The Fires of Yesterday (The Silent Earth, Book 3) Read online

  THE SILENT EARTH

  BOOK THREE

  Mark R. Healy

  Copyright © Mark R. Healy 2015

  markrhealy.com

  Cover Art Copyright © Mark R. Healy 2015

  Editing by Clio Editing Services

  clioediting.com

  Terms and Conditions:

  The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that he/she shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

  Part One

  Into the Dark

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part Two

  A New War

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Part Three

  The Unknown

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Into the Dark

  1

  The stars were gone.

  I crouched in the gloom of the garden and allowed my eyes to drop back to earth, to the cluster of leaves and stems that fluttered in the candlelight. I was reminded of how difficult it had become to tell night from day of late. The sun, when it came, spun across the sky behind the veil of murk, giving only glimpses of light and warmth. Empty promises that it never fulfilled.

  My hands fell gently across the soil, brushing under desiccated leaves. I searched like a blind man in the poor light, feeling for fruit, for seed pods, anything I might have missed when last I checked. Nothing.

  The plants were beginning to wilt and die.

  The darkness had come out of the north and swallowed the light like a wave of inky blood across the sky. There was no warning, no augury of its arrival. It just appeared on the horizon and moved inexorably toward us, marching onward as ominous as Death itself, sickle in hand, silent and unrelenting and grim. For close to twenty days it had stayed, brooding and resolute. The very essence of it seemed to have settled deep into my bones, a chill that I could not shake. I’d become desensitised to many hardships over the years, but this was a sensation that I just couldn’t seem to subdue.

  “Brant?”

  Arsha stood in the doorway of the house, her slender frame silhouetted against the dim light from inside. Caught up in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed her presence.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “What are you doing out there?”

  I clasped the candle and stood. “Just looking through the garden.”

  “You won’t find anything.” She took a few steps out into the yard. “I already checked earlier.”

  “Yeah. So did I, but I figured I’d do it again anyway.”

  As she neared, the glow of the candle alighted upon the pale skin of her face. Her visage floated toward me like a spectre, brow furrowed, eyes gleaming.

  “You okay, Brant?”

  Her auburn hair appeared black in this light, as did almost everything else, as if a great sooty brush had swept across the city and painted it with tar.

  “Sure. I’m fine.”

  “You look spooked.”

  I deflected away the comment with a little tilt of my head. “Just got a lot on my mind.”

  “I can understand that.” She looked to the sky, then back to me. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “Nothing that we haven’t talked about before. I’m still just… well, trying to figure out where to go from here.”

  “We’re coming to the crunch, huh? We have to make a decision.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked over her shoulder, back at the house. “Look, I need you to take watch. The monsters want their dinner.”

  Since the incident with the Marauders, we hadn’t left the children’s side. Without fail, one of us would stand at the front window of the house, looking out across the city for any sign of their return. With so much to do, it seemed a waste of resources, but there was no other choice. We’d come so close to losing the young ones, and we couldn’t allow that to happen again.

  “What’s on the menu tonight, then?” I said.

  “Bread. Again. And a bit of potato. It’s almost gone, though.” She turned and started back toward the house and I fell in beside her.

  “Ouch. They’re not going to be happy.”

  “I know, but we don’t have much choice.”

  “They’re going to whinge about the size of the meal again, aren’t they?” I said.

  “Oh yeah. You can bet on it. Poor things are hungry all the time. But if we’re going to make our grain stores last another couple of months, they’re going to have to get used to it.”

  I could hear them inside, giggling and chattering, blissfully unaware of the predicament they were in. Without the sun, nothing would grow. The crops that we’d spent so many years carefully establishing would die out, and only the grains – the wheat and corn we’d stored away – would be left to feed them. Those wouldn’t last longer than a matter of weeks.

  The children would starve if we didn’t find a way to stop this seemingly endless night.

  But how do we stop it? How do we bring back the sun?

  It wasn’t the first time I’d contemplated these questions. I couldn’t control the skies. I couldn’t part the clouds like some mythical god, or bend the elements to my whim any more than I could make plants grow without that precious sunlight. I felt impotent in the face of these forces that had conspired against us, and I couldn’t see a way out.

  Despite that, something would need to be done if the murk didn’t dissipate of its own accord. There was no future for these children if it hung around. Although from time to time there were gaps in the sky through which the sun briefly shone, these were too localised and short-lived to provide any value to the vegetation.

  “You’re thinking of leaving, aren’t you?” Arsha said, reading my thoughts.

  There was no point being evasive. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  I glanced to the north, considering. “Tomorrow. Or the next day. If I leave it much longer, there won’t be much point in going at all. They won’t survive.”

  “But what’s there to gain? What can you achieve out there?”

  “I don’t know, Arsha. Maybe there’s nothing I can do, and I’ll be heading off on a fool’s errand. All I know is that the murk came out of the north. I need to know what it is before I can figure out how to deal with it.”

  “So if the darkness came out of the north,” Arsha began, “we could take some seeds and head south…”

  “We’ve been over this, Arsha. There’s no time to establish the crops in a new location. Even if you can outrun the murk, you won’t have time to grow new plants before the children die of hunger.”

  “So you’re going to trample your way north, and then what? You’ll be heading right into the Marauder stronghold, for a start.”

  “I can deal with them.” She began to say something else, but I held up my hand. “Ars
ha, I survived out there for years once before. I can do it again. I can look after myself.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Do you know who else is out there? Ascension, the ones who are driving the Marauders back. They have far more resources than you and I. Maybe they have a way of keeping the children alive.”

  “Now hang on a second,” she said, uneasy. “You’re not going to just tell them about the children, are you? We still don’t know much about Ascension.”

  “We know that they’re against the Marauders, and that can only be a good thing.”

  “But what if they decide they want the children for themselves? They could take them from us and we’d be powerless to stop them.”

  “And what’s the alternative? The children sit here and starve?”

  She sighed. “I just wish there was another way.”

  “So do I, but I don’t think there is.”

  “At the very least, we need to go over every idea again once more before you go,” she said. “Okay? I think heading off into the wasteland should be the last option we consider.”

  “Sure. Let’s do it tonight when we have some peace and quiet.”

  She crossed the threshold and into the house. “Come on. Let’s feed these critters.”

  Arsha headed down the corridor and into the kitchen, and I ducked my head into the living room, where three of the children were playing a wrestling game on the floor, a squealing tangle of arms and legs. Mish sat on the sofa, cradling Atlas protectively. The smaller boy watched the other children avidly, his broken arm still in a sling.

  Mish gave me an apologetic look. “I tried to get them to settle down…” she began.

  “It’s okay, Mish,” I smiled. “You’re not a miracle worker.” I jabbed a finger at Atlas. “You are not allowed in this game. Got it?”

  The boy used his good hand to thumb his nose, and he blew a loud raspberry in my direction, then went back to watching the game jealously.

  I stepped into the bedroom we’d converted into a storeroom, which contained the solar cells and a small bank of LEDs poised over several pots containing seedlings. The plants did not look healthy. They hadn’t grown at all in the last week, and in fact were beginning to wilt.

  I’d anticipated this happening. The LEDs were not specifically suited for use as grow lights. Years ago, in the early days of the Winter, grow lights became highly sought-after commodities. For a few months they had sustained plants for the lucky few who possessed them, but when they eventually burned out there was no way to keep the plants alive.

  The LEDs we were using now, scrounged from various locations around the city over the years, were general purpose lights that did not emit the wavelengths most suitable for plant growth.

  They were another dead end.

  I crouched by the dented metal box in the corner, the cell bank. With no sunlight, the panels on the roof no longer renewed the charge to these batteries, and the levels had dropped another one percent in the last few days. There was no point continuing with this experiment. Obviously the plants were not responding to the artificial light, and we were draining our energy stores for no good reason. Reluctantly, I flicked the LEDs off, and the room was plunged into darkness.

  For a moment I couldn’t move. The pressure of finding a solution to our predicament was beginning to take its toll on me. For weeks now we’d discussed ways to keep the four tiny humans alive, but there simply wasn’t a good option. We’d never anticipated such an event. We’d always been more focussed on the Marauders, on drought, on fluctuations in temperatures. Never something as drastic as this.

  It won’t end like this. Not after everything we’ve been through. I won’t let it.

  Out in the kitchen Arsha was readying the simple meal for the children, laying out forks in neat alignment with the plates, positioning cups of water within reach of small arms but far enough away from the edge of the table that they wouldn’t be knocked over. I’d seen her carry out this meticulous routine many times. It was in her personality to be so particular, but I also thought in recent times the regimen had taken on a new meaning – it was a slice of normality, something familiar that she could control in contrast to the chaos outside the four walls of the house. Something in which to take comfort.

  “I turned off the LEDs in the storeroom,” I said. “They weren’t helping.”

  “Yeah, I noticed nothing was growing.” She dumped out a spoonful of cold mashed potato onto one of the plates without looking up at me. “It was worth a shot.”

  Just then a squeal of outrage erupted from the wrestling children, which quickly turned to tears. Loren extricated herself from the pile and rushed over to me, sulky, her arms dangling at her sides.

  “Myron kicked me,” she bawled, pointing an accusing finger back at the dark-skinned boy lying on the carpet. Myron’s face was a picture of innocence, and he shook his head in denial.

  “Uh-uh, did not.”

  The wrestling game always ended this way, with one of them hurt and indignant. For ones as young as this, however, memory was short, the discomfort quickly forgotten. They would be playing it again tomorrow, no doubt, just as rough and tumble as it had been today.

  “Now I’ve told you, Loren,” I lectured, “don’t play the game if you don’t like it. You sit on the sofa next time.”

  “No,” she said stubbornly, snapping her arms across her chest.

  “Myron, say sorry,” I said.

  “I didn’t kick,” he insisted.

  “Maybe it was an accident, but you should still apologise.”

  He pouted, then reluctantly muttered, “Sorry.”

  “Now, over to the table, all of you. Dinner is ready.”

  Atlas wriggled out of Mish’s clutches and scampered over to me as the others yipped and bounced their way toward the kitchen.

  “Daddy?” Atlas said, staring up at me with those round, dark eyes.

  I was still becoming accustomed to him calling me that. “Uh, what’s up, little guy?”

  “When can I play again?”

  I tousled his chocolate-coloured hair. “Won’t be long now. You don’t want to hurt your arm again, do you?”

  He shook his head adamantly.

  “It hurt a lot, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, when the bad man threw me in the sky.”

  I felt a pang of guilt thinking about it, knowing that Wraith had come so close to ending Atlas’ life. I wished that he’d never gotten his hands on the boy.

  “The bad man is gone now, okay? No need to worry about him anymore.”

  Atlas nodded obediently, but I knew that the horror of that night would not so easily be dismissed. He had awoken in the darkness with nightmares every evening since, sometimes more than once. It had been a horrible ordeal, and I could only hope that in time the bad dreams would fade and he’d be able to rest easy again.

  “Go and grab some food, huh?” I suggested, cupping his neck and gently directing him toward Arsha.

  Mish joined the four humans at the table and watched as they began to rip into their hunks of bread and cold mash ravenously. I’d anticipated complaints about the plain fare, but it seemed they were too hungry to care.

  Out the window, the Grid spire in the north was glowing like a white-hot needle in the wasteland. It had been the only bright object in the entire landscape in the past few weeks, and it indicated to me that the Marauders were still active out there. They hadn’t given up in their attempts to restart the Grid. We hadn’t seen any sign of their presence in the city – no vehicles or aerial surveillance drones – but the activity around the spire was a sign that they hadn’t left the region entirely.

  “The spire’s on again,” I said, and Arsha lifted her face away from Loren, who she’d been comforting as she wiped away the last of the blonde girl’s tears from her cheek. She patted her head and then made her way over to me.

  “I saw it activate a few times today. Seems they still can’t keep it going for more than a few minutes at a tim
e. Haven’t seen any other sign of them, though.”

  “If they do show up, at least we have a backup plan this time.” After the last attack, we’d designated a house in the next suburb as our fallback point should they return, even going so far as to run several drills with the children. In all likelihood, they wouldn’t bother us again. It was Wraith who had posed the threat – he was the one who had held the grudge against me, who had been prepared to go out of his way to chase me down. The other Marauders would find easier quarry further north.

  Even so, we had to be ready for anything.

  “So. Ideas,” Arsha said. She watched the children laughing as they played a slurping game with their cups of water. “Let’s weigh up our options.”

  “Okay. First off, I’ve already harvested what I can from the old plantation in the west. You might get a bit more out of it, but unless the skies clear up there’s not much that’s going to grow there either.”

  “Yeah,” Arsha said, glancing at me awkwardly. She was evidently still troubled by the very thought of the garden, where she’d experienced such sorrow. “I don’t really want to go back there, but I will if I have to.”

  “So, the first option would be to just wait here and protect the children and just hope the skies clear up.”

  “That’s a dangerous plan,” she said. “We have to take control of our own destiny if we can.”

  “I agree. I would probably rule it out altogether.”

  “Right. So what’s the next one?”

  “We head south on a wing and a prayer and hope the murk clears up. We’d have to lug the children, our grain stores, any seeds we wanted to plant, our tools, water…”

  “Everything but the kitchen sink.”

  “Yes. It’s a lot of gear to carry. And we wouldn’t have a destination in mind. We’d have no guarantee of reaching a suitable region.”

  “That one sounds less appealing every time we discuss it,” she said.

  “Personally, I don’t think it’s a good option. Unless we could find a car or something to help transport the gear.”

  “A car?” she said doubtfully. “There’s plenty of husks lying around, but neither of us are mechanics. How do we get one working?”