by David Peters
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilogue
Author's Note
Tail
END WORLD
Corruption Undone
Second Edition
By David Peters
Copyright © 2014 by David Peters
The End World Series:
End World One: Dawn of the Corrupted
End World Two: Ultimate Corruption
End World Three: The Captain’s Tale
End World Four: Corruption Undone
Other Books by David Peters:
A Darkness Book One
Solvi
Prologue
Dylan twisted the small screw handle locking down the top of the lid. With a small pop and the quick hiss, the metal ring was loosened and he carefully placed it on the wooden table behind him. He lifted the lid carefully and examined the rubber seal for any tears or marks of wear before setting it on the ground and leaning it against the can. With a deep, slow breath he inhaled the light floral scent as it drifted past him. His hands rested on the rim of the barrel as he stared motionless into the top. In a flash he plunged his hands deep into the powder. He pulled out a large handful and let it flow between his fingers and fall back into the drum. It was fine and dry, like talcum powder but a beautiful light-blue in color. It flowed between his fingers like a fine sand. Small wisps of powder swirled in the still air and drifted on the air currents creating light-blue beams of light as the sun shined in through the window.
Dust.
In his hands he was holding the most powerful weapon they had found to aid them in their daily fight against the Corrupted. Through trial and error they had been able to manufacture it in ever-growing quantities. A fairly simple blue powder obtained from one of the many varieties of wild flowers that covered the hillsides around Paradise Falls and many of the other small townships in the Pacific Northwest. Entire valleys turned white in the springtime when the hillsides would bloom. While appearing to be nothing more than a lightly scented flower to the few hikers that ventured into the mountains before the Fall, it was a deadly nerve agent to every kind of Corrupted they had used it on.
He watched the powder as another handful sifted slowly between his fingers. He was in the primary drying and grinding shed. At the center of the room a large grinding wheel sat in silence. The entire back wall was covered with drying flowers, each carefully hung upside down to dry. Every square inch of the wall was covered with various stages of drying stems. Three people spent their entire shift doing nothing but rotating the bushels brought in by the picking crews and moving those flowers that had dried completely over to separation baskets, then from there to the grinding wheel. They were able to reduce the petals and the center disk, or the eye as Doc liked to call them, of the flower into a fine enough powder that it flowed almost like a fluid.
Once the flowers had dropped their petals and gone to seed, the picking crews switched from harvesting to planting. They had buckets of the pepper-flake sized seeds ready for spreading on hillsides that didn’t already have the flowers or sending to townships that weren’t as lucky to have so many fields within their grasp.
He looked down at his hand again as another mound of fine powder drifted through his fingers. Dust picking was now the most dangerous job anyone in the town could have. The teams would range dozens of miles out into the mountains in search of more flowers, sometimes camping overnight instead of traveling in the darkness. Over the last year several of the more distant crews were badly savaged by Hunter attacks and two other crews simply never returned. No trace was ever found of them, no tents, no horses, they simply vanished.
Another crew had been working one of the fields in the next valley to the south when they were attacked. The groups that worked the hillsides harvesting flowers, affectionately known around town as the weed pullers, were the largest groups to work outside of the town. Nearly two dozen people were working a large hillside when one of the pickers was savagely attacked by a bear. She had been working near a tree line when she got too close to the mother bear’s cubs. It wasn’t just the Corrupted they needed to worry about and for a brief instant someone had forgotten that and paid a heavy price.
He shook his head as he thought about the young woman. Of all the things that could end the life of a person around Paradise Falls, someone managed to get killed by a bear. She had been rushed back to the camp but by the time the horses had made their way through the front gate it was too late. She had already bled to death and been dead for nearly an hour before they could even see the smoke rising from the town. Doc had said that even if he had been up on the hillside when it happened, they simply didn’t have the equipment that would have been needed to save her.
Another small stone placed on the ground, another small marker in the graveyard by the river with yet another name passing into history. One more human life snuffed out in this new, harsh world. One more family that has to be told someone important to them isn’t coming home, more faces turn to horror as their life is torn asunder and left incomplete and empty in a brutal and unforgiving world.
Dylan sighed heavily as he felt the weight of it all settle on his shoulders. Every injury, every death, any negative thing that happened in camp he would place squarely on his own conscience. As if he were the one personally responsible for anything and everything that happened in their small town. As if he had picked her out of a crowd, pointed at the hillside and told the woman to go pick those flowers.
He knew there was no way he could have altered the person’s fate but the death of anyone was always a horrific event. Being the town mayor, the person in charge of it all meant that everything ultimately fell on him. When things broke they looked to him to fix it. When food was tight they looked to him to find out why. When something ran out they looked to him to find out how it happened. It never seemed to end.
His thoughts drifted to the small graveyard by the river. So many lives ended as nothing but a small stone there. Even his brother was nothing but a gray fist sized rock planted on the grass. Since Dylan had first arrived at Paradise Falls, forty-nine stones had been planted there. Not one of them was from a person who died of natural causes. Some would succumb to trivial ailments that in the old world would have meant nothing more than missing a few days of work. Most of the stones represented swift, violent endings. It seemed like growing old was no longer an option for the survivors and the world was okay with mankind slipping away into extinction.
His thoughts moved back to the here and now. What could they do going forward? They had seven fifty-five gallon drums of the Dust made now and were finding new ways of using it all the time. Travis had designed a six-foot long section of old copper tubing that he sealed with beeswax at both ends. Inside each tube was a small, electrically fired charge. When the charge was set off, the Dust would come out several dozen holes in the piping creating a floating curtain of the Dust. The rooflines of every cabin had several of these hanging from their eaves. In case of an emergency they could hit one switch in the center of town and fire every single Dust curtain at once, filling the inside of the town with the defensive powder that would last for as long as fifteen minutes. Outside the walls they had heavier, military grade charges that would send nearly a pound of the Dust in a wide arc across the field. They had homemade handgrenades, Dustbombs that were nothing more than a blasting cap with a short fuse and an empty soup can. Simple, reliable, and completely deadly to any Hunter the cloud would come into contact with.
The small amounts they had on hand during the major attack a year ago had turned the tide of battle in their favor. If the Dust hadn’t been available, Paradise Falls would be as dead as any other major city was now. The Sumter hive would still be alive and well instead of the man-made lake Caperson and Dylan had turned it into.
He smiled to himself as he thought of the ground trembling beneath his feet when they had detonated the backpack sized nuclear weapon. It gave feeling to the anger he had toward the Corrupted. The sheer power that was at his command was overwhelming. As if it were his own hands lashing out and flattening the hive. The Dust was cleaner and didn’t pose any threat to the people in the town but he had to admit that it wasn’t as satisfying.
Another handful cascaded through his fingers and back into the can. So amazingly powerful yet so simple they almost didn’t make it. He thought back to the effect it had on the Hunters mere feet in front of him when Travis had detonated one of his test weapons. Hunters withered the instant their skin came into contact with the Dust. As near as they could tell, any contact with the powder, inhaling or on the skin, was one-hundred percent fatal to all Corrupted forms. In cases where the Hunters were exposed to a very dense cloud they would very nearly dissolve into messy piles. When the blue fog cleared there was nothing but the bones and muck of any Corrupted unable to escape.
He sealed the lid on the can and twisted the ring until he couldn’t tighten it any further. He checked the other cans and the large plastic storage bin where the unprocessed Dust was being stored. All were locked tight and sealed. The one downfall of the Dust was its tendency to clump up when exposed to moisture. It wouldn’t spread into the air unless it was completely dry. With little in the way of chemical drying agents, they battled constantly with something as simple as humidity. He knocked twice on the lid for good luck then turned and left the work shed.
The product of a flower was the best weapon yet created and it had only one single purpose. He knew the answer to all their problems was in those cans but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out how in the hell they could use it. They had the weapon to end the war but no method to get it to the enemy. They had the recipe but no way to get it out beyond the nearest encampments. Even those trips were dangerous and rare.
Dylan walked across town toward the cabin with the blue door. He shook his head as he thought about the problem. It was a war against mankind but there were days when he felt like it was his war alone to fight.
Chapter 1
Dylan shifted uncomfortably in the saddle as he scanned the wide valley below him. The town of Sumter or what would be more appropriately called the destroyed remains of what was once Sumter, was covered in a light dusting of snow. The soft morning light gave the desolate ghost town a soft blanket covering the burned-out buildings. A decade ago there would be several feet of hard-packed snow by this time of the year. Massive hills of snow would be piled at opposite ends of the town as the plows tried to keep the streets clear enough for the logging trucks to make their way from the highway to the old mill.
The previous year there had been less than a foot on the ground by this same time. This year nothing but a trace of fine snow covered the landscape and what little still remained was already melting away in the misty sunlight. Since the Corrupted had made their existence known, the climate had grown steadily warmer. More often than not, whatever fell during the winter was mostly rain and in some cases very heavy. The storms of the past were nothing compared to the freight trains of weather that blew through the mountains now. Massive storms with hurricane force winds and rain unlike anything the local people could recall. Twice this year they had to dig overflow trenches in the middle of town to direct the flooding Paradise River around homes and storage sheds. The second time it happened they had to admit the weather change was real and simply left them in place for future storms.
Nobody complained about the floods too much, not when they were reminded of what was most likely going to be another record-setting heat wave when the long summer months came. The extra rain left their water storage full and that was always a good thing when it came to life for them. When the long and hot summer months came they would never feel as if they had enough.
With the large field binoculars held up to his eyes, he scanned the town slowly from one end to the other. Scout patrols had the privilege of carrying one of the few military issued sets that hadn’t been dropped or otherwise destroyed by an accident. The town below him was still dead and would remain so indefinitely. Aside from the occasional crow or deer, the town was empty and lifeless. Occasional reports of Hunters moving among the burned out shells of buildings would come up at the morning meetings but they were rare and fleeting. A large majority of the town now sat at the bottom of the circular, man-made lake. The product of a small nuclear device that had been detonated deep inside the Sumter hive. When the topic came up in town most people considered it a fair trade. Some of the folks that had lived in Paradise Falls since it was founded would go so far as to say that Sumter needed the remodel, whether it was full of Corrupted or not.
He gave Buck a slight kick and the horse turned to walk up the well-used scout trail. His eyes continually scanned the heavy tree line as he adjusted the lever-action rifle resting in his lap. Until just recently, he had begun to wonder if he was going to have to switch to one of the more plentiful military style rifles and give up his trusty old-west style rifle. The ammunition he used was limited and nothing Caperson’s group had brought with them would work in his gun. The thought of giving up his heavy, two-hundred grain bullet for one of the military sixty grain rounds actually scared him. Travis had come through with a mold they could use for him to reload his brass. The lead rounds weren’t as accurate as the factory manufactured kind but he was willing to trade that off for the sheer hitting power the massive bullet carried but not still be able to drive nails at three hundred yards.
The muddy trail passed through several miles of low scrub before it exited into a wide, open grassy field. The center of the field was blocked by a six-foot wall that ran across the field and disappeared into the forest and brush on both sides. The brick, lumber and dirt wall was ten feet tall and more than six feet thick in places. It continued uninterrupted completely around the town. The secondary wall, more like a heavy fence than a wall, had been added just after the harvest season was over a few months ago. This low wall allowed them to push the fields further out and not have to worry as much about the various herds of elk and deer picking their fields clean at night. There would only be security walking along the top when there were harvesting crews working the fields.
Buck lowered his large head as he followed Dylan through the gate. Once the horse was clear of the opening, he pulled the gate closed behind them and slid the heavy metal bar through the brackets locking the heavy door closed. The locking bar would never be put in place if another scout or work crew was out working the eastern patrol zone. He could clearly see only one small flag was flipped up on the board ahead so he knew instantly that no one else from town had passed through the gate and into the hills beyond. A small board attached to the wall had several mailbox flags mounted to it. He lowered the one he had flipped up when he passed this way several hours before and returned to his horse.
Dylan climbed back into the saddle and Buck moved up the trail without needing to be told what to do. The path moved through two football field sized plots of already turned land, the long furrows hand turned behind horses like farming had been done over a century ago. They weren’t as perfectly straight and spaced as he was used to seeing on the farms all over the Palouse hills but it was farmland nonetheless. Come springtime they would be ready to plant various crops of wheat, corn and a large variety of vegetables. With the freshly plowed fields behind him, the trail wound randomly through more than two-hundred yards of open field. He waved his hand high over his head and saw a guard with a large rifle slung over his back wave a greeting back. Buck followed the zigzag course through their small min
efield without fail before crossing the small drawbridge spanning a nearly twelve-foot deep moat. The water below him would not only slow the attacks of any large groups of Corrupted, it held the large amount of the runoff they were getting from the rainstorms that moved through the valley.
The heavy gate opened as he approached and the on-duty guards pushed it closed as he passed through. With a heavy thump and the sound of the sliding cross member locking the door in place, he was finally home. With the sound of the door being locked the tension in his shoulders eased slightly, his watchful eye didn’t dart around the landscape quite as much and his ears weren’t so quick to focus in on everyday sounds. He was finally in what was considered friendly territory. The war zone of the New World locked out behind several yards of rock, soil and logs and some of the best defenses man had put up in this war for survival.
Buck followed the trail toward the horse barn without needing any guidance. He had made this trip far more times than Dylan could care to count. He could navigate the trail even in the pitch darkness of their rare midnight patrols and even knew the specific spots that Dylan would dismount to look around. Buck was not so much a part of the team as he was one of Dylan’s best and oldest friends.
With the horse fed and watered, Dylan gave him one more scratch behind the ears before making his way out of the barn and onto the town boardwalk. He was still amazed at the vast number of cabins and tents in the center of town and spreading out toward the walls. Their population had swelled to more than three-thousand people and continued to grow slowly. New arrivals were always a powerful testament to the human ability to survive when a random person would show up at the gate or another healthy baby was brought into the world. Some people had heard the rumors of a safe place to live while others had simply been lucky enough to see the smoke from the cabins many miles away. Scratching out a living in some abandoned cabin or living off of the berries and plants they were able to scrape up from the land. Most that made it to their walls were weak, sick or just days from succumbing to whatever illness they had picked up along the way.