The Fires Of Ares

The Fires Of Ares

by

Robert E. Taylor

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Robert Taylor on Smashwords

ISBN: 978-1-4660-4240-7

Copyright © 2011 Robert Taylor

All rights reserved.

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 person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities are entirely coincidental.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Susan Woods and Lea Petersen for their invaluable contribution in the proofreading of this novel. And, I would like to add that for any spelling mistakes, bad grammar, or other errors, please blame them. Thank you.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I began writing over twenty years ago. However, writing is a lot easier than getting published. As anyone who’s tried this route will know, the road to publication is a long one, filled with endless rejections and disappointment. Eventually, I gave up on the whole enterprise. The worst part wasn’t the rejections, though. It was the total lack of any kind of constructive criticism from agents and publishers. I had never expected them to send my manuscripts back with a ten page critique, but I had hoped for more than just a complement slip.

So we come to the present day. Increasing concerns over my day job’s long term viability have prompted me to reconsider writing as a career. I dusted off those old files and set to work on them. There are undoubtedly mistakes and grammatical gaffes in this work. For those I apologize in advance. Proof-reading your own work is a difficult task.

I hope you get some enjoyment out of this novel and please, please leave me some feedback about it. Positive or negative, I can’t get better at this if I don’t know where I’m going wrong.

Enjoy.

Robert Taylor, October 2011

CHAPTER ONE

Nathan snapped back awake with a jolt. The off-roader’s bouncing had probably been responsible. Kyle was a fairly good driver, considering he professed such limited experience behind the wheel. But he hadn’t quite yet got the idea that pot-holes were to be avoided. Nathan was positive he’d hit every one for the last twenty miles. As luck would have it, such jolts nearly always coincided with Nathan just drifting off to sleep.

Sorry. Kyle muttered, noticing Nathan’s return to wakefulness.

Not a problem. Nathan muttered through gritted teeth. The pot-holes didn’t bother him, as such; it was his fractured wrist that felt them the most. He adjusted his arm’s position in the sling he wore, trying to get it in a more comfortable angle.

The wrist was healing. They’d spent nearly two weeks at Samuel’s compound after the fun and games in Albertville. Of course, two weeks was not nearly enough time for the wrist to recover. None of them were medics, but Nathan figured he was looking at around another three or four weeks before he’d be able to use the arm for much. Longer for full recovery. He’d been lucky enough in that only one bone had broken, not both.

If that Eyeless had slammed my arm back a little harder.

Lucky. He was always lucky. It could have gone a lot worse. As it was he’d escaped from their nesting site and rescued Cara safely as well. He, Cara, Kyle, Kyle’s wife Jenny and their child Sarah had all managed to escape the city with their lives. Considering how it had looked at one point, that was practically a miracle in itself.

Lucky or not, he still felt the effects of that night.

It had only been just the one night, hadn’t it?

One night that had turned him into a walking invalid. In addition to the broken wrist, his right shoulder and chest had been lacerated badly and he’d lost count of how many times his head had been bashed. He’d lost a lot of blood…. again. It was getting to be a bad habit. First the Furback attack, then the Eyeless. The first time he’d nearly died. The second…. well, he hadn’t passed out that time. But neither had he been ready to dance a jig. Mostly, once Kyle had returned with the vehicle to pick them up, he’d just lain in the back with Cara across him, neither of them fit for little else.

Cara. His thoughts turned to her.

She’d been left behind with Samuel. The old man would take care of her, Nathan didn’t doubt. He’d made a point of leaving the old man with an unspoken threat of retribution should any harm come to her whilst he was gone. Samuel wasn’t stupid. Unspoken or not, he’d heard and understood perfectly well what would occur if he didn’t look out for her.

The big hybrid swerved across the road suddenly. Nathan looked across at Kyle.

I missed one! Kyle grinned. I actually avoided a pothole!

Nathan did his best to scowl, but found it turning into a grin anyway. The swerve had knocked his arm against the inwardly bent door panel on the passenger side, causing a small amount of pain. Nothing major, though. But the younger man’s delight at having missed the hole was pleasant to see. Nathan sometimes forgot that Kyle was only nineteen.

Great. Nathan told him. Keep this up and we might still have a suspension by the time we get to Fortuna.

Kyle grinned at him, not noticing the next pot-hole until it was too late. Fortunately, Nathan had spotted it and had moved his arm to a safer position.

Sorry! Kyle’s grin evaporated. The younger man was saying that way too much.

Stop saying sorry all the time. Nathan advised him. Just keep your eyes on the road.

Kyle nodded and gave the road his full attention. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the holes, he just had some kind of driver fixation when he did that caused him to drive right at them. Nathan shook his head and glanced at the speedometer.

Drop your speed a little. Remember what I said?

Kyle nodded, slowing down. Slower is better. More time to react. Plus it’s better for fuel usage.

Right. Nathan agreed. Remember, pot-holes aren’t the only thing you might run into out here.

Yeah, I know. Creatures, people, that kind of thing.

Nathan nodded. The more time you give yourself to react, the safer you’ll be.

I know. It’s just that, well, driving is fun!

Nathan shook his head. Driving is…. Crashing, not so much!

Okay! Okay! I get it. Slow and steady.

Nathan looked away and smiled. Kyle was enthusiastic about driving. That was a good trait, he supposed. But the man needed to learn a bit of discipline behind the wheel. As far as Nathan himself was concerned, the novelty of driving had worn off a long time ago.

Nathan turned to see how the other occupants of the vehicle were dealing with Kyle’s enthusiastic driving style.

Jenny was asleep on the back seat, sprawled out. The jolts and bouncing that Kyle was putting them through clearly had little effect on her ability to sleep. She was Kyle’s wife and mother to their daughter Sarah. She was also Kyle’s sister.

Nathan had travelled extensively since the Collapse. Along with the Old World’s infrastructure and most of the population, certain morals and values had also disappeared. He’d seen places where the few children that were born had fathers that were also their grandfathers. In Sarah’s case, of course, her father was also her uncle. Once upon a time such a thing would have been a terrible social taboo, a stigma that marked the perpetrators out as freakish and perverted. Nowadays, though, most people didn’t really give a shit. Life was difficult enough without worrying about irrelevant nonsense such as who slept with who.

Sarah herself, of course, was too young to understand any of that. Her parents did, though, and it seemed to bother them more than it did Nathan. If their story was to be believed, they had only relatively recently arrived here in the scrublands. Nathan needed to mull that over some more. He didn’t know what to make of it. But as far as they were concerned, there had been no Collapse, no Cough, no decline into savagery and primitive living. One day they’d been on a train, heading to a new life away from those who had decided that, as brother and sister, they could not be a couple. The next, they were here, in the wastes, having skipped all the unpleasantness that everyone else had gone through over the past twenty years.

Nathan had never been one for science-fiction, but the thought of time-travel had crossed his mind already. How that could be possible he did not know.

But is it any more unlikely than the way the world has gone already?

The Old World had gone, society wiped away by the Cough. An unpleasant disease that killed billions in the space of a single year. In its wake it had left a few hardy survivors struggling to survive. Over time, they had banded together, forming communities for mutual protection and prosperity. But the world had continued to change around them. Not content with wiping out most of the Earth’s population, whatever had happened, continued to happen. The world changed a little more each year, getting stranger and stranger as time went by.

First it had been the animals. Alien creatures unlike anything that had ever existed on Earth before. Alien, uniformly violent and totally inedible. Things like the Furback and Eyeless that had so messed him up over the last few weeks. As they had grown more numerous, so the traditional animals of the world had dwindled alarmingly. Now there were very few of them left. Only the lizards and the insects seemed to survive. Birds, mammals and fish had all vanished. Although, with the fish, that had as much to do with the poisoning of their habitats as it did any mysterious disappearance.

The Earth had grown warmer, too. Plains turning into barren dust-bowls. Forests becoming scrubland, scrub becoming deserts. No one needed a winter coat anymore.

They didn’t need umbrellas either. Rain had become the exception, not the rule. The world got dryer, the water scarcer. Only deep dug wells provided enough for the communities that had sprung up. Rivers and lakes dwindled and grew toxic to drink, infected with alien bacteria and microbes. No one could clean up the water from such sources, either. Once poisoned, it stayed poisoned.

But people endured. They struggled. They made do. They persevered. For year after year, as the world got ever more inhospitable, they soldiered on. They survived.

In the early days, it was not so bad. There was plenty left behind for the survivors to scavenge. There was food, water, medical supplies, fuel and the like. It was all just lying around, its owners dead and gone. There had been plenty for everyone initially.

As the years went by, however, the supplies grew scarcer. It grew more difficult to just survive on a day to day basis. The Old World was steadily picked clean until only the bones of civilization were left.

Communities survived by re-learning skills that had not been used by most of the people who now lived. Farming, animal husbandry, survivalism, mechanics. All of them were useful skills. All of them skills lacking in most people’s day to day lives before the Collapse. But they learned them quickly, or simply starved.

As the years passed, even the animals being raised for food and the crops being grown began to die out. The animals bore no young, the crops withered and died, victims of the increasingly alien ecosystem that they found themselves in.

Even people began to have fewer and fewer children. In time, a birth became a celebratory event. Fertile women, and men, became rarer and rarer. They became commodities to be protected and valued. It was a strange world indeed.

As the saying went. The World was not what it was.

Nathan’s own community, Fortuna, had begun to fall on hard times. Their main well was slowly drying up. Wells dug in the surrounding area all gave little or no water. The local area was scavenged to the bone. They still managed to do some hunting and trapping. There were still some animals, particularly in the hills behind the settlement, and they still had some crops growing. Every day, however, it grew harder to find enough to keep the three hundred strong community going.

So it was that Nathan and his fellow scavengers had been dispatched to the various points of the compass, to search for a site that they could all relocate to. Nathan’s discovery of Albertville, an almost untouched pre-Collapse city, was beyond anything he could have hoped for. It was just what the community needed. Ample supplies, ample space to expand into. All the marvels of the Old World, just laid out ready for them to take.

Except for the Eyeless.

There were scores, if not hundreds of them, in the city. Alien predators, violent and always ready to kill anything that wasn’t one of their own.

Smart too.

Everyone had thought they were just mindless animals, reacting violently to anything not like themselves. Instead, they were highly intelligent, capable of organizing ambushes, planning attacks, taking precautions to ensure their prey did not escape and God knew what else. One had even smashed his shotgun apart and then rearranged the pieces in the approximation of their original positions, right where he would find it.

The Eyeless had figured out how Kyle and his sister had been avoiding them and lain in wait, sealing off likely escape routes. Only luck, in the form of the vehicle they were now driving, had allowed them to escape.

Well, most of us. Cara had been caught.

She had been taken by one of the Eyeless, snatched away as quickly and effortlessly as an adult might take a doll from a child. Gone, but not forgotten.

Once they had lost the pursuing Eyeless, they had gone in search of her.

Nathan still shivered at some of the things he’d witnessed in the abandoned cinema.

Things no man should ever see.

He had no real idea what the Eyeless had been about, the weird little newt-things, the pulsating, somehow alive mounds of decaying flesh, the eggs they had laid in Cara. It was all beyond his understanding.

At least Cara was safe now. I got her out of there.

It had not been a moment too soon, though. Had he delayed even a minute or two, things could have gone very differently.

The image of the dying Eyeless, its phallus ejaculating green worms, appeared in his mind, making his gorge rise.

If I’d got there a minute later….

He shook his head free of the image, returning his attention to the car and the road.

Kyle was maintaining a steadier speed now. As a result, he was managing to avoid most of the pot-holes. Jenny still slept soundly on the back seats. Sarah was in the rear compartment, having made herself a fort out of the boxes of loot they had removed from Albertville. He could hear her talking and chattering away to herself and to her imaginary friends.

He and Cara had escaped from the cinema. Both of them had been in poor shape, but they had escaped. He’d done some backyard surgery on her to get the eggs out of her, then Kyle had returned with the vehicle to whisk them away from the town.

It was after that, though, after the escape from the cinema, that things had started to go downhill somewhat. Nathan found his thoughts wandering back to those moments.

CHAPTER TWO

The off-roader sped through the streets. Kyle was a somewhat erratic driver, but he wasn’t too bad for someone who supposedly had only driven his dad’s car on the driveway a few times.

A group of Eyeless had spotted them as they drove away from the retail area and given chase. They had never been close, though, and were falling behind at a rapid pace. Unlike before, Kyle was not trying to lead them away, just to lose them.

He slowed enough to make a right for one block, then a left at the next intersection, so that he was still going in the same direction, just one street over from the pursuing Eyeless.

They might give up completely if they don’t have line of sight.

After ten blocks without any sign of pursuit, the buildings began to thin and grow smaller. They were coming to the outskirts of Albertville now. Nathan had no idea what direction he was travelling in, but away from the city seemed a good move.

Nathan sat in the rear compartment with Cara across him. She was awake, and able to move a little now. But whatever paralytic the Eyeless had pumped into her was still in effect.

As for Nathan himself, he found himself drifting off into unconsciousness from time to time, only to be rudely awoken by a sharp pain in his wrist as the vehicle went over a bump or pothole.

The multi-lane city streets gave way to a single lane in each direction. The apartments and businesses gave way to suburban housing. After a mile or two, Kyle brought the Myrmidon to a quick stop, knocked it out of gear and turned around to check on Nathan and Cara.

Keep an eye out back. Kyle told Jenny, who nodded.

I think they’ll be okay. Jenny said, climbing into the back seat with her daughter and looking over at the pair of them. They’re both still breathing.

He said he’s not going to die today. Sarah added.

Nathan tried to respond, but was too weak to say anything. He contented himself with a smile for their benefit.

His bleeding’s stopped. Jenny added, looking out through the back window nervously. Behind them, the road was deserted. The Eyeless were miles away now.

Nathan touched his hand to Cara’s face. She smiled up at him. Physically, her ordeal hadn’t been anywhere near as traumatic as his.

Who knows what the mental scars are like, though?

Nathan looked to the other two. Thanks. He managed to say.

Now all they had to do was find someplace quiet to spend the rest of the night and tend to Cara’s wounds.

Mine too. I gotta stop getting myself nearly killed. It’s becoming a habit.

Kyle put the vehicle in gear again and drove on at a more sedate pace. There was no reason to race now. A revving engine made more noise than an unstressed one. They might have outrun the Eyeless, but there was no sense in giving their position away again.

Another mile, then two, then three passed uneventfully. The housing grew more spaced out. Each house ended up with more and more land around it and between it and its neighbors.

Once, it would all have been green lawns and trees. Now, it was just dusty soil for the most part. Here and there a cactus or hardy shrub had made a foothold where once only grass had grown. The wilds were slowly growing into the city, but it was as if they had only started doing so relatively recently and not twenty years ago.

Nathan reminded himself that his passengers were convinced the end of the world had come about six or seven years before, with the disappearance of everyone in the blink of an eye. He and everyone else he’d ever met knew that it all had begun twenty years before, with the Cough claiming the vast majority of humanity’s lives. His passengers had never heard of the disease before he’d told them of it.

Things appearing and disappearing. He shook his head in confusion. It was like God was pulling some sort of crazy magician’s trick.

Ahead, the houses ended in a long stretch of scrubland. Another mile or two had passed by whilst he mulled over the state of the world. Picking the last house on the right, Kyle pulled into the drive and turned the engine off.

The house proved to be unlocked and empty of anything unpleasant. Not that they spent much time checking. Nathan’s priority was Cara’s injuries. It didn’t appear as if she had suffered any fractures, miraculous considering the violence with which the Eyeless had hurled her about. The collar had protected her neck from its grip and claws, but he had feared she might have broken her neck in the attack. He was no medic, of course, but even he could feel that her neck seemed normal. The collar had a distinctly D-shape look to it, the metal deforming as it was slammed against the brick wall of the alley. The back of Cara’s head was covered in dried blood and matted hair, but the bleeding had stopped some time before. It was impossible to see how bad the wound was without washing away the blood and that might have started it bleeding again. There was no first aid kit and the house yielded only standard painkillers and plasters. Somehow he suspected a plaster was not going to do the trick.

The wound in her belly had bled some, but not a large amount. A couple of the sutures had pulled free during the drive, but they were easily stuck down again. All in all, she was looking to be in fairly good shape, considering.

Whilst his priority had been Cara, it was Nathan himself that Kyle and Jenny were worried about. Jenny tended to his wounds whilst Kyle put Sarah to bed in one of the bedrooms.

Lacking a proper means to stitch his wounds, Jenny, like Cara had done before, resorted to a normal needle and thread that she found in the master bedroom. Unlike the yellow thread Cara had used, she chose blue.

I really am starting to resemble a rag-doll. He thought resignedly.

Nathan bore the wound cleaning and stitching as stoically as he could. He passed out a couple of times but was at pains to point out that it was general weakness and blood loss that caused it, not squeamishness over the needle. That didn’t stop him from avoiding looking at her hands whilst she worked, however.

Upon his return to consciousness the third time, he found Jenny and Kyle had set and splinted his wrist whilst he was out cold. They’d used bits of bamboo from an ornamental roller-blind and significant amounts of tape to hold it all in place. Then they’d made a sling for his arm. All in all, it wasn’t a bad job of makeshift first-aid.

The house was fairly large, having four bedrooms. They only used two. It would probably have been safer to stay in the car, in case the Eyeless managed to track them, but they were all so exhausted by then that they really didn’t care if the creatures did find them.

Sarah and Jenny were asleep almost immediately. Nathan stayed with Cara a while, both of them dozing then, restless, his arm hurting, he rose and began to wander the house. He met Kyle doing the same.

Funny, Kyle observed quietly. It’s very similar to the house Jenny and I first stayed in when we left the train.

Nathan, who had gone through hundreds of such homes in the early post-Collapse days, nodded. They all look alike after a while.

The two men continued their separate explorations. It was clearly once a family home. One of the bedrooms was decorated as a nursery, complete with cartoon painted walls and hanging mobiles. It made Nathan a little sad to see it.

So many hopes and dreams. He thought. All gone because of a seemingly innocuous cough.

He wandered into the kitchen, dusty but still untouched since the pre-Collapse days. He opened a draw, marveling at the cutlery within. Just a few days ago, finding a house like this, unlooted, would have been an enormous coup as a scavenger. The cutlery in the kitchen drawer alone would have been enough to afford him a heroic status amongst the residents of Fortuna. Now, there was a whole city of houses and apartments just like this one, ready to move into once the Eyeless were dealt with.

Houses, businesses, small manufacturing places. Food and water. Supplies of every kind. The city had it all. If they could take it from the Eyeless, the community’s needs would be met for the foreseeable future.

Three hundred people in a city that once held tens of thousands, if not more.

It was almost too good to be true.

The Garden of Eden, with the Eyeless as the snake. He scowled.

It should be a simple matter to restore some sort of power. Even if the city didn’t have its own power station, there were still solar cells and wind turbines that could be built. There would be generators. And there was probably no shortage of fuel. So many abandoned cars, dozens of gas stations. It was all there, waiting for them.

No, the future looked bright. Apart from the Eyeless.

Getting rid of them would be hard, dangerous work. Nathan knew that they were not the invulnerable, supernatural predators that some people believed. He had killed a surprising number of them that very night. They could be dealt with. But it would take skill and leadership and a certain military ability that he did not possess. No one did back in Fortuna. The only person who’d had the kind of tactical smarts they would need had been Rufus, and he was long dead. He may have taught Nathan a lot, but there were certain things only experience could teach.

Reaching the lounge area, he spied a drinks cabinet. Nathan had never been a particularly heavy drinker, even as a teen. The Collapse put more immediate concerns in one’s head than where the next drink was coming from. But he felt a sudden need to have something burning his throat and putting a fire in his belly, so he wandered over to the cabinet.

It was reasonably well stocked, but lacking in particularly strong alcohol.

Nothing like Jason’s rotgut back in Fortuna. He thought.

He made do with neat whiskey in a glass. The owners had thoughtfully turned the glasses upside down when they put them away in the cabinet, so there was no dust inside them. The hardest part was getting the cap off the bottle with one hand.

He sat in a comfortable armchair drinking quietly for a while before Kyle, having completed his own tour of the premises, joined him. By then the alcohol had taken the edge off the pain in his busted arm.

Grab a glass. Nathan suggested to the younger man.

Kyle hesitated a moment, then did so. Nathan poured him a shot.

Thanks. Kyle said, downing the shot in one and then choking a little. He was clearly not used to alcohol.

Easy, Nathan advised, refilling his glass. That’s not water.

Kyle nodded and sipped at the refill. The two men drank quietly for a while.

We can’t stay here, can we? Kyle’s voice was half question, half statement of fact. He wasn’t talking about the house they occupied currently, either.

Nathan looked at him sadly. No. You and your family can’t stay in Albertville anymore. The Eyeless have gotten wised to your hidey-holes.

Kyle nodded and looked at his drink. Where will we go? Where can we go?

Nathan pursed his lips. I could take you back to Fortuna with me, when I go.

Kyle nodded again. What’s it like?

Nathan took a long swallow of his whiskey. As far as communities go, it’s not so bad. It’s not perfect, by any means. But they have laws and it’s as safe as you can get, these days.

A lot of people?

Three hundred or so. Mostly just folks trying to get by. A few bad eggs. Most are decent, though. There are even a few kids for Sarah to play with.

Kyle nodded. That would be nice. For Sarah, I mean. Kids of her own age.

Nathan considered for a moment. It would be a temporary solution. I’m pretty sure the mayor will want to take the city back from the Eyeless.

Kyle looked shocked. How will he do that? The Eyeless are.... He tailed off, unable to articulate his feelings about the creatures.

The Eyeless are several less than they were. Nathan pointed out. Fifty men, with decent weapons will make them run for a change.

He wasn’t sure that was true. But it was for the younger man’s benefit. The Eyeless were far more intelligent than anyone had given them credit for. His feeling was that, they might get the Eyeless on