The Last Legend
Page 1
The Last Legend
Book 1 of the Rhythm of War Trilogy
Ernie Lindsey
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Sample Note
A Pawn’s Betrayal
Dear Reader
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Ernie Lindsey
www.ernielindsey.com
“And a girl shall lead them.”
1
Don’t ask me how or why the world ended, because I can’t tell you. The only connections we have to the past are stories told by the Elders. At night, when the campfires are roaring, they fascinate the children with tall tales that seem too incredible to be real.
They talk about things called airplanes and computers, about fresh food that was kept cold in big boxes, cars and how people actually drove them—they didn’t even need strong horses to pull them from one place to the next.
The last remnants of the roads they used—those dark, crumbling paths cutting through the Appalachian Mountains—are paths to freedom that go somewhere far, far from here.
They make a long journey easier, but if you’re smart, you stay away. They’re too open, too exposed. Roving bands of dangerous Republicons hide in the hills, waiting on travelers too tired, or too ignorant, to know that they’ve crossed into the PRV.
The People’s Republic of Virginia.
That’s where I live, if you could call it living. They tell us that if you can survive here, you can survive anywhere.
And yet, I may never get the chance to find out if that’s true, because first, war is coming.
The drums echo down through the valley, racing across the lake and up the hillside where I’m hiding in a thick group of rhododendrons. It’s been raining for months, and at first, I think the heavy, rhythmic booming might be thunder.
Blue sky? I don’t remember what it looks like.
I know the difference between drums and thunder, but when you’ve been on point for twenty-four hours, watching, waiting, scouting—your mind starts to go numb. A simple branch cracking under the weight of its own saturated leaves might be confused for the warning of an approaching bear, or the screech of a blue jay might sound like an arrow flying by your head. It all blends together. They say that when one of your senses goes, the rest of them work harder to compensate, but when your mind starts to stumble from exhaustion, they’re all hazy.
I shake my head, clearing out the remaining cobwebs. The noise crawls into my ears again.
Boom, boom, ba-boom.
Once I grasp what this ominous sound could be, adrenaline shoots through my body and I’m instantly alert, shocked out of my mental fog and worried. The Elders said this could happen. They didn’t say when, but they knew it was inevitable. Grandfather told me so. He said that Ellery, the mystic, spoke of it during their last meeting. “War,” was all she said.
When I lean forward and push the branches apart, the wet leaves dump their rain puddles into my shirt. The water scampers down my back and gives me the shivers.
Boom, boom, ba-boom. Boom, boom, ba-boom.
I cock my ear and listen intently, just to make sure. Sometimes the younger children will sneak up into the hills and pretend to have battles. They always fight over who gets to be a part of the PRV, and who gets to be on the side of the DAV, the Democratic Alliance of Virginia, our northern enemies. The children play their little drums, shouting and pretending to shoot each other from hunting blinds and tree houses.
But this sound is bigger. Heavier.
Boom, boom, ba-boom. Boom, boom, ba-boom.
That’s not the beat of tiny hands on makeshift buckets. That’s the war rhythm. The sounding call of a large army; an army that will surely flatten us as it stomps past. Boot heels on an anthill.
Boom, boom, ba-boom. Boom, boom, ba-boom.
I strain to hear over rain pounding against branches, leaves, and the forest floor. How close are they? With all the ambient sounds amplified by the downpour, it’s difficult to say. I focus, hard, grinding my teeth, trying desperately to pinpoint their location, and a fearsome thought occurs to me: they’re closer than I assumed.
Ellery tells stories of how, in the past, they could hear attacking armies coming from two valleys over. But this… no, this is different. The sound is too defined, the echo is too clear, to be emanating from the other side of Rafael’s Ridge, the highest point to the north.
They’ve crossed the ridge already, and I may have just killed us all by not reporting in sooner.
I snatch up my supply sack and feel the weight of its contents readjusting inside: a canteen of water, stale bread, and a small block of goat cheese. I grab my slingshot and my bag of hand-picked rocks, and then I run down the hillside, slipping on the wet leaves and muddy earth, trying to be careful, but hurtling in a panic. I don’t want to break an ankle, because if I’m lying in a writhing heap of pain and can’t make it back to warn the others, we’ll have no chance whatsoever.
Reaching the well-worn path at the lake’s edge, I push into a hard sprint. My feet squish inside my boots, and I slip several times on the gooey mud, my pack swinging wildly on my shoulder, but I keep going, running, running, running between the trees, jumping over downed limbs and rockslides, evidence of the constant rain. These obstacles are easily overcome, at least until I make a costly mistake.
I jump over the same pine tree that’s blocked the path for years. I should know better—I should remember that the trail dips on the other side.
But I’m panicked, not thinking clearly, and I forget this important fact.
When I land, my boots slide with the mud, kicking out in front of me. For a brief moment I’m airborne, sailing along, and if I knew that the landing wasn’t going to hurt like hell, it might be peaceful, almost enjoyable. It seems to take forever, but it can’t be more than a few feet before I finally land on my backside, my jaws clashing together, biting my tongue. I skitter down the decline. Pain arcs from my tailbone all the way up into my skull, and I taste blood in my mouth. My tongue throbs. The ache in my back is sharp and blinding, but I get up, and I keep moving.
Honor, duty, and fear are powerful motivators.
Hundreds of lives, everyone in our encampment, all depend on the scouts to deliver news of approaching danger, to give them time to gather up their belongings and retreat to the safety of their shacks where they’ll cover them with an extra layer of defensive material. Maybe once a month or so, a scout will dart into camp and report that he’s spotted a roving band of Republicons.
These raiders travel in small packs, five to ten of them at most, and they’re usually easy to ward off. They don’t like to fight when they don’t have the advantage, and if you can get prepared swiftly enough, they’ll survey the situation and move on. But if they catch a scout napping and sneak through the perimeter, you can count on lost lives and stolen supplies.
Thankfully, that hasn’t happened in recent memory, but right now, a paltry group of thieves is the least of our worries.
Grandfather says we haven�
��t been invaded by a full enemy army in his lifetime, nor in the lifetime of his father. Only Ellery, the mystic, can recount the horrors of past battles. No one knows how old she is, and she won’t say. How she’s managed to live this long is a curiosity to everyone.
Rumors travel on whispers from shack to shack that she’s the last remaining Kinder. They’re only legends, but the Elders talk of experiments in the Olden Days, back when there was a government that thought they were in control. Back before the world ended.
Up ahead the trees part, and in the distant clearing, I see wisps of gray hanging low over the rooftops. Dense air presses on the smoke escaping from crumbling chimneys, forming a low layer of what looks like hovering clouds, a small blanket sheltering the uninformed.
I still have a half mile to go before I can deliver the bad news.
Behind me, another round of drumming echoes through the valley and races unhindered across the lake. It’s loud, and I wonder if the others back home have heard it already. If so, I’m in trouble for not warning them sooner. The only positive in this situation—if I dare to look at it this way—is that there may not be a chance for disciplinary action for my failures.
I run. My lungs and legs ache.
I spit out a mouthful of blood and gingerly test my wounded tongue against my teeth. It’s painful, and I wince. Let that be my punishment.
I’ve been in such a frenzied state, in a mad dash to get back to safety, that I’ve forgotten something—or someone, rather.
Over ragged breathing, I whisper, “Finn.”
He’s my forbidden friend, a member of the DAV, one of their forward scouts that I met in the forest a year ago.
I think, Why didn’t he warn me?
And I keep running.
We met on a sunny afternoon, before the rains came and rarely stopped, and our first encounter didn’t go well, at least not for him. He was far away from home. Two hundred miles, as the crow flies, and I had never seen someone from the DAV so far south before. Looking back, that may have been the beginning of their plans. The genesis of their war machine. I trusted him. It may have cost many lives.
That day, I was hiding in my favorite clump of rhododendrons, as usual, and I heard something down by the lake. I’d been on point for over a year and knew the sounds of the forest well: which trees creaked in the wind, which chipmunks lived in which burrows, and what time every morning the deer came through for watering. The noises I heard were unfamiliar, so I obeyed my duty to investigate.
I found him bent over a stream, drinking the runoff that feeds into the lake. A sharp knife to his throat led to a rapid surrender, and he didn’t hesitate to tell me who he was, where he was from, and what he was doing so far south. I promised not to kill him if he gave me information whenever he passed through the area. I didn’t see him often after that, maybe once every couple of months, but he would always bring me presents and thank me for sparing his life. Gifts like apples and cured meat—things we didn’t have the resources for in my encampment. He brought news, too. News of DAV troop movements, news of how many groups of Republicons he’d seen in the area, news of the world outside our valley.
The information wasn’t worth much, but I liked hearing about what happened in faraway places. People were still starving. Rain had washed out ancient bridges and dams. What was left of Pennsylvania and New York had formed an alliance instead of warring between themselves. These were people I knew nothing about, but it warmed me to know that they had found peace.
I kept the news that Finn gave me to myself. This was stuff that happened hundreds of miles away, and in a group where everything was shared, right down to the same hole in the ground when our bodies required relief, it felt good, personal, to have something of my own, something that no one else had. My secrets were mine alone.
Yet they were given to me by an enemy boy I allowed to roam in our woods. If the approaching army doesn’t kill me, my people will.
By the time I make it to the encampment, the pounding of the rain on the ground, on scrap-metal roofs and barrels where we store water for bathing and cooking, muffles the beat of the war rhythm entirely.
I’ve arrived in time to deliver the warning, but I already know it’s too late.
2
Breathless, I find Grandfather in our shack. He’s asleep on his cot, covered with a thin blanket, and he’s shaking. His fever has gotten worse. His skin is burning when I touch his cheek to wake him. Without medicine—which we don’t have—medicine that takes weeks to find at neighboring camps, medicine that’s too expensive to trade for because we don’t have the proper items like blocks of salt and deer meat, Grandfather may last a few more days at most.
That spot down inside my belly, where love and fear hold hands and fight for power, spins and swirls as each one struggles to gain control, but I don’t have time to worry over him now. If we don’t get prepared soon, Grandfather won’t need the medicine. It won’t be necessary.
I touch his cheek again, stroking it softly, until he manages to open his eyes.
He looks at me between slit, sleepy lids and says, “Caroline? What’s wrong?”
I say one word. The one word we’re all terrified of hearing. “Drums.”
“Go,” he says, trying to sit up. “Hurry. Tell Hawkins.”
“Should I—”
“Now, Caroline.”
I back out of our shack, slowly, toward the front door, watching him struggle to get up from the bed. He stumbles, and I move to help, but he stops me with a shaking finger. “Hawkins,” he orders.
Out the door, I dash between shacks. Some families have found enough usable wood from the abandoned towns nearby to add extra rooms and even a window or two. They’re the lucky ones. They’re supposed to share whatever they find, but when it comes to shelter, Hawkins allows each family to keep what they can recover from outside our jurisdiction. This one minor allowance is what keeps getting him elected to his spot as our GC, the General Chief.
Two roosters, circling and pecking at each other, scatter when I run past.
The rain has lightened enough for some of the others to venture outside into the tiny marketplace, The Center, where they trade food, clothes, and supplies they’ve salvaged, or something unique they’ve found, made, or grown.
I look at their faces. Faces that are so unaware, so unconcerned. They haggle with each other, fighting over whether three hens are worth a pair of boots, or whether a bucket of goat’s milk is enough to swap for a loaf of bread. From their reactions, the answer to both is no.
As I push my way through, shouting for them to move, heads turn and watch me.
Now they’re curious. Now they’re uneasy.
The sight of a scout running through The Center, with such insistence and madness, must be terrifying. If Elder Minnell would allow me to use his mirror, I’m afraid of what my face might look like. I’m sure that I would be afraid of it as well.
“Hawkins!” I screech. “Where’s Hawkins?” As if my desperation wasn’t already evident, the fear in my voice reveals too much.
Everyone knows what it means. I couldn’t have caused more chaos if I’d shouted, “Drums!”
Pandemonium ensues, and I immediately understand my mistake. Mothers grab their children and run for their hovels. Entire families drop everything in their hands—items they’ve worked so hard to obtain—and scramble home. There’s wailing and arms flying, making it difficult to navigate among the frightened throng of people. I fight to break through. When a young girl with dirty blond hair falls in front of me, I trip over her and land on my shoulder. I push myself up and get moving again before I’m trampled in the delirium.
The girl disappears behind a surge of thundering legs. I hope she’ll be okay.
It’s too late for subtlety, so I have to raise my voice above the cacophony. “Hawkins! Hawkins! Drums!”
I grab Farmer Wells by the arm as he tries to push past me. “Where’s Hawkins?”
“Let go of me, Caroline.”
“Down by his goats,” he says, wrenching free from my grasp. He disappears into the horde of shoving hands and crying children.
I look to my left and spot an opening. I lunge before it can close, before the panicked crowd swallows me. I reach Elder Lemon’s shanty and dart around it, back into a small alley. It’s clear. There are a few homes on this side, but not many. It’s too close to the woods and there’s too little protection from a stray Republicon or a hungry bear.
Rain peppers my face and gets into my eyes as I run, blurring my vision—or maybe it’s the tears. It could be either.
“Hawkins!” I shout again. A streak of lightning splits the sky, and it’s so close, the thunder is almost simultaneous. Out in The Center, the crowd wails and surges in response. They’ll kill each other before I have a chance to save them.
I spot our General Chief trudging up the hillside, panting, lumbering along, moving slowly like a pregnant cow. He spots me and tries to pick up his pace. In a place and time where everything is shared, Hawkins is the only one that’s overweight and plump. We all know he eats and hoards whatever he can get his hands on, but nobody questions it. The GC gets to do what he wants.
At night, when we’re trying to fall asleep, Grandfather tells me things he’s not supposed to, bits of history that could get him expelled from camp. Hawkins, he says, is just like the upper class from the Olden Days. The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. Grandfather says that everything changes, but there’s always a constant. Society, no matter how big or small, favors those with means, whether it’s earned or taken.