Tomorrow's Wrath (The Order of Chaos Series Book 2), page 1
Tomorrow’s Wrath
by J.M. Clark
Copyright © 2018 J.M. Clark
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Hampton Lamoureux
Edited by https://espressoeditor.com/
Formatted by FastFormatting@gmail.com
Fraternity Rose Publishing
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
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Website: http://www.writtenbyjmclark.com
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Contents
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
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
About the Author
Also by J.M. Clark
Chapter One
Prelude
There were no kids in the neighborhood anymore. Only him. His mother and father said that when they were kids themselves, tons of children filled the streets. He walked alone. They rode bikes together, played jump rope and a game called tag in groups. He wanted very much to be a part of all those activities. Someone his age to talk to would be nice; it all sounded like so much fun.
Branden could not even fathom the idea of other children. At thirteen years old, the only people he’d ever seen in his life were his parents. That was it—no other human beings. They moved around the neighborhood from home to home, ducking the big white vans whenever they drove into the subdivision he and his family lived in. Alone.
Sometimes he wondered if his parents were being truthful about the people in the vans. Were they really so bad? Would it really be so bad if they knew his family was there? Maybe they wanted to help?
Every few months the vans would come to do something called a sweep. Branden’s father, Morris, said a sweep was when they drove the streets of the neighborhood checking to make sure no one was around. To make sure everyone was still...dead. The van quietly moved up and down the roads, the big tires flattening the grass growing through the cracks in the gravel.
In some spots it was hard to tell where the curb and grass began because of all the overgrowth. His parents told him that at one time—before the sickness, people would cut the grass, clip the bushes, make things look really nice. To Branden it looked fine enough, but he had nothing to compare it to, other than pictures. Pictures did nature no favors though.
When the sweeps happened, he and his family would go into the attic of whichever house they were staying in that month and peer out the windows, making sure the van, or sometimes vans, were long gone before coming back out. In his entire life, Branden had never seen the drivers stop the vehicles and get out. They just drove through. Nothing to worry about, his father always said.
“They have a route to take once a month, and this neighborhood is just one part of the route. They wouldn’t waste their time getting out of the vans.” He was right, they never did. So over time they lost their boogeyman effect on Branden. They became a monthly inconvenience, nothing more.
Branden was playing in the backyard of a house around the corner from the house his family was staying in that month. When he had left earlier in the day, his mother, Karry, was getting lunch together, and his father was in the study of the house, sharpening knives and making traps. They caught their food that way. His father was really good with a bow, but his mother was better.
Dad never wanted to admit it, but they all knew that when food got low and all the chips were down, Mom would be the one bringing home the bacon, so to speak. His father always brought up the “bringing home the bacon” joke. Branden never quite understood it, but his parents laughed so hard whenever it came up.
He’d been shooting jump shots at the basketball hoop for an hour. The sun was high in the sky and sweat was pouring down his head, but he liked it. It meant he was working hard. His father always said, “If you aren’t sweating, you aren’t working hard.”
He didn’t mind being alone or doing things alone, because it was all he knew. Most of the time, playing was a solo act. Sometimes his parents would join him, but for the most part he was left to it. Independence was the way of the new world, and it was best to become accustomed to the current reality he found himself living in.
His father had a small brown recorder for when the vans came. He would blow on the musical instrument, and the sound served as a signal to come running home and hide in the designated spot of the house. For the most part, Branden happened to be with his parents when the van came. But for the few times he was on his own when a sweep took place, the plan had worked out just fine.
Nothing to worry about. Come home, hide, be quiet, and when the van was done with its business, he could go back to whatever he was doing. The sound of the recorder was easy to hear even if he was a few houses away; there were no other sounds in the world, minus birds and small animals, so the high-pitched warning could be heard quite loudly.
Branden stood at the free-throw line in the backyard of a home that no longer had a family. The previous residents no longer had any use for the makeshift court, or the home for that matter. Their bodies had been found in the house and placed in the cellar of another home.
All the bodies that had been left behind were in that cellar. His mother saw to the burial of any children from every house they’d lived in. She was great like that. Branden hadn’t seen many bodies, burials, or cellar visits, as they’d been in the same area for so long, but he could remember a time or two.
He remembered.
Bend your knees, flick your wrist for rotation, and hold your hand in the air for the follow-through. His father had played varsity basketball in school, and he taught Branden everything he knew of the game. None of the lights in the houses worked any longer because electricity was cut everywhere, so they used candles to light the homes at night, and they talked a lot about the past. There wasn’t much else to do besides reading (and they all read a lot), so Branden knew all there was to know about the world before everything changed—the way things were in his parents’ youth.
Hearing the stories made him happy he didn’t have to live through it; you can’t miss what you never had. Friends that never were, vacations only existing in a child’s imagination, could not be truly missed, for they were never experienced. They would remain future possibilities if things were to ever get back to where they once were. Nothing in his short life made him think this would ever be the case though.
Swish. The shot went through the net, silky smooth. That was forty-one shots in a row he’d made from the free-throw line. His best was eighty-seven. Most days he would come back here and shoot a bunch. It helped pass the time. If he couldn’t be found shooting at the rim, he would play in the creek not far from the backyard of the house and try to catch frogs, crawdads, and other small animals they could eat. Doing his part.
As he strolled over to retrieve the ball, Branden remembered his mother had told him to come home after a while to eat lunch. He liked to stop on a winning streak so that when he came back, he would already be in the positive. Wiping sweat from his brow and sweeping the dark brown locks of hair from his eyes, the young man turned to leave. He opened the metal gate and closed it behind himself, abandoning the basketball sitting still on the concrete beneath the rim.
He came running from the side of the neighbor’s yard and jumped over the curb, cutting through the yard and high-stepping over the grass and weeds now occupying what was once the best-looking lawn on the street so many years ago. Branden burst into the door of his home, meeting the smell of some kind of meat. The scent invaded his nose the moment he walked in the door. When they were able to have meat with dinner, that was a good supper.
“Mother, I’m home,” he yelled as he kicked off his gym shoes and went into the bathroom near the front door to wash his hands. He already knew his father would make sure he did just that the moment he saw him, so he planned to earn some responsibility points by anticipating the request.
The handwashing was always a half-assed job anyway. There was food begging to be eaten, and he wanted to get back out to the ball court to try beating his record. He finished quickly washing up in the bin of water they collected from the creek daily for just that purpose, then wiped them dry on a towel. With that out of the way, he rushed from the bathroom and headed to the kitchen. They would soon be eating together at the table and talking about different things; sometimes his mother would give an impromptu math or science lesson. She was a teacher before it all happened, so she was happy doing just that still to this day. Even if most of what she taught him was no longer useful, old habits died hard.
Branden went jogging into the kitchen, nearly sliding on the linoleum in his socks. “Let’s ea—” he began to say, but stopped mid-sentence, the words climbing back into his mouth, retreating down his throat and back into the voice box from which they came. He was frozen in disbelief at what he was seeing. He bit back a scream. From inside the sound of a thousand souls cried out in the very depths of his heart—but no sound left his lips.
What he saw didn’t look real to him; his brain couldn’t process the image. He looked away and down to his feet, searching to give his eyes a better image to report to his brain.
The once white socks were now soaked in red…in blood. He had slid into blood. How could something so lighthearted like sliding through the kitchen in socks, filled with excitement to have supper with your family, end up morphing into something so…disturbing? Branden thought about walking back outside and coming into the house differently. What he was seeing could not be real. At the same time, it was the most realistic moment in the whole universe.
His eyes followed the blood on the ground to his mother’s body. Her neck was cut open, and blood still rolled from the deep wound across her throat, creating a small red lake settling around her shoulder, which then came to be a small river that streamed past her feet. His blood ran cold at the realization of what was before him. Branden said nothing, he couldn’t speak. Finally, his eyes noticed something that they hadn’t picked up on with the shock of finding his mother…the way she was.
There were two men standing next to her body, staring at him. They did not make a move toward him; they just watched. They seemed almost as surprised as he was.
Branden found the courage, or maybe it was just shock and fear to call out to his other parent. Although something told him it would be for naught. “Father! Father! Where are you!” He had screamed loudly, though the scream was void of hope or feeling, never looking away from the men in black uniforms standing next to his mother’s dead body. He backed up into the living room area, an involuntary reaction to the situation, Branden was not aware of his body moving at all, his legs did all the work on their own.
He felt like he was watching it all happen, perched safely on the ceiling like a fly. He saw his body backing up, and he wanted to warn himself about what was slowly walking up behind him, but he found out too late…
A hand from behind grabbed the collar of his shirt. Branden nonchalantly turned to look at the hand. Before seeing the man’s face, he knew it didn’t belong to his father. The voice was not familiar, and the hand on his collar had blood on it. Most likely the blood of his father…
He was the only person alive in his family? The thought would be unnerving for anyone, let alone a child.
Of the three people left in a neighborhood in Mt. Healthy, a small suburb of Cincinnati, there was now only one. “You are coming with us, son,” the man holding his shirt said. “As you can see, this place is not safe for you. Everyone else here is dead.”
“Bring the van around, and let’s get to the Palace.” The voice was calm and steady, bored even. It did not match the scene in the kitchen or the fate he knew his father had met in the study. The knives he’d been so proudly sharpening didn’t help in the end, it seemed. All the hand-to-hand combat practice was pointless in the end, he thought, still staring at the bloody hand gripping his shirt.
Unable to speak again, Branden simply walked out of the house with them and waited on the sidewalk while someone pulled the van up. He did not weep, he did not curse the men who killed the only people he’d ever known. As the vehicle pulled up, he wondered how many shots he would have made if none of this had happened and he’d been able to go back to his make-streak after dinner.
Chapter Two
Carla
She’d left camp twenty minutes prior, walking the same hidden path she’d been sneaking off to for the last year. Nothing sinister in mind; it was simply a place to get quiet time, to reflect on things that were important to her outside of the group. That was important. How could she be of help to the many if she didn’t take the time to care for herself? She didn’t tell them because she didn’t want them to worry about her.
Carla made her way along the river’s edge, stepping over big rocks and vaulting over fallen trees, being sure not to make too much noise. There were those in her group who watched out for…things like this. Believed defectors or even someone else from a would-be competing group. She knew where they were all stationed though, so there wasn’t much worry on her part. But it was still good to keep a low profile.
After another five minutes of traversing the creek area, she made her way to a small cave located in the side of a small rock structure. She wouldn’t call it a mountain because it was not quite that, but it was big enough. The entrance to the cave was covered with shrubbery and sizeable tree limbs. She didn’t want small animals getting inside and walking off with the few things stored there that she held dear to her heart.
Carla slowly removed the obstructions from the entrance of her secret hideaway. The cave was dark, as was common for such places; they were not meant for humans. Caves were the homes of nocturnal animals that were gifted special optics for such a setting. She was not bestowed those same gifts, but the good lord did see fit to give her the gift of common sense. She had brought candles.
Carla struck a match from the box she stole from the common room of her group, lighting the candles and placing them in strategic spots of the dark, dank cave so that she could see all things. She wanted to make sure she was safe and that no predators had found a way inside, waiting to attack. Carla had a hunting knife and a pistol fitted with a silencer. If a shootout with a badger took place, she wanted to remain incognito of course.
All was safe and secure in the hideout, so Carla relaxed, removed her pea-green Army Reserve jacket, and laid it on the floor next to a milk crate where she usually sat. She had not been a part of the reserves before the sickness came. Carla was a Sunday school teacher at St. Andrews First Church of Louisville in Kentucky. Carla’s husband, Mark, had owned a successful construction company, which left her time to do what was important to her full time. Teaching the Lord’s word to kids is what she enjoyed, so, that’s what she had done for years.
When the sickness came to claim the lives of everyone, she was in church with her children and about seventy-five other members. Those that were still strong enough to drive to the Lord’s house the day the sickness came were lucky enough to die within those walls. She was not so lucky though.
Carla walked to the southern right corner of the cave and lifted a big stone with two hands just a few inches off the ground. She then set it just a foot away from where it was. Carla smiled. The thin brown wallet was still there; of course it was still there. Who the hell would be looking to lift a big-ass rock in a cave, in a world that had moved on long ago? It was a miracle she was still going through the motions of survival. She knew she was lucky to have found the Eagle group though. Prior to that she was trying to decide when she would slit her own throat.
