Radio Hope (Toxic World Book 1) (26 page)

POSTSCRIPT

Annette sat at her usual spot at the corner of the bar at $87,953. It was early in the evening and the crowd was already getting raucous. The attack had disrupted the harvest trade fair but the scavengers seemed just a thirsty as ever.

And rowdy. She had already broken up one fight this shift. You’d think fighting a battle with th
e Righteous Horde would have calmed them down, but no. She kept one eye on the crowd and the other on a game of bottle cap football she was playing with Pablo. The kid’s aim was scary. Must have gotten it from his mother.

Just as he was about to make another shot he looked over her shoulder and his eyes grew big.

“Uncle Marcus!”

Pablo jumped off the bar stool and ran to the door. Marcus and Clyde were just entering. Pablo barreled into Marcus and he grinned.

“How’s it going?” he asked, tousling Pablo’s hair. They walked over to where Annette sat.

“How’s The Doctor?” she asked.

“On the mend, thanks to you,” Marcus said with a smile.

“Thanks to Jackson too,” Annette reminded him.

“Well, that’s what we came over to talk to you about. After everything calmed down a bit Jackson and I had a talk. He told me about Abe’s deal with you folks and how he didn’t honor it.”

“Well, we didn’t really honor it either,” Annette said, wondering just how much of the truth Jackson had told.

Marcus snorted. “You can break any deal you want with that guy after what he did during the siege.”

“Yeah
, I heard about that. Why don’t you exile him?”

“Can’t. The whole Merchants Association threatened to leave and take all their goods with them. They own too much. New City can’t survive without them and they know it.” Marcus smiled and went on. “But we can dig him in the ribs a bit. First off, The Doctor is going to sponsor Jackson’s girl Olivia for associate status.”

“He’ll be happy to hear that. Not sure what he’s going to think about her being sponsored by The Doctor after, well, you know.”

Marcus shrugged. “I can’t figure out why he didn’t just have me sponsor her. I’d have been happy to. Pretty young girl growing up on Toxic Bay, it just isn’t right. Anyway, please pass on the news. And I got some bigger news for you.”

“What’s that?”

Clyde and Marcus looked at each other and grinned. Clyde cleared his throat and spoke.

“Well, we’re still in a state of emergency, which gives me and The Doctor special powers. That’s damn useful right now considering what a pain the Merchants Association is being. Anyway, after the battle we realized that things are changing between New City and the Burbs. We need to get some more order around here. You’ve been doing a great job keeping the peace in $87,953, so how about keeping the peace in the whole Burbs?”

Annette stared at the Head of the Watch. “What do you mean?”

Clyde turned to the crowd of drinkers and waved his hands in the air to attract their attention.

“Listen up everybody! I got some big news for you. You all know Annette Cruz. She’s been knocking heads here for years.”

Everyone laughed and raised their drinks. Annette blushed. These people actually liked her?

“She’s done more than that. On more than one occasion the city council has sent out posses after criminals, and she’s always been at the top of the list to go. Well, times are c
hanging and the Burbs are developing, so if she agrees we’d like to make that role official. Annette, how would you like to be sheriff of the Burbs?”

Annette’s jaw dropped. The crowd roared its approval.
She was so stunned she barely noticed Pablo pulling on her hand and telling her how cool that would be. Roy came from around the bar and gave her a big hug.

Marcus leaned in close. “The job comes with good pay and associate status of course. Citizenship for you and Pablo won’t be far behind.”

Annette looked down at her son, then back at Marcus.

“Then I accept.”

***

An hour later
, Marcus visited The Doctor. He was still ill and stayed in bed most of the time, but his skin had taken on a healthier color, the flu and infection were both gone, and the medication suppressed the nausea he got when he ate. As Marcus came in he was just finishing up dinner.

“She said yes,” Marcus told him.

“Good,” The Doctor nodded. “If anyone can knock the Burbs into shape it’s her. And she’s got no love for Abe. Making her into a power will help curb some of his.”

“Maybe,” Marcus said.

The Doctor put aside his tray of food and reached over for the medical kit. He set it one his lap and looked at it, passing his hand lovingly over the logo emblazoned on its side.

“The Red Cross, Crescent, and Star,” Marcus said. “Your old outfit.”

The Doctor sighed. “It wasn’t really an outfit by the time I got trained. All the international organization had disappeared. It was just scattered groups of doctors in my day.”

“Trained you up good, though. I don’t know where we’d be without you.”

“I don’t know where I’d be without this case.”

“Heaven. If anyone gets in it’s you.”

The Doctor shook his head. “You know I don’t believe in all that.”

“Yeah, well there’s been a hell of a lot of people praying for you these past few weeks.”

The Doctor didn’t reply. He ran his hand over the case again.

“So do you believe Jackson’s story about meeting people from Radio Hope?” Marcus asked.

The Doctor shrugged. “Where else could they have gotten this? What amazes me is that not only is this a complete and apparently untouched medical kit, but that it has two year’s worth of my medication in it. It’s like this came out of one of the RCCS’s clinics.”

“A blast from the past!” Marcus laughed.

The Doctor looked down at the case, running his hand slowly over the logo.

“Or a note from an old friend,” he murmured.

***

Jackson Andrews couldn’t believe the Burb Council’s meeting was being held at $87,953. While he approved of it being at a public place so that everyone
could join in, why did they have to pick a place owned by a citizen?

Even more, he wasn’t the only person to be voted onto the council
today. He’d heard Ahmed would be voted in too. Imagine, a citizen on the Burb Council! Well, considering what he’d heard about him defying The Doctor during the siege and moving out to the Burbs in protest afterwards, he supposed the guy had earned it. Class loyalties ran deep, though, and Ahmed would need to be watched.

All those thoughts fell away as he entered the bar. He’d never been in here before. Back when he was a citizen he drank within the walls. After he was banished he never stepped foot in $87,953 because it was owned by a citizen.

He could see why it was so popular. The lights were on, music was blaring, and people were drinking and having a good time. He passed through the crowd and saw Ahmed and some of the members of the Burb Council already there. A moment later he spotted Annette sitting at the bar.

One of the Burb Council waved him over. “Come on, meet
ing’s starting soon.”

“In a minute,” he called back. “I’m going to have a drink with a friend first.”

He slid into the bar stool next to Annette. “Evening sheriff. Why the long face?”

Annette gave him a thin smile. “
News travels fast.”

“Aren’t you happy with your promotion? I hear they gave you associate status.”

Not that associate status is going to have much meaning soon. The first thing I’m going to push for on the Burb Council is to get citizenship for everyone. No more of this bullshit ranking.

Roy slid two beers in front of them. “On the house.”

Annette stared into her drink. “Yeah, well, I guess it’s just hit me how much responsibility comes with the job.”

“Be your own woman. Just because the citizens put you in the job doesn’t mean they own you,” Jackson said, taking a pull from his glass.

Annette reached into her breast pocket and pulled out a long bullet.

“That from you
r sniper’s rifle?” Jackson asked.

A
nnette held it up to the light. “A .338 Lapua Magnum round. It’s the last one I have. I asked Clyde if he had any in the armory and he said he hasn’t seen any in years. Neither have I.”

“I don’t think you’re going to need a sniper’s rifle to keep the peace in the Burbs.”

“Actually I think I will,” Annette said, turning the bullet over in her hands. “You see, the Righteous Horde is beaten but not beat. You can’t give a self-proclaimed messiah a bloody nose and expect him to turn the other cheek. As long as he’s out there he’s going to want to gather another army and come back here. Nobody’s safe until he’s gone.”

Jackson sat back. “You’re not thinking of going after him? They didn’t ask you to, did they?”

Annette shrugged. “No, no they didn’t, but chasing fugitives is part of the job description. The Burbs won’t be safe until that guy’s brought to justice. No place will be safe. Want to be my deputy?”

“Oh shit! Roy, I need a shot. Give the lady one too.”

Roy came over with two shots.

“She shouldn’t get drunk on the job,” Roy said with a grin.

“Then I’ll have both,” Jackson said. “I think I’m about to say yes to a really, really dumb idea.”

Jackson slugged back both shots in rapid succession. Roy leaned against the bar and chuckled.

As the alcohol eased into him, Jackson took a look around.

“You now, this is a really nice place you got here. I should have come in here before.”

“The sign says ‘Roy loves everybody’. Bring that girl of yours next time. I’m always happy to meet new residents,” the bartender said.

Jackson smiled and looked at all the circles of friends drinking and enjoying life, having cheated death in this ruined, toxic world for one more day.

“Yeah, a real nice place,” he said again. “But I’ve always wondered about the name. Why do you call it $87,953?”

Annette rolled her eyes. “Oh
, here we go. It’s his favorite story.”

Roy stood up straight and
his smile broadened. “Well, if you add up $27,680 for the mortgage on my house, $45,280 I owed on my farmland, and $14,993 I owed a moneylender, that comes to $87,953. That’s how much I was in debt before the last city-state government fell. I was stressed out day and night thinking I’d never get out from under all that debt. Then BOOM. North Cape had a coup, then an invasion, and it was all over. I was a refugee and more free than I had ever been. I ended up here with the first wave of settlers. I farmed like the rest of them, but my real talent was brewing. Always has been. So I started a bar and named it $87,953.”

Jackson laughed. “Damn Roy, sounds like you’re a bit of a revolutionary.”

Roy smiled at him.

“In my own way, Jackson, in my own way.”

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Thanks for reading Radio Hope! In the next few pages you’ll find a sneak preview of Book Two of the Toxic World series as well as more information about me and my writing. If you enjoyed my work, please take the time to write a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or another online forum, and spread the word! As a relatively unknown author I could really use your help. Also feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Special sneak preview Book Two in the Toxic World series

REFUGEES FROM THE RIGHTEOUS HORDE

Coming May 2014!

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 vegeta
tion. That meant there were toxins nearby, 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 numbers 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.

S
he 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 and a wave of hunger passed over her. 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 you haven’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 your entire body and mind.

She pulled out a tuft of grass nearby and stuffed it in her mouth, tasting the metallic tang of toxins that came from this soil. Susanna rolled over so she could reach another tuft of grass. Forget cancer. She’d never get c
ancer 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 had stripped it of anything edible.

Her vision only took in the far places, the places where there may be something to eat, the places that 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, instead he was 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 believing a little 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 gave 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 was
n’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 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 realized Eduardo was dead. It had never entirely left her mind in the hours since.

“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.

Susanna reached into her pocket and pulled out her flint and steel. 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 hard on her face on t
he 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 turned herself onto her back and lay
like Eduardo looking up at the pale blue sky. The winter breeze carried a sharp chill, and when she wasn’t bent over 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.

The Elect
had attacked her settlement 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. Across this valley, which took two days to walk from side to side, were several little settlements where families farmed and raised cattle and chickens. Each settlement had a blockhouse to hide in when bandits came. Everyone ate well enough and they felt secure.

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

And now she was here. All her old friends were dead, as she would soon 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 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 rest
in 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 the 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 over her, 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, but not too quickly 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. “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.

Now that she was done eating and drinking, 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.

“Thi
s 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 to
o good to be true. They were going to leave her.

The man whistled and two other men with a stretcher came over and put her on
it. They lifted her up and the whole column started walking toward the mountains. Susanna looked around her and saw there were about a dozen of them. Trailing along beside them were ragged, starving men and women who must have come from the Righteous Horde like she had. 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 made a solemn 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 s
tarving 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. 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 men with the rifles about how they should have made it there already, but the man merely shrugged and gestured to the exhausted cluster of men and women 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.