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

cover my tracks, there was a sound in the forest that was too loud to ignore.
                  Twigs snapped every so often, and that didn’t shake me, but the sound of wood breaking and being crushed occurred, I couldn’t help but give it my attention.
                  My heart raced infallibly as I dashed over to the rifle, picking it up and swinging the barrel up to face the forest in front of me, in the general direction of where I thought I had heard the sound.
                  I tried to steady my breathing, but when burying a corpse out in the forest under secretive circumstances there comes a certain level of paranoia. I waited like that for the longest time, my eyes desperately searching the dark for some sign of movement, waiting for something else… But there was nothing. My eyes had adjusted plenty during the several hours I had spent there, and with them I perceived no threat in the slightest.
                  Finally I lowered my gun, keeping it in my hand as I returned to the job at hand.
                  When it was all over I stood there and stared down at the ground. He would be lost, now – nobody would ever remember him. He had survived the outbreak, but now he had been killed over the hunger that had come around… And above all of that stuff, he had been out there for fifteen years. Who knows where he had been living up until now? Why had he left his previous place? Was it just food? What kind of stories would he have had to tell? What kind of man had he been?
                  Had he always been like that?
                  I didn’t believe in a heaven or a hell any more after everything that I had seen… But, still.
                  ‘I’m sorry it had to happen like this. You must understand that killing you was the last thing I wanted to happen, but you threatened the life of one of my own, and that isn’t something that I can let slip past me. These people trust me to look after them, and I intend to do that to the best of my ability.’
                  I took a deep breath as I stood there in the quiet dark of the forest. I was about to leave, before I searched in the undergrowth for a stick and planted it into the ground, up right, at the head of the grave. It was big enough to matter, and small enough not to be seen.
                  Retrieving my things, I set off back towards Bastion.
    ***
    Getting back into the town wasn’t much of a problem – I copied the same method I used to get out, and it worked just fine for me.
                  It was around midnight, and all was quiet. I made my way silently into the house and, in a change of routine, took the gun and the shovel upstairs with me, setting them up against the wall opposite my bed.
                  I lit a candle on the bedside table and laid on the well-worn, comfy mattress, watching the long, thin shadows of the two items flicker in the orange light, my head propped up on a pillow. Somewhere in all of that the candle went out, and around that time my eyes flickered shut, as another day in Bastion came to an end.

Part Two
    Savages

Chapter Eight
    Treehouse
     
     
     
    Every day was a fresh slate. I tried not to hold too much over my head and blame myself for these things, but when I saw the shovel and the gun as I awoke, these being the first things I saw, I couldn’t help but think back to the previous night.
                  In the early morning light I returned the shovel to the shed and the gun to the lockbox, before checking my schedule and seeing that I was due to be harvesting wheat with none other than Hayley, and a few others, that morning.
                  In the old world Mary had been an accountant – she had entered early retirement just a few years before the outbreak, and when it happened we had eventually run into her. My family had known her for years,