The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) by Will Hawthorne Read Free Book Online Page A

too hot for that,’ I said, ‘I’m actually starting to get a bit bothered with it. Reckon you could sort it for me?’
                  ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’
                  ‘Because I don’t trust myself with a knife.’
                  ‘That’s god damn true. All right, hurry it up and get back inside.’
                  My mother is the only person on the entire planet that I trust with a knife, maybe aside from Robbie, although he lacks the trade skills that she possesses. There are two reasons for this.
                  The first is the fact that she’s the person I trust most. She had raised Robbie and I since we were kids, literally through the end of the world, and taught us right from wrong in a place where those lines all too often crossed over. If somebody was going to cut my throat, it certainly wasn’t going to be her.
                  The second reason is that when it came to shaving, a cut in the old world could be resolved pretty quickly with some antiseptic formula. Now, though? The tiniest could become infected, and it was something Mae had enough trouble keeping at bay all the time. In short, Henrietta was a pro, and her knife skills certainly wouldn’t bring any harm to me.

Chapter Six
    Banquet
     
     
     
    I had gone back to bed that morning, but I hadn’t slept much. We weren’t monks, if the virus had reached the mountains of Tibet thousands of miles away, that was – we had a policy that everybody had a right to a good eight hours of sleep during each 24-hour cycle, regardless of when that time would be.
                  I still had a few hours on the clock, and even in this world of perpetual fatigue, I couldn’t relax enough to drift off. Everybody had their duties, even if their duty was to assign duties to everybody else, and I wasn’t the type of person to call myself leader and watch the citizens do the hard work. It wasn’t me. Absolute power corrupted absolutely. Maybe that was true, but I didn’t have absolute power, and I didn’t want it. In Bastion the people had the power, and if I got too big for my own boots everybody could group together and kill me in my sleep if they truly wished to do so.
                  I tried to have a little more faith in humanity than that.
                  Sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes, I decided to head back out. I changed into a new t-shirt, of which there were several stacks in the wardrobe that we had raided from an industrial warehouse a while back, the rest of which were evenly split up amongst everybody else, and pulled my boots back on.
    ***
    Before we go any further in this story of ours I’d like to address the fact that I’ve probably named a lot of names, and it might be a little difficult to remember all of them. I don’t intend for you to keep a notepad about all the names I speak of here – I don’t know how far in the future you’ll be reading this account of events, or if the future even has writing materials in abundance, or the computers that I vaguely remember from my childhood. That night, though, it was the banquet, and everybody was there. While the citizens of Bastion were my main priority, the vast majority of them have little of a part to play in the current story – for a moment, we’ll look at who we’ve mentioned already.
                  Henrietta and Robbie I’ve spoken about already, as well as Carl who lived next door.
    Rudy was our defensive expert – he took care of weapons and the like, in the event that they were ever needed. I spent a long time making sure that he was sane before even making him a permanent member of the community.
    Marcus and Maria lived a little way down the road – he was a farmer through and through, while Maria was a mechanics expert who had helped with the water system.
    Larry who you saw earlier was an elderly gent who was just happy