All Fall Down: The Chronicles of Altor, page 1
The Chronicles of Altor
The Precipice
All Fall Down
Ashes, Ashes
All Fall Down
Book Two in The Chronicles of Altor
by Shawn Inmon
Copyright 2023 © Shawn Inmon
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of brief quotations in a review. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to events or people, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One | The World as It Is
Chapter Two | New City
Chapter Three | New City Redux
Chapter Four | Longbaugh State Prison
Chapter Five | Longbaugh Redux
Chapter Six | Nowhere, Alaska
Chapter Seven | Dust to Dust
Chapter Eight | Nyx, Now Zari
Chapter Nine | Smell the Coffee
Chapter Ten | Inside Prison Walls
Chapter Eleven | Spring in New City
Chapter Twelve | The Fall of Covington
Chapter Thirteen | Seeds of Hope
Chapter Fourteen | The Luckiest Man in Alaska
Chapter Fifteen | Melinda & Sheba
Chapter Sixteen | Under the Dome
Chapter Seventeen | Vulnerabilities
Chapter Eighteen | Zero Pop
Chapter Nineteen | Water, Water, Nowhere
Chapter Twenty | Longbaugh Burglars
Chapter Twenty-One | The Battle in the Backyard
Chapter Twenty-Two | Calling All Agents
Chapter Twenty-Three | Flightseeing
Chapter Twenty-Four | When Harry Met Nyx
Chapter Twenty-Five | Meet the Militia
Chapter Twenty-Six | Search and Rescue
Chapter Twenty-Seven | The Ballad of Dickie Spahn
Chapter Twenty-Eight | Conversations with Janus: | Young Tom
Chapter Twenty-Nine | Away
Chapter Thirty | So Close, So Far
Chapter Thirty-One | Can’t Stand Still
Chapter Thirty-Two | Dust City at Last
Chapter Thirty-Three | Scouting
Chapter Thirty-Four | The Massacre at Dust City
Chapter Thirty-Five | Aftermath
Chapter Thirty-Six | Trouble in Paradise
Chapter Thirty-Seven | Aftermath Redux
Chapter Thirty-Eight | Conversations with Janus, Part Two: | Harper Wilkins
Chapter Thirty-Nine | Home Again, Home Again
Chapter Forty | Dinner at Artie’s
Chapter Forty-One | The Battle for New City
Chapter Forty-Two | Conversations with Janus, Part Three: | Alastair Struan
Chapter Forty-Three | Conversations with Janus, Part Four: | Quinn Starkweather
Epilogue
Coming Soon | Ashes, Ashes | Book Three in The Chronicles of Altor
Author’s Note
Chapter One
The World as It Is
When society crumbled, when the bombs fell, when the infrastructure failed, millions died.
The world burned. Chaos spread from sea to shining sea.
Humans are such egotistical beasts that we like to call such happenings the end of the world.
It was not the end of the world.
The end of humanity? Perhaps. That was yet to be determined.
So many had already died, and winter had not yet arrived.
Initially, it was often factors that were beyond your control that determined whether you would live another day or die in the first wave.
If you were in bad health or needed drugs like insulin or ongoing cancer treatments, there was almost no chance of surviving. As civilization met its demise, so did those who were sick.
The old and others who had less severe medical challenges were mostly in the same situation.
Up until the Rage Wars, or as some dubbed it, Eat the Rich, people who were skilled in coding or working with artificial intelligence were highly valued. Educated people automatically had a leg up. The Rage Wars knocked them to the bottom of the totem pole. Doctorate degrees had almost no value.
Instead, the ability to grow food, to repair things with limited materials, to hunt, were suddenly respected skills.
When you are starving and there is no power, being able to write an elegant line of code means nothing.
For some people, it was difficult to adjust to the idea that money, or gold and silver, which had represented money for so long, now held no value at all.
Most proprietors of grocery stores were smart enough to close up, board up, and carry their goods to a place they could defend to the death. At a minimum, this gave them an initial leg up in their own survival story.
Others, like Bentley Frick, reveled in the new opportunity the Rage Wars presented. He did not close up his grocery store in Elgin Wyoming. Instead, he doubled, then tripled, then quintupled his prices, and found that people were still willing to pay. Soon, he was selling bags of sugar and flour for fifty dollars a pound. A single cylinder of Morton’s salt, which had been less than two dollars in the before time, now sold for twenty-five dollars. He thought his customers were crazy to pay such outrageous prices. His customers realized that cash and precious metals held very little true value. When the power went out, Bentley stayed open and since the banks were closed, began to accept jewelry, gold, silver, and other fineries for mundane items like bags of seen and fertilizer.
Bentley had grown up poor and had always dreamed of being rich, but had not made it past being a solid middle class citizen. This, he thought, was his opportunity.
He was both right and wrong.
Within a day, his store was stripped of everything. His safe bulged with currency, his stock room was filled with paintings, fine vases, and high-end watches. His primary worry was that his haul was too heavy to move and that he would soon be robbed. He sat in a chair in between his safe and his back room, a double-barreled shotgun laid across his lap, waiting.
He was sure the power would soon be restored and he would be perhaps the wealthiest man in Elgin. He spent the time considering what kind of new car he would buy, how he would remodel his house, and what would the best companies be to invest in.
Less than a month later, he died of starvation, a uselessly wealthy man.
Where you lived determined how bad your chances were.
Large cities were impossible. The only way for people who lived in cities to survive the Rage Wars was to get out of them. No city has enough food to feed everyone in it for more than two weeks.
It’s not for nothing that Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs starts with food, water, warmth and safety. Take any one of those things away from a person for even a short time and a free person becomes a slave to finding that very thing.
Life in large cities after the Rage Wars was untenable. If, that is, you were lucky enough to have not been in one of the fifteen cities that had been hit with nuclear weapons. The inhabitants of those cities and immediate surrounding areas had drawn the short straws. Even if they were not killed in the initial blast, their immediate surroundings had become a radioactive wasteland.
People in those cities broke into two groups.
One group wanted to flee immediately. That was when the radioactivity was the highest and they would all inevitably die, either through radiation poisoning or by their own hand when faced with that awful death.
The other group wisely sheltered in the safest place they could and let the radioactivity die down for a few days or a week.
By then, their immediate world was unlivable—twisted wreckage, roads and freeways that were impassable, and no food. Most of them died trying to walk out of the blast zone. Anyone who made it through that was a survivor who might be a force to be reckoned with.
In the big cities that were unaffected by nuclear attack, people lived stacked one on top of another, jammed together in a way that was convenient in a world of Uber drivers and grocery deliveries. Impossible in a world where there were no groceries to be delivered.
Medium-sized cities, say Sacramento in California, Omaha in Nebraska, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, were ignored by the nuclear attacks but were still not good places to be. Cities of any size were filled with people who were non-productive. Non-productive, that is, after cell phone towers fell, the Internet went blank, and power stopped coming at the flip of a switch. Lawyers, salespeople, and insurance companies were of no use in this newly created world. Gas stations were useless without gas to sell. Restaurants shuttered immediately, with the owners hiding their remaining food away for themselves. Radio and television stations were shut down. A quick-witted morning air personality was of limited usefulness when the food ran out.
It was better to be in a small town that was a few hundred miles from the nearest major city. Fewer people lived in multi-family housing. More people had gardens, and many had been taught survival skills from a young age.
Those small towns immediately became attractive to those who fled from the places that were unsustainable.
Many of those who arrived from the more populated areas came as refugees, seeking a hand up, a warm and dry place to sleep, enough food to stay alive. Some of them—not all, no town could accept all the refugees—were welcomed.
Others came armed and seeking their refuge down the barrel of a gun.
Small farming towns became battlegrounds.
People banded together, finding strength in numbers. Those small bands joined as well. Small militias formed, both to attack attractive targets and, in the small towns, to defend them.
Towns of ten or twenty thousand people were generally not built to be defended because there had been nothing to defend against in more than a hundred years. They were built with good roads to access the larger cities and carry what they grew away, farms to grow produce, or just lots that looked down on lovely lakes or rolling hills.
One such town was Haperville, Oregon in the Willamette River Basin, a hundred miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. It was built on a tributary of the Willamette River and was among the most fertile farm land in the world. There were lakes and the hills were green year-round.
There was a small tourist industry of people who came to fish those lakes, but mostly Haperville had been filled with people who had lived there for generations.
Everyone who had ever been there tended to remember it, and fondly. That was good for repeat tourism, bad when there were roaming bands of armed people who had been displaced and were looking for a new place to settle.
Haperville had a population of 7,812 people. A month after the power went out, most of them were still alive—a claim that few towns could make. The people of Haperville came together, took care of the sick and the elderly. They lived more like communities had hundreds of years before, when the focus was on survival, not progress.
The first band of armed people made a bold attack on the town and were turned away easily. There had only been a few dozen in the attack. It was stupidly straightforward, hoping that spraying bullets around would pass for a strategy. It was not, but they managed to kill more Haperville residents in that initial attack than had died since the power went out.
The last four men in the attacking group ended up holed up in the drug store. A good place to find shelter if you had wounds that needed to be bandaged. A bad place when everyone in town knew you were there and there were only two exits from the building.
The four invaders shot out all the windows at the front and tossed a few grenades out onto the street. Again, hoping to distract with noise and flash and bang. It had been a losing strategy the first time they tried it, and it failed again this time.
They hoped the destruction at the front would distract everyone while they escaped out the back.
That was a miscalculation and the four of them died as soon as they emerged into the alley.
That was the first battle of Haperville, but not the last.
It did warn the town of what was likely to come and the people of Haperville put their own militia together, led by retired US Marine Jeb Parker. They quickly built barriers at all roads leading into the area and kept them manned around the clock. Next, they tore out trees and bushes that were outside the entrances to town so attackers would not be able to find cover as they approached. They poured barrel after barrel of used oil on the roads to make them more difficult to traverse.
Everyone in town who was old enough or strong enough to walk carried a weapon with them wherever they went.
They would not be caught off guard again.
Several weeks later, a much larger and better-organized group of raiders descended on the town.
The good citizens of Haperville had hung the rotting corpses of the previous attackers from trees at the edge of town to show they were not to be messed with. It had no effect on this new army. It was a conglomeration of almost a dozen smaller bands of men and women who had come together to look for a long-term home. They weren’t all trained, but they were all heavily armed and the people at the top had some training.
They all wore uniforms. The uniforms were not uniform—that is, there were many branches of the armed forces represented, and many of the uniforms did not fit. They looked like they had been hanging in closets for years, decades even. If you looked closely at the back of the line, you would even see some World War I doughboy uniforms that someone had picked up at a Salvation Army.
This newly formed militia, which called themselves the FSA—The First Survivalist Army—attacked more intelligently than the first group had. They realized that the people of Haperville could defend the town relatively well, but not the surrounding farmland. By nature, that was open territory.
The invaders were badly outnumbered in the town proper. With the locals manning all the good, defensible spots and the attackers having to advance over open areas, that was not a viable attack strategy.
Instead, they split up and focused on places where they could have the numeric advantage—individual farms or tiny offshoot neighborhoods.
Within a week, the FSA had managed to surround the town by winning one small battle at a time. Over that period, the invaders had killed several hundred people while suffering minimal losses. Once the army had these farms, they could afford to be patient. They controlled big farmhouses stocked with food.
It was the town itself that was now under siege.
Jeb Parker could see where this would end—with the invaders waiting them out and picking them off one by one. He decided to launch a counterattack while the citizens of town still had the advantage of more guns and men.
In the end, it went as many wars do. People died. Small pieces of land were won, then lost, then won again.
The counterattack lasted for three days and nights.
When it was over, every last one of the FSA was dead.
As were most of the defending army of Haperville, including Jeb Parker.
They had won the battle but that victory had ultimately made winning the war impossible. The battle had left the town so damaged, so depleted, that they stood wide open to the next group of attackers who happened along.
Haperville fell to an unnamed but well-organized militia ten days later. The remaining citizens did what they could to defend themselves, but they couldn’t do much.
The new army established themselves as the rulers of Haperville and put whatever original citizens were left to work. The town was ruled in just such a fashion for several months, until the next roving band came, and the raiders became defenders.
And so it went, endlessly, in Haperville and in hundreds of other small towns across America.
Invaders attacked and won, or were repelled. If they won, they became the defenders for a period of time until they were displaced. On and on and on.
Where was the best place to be once the Rage Wars had gone quiet and the Age of Survival had kicked in?
Not cities destroyed by nuclear devices.
Not cities at all. People almost immediately became rats fighting over the last scrap of food at the bottom of the garbage can.
And not towns, either. They suffered from being too attractive and were nearly impossible to defend.
So where, then? Where?
There were very few adequate answers to that question.
Altor, the domed city, was the safest place in the world.
Dust City, which had the wing of Altor over it as protection, was safer than most places, but was very difficult to get into.
And then there was New City.
Chapter Two
New City
New City was originally not a city at all. It was initially a housing development a few miles outside Covington, California, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The development was called Tucker’s Landing and was intended to cater to the well-off.
The Rage Wars were not kind to places that catered to the well-off and that extended even to areas as remote as Tucker’s Landing.
It was a beautiful development, where houses sat on fenced-off, two-acre landscaped lots. River rock frontages and stamped concrete circular drives made it look like almost any other Northern California development. Some of the people who lived there had one or two horses, but most people just used their small acreage as a privacy buffer against the world. That was aided by the fact that the development was surrounded on three sides by a box canyon.
The people of Tucker’s Landing were wealthy, though not the kind of people that made the news for being so. They were millionaires a few times over but were not captains of industry. The houses in Tucker’s Landing were all large but not immense. The average home in the neighborhood was 4,200 square feet. There were one hundred and fifty-six homes that fit into the natural refuge that had once been known as Alduras Canyon.
