by Mark Tufo
The Ravin:
Indian Hill book 1 - YA Edition
Mark Tufo
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Mark Tufo
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and http://zombiefallout.blogspot.com/ home of future webisodes
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Editing by:
Gerald Rice
[email protected]
Cover Art:
Shaed Studios, shaedstudios.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
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Dedicated to my wife, who is my muse, my inspiration and my partner in life. (Just like a woman to be able to multi-task, I’m lucky if I can make toast and tie my shoes at the same time, although why I’d need to do those two things at once, who knows?)
To all the brave men and women of the armed forces, thank you for all that you do.
Table Of Contents
Chapter One – Journal Entry 1
Chapter Two – Journal Entry 2
Chapter Three – Journal Entry 3
Chapter Four – Journal Entry 4
Chapter Five – Journal Entry 5
Chapter Six – Journal Entry 6
Chapter Seven – Journal Entry 7
Chapter Eight – Journal Entry 8
Chapter Nine – Journal Entry 9
Chapter Ten – Journal Entry 10
Chapter Eleven – Journal Entry 11
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen- Journal Entry 12
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen – Journal Entry 13
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen – Journal Entry 14
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen – Journal Entry 15
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One – Journal Entry 16
Chapter Twenty Two – Journal Entry 17
Chapter Twenty Three – Journal Entry 18
Chapter Twenty Four – Journal Entry 19
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six – Journal Entry 20
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine – Journal Entry 21
Chapter Thirty – Journal Entry 22
Chapter Thirty One – Journal Entry 23
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Chapter Thirty Four – Journal Entry 24
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven – Journal Entry 25
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
Chapter Forty – Journal Entry 26
Chapter Forty One
Chapter Forty Two – Journal Entry 27
Chapter Forty Three
Chapter Forty Four
Chapter Forty Five – Journal Entry 28
Chapter Forty Six
Chapter Forty Seven – Journal Entry 29
Chapter Forty Eight
Chapter Forty Nine – Journal Entry 30
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty One
Chapter Fifty Two - Journal Entry 31
Prologue - Day Before Final Assault
Hello, my name is Michael Talbot—Mike for short. I’m a Colonel in the U.E.M.C. (United Earth Marine Corps) and war has been raging on our planet for years now. I’m writing these memoirs now because I don’t know if or when I will ever be able to again. The woman I love with all my heart is sleeping—she sleeps a lot these days and I want to leave something to the child she carries within her. Tomorrow begins our final assault, for good or bad, and if I should fall, I want my unborn son or daughter to know all the grief, suffering, and hope I have carried these long years. So this is my story - I’m not William Shakespeare, I’m not George Orwell, and I sure as heck am not Stephen King. I’m just a person with one hell of story. By now, you know the ending of it thus far… I’m alive. But how I got here might be a tale worth sitting down to read. From conversations I’ve had I was able to fill in the parts I didn’t physically witness. And if I’m lucky and I last long enough, I may be able to tell you how this whole mess ends up. Well, if you’re ready, my child, I’m going to get this show on the road.
CHAPTER 1 – Journal Entry 1
The year was 2013, September to be more specific. I had just started college and my new life; I was finally out from under the rule of my tyrannical mother, your grandmother. I had begun to date who I thought was the perfect woman, all was well with the world. Seventeen and in love, there can be no better feeling. But maybe I should stop there. I’m going to go back a little further in this story. Three years and some change.
June 2010. I did the majority of my growing up in Boston, with a nonexistent father and an overbearing mother. Oh, the stories I could tell you about her, but I have no desire to write a book on psychology. We had lived in Boston proper for the first 14 years of my life and then my mother decided the house I had grown up in was too big. The dice had been rolled, my parents had made the most fateful decision of my life. We moved out of Boston and put its bad schools behind us. Here we were in downtown Boston where everything and everybody was going a mile a minute, to Walpole, Massachusetts, a town right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. They even had soda fountain shops. I was going nuts! The boys around here liked to do things like go fishing or hiking at some place called Indian Hill. Gee, did they go to ‘picture shows’ on Saturday nights too? I thought I was in ‘Leave it to Beaver’ only this was more Twilight Zone-ish because I wasn’t watching it, I was living in it. That first summer was the toughest in my young life. None of the kids I semi-hung around with wanted to do anything I thought was pretty cool. Like throwing rocks at the passing trains or stealing liquor out of mommy and daddy’s liquor cabinet, or pilfering comics from the local variety store. They wanted to fish and paint fences and suck cow teats. It was hell. The upcoming school year did little to improve my mood. Great, I thought to myself, now I get to be exposed to the whole damn crazy village as opposed to just a few of its idiots. My mother couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t out with the other boys enjoying the fresh air. And do what, Ma, plant flowers? So the summer pretty much came and went without too much fanfare. I had a couple of people you might call friends, but I wasn’t sure if I’d even get wet if they were drowning. September came and I trudged myself to school, my mom had offered a ride but I was having a hard enough time adjusting without my mother dropping me off in her beat up station wagon. I had slumbered through the first five periods of my first day of junior high, only perking up enough to check out a couple of the finer things, meaning girls.
Eating lunch alone was a blast. My semi-buds had the next lunch. Oh man, I could already see this school year was going to be as painful as the summer. And then came Algebra. I didn’t think much of it, what teen does. I sat as far from the front as I could, which luckily with all these Johnny’s and Becky’s wasn’t a tough seat to get. Last row, far left. The teacher had turned to write her name on the wall. I was just getting ready to write her name down, when ‘splat’ a huge spitball landed right next to her face. She had spit juice all over her face and the front of her blouse. Whoever had been working on that beauty must have started two periods ago, it looked to be two whole sheets of paper. Of course she immediately looked at me
as did the rest of the class.
“Mr. Talbot, I need you to go to the principal’s office,” Mrs. Weinstedder said.
“I didn’t do anything!” I pleaded. I sure didn’t need my mom picking me up on the first day of school.
“Mr. Talbot, we all know you’re the new boy here and I’ve never had this problem before.” She crossed her arms, tapping her left foot.
“Mrs. Weinstedder, I didn’t do it!”
Her foot went faster. Any faster, I figured and she was going to take off. “Young man, you march down to the principal’s office right now or I’ll drag you there by the ear.”
That got a snicker out of the class.
“Mrs. Weinstedder, check my notebook, I don’t even have any pages ripped out of it.”
She started to head toward me. At a svelte two hundred fifty pounds I had no doubt she would make good on her threat. I grabbed all of my stuff and headed toward the door. The other students were almost choking they were so intent on holding in their laughter. I was so mad I must have turned four shades of red.
“That’s right, class, we don’t need his type in here now do we?” I heard her say, scornfully.
“Why don’t you shut up, you fat cow!” I spewed. That was the line that got me three days suspension. But it was worth it. And I walked out of the class and down the hall toward the principal’s office. I had been taking my sweet time. I was in no rush to go meet Mr. Ratspindler. You knew just from the name what kind of person he was, he’d have my mother up here before I got the seat cushion warm and then the real fun would begin. I had gotten about two-thirds of the way down the hallway when some kid I had never seen before came half running with his books and book bag out of the class I had just been ejected from. You could hear the class roaring in laughter as he made a mad dash out of the class.
“I know your mother, Mr. Ginson, don’t think that I won’t be talking to her after this little incident!”
“For your information, Mrs. Weinstedder, she is not my mother. And that other kid was right, you are a fat cow.” The class was now bursting with laughter, a few of the teachers even opened their doors to see what all the commotion was about.
“Hey kid, hold up.”
“You talking to me?” I pointed to myself.
“No, the other kid that just got kicked out of Algebra.”
“Well, I’m Michael, not ‘kid’ and my friends… at least the ones from back home… call me Mike.”
“Well, ‘Mike’, my name’s Paul Ginson. My friends call me Ginner.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“What are you here for?”
“Well, when she turned back toward the board I nailed her with the second barrel of my spit cannon.”
“Oh, so you’re the one who got me kicked out of class.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who called her a fat cow first.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Hey, I know a shortcut to Ratsniffer’s office.”
“What could be shorter? He’s right at the end of this hall.”
“Do you really feel like going down there? Mrs. Fat Cow, nice call by the way, doesn’t know how to work the intercom. She won’t even be able to tell him about the whole thing until after class. By that time we could be long gone.”
“But we’ll get in trouble.”
“Too late for that.”
I thought about it. “What do you have in mind?” And that was how I met my best friend.
CHAPTER 2 – Journal Entry 2
We spent the day up on the local supermarket’s roof, of all places. If you pulled the dumpster over just a little bit you could climb on that and up a drainpipe and onto the roof. It was an easy climb for a spry fourteen year old. I didn’t think my mom would be coming to get me up here any time soon. The thing that struck me the most when I got up there was how huge it was. It looked like a giant shingle parking lot. There were all sorts of vents and air conditioners and fans all over the place. I stood there kind of slack jawed taking in the scenery.
“Come on!” Paul yelled. “If you stay too close to the edge and a passing car comes by they’ll be able to see you.”
I started to move toward the center, but I was getting the willies in my stomach. What if the roof gave? What if someone in the store heard us? What if—
“Come on.” Paul saw my hesitation. “Don’t worry, the roof won’t cave.” He then proceeded to jump up and down on it. I motioned him to stop and put a finger to my mouth. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “Don’t worry, they can’t hear us, either!” Then in a more user-friendly voice, “I want to show you something.” He headed toward dead center of the roof where a huge air conditioner was. He opened up a little trap door that seemed to be there for maintenance and pulled out five beers. “It keeps them cold,” he said casually and tossed me one.
“Thanks.” I stared in wonder. I popped the top and he wasn’t kidding, I nearly froze my throat and I got a brain freeze to boot.
“Slow down, you act like you’ve never had a beer before.”
Technically, it wasn’t my first, more like my third, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “I’ve been hanging around this whole summer with Billy Summers and John Smithstone.”
“I’m sorry,” he said in a mocking tone. “Those two turds would probably shampoo with the beer before they’d drink it.” We both laughed.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“So what’s your story, Mr. Talbot?” he said in his best Mrs. Weinstedder impersonation, which wasn’t all that bad. I told him about the deal with my controlling mother and my dad who headed out to parts unknown every Friday night and magically reappeared every Monday morning. And even the times when he was physically present, he was nowhere near the vicinity mentally.
“Ah, that ain’t nothing,” Paul said as he tossed me another beer. “My dad and my real mom got together in one drunken moment and produced yours truly. They tried to make a go of it, but when my dad decided to go to AA and then tried to get my mom to enroll she wigged out and left him. Then he married some born-again Christian lady named Barb.”
“Like barbed wire,” I said, now starting to catch a little buzz.
“And that she is, a big barb in my ass.” The visual was too much. I laughed and sprayed beer all over the place. Paul joined in the festivities.
“Anyway,” he started after we had calmed down a bit. “She has no clue at all. I’m not kidding, she actually pulls out a child-rearing book whenever she has a problem she doesn’t know the answer to. She makes me and my sister have family discussion for an hour after dinner every night. I don’t know what to say to my girlfriend for an hour—what am I going to tell this lady?”
“So what do you do?” I couldn’t believe it. His family sounded as dysfunctional as mine; apparently, all was not well in Smallpole.
“Well, mostly, I just nod and go, ‘yeah, uh-huh, exactly’. Luckily, my sister loves to yack, so she takes up the majority of the hour.”
“What does your dad do during all of this fun time?”
“He sits on the couch, watches sports and drinks bourbon and coke.”
“I thought you said he went to AA.”
“He did, but he didn’t like the part about complete abstinence regarding booze. He doesn’t get smashed like he used to, but I can tell he’s definitely getting buzzed.”
“Your mom, I mean, Barb doesn’t care?”
“No, she’s too busy with her nose in some parenting book, trying to find new ways to cope with teenagers.”
“I thought I had it rough.”
“Don’t sweat it, I’m pretty much used to her now. Besides I read the books she’s looking at, so I know how she’s going to approach almost every scenario.”
“Brilliant.”
“Yeah, not bad, huh?”
“Where’d you get the beer? We’re running low.”
“Well, we can’t get it in this town. The mayor would know about it before dinner. If we go one town over
, Norwood, they have an area called the Flats. Sort of the seedier side of Mayberry. There’s a bum there. If I give him the money and one of the beers he’ll buy for me.”
“Awesome, I have five bucks. You got anything? Maybe we could get a twelve-pack.”
“Yeah, I’ve got four. That should be plenty.”
We split the last beer and climbed down a little groggier than when we had climbed up. “So how do we get there from here?” I asked, pleasantly buzzed.
“You can’t get there from here.” Paul did his best impression of a Northern Maine resident. “We’re going to have to be very careful. We have to get out to Main Street and hitch.”
“Hitch? Really?” I had visions of my mother pulling over to give us a ride on our shortened school day.
Paul, seeing the look on my face, piped up. “Don’t worry, we won’t have to be visible for long. I’ve done this a dozen times and I never had to wait more than ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is a long time to have your butt in the breeze,” I said out loud.
“Come on, we’ll be fine.” He wrapped an arm around me.
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe we should just go and see Ratsniffer.”
Paul stopped dead in his tracks and eyed me suspiciously.
“Maybe I have let you in on too many things.”
Then he realized I was joking, once he saw the grin on my face. “Nice. You had me there for a moment.” And then he chased me to the street.
Eight minutes later, according to Paul’s watch; we were in the back seat of some old VW van. The driver was a serious holdover from the sixties; long hair and beads abounding. Luckily for Paul and me, this was a short drive because ‘Windstar’, as he liked to call himself, rambled on incessantly about how ‘The Man’ was trying to keep the people down. I don’t think Windstar picked us up for any altruistic reason. I think it was so he could have a captive audience for his rhetoric.