Beyond Green Fields #8 - One Grand Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip: A post-apocalyptic story Read online

  Beyond Green Fields #8: One Grand Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip

  A post-apocalyptic story

  Adrienne Lecter

  Contents

  Introduction

  I. Traders

  1 - ANDY

  2 - ANDY

  3 - ROB

  4 - ANDY

  5 - ROB

  6 - ROB

  II. Patrol

  7 - ROB

  8 - ANDY

  9 - ROB

  III. Dispatch

  10 - ANDY

  11 - ROB

  12 - ROB

  13 - ANDY

  14 - ANDY

  IV. Hit & Run

  15 - ROB

  16 - ROB

  17 - ROB

  18 - ANDY

  19 - ANDY

  20 - ANDY

  V. Finale

  21 - ANDY

  22 - ANDY

  23 - ROB

  24 - ROB

  25 - ANDY

  About the Author

  Books published

  Beyond Green Fields #8: One Grand Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip

  A post-apocalyptic story

  by Adrienne Lecter

  Copyright © 2021 by Adrienne Lecter. All rights reserved.

  http://adriennelecter.com

  Produced and published by Barbara Klein, Vienna, Austria

  Edited by Marti Lynch

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read her work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help spread the word.

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  adriennelecter.com

  To my supporters on Patreon.

  Without you, none of these stories would exist. You made this possible.

  Thank you!

  Introduction

  Round Seven: One Grand Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip

  The beginning of one grand adventure!

  Growing up in Alaska hundreds of miles away from civilization has its perks, but there is also one huge drawback: our parents.

  They left us with quite the legacy to live up to.

  It’s been over two decades since the zombie apocalypse turned the world upside down and a new civilization rose from the ashes of the uprising and civil war. There is so much to explore—and it’s for the best if our parents don’t know what we get up to.

  It’s about time we get to write our own story!

  Warnung: contains spoilers of the entire Green Fields series (in particular the ending)—best enjoyed after finishing the series.

  Part 1

  Traders

  1 - ANDY

  “Mom is going to kill us when she finds out about this!”

  My brother’s squeak made me want to roll my eyes, but not even that—mostly token—protest could wipe the stupid grin off my face.

  “First, they’ll have to realize that we’re gone and not with one of the hunting parties.” That would buy us a few days, maybe even a week, if we were lucky. “By then, we’ll be far enough away from any of the posts that they can’t track us down. And I’ll happily deal with her nagging later if it means that I get to live a little before we’re grounded for life!”

  Rob was still squinting at me, even after buckling himself into the passenger seat and checking that the weapons in the central rack were all loaded, with all additional ammo pouches filled to the brim.

  I sent a silent prayer to any powers readily available as I turned the key in the ignition. One tense second ticked by, two, but then the engine came to life with a barely audible whine, more noticeable by the vibrations lent to the chassis of the pickup truck around us than sound. My grin widened, and I patted my faithful vehicle on the dashboard.

  Rob’s eyes went just a little wide.

  “Seriously? You want to go on a weeks-long road trip in a car when you’re not even sure it will start? Are you insane?”

  Quite possibly, but it was now or never. I’d spent an entire year pilfering gear and sneaking away from the town at odd hours of the day to get the car ready. Last week, the roads had still been half-frozen, making traveling in a single vehicle all on its own treacherous to say the least. A week from now, every able-bodied soul would be either working in the fields or ranging far from the settlements to check on our outposts and start with repairs and new construction. Just a little stir crazy after another endless winter in the tundras and forests of southern Alaska and northwestern Canada, everyone was eager right now to spend a few days hunting, or doing whatever other activities were best left to the outdoors.

  It was so like my brother to be a pessimistic pussy.

  The look I shot him seemed to convey that sentiment loud and clear without me having to open my mouth and explain—one thing I inherited from Dad. Just like I’d expected, that was enough to make him shut up, although he grumbled something under his breath that I was sure I didn’t need to hear.

  “She starts nine times out of ten,” I said, feeling the need to reassure him… and maybe myself, too. “And usually right on the second time when she does stall. The locks engage every single time, so no need to get your panties in a twist.”

  The glance he cast my way was a baleful one, but he didn’t protest further.

  Concentrating on the dashboard, I exhaled, focusing on what was in front of us. Mostly grassland, still cold and with only scant vegetation over hard rocks since my hideaway spot for the car was a good mile away from the next road, and that a barely used one, just to be sure nobody would accidentally happen upon my project. Rob and I had spent the last week making sure the road was clear, which had required dragging no less than seven fallen trees to the side that hadn’t survived the winter.

  We had enough weapons to arm six people, ammo for ten, and food for well over two months—and that was calculated without us getting any other provisions on the road or a chance to hunt, which I severely doubted would happen. All of that could be traded for goods, but the plan was to pay for whatever we’d need with the bundles of furs, leather, and the small crate of meds stashed away with our sleeping bags in the back. That was the only part that didn’t sit well with me—stealing meds that someone I knew might potentially need. The chance of that was low since I had barely skimmed off the top, not raided our entire stash—and it wasn’t like Mom or someone else couldn’t cook up a new batch.

  Rob had also contributed five ominous pill bottles of what he claimed were recreational drugs—not that we’d had a chance to test them. I was sure we’d find a willing guinea pig to try them out on soon enough, if the scavengers out on the roads were anything like those irregularly dropping by our town. Who wouldn’t want to have a good time?

  “Why are you stalling?”

  My brows shot up, my tongue burning with a scathing comeback, but then I realized that my knuckles were white from how hard I was gripping the steering wheel. Chuckling softly, I forced my fingers to relax before I dropped my right hand to the gear shift and started easing the car forward. Yeah, I was driving stick; call it an additional safety measure. Blame my mother and Martinez for keeping me oblivious to the wonders of alternate options until well after I’d mastered the art of not stalling the engine every single time I tri
ed to accelerate. Besides, most discarded cars that I’d found that were just serviceable enough that I could rebuild them came with a gear shift. The registration I’d found in the glove compartment of the truck said it was from 2005, which made it kind of perfect. Newer, and I doubted I would have gotten a chance to repossess it since our scavenging trains had been very diligent about stripping the land of anything even remotely useful. Older, and it would have been more than I alone could have handled. Electric motors and additional battery banks were a bitch to build sometimes.

  In short, it was the perfect car, for the perfect opportunity, for the perfect road trip of the ages.

  It was also the day after the first trading caravan of the year had passed by our town, heading south, still close enough that we could catch up to them to hitch a ride.

  Opportunities like that only came around once—and we were ready to catch this one and run with it.

  “Maps are under the seat,” I told Rob as I eased the truck across the bumpy meadow toward the next thicket behind which we’d get to the access road.

  “We’re going for the coastal highway, right?”

  I shook my head. “No. We’ll cut right across the peninsula. The road’s mostly free. I know. I was out there last week with Fremont and Slack. We’ll be able to catch up to the traders before they make camp tonight.”

  My brother looked suitably impressed—or as impressed as he dared appear. Apparently, trusting in your sister’s competence was beyond any sixteen-year-old, even if she was fifteen months your senior and had everything planned down to the emergency spare wheels, plural.

  “I can’t believe we’re really doing this,” I heard him mutter a few minutes in. My concentration was mostly on the road but with half a brain I was trying to select the perfect mix tape in my mind. The clunky MP3 player connected to the car’s stereo had my favorite twenty albums pre-loaded alongside an assortment of what Burns insisted were road trip classics. Not that I’d breathed a word of intention anywhere close to him—rather than rat us out, he would have personally escorted me to my impending ass-kicking—but I’d spent enough time going on trips with him to know his tastes.

  All excitement aside, a wisp of homesickness twisted through my stomach.

  It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—but maybe it was still a half-assed plan, made for all the wrong reasons. Rationally, it made all the sense in the world to turn north rather than south and be back in our town within the hour.

  Instead, I hit the “play” button to make one of the most iconic guitar intros ever blast through the cabin.

  “‘Thunderstruck’? Nice,” my brother enthused, grinning, showing not a care in the world.

  That’s the spirit, I told myself.

  South we went.

  2 - ANDY

  Two hours later, we passed by the imaginary demarcation line that officially ended the territory of our town, fifty miles south to southwest. From here on out, it was only guard posts and forward fortifications, all of them still abandoned this early in the season and with no incoming forces warranting early troop movement. In the entire time I could remember, we’d only ever had one reason to send more than hunting parties south, and that had been before I understood what that meant. The burned-out husks of vehicles left by the would-be intruders remained a neat seventy-mile marker for the road. They seemed to have done a great job as a warning sign, too, since that had remained a one-time incident seldom mentioned by my people.

  Until this marker, we both knew the entire terrain like our backyard… since it had pretty much been our backyard growing up. From here on out, it was the big unknown; any trips we’d ever taken had been farther inland or north.

  The road, patchy and in increasing disrepair, continued to run mostly straight through the wilderness.

  It was a lot less impressive than I’d thought, venturing into the unknown.

  Rob spent all of ten minutes perusing the maps before he undid his harness and clambered into the back to fiddle with one of his drones.

  “Want me to stop?” I asked, more annoyed that he got to play with his toys than because I was concerned about his safety. Frankly, the closed cabin of the truck was too stuffed with stuff that he couldn’t have gotten flung far had I hit an obstacle head-on.

  “No need. Just warn me if you’re about to fly around a bend.”

  I pointedly stared at the endless flat before me, the road running straight for miles before it gently curved around a small hill and out of sight.

  “Not going to happen any time soon.”

  Ten minutes later, he was back in his seat, the stupid drone launched out of his window and turning into an annoying speck over the road. Rather than follow its course, Rob’s attention was glued to the display of the control module, showing him a real-time camera feed between the two joysticks he controlled the thing with. The drone veered east, then north out of where I could easily keep track of it.

  “Just checking if someone’s following us,” he explained.

  My tongue burned with the observation that if this were the case, we’d be back home and grounded long before nightfall. I was going at a good clip, but any party sent after us would have easily caught up by now. I could have gone faster, but it wasn’t worth risking the car just yet.

  Twenty minutes passed. The only change were two moose wandering idly across the road, yet far enough away that I hardly needed to slow down to let them pass.

  “Anything?”

  “Nope,” Rob offered, not even bothering with looking up from his camera feed. “I’m sending it ahead now so we’ll have an easier time finding the caravan.”

  “How long do the batteries on that thing hold up?” More importantly, how much would recharging them drain from the truck’s main bank? The weather was nice today, but even with the entire roof crammed with solar panels, I’d lose at least ten percent every day from their full charge. Before long, I’d have to stop for an extended time to get a full recharge.

  It was another forty-five minutes—and beyond what I thought that little drone would be able to do—when Rob let out a soft, victorious crow. “Gotcha!” He turned to me, grinning, as if I could see what was going on with his little display. “Found them. They’re around five miles ahead of the intersection where we’ll get to the highway.” All the while, he never stopped manipulating the controls. “And look, there’s us!”

  I gave him my best “good job, dummy” smile but kept most of my attention on the road. It was kind of ludicrous to consider that they’d done a one and a half day detour to traverse terrain that we’d crossed in less than four hours, but then this was still our land. Few traders dared cross it, and nobody was stupid enough to stray from the designated trade routes. Their reasoning was hilariously stupid, though. I’d heard a few of them mutter about it when they’d thought none of us would hear them. As if anyone up here would be undisciplined enough to go hunt down anything that moved out there just for sport.

  Hunting trips were highly planned affairs, with tightly calculated quotas to prevent overhunting.

  Last time I’d looked, “trader” wasn’t a category on that list.

  “Intersection” was a big word for the point where the road we had been taking merged into the “highway,” which was an equally asinine description. It used to be one of the old two-lane roads winding through the landscape, but because it was the only road that had been cleared and was as well-maintained as possible, it had turned into “the road” leading up to the settlements in Alaska. We rarely used it, and it was a pain, really. Unpaved roads were easier to use because their potholes could be filled in much easier—which was one of the tasks that the repair crews would set to next week. I was so not sorry not to be around for that menial labor of love. But, for whatever reason, the traders loved their cracked asphalt roads.

  I couldn’t see the convoy of cars yet as they kept rolling toward where I brought the truck to a halt, but the slight cloud of dust they inevitably raised was already visible. Rob jum
ped out of the car to snatch up his drone and pack it back up, making me groan when he wasted no time connecting his little leach to my battery bank.

  We were both standing ready next to the car—lightly armed but not pointing our weapons at anyone or anything in particular—when the lead car rumbled into view. I sent a prayer to the universe that our gear and the hats we were wearing—an old ball cap for me, a boonie hat for Rob—would shield our faces a bit, making us look like we were old enough to be out and about on our own. I knew I could easily pass for twenty—as a few unwanted, lascivious comments from some asshole hunters we’d crossed paths with last summer had proven—but my brother was still that tall, gangly, not-quite-grown-in awkward that screamed sixteen from a mile away. I normally didn’t mind being still several inches taller—able to talk down on him in every possible way—but right now it wouldn’t have hurt if he’d beefed up a little more over the winter.

  The train of cars came to a halt. I could see the two men in the front row of the lead car discussing among themselves briefly. It was the passenger who got out, an assault rifle in hand, but it looked more like a token gesture. I did my best to stand tall and sure, forcing my muscles to lock to keep from shaking with excitement and the hint of anxiety that had taken root in my stomach.