Ashes of the World: A Post-Apocalyptic Story (The World Burns Book 2)

by Boyd Craven III

  He marveled at how simple it was, the construction of it. Four posts, a box in the middle with holes drilled every four inches going across what would be the head and footboard and every six inches down the length. The rope was strung head to foot and back in one big continuous piece, and then when the sides started, the rope was woven over one row, under the next, over, under until a large net was formed. Just like a hammock. He finished his bed, tying a knot in the last piece and laid on it, feeling it give but hold. It felt a lot like a hammock and he smiled at the comfort, jealous of the folks who were going to be staying here if everyone made it back.

  He listened to Blake’s plan and liked it, but had no idea if it would work or not. Because of his blog, he had spun off a YouTube video series where he would show different things in his gardening adventures, and one of the things he had been planning on doing this summer was using castor oil to scare off moles, voles and mice. The heated oil was also used in dozens of remedies including use as a laxative or something to make you throw up, to birth control and even wound dressings. He’d gotten a supply of beans for that purpose, and had been planning on using an old hand crank press from his grandparents youth but the world crashed and burned and the beans had sat, unremembered until now.

  Everyone had started carrying a bag of mixed beans in their backpacks, as well as the jerky, and the plan was to give the kids food, or let them ‘steal it.’ Well, the kids had gotten Blake’s bag, and he hoped the few pounds of beans would be enough to give his family and new found friends the advantage they needed. The odds were grim, more than five times the size of their small homestead, if you believed the information Blake got from Melissa. He still remembered Blake’s words regarding her… “Tell Bobby I’m sorry.”

  He felt a sense of relief that she wasn’t a willing participant, because the instant attraction he felt for her had made him angry when Duncan first turned them away. He let his guard down and had let James slip in behind him, only to be brained by a tree branch. He’d never been a believer of love at first sight, but there seemed to be a lot of it going around lately. He wondered if Melissa had also felt cupid’s arrow, but didn’t dwell on it long. There was still a lot of work to do.

  +++++

  The rest of the group was waiting, trying to go about the day as if everything were normal, but sneaking in rest when they could. They knew that it was going to be ugly and heart breaking and that none of them were guaranteed to make it back tonight. Sandra was beside herself, for the way the women and children were being treated, and wanted to head out just after dark. None of them knew how long it’d take the poison to kick in, so they compromised and decided to start their trek to the camp at 1 a.m. They should reach there by 3:30 a.m., and decided to wait and see what was to come of things.

  The walk through the woods loaded down with their gear was torturous and nerve wracking, only Sandra and Blake seemed at home in the dark so they took point. The trail between the two camps was becoming easy to find, and even Lisa wasn’t prepared to be able to pick it out but she could. Too many feet had traveled back and forth in a short space of time. Lisa stayed close to Duncan, who would hold branches out of the way for her in the dark with Weston bringing up the rear.

  Bobby had been working in the basement shelter off and on all day, resting on one of the beds whenever he needed to. He had wished them luck, and lit a candle to lie down and get some rest. He was planning on helping the survivors settle in, if everything turned out.

  As far as plans go, this one didn’t go as planned.

  +++++

  “Over there. I see one of them thrashing on the ground and others lying around the fire,” Blake whispered.

  “Are they dead?” Duncan asked.

  “Can you smell it?” Sandra asked, and everyone nodded.

  The air close to the camp smelled like an open latrine. They crouched lower when the camper door banged open and a man ran out with an armload of something and it banged into the bed of the truck that the caged women were being held.

  “Do we wait?”

  “I don’t see anyone else,” Weston answered.

  “I’m moving in towards the truck, watch my back,” Sandra whispered.

  She moved stealthily, her small frame casting almost no shadow in the dancing light of the main campfire. She could hear women and children crying the closer she got, and could tell where the sounds were coming from. She lifted one end of the tarp and let it fall closed behind her. She saw several dark shapes and shining eyes looking at her thoughtfully.

  “You are here to save us?”

  “Yes, how many of them are dead?”

  “Almost all of them. David is the only one who doesn’t seem to be sick or dying.”

  “What about the people being held in the camper?”

  “They are probably cuffed. They usually are always cuffed or chained.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “They should be,” the young woman answered.

  “What can I do to help?” Another woman asked, as the sound of the camper door banged open again.

  They all sat in silence and when his footsteps got close, everyone winced. Sandra knew that Blake probably had the man in his sights, but they had wanted to try to find one of them alive. It’s not that they’d mistrust the victims’ stories here, but they wanted somebody who could tell them about the other group. The timing, everything they could.

  “Can you distract him? Get him to come over here?”

  “You going to take him out yourself?” Melissa asked her.

  “Probably. Looks like he has a knife and a pistol. I figured I’d brain him from behind like what happened to one of ours.”

  She saw the stricken look on the young woman’s face and connected the dots.

  “Bobby is all right, and Blake gave him your apology Melissa.”

  “Here he comes again,” Martha said near the back of the cage where the door was.

  Sandra willed herself to try to be invisible, to be as silent as she could be and eased down so she didn’t make a lump on the side of the trailer under the tarp.

  “David, David!”

  “Shut up woman,” The man’s voice was hurried, cracked.

  “You better let me out of here, or I’m going to hunt you down and hack your balls off.”

  “I’m not letting you out until I want a turn with you.”

  “You’re the last one. Who says you’re going to have any turns?” She snarled.

  “Oh, so you think you can stop me?” The anger in his voice made it deepen and Sandra could hear him moving closer to the door.

  She let the tarp slide off her as she backed out slowly, pulling her pistol and knife.

  “Yes I can, you always were the weak one. Charlie always said you were the biggest coward of the bunch. Why else do you think that you were always left behind to watch over us when they went out to raid?”

  “Coward? You bitch, I’m going to carve a new-“

  Sandra had moved in behind him and sent the butt of the knife crashing down on the back of his head. It didn’t knock him out, but he fell stunned and she startled when she heard running footsteps. She swiveled and aimed her Beretta. Almost immediately she lowered it again, recognizing the forms of her friends and family. Blake fell upon David’s form, and he used a length of bailing wire to secure him with his hands behind his back, the wire biting deep.

  “How many more are there?” Blake growled into the man’s ear.

  “If Joe finally died, I’m the last one,” David said.

  “Duncan, Sandra, please mop up and be careful. Lisa, help me find the keys for this door. Shoot any of these men if they so much as move, they might be playing opossum.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Weston asked.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to ask David some questions.”

  “Police procedure? Or how I’ve always wanted to ask a scumbag?”

  “Totally up to you,” he told Weston who just smiled, and cracked his
knuckles before advancing on the now cowering David.

  “You came back for us,” Martha told Blake, giving him a sardonic smile.

  “I promised.”

  “Who’s the short haired Tasmanian she devil?”

  “My wife, Sandra.”

  “Shoot, why are all the good ones already taken?”

  Her words made him crack up a little bit and he started examining the lock on the cage.

  “The man with the black vest over there. He’s got a set of keys,” Melissa offered.

  Blake left the cage, and moved towards the man she’d indicated. The smell of loosened bowels and sickness hung over the corpse like a cloud. Not wanting to, but knowing it was necessary, he rolled the man onto his back and started searching his pockets. He came up with a lighter and jack knife in one pocket and finally found the keys buried deeper than he’d liked to have dug in the other pocket. He held them up smiling. Lisa took the keys and started trying all of them while Blake went and inspected the bodies. The man who had been spasming earlier had now expired, and everyone else was dead. He touched each of them in the eyeball with his rifle before moving on, not wanting to get too close to them yet. He dreaded the cleanup and sorting through the rest of their belongings, but it had to be done, and done fast. No one knew when the rest of the group would be joining them.

  The sound of flesh smacking flesh and sobs made him turn and run towards the camper, but he’d found Weston looming over a crouched David.

  “Next Tuesday. They are getting re-supplied by the Guard unit and then moving on down here. They can’t break their orders until then,” David blubbered.

  “Guard unit?” Blake asked Weston.

  “Yeah. Hey, take these,” he handed Blake a set of keys. “It’s for the truck he was loading up.”

  Blake wandered off, hoping he’d heard wrong. The truck fired up the first try and had a half a tank of fuel. He shut it off and checked the bed of the truck. Camping supplies and guns. Lots and lots of guns. Most of it was military hardware of some sort.

  “Don’t kill him yet,” Blake yelled over his shoulder and saw Duncan and Sandra exit the camper.

  “Baby?” Blake rose and started to run to his wife, who was carrying a small form that had wrapped its arms and legs around her torso.

  They could all hear the kid crying, and Blake’s heart broke. Sandra’s eyes were moist with tears as well and she tried lifting the child under her arms to give to Blake to hold. The child made a piteous moan and she pulled him close again. The brief separation had shown him that it was a young boy, no more than five or six years of age.

  “Is everything okay in there?” He asked her.

  She just shook her head, fat tears running down her cheeks.

  “One of them was still alive. One of the bad guys, I mean.”

  “Did you have to…?”

  “No, the man was going to… Hurt… Little Chris here. He tried to hold him as a shield when he saw us. We’d already freed some of the men and Dad had to uh… I’ll tell you later.”

  The child’s sobs were loud in the air, and a cheer went up behind him as Lisa got the door opened and the women streamed out. Following Duncan were over a dozen haggard survivors, older men and women, with a couple of children sticking close to their parents. Melissa ran to a bedraggled couple and hugged them fiercely.

  It took the survivors some time to realize that they were free and most of them took up the offer to come back to the homestead with one couple thanking them but not taking them up on it. The dorms were going to be filling up tonight, and they would sort things out in the morning, but they had to pack things up here and bug out.

  “Do we take the camper? All the horrors that happened inside there?” Duncan asked Sandra and Blake.

  “I don’t think so. I’d like to torch it personally, but we need to strip everything and get it back home.”

  “We can load up the caged trailer with stuff then, and have folks walk back? Weston asked.”

  “I don’t know if they can all walk or not. Not after what they’ve been through. Lets stage some of the gear in the camper and fill both trucks and the other trailer and drive them most of the way home,” Sandra said.

  “Okay, let’s do that.”

  They worked furiously through the night until dawn, packing everything up one way or another. One of their biggest finds was a working radio and some mobile handsets. Immediately, their chances of survival went up with that one simple find. No longer would they have to wonder what was going on from afar, they could set things up for it to work, and Blake’s solar setup could easily charge the batteries that ran the communications.

  Moving the human cargo was not easy, nor was it fun. None of the women would ride in the caged trailer and instead took the beds of the trucks, and were scared of all the men except for Blake. Those who would ride in the caged trailer were couples and kids. The camper was left behind, with some more guns and ammunition they simply didn’t have room for. One thing they didn’t find much of and discarded was the food that the slavers had.

  That’s what this band had been about. Slaves. They captured men women and children and had been selling off the men and boys for labor and the women as sexual slaves for sale or rent. In the two to three weeks that they’d been operating, they’d been traveling under a heavy convoy, some of it made up of former National Guardsmen. It was a chilling revelation and even more scary for the fact that the country had fallen apart in a month’s time.

  “We can’t let them get away with this,” Sandra told her husband, who was driving the truck full of the women.

  “We won’t. It’s part of the reason why I’ve got David stashed in the back of the second truck.”

  “Don’t you worry that he’ll get away and tell the others about our traps?”

  “He’s now the minority. He’s now in the middle of a camp full of folks who want him dead. The trick will be to keep him alive until the Guard makes contact again.”

  “Do you think… The world will ever be the same again?”

  “I do. Out of the ashes, the phoenix rises,” Blake’s face was stone cold, looking at the trail ahead of him.

  “Is that your fancy way of saying that the bad times are over?”

  “No, not yet but someday it will. It has to.

  “Let’s get these folks settled, and then cook a huge feast.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me. What about the little guy?” she asked him, a sleeping Chris on the bench seat between them.

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “Besides, we have to finish our honeymoon,” she poked him in the side and busted up when he jumped and let out a surprised squeak.

  ----- The End -------

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  _____________________________________________________________________________________

  About The Author –

  Boyd Craven III was born and raised in Michigan, an avid outdoorsman who’s always loved to read and write from a young age. When he isn’t working outside on the farm, or chasing a household of kids, he’s sitting in his Lazy Boy, typing away.

  http://www.boydcraven.com/

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  Email: mailto:boyd3@live.com

  You can find the rest of Boyd’s books on Amazon here.

 

 

 
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