Fall of Earth (Book 1): The Survivors of Bastion

by Will Hawthorne

  I checked my bag, making sure I had everything for the short morning trek ahead of me, before unbarring the door and heading outside.

  In three years, we hadn’t had a single accident.

  I locked the door up – with all my fingers remaining – and headed next door. Carl lived here by himself, as many of the members of our community did thanks to the fact that there were so many houses and so few of us in the grand scale of things.

  Few in some ways, that was, but when it came to feeding nearly 50 people without a mall 15 minutes away, or in the country in general, we had to get creative with our endeavours. With the garden plantations and the farm, most could feed themselves, but we also tended to a large crop field just outside of the walls, as well as a small farm for other things.

  That was where Carl and I were headed that morning – to do a little harvesting and to check up on things.

  I stopped outside of the front door and checked my watch. He should have been out here by now, but with a knack for sleeping in he wasn’t. Carl was pretty useless in many regards, but above everything else he was a good man, and when he came wandering up to our doors one day during a storm I couldn’t turn him away. Despite his frequent idiocy, he had proved himself with loyalty, and in this world trust was something that I valued above all other things.

  I knocked on the door, and after waiting a little and repeating the whole act several times with no response, I finally picked up a small pebble, gaged the weight in my hand, and threw it at his bedroom window.

  The glass on one of the panes fractured but held in place – double-ply.

  I stood about on the driveway whistling, adjusting the strap of the gun on my shoulder, as I took in the warm, early morning sunshine. By my best guess it was early August – dates were something we should have kept a track of, but they were something that didn’t matter in our circumstances. I waited until a few seconds later when the bedroom curtain finally opened, then the window.

  ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘7am, Carl,’ I said, looking up and smiling as I shook my head. ‘The time never changes and neither do your sleeping habits. We’ve all got a job to do, bud, so let’s get to it.’

  ‘What about my fucking window?’

  ‘Rudy’s got some spackle, or our equivalent of it… We’ll board it up when we get back.’

  Carl shook his head, but he couldn’t hide the smile on his face as he shut the curtain and headed back inside. While I waited for him I looked about the street at the houses, wondering about the many people who remained inside. Some I knew much better than others, but back in my room in the top drawer of my desk I had a roll call list of everybody who was in our community, and I made a point to try and get to know at least every member of Bastion.

  We weren’t the only community, of course. About three miles to the East, in one of the nearby towns that this one had been twinned with before the world had fallen, there was a small commune of around 70 people who had set up a similar system to our own. We held an alliance with them – about as shaky as you could expect in a world with no police and no law to govern anything – but for the most part we got along just fine. Like villages had probably done in the dark ages and in prehistoric times, we traded goods periodically and met up to discuss any issues that might be hanging over our heads, and communicated via shortwave radio. A cliché, I know, but with our generators it was one of the only thing that didn’t require a bigger electrical system to power.

  Their community was called Ashby, and it was led by an ex-police officer called Helena. That was about all I knew about her. She had tried to get us to ‘join’ them a couple of times, likely as a result of her law-enforcement background, but I had declined on behalf of the rest of Bastion after having reached a vote. I had found myself in the role of leader of our community pretty much by accident – having grown up in this world, I was the most accustomed to it, despite being one of the youngest.

  While we trusted Helena and the citizens of Ashby for the most part, we always brought our guns every time we came to meet.

  Back outside of Carl’s house I heard a clattering through the door, and suddenly the door opened and out he came. He was an average Joe of a guy, if I had to summarise him with one term. Average height, average build, dark, messy hair and a willingness to get the thing done presuming he wasn’t sleeping on the job – he just wanted to help. I was a little different, having always been tall for my age, and my willingness to work was more of an ingrained obligation. My head didn’t work any other way than to survive, lead, and keep Bastion together.

  I had a responsibility to the people of our community, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to keep everyone alive and everything running properly as best as I could.

  ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ Carl said, looking up at me.

  ‘Knife?’ I asked, nodding at him.

  ‘Oh… Yeah, right…’ He dashed back inside the house and took up his sheath belt, wrapping it around himself and checking the blade before holstering it again. ‘Ready.’

  ‘And the front door?’

  ‘Right…’ Carl sighed, turning and locking it. ‘I still don’t see why it’s so important to keep everything locked. Thought we were a community?’

  ‘We are, and everybody here knows where they’re best off, including me. But we’re all also human,’ I said, setting off with him by my side, ‘and in a world like this we’re all susceptible to straying from time to time. I don’t wanna have to exile anybody.’

  Carl didn’t say another word, only nodding with understanding as we headed along the road towards the south exit.

  Out of more than seven billion people that called the Earth home prior to the virus outbreak, our best estimates now held at perhaps a million across the world. Our country held approximately 10,000 of that number. These were, of course, guesses at best. We had no way of communicating beyond the radio frequencies – which rarely if ever spouted anything relevant other than static – and making treks to points nearby.

  As for the country we occupy… Well, I would rather not say where it is, but we’re in the West, primarily English-speaking and a first-world country… Well, we were a first world country. I suppose that narrows it down.

  Based on the reports that scraped through before media and electricity had gone dark, nowhere in the world had escaped the virus. The media had called it L1F3, and the symptoms that came with it were typical of the flu, combined with some horrendous mixture of problems that caused your body to make desperate efforts to evacuate itself of every fluid in an attempt to rid itself of the infection until your heart finally gave out.

  My father had undergone it – he was buried in a little section of greenery behind our yard, amongst some small trees. For some reason the rest of us had gone uninfected. We had all demonstrated some immunity to it, and this immunity had a 50/50 chance of transmitting to the next of kin of anybody who had it at the time. While my mother had the gene, my father had not – Robbie and I had both inherited it by some fateful chance.

  My mother visited my father’s grave periodically, and she had done so with less and less frequency over the years until finally she only attended it to tidy it and say a few words.

  The past can fade, but it never falls away completely. I think in some ways that’s a good thing.

  Carl and I finally arrived at the south gate. I call it a gate – it was a small door in between two sections of the wall of cars. Not as cool as something in a medieval castle, but if anybody made an effort to invade they would be bottlenecked, and we would have the advantage.

  Function over fashion.

  I undid the lock and pulled the chain aside, shouting up to Larry, a 54 year-old with not-so-great hearing who had currently pulled guard duty for this side.

  ‘Larry… LARRY!’

  On the shout he turns and looks over at me nodding his up to ask what’s wrong. I make a rough signal with my hands to represent locking the gate after we’ve gone, and he nods with understanding.<
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  ‘You sure you don’t want the Ranger?’

  ‘No, I think we’ll walk. It’s a lovely day for it!’

  Larry laughed and nodded, waving us off.

  Carl and I headed out the door, and after shutting the door behind us I found myself, once again, in unclaimed territory.

  Chapter Two

  Fawn and Doe

  The space beyond our walls was odd. We set up barriers in the real world, true, but these also represent barriers in our mind. Crossing a certain line that we have placed ourselves, no matter how insignificant, changes the way you think. Moving into the zone outside of Bastion, I found myself on guard and on the defensive, my eyes scanning our environment for anything that might present a threat.

  On this side of the wall there was a huge field filled with wheat that we tried to keep in abundance as best we could. Back when I attended school as a kid I remember my teacher telling us that bread was one of the only foods on the planet that almost everybody from every culture, background and walk of life ate because it was so simple to make. It was a notion that our community tried to embody, not because of something I had been told as a kid, but because it turned out to be very, very true. Every one of us ate it, but then we did have much of a choice.

  The fields stretched on for many miles beyond where we were headed, with the occasional patches of trees and sections of forest dotted about amongst them. These were the most dangerous – they presented a spot where anything could lurk in the darkness, waiting for us, plotting our downfall.

  Many might have called me paranoid, but I didn’t trust anyone completely – not Hayley on the other wall who I spent the most time with by far out of everybody here, not my mother, not even Robbie. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but Henrietta once told me that even while my Dad had been alive, they didn’t trust each other 100%.

  People faltered, and I always strived to remember that.

  Carl and I set off through the fields through the dry grass, heading along the carved out path in the greenery towards the crop field. Carl stayed ahead as I kept a lookout around us, he carving through any shrubbery that happened to get in our way, though there was little of it.

  All of us had grown used to not speaking for extended periods of time, but sometimes it was nice to just hear another person’s voice – that early morning it was Carl’s voice that I would be hearing.

  ‘Tommy?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can I ask you something? Just between you and me?’

  ‘Sure, long as we keep on our way.’

  ‘Okay… What do you think of Maria?’

  Maria lived in a house with her older brother in Bastion. They were both impeccable farmers who tended to a large patch of crops in their own back yard, Marcus, her brother, in particular. Maria had a decent knowledge of mechanical constructs and had helped us put together a water irrigation system. She was smart, and about Carl’s age – as a result I knew immediately what he was getting at, but I wasn’t going to let it on.

  ‘She’s all right,’ I said, ‘a great member of our community. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing… I was just wondering about asking her if she… If she…’

  ‘You were gonna ask her out?’ I said.

  ‘Pretty much… Kind of… What do you think?’

  ‘You’re a little older than me,’ I said, so you can probably better remember how these things went on TV and movies when we were younger. I did watch a shitload of TV, don’t get me wrong, but still… We don’t exactly have a diner where you can take her out to.’

  ‘I know… I just thought we could do something some time.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, Carl slashing through the shrubbery with a little more force as we reached the next field. ‘Well, I don’t remember a whole lot from TV, but I do remember this old show where these people went to a beach, and one says to the other, ‘would you date me if I was the last man on Earth?’ and the girl is like ‘maybe…’ So think of this situation in that context.’

  ‘You are such a fucking asshole, Tommy,’ Carl laughed, sheathing his knife as the field levelled out.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry…’ I said genuinely, ‘I’ll have a chat with Marcus when I next see him. But you are thinking of starting a relationship with a girl whose brother is a farmer, and seems to get bigger and bigger by the day despite the fact that we don’t all exactly eat fulfilling diets.’

  ‘I know…’ Carl said, ‘Hey… Thanks, Tommy.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. You see anything up ahead we should be worrying about?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘All right. Let’s keep moving.’

  The fields were separated by aging, rotted fences that stretched out across the countryside like patchwork quilts. I had remembered the bigger kids before the outbreak coming into these fields to play games, and the people who would walk their dogs along the outskirts through the beaten paths that we had regularly tread on now that they were around to help us no longer.

  My mind was somewhere else, something I shouldn’t ever have done – but it was then that I walked into the back of Carl. He had come to a complete stop and stared straight ahead of himself.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Shh…’ He muttered, holding up a hand, ‘There…’

  I brought myself to a stop, knowing that he had seen something, but not what. I followed his line of sight, trying to determine what it was that he was looking at exactly, when I saw it.

  In the next field, a particularly large one that had once been used by farmers from a nearby compound to grow out corn, were a pair of deer. There was a larger one and a smaller, but from this distance of about 100 yards that was all I could determine.

  ‘Drop,’ I muttered, and we both silently sank to our stomachs behind some tall grass, keeping the pair in view.

  I retrieved the rifle slung over my shoulder and removed the scope from it, sliding it out of its compartment. Sitting up a little, registering only the sound of Carl’s breathing and the steady, almost non-existent rustle of the wind on the grass, I closed one eye and looked through the scope.

  A doe and a fawn came into magnified view. They were grazing on the tall grass in the next field, their heads both ducked down as they indulged. For a few moments I watched them, taking part in this ingrained ritual in absolute peace. What it must have been like to be one of them, to have not even noticed the onset of the virus when it had struck but for a marked increase in silence thanks to the large absence of humanity.

  Eventually I lowered the scope, biting the inside of my lip.

  ‘What do we do?’ Carl asked.

  ‘The mother’s got more meat on her, but if I miss her head she’s still gonna have enough strength to get away. Fawn’s got less meat but even an off-shot will weaken her to the point that she won’t get far.’

  ‘Yeah…’ Carl said. ‘I haven’t eaten meat in a while.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  I paused thinking it over again.

  ‘The other thing,’ I continued, ‘is that the bigger will feed everybody tonight. It won’t be a whole lot, but everybody can have a little.’

  At this point I was just speaking to myself – I realised this when I glanced over at Carl, who had lowered his head a little.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I… Nothing, it’s just… We’re gonna kill it.’

  Carl didn’t say anything else, but the conflicted expression on his face said a lot more.

  ‘Look,’ I started, ‘we can carry on as we were and after a few steps they’ll both see us and take off, and tonight we can have an extra helping of raw beetroot. Don’t get me wrong, I love the beetroot we produce, but a man needs a good helping of animal sometimes.’

  ‘A good helping of animal?’ Carl asked.

  ‘Just something I remember my Dad saying once,’ I said, smiling and shaking my head. Rather than chase the thought up I slid the scope back into it’s compartment on the rifle and raised it up, looking through
it once again, but now by the hold of the barrel and the trigger.

  They were still exactly where they had been. The crosshairs were directed between the two of them. I breathed steadily, waiting for the breeze to settle for a few seconds, but even if it did I would be shooting at nothing but air.

  Two inches of movement and I would change from the doe to the fawn, and back again. I aimed it at the youngling, right at the thick section of the neck – I had changed my mind about the focus point. If I went for the head and it decided to look up at a moment’s notice, the bullet would go flying past, and so would the sound. They would both take off, and we would go without meat. Aim for the neck, and it would still go down, even if we had to follow a trail of blood.

  I took a deep breath, hearing Carl hold his breath with anticipation by my side, and steadied the crosshair on the fawn’s neck.

  The seconds seemed to slow down incomprehensibly, and all that existed was the trigger and this unknowing animal, whose consciousness I was about to remove from existence.

  Quickly, without even realising that I had made the move myself, I switched to the doe, steadied myself faster than I ever had done before, and pulled the trigger.

  The sharp crack through the air registered to me milliseconds after I saw the whisper of blood in the air and the doe go down. It flailed desperately, trying to retain a grasp on what was happening as each second ticked on where I sat.

  Through the crosshairs I looked over at the fawn – for some reason it wasn’t going anywhere. It was jumping up and down on the spot, almost excitedly, as if panicking, not knowing what to do with itself.

  Without a second thought I moved the crosshairs towards it’s body, checked my aim, and pulled the trigger again.

  It went down onto it’s side, flailing together with the doe. That was the point at which I had to turn away, moving the gun to the side and clenching my eyes shut.

  ‘Shit… Nice work, Tommy…’