Free MERCS: Crimson Worlds Successors by Jay Allan Page B

with them, and nobody was going to keep him from that.
    “ Eagle One command center, this is General Cain…commence landing operations.”
     

 
    Chapter 6
     

Settlement Jericho
Planet Earth, Sol III
Earthdate:  September, 2318 AD (33 Years After the Fall)
     
    “We just got word on the com unit.  The Martians are making another series of aid drops.  We should have ours sometime tomorrow.”  Ellie was walking up the path toward the small shelter she and Axe had shared for 25 years.  She had a big smile on her face.  “That’s really going to help us with our winter stores.”
    Axe turned abruptly when he first heard her, and he slipped something behind his back, hiding it before she rounded the corner and looked up at him.  He stifled a cough and gave her his own smile.  “That’s great news.  We can really use it.”  Jericho’s population had been growing steadily over the past few years, and now there were over a thousand men, women, and children crowded within its makeshift walls.  Axe had been determined to turn away the last few bands of refugees, but Ellie had convinced him to take them in.
    He understood her sympathy, but he also knew there was a limit to what they could do.  Thirty years after the Final War, Earth was still a ravaged wasteland, its poisoned hills and fields traversed by wandering bands, survivors of the doom that had claimed most of mankind.  Axe knew how tenuous life was for the scattered groups, but he felt his first responsibility was to Jericho’s existing residents, many of whom had been with him for years and who had helped to build the settlement to its current state of relative prosperity.  It was a constant challenge to feed the people they already had.  If it hadn’t been for the Martian drops…
    He remembered the early years, right after the war, the nightmare just to survive from day to day.  Axe had been about 40 klicks from the city when the bombs hit.  New York had shrunken considerably since its peak centuries earlier as a massive metropolis, but the Manhattan Protected Zone had still occupied a prominent place on the target lists of the enemy Superpowers.  Half a dozen of the big city-killer warheads had impacted by the time the attacks ceased, leaving nothing whatsoever of the kilometer-tall towers that had reached into the sky.
    Axe and his small band of followers had taken refuge deep in the cellar of a long-abandoned factory, hiding from bombs, from radiation—from the nightmare that had descended on the world.  But eventually they ran out of food and water, and they were forced to leave the relative safety of their hiding place in search of sustenance.
    They didn’t dare get any closer to the radioactive hell surrounding the city, so they went east, eventually reaching the very end of what had been called Long Island.  Once a densely-populated part of the massive New York metropolis, the island had long been mostly abandoned, a sea of crumbling suburbs where millions had once lived, before the government decided people were easier to control in densely populated cities than they were dispersed over hundreds of small towns.  Now there was little but the remnants of 150 year-old houses and stores, all that still stood to attest that so many had once called the place home.
    Axe had realized his small band needed to get off the island to survive.  They’d managed to scavenge what they had needed to survive in the short term, but Axe knew they had to find someplace they could hunt and grow food if they were going to survive in the years to come.  His limited knowledge of geography told him the route back west was out of the question.  There was no way off the island in that direction that didn’t come within the lethal radiation zone around the city.  In the end, they left from the east, building crude rafts and barges to cross the narrow sound to the coast of what had once been Connecticut.  They’d then marched north for weeks, staying