FALL OF DARK: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller: Book 2 (Ravaged World) Read online

  FALL OF DARK

  * * *

  RAVAGED WORLD SERIES BOOK 2

  SAM J FIRES

  SAMUEL FIRES PUBLICATIONS

  Copyright © 2021 by Samuel Fires Publications. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment.

  This book or any portion may not be used or reproduced in any manner save without the author’s express written permission except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Mythic Book Covers

  First printed in 2021

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  NEMESIS (PREQUEL TO THE CRIMSON RAGE SERIES)

  Scott’s an ordinary nine-to-five guy with a regular family trying to scrape a living. But his life’s about to get blown apart.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures as Scott is compelled to accept a job which is offering the sort of money he’s never seen in his life. The trouble is, he’s not sure what this job entails. And at what cost? The stakes are high and if you’re not careful, this can see you thrown in jail.

  Scott’s a victim. It’s not his fault of course. He’s brimming with fury and needs to take revenge. He’s going to kill the guy who sent him to his jail sentence.

  Little does Scott know he’s about to meet his Nemesis. And suddenly the world is thrown into a spin as the urban landscape is transformed and millions of people wiped out.

  But Scott’s an opportunist and he sees an opportunity. Will his plans get him killed? Or will he escape with his life?

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  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 - DONNA

  CHAPTER 2 - LEA

  CHAPTER 3 - TRAVIS

  CHAPTER 4 - THE RIDER

  CHAPTER 5 - DONNA AND ROZ

  CHAPTER 6 - ROZ

  CHAPTER 7 - THE RIDER

  CHAPTER 8 - TRAVIS

  CHAPTER 9 - LEA

  CHAPTER 10 - DONNA

  CHAPTER 11 - LEA

  CHAPTER 12 - DIANE

  CHAPTER 13 - DONNA

  CHAPTER 14 - TRAVIS

  CHAPTER 15 - DONNA

  ALSO BY SAM FIRES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CRIMSON RAGE PREVIEW

  PROLOGUE

  It was hard to believe that only hours ago this building had housed thirty occupants. Now, it was deserted. Stripped of all intelligent life.

  Except for one.

  She stealthily moved down the long corridor, gripping a blade in her right hand. Even though the owner was certain that she could impale her attacker, she cursed herself for not keeping it sharp, letting it get dull over the years as she was lulled into a false sense of security.

  Her ears pricked up at the sound of something clattering in the distance. It was a metallic sound ricocheting off the walls, echoing through the corridor.

  She raised her weapon, keeping it aimed in front of her. In times like this, she missed projectile weapons. Nowadays, if you needed to kill, you had to get up close and personal. This required an iron will. In the new world, killing had lost all its safeguards. You had to be willing to risk death, and worse, you needed to be right there to watch the light in their eyes fade out. Every time a life was taken, a piece of your soul would splinter away, tumbling down into a hell of your own making.

  Then came the screams. The screams that had haunted her troubled dreams for a decade. Screams that made her feel this conflict would never end and would never stop consuming souls.

  CHAPTER 1 - DONNA

  There were times when Donna felt the need to pinch herself.

  Everything that was happening shouldn’t have been possible. But after ten years, she’d learned not to focus on what was and wasn’t possible. The lines between the two had blurred considerably.

  As time passes, memories often fade. Yet Donna’s refused to diminish. Her recollection of the first sandstorm all those years ago was burned into her brain like the first grains of sand that had pierced her flesh.

  Looking back, what struck Donna as odd wasn’t so much the abnormal change in weather, but that she’d fought back from it. At the time, she’d been in the throes of bipolar disorder and had decided to come off her medication. She had hated how the tablets blunted her thought processes, and, in the words of her old friend Josie, ‘turned her into a zombie’. Of course, she’d chosen the worst possible time to come off them.

  Any attempts to establish a relationship had crashed and burned in what felt like record-breaking time. Her relationship with close family and friends would often be strained, testing them to the limit, and she was prone to mood swings while at work. The disruption had grown to the point where her boss – an otherwise understanding presence in her life – had told her that maybe it would be best if she looked for work elsewhere.

  Donna was left with no partner, no job, and a total lack of self-esteem. She’d failed at every aspect of her life and had been contemplating the point of it all. Why shouldn't she just end it there and now?

  Even now, Donna still couldn’t decide whether the storm had been a blessing or a curse when it tore into her life. So many lives had been silenced that day. She’d found salvation in the form of Eric and Jane. They took refuge together when the desert was being formed for the first time. It was hard to believe that mere hours before the storm took hold, they had been strangers who had passed each other on the street, with next to nothing in common. Donna could never have imagined she’d be establishing the bonds that would guide her through the turbulent times.

  In Jane, Donna found a confidante, someone who understood her and could nurture her. Seeing Jane rush into combat time and time again, no matter the danger to herself — even after losing one of her eyes — was something that Donna respected immensely. She hoped that one day, she could find such bravery.

  That opportunity came with the rise of Sarah Lee and her Desert Rats cult. The memories almost made Donna laugh. There they all were at the end of the world, and this woman’s sole concern was having enough people to worship the ground she walked on. Donna had at the time figured this was as good a time as any to end her life, but the incident with Sarah Lee had awakened her survival instinct.

  She realized that she had more to offer. She wasn’t yet ready to meet her maker. That wasn’t to say her condition didn’t cause her difficulties over the intervening years, but she’d gotten better at managing it. The dark episodes of despondence were increasingly far apart, and when they did come along, Donna was able to handle them much better than she did before.

  As much as she’d like to take credit for this gargantuan leap in personal development, much of the credit lay with Roz.

  Roz had been training to become a therapist at the time of the apocalypse. Since education wasn’t exactly a priority when everyone was running for their lives, her training had stalled and she’d been forced to take refuge in the sanctuary. This had given Roz time to think, to try to work out whether she would even have a future. After the threat of the Desert Rats had been taken care of, Roz allowed herself to hope once again. What she discovered in the few surviving therapy book
s allowed Roz to continue her training.

  Donna had been one of her first clients. It had always perplexed Roz that heroes, or heroines, were often the ones who needed saving. After spending enough time with Donna, Roz had learned that you couldn’t put yourself in the line of fire without bringing a piece of it back into your personal life, and this could make you a stronger person, or it could destroy you. Roz saw in Donna a building strength and confidence.

  In a way, they helped each other. In Roz, Donna had found a kindred spirit. What made their meetings so meaningful was that ever since she was a child, Donna had been forced to put up barriers, certain that if anyone were to see ‘the real her’, they would run a mile. But not Roz. With Roz, Donna felt like she was being seen for the first time. Soon, the friendship turned into a romance as the two fell in love with each other.

  Then there was the final incident at the sanctuary which saw many of the inhabitants lose their lives and the entire community forced out into the metropolis. It was then that Donna and Roz realized there was a purpose for them both. They could give back to the community. They went about setting up a clinic. Granted, it wasn’t exactly a conventional clinic. Before the apocalypse, the building had been a bar run by Donna’s friend Josie, who had given her life to help them escape from Sarah Lee. Roz had taken one look at the aged interior and had nudged Donna playfully, “I hope we’re not sending the message that the answer is found at the bottom of a bottle.” That had been the first time Donna had laughed in ages. She almost felt happy again.

  They’d had to change a few things around, such as taking down the drinks, the unopened ones now selling for a premium price around Travistown – Roz had joked, “I think we’re bringing bootlegging into the 21st century.” Since social media was a thing of the past, they had to rely on word-of-mouth to find people for their clinic – calling it The Landers Clinic – named after Eric Landers, the filmmaker who had lost his life to Sarah Lee and the Desert Rats but had made sure that they would all have a tomorrow.

  It wasn’t easy to get the Landers Clinic off the ground. Given the precariousness of their situation on any given day, it felt like a leap to ask patients to find anything positive in their lives. “That’s the problem with national tragedies,” said Roz. “They get so much of reality hammered into their face, the concept of being happy might as well be fancy. Look at the poor souls who lived through both World Wars.”

  Despite this, the business had grown steadily over the years, and more and more people were taking part in the group sessions. Sometimes, it wasn’t even about mental illness. It was just lonely people looking to find their new direction in the world.

  Ironically, the moment that convinced Donna of the need for the clinic didn’t take place in the clinic itself. One day, she’d been making her way back from the farmer’s market after having picked up groceries for herself and Roz, when she happened upon a lone man. As she got closer, she realized he wasn’t a man, but a teenage boy, no older than fifteen or sixteen. She could see him walking further and further away from Travistown, out into the desert that had once been a thriving city.

  He had refused to listen to her at first, determined to head out into the storm, unable to cope with the pain of living. But Donna finally managed to catch up to him. The two talked for what felt like hours about the possibility of finding happiness at the end of the world. Before long, the teen was taking part in the group’s therapy sessions, opening up and talking about what he wanted for himself.

  Donna had learned long ago that her mother had been right all along when she’d tell her as a child, “Donna, you can’t always get what you want in life. Who said life has to be fair?” It was as she became an adult, she realized that things can just be good enough, and she could finally say, “I am content with what I have to show for my life.” Donna certainly felt that contentment when she was helping people overcome the same hurdles she had, refusing to allow her mental illness to get her down…

  …while also trying to put Jane out of her mind as much as possible.

  CHAPTER 2 - LEA

  “So, how has everyone been coping lately?”

  It had been three weeks since the Sculptor’s reign of terror. Although they’d been assured there was no longer any danger since he’d been brought to justice, that didn’t stop people from being scared and suspicious.

  “I think he’s still out there,” said a man in his fifties, who before the apocalypse had fought in the Iraq War, having learned the hard way to be on full alert 24/7.

  “That’s definitely not the case,” interjected Lea. “We caught the madman fair and square and chased him into hell.”

  Neither Donna nor Roz knew what to make of Travis’s most trusted soldier sitting in on their group therapy sessions. They weren’t even sure if she had any mental ailment to speak of, but she’d wanted to take part in the sessions. They could have asked her to leave, but they didn’t want to risk saying or doing anything that would agitate Travis.

  Roz entered the conversation. “There, you have proof from the horse’s mouth. I’m pretty sure that if he were still running loose, Travis would tell us, right?” She looked directly at Lea, who suddenly seemed unsure of herself.

  “Of course,” managed Lea.

  “The whole point of these sessions is about trying to find something to live for,” said Donna to the group. “If we all wanted to roll over and die, we would have simply let the storms bury us, but here we all are, ten years later. I think we’re all at that point now where it’s not enough to just survive. We’re testing the quality of life. We’ll never get back to how things were, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find something meaningful, and who knows, there may be certain aspects of past life that we’d rather do without?”

  “Here, here,” added Roz. “I’m certainly not upset that I’m no longer getting constant notifications of cat videos.” There were a few faint laughs from the group. “What about the rest of you? What are you glad to be rid of?”

  One woman raised her hand. “Traffic. I used to work at a coffee shop and the only thing more grating than a dead-end job and a pervy manager was the rush hour. I feel like I aged years in those hours I spent stuck behind some asshole in a traffic jam.”

  “Well, there’s something,” said Roz. “And of course, traipsing across the desert means we’ve been forced to learn the art of moonwalking. Anyone else?”

  “I don’t miss my ex-partner,” said a man in his early thirties. “We’d gone through college together and I’d just moved in with her. That was a huge mistake. Nothing I did was ever good enough for her. She was constantly chipping away with her criticisms. It felt like emotional abuse. I was always on edge. I was already thinking about leaving when the storms started. I never knew what happened to her. Doubt she survived. I hope she did, and despite everything, I wish her well.

  “I’m now in a relationship with a new partner who I feel completes me in every way. It’s like the storms pushed us together for it to happen,” Donna and Roz shared a knowing look. “She’s two months pregnant with our first child. “We put it off for a long time. In a way, I’m still not sure how I feel about bringing a child into this world. I used to think it was great cruelty, but, as you said, we want to live for something. Who knows? Maybe this kid will avoid making the same mistakes we did.”

  There was a round of applause going around the room. “Anyone else?” asked Donna.

  A woman in her mid-fifties spoke up. “I don’t miss bureaucracy and having to fight all the time to get anything done. I used to work in the theatre as a playwright and I tell you, it was a nightmare getting any projects off the ground”.

  “Yeh, I’m with you there,” offered Roz.

  “However,” the woman continued brightly. “I’m pleased to inform you that I shall be renting out a hall along with a group of enthusiastic actors and we shall be putting on a performance.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure to attend,” said Donna before the room broke out in applause once aga
in.

  When it finally died down, Roz spoke up before anyone else had a chance to speak. “I think we ought to hear from Lea.”

  For the first time since she had started attending the meetings, Lea was caught off-guard. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you’ve been coming to these meetings for a while now and you’ve been alarmingly quiet,” observed Roz. “Whatever your problem is, you can tell us.”

  Lea leaned forward in her chair, giving the question some thought. “There’s nothing I miss,” she said bluntly, “I never got a chance to experience anything. I was a child when all of this kicked off. I never had a normal childhood.” Roz couldn’t tell if there was a hint of derision in her tone.

  “Don’t you ever wish you had?” asked Donna.

  Lea shrugged. “Not really. I’ve spoken to people who had their teenage years before it all happened, and I’ve gotta say, it all sounds so… tedious. Proms, trying to work out which shoes will go with which dress. I’ve spent most of my life on red alert. The only alert those girls seemed to know is what to do when a hot guy comes their way.”

  “I think you’ll find, even back then, there was more to life than just guys,” said Roz. “I say this as someone who went through their teenage years before the storms. Haven’t you ever wanted to do anything ‘normal’? Like hanging out with friends, playing sports…what about swimming, for example?”

  “I…” Lea fell silent, trying to conjure up the image of her throwing her arms forward and propelling herself through a pool of water. The thought was quite tranquilizing. She tried to imagine the feeling of the cool liquid lapping against her body, the scent of chlorine in the air, but she couldn’t. She’d never experienced any of that for herself. She only had her imagination and the experiences of others to fuel her fantasy.