Future Rebuilt

  Copyrighted Material

  Future Rebuilt Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Pierce

  Book design and layout copyright © 2018 by Daniel Pierce

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  Daniel Pierce

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  Future Rebuilt

  Book 2 in the Future Reborn Series

  Daniel Pierce

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  1

  “If we’re killing something, then I’m going to need a better ponytail,” Mira said, binding her honey-colored hair with a length of thick twine. The desert wind was snappy, and Mira’s green eyes narrowed in the face of it as she smiled at me, full lips pulled to one side.

  “We’ll need more than just a ponytail,” I said, pushing my fingers into the animal tracks before me. Something huge had come close to the oasis, leaving a grisly calling card behind just over the last ridge. Two—possibly three, the scene was a mess—wolves had been cornered, killed, and partially eaten. These were the lanky desert wolves, not small animals, and they had been apex predators in my time.

  Emphasis on had been. The Empty was a bad place to be meat, and the wolves learned it the hard way. In the 2000 years I was sleeping away the apocalypse, the world had gone from bad to worse. Predators of all kinds roamed the sands, rivers, and skies, but they all tended to have something in common that I found irresistible.

  They were delicious over a fire.

  “Two toed, looks like a hog. Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen,” I said. My hands are big, but even I couldn’t span the length of a hoof print, ground into the gritty soil and spotted with the blood of an unfortunate wolf. “They get gigantic, I guess?”

  My hunting partner Mira just nodded. She was more than capable of killing anything in the desert, but for safety purposes, we always went in pairs. Me with my nanobot enhancements, her with two decades of experience. It was a simple rule as we built the Free Oasis into an island of civilization on a broken world. Don’t do anything stupid was the first rule we adhered to. The second rule was even simpler: the stupidest thing of all is getting killed.

  “Gun or knife?” she asked, thumbing the safety on her rifle. There was a series of rippling canyons just ahead, sheltered from the wind and deep enough to act as cover for something that was, no doubt, busy tearing apart the remains of a hundred-pound wolf. The blood trail led us here. Our weapons would end the journey in the same place, with the purpose of our little jaunt being nothing more complex than dinner. I didn’t see boar tracks. I saw an invitation to free barbecue, and I fucking love barbecue. With more people to feed each day, it made sense to hunt when we could.

  Like now.

  “Jack?” Mira asked, breaking me out of my reverie.

  “Sorry. Got thinking about barbecue. And beer. Maybe air conditioning, too,” I said, running a hand over my black hair. I had green goggles resting on my head, the thick lenses perfect for cutting the ruthless Empty sunshine. I pulled them down, smiling at Mira. “Kiss for luck,” I told her.

  We’d done more than kiss the night before, but it was a good ritual, no matter what the occasion. I made it a point to assure Mira and Silk—who was sensibly back at the Oasis, directing the watering team—that we were connected, real, and we mattered to each other. It was the only way to reclaim our humanity in a sea of disaster.

  The fact that both women were gorgeous was immaterial. I was saving the world, one perfect ten at a time.

  “Kiss for luck,” she agreed, and we did, and it was brief but good, and she laughed, her teeth flashing in the brilliant light. “Now let’s go slaughter this hog and get the kids dragging it back. I’m hungry.”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” I said. “Knives. I respect the pig, but I don’t want to blow a ham apart just because I’m scared of getting my hands dirty.”

  She hesitated, then gave me a terse nod. “Mind the tusks. The only one I’ve seen up close could gut an ogre with one tooth.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll watch the tusks. They’re heavy, thick?” I asked her, unsheathing one of my short swords.

  “Thick as your wrist.” She held her hands apart, and I whistled. I smelled blood on the wind and knew the beast was eating, though it was down in the gulley, out of our sight.

  “I go in from up top. You put a round in its head if I miss, but only the head. Even in my time, wild hogs had thick gristle on their chest cavities. Tough bastards,” I said, ceasing to the edge of the depression. I could see the top of an animal, but the scale was—

  “There she is,” Mira breathed.

  “She? Holy shit. That’s a female?” I asked as the top of her head came into view. It wasn’t a pig. It was a truck with fangs, and it was busily chewing the leg of a wolf like a chicken wing. Thick black bristles covered the creature, which stood five feet at the shoulder, it’s hide a mismatched pattern of red and black stripes. The eyes were small, the tusks gigantic, and the muscles bulging, right down to the ridiculous tail that swished back and forth in a contented rhythm as it ate the wolf. The ears twitched when I rose up, as if she could hear me.

  “Big ‘un, huh?” Mira asked, her smile tight. She knew I was more than human, but the pig was far less than anything normal. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  “Big meal, you mean.” I smiled again, if only to put her at ease. We’d been together for two months of hard work and adventure, and our own future was still a work in progress. From the loss of her sister to the fight with Taksa, she’d been a steady presence at my side.

  I didn’t intend to let a giant slab of bacon change that.

  “They lash up with those tusks, right?” I asked, my eyes never leaving the hog.

  “Up and to the side,” Mira said.

  “Then I’ll go in through the back door,” I told her. “Showtime. Cover me, babe.”

  “Will do,” she said, lifting her rifle as I jumped up and over the lip of the gulley.

  My feet landed in the gravel with a crunch. I expected the hog to look up and identify me as a threat, but she skipped that step entirely and went batshit crazy at the first sound of my landing.

  With a squealing roar, she was charging me as I brought my sword up in a glittering arc, the blade whistling with a lethal song as I leapt up, twisting to the side with my arm out for balance. The sky spun around me, blue on blue, while underneath me the giant hog raked the air with her tusks, each length
of ivory hissing as it cut the air like a scythe.

  I grunted, landing hard and coming to a battle-ready position as the hog’s tiny butt turned impossibly fast, tail wagging with joy at the idea of killing something. She lowered her enormous head and charged me again, all in the span of seconds. Spittle flew from her mouth, nostrils bubbling with putrid saliva as her mouth opened to expose a bone white palate filled with yellow teeth crowded at wild angles. The tusks were even bigger up close, the inner edges ridged for maximum shearing. All in all, the hog was a perfectly designed killing machine.

  So was I.

  I planted my feet and blurred into motion, streaking forward in a half-leap that carried me over the charging hog and to the right, a slashing backswing ripping into the tough chest wall as she squealed with indignant rage, but not before her tusk caught my wrist to spin me around with savage force.

  I landed elbow first in the grit, and she was on me again despite my augmented body. The Empty made tough animals tougher and fast animals faster. She was both.

  I’d gone high the first time, yielding a long cut down her side. The next attack would be more direct, because the beast wasn’t going to tire anytime soon. I shook out the stinging impact on my arm and switched my grip, my left hand closing over the sword handle as I began to stab forward before the pig’s tiny eyes could register what was happening. She was fast and powerful, but that didn’t mean she had brakes.

  The point of my sword punched through her shoulder, sinking in far enough that her weight began to tear the blade from my hand, but I went with the cut, locking my shoulder and elbow in a line as I met her charge with everything I had.

  Her mouth opened and she roared.

  With a savage twist, I turned half my sword in her chest cavity, shredding lungs and heart with a series of jerks that turned the giant creature into the world’s largest breakfast sausage. In her dying gasp, she collapsed on me, driving her stinking snout into my eye with enough force to snap my head back against the ground. I’d have a shiner, but she was stone dead before I could begin sliding out from underneath the body, which stank like a charnel house.

  “Little help, babe,” I wheezed.

  “Gotcha,” Mira said from above, though there was a hidden laugh in her voice. “And here I thought I was more your type.”

  The hog splayed over me like the world’s worst date gone wrong, but with Mira’s help and a healthy dose of cussing, I was able to roll the slack corpse off onto the gravel.

  “You are. She isn’t. Not yet, anyway,” I gasped. The hog had scored me more than once in the fight, and the pain was flaring into existence now that the brawl had ended.

  “Are you saying you like bacon more than this?” Mira asked, waving a hand down the length of her athletic body.

  When I hesitated, she pretended to kick me, but I patted the air with my hands while catching my breath. “If I ever pick barbecue over you, go ahead and shoot me. You have my blessings.”

  “Good answer,” Mira said, smiling. Then she grew serious, looking the giant hog over as blood seeped from the mortal wound I delivered. “Is this going to fit in the ‘stang?”

  I gave her a mock glare. “Woman, if you ever suggest we put a stinking, bloody carcass in Dixie again, there will be consequences.”

  She put her hands on her hips, returning the look. “I can tolerate sharing you. I can tolerate your snoring—”

  “I don’t snore.”

  “You do, and you know it. But naming that car? And the way you look at. . . her?” She shook her head. “I have limits.”

  “Lots of people named their cars,” I protested.

  “Yeah, two thousand years ago. Now, what about the pig?” she asked.

  “I’ll drain and gut it here, but I already have a solution.” I gave the sky a look, then reached into my backpack and withdrew a flare gun. We’d found three of them in the Oasis underground, and test-firing one of them yielded a shot that was still bright enough to see in the daytime. “Natif is watching, and we’re less than two klicks from home and higher up. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Which is? Send help?” she asked, pulling her knife and testing the edge. She wasn’t faint of heart. If there was work to be done, it didn’t matter how bloody, Mira was good for her share.

  “The Harlings are coming with a wagon,” I said, drawing my own hunting knife and squatting next to the pig. “Must weigh at least 800 kilos. Easy.”

  “Food for a month. Or more, if we add to it. I’m plenty tired of blood chicken and frybread,” she said. We all were, but in a few weeks, our gardens would be large enough to supply food, rather than just transplants and seeds.

  “I’ll have Natif gather any oak limbs that have dropped. I think it’s time to build a smokehouse,” I said, slicing into the hog. We would use every part of it except the viscera for food. The guts would go into the ground as fertilizer, and the hide would be cured. I even had plans for the tusks, once I got them out of the giant skull.

  “You mean we can have bacon? And hams?” Mira had a near sexual glow to her face. She really was my kind of woman.

  “And smoked fish, and we’ll hang birds in there, too. Hell, if we can find enough wood, we might even smoke cure some eggs,” I said.

  “Let’s start with ham,” Mira said, cutting down the hog’s bulging spine. “Then we can worry about eggs.”

  I began my work, and the pig’s hide fought my knife like it was made of steel. When I looked up, Mira was smiling. “What?”

  “Do you think we’re going to make it?” she asked. In that moment, she seemed young.

  I smiled at her, and her beauty, and all the challenges ahead of us seemed like something we could handle. I knew there would be hard days, but we had a chance. A good one.

  I leaned forward across the hog and kissed her. Despite the scene, she didn’t pull back. “We will if I have anything to say about it.”

  Driving the knife into the pig, she grinned. “Good enough for me.”

  2

  “At some point, we’re going to need a sawmill,” I said, watching Natif pile oak limbs into the firepit.

  “Why?” he asked, his hands never stopping. The kid was a machine, and he would be a solid fighter once he got some size to him. The other children were tougher than I was used to seeing, too, being the children of traders. The Harling kids—Korina and Beck—were both busy, bright, and fearless. The Empty made for hardy people, even when they were under the age of twelve. I answered with the future in mind, because every decision I made had long-range effects.

  “We need our own lumber, and I think we can build our own forest, even if it wouldn’t grow naturally,” I told him. When he had the limbs in place, I drove the first of two heavy stakes into the ground. We were in an open area near the Oasis center, close to where ogre blood had been spilled to free the place and make it our own. The heat from cooking pork would go up without harming the tree canopy, as well as giving us light for the family meeting.

  There were enough of us that one fire was too small for the whole group, but for tonight, it would be me, Mira, Silk, and the Harlings, with Natif and Lasser working on dinner detail. Korina and Beck were brewing tea on a small brick oven we’d built. We had plenty of clean water and herbs for tea, though I would have killed for coffee. Maybe someday we would have our own supply.

  “How long will it take to cook?” Lasser asked. He stood, knife poised over a large chunk of pork that was marbled with fat and glistening in the fading light of day.

  “Faster if you split it into chunks. Let’s do kebabs. We’ve got those lengths of steel from down under, right?” I asked.

  Lasser merely nodded, cutting at the loin with efficient strokes and handing them to me. I watched as Natif pierced the chunks of meat, sliding three or four onto each length of steel.

  “Clouds tomorrow,” Doss Harling said from under a nearby tree. “No rain, but maybe good for planting some of those saplings.”

  “How many are ready?” I asked. I
knew, but I wanted everyone invested in the planting. We were building our future, one tree at a time.

  “Forty. The seeds are—never seen anything like it,” Doss said.

  “Gene splicing and who knows what else for everything in the vault. I’ve read about that in the drives. Incredible to think that once upon a time, we could change the very nature of things. With the improvements to the seeds, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have another 200 by springtime,” Lasser remarked, turning his kebab slowly. The fire snapped away, hot flames rising as coals built below. Everyone looked at the fire as a talisman. It was something we built, in the middle of a place carved out of a howling wilderness, and if I made the right calls, we could grow into something more than an outpost.

  We could have a life. Safety. Another generation, and one beyond that.

  “Will you look in the drives tonight?” Silk asked me. I spent one hour a night combing through the huge stores of data she managed to save. It would take months—maybe years—to get through the handful of terabyte drives, but I learned something each night; often a clue that would help us as we expanded outward.

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll clear another room in the second wing down under, then plant. We need to talk about leaving some gaps in the trees,” I said, pushing my kebab closer to the glowing coals.

  “A gap? Why?” Mira asked.

  “Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think we should start making space for homes. We’ll have more people, and they’ll need to live somewhere. When they arrive and prove their value, they can build. By having a plan, we grow in a smart way, instead of chaotic streets and random channels of flowing water. The wheel shape works, but only if people can live in concentric rings. Better for defense, and better for order,” I said.