The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  The Lawgivers: Gabriel

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  The Lawgivers: Gabriel

  By

  Kaitlyn O'Connor

  (C) Copyright by Kaitlyn O'Connor, July 2012

  (C) Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, July 2012

  Published by KK&M, llc

  Smashwords Edition

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  kkandmpublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  Dedication:

  For Jackie Jackson for her unwavering support. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for all of your hard work on the website that you built for me! It’s wonderful! Beautiful! The best ever! I’m so thrilled!

  Prologue

  The lucky ones never knew what hit them.

  One minute they were going about the business of living—the next, oblivion.

  Already sinking into decay from much the same causes as the fall of Rome—greed, sloth, corruption, and civil disorder—the days of the great human civilization of the twenty-first century had been numbered even before Mother Nature had unleashed her wrath but, as she had many times before, Mother Nature proved mightier than all the combined power mankind could wield. Civilization didn’t crumble slowly to dust. It was vaporized in a nanosecond by the twin asteroids that whipped around the sun, evading the Near Earth Object Tracking System and blindsiding the planet with virtually no warning. One plowed into the North American continent, the second into Europe.

  For the survivors who clawed their way out of the rubble and ash, life was hellish and it only got worse. The debris thrown into orbit by the twin impacts blotted out the sun. The fires that erupted from the superheated air created by the impacts added their pollution and the Earth began to cool to a nearly perpetual winter.

  And then the angels fell to Earth and brought the wrath of god to the remnants of the once mighty civilization left to eke out an existence on the scarred Earth.

  They called themselves the Lawgivers.

  The humans called them winged demons from hell.

  Chapter One

  Lexa scanned the rolling plain that stretched out in every direction, virtually featureless beyond those dips and swells, wondering which way would lead to water and which to death.

  There were some things one never got used to—not really—hunger, thirst, being too cold or too hot, being so tired you felt like you would drop where you stood and simply cease to live … being afraid. Lexa had never been able to get used to it, at any rate.

  She’d hardly known anything else in her life, and yet there’d been moments, brief segments of time, when none of those things had been the case, and it only took the absence of complete misery sprinkled throughout her memory to make being miserable from one thing or another, or many of them at once, nearly intolerable at times.

  She didn’t remember ‘before’, at least not the ‘before’ that most people meant when they talked about before. She remembered her before. Even though the memories were faded and ragged around the edges, she remembered Sir, her mother’s man. She vaguely remembered her mother. She remembered best the baby brothers and sister she’d helped Sir take care of because her mother was gone. ‘The day’, her day, was foggy in her memory, not because there were gaps but because it had been like an explosion, so many things happening at once that it had been hard to grasp anything but terror.

  It was the day the raiders had descended upon them and her whole world changed.

  Most people, though, were referring to ‘the day’—before ‘the day’. There’d been an explosion then, from what she’d heard, but she’d been born after that. She wasn’t certain how long afterwards, but the only world she’d known was nothing like the one she’d heard olders talk about. That place was so very different from everything she’d always known that she wasn’t completely convinced it had ever existed. So much of what they talked about was hard even to imagine.

  Like the cold that was no more than a ‘season’ and then went away—a blue sky, green things everywhere.

  She’d seen blue sky, though—not when she was young. It had been after she’d finally escaped King Ralph, after she’d fled the nightmare her life had been since ‘the day’ because she’d finally realized that anything was better than that. Even death would have been more welcome. When she’d realized that truth, she’d ceased to be afraid of being alone, of facing the scarred Earth, the unknown, by herself. It had given her the courage to flee.

  The first time she’d seen blue sky, she wasn’t sure whether she’d been more awed or terrified. No one else had been certain either, at least no one who, like her, had been born ‘after’, she supposed because they hadn’t really believed in it either. But one day the thick, boiling clouds that formed a roof over the world had seemed to thin and then tear, and there it was, pale streaks briefly visible far above and a near blinding glint of something up there that poured heat down on them. She’d thought it might be the sun, but it was a monster unlike the hazy ball of light she was used to seeing when night gave way to day.

  That warmth had felt glorious at first. It had warmed her like no fire ever had. It seemed like she’d been cold her whole life, sometimes colder than other times, but always cold and she’d thought it must be a good sign. But then the numbing cold had begun to subside and she’d gotten warmer and warmer until she’d begun to fear she would catch fire.

  The first few times she’d seen blue sky, she’d felt much the same—not quite as awed, not quite as frightened, but still uncertain of whether or not she liked it or should be afraid. Slowly, so slowly she was hardly aware that things were changing at first, the thick, boiling gray and white clouds she was so used to began to vanish little by little and she could see blue sky more and more often. And, as it did, the ice that covered everything began to shrink and melt away. The mud and the heat from that enormous, fiery ball in the sky began to war with the misery of cold and then she began to see green things, many green things, not just the occasional stubby brownish-green things she was used to, but tiny, bright carpets of green bursting from the soil almost everywhere she looked.

  It was scary the way things had begun changing. She wasn’t certain if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Mostly it was just something else to worry about—whether it would make life harder than it already was or not.

  Lexa stopped abruptly as she topped the rise she’d been struggling up, realizing she’d allowed her mind to wander from her purpose to her misery—a very dangerous thing to do.

  Before her in the gathering gloom of dusk was a village. Her throat closed. Her stomach growled and her heart commenced to pounding more rapidly with a combination of fear and excitement.

  She’d run out of water almost two days earlier and she was so low on food that she hadn’t eaten more than a few bites here and there for nearly a week. Before her lay the possibility of replenishing her nearly exhausted supplies.

  And a
lso the possibility of getting killed or raped or enslaved.

  For once she didn’t debate the wisdom of going in or avoiding it entirely, however. She had needs she couldn’t ignore anymore. She couldn’t afford to bypass the village. She was going to die if she didn’t get water at least, and, as dangerous as it would be to approach the village with the hope of bartering for what she needed without getting killed in the attempt, she really didn’t have a choice.

  Strangers were never welcome. On one level, she resented it, but then again she understood their position. Strangers represented a threat. At the very least, it was another hungry mouth and no one wanted to share what little they had with strangers when it might mean someone they knew and cared about could go hungry, or starve to death, in the stranger’s place.

  At the worst, a stranger could be a spy, someone sent in alone to assess the fortifications, the number of able-bodied defenders, weapons and munitions, and the food and water supply.

  Water was pretty much a given. Villages were few and far between and they only sprouted up where there was water, a supply sufficient to make squatting on it, and fighting to defend it, worthwhile.

  Food was another matter. Any time enough people squatted in one place to form a village it meant feeding them was going to be more of a problem the bigger the village got … and this one looked like a fairly sizeable village. Even from a distance and with the shadows gathering because the sun was riding low in the sky, Lexa could see upwards of two to three dozen huts.

  Clearly, it dated back to ‘before the day’. Besides the inevitable rickety shanties and huts she was accustomed to seeing, there were quite a number of skeletal remains of buildings that were more than one story tall. There were actually two or three of those buildings that were nearly intact … or at least looked like they were from where she stood.

  Naturally, it was fortified. It wouldn’t be there at all if not for that because of the bands of roaming gangs. Rusting vehicles had been dragged into a rough circle around the village and rubble from the useless buildings piled on top and around them to form a wall eight to ten feet high. Jagged, spear-like posts were wedged into the rubble pile at angles and jutted outward like the quills of a porcupine.

  There were a couple of dangerous-looking men wielding guns guarding the only gate Lexa could see and she eased back down the rise and sat down to consider whether she ought to risk going in after all or not.

  Only two guards could mean several things.

  The village hadn’t had a lot of trouble with the gangs and didn’t see a need for more than two guards.

  Or the village had been taken over by a gang and they were confident they had control over the whole territory—which meant they were some really bad sons-of-bitches.

  Either one, she decided, was as likely as the other.

  She hadn’t seen a soul in weeks, which might support the latter theory.

  Of course, she went out of her way to avoid running in to anyone. Traveling alone was a sure way to get killed if one didn’t make it a habit to avoid people.

  Unfortunately, since she didn’t dare make contact with other people except when it was absolutely necessary, she was now in a position where it was absolutely necessary. She couldn’t make it much further without water. She wasn’t going to last a hell of a lot longer without food.

  Getting up after a few minutes, she began to circle the village, easing up whenever she found a vantage point that would allow it, to check out the fortifications.

  The best thing, for her, about the fortifications, was that they were designed to keep attackers out in general, not to keep people in, and there were usually several places where escape was possible if not a breeze.

  By the time she’d circumnavigated the village, she’d spotted three possibilities for a quick exit if she discovered that was desirable and she felt better about approaching the gate and asking permission to enter.

  Strangely enough, the guards, she discovered when she’d reached her original position and could see the gate again, had disappeared. Her heart seemed to trip over itself. More than half expecting one or both to come up behind her, she searched the area more closely and finally spotted both men sitting in the shadows near the gate. They looked like they were asleep.

  She frowned. That was odd. Really, really peculiar.

  She didn’t know what to make of it—whether that was going to make it easier to get in or if she should go in at all.

  She’d already accepted that she didn’t really have a choice, though.

  Cautiously, she retreated a short distance to assess the new situation and decide what to do.

  She had to disguise herself. That was a given.

  She couldn’t look like a man. She was too short and too slight—especially since she’d had so little to eat in so long. It sure as hell wasn’t safe to look like a woman, though, and especially not a young girl. That was just asking to become a victim.

  Besides which the guards were certain to suspect that she’d been sent in by a gang to scope the place out ... in which case they’d probably kill her on the spot … after they’d raped her and tortured her to try to get information out of her that she didn’t have.

  Moving off a little further, Lexa found the cover of a medium sized boulder and some scrubby plant growth. When she’d managed to untangle the knotted rope around her waist that she used to secure her supply bundle, she dropped it to the ground and peeled her tunic off. The chill wind of dusk made her skin pebble all over, but she gritted her teeth and dug out a strip of cloth, wrapped it around her chest and used it to flatten her breasts. Not that they were particularly large to start with, but they jiggled when she moved and that was enough, she’d discovered, to catch a man’s eye since they always seemed to be on the lookout for a female to fuck.

  She was filthy and she didn’t exactly smell lovely since she hadn’t been near enough water to even make a stab at cleaning herself in weeks—a circumstance that she found extremely repugnant—but she’d discovered men didn’t allow that to put them off.

  Actually, in her personal experience, they generally smelled far worse—which might account for that. They probably couldn’t smell her unwashed body over their own.

  There wasn’t much, as a matter of fact, that would distract them once they set their sights on rutting—even the discovery that they were rutting another male—except maybe a knife between the shoulder blades ….

  She’d fashioned herself some facial hair that she liked to think gave her more of the look of a young man—hopefully too old to appeal to the men that liked boys, or at least were more than willing to rape them. She struggled for a few moments and finally gathered enough spit to moisten the sap she used to glue the hair to her face and patted it in place. Finally, she tied her hair back, tucked the ends into the back of her shirt, and wedged her battered hat back on her head, tipping it forward to shadow her face.

  Everyone had long hair and any male old enough to have hair on his face had a beard. The problem was that she knew her hair was longer than it should have been for a boy the age she was trying to portray.

  Because she was many years past puberty.

  When she’d done the best she could with her disguise, she studied her ‘treasures’, trying to decide which would make the best trade items. It had to be desirable or she wouldn’t be able to get what she needed but if it was too valuable she could have the same problem. Or worse, they might decide to just take what she had.

  Of course, there was always that risk.

  When she’d made her choices, she buried the items she didn’t want to trade and what remained of her food, tied her pack to her waist once more, and tried to calm her racing heartbeat. It wouldn’t do to allow them to see just how scared she was. They could smell fear and they were liable to interpret that to mean that she was a threat to them.

  She discovered the guards were still sitting in the shadows near the gate when she returned. Girding herself, she stepped out into the open and ap
proached the gate. Neither of the men moved.

  She stopped when she was within a few yards of them and the gate, straining to see if she could tell if they really were sleeping or if they were dead.

  They weren’t snoring. She thought they should be if they were asleep and not dead, but she didn’t see anything to indicate that they’d been attacked. She hadn’t heard anything and if anyone else had, she would’ve heard an alarm go up. There weren’t any signs of a struggle—no churned up dirt or anything knocked over and no blood.

  After a brief debate, she finally decided to risk slipping past them. That seemed dangerous, but waking them also seemed perilous, and, of the two choices, she liked trying to sneak in much better.

  A cold sweat was trickling between her shoulder blades by the time she’d slipped through the narrow opening.

  She was definitely going to take another route out when she left, she decided.