The Scourge (Book 3): Grounded
GROUNDED
The Scourge Series Book 3
Tom Abrahams
A PITON PRESS BOOK
GROUNDED
A Scourge Series Story
© Tom Abrahams 2020. All Rights Reserved
Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev
Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan
Proofread by Pauline Nolet
Formatted by Stef McDaid at WriteIntoPrint.com
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
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WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS
THE SCOURGE POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL SERIES
UNPREPARED
ADRIFT
GROUNDED
THE TRAVELER POST-APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES
HOME
CANYON
WALL
RISING
BATTLE
LEGACY
HERO
HARBOR
THE WATCHERS DYSTOPIAN SCI-FI SERIES
THE BAR AT THE END OF THE WORLD
THE BAR AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA
THE BAR IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (FORTHCOMING)
A DARK WORLD: THE COMPLETE SPACEMAN CHRONICLES
SPACEMAN
DESCENT
RETROGRADE
THE ALT APOCALYPSE SERIES
ASH
LIT
TORRENT
AFFLICTION
POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES
SEDITION
INTENTION
JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES
ALLEGIANCE
ALLEGIANCE BURNED
HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE
STAND-ALONE WORKS
PILGRIMAGE: A POST-APOCALYPTIC ADVENTURE
EXTINCTION RED LINE (WITH NICHOLAS SANSBURY SMITH)
Contents
Author’s Note
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
The Scourge series is based on the same plague that altered the world in the eight-book Traveler series featuring Marcus Battle. However, this collection follows the adventures, trials and perseverance of an entirely different cast of characters.
Instead of beginning five years after the onset of the disease that killed two-thirds of the world’s population, the Scourge begins with the plague in its earliest days. And rather than feature a war veteran in Texas, these books are centered on a group of men and women in Florida who have no survival expertise.
The rules governing the Traveler books apply here. You may even notice some Easter eggs that pay homage to the original series, and if you read carefully enough, you might even notice a familiar character or two whose lives intersect both series in different ways.
I hope you enjoy this exploration of the same world that brought you Marcus Battle, Lou and the rest of the beloved men and women readers so welcomingly embraced. I expect it will offer a wholly new perspective on those who survived well beyond the eventual confines of the wall.
For Courtney, who grounds me and lifts me up.
“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.”
—Aristotle
PROLOGUE
AUGUST 30, 1349
LONDON, ENGLAND
Ralf Brooker was alone. He was in the corner of his room, squatting against the wall with his hands over his ears. The pained cries for help and the desperate pounding on his door was too much.
Answering the door was a life-and-death decision. He wanted to live.
He’d quit his job in the city and isolated himself in an emptied village three days’ walk from the cluster of festering plague pits he’d filled with decaying, swollen and blistered corpses. That he hadn’t contracted the fatal illness yet was a miracle for which he’d thanked God repeatedly. But Ralf was a realist. The longer he tested fate, the more likely he was to lose.
Standing at the mouth of one of those pits, Ralf had watched his boss light them afire. He had been lost in the flames, mesmerized by the flicker and whips of heat. Thoughts of his life before the Black Death flashed in his mind. They were distant memories, fuzzy at the edges and without context. It was something alien, something he watched from above as a spectator rather than the one who’d experienced it.
This new life was the real one. It was all fire, smoke and ruptured flesh. It was abandoned children left to die in the streets. It was husbands leaving wives, and brothers abandoning brothers. Ralf bore his own scars, suppressed his own demons. One of those demons clawed at the wood, screeching for help.
“Please,” called the raspy, agonized voice. “Please let me in. I don’t want to die out here. Please.”
That the demon at his door was his fault. Ralf cursed himself for putting himself in this position. He’d traveled here to this remote ghost village to avoid the very circumstance he now faced.
After several days of staying locked in the room, he’d gone stir-crazy. Boredom gnawed at him and he ventured outside. The day before, the demon found him.
The earliest rays of a rising sun leaked through the cracks in his shuttered window on the second floor of the boardinghouse. It illuminated colonies of dust, which danced in the air.
He moved to the window and cracked open one of the two shutters to peek outside. He blinked at the light, adjusting from the darkness of his room, and scanned the street below.
An empty rutted dirt road ran like a dry riverbed through the center of the village. An abandoned two-wheeled cart sat directly below the boardinghouse, the only two-story structure in the village.
Ralf unlatched his door and moved onto the narrow, dank catwalk that led to a worn set of stairs with loose and unsteady boards. He reached the first floor and moved from the steps into a vestibule that served as the building’s entry. He peeked through the gaps in the front door, the warped planks of wood offering glimpses of the outside. No movement, no sign of life.
Isolation was the point. It was the goal.
Two schools of thought existed among the uninfected. Most subscribed to isolation and avoidance of excess. They formed separate communities, associated only with the healthy, avoided too much drinking, and forbade talk of illness and death.
Others did the opposite. They believed they were doomed, that this apocalypse was world ending. They lived hedonistically and did nothing to avoid what they believed was a preordained contraction of the deadly disease.
Social order was virtually nonexistent. Those who enforced the laws of man and God were dead or shut in with their families. No authorities roamed the streets or the halls of justice. Survivors governed themselves.
The moderates tried to find a middle ground between the isolationists and the hedonists. They were few and far between.
Ralf, a man of self-imposed morality, didn’t join the men and women of excess. And given his previous job, one in which he’d heaved bodies into carts and dumped them into pits, no community of isolationists would have him.
He’d found his own place in the abandoned farming village near Wolverton, two day’s walk northwest of London. It consisted of a half dozen houses, large weed-ridden grain fields, and a collection of storage barns in which the farmers kept the grain. Ralf stayed out of the barns. They’d become home to plagues of rats.
Thin and unhealthy oxen roamed one of the fields. Ralf counted four of them.
The remarkable thing about this village near Wolverton was the lack of people. Everywhere else he’d been there were bodies, crosses on the doors, plague pits, and the overwhelming odor of burning flesh and hair.
This village was devoid of all of it, as if the entire populace of the place simply vanished into thin air. And that was something else about this place. The air was fresher here. Not only did it lack the acrid odor of all things plague, but it was almost clean. There was something refreshing in each full breath.
He’d pushed through the front door and stepped into the dirt, his boots crunching against the hard soil. Ralf walked to the center of the road. He pivoted, scanning in all directions. In the far distance to the south and east hung the haze of a city under siege. Too far to see the city of London, Ralf was close enough to notice the difference in the sky. Instead of blue, there was a dingy gray smudge.
He stepped toward it. A thin sheen of sweat bloomed on his forehead and at his temples. The back of his neck was damp against his c
ollar.
Ralf’s stomach grumbled. He touched his midsection, trying to ward off the constant hunger pangs. Somehow, somewhere, he’d have to find food and water.
Years into the Black Death, starvation killed as many as the plague. Fewer mouths to feed also meant fewer people to farm, to slaughter, to market, to cook.
Ralf understood he would have to kill the oxen. There was no way around it. But that would be his last resort. Once they were gone, there was little hope of finding meat anywhere else. He wouldn’t eat rat, and he wasn’t much with a long bow. The oxen could wait for now.
He walked toward a cluster of ash and oak trees, which provided shade for the last of the thatched houses on the village’s one and only road. The night before, he’d heard the cucking of a finch.
He reached the stand of trees and looked up into the branches, shielding his eyes from the shafts of light cutting through the thin canopy. He scanned from top to bottom and left to right until he saw it. A haphazard nest a quarter of the way up an ash.
Ralf studied the connections among the trees and envisioned the path from one to the other up to the height of the nest. Then he began his climb. Up an oak, over to the ash, back to the oak, he muscled his way skyward.
He settled onto a foothold and then pushed himself higher to grab the next branch without looking down. Then he lifted his other leg to find the next, higher perch. Several minutes into the climb, he rose even with the nest and smiled at its contents.
Five tan eggs nestled in the thatch. Red speckles dotted the buff exteriors.
Ralf steadied himself, bracing his foot into the crook of two branches, and reached into the nest. He plucked the eggs with trembling fingers and transferred them into the bag attached to a belt he wore loosely around his waist.
All five eggs securely in the pouch, he methodically descended. From one tree to the other and back, it seemed more treacherous on the way down.
At last he hit the dirt and wiped his hands clean from crumbled bark and threads of sap. Ralf adjusted the bag on his hip and looked up. That was when he saw her. A woman about his age, perhaps younger, stood in the middle of the road close to the cart. She had long hair that was frayed at the ends near the middle of her back. She wore a linen kirtle with a soiled white shirt underneath. The kirtle and shirt covered most of her body, so he’d not seen, in that split second, any obvious signs of the disease. Her clothing also told him she wasn’t a woman of wealth or influence, at least she hadn’t been since the Black Death clutched Western Europe in its claws. That meant nothing though. People were sick without symptoms.
His heart jumped, kick-starting an accelerated pulse he felt on the sides of his throat. Ralf backed up, hiding amongst the trees. He tried to control his breathing.
Had she seen him?
Ralf closed his eyes against the flood of sweat that draped his face. He licked his lips and put his hand on the bag, unconsciously protecting the eggs.
He backed up another step, slipping farther into the cluster. From behind a thick oak he peered to one side. Too far back to see the road clearly, he couldn’t tell if the woman was gone or not.
Ralf crouched into a squat and held his position in the thicket. His stomach grumbled again and he grimaced. His hunger matched his fright.
Reason told him he should be scared. He’d survived weeks in the service of his boss, touching the dead, walking amongst the infected filth. Every day he wondered if the next would be the one on which he’d wake up vomiting, spot the black spots under his arms, or convulse and lose control of his motor function. That day never came.
Coming into direct contact with an infected person here in this village should mean nothing. Except that it wasn’t the disease that sent his heart racing, made breathing a chore, and produced sweat from every pore. It was, instead, having that person ask for help.
Everyone asked for help. It didn’t matter the circumstance, everyone in these post-apocalyptic days, the days so richly prophesied in the New Testament, wanted help of some kind. Food. Shelter. Medicine. Weapons. Protection. Sex. Money.
Ralf wanted to oblige none of these. He wanted to be left alone to ride out the dying wave of the illness and be alive to watch the rebuilding of society.
Unlike the hedonists, he wasn’t fatalistic. Rather, he believed good days might return in his lifetime. Unlike the separatists, Ralf didn’t fear infection. He believed himself immune somehow.
Nevertheless, he feared that any connection with someone in need would be his death. The needy would put upon him until he gave no more and then discard him for a cracker crumb or a blanket or a finch’s egg.
His eyes were closed when the girl’s voice nearly stopped his racing heart. She stood meters from him, her hair draped across her face, her thin hands fidgeting with the fabric at the cuffs of her shirt sleeves.
“Hello.” Her accent reinforced the statement of her clothing. “Are you sick?”
Ralf didn’t respond.
The girl swiped strands of hair from her face. Her skin reminded him of the eggs in his bag, sallow and translucent. Her lips were more purple than pink. Dark circles ringed her eyes. If she weren’t standing in front of him speaking, Ralf might have thought her a corpse already.
She looked at the ground in front of her. “I’m sick. I have the spots under my arms.”
“That’s the first sign. Sorry.”
She frowned. “I’ve got lumps too. Sores. My father made me leave the house.”
Ralf glanced from side to side, the mention of another person making him instinctively check for other unwanted visitors.
“I walked here looking for food. Do you have any food?”
Ralf didn’t want to lie. He also didn’t want to share.
The girl touched her stomach. When she did, the sleeve pulled back on her wrist, revealing a yellow sore ringed with red. She must have noticed him staring at it. She used her other hand to pull down the sleeve. “I’m so hungry. If you had anything at all—”
“I don’t have anything to give you,” Ralf said truthfully. He didn’t have anything to give her. The five eggs were for him.
The girl looked at the ground again. “Oh. I saw you in the tree. I thought—”
Using a hand to balance himself, Ralf stood, his back to an ash tree. There was nowhere to go. He hoped the girl would leave. She didn’t.
“Are you staying here in this village? I didn’t think anyone was here anymore. My father’s in Wolverton. He told me to come here, said I couldn’t infect anyone here because everyone was gone.”
She took a step closer to him. Ralf wanted to shout at her, tell her how selfish she was being for being close to him. He said nothing, though, knowing he was the selfish one. He had five eggs.
Yet that would create problems, the exact problems he’d come here to avoid. Contact with other people, especially the desperate ones, was worse than the disease itself.
Giving this woman food was like tossing seeds to the pigeons. It taught them to come back in greater numbers.
“My name is Elizabeth. I’m fifteen. I was betrothed to a farmer’s son in our village. It was a good match, my father said. Our two families would have the biggest farm in a day’s ride.”
Her gaze shifted as she spoke. She looked toward Ralf, but she didn’t see him. There was something distant in her eyes as she spoke.
“He died. The farmer’s son. Then his father died, then his mother. His sister left, but maybe she died too. He had another brother. I don’t know what became of him. I got sick and my father sent me away.”
Ralf swallowed. “You said that.”
“I was changing into my nightclothes,” she said. “My mother saw the spots first. My arms were over my head to put on my gown. She screamed and Father came running. I didn’t want him to see.”
The girl folded her arms across her chest, tucking her hands under her arms the way someone fighting off a chill might do.
Ralf swallowed hard, conscious of an effort not to breathe the air. Despite his long-held belief that he was somehow protected from the disease, he now doubted himself. This woman was too close. He cursed himself for being careless. With patience, he could have waited until night to leave the room.