No Shelter Trilogy (Omnibus, Books 1-3) Read online

  NO SHELTER TRILOGY

  Box Set Omnibus Edition

  by T.S. Welti

  http://tswelti.com

  Copyright © 2012 by T.S. Welti

  All rights reserved.

  For Ronnie,

  who encouraged this lunacy

  and will never know how much that meant to me.

  CONTENTS

  NO SHELTER: Book One

  LEFT BEHIND: Book Two

  BURIED ALIVE: Book Three

  Other books by T.S. Welti

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “The end of the world will come with a violent choking breath, and the final gasp will be that of a child.”

  - Dr. Bradford Pike, December 21, 2042

  CHAPTER 1

  I didn’t know how sharp my blade was until Isaac used it to stab me in the back.

  I met Isaac Faulk during the Whitmore High School riot two years ago. Isaac, with his towering build and eyes the color of smoldering ash, immediately caught my eye as a potential ally. After the ice melt and the flooding, my mother and I knew we wouldn’t survive in this environment without a man around. Isaac fit the description, but he was intimidating.

  He didn’t look totally scary; at least not at first glance. The scariness came from the darkness that dwelled in his eyes and the hard shadows and lines of his young face. He was hungry in every way.

  He arrived at Whitmore High School alone, but he made friends immediately. My mother and I, mostly I, studied him from a distance.

  “Nada, you shouldn't stare. It makes people uneasy,” my mother said, as she cleaned the festering wound on her thigh.

  During the flood, a broken tree branch gored my mother in the thigh. The wound had begun to heal nicely after a few weeks at Whitmore, but an infestation of bedbugs had re-infected the wound. She had been nursing it for more than six weeks now and growing weaker by the day.

  “I’m not staring,” I insisted, as I took the aloe from her hand and closed the jar. “This stuff’s not working, Mom. You need antibiotics.”

  “They’d sooner give us a knife in the gut,” my mother muttered as she leaned against the wall of the cafeteria and closed her eyes as she fiddled with the ruby pendant on her necklace. The last remnant of her life with my father.

  They’d sooner give us a knife in the gut.

  My mother was referring to the twenty or so hulking young men who lurked in the corner of the cafeteria all day. They called themselves the Guardians. They claimed to guard the Whitmore High School community from those who wished to take an extra scoop of beans in the lunch line or outsiders who tried to raid the auditorium, which doubled as a storage room for all the food and supplies. But Mother and I knew better.

  The Guardians wanted to gather enough men in their gang to take over Whitmore and keep all the food and supplies to themselves. Hallie Glover had whispered this information to me in the lunch line two days ago. I hadn’t seen Hallie since.

  The Guardians probably dropped her over the cliffs into the rising waters over what used to be Los Angeles. L.A. and everything I loved and hated about the city was under a hundred feet of ocean. The Hollywood sign made it out almost completely unscathed by what is now referred to as “The Event”.

  Of course, that wasn’t the official name of the storm that Dr. Bradford Pike predicted twelve years earlier. With everything either frozen, under water, burned to dust, or deserted, nothing was official anymore.

  As the atmosphere grew more toxic and the polar ice melted into the oceans, the water levels rose gradually for about forty years. It wasn’t a huge concern until Dr. Pike discovered a way to measure tectonic plate pressure. His discovery led to more and more research and evidence that predicted rapidly cooling oceans could increase the stress on tectonic plates and set off an unstoppable chain of biblical flooding, earthquakes, super volcanoes, and monstrous blackout storms caused by volcanic ash. His research was criticized as sensationalism and buried by the very government agencies that were supposed to promote environmental protection.

  The wealthy abandoned America in the years before the storm. The media left, the politicians left… We were the ones left behind. The lost souls wandering a broken environment and scrapping for food, clean water, and shelter.

  If you were lucky enough to find all three of those at the same time, you’d better keep it to yourself.

  Despite my mom’s advice, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. In the light of the trash can fires and candles Isaac appeared broken. Whatever happened to him to make him seek refuge at Whitmore, it must have stripped him bare. He was exactly the kind of person I wanted with us when the Guardians took over—someone with nothing to lose.

  The next morning, I approached Isaac. That’s when the fragile community at Whitmore High School shattered into a million pieces.

  I grabbed a green plastic plate from the rack and walked quickly to catch up with Isaac in the lunch line, passing up the breadbasket—the only decent food in the cafeteria.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Isaac turned around and examined me from beneath the curtain of brown hair covering his eyes. “Hey.”

  “I… I need to talk to you.”

  He didn’t respond or look at me as he grabbed a plastic fork as if he knew what I was going to ask and he didn’t want to encourage my insanity. I had to make my plea quickly.

  “I can hunt and I’m good at hiding,” I whispered, as if I was on a survivalist job interview.

  “That’s not worth much around here. They’ve got enough food to last a year.”

  “It won’t last a year and you know it.”

  He avoided my gaze as he grabbed a thimble-sized cup of pudding from a tray. Next to the hundred or so thimbles of pudding were trays of finger-sized peanut butter sandwiches and tiny cups of reconstituted mashed potatoes.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Isaac replied.

  Though I could already taste the chocolaty pudding on my tongue, I passed up the pudding, as usual, and took a peanut butter sandwich and a heaping spoonful of beans instead. My mother needed the protein and vitamins. Once she was better, I’d have pudding every day—if the Guardians allowed it.

  “You know what they’re doing,” I whispered, nodding toward the corner where Vic, the leader of the Guardians, watched our conversation carefully as if he could read our lips. “If you think they’re going to include you, you’re wrong. You’re going to need me as much as we need you when you’re out there without a decent rabbit or squirrel to sink your teeth into.”

  “Squirrel? Are you serious?” he replied with a sneer.

  Then he flashed me a look. It only lasted a second, but it wasn’t just any look. It was the kind of look that said, “I know exactly what you mean and you’d better shut up before you get us both killed.”

  I hung my head for a moment, ashamed of my brash behavior. It was so unlike me. Before the storm, I would have never approached someone like Isaac Faulk. Of course, before the storm I never would have killed rabbits and pigeons with my bare hands. Before the storm, I was your typical L.A. teenager with no real friends.

  I had a few classmates I spoke to in English class and a Chinese immigrant I befriended in gym class. During lunch, I spent my time alone in the library or helping my old freshmen history teacher grading assignments. I was a complete social degenerate.

  After the storm, I learned to speak up pretty quick. I even teamed up with a younger boy—Jared—for a while as we learned to hunt. Two weeks after meeting him, Jared was killed by a pack of coyotes. That’s when we ended up at Whitmore.

  It was too difficult to hunt alone.

  Isaac began walki
ng away toward the Guardians. Was he already one of them? Did they take some kind of oath? Was he about to tell them what I had just told him?

  I pushed past an elderly man with a walker and tried not to drop the food on my plate as I grabbed the back of Isaac’s hooded sweatshirt.

  He spun around with a wild glare in his eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I just want to talk,” I whined with desperation. My eyes darted back and forth between the ferocious expression on Isaac’s face and the suspicious glare Vic was directing at me.

  Isaac grabbed my arm so hard I dropped my plate of food. “Get out of here,” he said, pulling me toward the cafeteria entrance.

  “You’re hurting me!” I cried, trying to wrench my arm free as crowds of onlookers gawked at me.

  “You need to get out of here,” he said, pushing me out of the cafeteria. “Go back to your room.”

  “I just wanted to talk to you,” I replied, trying to hold back the tears welling up in my eyes. “That’s all I wanted.”

  Something changed in his face. I couldn’t tell if Isaac felt guilty or if he pitied me for being so pathetic. “Go to your room, Nada.”

  He disappeared into the cafeteria leaving me in the hallway with no food or hope. As I turned to leave, someone placed a hand on my shoulder. I whipped my head around, certain it would be Isaac coming back to apologize, but it wasn’t. It was Vic.

  He clasped his freakishly large hand around my throat and shoved me against the lockers. I couldn’t breathe as he pressed his weight against me. Tears spilled from my eyes as my throat closed.

  “What are you up to?” he said, his nostrils flaring as he pressed his face against mine.

  His face swam in my vision. I tried to speak but nothing came out.

  He threw back his bald head and laughed. “What’s the matter? I thought you wanted to talk.”

  My tongue swelled inside my mouth. It felt as if a thousand needles were pushing my eyeballs out of their sockets. My hands were getting cold. Screams and chants filled the halls, but I couldn’t make any of it out.

  As the blackness began to close in, Vic let go. I crumbled to the floor in a heaping mess of tears and gasps. I tried to fight the blackness closing in, to lift my head, but the cold sensation spread from my hands to my arms then throughout my entire body. The blackness won.

  “Drink some water.”

  I woke with a headache the size of L.A. I opened my eyes to find Isaac hovering over me. He was bleeding from a deep gash on his cheek and the hair on one side of his head was matted with more blood.

  “What ha—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I grabbed my throat, which felt four sizes too big.

  Isaac shook his head as he held a bottle of water to my mouth. “Don’t talk. Just drink.”

  I tried to lift my head to see where we were, but the pain in my neck seared through every part of my body. Tears streamed from my eyes. Isaac brought the bottle of water to my lips and poured a few drops in. I tried to swallow and nearly choked.

  He slipped his hand under my neck and lifted my head as I attempted to catch my breath. He brought the water bottle to my mouth again as he held my head up. I could smell the woodsy scent of sweat mingled with the sweet metallic scent of blood on him as he watched me take a sip of water.

  With my head lifted I could see we were in a cave with a small fire burning near the entrance. “Where are we?” I whispered. “Where’s my mom?”

  Isaac laid my head down gently on a pillow of fern fronds. He crawled to the fire and threw on a few more twigs.

  I rolled gingerly onto my side. My head and vision pulsed with every aching beat of my heart. “Where is she?”

  He crawled back to me and placed a blue scarf on the dirt floor in front of me. “She didn’t want to come.”

  I stared at the scarf. “What are you talking about? What happened to her?” I cried, my throat becoming even thicker with molten tears.

  “After you passed out, they torched the school.”

  “Who? The Guardians?”

  Isaac nodded. “I carried you all the way to your room, but your mother didn’t want to come. Her leg was too bad… I couldn’t carry you both.”

  The pounding in my head multiplied and spread to my chest. A sob lodged in my throat as I imagined my mother being burned alive. The pounding intensified until the walls of the cave pulsed with every beat of my heart.

  “Are you okay?” Isaac’s voice sounded far away.

  I managed a single piercing shriek of grief before I passed out again.

  CHAPTER 2

  Two years have passed since my mother burned to cinders in the ruins of Whitmore High School. Two years since Isaac saved my life. Two years living in caves in what used to be the Angeles National Forest. Two years of hunting in the forest and bartering for food and water at the trading post. Two years and two brushes with starvation later we’re still running from Vic.

  With the promise of shelter, security, and a never-ending supply of food and water—and a convincing arsenal of automatic weapons—the Guardians have recruited a few hundred more soldiers in California and thousands more across the country. They are the new government, which operates more like the mob and exists solely to serve itself. The tales of their spread come to us mostly through the trading post.

  Without automatic weapons or easily broken promises, Isaac and I have managed to recruit two more members to our tribe: Eve and Mary. Mary likes to call us the Guardians of the Guardians. Isaac thinks it’s corny, but I think it’s a pretty accurate description of who we’ve become.

  “Throw me that rope, please,” Eve calls out to me from the back of the cave where she’s been twisting her long, black hair around a small blade for hours. Even when she’s thinking up new and sinister ways to entrap unsuspecting game, Eve never forgets to say please and thank you.

  I grab the coiled rope and toss it to her. While Eve is good at trapping animals, I’ve gotten even better at murdering them with my bare hands. All the ballet classes my mom forced me to take before the storms are finally paying off. My ability to walk softly and twist my body into impossible positions means I can hide anywhere without making a sound. The element of surprise means everything in the wild.

  I killed my first cougar three weeks ago. True, it was only a teenager, and I didn’t make it out of the encounter totally unscathed, but I give myself wilderness points for mastering such an awesome predator. The experience had me on an adrenaline high for days and the four of us feasted on smoked cougar jerky for weeks. Not the tastiest culinary invention, but it’s packed with protein.

  Mary snatches the blade from Eve and throws it at a wooden target in the corner of the cave.

  “Can you please stop doing that?” Eve says much too politely.

  “I have to have mah knife skills ready in case the Guardians come back,” Mary replies, as she pulls the knife out of the target and drops it on the floor where Eve sits cross-legged.

  When the Guardians aren’t relaxing in lounge chairs on the beach of their Salton Sea compound with their guns resting on their fat bellies, they’re bullying the vendors at the trading post or raiding hideouts. They’ve raided our cave twice in the last two months. At least we know Vic had nothing to do with either of these raids. If it were Vic, he’d have found a way to haul off the four barrels of water we have buried to ensure we were left with nothing.

  “You did it again,” Isaac says to Mary as he pokes the fire with a small twig.

  Mary stares at him with a note of panic in her brown eyes. Her hand twitches as she tries not to cover her mouth the way she always does when she mispronounces something.

  “You have to learn to say my not mah,” Isaac says, and I can hear the irritation in his voice. “It’s been eight months. You should be rid of that stupid habit by now. You might as well wear a red armband.”

  The country has been divided into four sectors. Each sector is distinguished by their accents and mannerisms. Eight months ago, Mar
y made it here from Georgia, which is now part of the Southern Sector. The only Southerners who can roam free in the Western Sector without the risk of being killed are the Guardians. Southern Sector Guardians wear red armbands to distinguish themselves from the Western and Eastern Sector Guardians.

  Mary takes a seat next to Eve and reaches for the knife again. Eve snatches it up quickly and tucks it behind her back. Mary leans against the wall of the cave and pulls her honeyed curls away from her face. The scars on the undersides of her forearms are barely visible in the dim light of the fire.

  Isaac’s criticism has the power to send Mary into a spiraling despair and, when she’s in a tailspin, I’ve caught her using her carving skills on herself.

  I glare at Isaac from across the fire. “You don’t have to be such a jerk about it.”

  Isaac rolls his eyes as he springs to his feet and leaves the cave. I follow right behind him.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says before I can even say a word.

  I grab his arm and pull him back toward the cave. “You can’t leave without a torch.”

  He looks me in the eye and for a moment the hardness in his eyes wavers.

  “Please don’t leave without a torch,” I say a bit more gently.

  Isaac can be moody sometimes, but he knows me better than anyone. I can’t lose him.

  “Come with me,” he pleads.

  He holds out his hand and I take it. His hand is warm from tending the fire and it completely envelops my hand like a giant holding a sparrow. We walk for a few minutes in silence with nothing but the moonlight illuminating the forest.

  “Want to go to our spot?” he asks.

  Before Mary came along eight months ago, Isaac and I used to spend hours sitting and talking with our feet dangling over the cliffs. I nod and let him lead me away.

  The Moon over the ocean mesmerizes me. Isaac helps me sit down so I don’t slip. The grass on the edge of the cliff crunches beneath us. Isaac scoots toward me and pulls me closer. I rest my head in the crook of his neck and I feel as if I’ve gone back in time.