The Commonwealth Provisional Authority (eBook)

Tales from the Wasteland

George McClean (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
132 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-107004-2 (ISBN)

Infos

The world ended in fire. What remains is dust, ruin, and survivors fighting for more than just breath.

Elias is a lone wanderer, carrying the ghosts of his past through a wasteland haunted by feral ghouls, mutants, and warlords. His path changes when he discovers the Smithsonian Depot-an underground refuge preserving humanity's last knowledge.

Joined by a brilliant but eccentric scholar, a young mechanic, and even a ghoul who remembers being human, Elias must cross a broken America to reach the Commonwealth Provisional Authority-a settlement daring to rebuild civilization.

But the journey north is no simple march of survival. Every mile is a war, and hope itself may be the deadliest burden of all.

Fans of Fallout, Metro 2033, and The Road will be gripped by this epic tale of survival, sacrifice, and the fragile spark of hope in a world determined to stay dead.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

The dust had a taste. It was the first thing Elias learned, all those years ago. It was the taste of rust, of old bones, and of a world long since given up the ghost. It settled on his tongue, gritty and final, with every breath he took through the frayed scarf wrapped around his face. The sky was the colour of a day-old bruise, a perpetual twilight stained with the memory of the old world’s death rattle.

He moved through the skeletal remains of a city that had no name anymore. Towers of steel and glass were now jagged teeth biting at a sickly heaven. Concrete had crumbled into great, scree-filled slopes, and the wind whistled through empty windows like a mournful spirit. This was his world. A canvas of ruin painted in shades of grey and brown.

His boots, soled with salvaged truck tire, made soft scuffing sounds against the grit. Every sense was tuned, a live wire humming with the silence. Silence was safety. Noise was a prelude to death.

Elias was a lean man, all whipcord muscle and hardened resolve. His face, half-hidden by a hood and the scarf, was a map of hard living, with eyes the colour of the pre-Fall sea—a blue that seemed impossibly vivid in this monochrome hell. On his back, he carried his life: a dented canteen, a few strips of leathery dried meat, a knife honed to a cruel edge, and his most prized possession, a bolt-action rifle with five precious rounds left. He was a scavenger, a ghost, a story told by desperate survivors around guttering fires. The man who walked the dead roads alone.

He was hunting for water. The old maps in his head, painstakingly pieced together from scavenged fragments and old-timers' tales, pointed to this sector. A place that had once been called a ‘financial district’. Somewhere beneath the mountains of rubble, there had to be a pre-war aquifer access point, a maintenance tunnel others had overlooked.

The ghouls were why they’d overlooked it.

He felt them before he saw them. A change in the air pressure. The dust seemed to settle differently. The oppressive silence deepened, becoming not just empty, but watchful. Elias melted into the shadow of a collapsed bank vault, his breathing so shallow it barely stirred the dust on his chest.

Then came the sound. A dry, rattling scrape, like a bundle of sticks being dragged over stone. It was followed by a wet, guttural clicking.

A figure shambled into the intersection ahead. It was a mockery of a man. Its skin was pulled taut over its skeleton, grey and shiny like a mushroom’s underside, webbed with pulsing, violet veins that glowed faintly with the radiation that sustained and tortured it. Its eyes were milk-white, blind but somehow seeing. It sniffed the air, its head cocking at a grotesque angle. Its mouth hung open, slack and dripping a blackish saliva, its teeth filed to sharp points by a diet of who-knew-what.

This was a Stalker. A scout. Where there was one, there were never fewer than ten.

Elias held his breath, becoming part of the rubble. The ghouls were the mutated remnants of those who had been caught in the open when the skies fell. The radiation had baked them, twisted their DNA into something new and hateful. They were not mindless. That was the true horror. They were intelligent, pack hunters, driven by a fanatical, zealous loathing for the "Pure-strain" humans who had survived in shelters, unsullied by the world’s poisoning. To them, Elias and his kind were abominations, a blight to be cleansed from their new, radiant world.

The Stalker clicked its tongue again, a sound that made Elias’s teeth ache. It was communicating. An answer came from a ruined building to the right—another series of clicks. Then another, from the left. They were converging. They had his scent.

Elias had two choices: run and be run down, or fight and be overwhelmed. He had a third, desperate option, one born of a lifetime in this graveyard.

As the Stalker in the intersection took another step toward his hiding spot, Elias moved. Not away, but forward. In one fluid motion, he scooped up a jagged piece of rebar and hurled it with all his strength not at the ghoul, but at the glass-fronted building behind it.

The shatter of the remaining pane was catastrophic in the silence. It echoed through the canyons of dead steel like a gunshot.

The Stalker flinched, its head snapping toward the noise. Its companions answered with agitated clicks. It was the distraction Elias needed. He broke from his cover, not away from the ghouls, but parallel to them, sprinting silently across the open ground toward the shell of a long-dead public transit bus.

He slid under its rusted chassis just as the pack surged into the intersection. There were five of them. They swarmed the source of the noise, claws scrabbling at the broken glass, hissing and spitting in their frustration. Their confusion wouldn’t last long.

Elias belly-crawled through the dust and decay under the bus, emerging on the other side and immediately vaulting through a blown-out window into a low-ceilinged office. He was a rat in the walls now, using the labyrinth of crumbling rooms and collapsed hallways to his advantage. He could hear them fanning out, their clicking calls becoming more systematic, more organized. They were hunting in earnest.

His heart was a drum against his ribs, but his mind was cold, clear ice. He moved with a predator’s grace, his passage a whisper. He knew where he was going. The old map was etched behind his eyes. Down this hall, through the broken fire door, into the sub-basement.

He found the service door exactly where it should have been, half-buried under a fall of ceiling tiles and dust. The metal was thick, rusted solid. Hope, a dangerous emotion he usually kept caged, fluttered in his chest. He put his shoulder to it, muscles straining, veins standing out on his neck. It groaned in protest but didn’t budge.

A wet click sounded directly behind him.

Elias froze. Slowly, he turned.

A ghoul stood at the end of the short corridor. It was bigger than the others, its mutations more pronounced. A twisted horn of bone jutted from its forehead, and one of its arms ended not in a hand, but a single, scythe-like talon of keratin. A Alpha. It must have cut him off, predicted his path. Its blind eyes were fixed on him, and a low, bubbling growl rumbled in its chest. It knew it had him cornered.

There was no time for the rifle. It would be on him before he could swing it around.

The Alpha charged. It moved with a horrifying, scuttling speed, closing the twenty-foot distance in a heartbeat.

Elias did the only thing he could. He stopped trying to open the door and instead threw himself at it, a desperate, last-ditch shoulder charge fueled by pure adrenaline. With a shriek of tortured metal, the rusted latch gave way. The door flew open and Elias tumbled through into pitch blackness, falling down a short flight of concrete steps.

He landed hard on cold, damp concrete, the wind knocked out of him. Scrambling to his feet, he turned to slam the door shut. The Alpha hit it from the other side with the force of a truck. The metal door buckled inward, and the scythe-talon punched through a rust-thin spot, slashing the air inches from Elias’s face.

He threw his weight against the door, grabbing a fallen pipe and jamming it through the old handle. It was a flimsy barricade. The door shuddered again under another impact. THUD. The pipe bent. THUD. The sound of claws screeched on the other side.

Elias backed away, fumbling his electric torch from his pack. His hands were shaking. The beam flickered to life, cutting a swath through the absolute black.

He was in a narrow maintenance tunnel. Dripping pipes ran along the walls, and the air was cool and carried the faint, blessed smell of stale water. He had found it.

But the door wouldn’t hold. With a final, metallic scream, the pipe sheared and the door burst open. The Alpha filled the doorway, its form a monstrous silhouette against the dim grey light from the world above. It let out a triumphant, gurgling shriek and lunged down the steps.

Elias ran. The tunnel was a straight shot, with no offshoots, no doors. A death trap. His boots splashed in shallow, stagnant puddles. The beam of his torch danced wildly ahead of him.

The Alpha was faster. He could hear its claws scraping on the concrete, its ragged breath getting closer. He wasn’t going to make it.

His light caught something ahead—a T-junction. A choice. Left or right. As he got closer, he saw the right tunnel was partially collapsed, clogged with mud and debris. Left was clear.

It was a trap. It had to be. Too obvious.

Five feet from the junction, he made his decision. He skidded to a halt, turned, and dropped to one knee. The Alpha was ten paces away, closing fast, its talon raised for a killing blow.

Elias raised his rifle. There was no time to aim. He fired.

The report was deafening in the confined space. The round took the Alpha in the centre of its mass. It wasn't a killing shot—their organs were shifted, hardened. But it was enough. The impact stopped its charge dead, punching it backward with a grunt of shock and pain. Black, tar-like blood...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 0-00-107004-5 / 0001070045
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-107004-2 / 9780001070042