Fire From The Sky | Book 9 | Brimstone

by Reed, N. C.

  FIRE FROM

  THE SKY:

  BRIMSTONE

  Creative Texts Publishers products are available at special discounts for bulk purchase for sale promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. For details, write Creative Texts Publishers, PO Box 50, Barto, PA 19504, or visit www.creativetexts.com

  FIRE FROM THE SKY: BOOK 9: BRIMSTONE

  by N.C. REED

  Published by Creative Texts Publishers

  PO Box 50

  Barto, PA 19504

  www.creativetexts.com

  Copyright 2020 by N.C. REED

  All rights reserved

  Cover photos used by license.

  Design copyright 2020 Creative Texts Publishers, LLC

  The Fire From the Sky Logo is a trademark of Creative Texts Publishers, LLC

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual names, persons, businesses, and incidents is strictly coincidental. Locations are used only in the general sense and do not represent the real place in actuality.

  Kindle Edition

  FIRE FROM

  THE SKY:

  BRIMSTONE

  N.C. Reed

  For those gone ahead

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  FOREWORD

  -

  As I've said many times, no project like this is created in a vacuum. Writing is just the start of the process. Getting the completed project into the hands of the reader takes a good deal more effort.

  Fortunately for me, I have Dan Edwards and the team at Creative Texts Publishing to make that effort. Once I send the completed tale to them, it then falls to them to develop suitable cover art, edit and proof the book, prepare it for print versions and format it for Kindle. Then comes promotion, advertising, and other activities that fall under the general heading of marketing. If it weren't for Dan and Creative Texts, I'd have to do all that myself. Which would mean a lot less time for me to write.

  And, lets be honest, it probably wouldn't be done half as well if I were doing it myself. So thank you, Dan and Company, for trying to make me look more like a writer, and less like a story teller sitting on the porch of the country store. If we still had a country store.

  I must also, as always, thank my family for encouraging me, and for correcting me when I drift too far off course. Not that I would do th- squirrel! Just kidding. It wasn't a squirrel. What was I saying?

  Jokes aside, their help and encouragement is sometimes what helps me get over rough spots in the stories I'm working on. Their suggestions often alleviate writer's block when nothing else will. I'm blessed to have them. No other word is sufficient to describe them.

  No list of thanks would be complete without thanks to you, the reader. If not for you, there would be no me. At least not in the sense of me, the writer. I want you all to know that pretty much every word I write, and every idea I hatch or plot, is done with you in mind. I want you to enjoy what I write, because if you don't, then I've failed at my job, and my goal. Which is to give you a few hours of enjoyment and a break from the troubles of real life. For that few hours, I want you to feel as if you're living on the Sanders' Farm, fighting the apocalypse to a standstill. If I manage to do that, then I feel like I'm a success.

  As always, I'll leave it to you to decide if I did that or not.

  N.C. Reed

  PROLOGUE

  -

  The Worthy Ezekiel Talent stumbled down the alleyway holding one arm to his ribs while he used the other to steady himself against the wall he leaned upon. He wasn't sure, but it was possible that his arm was fractured. Once again, his message of peace and understanding of what had befallen the world had fallen on deaf ears. Once again, he had been persecuted by those who would not see.

  His work had never been easy, but the Uttermost had warned him and all the others that such work was never easy and thus only the truly worthy could be called upon to perform it. Anyone could work the fields. Any loyal follower could be a soldier. But only those rare few could truly be Worthy.

  Talent had proven his worth on more than one occasion, but this time, this Lewiston, was proving to be much harder. Much more difficult.

  Perhaps they were a hardier breed than those he had brought the word to before. Perhaps they were better prepared for the wrath of God that had fallen upon them. Perhaps they were simply better at living from the land itself than others. That last was a trait worth admiring, even cultivating, with the right mindset.

  Unfortunately, this area lacked that mindset as yet. They had not yet suffered enough, it seemed. They had not yet been brought low enough. Not brought to their knees as others had been.

  The result was not only a rejection of the word of the Worthy, but also of Talent himself, usually at the cost of physical persecution such as today's beating. But it was of no matter.

  He would rest. He would heal. He would try again.

  But there would come a time when it would be necessary to loose the Army of God upon these unbelievers if they continued to refuse the word that he brought. There would come a time when mere words were no longer used. Then, it would not be the wrath of God that brought the proud low, but the wrath of the Worthy. Wrath that would see fire and brimstone rain down upon those who resisted the Uttermost's holy message.

  But not yet. Not quite yet. Talent had been taught many things since his indoctrination, and patience was one of them. Patience and forgiveness. He would exercise both, and rest for a while, allowing the memory of his words to linger with the people that had heard them.

  Then, armed with the absolute conviction that he was right, he would return to try yet again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  -

  A lot could change in two months. It usually did, too. Weather, of course, as the seasons changed. Work schedules. The way the sun crossed the sky during the day. The crops in the fields and the fruits on the trees.

  It was that last change that had the Sanders' farm buzzing with activity for the last two weeks now. Even before this, there had been daily activity in the huge gardens as everyone pitched in to help harvest the fresh food growing there. Some of that food would be eaten that same night, whereas the rest would be canned, or perhaps dehydrated, and stored against the needs of winter.

  But now, harvest was upon the farm. The true harvest that required the massive farming machinery to move once more as grain was harvested not by the basket, but by the bushel. And where the hay fields would be cut one final time before they began to lay fallow for the winter.

  Two months was also a long time for someone to be in training. A long time to test the determination that had started you down the path that found men and women screaming at you as you tried to be better today than you were yesterday. As you tried to go further, go faster, carry more, work quicker than when you began.

  And that wasn't the whole of it, either. Every day, after running for miles and doing what seemed lik
e endless calisthenics and drills, after blessed periods of classroom instruction, then, after all that, heading off to the gardens for a four-hour shift of gathering vegetables. No one was exempt from that, including some rather unexpected participants.

  “My God, I just thought the first class was hard,” Sam groaned and she and Abby headed up the hill to what was known as the Cabin Garden. “I hurt in places I shouldn't even have.”

  “Yeah,” Abby agreed. She cast a surreptitious glance to the side to take a look at the most surprising of the participants. Jasmine Webb saw Abby look her way and smiled slightly, though she remained silent.

  Jasmine had not spoken a great deal since she had returned to the farms. After the ordeal she had endured, no one blamed her. Her sister-in-law, Daisy, had endured even worse, but seemed, at least on the outside, to have dealt better with it. Abby worried that Jasmine was a ticking time bomb and couldn't help but keep an eye on the older woman.

  “Wasup, biddies?” Marcy George caught up to them, draping an arm over the shoulders of each of the older girls. “Y'all older women be drag assin' around like you ain't never. I swear,” she chuckled as she shook her head.

  “Laugh while you can, youngster,” Sam replied with a tired laugh. “You aren't going anywhere but downhill, now.”

  “Girl, please,” Marcy scoffed. “I'll still be going like the Energizer Bunny when the rest o' y'all done fell out on the ground.”

  “Big talk in a small package,” Abby snorted, but had to smile at Marcy's enthusiasm. The teen had been through a great deal, and had ultimately had to separate herself from her family over a major difference of opinion. Everyone had tried to rally around Marcy and remind her she still had family around her, blood or not.

  “Hey! Ain't nothin' wrong with this package!”

  -

  Zach Willis was on hay duty along with several other 'soldiers', including Xavier Adair himself. It was an excellent way for them to stay in shape, and the work had to be done by someone.

  Zachary had stayed very close to Xavier and his estranged brother, Byron, for the last several weeks. Zach had certain issues that needed to be restrained, and both brothers had experience in that sort of thing. The pair had offered to take Zach under their wings, as it were, and Zach had taken advantage of this to learn all he could from the older men.

  “Something I don't understand, X,” Zach said as he tossed another small bale of hay onto the trailer. While the Sanders also used the larger round bales, they still maintained their 'square' baler, using the smaller bundles to fill the loft of their barns.

  “What might that be, Zachary?” Xavier asked, pausing to take a drink from his canteen before grabbing another bale of hay.

  “Two, maybe three times, we've done stuff that Clay said we wasn't gonna do,” Zach noted. “He gets mad every time, but he don't punish us. I can't tell if he's really mad or not. But why would we go against his orders like that, anyway? I mean, he is in charge. He was your officer before, right? Did you guys do that kind of thing to him when you were overseas?”

  “On occasion,” X nodded slowly, clearly considering the question. “It comes down to responsibility, usually. Clay has a great deal on his shoulders, you may have noted. He must make decisions for the majority of this farm and the people who now call it home. That means he sometimes, perhaps even often times, is forced to make distasteful decisions because he has to act with the best interest of everyone here. And remember that interest includes you and I, as well as all the others.”

  “I get that,” Zach nodded.

  “When we go against Clay's orders, it's not a spur of the moment thing where we are fomenting revolution against the authority figure,” X grinned slightly, though it didn't reach his eyes. “We do the things that Clay wants to do, but can't. We make the runs that Clay so desperately wants to order done, but can't afford to give that order because it might hurt this farm and the people on it. You will note that when we are in combat, no one questions his orders,” he pointed out.

  “True that,” Zach agreed.

  “Never, ever forget something, Zachary,” X turned deadly serious for once. “Clayton Sanders is a good man. A fine solider and a better friend. He is also the closet thing to a demon you will ever experience in this world. In combat he is cold and calculating, ruthless to the point of viciousness, and completely unforgiving. Without mercy of any kind. You never want to be on the wrong side of that. Ever,” he stressed to make sure the point was hammered home. When Zach nodded his understanding, Xavier continued.

  “The kind of work we did. . .the people who assembled those teams looked for certain psych profiles in their search for recruits. We are, all of us, damaged in some way. By damaged I mean we have issues that most people in a civilized society would frown upon,” he explained. Zach nodded slowly, knowing he was in that category himself.

  “When you take someone like that and put him into the grinder that we were fed into, it changes you,” Xavier continued. “It takes the material that's already there and finishes it, so to speak. Think of a clay pot. Until it's fired, it's not really good for anything. Afterward, it's a useful tool that can be used in a number of ways.” He paused again, once more considering his words.

  “It also becomes brittle,” he finally settled for saying. “Like that pot, men like us become brittle. By that I do not mean we become weak. Quite the opposite, in fact. Those weaknesses, if they ever existed, are long behind us. But we do develop triggers that will set us off against something. We are hunters, Zachary. It's all we ever were, really. We hunted terrorists, we hunted child traffickers and sex traffickers, criminals of many kinds who had escaped the justice they rightly deserved by hiding in the wild places left on this earth.”

  “And killed them,” Zach interjected.

  “And killed them,” Xavier nodded. “They were more than deserving of death, and we were more than happy to deliver justice to them with a bullet, a blade, with bare hands or anything else we could use.” He stopped suddenly, as if realizing he had spoken too much.

  “Back to your question, however,” he smiled again, “when you have worked with someone long enough, you develop a sense of what the other is thinking. Using our last incident as an example, we knew women and children were being held prisoner, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you think Clayton felt when he had to look at the numbers in front of him and make the decision to leave those women, and especially those children, in the hands of barbarians such as that?” Xavier asked.

  “I never really thought about it,” Zach shrugged. “I mean, that's all above my pay grade. If I had a pay grade, anyway.”

  “Exactly,” Xavier nodded firmly. “We are allowed the luxury of not considering all those things, because we are not in command. Clayton does not enjoy that luxury. So, he was forced, as the man in command, to make the decision that we could not undertake a mission to free those poor souls.” He paused yet again, looking at the far horizon. It was clear to Zach that Xavier wasn't looking at what was in front of him, but was instead seeing something else. Somewhere else.

  “Leaving children to that fate is especially difficult,” Xavier finally said quietly. “We've been there before. Once too many times, in fact. So, rest assured,” he turned his gaze back to Zach, “it hurt him to make that decision. Tore at his soul, even. At the very fabric of his being.”

  “So, we did what he really wanted to do, but couldn't,” Zach said rather than asked.

  “Yes,” Xavier said simply.

  “So, how do we know when to do something like that?” Zach asked after a few more bales of hay.

  “You, do not,” Xavier shook his head. “That is something you must always leave to those of us who have served with him, and know how he thinks. And even we sometimes make mistakes. I will say, however, that we have a decent track record. More than decent in my opinion, though I am admittedly biased.”

  “Cool,” Zach nodded as he slung another bale of hay onto the
trailer. “So, we didn't get in trouble because we actually did something he wanted to do himself, but couldn't,” he wanted to make sure he understood.

  “Essentially, yes,” Xavier confirmed. “But never mistake that as weakness on his part,” he warned. “It's not. He knew we did something that needed doing, and allowed it to go, as he did with the Webb farm rescue for instance, despite the problems it caused him. But remember, you need to always leave that kind of decision to Poncho, or perhaps to Nate. Not yourselves.”

  “What about you?” Zach asked, looking squarely at his mentor.

  “I think we have established that I am not the kind of person to be placed in a position of any authority whatsoever,” Xavier chuckled. “I care very little for rules or moral conventions, and less for consequences. No one wants me making such decisions, and I am man enough to admit I am not the proper person to be making them, anyway.” He paused one last time, looking at his protege carefully.

  “Reckon I'm not, either,” Zach said after a moment of thought. “I guess I need to let others do that kind of thinking. I'll just stick to killing bad guys.”

  “An excellent decision, my young apprentice,” Xavier smiled brightly. “Now, let us finish with this appalling chore so that we can shower this, this cattle fodder, off and enjoy something cold to drink.”

  -

  “So, we're going to open trade with Jordan, then?”

  Jose 'Poncho' Juarez was in Clay Sanders' small office, inside what was commonly called Building Two, on what had once been the Troy farm.

  “As a trial,” Clay agreed, a frown on his face. “I don't think I can rightly refuse our people the opportunity to trade with people outside our small outfit. And, we can trade some as well. The farm, I mean.”

  Clem Pickett and Clint Dawson, Jordan's Mayor and Militia Commander, respectively, had made repeated overtures to Clay to try and repair the damage the two of them had caused with their wild suspicions of Clay plotting to control the entire area, Jordan included. These suspicions had been fired and fueled by Franklin George and his wife Malitha in large part, though Clay was certain others were equally responsible. Several of the town's residents had openly called for Jordan to seize the Sanders Farm and all its assets, bringing all of it to Jordan, 'where it belonged'.