Haven (Book 1): Five Years Dead Read online




  Copyright 2019 Alex Irving

  Cover created by DeAniege Designs, 2019

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced in part or whole without written permission except in the case of small quotes for reviews, articles, or essays.

  ASIN: B07XZB146M

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Forward

  This is in no way a survival guide, a tourism guide, nor a road map to the geological places mentioned. While every attempt has been made to thoroughly research many of the tools, actions, and responses, there is no guarantee that errors have not made it through the screening process. At no point should anyone attempt to build an object, eat a plant, or use a device in ways that are mentioned within the following pages without prior personal experience with said items.

  While geological names have been retained and used where appropriate, the names and purposes of commercial businesses have been altered to suit a purpose.

  Some facts mentioned by characters about 'previous years' may change over the course of the book and series that follows. This is not in error, but the truth finally coming to light about the actual historical events that have led up to this point in time.

  Standing at the end of the bridge, looking out across the river, he couldn't shake the feeling of standing over a fresh grave. Nothing stirred within the city limits—not animal nor human. Reports from the scouting team had said the city was dead, buildings standing like gravestones, silent witnesses to unknown nightmares.

  “Think the bridge is stable?” Net, his second-in-command, asked.

  Net was a petite woman who looked relatively harmless. When she felt the need to, in moments such as these a subtle change in her expression announced to the world she was done with trouble. Her dusty red hair was cropped short and stood on end, stubbornly refusing to turn grey, as her younger sister's had changed.

  “Should be,” he said in response. “If it was stable after four years, it should be after five. One vehicle at a time, though, just in case.”

  “The river's a little high, moving a bit fast,” Net said, looking over the side of the bridge.

  “How are they behaving?”

  “Boss, we've been travelling two months in cramped quarters with no safe place to lay our heads or backs,” Net said before she looked to the truck, where two of their team were standing on either side of the vehicle waiting for Net to return with orders. “Ace has been behaving himself, for the most part, but Scout is overly sensitive at the moment. We all are.”

  ‘Boss’ was a nickname the team had forced on him because he was in charge. Aidan accepted the moniker even though none of the others were around to hear it. Until they had left for their cross-country journey he had simply been Aidan. Nearly everyone had chosen different names for the field, short names which were easy to call out in a firefight.

  “Tells and Sella aren't arguing,” he said pointedly. “Have Ace drive, put yourself between the two of them. We'll have shelter by tonight, then we can all relax a bit.”

  Net nodded and walked back to the truck to give the orders. The truck was Net's baby, she had owned it for years and took very good care of it. All of the team knew how to use the stick-shift in the truck, but Net only really wanted herself or Ace driving.

  Ace was a mercenary assigned to the team along with Tells, to protect them when they were out and about. Both were the same age, childhood friends. Ace was short, Tells tall. Where Ace was broad, Tells was slimmer. They both had brown eyes, though Tells' were calm pools which rarely rose to anger and Ace’s were almost always filled with mischief. It was difficult to tell with the buzz cuts, but Ace had brown hair and Tells' was blond. With their hair cut short, and their eyes the same colour, they almost looked like brothers.

  The third person in Net's group was Scout, who had to be part of Net's group because she was the only one who could handle Scout, and Scout was the only one who could handle her. Tells had worked with Net and Scout for a bit, but halfway through their trip they had switched in order to keep the mercenaries on their toes. Boredom led to blurring one's duties.

  Where Tells simply existed in Net's group, Ace had aggravated Scout to the point that the usually quiet young man was developing a backbone. With both of them in Net's vehicle, she could keep a close eye on them and when things got too intense, they were separated to allow everyone time to calm down.

  Scout was the tallest out of all of them, and had dirty-blond hair and grey eyes. There was little to the young man besides skin and bone. What muscle Scout had developed was mainly on his legs. His light-weight and slim form made him the fastest runner on the team—the fastest Aidan had ever met—and his job was reflected in his nickname. Scout would do scouting for them when necessary. He was also one of the best trackers, having learned much from Net and then expanded on that knowledge through practical application.

  Aidan considered the bridge once more before he headed to the van his group resided in. Inside were the necessities of life and enough supplies to start a settlement.

  As far as anyone other than him knew, the team was going out to find a place for a settlement, if the leader of their organization approved of the area. The low population, so far removed from home, would make for a perfect place to farm, for the human race to start over again.

  What the rest of the team didn't know was that the area they were setting up wasn’t for a settlement, it was for a base. A settlement was like any other town; a base was a foundation for their organization to run from.

  They were the ones who would take on leadership roles and everything else would be built around them. There was very little chance of Len, the leader of their organization, declining to start up when he visited in the fall, short of the team breaking certain, key laws; which, if they were found guilty, would result in their execution.

  “Safe?” Tells asked from the passenger seat.

  “Safe enough,” Aidan said.

  “Good place, this city,” Tells said with a motion out the window. “Two rivers to back you, all you need to do is take out the bridges. No one from the east, north, or south could get in. Could only have people coming from the west because the rivers are too deep to cross any other way.”

  “We are headed to the west end of the city,” Aidan said carefully as he started the van.

  “I've been studying the maps,” Sella said from the back seat.

  Sella was the youngest of the group, but not the newest. Ace and Tells had been added to the team after Net had 'bought' Sella off of her father. With her dark brown hair and eyes, Sella was named so because her father had been seeking to sell her. She hadn't thought 'Sell' was feminine enough.

  Aidan had heard men call her beautiful, and he supposed that was true enough. Her mocha skin had survived the end of the world with only a few blemishes, and her dark hair had a nice, silky look to it despite lacking the shampoos and conditioners
women had used before the end.

  “That's good, Sella, but maps are old by years. Weather can have an amazing effect on the landscape of a place,” Aidan said, glancing at the rear-view mirror to see if Net had started her truck.

  “Like the mountain pass,” Tells said, more to himself than anyone else.

  “We're lucky we're organized enough to get over it. We're also lucky the scouts found a place that's abandoned and reported back good news,” Aidan said, driving off the highway and onto the bridge. “This part of the country wasn't densely populated, a majority of the people were in one area.”

  Net would wait until he was safely across before she followed.

  “Why didn't the scouts head south?” Sella asked. “To the capital? We always go to the capital.”

  “Because, this capital is right near the border. The rats have been moving west. The climate here will protect us from most of them, but down south is all warm and wet. Nothing to really stop them.”

  Aidan put the van into park on the other side of the bridge.

  Tells peered out the windshield. “The rats this way have had more meat on their bones, there have been more of them running wild. It's not like back home where we've been keeping their numbers down, or they've run out of food because it was so populated before the end. A lot more space per person means more food per rat, which means stronger rats. I don't like this. Rats are hard to kill back home, so how's it going to be here? They haven't had humans to compete with.”

  “You see any rats?” he asked.

  “No, not since two cities back, no sign of them either. Doesn't make any sense,” Tells said quietly.

  “Try not to jump at shadows,” he said.

  “I might be a merc, but I'm not an idiot.” They all needed to get out of the vehicles and have some space to themselves.

  Aidan remained quiet as Net pulled up behind him. Pulling the van out of park, he drove down the highway and turned down the street the scouts had told them to turn down.

  The buildings of the downtown area stood hollow, empty. Windows were—for the most part—not shattered. Their doors were closed as if it were a Sunday morning and nothing had opened yet. Debris littered the streets, signs sagged, and power lines were downed. Electricity hadn't run through those lines in over five years, rendering them relatively harmless. The team might even return to salvage the wires for their own uses.

  Out of downtown the buildings remained much the same. All the buildings looked as if they had been closed up for the night. There was nothing out of place, and there were none of the usual signs of looting or people having lived there after the end. No quick graves dug on the lawns of the few houses they passed, the roads hadn't been cleared of debris and lawns were overgrown with weeds and grasses.

  The highway wound through the city and back up a hill, out of the bowl of land that a majority of the city was built in. Up the hill was a location that had just been developed, buildings backing onto wild land. The city would give the team access to modern commodities from the shopping complex they would settle in, and access to the natural ones they would come to rely on as the years wore on.

  They did not pause on the road to look at the complex because the truck made noise; its engine had been altered, but it was still older than the van's. Driving off the highway, he slowed the van as Tells rolled down the window. The young man pulled out his pistol and looked around them, at all the buildings, through the windows, trying to catch sight of movement before the source of any movement realized where the rumbling of the truck's engine was coming from.

  He pulled into the parking lot and put the van into park, then shut it off.

  “Guns at ready,” he said quietly to Sella.

  She pulled out her weapon on his order.

  They were all trained to use a gun, had all practised many times, but Sella had never fired a weapon in the field. Her main role was as a motherly figure. Sella could cook and clean, raise children and had skills as a midwife. Everyone needed food, and on long trips good food was key to morale. Far too often, when teams travelled, they found themselves crossing paths with wandering couples where the woman was pregnant and in need of help.

  In teams, Sella's role was usually combined with Net's. Having the medic also in control of the food supply allowed the medic to have a role even when there was no injury. Aidan had allowed his team to choose their roles because he knew they were all very happy in the places they had chosen for themselves.

  Happy people meant a happy team.

  Stepping out of the van, he looked back at the truck, then towards the store that would be their new home. The scouting crew had found the location based on what they knew from other cities. The chosen store had nothing of value to anyone trying to survive. Those who had survived the first winter had gone looking for warehouses, sporting goods stores, and home improvement places.

  No one wandered near the pet stores, the craft stores, the home decor places, because no one had time for such trivial items.

  “Nothing's been in or out for some time,” Tells said, motioning to the leaves from the year before, gathered on the sidewalk of the store.

  The windows were coated in dust, the doors open just slightly, and there was a distinctly abandoned look to the building. Sella stepped up beside Aidan, frowning deeply at the sight of their new home.

  “What?” Aidan asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said, skirting away from him, towards Tells.

  Net approached them, gun at the ready. “Looks empty, do we have to sweep?”

  “Yes,” Scout said, moving past them all, to place himself between them and the store.

  “He smells something, I'm sure of it,” Ace said with a grumble, his assault rifle pointed at the ground and away from the rest of the group.

  Each team had a rifle, one for each of the mercs. These weapons were mainly for show, as people reacted to assault rifles differently than they did handguns. The one use of the rifles were shooting at a pack of rats, out in the open, who had to be scattered quickly.

  Fire on a rat nest with an assault rifle and they all mobbed the shooter. Do the same to rats out in the open and they scattered like the creatures they were named after.

  “What I smell is the stench of an overpaid merc,” Scout snapped back at Ace.

  “I'm not paid with anything more than a bit of food, a roof over my head, and the delight of your wonderful company,” Ace said snidely.

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “That I think as highly of an ex-rat as you do an overpaid merc,” Ace said.

  “Enough,” Net said, silencing them both, which caused Scout to stiffen and look away, as if that would make him invisible. “The two of you are lucky the place is empty. If it weren't, every occupant would know about your bloody whining.”

  “Nothing's been looted,” Tells said, shifting to look around. “This isn't normal. Cities get looted, even if it's only taking what you need to survive. There's evidence.”

  “Welcome to northern Canada, eh?” Ace said with a smirk.

  “Ace, I will slap the stupid out of you,” Aidan said, he motioned to the door. “These complexes had sentinels. Now, the scouts found nothing, but they came in late spring. If there is a sentinel, then possibly he or she was out enjoying themselves. It's early spring now. More likely the sentinel is staying close to home. Keep an eye out. We'll clear the store, then set up.”

  “Most of the sentinels have either abandoned their posts or gone mad,” Net said, checking her gun. “Problem is the mad ones. With the sporting goods store there, so close by, the sentinel would be armed. If they’ve abandoned their post, given all up for good, then others will have moved in and call themselves sentinel to keep themselves within the old laws. They are even more dangerous because they will be in a group and will kill anything that threatens or questions them.”

  “Ever run into a sentinel yourself?” Scout asked, pulling a bag out of the back of the truck and shouldering it.

&n
bsp; “No, but Len has,” Net said.

  “Really?”

  “Mm,” Aidan said as he stepped towards the front of the building. “It’s where he got his scar.”

  “Which one?”

  Len only had one visible scar, but Aidan wasn’t about to let on that it was a strange fact for Scout to know. Aidan glanced over his shoulder at Scout and motioned with his free hand towards his forehead.

  “The one that’s distorted his pretty little features,” he said.

  “Got that from a sentinel on the coast, thought the woman was in her right mind and everything and…” Net paused for a moment. “In typical Len style, he tried to sleep with her. She took the nail-removing end of a hammer to him. Few inches to the left and she might have killed him.”

  “Too bad she missed,” Scout said under his breath, almost too quietly for Aidan to hear.

  Aidan led the way into the store.

  There would be plenty of time later to figure out what Scout meant.

  Their organization had seen several settlements built around retail complexes. From those settlements they extrapolated the best possible scenarios. Some retailers, like the much larger warehouse stores, had the same set up in each store, making it easier for travelling people to find what they needed.

  Smaller stores changed the setup, tried new things, or made do with smaller locations.

  The store that had been chosen, after careful review of the scouting report, was the one that the scouts had chosen to stay in during their time in the city. A craft store located directly beside a pet store. The reason for this was that no one went near a building full of dead, decayed, puppies and kittens. Pet stores hadn't been emptied out at the end; there hadn't been time to evacuate families, so who had stopped to think about living creatures inside stores?

  Inside the entrance of the store there was dirt and debris, just as the scouts had said there would be. The report given had been an intricately detailed account of how the scouts had found everything, in order to give the team a nearly perfect view of their new home.

  There was no indication anyone had been inside the store in the past year.