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

to help with anything that needed doing – a working man, which was something that I admired endlessly.
    Leah looked after and monitored everything that came in and out of Bastion, hence the reason she had joined us earlier outside of the wall. She was resilient and straightforward, the epitome of the kind of person you had to become in this world.
    Sam did the cooking and looked after the general food supplies. He was indeed eccentric, but it helped when his life revolved around sustenance. He would be cooking the veal up that night.
    Mae looked after medical factors and hygiene. She had been a nurse for many years prior to the outbreak, and her skills had proved to be endlessly valuable. She and Larry spent a lot of time together, and considering they were about the same age… Well, you can probably paint good enough picture on your own. Out here, finding that special someone was a lot easier considering the lack of options. But everybody needed somebody, and that was how things went around here.
    Then there was Hayley… She and I… Well, I don’t know. We had known each other for a few years, but had only really seen each other as platonic friends. She had been part of a commune that had been overrun a while back, and had wound up on our doorstep in something of a state. Mae had brought her back to health. She was a year or two older than me, and she, Robbie and I had hung out a lot over the years. We had never really had much of a prolonged childhood or even a period of teenage years where we could all just have fun and play in the streets, so we could be immature at heart.
    That was part of the reason that we had built the treehouse in the forest so many years ago, which we hadn’t been back to in ages. Remember that little patch of trees by the wheat field just outside the walls? Well, in a world where the spoils of the past no longer existed, we had found ourselves building a treehouse in the woods, Robbie, Hayley and I. When I was a little I had seen the other kids in movies building them, and I had wanted to do the same, but there were so many things standing in the way of being able to do it – landowners who did nothing with the forests other than letting them sit there, people ripping them down for no good reason other than because they could, and as well as all that the resources.
    It had only taken the end of civilisation and the deaths of 99.98% - or whatever it was - of the planets population for me to be able to build a fucking treehouse with my friends in peace.
    Go figure… what I wouldn’t give to have the landowners, the bullies and the absence of wood panels back again.
    ***
    Over the course of the rest of the day I helped set up the park benches along the road down the main street of Bastion. We had looted them from a park years ago during a period of resource hoarding, and had decided to keep them as they were rather than to strip them down for wood. There were enough to place side by side so that everybody could sit together on an enormous table on the rare occasions that the entire community ate together.
                  Tonight would be one of those rare occasions.
                  We used slabs for our eating rather than plates – they were durable and required less upkeep than traditional crockery, not to mention the fact they weren’t nearly as prone to shattering. Knives and forks, on the other hand, were one thing that we always used. It was one of those things that seemed to separate animals and humans, I thought, and everybody else seemed to agree. Eating and drinking, this one thing that every human had in common, was something to be done in a civilised fashion as opposed to gnawing at our food like animals. It kept us on our feet and stopped us from descending into some lower quality of living.
                  I set everything out in the street, and after half an hour or so some of the community came out to join me and ask what was happening. I