Enclave: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (Nation Down Book 1), page 1
ENCLAVE
©2025 DEVON C. FORD
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Nation Down
Enclave
Mission
Isolation
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CONTENTS
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
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Thank you for reading Enclave
PROLOGUE
Miles City, Montana
Emilia Isherwood preferred to be called Millie by her friends.
Two of those friends, her roommates, were gone now. A panicked crowd had swept one away, and the other now hissed and snarled as she beat bloody fists at the closet door Millie tried desperately to keep shut with her feet.
With her back to the drywall and her legs straining at the effort it took to keep that door from bursting inwards, Millie sobbed from the pain—emotional and physical—she had endured for longer than she could comprehend.
She never wore a watch, being of the generation who might as well have been born with a smartphone in one hand. Since that phone had been dropped along the way, she had no idea how long she’d been there. All she knew was that night had turned to day and the light outside seen through the cracks in the door forced open with each animalistic impact had begun to dim once more.
“Please…” Millie sobbed, barely summoning the energy to form a coherent sound. “Please, Sarah, just go awaaaay!”
She wailed the final word, and to her shock, the desperate, relentless attempts to force the door inward stopped.
She held her breath, listening intently, unable to trust herself not to have imagined the change. She was beyond exhausted. She had never been so frightened nor so tired at any point in her life, and more than once during the time she’d been trapped, her mind had wandered off into hallucinations born of terror and utter fatigue.
“Sarah…?” she said, praying that whatever had overcome her friend had passed.
She imagined herself opening the door to see the sweet girl she’d known since high school sitting there, recovering from whatever illness had caused her to be so persistently violent ever since a crazed man had bitten her shoulder hard enough to draw blood through her shirt during the panic of the previous day.
“Sarah?” she tried again, making the mistake of releasing the pressure from the door with her feet.
The door crashed violently inward, slammed full force by ninety-five pounds of twenty-two-year-old Sarah Crowther, who must have hit it at a dead run from the other side of the apartment.
Millie’s left ankle cracked with the sound of a gunshot, but the scream she let out after a second of shocked silence was louder still. That shriek of unfathomable agony carried enough volume and intensity to break glass, and any person in close proximity to such a piercing sound would have covered their ears out of self-preservation.
But Sarah was no longer just any person.
She ceased to be a person at all when the pathogen had spread through her body, folding the cellular protein molecules abnormally with unanticipated, horrific effects.
The infected girl took full advantage of the gap in the door, forcing her body through so violently that she scraped the skin off her right cheek deep enough to expose bright white bone before the rest of her small body forced the door wider, and she fell on Millie’s screaming body.
The scream of pain from her broken ankle became louder still, finding an extra octave and yet more decibels as Sarah’s teeth found purchase on the soft flesh of Millie’s neck. She bit hard, crunching, ripping, gnawing, tearing flesh until hot blood flowed like a river.
Still, Millie screamed, but her screams became quieter with each breath. Each expulsion of air carrying her horror weakened until she went silent, only issuing a few sporadic gasps.
Millie lay still, no longer feeling the pain of her ruined ankle that made her foot flop around with every jerking heave her body gave in the final moments of her short life.
Sarah stopped chewing, suddenly losing interest in the fresh meat that had kept her obsessively occupied for nearly eighteen hours. Standing as if dazed, Sarah wandered off, bumping into furniture as she wandered their apartment. She bounced off the glass door to the first-floor balcony until her body found the gap that permitted her to go outside, where the railings temporarily held her captive.
Gunfire. Screams. A wailing siren. The deep honk of a truck horn. Smashing glass and the telltale crackle of a fire gaining purchase. These were the sounds of the world now, afflicted as it was by the plague sweeping diagonally down from the northeast and diagonally up from the southwest. That plague flowed like floodwater, finding every patch of low ground, every easy run-off, seeking each and every path of least resistance to spread.
People—those still living and thinking—aided that spread. They took to their cars, to planes, and any and all other forms of transport, echoing the American classic eighties comedy minus the comedy. Technology and dishonesty aided the spread of the pathogen, as those desperate people with the means and the will to try and get far away from where they were utterly failed to comprehend their part in the initial downfall of the world they knew.
A little under half an hour later, Millie joined Sarah on the balcony. Her once white blouse was sheeted red down one side, and the frilly collar—something she recently thought was pretty—was torn by the violence of Sarah’s attack.
The two girls stood on either side of the glass partition. Still, they paid each other little attention, merely reacted with uncomprehending interest as the other made noises by impacting things, until a scream from the street below snapped both of their heads in that direction.
A man ran, stumbling, pleading as he tried to escape, as if the group of relentless chasers could ever be reasoned with. The former Sarah and Millie, or at least their unconscious bodies, followed that procession below as Millie squeezed through the same gap in the door to stand beside her erstwhile roommate on the balcony.
They watched with growing agitation as the man below, wearing tan slacks with a darker color around the groin, made his pathetic way past them. At his nearest point, they both became excited, and even with one working foot and one leg snapped clean in half at the ankle, Millie moved with a speed untethered by self-imposed limitations or any fear or consequence. She was unrestricted by the learned knowledge that she shouldn’t throw herself from a first-floor balcony, which she did with zero regard for the damage she might sustain by such an act.
As luck would have it—luck for the former Millie and not the man who had so recently pissed in his unfortunately colored pants—she landed atop heaped trash bags, which prevented her skull from impacting the sidewalk below.
She reached out for his legs on instinct as he passed, driven by the same desperate need to find and attack any living person not afflicted as she was, tripping him so it was his head that impacted the sidewalk as hers should have.
Stunned and dazed by the crack he took on the skull, it was his turn to scream as Millie’s teeth found his exposed flesh and tore through his skin to paint the sidewalk red with blood.
1
Southwest North Dakota
Nine Months Later
“Well… Fuck. Me. Gently. Take a look at this sorry sight.”
Gerry, or Gerard to his mother, stirred himself in the oppressive heat. With a groan, he rolled over, huffing his annoyance at being so disturbed even when it was literally his job to spot for his shooter, who had alerted him to something.
That was how they worked, taking turns to watch while the other closed his eyes and took full advantage of the weak shade provided by the tarpaulins and camo netting hung over their heads atop the tower of rough timber.
“Alrighty… where’m I lookin’, Rob?” Gerry asked groggily.
“Marker twelve. Go right.”
The voice was distorted because the speaker had one eye screwed shut to the scope, and the bunched cheek made him speak out one side of his mouth like some grizzled old cowpoke. He’d been taught not to do that, to keep both eyes open and focus through the scope, but a rogue shaft of sunlight annoyingly chose that particular part of the day to mark him out like he held a quest in a video game.
Gerry grunted and huffed a little more as he moved the powerful and expensive range-finding binoculars to the correct spot, automatically twisting to point them toward marker twelve. That was the entire purpose of using numbered markers: to cut down on the time it took to put the crosshairs on a target. That and to coordinate heavier support in the form of indirect fire from back in the timber city behind them.
“Huh! Don’t see that every day!” Gerry exclaimed.
They watched in silence for a few seconds before the chuckles started, with Gerry taking the part of Beavis while his shooter matched the energy by summoning his best Butthead.
“Ha! Haha!”
“Uhhuhuhuhuh.”
“Ha! Hahaha!”
“Uhuuhuhuh.”
That went on for a few seconds, both men upping their impression game until Gerry broke character and laughed for real. He brought himself back under control with another long huff and went back to business.
“Okay… range five-twenty-five… wind—”
“There is no damn wind, Gerry. Wish to God there was,” came the gentle interruption.
Rob’s annoyance wasn’t at the younger man but at the heat and the lack of escape from it. He didn’t need to apologize for interrupting. The two men had spent the latter part of the previous winter lying flat, looking out over the empty landscape, and through to summer when the heat haze made their job harder. They’d reached the level of companionship where silences were comfortable.
“True that, my man. Truuuue that. Alright, fire when ready.”
Rob watched the shambling figure approach lopsidedly through the powerful optic; the image blurred as the heat mirage shimmered straight up from the feet.
Foot, he thought. Not feet.
Because the approaching woman was walking in a long, left-handed loop.
“Fuckin’ thing lost a foot!” Gerry said with amusement, making Rob wonder when such vile mutilations became amusing to them.
“Looks that way,” Rob answered softly, his eye still screwed shut for focus in the sunlight.
“Uhhh… fire when ready, dude.”
“Yeah, I heard ya,” Rob said again, speaking almost to himself.
A headshot at five hundred yards on a moving target was a magic trick, but it was a trick he could pull off with the military rifle they gave him when they learned—and more importantly, he proved—he could shoot. That gift came at a price, however, and that price was being paid by every bead of sweat that rolled between his ass cheeks in the North Dakota heat.
“You want I should give it a try?” Gerry asked with as much casual disinterest as he could muster, but Rob knew the guy was desperate to take a long shot.
“Nah, I got it. Just wanna make sure is all. Hold your horses.”
Gerry held said horses along with his tongue as both men lay on their bellies and watched the pathetic progress of their blissfully unaware target.
Perhaps blissful was accurate, but Rob wondered, not for the first time, if there wasn’t something inside the distant woman’s mind that sought out living people for something other than meat.
A minute passed, during which time Rob reminded Gerry that he was waiting to take the shot the first time he nagged, and the second, he pointedly asked if Gerry wanted to walk half a mile out to deal with the corpse. Gerry stayed quiet after that.
During that time, the woman had come into view more clearly, proving that she had indeed lost her left foot somewhere along the way, just as she’d lost most of her clothing as one torn pant leg flapped with every halting step as the other clung to the leg without a foot.
The blouse, once white but now something between a pale brown and a dirty pink, complete with a lacy collar that hung in grimy tatters, flapped open at the torn buttons to expose a small, gray breast.
“Whoa-ho-hoo, we err, we got a little wind left to right,” Gerry chuckled.
“Yeah, I see that,” Rob murmured as he settled his body flatter and decided the time had come.
“Well… hop along, Zebede… hey, that fits, right? Zebede? Zombiedee? Yeah?”
“Uh-huh,” Rob answered absently, feeling the disappointment leak off Gerry for his crappy joke being ignored.
Rob flicked off the safety and applied pressure to the trigger, pursing his lips to blow the air out of his lungs.
Holding his breath right after starting to breathe, he held the crosshairs in the right place.
The last ounce of pressure came and went without hesitation.
The noise of the suppressed report still rang in his ears as he watched the silent puppet show in the hazy distance where the woman’s head simply ceased to be.
The image looked like a balloon popping, like some macabre gender reveal party where the kid was going to be whatever dark red chunks of gore indicated, and the lack of sound made everything so much easier for him to deal with.
Not like killing them up close, with the sounds and smells overwhelming his senses.
“Score! Right in the fuckin’ noggin’,” Gerry crowed like some twisted sports commentator.
Rob closed his eyes and relaxed, fighting the urge to tell Gerry to shut the fuck up as he searched with his hand for the spent casing. The guy always got over-excited at the thought of killing, and Rob tried to be kind to him about it because the last year of his life had been rough.
Rob’s had been no picnic either, but he tried not to judge. It caused him less stress to be that way, opting to be the pebble on the riverbed of life and not the salmon swimming against the current or some other prophetic bullshit he’d heard one time.
“Yeah,” Rob said quietly, carefully pocketing the spent brass. “Call it in.”
With his eye back to the scope, Rob moved the rifle left to right to scan their sector—marker one to marker fifteen—facing east over the hundred miles of open ground in case the poor woman wasn’t alone as Gerry fumbled for the ancient radio set.
He’d bet good money that she was alone if money still mattered. It made no sense that Loopy-Lou, the one-foot-wonder, would be the advance recon faction, not unless the main force had crossed a minefield with less luck, and he knew the nearest minefields were north of their enclave and not on the southeastern side where they were stationed that day.
“Base, this is station one, over?” Gerry transmitted over their radio.
“One, go for Base.”
The response was bored, as if the heat back there was much worse than what they suffered under the beating sun.
“Base, station one. Lone Tango at marker twelve… situation’s been resolved with one KIA. Over,” Gerry said, making it sound like he’d done it himself with the power of his mind, and it was no biggie.
