Apache Dawn: Book I of the Wildfire Saga Read online

  Contents

  Title Page/Copyright

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  Dedication

  Half title

  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

  The saga continues...

  Please Review

  Author Contact Info

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  Half title

  MARCUS RICHARDSON

  © 2014 Marcus Richardson.

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Printing, August 27, 2014.

  2nd Printing, 11 May 2015.

  3rd Printing, 21 April 2016.

  This is a work of fiction.

  The people and events in this book have been written

  for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to living

  and/or deceased people is purely coincidental and not intentional.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording, or by any information

  storage and retrieval system without prior written consent by the author.

  Want to get an e-mail when my next book is released

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  [Books by Marcus Richardson]

  THE FUTURE HISTORY OF AMERICA

  Book I: Alea Jacta Est

  Book II: Sic Semper Tyrannis

  Book III: Dux Bellorum

  THE WILDFIRE SAGA

  Book I: Apache Dawn

  Book II: The Shift

  Book III: Firestorm

  Other books in the WILDFIRE series:

  False Prey (Novella)

  The Wildfire Bundle (Books I-III)

  For Dad.

  This book could not have been written

  without your support and encouragement.

  CHAPTER 1

  Haslet, Texas.

  The not too distant future…

  CHAD HUNTLEY SCRAPED THE last handful of cold dirt onto the fresh grave. He brushed aside a few bits of snow which had already tried to cover the rude wooden tombstone he had helped his neighbor carve that morning. The ground had been frozen for three weeks. It’s what always happened in winter. Things died. The ground grew hard and inconsolable, as if feeling the same pain of love lost, lives destroyed, sacrifices wasted.

  He wasn’t afraid of crying. He wished to God he could cry. Crying, it seemed to him, was the appropriate thing to do when your entire family withers and dies in front of you. He just had no tears. Patting down the last bit of dry, cold earth, he paused, his hand on the crude mound that covered Mom. He watched absently as fresh snow landed on his hand and didn’t immediately melt. He thought it was odd that he couldn’t feel the cold anymore.

  He felt nothing.

  Mom didn’t feel anything anymore, either. The coughing fits, the congestion, the fever, the pain. It was all over. She had lasted longer than most, he guessed. Certainly longer than his father and sisters. That was Mom, though. The toughest woman he ever knew. He smiled and wished again that he could cry.

  Chad grunted and stood up. He brushed the snow and dirt from his favorite jeans. His best boots were already under the new snow. Tilting back Dad’s well-worn Stetson, he looked up into the gray nothingness above. The snow swirled and fell around him in silence. It was a wet snow. Some of it hit his face. If he couldn’t cry, maybe the sky would.

  “It’s time we got inside. Come on, son,” mumbled his neighbor, Doug Miller. The grandfatherly man struggled to hold in a cough. Chad knew his neighbor’s time would be up soon.

  “I know what you’re thinking, son. But, I’ll be damned if the young man who helped me care for Emma is gonna freeze today. I owe your folks that much.”

  “Miss Emma wouldn’t want you to turn into an icicle, either.”

  The old man chuckled ruefully and Chad raised his eyes up from the grave with no expression on his face. He looked left and right at the other mounds, where his dad and sisters were already at rest in the cold ground. He looked at the sick old man that stood before him, trying not to shiver.

  Mr. Miller was wrapped in two muddy blankets and had snow on his shoulders. A thick wool cap perched on top of his head provided only a little protection to the wispy silver hair that poked out in all directions. Old Man Miller stamped his boots a little in the snow to keep his feet warm. He suppressed another cough but his shoulders shook with the effort. He glared at Chad under a bushy white eyebrow with a rheumy, red rimmed eye.

  “I ain’t sick, so stop worrying—but I am gettin’ cold.”

  Chad sighed. The stubborn old man would deny he was sick until the day he died, Chad figured. Everyone was dying around him. Had been now for nearly a month, ever since the Blue Flu had arrived in town.

  “Do you think my family is with Miss Emma?”

  Mr. Miller stopped coughing with a start and stared incredulously at the younger man. “Son, I know you’re deep in a pit of grief right now, but I’m mighty hard-pressed not to slug you and teach you some manners. Emma…” he turned away suddenly.

  Chad felt foolish and guilty. He regretted mentioning Miss Emma as soon as he said her name. He sniffed and wiped his nose. The pain was clearly still too fresh for Mr. Miller. Miss Emma, the closest thing Chad had ever had to a real grandmother, had passed only last week.

  The old man straightened his shoulders. He looked back at Chad and in a quiet voice said: “The house is empty, Chad. Empty. We been married 33 years.” He took in a deep, ragged breath and stared up at the falling snowflakes. “I cry myself to sleep every night in a cold, empty bed.” He blew his nose into a paisley handkerchief. “A man doesn’t get over that in a week, boy.”

  Mr. Miller sighed when Chad stepped back as if struck. “I’m sorry, Chad.” He put a shaking hand on Chad’s shoulder and squeezed. “It’s just hard to figure what you meant. You ain’t had no tears or…anything since your momma…that was no more’n a few days ago.”

  Chad knew instantly what the old man was talking about. He had felt it about himself and was worried something was wrong. He should be crying, sobbing, inconsolable. Not only was Mom dead, but with her passing, he was left totally alone in the world. Well, he did have family back east and a few cousins up in Montana, but since the world seemed to be ending, they might as well be on the Moon.

  Mr. Miller watched Chad’s face and said, “Chad, to answer your question truthfully, yes. I suppose she’s with your family.” He looked up at the gray skies unloading their white cargo. A sad smile graced his wrinkled face. “I expect they’re up there together somewhere, looking at us and shaking their heads. Two grown men standing around in the snow.”

  “I’m only
sixteen,” said Chad in a small, quiet voice.

  Mr. Miller put a thin arm around Chad’s shoulder. “Son, what you’ve had to do the last few weeks…don’t you ever let anyone say you ain’t a man now.”

  Chad turned without a word and walked slowly toward his house through the snow. Mr. Miller struggled to keep up with Chad’s longer, strength-filled strides. Chad wondered again why he never caught the sickness. Most of the people in the neighborhood had gotten sick—children, men, women, even pets. Chad never even had so much as a sniffle. Many of the houses in the subdivision been completely emptied.

  Mr. Miller sneezed rather violently just behind him and Chad turned his aching mind to that painful thought again. Why? The neighbors to the south had all died two weeks back. His mom had called for help from the police, but they refused to come. Half the police in the county were either dead or bed-ridden. Contact with all the sick and suffering people had taken its toll on the police and doctors all over the country. The small force of first responders in their little patch of north Texas had been decimated.

  Chad crunched his way across his backyard in silence. The lights in the house flickered. Everything went dark for a few seconds, then came back on. Most of the houses in the little community had already gone permanently dark. There weren’t many people left to care anyway.

  His thoughts went back to Mom. When the Johnsons took sick during that first awful week, she went to help their young children. Before the week was out, the news—and the bird flu—had spread around. His mom didn’t even pause to take precautions. She said if she was infected, it was too late to worry. She said she was going because the children needed her—everyone else was scared to go. The world was scared. Chad went with her, despite Dad’s bitter protest and tears from his sisters.

  Chad had ultimately been the only one that ever walked out of their home again. His childhood tendency to never get sick when his schoolmates got the chicken pox, measles, mumps, even mono or the common cold, had once been seen by everyone as a blessing. Chad looked at himself in the pale reflection of his porch door. They were wrong.

  It was a curse.

  His reflection did not lie. He still looked fresh-faced and healthy, despite losing just about everyone in his life. He hadn’t heard from his relatives in weeks and had assumed the worse. His uncle in Montana admitted he was sick. Sue, his aunt in West Virginia, had called just before the phones went out to say she was sick and that Uncle Don had already passed. She cried to him on the phone that there was no one willing to help. She was hysterical. Uncle Don’s body was still in the house and her babies had died. A single gunshot was the last thing Chad heard before he hung up the phone.

  Mom, wrapped up in blankets and taken by the fever in bed, knew from his face what had happened to her sister. She had heard nothing from the rest of her family in Maine.

  Mr. Miller stood waiting at the door, wheezing and shivering from the exertion of walking across the yard in the snow. “You gonna open the door or stand there like—“ He sneezed, then wiped his nose. “I don’t know how you never got sick…”

  Chad opened the door and heard his mother’s voice echo through his mind.

  “My strong little man…never gets sick…” were the last words Mom had whispered to him from her cracked lips. There were tears in her bloodshot eyes, from the fever or from fear or love—Chad never knew which. He supposed it didn’t matter anymore.

  Chad remembered the moment it had started.

  It was when they had come back from visiting the Johnson family down the street—Mom had sneezed. Just once; a small thing, really.

  Two days later, his sisters were sick. Four days after that, Dad died struggling and thrashing in bed, unable to breathe and delirious from the fever. His sister Gracie soon followed, choking on the liquid in her lungs. Chad hated the awful memory of the pink-tinged foam that had bubbled out of her nose and mouth at the end.

  His baby sister, Helen, whom he had thought might be immune like himself, was walking from the bathroom and fell down on the floor without a sound. She was dead a few minutes later. At least she hadn’t suffered.

  Chad shivered as remembered Mom’s scream when she first saw Helen’s face, with its blue, almost indigo coloring near the ears, eyes, and over the cheeks. That sweet face that had so many times looked up to Chad in wonder and adoration, had looked then like some sort of B-rate horror monster.

  Mom had clung to life for another week of pain and misery. At last, with the dried blood caking her hair and fresh blood smeared on her face, she too, succumbed and died, wheezing and wild eyed.

  He alone had survived the terrible disease unscathed. As far as he knew, he was the only person anywhere that hadn’t gotten sick from what they called the Blue Flu.

  Chad had dutifully helped Mom care for the sick while she could, whether they were next door or across the hall. He had spray-painted the red “X” on homes that had sick inside. He had later sprayed the black “X” on homes that had dead inside, just like the government advised.

  He had helped bury the dead when the authorities wouldn’t come because they were scared or sick, themselves. He had helped bury the Johnsons. After Mom had gotten sick, Chad had been the only one left to care for their elderly neighbors, Doug and Emma Miller. He helped Mr. Miller bury Miss Emma. Chad was left alone then, to bury his family, one by one. He had never even so much as sneezed.

  Not once.

  Guilt flooded over him. Why had he been left untouched? Why had he been spared the sickness only to live through the mind-shattering sadness of watching his family die? He had wracked his brain for days, trying to think of some heinous act he had committed that would have offended God so mightily.

  Now, looking out the open door toward the little mound of fresh snow far back in the yard, he wondered again why he wasn’t there next to them. What did he do to deserve this fate? To see all those he cared for wither and die around him, without sharing in their suffering or even able to comfort them? They all in the end, had become angry with him. Everyone did—they were jealous of his health. All except Mom. She had been so happy to know he would live on, strong and healthy as ever.

  Hell, he was even mad at himself, for not being able to cry. For not being able to feel.

  Chad sighed as a snowflake tickled his nose. He shut the door and returned to the relative warmth of the empty house.

  When people all over the world realized that the sickness was a real pandemic and not just another widely-publicized scare, it was too late. All the planning the government had done, all the fear it had been accused of starting came to be justified in one little announcement.

  It’s real and it’s here.

  Not confined to faraway places like Indonesia, Hungary, Africa, or even Europe. It was in our cities, our malls, our schools, and Churches. It was in our backyard.

  And it was too late.

  Mom had huddled with him by the fire, watching the newscasts grow less and less frequent as the media began getting sick. Anyone who came in contact with the sick, human or animal, took a great chance with their life. Some had chosen to come to work anyway and ended up paying dearly for their stubbornness.

  Still Chad could not cry. Mom had. She was terrified. His mother, the rock of his life, alone in the safety of their home, had cried for hours on Dad’s shoulder at the waste of it all; the pain and suffering, the fear. When the phone rang that night and Betty Johnson had called to say her husband had died, Mom dried her own tears and fearlessly went to help. Chad had gone with her. That was Mom—her heart had always ruled her life.

  Chad felt nothing. Empty. Alone. He walked to the heat register and tapped it again.

  “I don’t know why you bother, boy. You know just as well as I do, the propane man ain’t been through here lately. We ain’t getting any more.”

  Chad looked over his shoulder at the sick old man. Inside under the lights, his face was thin and gaunt, the skin stretched over his light frame. When the coughing seized him, his wh
ole body shook. His eyes were runny with fever. Chad could smell death on his last friend in the world. He walked to the window and looked out through the snow to his family. The shovel was still lying next to the house. He sighed and figured he’d have to bury Mr. Miller in a few days. He glanced into his neighbor’s yard and saw the little tombstone for Emma. He’d put Doug next to Emma. Miss Emma would like that.

  A thought occurred to him that almost made his heart stop. His family would forever be incomplete. He wouldn’t get the sickness; he knew it wouldn’t hurt him. Chad didn’t know why, but he was immune to just about anything that got others sick. Least, that’s the way the doctors seemed to describe it as they scratched their heads in puzzlement.

  “It’s a blessing son, a true blessing. A medical miracle!” the doctors had said, all smiles. He remembered them saying that at his annual check-up for school every summer.

  He took off Dad’s hat and dropped it on the table. Snow started melting on the floor as he shrugged out of his jacket and outerwear. The temperature inside was only a bit warmer than outside, since he had run out of propane three days ago.

  “You’ll catch your death too, young man, you take that coat off,” said Mr. Miller in between coughing fits. He eased himself into a chair by the fireplace. “Aaaah,” he sighed. “I feel better already.” He was still bundled up from outside. Chad hoped the old man’s gnarled hands thawed out quickly in the heat of the naked flame.

  Mr. Miller turned on the TV and listened to the latest casualty numbers. Hundreds of millions dead in Asia, and Africa. Close to 4 million in France and England alone. Estimates on fatalities were thrown about. No one really knew for sure, but most of the “experts” predicted the number of dead in America alone would top out eventually around 10 million. The big cities were graveyards on a Biblical scale.

  Everything had been shut down—grocery stores, gas stations, even the local police and fire department—because there was no one left to work. Nearly everyone was sick and in bed or on the floor and the ones who weren’t, would never rise again.