Free The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) by Will Hawthorne

in.
                  As I crossed through the forest so that I wouldn’t be seen, it occurred to me that somewhere up above was the treehouse. It had been so long since Hayley or I had been back here – it had only been two years ago, but even so it felt like a lot longer than that.
                  I didn’t stop to search for it. In this darkness there was no chance of me seeing it, and right now I had more pressing matters at hand. With the view of me blocked by the trees, I plodded on through the forest, making my way to the next patch of field, across which was where I had left the body.
                  At night, beyond the walls, every sound appeared to me as a threat. Above, the leaves on the branches rustled amongst each other in the wind, and every time there was a sound in the undergrowth I had to tell myself that it was just a squirrel or some other animal.
                  I crossed the field in the dark quickly, unhesitatingly entering the next patch of forest. I knew where the body was, and as I approached it’s vague outline in the dark I found myself slowing down in my footsteps. The flies had already begun to buzz around it in small numbers, and while the smell wasn’t yet that bad a small part of me was thankful for the darkness that blocked my view of him.
                  It was as good a place as any to bury him – I was enough of the way into the forest that I could cover the place of burial with leaves and shrubbery. Even if anybody from Bastion came wandering through here, they wouldn’t find any sign of it.
                  I checked the safety on the rifle before carefully setting it down nearby. I returned to the burial spot, using the blade of the shovel to outline the six-by-two foot spot, and stopped for a moment, balancing my hand on the wooden end of the long shovel and standing there in the dark.
                  It had happened so fast… This man had probably been just as desperate as we had in the early days, eating whatever animals from the forest that we could find while subsisting of nettle soup and wild berries. It had occurred to me somewhere in the years leading up to this point that we may have become shades of our former selves – our life goal was to build things back up to the way they were before, to how we lived, with limitless supplies constantly at hand and so that we would want for nothing. We had all taken it for granted, and only realised how important it was to us once that it was all gone.
                  My conflicted mind, of course, stemmed from the fact that the more we gained, the more we had to lose. At that point, I also realised wat my mother and father used to mean by ‘corrupt politicians’, and why they were so protective over what they had.
                  In a way, I was corrupt – I was holding the truth about this intruder back from the citizens of Bastion… But did they really need to know? What good would it do? Did it even matter?
                  He had threatened one of our own, though, and I looked after my own.
                  I took the handle of the shovel tightly in both my hands and thrust it’s metal edge deep into the soil.
    ***
    Hours had passed by the time I had finally refilled the hole, getting past the ominous limp feeling of the man’s body as I pushed it across the ground, before it finally toppled down. I smoothed over the ground, covering the fresh dirt with shrubbery, sticks and leaves, until, by my reckoning in the dark, it looked just like any other area of the forest.
                  During this time, as I worked away with the small sounds of the shovel and my heavy breathing, the sounds of the forest around me in the dim light had largely failed to register to my ears. I had heard next to nothing.
                  Right then, though, as I shifted the undergrowth about to