A World of Ash: The Territory 3 (25 page)

Squid climbed down from the cabin of the bio-truck, shutting the door after himself. The driver, Brant Lang, a farmer from a few farms over, lifted his hand in a wave as the bio-truck roared, coughed, and popped as it drove away, leaving Squid looking through the haze of smoke and dust at his uncle’s farm.

The town of Dust had still been very empty when he’d arrived, but it was beginning to recover from the events that had taken place there, just as towns were recovering all across the Territory. People still needed food and they still needed dirt. The sudden eradication of the ghoul threat had not miraculously made the soil fertile. Life would continue along similar lines, as it always had in these hard-working towns.

Squid had asked around but no one had seen his aunt. Jon Pickles had been out here on his return to the town and said the place was abandoned. Squid’s aunt had been categorized as one of the many who had been killed somewhere between here and Alice.

Squid walked in through the open gate and headed toward the farmhouse. The yard where his wooden outhouse stood seemed incredibly small. The stables were closer than he remembered, and even though he knew his uncle’s farm had been one of the smallest on the outskirts of Dust, the fences around the paddocks which had once marked the borders of his world appeared very close. The space he had roamed for the first sixteen years of his life now seemed like the solitary confinement cells in Pitt compared with the open spaces of the desert.

Walking through the house, Squid found it empty. Everything was untouched, down to his aunt’s knitting sitting on the chair in front of the fireplace. He lifted it and fingered the green wool still wrapped around the needle. It was to have been a jumper for his uncle, no doubt. The usually smoldering stone fireplace looked to have gone out long, long ago, the mound of ashes looking a lot like those that had settled over Alice in the days following the battle. Beside the fireplace Squid saw an un-split log waiting to be loaded onto the long-gone-out flames. He crouched down beside it and ran his fingers over the shallow indents where an axe had hit it time and time again, sixteen times. He smiled.

Back outside he wandered over to the stable. The fence was down; The Horse and Bluey would have bolted long ago. Oddly, he found himself missing The Horse, as though perhaps his reunion with that monstrous animal might have been a positive one. After all, since leaving Dust he’d faced down things a lot scarier, even though a part of him still insisted there was nothing anywhere in the world scarier than that animal.

Squid spent the night sleeping in the house, which felt strange. He slept in his uncle and aunt’s bed, which felt even stranger. Being back on the farm was feeling more and more surreal. It wasn’t the nostalgic homecoming he’d expected. The concept of the quiet life of dirt farming no longer had the appeal he’d imagined it might have. Something was hanging heavy over him.

There was adventure out in the world, and now, with the fence being taken down and the threat of the ghouls gone forever, the world had been opened wide. Squid knew what it was that worried him, what it was that made him feel uncomfortable about being here. It came from thinking about the rest of the world. How many other places were there where people lived behind walls and fences fearful of the ghouls roaming outside? Squid knew where there was a vast quantity of vaccine remaining stored and ready for use, and the key to that still hung around his neck. Plus, he knew at least two people he was sure would join him on a crazy mission out into the world.

When morning came Squid collected food, water, and the clothes he’d brought with him in a backpack from Alice, and headed away from the farm. As he stepped through the gate he looked back at it. The way it sat crookedly on its hinges no longer made it seem like a menacing smile. It no longer froze him. It just looked like a broken gate. Another fallen barrier. He closed the gate, latched it, and began walking back toward the town called Dust, this time excited about the endless possibilities of the world beyond.

As always I think it's important to acknowledge the team that exists behind this book other than myself. Ever supportive friends and family, especially Holly who is an endlessly patient, supportive and loving wife. Seriously, I think there should be a support group for the spouses of authors where they can do seminars like 'Dealing with your partner's never ending cycle of egotism and self-doubt' and 'Are they jumping out of bed in the middle of the night? Don't worry, they probably just had an idea' and 'Explaining how Twitter might be work.' 

Thanks to Sianon, Jason, Seb and Kerry for beta-reading drafts of this book and providing ever important early feedback.

Thanks to Brianne who edited the entirety of this series and has really helped tie it all together with this final book. 
A World of Ash
, and the whole of this series, is a better experience because of the deft touch she brought in editing.

And of course thank you to the team at Momentum, Joel, Shelly and Patrick, it has been a pleasure working with you. Thank you for taking a chance on my post-apocalyptic outback zombie story and nurturing it through its life. You and the imprint will be greatly missed as Momentum folds back into Pan Macmillan, a great loss for genre publishing in Australia. Many authors, including myself, owe you our start and we will be forever thankful.

Last but not least, to you, the reader, thank you for sticking with The Territory series and I hope you've enjoyed the ride as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope you'll join me in whatever adventures I pen next.

Justin Woolley has been writing stories since he could first scrawl with a crayon. When he was six years old he wrote his first book, a 300-word pirate epic in unreadable handwriting called “The Ghost Ship”. He promptly declared that he was now an author and didn't need to go to school. Despite being informed that this was, in fact, not the case, he continued to make things up and write them down.

Today Justin is the author of the Australian-set dystopian trilogy The Territory Series, comprised of the novels
A Town Called Dust, A City Called Smoke
and
A World of Ash.
Justin lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife and son. In his other life he’s been an engineer, a teacher and at one stage even a magician. His handwriting has not improved.

A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1
A City Called Smoke: The Territory 2