Roberts Red Star Rising

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5439-1451-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 404 Seiten

In Red Star Rising, the riveting sequel to Truths Blood, America has fallen. The Chinese military occupies the former United States and two men struggle to survive rogue gangs, the army, and even the occasional cannibal. Dustin Lang is on his way home after trying to free his brother from a Chinese prison. Meanwhile, Eli West searches for his sister in a ravaged Willamette Valley. In this brutal and unpredictable world, who will survive?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roberts, Tyler

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO “Meadows of green turned to fields of destruction, under the baptism of fire.” Monk Our trip home across the parched Central Oregon high desert, bathed in the smell of sun-drenched sagebrush, was a long and disheartening ride. The desolate landscape and overcast skies brought a gloom of their own to our weary and downtrodden souls. Angry black clouds of a gathering storm filled my psyche and pelted me with hailstones of guilt, anger, and regret. Two days after the loss of my father and the rescue of my brother, the adrenalin had finally worn off, and I was left exhausted, weak, and fearful. Change has never come easy for me, and mentally, I was still recovering from escaping Seattle to my parents’ home. The loss of my family and the collapse of our nation buried me under its rubble. My father, with whom I had often disagreed, was gone and unwillingly, it has fallen to me to continue this story. Why I’ve survived, I cannot say, and I can’t help wondering why others more deserving have not endured. I suppose there are many asking the same question, and of course, there are no answers but still, here I remain. I never realized how much of a shield my father had been. His sixty-plus years gave him context for the wisdom he’d attempted to share—context I now know I lacked. When he warned me of our nation’s turn toward fascism and the growing power of the government, I believed he was out of touch. He’d pointed toward the laws being passed that protected giant corporations instead of innocent citizens, and when he used Mussolini’s own definition of fascism—“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”—to demonstrate the reality of what was taking place, I told him he was overreacting. And again, when our nation became a full-fledged police state with drones flying overhead, armed with facial recognition technology and every email and phone conversation monitored, I’d sided with the government, agreeing it was for our own protection. To this, he had replied with another quote, this time from William Pitt, House of Commons, given in 1783—“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” How my father knew these things, I’ll never know. Sadly, I must admit there are few in my own generation who understand these things. My father, who now lies cold in his grave, a grave I will surely never see, is free of all this. Free of the fears that bent his shoulders, gnawed at his joy, and beat his soul with the unrelenting hammer blows of propaganda. Now harnessed to the heavy mantle of duty and responsibility he once carried, I miss his insights. In fact, I’ve never felt so alone or emptied of all that was in me. Broken as we were, there was little banter amongst us when we began our trek home, and our fears took form in the roiling gray clouds overhead. Why had I paid so little attention to my father’s warnings? When he’d shared with me the things close to his heart, the experiences that should have drawn us closer, I overreacted and pushed back. Only now do I understand he’d attempted to share much more than warnings about our nation. It was his own way of sharing a part of himself so I could know him better. Now, there’s no one to turn to, and quite suddenly, I’ve come to know the full weight of the burden he carried. It has ridden me hard and rough these long, desperate days spent crossing the frigid void of the high desert. In a time and place where the only interruption might be the snorting of our horses, my mind has wrestled endlessly with all of this. In the end, my father, Cliffson, had accomplished what he’d set out to do and successfully rescued my brother Zach. He paid the ultimate price to do it, but in my heart, I knew he was OK with that. I was not, and from the seat of my saddle, in the middle of these empty high desert plains, my heart longed for home. It was in the very moment of yearning for home when a new realization descended upon me. Home? What I had subconsciously been envisioning as home would now be nothing more than cold memories and drafty recollections. The graves of my mother and the Jeffersons would stare back at me each morning when I would rise to greet the light of each new day. Suddenly, going home no longer felt like going home. Of course, Kate was by my side each and every moment, as faithful and trustworthy as ever, yet I still felt lost. The world I was familiar with was gone. Dad and Monk had been preaching to me about it for some time, but I clung to a hope that things would return to what I viewed as normal. All their talk of self-reliance and prudence seemed so backward and old-fashioned. Like we were supposed to live the way the settlers did when they settled the West. Weren’t the settlers immoral brutes who destroyed cultures and subdued other people along the way? Yada, yada, yada, I’d heard all the history behind it, but what was so great about the settlers to be held up as an example when modern society had brought about such a fresh new world. The government collective was providing nearly everything we needed, so what was all this self-sufficiency stuff about? It’d all seemed so…I don’t know…so pre-historic. Ultimately, I found it nearly impossible to comprehend that my world could end, so I’d blown off most of what they were trying to teach me. Now the blood of those truths lay crimson and accusing all across the land. Without the shelter of my parents, Monk, and the creature comforts of the world I’d known, it all came into laser focus with dizzying speed. Liberty…what is liberty, and why do men always fight over it? What is it about mankind’s nature to always want to control other men? What is it about mankind that we are not happy unless pursuing power, success, and recognition, and quite often at the exclusion or even violent elimination of those who don’t agree with us? I’d had a good life, and I wanted it back. These other battles men fought held no interest for me. Was it worth all this fighting and killing? Why couldn’t people leave each other alone? The thoughts rolled through my head like an out of control locomotive and pursued me tirelessly across the desert. Subconsciously, I began taking shelter in a song I’d learned after hearing it on one of my father’s CDs. The haunting, melodic rhythm fit the pace of my horse, and time and again, I caught myself softly singing the words to “My World Is Gone” by Otis Taylor. The creaking leather of my tack worked as backing vocals, and though the sad song called out to a loneliness deep inside, it also provided a strange comfort. To describe my brother Zach would be to depict a black hole, utterly and wholly despondent, yet at the same time guarded by a razor sharp edge of hate. His first words to me after being rescued were “Imagine seeing you here. Can’t imagine how they pulled you away from that suffocating nanny state in Seattle.” We’d had our differences as brothers commonly do, but this was completely foreign to me. I’d always known him to be a big-hearted, caring individual. Throughout our trip across the desert, he barely said a word, but the pain behind his eyes was diamond-tipped and could permanently etch your soul if caught in his stare. His deep-black beard and long, matted hair formed a cave he chose to hide in. Only the sight of his piercing, blue eyes could be seen peering from within this fortress, and I saw odium there so vile, it frightened me. He had suffered many things during his time in the prison camps, and it was robbing him of his humanity. I longed to know the details of his imprisonment, and I deeply desired to find some form of solace by which he could be restored, but reality for Zach was the knowledge of losing both parents the moment he regained his freedom. It haunted him with the accusation that it was his own fault they were gone, and no amount of explaining could achieve any gain. Fact was he was quite combative in these matters, going so far as to accuse me of being part of the problem that contributed to our nation’s downfall. No matter how I tried, I could not reach him, and he seemed to withdraw deeper into the dark hole of his hooded sweatshirt with each passing day. Then one night, five or six days into our trek home, it began to snow. Lightly at first, but before long, the soft white of mammoth flakes accompanying the early winter storm had covered our gear and the grove of junipers in which we were encamped. I threw more wood on our little campfire, and we all snuggled closer. The resounding hush accompanying the snow was an odd relief, and just as I began to relax in its embrace, a bizarre reverberation knifed through the gentle sound of descending snow to disturb my peace. Was someone in the throes of death? No, it was much too rhythmic. I asked the others if they too heard it, and each of them nodded, unwilling to speak and break the faint connection we held. The light breeze must have shifted slightly then, because soon we could all hear the beating of a drum and the cadenced chant of an Indian at song. But how could it be? Who in their right mind was sitting out here in the middle of nowhere, singing a song in the middle of a snowstorm? The feeble flashlight we’d taken from Benson’s cave seemed to find new life in the white wall of falling snow, and soon we were making our way in the...