The Wasteland Soldier, Book 3, Drums Of War (TWS)

I'm Laurence Moore and I write post apocalyptic, science fiction stories.
I'm currently working on the next book in the Wasteland Soldier series. The central character in each book is a man named Stone, a ruthless but heroic drifter, righting many wrongs and restoring balance to an unforgiving future world.
Born in London, 1970, I was an avid reader as a child and by the age of 10 declared that I wanted to become a full time writer. I began with short stories and choose your own adventure books before penning novels in my teens and beyond, heavily influenced by the 80s landscape of Threads, Gamma World, Mad Max and the Cold War.
I currently divide my time between writing, reading and spending time with my family.

DRUMS OF WAR

The Cloud Wars was the final war of the mythical Ancients. Cities of glass and steel melted, the sky burned and billions were consumed in the fires of the Metal Spears.
Centuries have passed and in Ennpithia nature has all but reversed the devastation. Survivors have advanced to a medieval level of society with law, economy, religion and education.
Stone is the wasteland soldier, righting injustice in an unforgiving world. With his hard fighting companion, Nuria, and the enigmatic Map Maker, they are determined to thrive in this promised land and put behind them the horrors of Tamnica.
But what they discover is a society tainted by secrets and mired in unrest, the fallout from a civil war ten years before. Pitted against sinister and ruthless adversaries, there will be more than their own lives at stake - for where there is Man there is always the ability for total annihilation.
And for Stone and Nuria the future will rest in the hands of an enemy they know only too well.

This book is dedicated to:

Terry and Vicky

Family means everything.

Always

“Stone!”

The coach was sinking. Metal groaned and whined as the earth began to gradually swallow it. It was their second rain drenched night of struggling through the Metal Sea. The name was one of irony, naturally, because there was no churning water or crashing waves or foamy white spray; nothing but miles of blackened and rippled mudflats that stank of salt and seaweed and were littered with obstacles. The sea had died centuries ago, during the age of the Before.

The three of them had abandoned Gallen’s sun baked wastelands - seeking, hoping, dreaming - that beyond its arid shorelines lay Ennpithia, the promised land of freedom and safety. But their ambition had been blunted against another grim landscape, a terrain thickened with blankets of fog and swept by sheets of torrential rain. Having barely escaped the treacherous street gangs of Maizan they had tracked to the furthest tip of the world and leapt into the unknown, discovering a place more soulless and unforgiving than any that had come before.

It was the Map Maker who’d cried for help, his round face popping with frightened beads of sweat. Arms aloft, he was a miserable and pitiful looking man; his hands had been severed and his wrists were tightly bound with thick cloth.

“Please don’t leave me behind.”

Stone, tall and bearded and heavily scarred, had no intention of leaving him behind. His hooded eyes were narrowed and focused. He showed nothing as he sprang along the aisle of the coach and dragged the full bellied man onto his feet, grunting as he hustled him along.

They had moved amongst the markers of another age and, despite the freezing wind, had often paused to marvel at what the Ancients had created and then wilfully destroyed. Gingerly, they picked through an eerie and seemingly endless graveyard of half-submerged metal machines; bloated and discoloured by the centuries, most beyond all recognition.

As darkness descended Stone had opted to make camp inside the coach; they had to stop or lose all sense of direction. Its glass windows were shattered but had been boarded over. The wood was rotten and green; it kept the filthy weather outside and the smell of damp inside. Many of the seats had been ripped out to make space for people to lie down in although there was no one here now. It was too damp to make a fire. Stone tore off the wood from the back window, affording them a good view of the surrounding mudflats. Not that they had seen anyone since leaving Caybon. Nuria was convinced they’d spent the past two days walking in circles, lost in the swirling fog and pouring rain, and were barely a few miles from the Gallen coast. She had little faith in the Map Maker’s skills of navigation and was frustrated Stone was placing such weight to the enigmatic man who believed he could mend this broken and barren world.

“Get the weapons,” shouted Stone, but Nuria had already scooped up the sheathed swords they’d carried since escaping from Tamnica. She threw them over her shoulder, grabbed the backpack laden with supplies and scrambled out into the heavy rain.

Face reddened, Stone tossed the Map Maker out the back window and onto the sticky grey mud. Nuria dragged the heavy man to his feet, panting as she lifted him. He straightened the precious satchel of maps hanging around his neck. They were the only maps in Gallen and the only maps that hinted at the existence of Ennpithia.

The coach whined loudly and sank further, going down at an angle. The way out was disappearing fast.

Stone reached for the rising ledge of mud but it crumbled beneath his weight. He curled his hands around the lip of the roof but as he prepared to pull himself out backward the vehicle tilted violently. He was slammed into a stinking wall of mud and plunged into darkness.

Nuria, blonde hair plastered to her skull, face streaked with mud, watched in horror as the rear end of the coach was sucked beneath the surface. The front end rose slowly into the air. She threw aside the swords and unlatched the backpack, hastily taking out a length of rope. She moved swiftly and ran through the pouring rain, all the time calling out his name. She climbed the rusted base of the coach and tossed one end of the rope through the shattered windscreen. It went taut as he caught hold of it and she leapt clear and began to pull as he climbed. She was strong, athletic, well trained, once a soldier, but for half a year she had been locked away in prison and her body was still malnourished. Thick perspiration ran down her face. Her chest burned. Her arms strained. Her boots sank into the mud.

“Wait,” she shouted.

She ran to the nearest obstacle of metal, an enormous wing snapped clean from a sky car. It was appeared hundreds of feet long, disappearing into the fog, twisted and hollow, the wind whistling through its rusted frame. She fed the rope through a gap and knotted it.

“Now.”

The rope tensed once more as Stone began to climb. The rain poured in, forcing him to duck. The coach whined loudly and began to sink deeper into the mudflats. Nuria’s heart hammered. As his head poked through the windscreen her breathing calmed but then the ground suddenly shook and a long black fissure speared open. Nuria and the Map Maker were hurled off their feet and the vehicle disappeared.

“Help me,” screamed Nuria, as the tremor continued to distort the world. The Map Maker lumbered toward her, rocking from side to side. The mud was torturous. Crossing even a short distance left him breathless. His clothes were sodden. His bald head glistened. Nuria grabbed the slack of the rope and wound it around both his arms, far below the wrist.

“Now pull,” she growled.

The Map Maker’s face grimaced and he gritted his teeth. His boots were slipping into the boggy terrain and his body shook as the unrelenting tremor sliced more ugly fissures across the mudflats. It was the most horrible place he had ever seen. Born in a cell in the city of Chett, put to work mapping the land of Gallen, he had witnessed dead cities and barren deserts and forests of stunted trees, yet here, in the Metal Sea, it reeked of death, more than any of those places. He wondered how many souls had disappeared beneath the surface. He wondered how many thousands of bones they stood upon.

“Pull.”

The rope wasn’t budging. Stone was a dead weight. The seconds were passing. Black clouds scudded in the night sky. He could hear Nuria screaming into his ear as she dragged on the rope behind him, desperate to save Stone, but her words were lost in the rush of the wind and the lash of rain. His head was already filled with noise. It was a voice, he was certain, but the truth of its words eluded him and the distortion could never be silenced. Ennpithia would offer him peace. Ennpithia would be his sanctuary and drive away the menace. After all these years, a lifetime of poring over maps and travelling the continent of Gallen, he knew his time had come. It had been calling to him his entire life. He had simply never known it. He would reach Ennpithia. He would not fail … but he needed Stone and Nuria both; one was not strong enough without the other alone.

“Come on,” he said, pulling hard, surprising himself.

Ringed with sweat, arms throbbing, the mud climbing above his ankles, he was suddenly thrown backward, smacking into Nuria. The mud spattered end of the rope flicked into the air and landed with a loud slap.

Stone was gone.

“No,” said Nuria. “No, no, no.”

As the tremor began to subside, she was on her feet, sinking to her knees as she took each step, her breathing laboured, blue eyes torn with fear that he was truly gone. The Map Maker realised, in those chilling seconds as the fog bound them, how deeply she cared for the near silent drifter, frantically calling out his name and throwing herself against the mudflat where the coach had once stood, digging giant clumps with her bare hands.

“Stone,” she said, sobbing.

Then a fist broke the rippled surface of mud, followed by another, and a bearded head thrust into view, coated with black and brown sludge. Nuria grabbed hold of him. On his knees, gasping for air, spitting and puking, he reached out and gripped her arm and she levered the tall man onto his feet. She threw her arms around him as the wind blasted viciously over the desolate landscape.

The Map Maker offered a canteen of water, balanced between his stumps. Nuria took it from him and handed it to Stone.

Silently, he unscrewed the cap.

She looked into his eyes.

He looked back at her, saying nothing, and nodded.

“Are you okay?” asked the Map Maker, but there was no time to answer. The tremor struck again and the ground shifted aggressively beneath them, bundling them from their feet and slamming them down with ugly wet smacks. A giant tentacle snaked from the earth and lashed at them. Nuria rolled clear, her eyes wide with shock. In the gloom of the night, she saw more tentacles swirl and rise, each one easily thirty or forty feet in length. Stone grabbed the weapons, tossing one of the swords at her. He dragged his iron blade from its scabbard and roared. He had no idea what they were facing. It reared in the thick rolling fog, an impossible beast, but there was no time to think – only to fight. The giant tentacles swarmed around them. The rain continued to pound without mercy and the ground shook. Stone swung his sword and cut into one but he grunted fiercely as the blade jammed in armoured flesh. Nuria stepped alongside him and hacked at it, but her sword bounced back with a loud metallic clang.

Once more the tremor began to ease and as it did the strange beast grew lifeless and the three of them watched the flailing tentacles drop to the mud. Stone yanked his sword free. He frowned at the clean blade. He stepped forward, dropped onto his haunches and lifted a heavy metal pipe in his hand. It was grey and ridged and empty. He saw the cut he had made with his sword.

He rose, shaking his head, half-amused.

Nuria looked down at the maze of pipes that had burst through the mudflats. Another forgotten piece of the past. Her mouth twisted into a wry smile, a look Stone had grown accustomed to and realised he even looked for.

She began laughing.

The Map Maker stared at her.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s funny? What was that creature?”

Stone patted him on the back, sheathed his sword and started walking.

Filthy and shivering, the trio disappeared north into the swirling fog, passing the mottled green remains of ships and boats jutting from the surface. It was dawn before the rain stopped. The wind echoed across the land and they stopped and stared as thin rays of sunlight lined the edges of angry clouds.

“Shit,” said Stone.

“I don’t believe it,” said Nuria.

“Yannis lied to us,” said the Map Maker. “We should have never trusted her. I told you.”

He glared at them both.

“She lied, she lied about all this. She sent us out here to die.”

“Yannis probably didn’t know,” said Nuria, quietly. “It’s not like anyone ever came back.”

She let out a deep sigh and looked down at the foamy water lapping over her boots. Waves crashed against the mudflats, curling around the long forgotten vessels that had once sailed upon it. She glanced at Stone and saw him scratch his beard, deep in thought. The sea stretched grey and choppy into the fog shrouded horizon. Yannis had told them they would not require a boat to reach Ennpithia. The Cloud Wars, the final war of the Ancients, had incinerated giant swathes of the world, including its many seas and oceans. She couldn’t have known that some of it still remained. Nuria wondered how many days lay ahead of them before they reached land.
If they reached land.
Conrad had told them Ennpithia was a fable, told to children to ease the pain of losing a loved one, a special place where the soul floated toward, able to rest beneath the sign, whatever that was.

“It might not even exist,” she said. “This might be the end of the world.”

“It does exist.”

“Conrad said it was a fairy tale for children.”

“We’re not turning back,” said the Map Maker, and he waded into the sea, the dirty looking water slopping onto his thighs. “I have to carry the Light to them. I have to bring sense to this world. I have to unify the people.”

Stone and Nuria exchanged puzzled looks. He’d been spouting curious nonsense like this for days.

“How do we cross that?” she said, shaking her head.

Pockets of sunlight punched through the dawn fog. Even the hint of it felt good on her skin.

“It’s so easy for you,” said the Map Maker, raising his arms in frustration. “You can turn around and walk away from this. Go this way, go that way, it doesn’t matter, does it? What am I supposed to do? I have to reach there. I have to rebuild what has …”

“Enough,” said Stone, his voice a deep growl. “No more of that shit. I don’t want to hear it.”

He took out his binoculars and scanned the landscape. Within a few minutes a thin smile shaped within his beard. He nudged Nuria, pointed. She saw exactly what he had spied. They sloshed through the water, momentarily leaving the Map Maker behind.

“He’s getting weirder,” she said. “I don’t understand what he’s talking about anymore.”

“Did you ever?”

She snorted. Then fell silent.

“I thought I’d lost you.”

He stopped, turned to her, his brooding eyes set deep in a heavily lined face, his leathery skin carrying a fresh and terrible looking scar that ran from his eye, over his nose and across his cheek. Nuria reached up with her hand, cradled his face. Once he would have flinched. Now he warmed at her touch. She tilted her head, a lop-sided smile upon her lips. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. He kept looking into her eyes and she slowly lowered her hand.

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