Refugees from the Righteous Horde (Toxic World Book 2)

Refugees From The Righteous Horde

Toxic World Book Two

by Sean McLachlan

For Almudena, my wife

And Julián, my son

Copyright 2014 Sean McLachlan, all rights reserved.

Cover design by Andrés Alonso-Herrero. Photo copyright
Marcin Roszkowski via Shutterstock, used with permission.

The characters in this work of fiction are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. There are a number of actual radio stations called Radio Hope. The Radio Hope in this novel is not intended to represent any of them and is entirely fictitious.

Toxic Bay, on the other hand, is a real place. . .

CHAPTER ONE

Susanna Waites knew that if she didn’t get something to eat soon she would die.

She lay on hard, rocky ground that was almost devoid of vegetation. She knew that meant the gritty soil was laced with toxins, but she was too exhausted to move. It had been a week since they had attacked the city, a week since they had been repulsed and The Pure One had fled with his guards and a few of the women. The rest of the Righteous Horde had scattered.

Her hunger had already made her weak by that point. Consigned to the rearguard to carry a pack of blankets for the soldiers, blankets she didn’t get to use on the cold winter nights, she had been abandoned with the rest of the porters. The men with the machetes and spears, also abandoned for not being among the Elect, had taken the blankets for themselves. They had suffered the worst during the attack, losing half their number to gunfire and flames before finally retreating. Now they were mad with hunger and terror, sweeping through the desolate land attacking anyone who might have something to steal.

Susanna had nothing worth stealing. No food, no coat, even her body wasn’t worth stealing. All her life men had reminded her that she was ugly. During the march she felt a certain smug relief that she hadn’t been chosen to “marry” one of the Elect. For once her looks had worked to her advantage. Now her stomach told her otherwise. The Elect’s victims at least got to eat.

Her stomach clenched as a wave of hunger curled her into a ball. The march had taught her that hunger isn’t a constant nagging feeling. That may be the case for people who eat regularly, but when someone hasn’t eaten for a week, and ate rarely for two months before that, then hunger fades into the background, a tremulous weakness that withers the spirit but is only physically felt at sudden moments when it takes over the entire body and mind. Then it was like she was the little finger of some masochistic giant, who curled it painfully closed and then smashed it again and again on the hard plain.

Once she could move again, Susanna pulled out a tuft of grass nearby and stuffed it in her mouth. Her dry tongue prickled with a metallic chemical tang. Susanna rolled over so she could reach another tuft of grass. Forget cancer. She’d never get cancer if she didn’t live past this week.

The grass would never be enough. She needed to get somewhere closer to food. New City, the object of The Pure One’s ambition, lay two day’s march to the south. She couldn’t go there even if she had the strength. They’d shoot her on sight. The mountains, with their green slopes and rabbits, looked impossibly far to the east. The same held true for the sea to the west. And to the north lay nothing. Many of the machete men had headed that direction and surely they had already stripped it of anything edible.

Her vision took in only the far places, the places where there may be something to eat, the places where her blistered feet and knotted stomach could never carry her. She was marooned on an island of her own weakness, doomed to only look longingly at distant horizons.

She didn’t want to look closer. She didn’t want to look at Eduardo.

He had been a porter like her. Too old to wield a machete, but young enough that he wasn’t killed outright when the Elect captured him, he had been given a pack of food, a pack he was told on the pain of death not to allow anyone to touch. He had served faithfully, even coming to believe in The Pure One and his prophecies.

Susanna had hated him for that until she realized that he only believed because to not believe would have made him as miserable as she was.

He wasn’t miserable now. Susanna’s eyes focused on him. He lay on his back, unmoving. He had died early that morning, not of hunger—the Elect had given him extra scraps to keep him honest—but of what appeared to have been a heart attack.

Susanna had taken his shirt and pants and put them on over her own. Maybe she wouldn’t be so cold this night. Maybe she could get some sleep.

Eduardo lay a few feet away from her, clad only in his dirty underwear. The slight curves of his arm and leg muscles fascinated her, as did the fact that his stomach wasn’t as caved in as hers. There was still some meat there.

She thought again, as she had a hundred times since Eduardo died, about the flint and steel and bit of char cloth in her pocket. The firestriker was her sole possession, something so common that the machete men hadn’t taken it from her.

She could light a fire. Using the last of her energy she could light a fire with grass and sticks from that dead bush over there and then find a sharp stone or a piece of glass from the Old Times and cut off some meat.

A terrible, seductive thought. Susanna was appalled that it had occurred to her the moment she had realized Eduardo was dead. It had never entirely left her mind since.

She forced herself to look away, back at the distant horizon with its mocking promises of unreachable food. As if of their own accord, her eyes turned back to focus on Eduardo.

“No,” she croaked.

She had said the same several times already today, and each time the little worm that was eating at her soul had wriggled through her conviction, whispering its justifications.

This isn’t about morality; this is about survival. Only the strong survive in the wildlands. Morality died with the Old Times.

“No,” she repeated, and felt something harden inside her. The worm was squeezed into silence. Crushed.

Susanna reached into her pocket and pulled out her firestriker. Struggling to her knees, she waited a moment until her head stopped spinning and then threw the flint as far as she could. The char cloth she let drop. The breeze carried it away, a little fluttering sail of black. Then she turned and threw the flat rectangle of steel as far as she could in the opposite direction of the flint.

The effort of the second throw made her topple over and land face first on the gritty soil. She sobbed tearlessly for several long minutes, unsure if she was miserable because she had just killed herself or happy that she had done the right thing or simply relieved that it was over.

Eventually she rolled onto her back and lay like Eduardo, gazing up at the pale blue sky and waiting for the end to come. The winter breeze carried a sharp chill, and when she wasn’t bent double from the hunger pangs she shivered all over. During one of her spasms her hand brushed a single blade of grass, the only one left within her reach. She pulled it out and started to chew.

Her settlement was attacked six months before. They’d been living far up north, far enough that New City was only a vague story some far-walking traders and scavengers told. Neither she nor anyone she knew had ever ventured this far south.

They didn’t need to. They had a good spot—a large, well-watered valley relatively free of toxins. Scattered within this valley, broad enough that it took two days to walk across, were several little settlements where families farmed and raised cattle and chickens. Each settlement had a blockhouse for when bandits came. The raids were regular but minor and rarely led to casualties. Everyone ate well enough and they felt secure.

Then the Righteous Horde arrived. They had only numbered in the hundreds then, led by a wild-eyed priest who called for a purification of the land. When some settlements tried to resist, that terrible machine gun of theirs tore right through the wooden blockhouse walls. The survivors were crucified to set an example for the other settlements. Susanna’s people tried to flee and were hunted down. Those too young or too old to follow the march were killed outright. The rest became porters or machete men.

And now she was here. All her old friends were dead, as she herself soon would be.

With an effort she turned her head and looked at Eduardo. He had been the last from their old settlement, a foolish old man whom she had never liked. Strange how she ended up spending her last hours with him, and how at the end she had done him a great favor.

Let him restin dignity, and let me die the same
,
she thought.

She felt a hard knot deep inside her that wasn’t hunger, and she realized that if she had the strength to stand, her back would be straight and her chin high. She had been pushed around and passed over her whole life and now that it was ending she had finally said, “No more, this is as far as I’ll bend.” A weaker person would have degraded herself by feasting on Eduardo’s corpse. She had heard of scavengers doing that in lean winters. But not her.

She looked back at the sky. Let the end come soon.

“Hey.”

Susanna blinked. Now she was hearing things. Maybe the end was coming sooner than she thought.

“Hey, are you alive?”

Susanna looked over at Eduardo in astonishment. He lay where she had left him, glassy eyes staring at a sky he would never see again.

“Hello?”

The sound had come from the other direction. She looked that way and saw a man.

The first thing she noticed was that he had a paunch. A wave of hunger passed through her body, doubling her over so that her knobby knees touched her chin. Tearing her eyes away from that beautiful paunch she looked at the rest of him.

He was an older man, with white hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He smiled at her and pulled something out of a satchel that hung from his shoulder.

A corn cake.

“Here,” he said.

Susanna got on her hands and knees. The man stayed where he was a few feet away. She crawled over to him, the allure of food giving her strength. He put the corn cake in her mouth.

“Eat that. Go slowly or you’ll hurt yourself,” the man said. He pulled a canteen off his other shoulder and held it to her lips. The water tasted tangy, strange.

“I put a bit of lemon juice in it,” he explained. “You’ve probably never had a lemon. They don’t grow around here unless you have a greenhouse. It will build your strength.”

Susanna ate and drank, feeling nothing. She had resigned herself to death and now this had happened. She didn’t know what to think, so she simply allowed her body to take over the mechanical task of staying alive for one more day.

“There’s plenty more where that came from,” the man said once she finished.

Susanna looked around and noticed that other people had joined them, well-fed men and women carrying guns. One scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. Another bent over Eduardo.

“This one’s a goner,” he said.

The man who had fed her put a soft hand under her chin and made her look up at him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Su—Susanna.”

“I’m Abraham Weissman, and I’m here to help you.”

The man smiled at her but the smile came out flat. A little tremor of fear fluttered in her chest.

“Did you say you have more to eat?” she asked.

Abraham Weissman nodded. “That’s right, but we need to go now. We have a long way to walk. Can you walk?”

Susanna sank to the ground. It had been too good to be true. They were going to leave her.

Abraham whistled and two men bearing a stretcher came over and put her on it. They lifted her up and the whole column started walking toward the mountains. Susanna saw there were about a dozen of them. Trailing along beside them came a crowd of ragged, starving wraiths who must have been from the Righteous Horde like her. Some lay in stretchers while others shuffled along as best they could. From what she could see none had been machete men. The only men were too old and The Pure One had a strict law against women carrying weapons. These people had all been porters, left behind by the Elect and not strong enough to keep any of the food.

They walked for the rest of the day, making slow progress because the starving people had to keep stopping to rest. The man who had given her the corn cake grew impatient and kept using a pair of binoculars to look to the south. Susanna got the impression that he was worried about being followed. At noon everyone was given another corn cake and some lemon water.

Dusk found them about halfway to the mountains. Abraham Weissman shouted at one of the women with the rifles about how they should have made it there already. She merely shrugged and gestured to the limp cluster of ragged souls bunched by the campfire.

Dinner was another corn cake and more lemon water. Susanna had regained enough strength to sit up through the entire meal. Little was said. The leader, whom everyone called Abe, talked quietly with a few of his followers but no one talked with the men and women from the Righteous Horde. And they talked little among themselves.

After all, what was there to say?

As the sun set, the men and women with the guns went among those left behind by the Righteous Horde and took their shoes.