New Bloods Boxset: The Complete Series
Michelle Bryan
Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Bryan
Published by Aelurus Publishing
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Book 1 Awaken
1. Rivercross
2. The Sand Lands
3. Mountain Gulch
4. Raiders Camp
5. Gray Valley
6. Iron Bones
7. Littlepass
8. Sanctuary
Book 2 Ascension
1. The Return
2. The Plan
3. The Journey
4. The City
5. The Invitation
6. The Training
7. The Tea Party
8. The Masquerade
9. The Prisoner
10. The Escape
11. The Allies
12. The Tunnel
13. The Fugitives
14. The Attack
15. The Reunion
Book 3 Annihilation
1. A New Day
2. Intervention
3. A Quicker Journey
4. Reunion
5. Under Fire
6. Rejection
7. Unlucky Strike
8. The Bet
9. The Out Lands
10. Dreams
11. Awakening
12. Reunion
13. The Promise
14. The Plan
15. Celebration
16. Change of Plans
17. The Surprise
18. Dreams Interrupted
19. The Ultimatum
20. Pain and Guilt
21. Back To Reality
22. Skytown
23. The Plan
Epilogue
About the Author
Books by Michelle Bryan
Book 1 Awaken
1
Rivercross
It’s still dark outside, not quite morning, but I lay wide awake. The sun has yet to rise and start heating up the day. Today is my born day. My eighteenth year. I am, as Miz Emma would say, officially a grown woman. I don’t feel no different. I get out of bed, pull on my tunic and trousers, braid my hair, and wash my face in the basin of water beside my bed. My morning ritual. Born day or not, I still have traps to check.
My worn, leather boots are lying under the bed where I dropped them last evening. I pull them on and lace ‘em up real tight. I can hear Grada snoring on the other side of the tin wall that separates my bed from the rest of the shanty. I grin to myself. With that gods-awful racket, it’s no wonder I cain’t sleep. Quietly, so as not to disturb him, I tiptoe around him sleeping on his cot in front of the cold hearth. I don’t want to wake him. He’s been having troubles sleeping as of late.
On the wooden table next to my water skin and hunting knife sits a surprise. Waiting there for me to find is a small bowl of sweet bush berries and a faded blue neck wrapper. My born day gift. It brings a smile to my face. Grada never forgets. The calico cloth looks a mite familiar though. I think it was once a piece of Miz Emma’s apron, but it don’t matter. I know he would’ve made her a fair trade for the cloth, maybe some jerky or dried taters, something from the cellar. Although these days, there ain’t too much left in there. It’s running mighty low.
I wonder to myself how he’d gotten the berries. You had to walk a fair ways now for berries, and ever since Grada fell off of the shanty while fixing the roof, his leg has been bothering him something fierce. My guess is he talked Ben into fetching ‘em. However he got them, they look mighty tasty. I pop one into my mouth and bite, and the sweet flavor bursts across my tongue. I cover the rest in the biscuit cloth, saving them for later tonight, but the wrapper I tie around my neck. It’ll definitely come in handy today out in the sand lands. The cloth is real soft and smells like washin’ soap. I hold it up to my nose and take a deep breath. It’s only then I realize Grada is watching me, smiling under his bushy gray whiskers. I ain’t even noticed the snoring stopped.
His hair sticks up in tufts from his sleeping.
“You found your gift all right then,” he says, and I smile.
“Aye. It’s lovely, Grada, truly is. Thank you.”
I go to him, kiss his wrinkled cheek, and pull his blanket over his shoulders.
“Sleep now,” I say. “It’s still barely mornin’ yet.”
“You taking the bow?” he asks as he watches me walk back to the table.
I nod as I put the knife and water skin in my slingbag and hook the bow and quiver over my shoulder.
“Just in case. You never know when you’re gonna sight a wild rabbit or such,” I say.
“Well, don’t stray too far. There’s been sightings of a couple of wild wolflings roamin’ to the north. You don’t wanna run into them.”
I nod again at his words. “Aye, I heard ‘bout that.”
“Be careful, girlie,” he says.
I grin at his worry. It was the same words every time. I’ve been doing our hunting for years now. I think it’s time he got over the worrying part already.
“I will, Grada. I’ll be back before noon.”
I cover my head with my hat, pick up my slingbag, and head out. The sun is just starting to crest the horizon, but the morning’s already warm. It’s gonna be another scorcher.
There’s another early riser up along with me. Shelly is already at the well in the center of the shanties, filling her cooking pot. She smiles at me as I join her to fill my water skin.
“Mornin’ Tara,” she says, and I nod a greeting. “Happy born day.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Eighteenth if I recall. Gods, the time does fly by. Seems like it’s only been a few years since your Grada brought you home.” She shakes her head like she cain’t believe her own words.
“It’s gonna be a grand celebration tonight for certain. It’s not every day you becomes a woman, now is it? Thomas was already out and found a nice big hunk of prickly wood for tonight’s fire. He says the secret to a good celebration is a slow-burning fire and a fast-burning whiskey.” She laughs at herself. I laugh too, though I don’t think it’s funny at all, but I don’t wanna be ill-mannered.
“Why, I remember for my eighteenth born day we—”
“Ma … hurry up with the water. I’m starvin’.” Young Thomas, one of Shelly’s two young’uns, yells at her from their shanty door. Thank gods, I think. Shelly is a fine woman but once she starts talking, she don’t know how to shut up.
“I’m comin’!” she yells back, then says to me, “I’ll see you tonight, child.”
“Aye, you will.” I cap my water skin and watch her hauling the heavy, black, metal pot towards the shanty, thinking maybe I should help. But then young Thomas runs out to meet her. He grins at me and waves as he takes the pot from his ma. I wave back. I like him; he’s a good boy.
I don’t meet nobody else. The rest of the shanties are quiet and still. Everybody’s either still sleeping or already out trying to garner some kind of offering from this barren land. I don’t even meet Lou, which I think is a mite peculiar. He’s always up before dawn, working on his copper still, shining and cleaning. I truly believe he thinks more of that still than he does his own shanty. Then again, I guess you cain’t get whiskey from a shanty, and Lou … well, he likes his whiskey.
I trudge over the dry earth heading outta the village, each step sending up a puff of dust into the air. Ain’t seen no rain for quite some time now. The brown, muddy well water a testam
ent to that. But we keep hoping. Sometimes we get teased with dark clouds on the horizon, and we pray to the gods that they make it this far. But they don’t. They just break up and disappear before they get anywhere near us. Grada believes the rain will come. He says it always does, that the gods wouldn’t be so cruel. I cain’t understand why he thinks this ‘cause if the old folks’ stories are to be believed, the gods have always been cruel.
The old folk say that the land wasn’t always dry and barren. I grew up hearing stories of how once, long ago, the land had been green and alive. How every kind of plant imaginable had grown wild and that crops had covered fields as far as your eye could see, just waiting for the harvest. It was said that rivers ran swift and clear and were so full of fish they looked like shadows moving in the water. They would tell us young’uns of how the settlers long before us had built huge buildings called shop markets filled with food and supplies, and you could just walk right in and take what you wanted. And that those same settlers could travel over the sand lands—in a day no less—in moving machines called “veacals” and fly through the air.
Those stories were passed down through the years, and I heard ‘em over and over again. And like every other young’un, I listened to them all wide-eyed and reckoned every word to be the gods’ honest truth.
I don’t rightly know if I believe ‘em anymore. It’s my eighteenth born day. I shouldn’t believe in the children’s tales even if Grada swears they’re all true. He says when he was a boy he saw one of their flying veacals. Or what was left of it anyways. There wasn’t much left of anything from before the Shift.
The Shift. That’s what the old folk called … well, whatever it was that happened to the lands a long time ago. Oh, I ain’t that simple. I know there’s some truth to the stories. There has to be since I’ve seen for myself ruins of old settler buildings, rotted away and half-buried by the sands. And just about two leagues from Rivercross, there’s an old relic field that we call the pickin’ grounds. Found things there I cain’t rightly explain, but they come in real handy. Aye, something awful bad happened to those settlers for ‘em all to disappear like that. The old folk say it was a terrible sickness. A man-made plague that killed off most of the people or changed ‘em into muties. They say the plague was the consequence of the third great world war. Third. As in number three. I guess they didn’t learn their lesson from the first two? But the story goes this third war destroyed the land and made it the way we know it: a dry, dusty, barren land scorched by the sun and cruel to every living creature that now walked upon it. If this was all true and the gods allowed for that to happen, then I don’t believe they really care if the rains come or not.
I pull the brim of my hat down a bit lower to shield my eyes. The sun is climbing now in the cloudless, blue sky. A blazing and merciless ball of fire. I look out over the landscape that lies before me, shimmering already in the morning heat. The hard-baked, cracked ground I’m walking on with its sparse brush and stunted prickly trees that only grow to your waist is so unlike the green wetlands of the stories that it’s kinda hard to believe they truly existed at all. Don’t even know why the stories are knocking around in my head this morning. Maybe ‘cause it’s my born day, and I’m thinking about tonight’s celebration.
Born days are real special in Rivercross. We ain’t usually got much cause for celebrating, so the whole village gets involved when we do. There would be food, storytelling, and music. Grada or Thomas usually did the storytelling, and Shelly, well even though that woman’s voice hurt your ears from her talking, her singing could bring you to tears it was so lovely. Lou would break out his brewed whiskey. That always made the old folk smile. And just thinking about Miz Emma’s sweet berry bread made my mouth water. She always made berry bread for everybody’s born day—if we could get berries that is—and it was the best I ever tasted. Well, it’s the only I ever tasted, but that don’t mean it ain’t the best. Grada always said there wasn’t none better in the world, but I reckon he ain’t been more than two day’s travel from Rivercross than I’ve ever done.
Rivercross is my home. Lived here my whole life. Not much to look at. Ten shanties built out of whatever could be scavenged from the pickin’ grounds. Mostly plastic and metal, a bit of rock, and some wood if you were lucky enough to find it. About twenty-five of us or so live here, mainly old folk. Besides myself, there’s only three other young’uns. There used to be more, but sickness came about five years ago and took some of the folk, old and young alike. Even Grada fell mighty sickly. I tended to him for days, wiping down his fevered face, holding his hand, and willing him to live. He’d been the only lucky one. He had fought it off. The others … they weren’t so lucky. It didn’t affect me none though. I cain’t remember ever being sickly a day in my life, but I do remember that. It had been a real bad time.
Rivercross is just as good a place to live as any I reckon and better than some. We are family. We look out for one another. We grow what we’re able in the tired soil. Sometimes, if we’re real lucky, we get enough rain for a fine harvest of taters or yellow corn. It’s always a good year when that happens. We forage for berries, hunt and trap what game we can find. Hunting used to be a lot easier with Grada’s iron shooter, but we ain’t had lead slugs for it going on two years now, so I do my hunting with my crossbow. Grada says I’m a natural with the bow and the snare wires we got off a trader some time back. Cain’t rightly remember what we traded for ‘em, but it was the best trade we ever done. Dirt dog meat is the main source of food for the folk of Rivercross now, and my snare wires do most of the supplying. I don’t mind. I look forward to checking my trap line every morning, up and out before the sun gets too hot and the day so dry so that all you can taste are sand grits. It’s quiet and peaceful and allows me time to think. And sometimes when I’m just standing and watching the sun rise, I swear the land speaks to me. Nuthin’ like real words. Nah, that would be bat shite crazy. But I swear I can hear it waking from its nightly slumber and welcoming the sun. I can even tell sometimes when the rain is gonna fall ‘cause I feel the land’s eagerness for the water.
I tried to explain this to my friend, Ben, but he just tells me to keep my mouth shut ‘bout it else people might think I belong out in the sand lands with the muties. So I don’t mention it to no one. It’s a secret between me and the land.
I move up the trail a bit more and hunker down by a scraggly bush to check on my next trap. Unlike the ones before, this one has snared a dirt dog. Good. I’d promised fresh meat for tonight’s stew, and I didn’t want to disappoint. I hook the furry carcass onto the strap of my slingbag and say a quiet “thank you” to the critter for its sacrifice. Ben scoffs at me when I do this. He calls it superstitious shite, but I believe in thanking the land for providing. And I ain’t going to admit it to him, but I truly believe the land hears me when I do.
Shizen, it’s hot. I take off my hat and wipe the dust and sweat from my face with my neck wrapper. A warm, southerly wind picks up and feels real good blowing through my sweat-soaked hair. The day is heating up real quick. I’d best be finished before the sun sits too high in the sky.
I keep moving up the trap line and start humming a tune that pops into my head. I try to remember what song it’s from. I don’t recall ever hearing Shelly or Grada sing it before, but they must have. I hum it a bit more, and it scratches at my brain. Maybe, I think, it’s something my ma used to sing to me when I was a baby. Wouldn’t that be something?
I don’t remember my ma or my pa for that matter. Never knew ‘em, but I reckon I must have had them at some point. Nobody in Rivercross ever knew ‘em. Don’t rightly know where I come from. Grada says he found me one day while he was out scavenging. All he was looking to find was some medicinal herbs or at least some good trading trinkets, but instead he stumbled upon me. He says I was just laying in a building husk, crying my fool head off and as dirty as the day was long. He reckoned I’d been there a couple of days at least and that no one was going to come looking anytime
soon. There was no sign of my folks. He don’t know if I was left there on purpose like or if something awful bad happened to my ma and pa.
As low as it sounds, I like to think they were eaten by devil cats or taken by a dust storm. It kind of makes me feel better than thinking they had just left me on my own to die. Grada, now saddled with a bawling, hungry baby, figured he may as well take me home and he reared me ever since. For eighteen years now, so today is really my “found” day. I always laugh when he says that.
He has been real good to me, taught me everything I know. He’s a mighty fine shot with the crossbow and the iron shooter, but he says there are days when I’m a hell of a lot better. He taught me to plant for harvest and to find and brew the medicinal herbs needed to treat sickness and infection. He showed me how to make stew and corn biscuits, though mine always turn out awful bad tasting. He also taught me to read and write some. Even though I didn’t see the point of that, he kept saying it would come in handy someday, so I didn’t argue the learning … much. I just went along with it. Cain’t say an opportunity has ever arisen out in the sand lands for me to use my word learning, but as long as it made Grada happy. He loves me like a real grada. Though some days when I rattle his nerves, he says he should have traded me instead of keeping me, but I know he don’t mean it.
New Bloods Boxset Page 1