not in any detail at least, but we have been out here enough times we know exactly what’s behind those doors.

  And I have no desire to see it.

  “Must have been close to one of the bomb sites,” Jacob murmurs, as though afraid to wake the dead. Or maybe he’s just showing respect. “My dad used to say that when the population got exposed to toxins from the bombs, a lot of people suffered. Some decided it was better to just... go out quietly instead.”

  Jacob’s dad has been dead about as long as mine’s been missing. I don’t think they’d been friends or anything, but I think that if they’d gotten to know each other, they would have been. At home, neighbors didn’t like mixing, it was too risky. Anyone could be an Elite hiding out, just waiting to make their move. The only people you can trust are your family members.

  It was a fluke me and Jacob even became friends. And if I’d been older, like I am now, I don’t think it would have happened.

  I glance at him sideways, studying his strong profile as he stares at the X on one of the doors. I’m glad we met when we were kids... even if we can never agree on much of anything.

  Folding my arms across my chest, I mutter, not able to help myself, “Or this was a testing site, just like the Elite always say. How people used each other to test out new drugs, new weapons, not caring what happened to th
em.”

  Jacob looks back at me casting me a sharp glare. He has always hated the Elite—I do, too, if I’m being honest—and he’s not afraid to say it either. Contradicting something his dad said in favor of something the Elite say... well, if it wasn’t necessarily very nice of me, it was important to do. I lift my chin, my stubborn streak stirring to life as I glare back at him. He forgets sometimes we live in a world with specific rules and breaking them comes with dire consequences.

  Besides, the world we’re standing in right now is ruined. That’s kinda the point. If they hadn’t been awful, cruel people, why is their world obliterated, nothing more than X’s on the doors to mark where their people died?

  “Let’s keep going,” Jacob’s tone is gruff, revealing just a hint of anger, so I keep quiet as I follow him.

  When we decide the place is safe enough, we split up after finding a map on a wall. Jacob goes to the left toward the library (of course) and I go to the right, heading down the hall toward the nurses office.

  I don’t know if there will be anything there worth scavenging, but I figure it will still be my best bet. I pass at least ten doors with X’s on them, and knowing each one of them holds a room full of bodies elicits an involuntary shiver as I walk. I can’t help it, it just feels creepy. I know they’re nothing but bones, mostly, but sometimes, if the room was sealed up tight... that’s why we never check the rooms anymore. We go where we think there will be the best stuff, look around, and leave as quickly as we can.

  The nurse’s office is toward the back, near the big gymnasium that students used for physical activities.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to go to a school like this... and then I decide it must have been terrifying. All those other kids, none of whom you could trust, and a teacher at the front telling you what to think.