by Bobby Adair
“TENBROOK is life.”
“TENBROOK is the answer.”
“TENBROOK guide us.”
“TENBROOK make us strong.”
“TENBROOK give us children so that we may serve even after our death.”
All around the square, Tenbrook saw his men on their backs on the ground, in various states of dress, with their manly needs being tended to by more than one girl.
More men ran into the square from their barracks, eager to participate. Women who caressed them like a lover, or grasped them like a whore, quickly engulfed them. Some men pushed their way through the first women that came to meet them, walking instead among the dancing worshipers, looking for particular ones, perhaps the favorites that they’d been eyeing in the market, hoping their husbands would never return from Blackthorn’s folly so they could claim them, or perhaps just looking for a girl with the right color of hair or eyes.
As titillating as the debauchery in the square was, Tenbrook’s attention was focused on the Cleansing platform. Around its edge knelt a dozen naked women, all watching the center, where one woman stood with her arms in the air, surrounded by three others. The one at the center screamed each time one of the others swung a short horsewhip across her bare skin. Front, back, it didn’t matter, the whipped girl’s skin was crisscrossed with red welts and blood.
“Shall I muster the men?” Captain Sinko asked, looking around warily.
“Would they listen?” Tenbrook laughed, knowing they would once he got their attention. But why?
He continued watching the girl on the platform cry out each time the leather found her skin. He saw the glistening of tears down her face, and he saw her pain as she cried for her tormentors to stop. As he watched, another fair skinned girl with red hair was dragged up the steps and shoved to the center of the platform. The whipped one, disappointingly, was led away.
The three with the whips all took a few moments to curse the redhead between them. When they finished that part of their new ritual, or punishment, or whatever it was, the redhead reached her hands to the sky and looked at the stars overhead. One of the whips lashed her across her back, and the redhead screamed. Another lashed across her belly, and the third whipped her legs.
Tenbrook told Sinko, “Let the men have their pleasure. This is the reward of stone-hearted men who do what they must. We earn the adulation of the weak.” Tenbrook left his captains and guards and strode toward the center platform.
Chapter 97: Fitzgerald
Kneeling on the edge of the platform with her head forward, and her black hair hanging around her face to keep it hidden in dark shadow, Fitz watched Tenbrook walk through the slowly undulating women as he came to the steps at the bottom of the platform.
Tenbrook looked on as the three tormentors whipped the redhead, taking slow turns, letting the girl feel the pain of each lash, and forcing her to anticipate the burn of the next one.
Each time the leather cracked across the girl’s skin, Tenbrook seemed to inch a step closer to pleasure.
He stepped up and the girls near the stairs reached out to drag their fingertips softly down his legs.
Fitz watched Tenbrook stop at the top of the stairs. Most of his men were in the square, enveloped in women who couldn’t seem to get enough of them. More of Tenbrook’s men, perhaps the last of them, walked or ran into the square, following their lust.
Coming to an unspoken decision, Tenbrook turned toward the whipped redhead and crossed to the center of the platform.
He reached out and clasped a hand around her throat and squeezed.
The girl’s eyes went wide as she choked. Unable to breathe, she grasped Tenbrook’s wrist and tried to pull it away. But she was much too weak to resist Tenbrook’s strength.
He slapped her across the face. Blood spilled from her split lip. Tenbrook pulled her to him, releasing her throat and grabbing a handful of her hair to guide her face toward his. Nose to nose, he held her there for a moment, staring into her wide, fearful eyes as she cried. Tenbrook pushed closer and licked the blood from her mouth as he engulfed her mouth with his own, grinding his face into to hers, taking pleasure from the pain.
The tormentors had their hands on Tenbrook, moving up and down his back, rubbing his thighs and pushing their hands down the front of his trousers.
Tenbrook responded by touching what he wanted to touch, kissing what he wanted to kiss, and letting the women slowly disrobe him.
All around the platform, the women who were not engaged with a man chanted and danced.
The last of Tenbrook’s clothes fell away as the women greedily tried to be the first to please him. They laid him on his back on the platform. Tenbrook, still focused on the redhead with the bloody welts on her skin, pulled her down on top of him. She didn’t struggle to get away. She mounted him, sitting straight up.
“Whip her,” Tenbrook ordered, “while she pleases her master.”
One of the tormentors slapped her horsewhip across the redhead’s skin, and Tenbrook seemed immensely pleased.
Fitz got to her feet and walked to a spot at Tenbrook’s feet, where he’d not be able to see her with the straddling redhead blocking his view. Fitz got down on her knees as one of the other girls passed her Tenbrook’s sword, which the girl had stolen from his scabbard while Tenbrook’s attention was focused on the redhead.
Fitz took the cold hilt in her hands and held the blade straight up in front of her as she looked around the square, catching eye after eye of the women out there. They saw the blade. They understood what was to come next.
Fitz lowered the sword and pointed it straight ahead between Tenbrook’s legs, the tip not more than a few inches from his crotch. She thought about Franklin’s mashed skull in Tenbrook’s upraised fist as Tenbrook taunted all the worshippers in the Temple, all the women too weak, too afraid to stand up to him.
With all the anger from that moment blazing in her mind, she pushed the long sword up through Tenbrook’s pelvis, into his abdomen, skewering his chest.
Tenbrook’s legs locked straight out in a spasm, and his scream was immediately muffled by one of the tormentors pressing a cloth over his mouth.
The redhead hopped off of Tenbrook, giving Fitz a view of Tenbrook still lying on his back, with his shocked face looking up at her. The tip of the blade came out through his shoulder to the right of his head as she drove the sword all the way to the hilt.
Tenbrook gagged, and his eyes went wide and white. He tried to move in jerks. He raised his arms and grasped his chest as blood poured out of his mouth. He kicked weakly as Fitz let go of the hilt, standing up, throwing her hair back to give Tenbrook a good look at her face before he died.
“For Franklin,” she said.
Tenbrook’s struggles stopped, and he lay lifeless at her feet. She looked around the square to see the glint of silver knives and swords, taken from scabbards and pockets, wherever the men had left them before they succumbed to temptation. All of the blades turned red.
Men yelled and gasped. Some screamed and struggled, but in the space of moments, it was over. The dancing stopped. The singing ceased. All or nearly all of Tenbrook’s men were dead.
Ginger stood up, still bloody from being whipped, her mouth still red from Tenbrook’s brutality. She put her arm around Fitz. “You’ve done it.”
Fitz put an arm around Ginger and another around Ashley, who’d just come up beside her, and she said, “We’ve done it.”
Ashley asked, “What now?”
Fitz looked at all the new butchers of Brighton, naked and staring back at her, many with bloody hands and others with their victim’s blood on their faces and chests. A few chanted, “LADY FITZ. LADY FITZ. LADY FITZ.” Others joined in until the voice of every woman in the square had merged into one. Fitz looked across the square at Blackthorn’s empty house, now her h
ouse.
Fitz said, “We have a new home to sleep in tonight.”
Chapter 98: Oliver
After following the coast for so many days, they’d all gotten used to the rhythm of flat, inlet-broken ground and bays, both of which they had to work their way around. Sometimes the rivers flowed into the ocean and forced them to find a way across. The terrain was generally easy, but the farther they walked, the hillier it grew, with more and more cliffs standing above the surf.
“When was the last time we saw a demon?” Oliver asked.
Melora, who’d taken to walking along with Oliver, said, “Three days ago, right?” She called out to Jingo. “Jingo, when was the last time we saw a demon?”
Jingo stopped and took a deep breath. “Three days, I think.” He looked over at Beck. “I haven’t done this much walking in a long, long time.” He walked over and sat down on the trunk of a tree that had fallen in the shade of another.
Melora and Oliver joined him.
Beck said, “I’ll let Ivory know we’re going to rest.” He jogged along the trail, nearing the crest of a hill upon which they’d been walking while Jingo drank from his canteen.
“Where do you think all the demons have gone?” Oliver asked.
Jingo shook his head and looked around. “I used to journey up and down the coast and into the mountains when I was young.”
“In an airplane?” Oliver asked.
“No.” Jingo laughed. “I meant after the fall. I stayed in the city for three or four years before I ventured out the first time.” Jingo frowned and shook his head. “Things were still bad then. I was nearly killed.”
“What happened?” Melora asked.
“I was shot.”
“Shot?” Oliver asked. “What does that mean.”
“Remember when you asked about guns?” Jingo asked.
Both Melora and Oliver nodded.
“To put it simply, a gun is a metal tube about that size.” Jingo held up a finger. “Using Tech Magic, guns took a small piece of metal and expelled it from the end of the barrel going unimaginably fast. That’s what made the thunder noise and the fire that you talked about in your legends, Oliver. A tiny piece of metal did the killing.” Jingo held up one of his little fingers and pointed at the tip. “The metal was about that big, mostly.”
“A tiny piece of metal could kill?” Oliver shook his head.
“Seems hard to believe,” said Melora.
“Is it?” Jingo asked. “Melora, you should know. You shoot an arrow at an animal from far away. And with that small arrow, you kill it. A bullet works the same way. It’s smaller, but it travels fast enough to poke a hole in human flesh. Getting shot is a lot like getting stabbed with a sword, but the wound is generally smaller.”
“And somebody shot you?” asked Oliver.
“Yes,” said Jingo. He leaned over and pulled up his pant leg, showing Oliver and Melora a circular scar in his calf. He turned his leg and showed them a similar scar on the other side. “The bullet went right through.”
Oliver was fascinated. “What did you do to the man who shot you?”
“I never saw him,” said Jingo. “Like I told you about guns, you don’t have to be close to use one.”
“Is that why you stopped traveling?” Melora asked.
“Yes,” said Jingo. “After I was shot, I didn’t leave the city again for thirty or forty years. By then, very few people were around. Nobody had guns or bullets to shoot anyone anymore, for the most part. I was pretty safe. After that, I used to travel, like I said. I used to go out and look for men and women like me. I used to try to find out if civilization survived anywhere.”
“Did it?” Oliver asked.
“Not that I could find,” said Jingo. “Eventually, I stopped going out to look.”
Beck came jogging up, out of breath, excited about something. “Come up to the crest of the hill. You have to see this.”
Oliver reached the crest and stopped behind a blackened tree trunk lying on it side.
Ivory, hiding behind the same tree trunk, asked, “What do you make of that?”
Oliver looked down at a bowl shaped valley surrounding a bay. Every tree in the valley had been cut down, leaving thousands of stumps, each with a top as flat as a dining room table. Oliver had never seen a tree cut that way before. Trees felled with axes left ragged stumps.
Most of the valley had burned, and among the blackened stumps on the ashen ground lay thousands of skeletons.
At the center of the valley, down by the water, Oliver saw the remnants of a stockade made from logs. They were standing side by side, sharpened at the top end. The logs formed walls thirty feet high, but many of them had fallen, and most were burned to ash.
Inside the boundary of the stockade stood nearly a dozen towering houses, seemingly constructed from the logs cut in the valley. Each of the houses was large enough to fit five or six families. They stood four or five stories tall, narrowed to a roofed observation platform, and were open on all sides, large enough to easily hold a dozen men.
Oliver looked in the water and saw something even more fantastic.
“Ships,” Jingo whispered.
“They look like your boat,” said Melora, “only much bigger.”
“They’re probably a hundred feet long. Mine was only twenty-seven feet.”
“Did they lose their masts and sails?” Melora asked.
“Those kinds of ships don’t have sails,” Jingo answered.
“How do they get them out into the water?” Oliver asked.
“They don’t,” said Jingo. “Those four ships will be on that beach until they rust away.”
“Rust away?” Ivory asked. “They’re made of metal?”
“Steel, most likely,” Jingo answered. “It looks like they’re stuck.”
Ivory mused, “They must be worth a fortune.”
Beck shook his head in disbelief. “That’s what ships from your time looked like?”
“No,” said Jingo. “We had plenty of ships that size, but we also had ships ten times that big. Those aren’t ancient ships. They look like they’ve been there a long time, maybe ten or twenty years, but those aren’t from ancient times. They weren’t here the last time I came this way, maybe a hundred years ago.”
“Where did they come from?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jingo.
Ivory tensed and crouched down.
Everyone did the same.
“Look.” Ivory pointed down to a spot where the stockade had burned to ash.
Oliver followed Ivory’s gaze and saw a person, draped in what looked like a blanket with a hood, colored in shades of green and brown. The hood was down, letting the woman’s long hair flow down her back. In one hand was a pair of rabbits she’d killed. In her other was a long, intricately shaped thing. Oliver turned to Jingo and asked, “What’s that she’s carrying?”
Jingo’s voice seemed stuck in his throat, but he managed an answer. “That, Oliver, is a gun.”
CONCLUDED IN “THE LAST CONQUEST” BOOK SIX
The Last Conquest
A Dystopian Society in a Post-Apocalyptic World
Book 6 of The Last Survivors Series
Preface
Welcome to the end.
You’ve reached the final book of THE LAST SURVIVORS, the longest in the series by a quite a bit, and the culmination of 400,000 words, two years worth of work, and a group of characters that Bobby and I have grown fonder of than we anticipated. Thanks SO much for sticking with us through the journey. The fans of this series have been awesome and incredibly patient with us.
I want to thank Bobby for the friendship, the support, and the faith during this project. We took a risk in the beginning, and I’m so happy we did.
For those who want more THE LAST SURVIVORS, I’ll be doing a series called THE RUINS, set in the same world and with some of the same characters, taking place immediately after the events in THE LAST SURVIVORS. For more info on that, you can read a sample chapter at the end of the book.
But for now…THE LAST CONQUEST.
Tenbrook and General Blackthorn are dead, but the battle for Brighton isn’t over. Winthrop’s army is on the move. Jingo and his gang have come across a new discovery. What will be the fate of Brighton? And who will survive?
I won’t hold you up any more. Without further ado, here’s THE LAST CONQUEST.
-Tyler (T.W.) Piperbrook & Bobby Adair
September 2016
Chapter 1: William
William peered out the glassless window of the ancient building, watching the sun set through the cracks of the monoliths that lined the city street. The light cast an amber aura over the dying weeds that snaked through the pocked road, illuminating large chunks of Ancient stone that had fallen from the timeworn buildings, cracked and scattered without pattern. William could no longer see the rats, but he could hear them scurrying between the crevices and searching for carrion that hadn’t been claimed during the day.
The towers guarding the decaying streets stood silently, fascinating William every time they caught his eye. They reminded him how much he wanted to learn the Ancient City’s secrets. He longed to understand its whispers as he wandered effortlessly through places that men had been too afraid to explore.
But that would have to wait.
A shuffling noise drew his attention to the sixty or so demons behind him, who were fidgeting, scratching, and curiously searching the nooks and crannies deeper in the building. Their silhouettes blended with the growing shadows.