The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) (2 page)

Part One

One Day in Bastion

Chapter One

Bastion

I shuddered awake in the dim light of the dusky morning, the mattress creaking beneath me.

              The quiet mornings were something I had never gotten used to, even now, fifteen years on from the outbreak. Sleeping in the same house could do that to you, of course; the echoes of the past remained, and traits became attached to the places that I had known since I was a kid.

              I sat up in bed, looking about my dusty bedroom, which more often than not felt like some preserved relic of a bygone era… Which it was, in many ways. While I had ditched my red plastic drawing desk that seven year-old me had spent so many painstaking hours sat at, and downtuned my collection of toy cars to just a few of my favourites, some of these old toys still sat on a small shelf in my room.

              The rest were lined with useful things salvaged from the old world – books, mechanical parts, clothes, and those things that become oh-so important without you even realising until civilisation completely collapses.

              But we’ll get to that in a little while.

              I had slept in my clothes again – jeans and a scrubbed white t-shirt. Denim might have been a constant fashion staple from before but now it was more useful than ever – tough, durable and long-lasting, no matter how much the colours wore out.

              I rubbed my eyes and crossed to the window before opening the blinds and looking out over the street.

              Our street.

              The street I grew up on was originally called Bastille Avenue. As we met the others over time, the one’s who could be trusted, and the one’s who couldn’t who were no longer with us, we came to a decision regarding the section of the suburb. We lived in a small town that was at least an hour’s drive from a major city, mostly surrounded by rolling hills and countryside. Our suburb was remote, more remote than any we were familiar with, and considering that there were so few of us left in the country, if not the world as a whole, we decided to call that part of the suburb our home.

              Bastille sounded a little like Bastion – a bastion was something strong, something tactical and strategic that represented human logic at work, so that was what we decided to name our little community.

              Over time we met up with others, and things rarely ever went smoothly. In this new world of ours, were by our count more than 99.98% of the world’s previous population were dead, everybody’s own survival was the only thing on their minds. We couldn’t trust them, and as far as they were concerned they couldn’t trust us, even if we ourselves knew that we were reasonable people who would only kill if we were threatened.

              Steadily, though, we built up friendships and alliances. I had to grow up quickly, and this was something that wasn’t just encouraged by Henrietta; it was sparked by something innate in my mind.

              Now, Bastion was home to 48 people. We were a small community who lived in the houses left behind on Bastille Avenue, these old brick structures that had been left vacant since the outbreak of the virus.

              The street was quiet as I looked out over it, save for one person – Rubin, who was on shift as the interior night guard and about 15 minutes from his switchover so he could get some sleep. If it weren’t for the little touches, it might have looked the same as it had done fifteen years ago, but there were always some shadows that cast their impression over everything. Weeds grew from between the huge potholes and cracks in the road and the sidewalk, many of the front yards had been swapped out for small plantation gardens with fruits and vegetables surrounded by chicken wire, and there wasn’t a single car to speak of on any of the driveways.

              What cars we could find in the aftermath had been used to build the wall that surrounded Bastion. Hundreds had gone into the making of it, and with the help of the settlers that had steadily trickled in during those first few years we had managed to build it. Three cars high at the lowest point, the whole thing tracking around Bastion in a rough rectangle. While we only used one interior guard to patrol the houses and the streets at any one time, the exteriors were monitored at their four corners by four individual guards from the community. Shifts were switched up regularly, but right now it was their job to monitor the outside of the wall for any signs of movement, even if it was a stray deer that had wandered into the nearby areas.

              From my window I could see Hayley on the westerly lookout, a book in her hand which she kept glancing down at for several minutes before looking back over before her periodically, and then repeating it.

              I watched her, and Rubin, and the street, for some time before returning to the room and getting changed into a set of work gear and grabbing my harvest bag from the end of my bed. I had a long trek and an even longer morning ahead of me… And that was before I got Carl out of bed.

              I headed into the hallway, hearing Robbie snoring from his room. Henrietta – I had interchangeably been calling my mother by
mom
and her first name for a long time, now, which she still chastised me for regularly – had always slept quietly. I pressed my ear against the bedroom door and eventually heard her steady, quiet breathing, making sure that she was still alive.

              This was my morning routine, checking that the two people who I needed most and who needed me most were well before beginning my day.

              I reached the front door, pulling on my boots and my coat before reaching beneath the hallway cabinet and unlocking the trunk beneath it. While my Dad’s gun was under my bed upstairs, something Henrietta had finally given up to me when she realised it could do some good in my hands, the gun I kept in the trunk was closer to something an ex-soldier might use for hunting, with a modified crosshair scope attachment. Rudy, who lived at number 74 and knew a few things about guns, had said that it was a something-or-other make, but the make didn’t matter a whole lot to me – not anymore. As long as we had enough rounds for the weapons that we held, and we knew how and when to fire them, that was the only thing that was important to me.

              Honestly, I had used it more for the scope than I would ever use it for the simple fact that it could kill whatever I pointed it at. Range and distance beyond the walls were a factor that could get you killed depending on what you were moving towards.

              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.