Lone Survivor (Book 2): All That Survives Read online

  ALL THAT SURVIVES

  Jack Hunt

  Direct Response Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Hunt

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to an online retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  ALL THAT SURVIVES book 2 is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Jack Hunt

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  The Agora Virus series

  Phobia

  Anxiety

  Strain

  The War Buds series

  War Buds 1

  War Buds 2

  War Buds 3

  Camp Zero series

  State of Panic

  State of Shock

  State of Decay

  Renegades series

  The Renegades

  The Renegades Book 2: Aftermath

  The Renegades Book 3: Fortress

  The Renegades Book 4: Colony

  The Renegades Book 5: United

  The Wild Ones Duology

  The Wild Ones Book 1

  The Wild Ones Book 2

  The EMP Survival series

  Days of Panic

  Days of Chaos

  Days of Danger

  Days of Terror

  The Against All Odds Duology

  As We Fall

  As We Break

  The Amygdala Syndrome series

  Unstable

  Unhinged

  Survival Rules series

  Rules of Survival

  Rules of Conflict

  Rules of Darkness

  Rules of Engagement

  Lone Survivor series

  All That Remains

  All That Survives

  All That Escapes (coming soon)

  Mavericks series

  Mavericks: Hunters Moon

  Time Agents series

  Killing Time

  Single Novels

  Blackout

  Defiant

  Darkest Hour

  Final Impact

  The Year Without Summer

  The Last Storm

  The Last Magician

  For my Family

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  A Plea

  Readers Team

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Joanna Camlin hadn’t come here expecting to die.

  The knife-wielding maniac sliced into her flesh with a crazed look in his eye. Was this how it would end? Her father had warned her of the dangers of hiking the Appalachian Trail, and that was long before the event. The event that had stripped the nation of power and crippled the infrastructure. The event that had forced people to commit all kinds of atrocities in order to survive. The event that had kept her away from towns, thinking it was safer in the wilderness. She wished she’d listened to him. But at twenty-one, she was impulsive, hungry for adventure, and not even wild horses could have dragged her away.

  Now had he asked her when she was fifteen, in high school, and a Girl Scout, she may have agreed. Back then her love of the outdoors was marred by unrealistic expectations, a one-time brush with poison oak and an unhealthy fear of bugs. Of course she got over that but not the memory. She could still recall the itching and throbbing blisters after hiking miles into Yosemite National Park on a trail no more than two feet wide.

  It was then she’d heard of the Appalachian Trail, or simply the AT as it was known. The AT was considered the granddaddy of all long-distance wilderness trails in the USA. Extending from Georgia to Maine, it attracted thousands every year. Her scout leader had talked about it with such fondness as if it was the last true adventure. That had stuck with her. Joanna remembered her face lighting up as she pulled a map and ran a finger over a red line that covered over 2,000 miles, fourteen states and a variety of elevations that went as high as 6,000 feet.

  But it wasn’t all wilderness and mountain ridges; it crossed fields, highways and towns, many of which were only a few miles from the path drawing in hikers and backpackers attempting to hike it all in a single season. Maybe that’s what piqued her fascination. Or perhaps at the age of twenty-one, after finishing college, she simply refused to fall into the trap of spending the next forty years of her life tangled up in excuses and some job she hated only to accept adventure as a limited week long vacation.

  Go to college, get a job, get married, have kids and die.

  Nope. Not her. Not yet. She was young, fearless and free and there was plenty of time for that kind of ankle-weight behavior. Oh God, why hadn’t she listened?

  The blade drove deep into her gut, a sharp and painful twist of fate that not even she could have foreseen. She screamed in agony; her cries lost in the darkness of the woodland.

  If only they’d stayed in one of the towns they’d passed through on their way south from Maine. Would they have encountered others like him? Desperate and deranged people, changed by the event. Was that what had caused him to lose his mind?

  Even as he continued his tirade of stabbing, she questioned it all.

  The breakdown hadn’t occurred all at once nor were all the towns across America affected the same way. Some fared well, rallying together, protecting their own, while others simply fell apart.

  In the beginning the reports of chaos sweeping the nation, mass looting and confusion were rampant. Cities were the first to suffer, many destroyed in hours as planes crashed to the earth tearing through homes and businesses, and reducing entire communities to rubble. The power outages, loss of water, lack of communication and end of transportation presented a challenge that was far too great for government and emergency services to handle.

  Days turned to weeks, weeks to months and disarray soon became the norm.

  Already hiking the trail at the time, Joanna thought they’d find safety in the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains.

  How wrong she was.

  Traveling with her boyfriend Luke, and two close friends, Michaela and Chris, she couldn’t have imagined anything going wrong. Chris had already hiked the trail once in his life, and Luke had a career as a police officer.
They were armed and more than ready to deal with trouble, until trouble changed all that.

  Somewhere in the George Washington National Forest, they’d come across an oddball that went by the trail name, Maestro. He was a hippie-looking fella in his late twenties, carrying a banjo and looking as if he had consumed one too many magic mushrooms. He’d stopped by their camp and asked for a cigarette but none of them smoked. He’d continued on his way only to spook Michaela an hour later while she was cleaning herself in a river nearby.

  She’d managed to collect her clothes and Luke and Chris went to check it out but by then he was gone. That had been in the afternoon.

  After they retired to their tents for the evening, Joanna had heard someone rooting through the campsite. At first she thought it was a bear but then she heard a voice.

  “Luke. Luke, wake up,” she said shaking him.

  He rolled her way. “What’s the matter?” he asked groggily.

  “Someone’s out there. I think it’s that guy.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “Luke.”

  Before he could crawl out of his sleeping bag, she heard liquid being splashed, then a whoosh before a glow of light followed by Michaela’s scream.

  They scrambled out.

  Joanna could smell the blaze before she saw it, the smoke wafting over. Shouting and screams mixed together as she turned to see Chris and Michaela’s tent on fire and the same man nearby holding a gasoline can in one hand, and a knife in the other.

  They were trapped inside. Even as a hole appeared in the tent and Michaela stumbled out, the man drove a knife into her back three times then looked over at them.

  “Run,” Luke said to her as he tackled the lunatic to the ground.

  Joanna looked over her shoulder as she ran, then tripped on a large tree root. Her knees ground into the earth causing her to scream in pain. Behind her Luke was rolling on the ground with their attacker while Michaela lay motionless only a few feet away.

  Staggering to her feet, she was torn between running and going back to help but it was the sight of the man driving the knife into Luke’s stomach twice then looking her way that made her bolt. Her thighs burned as she barreled through the blackness of night, trees exploding into view. Her foot caught again and this time she rolled down a steep embankment, coming to a stop as she collided with a tree. She laid there for a minute or two before looking up and seeing the hippie pitch sideways and make his way down.

  Up and running again, tears streaming down her face, she regretted not listening to her father. If she’d stayed in New York she might have got into trouble but at least she would have been relatively safe, surrounded by family. Now there was no one. No one to hear her cries. No one to prevent the piercing blade from entering her back.

  Taken down, like a lion on a gazelle, she thrashed in the man’s grasp, begging, pleading for her life but that only seemed to excite him more. She scratched his face in one final attempt to claw at his eyes only to be punched so hard she lost consciousness.

  She came to as the knife entered her gut.

  Drained of strength to fight she looked at her attacker through tears, hoping her face might invoke sympathy and somehow stop the madness, but it didn’t. He continued his tirade of violence. She gagged at the stench of her own blood. The blade lifted again, a glint of silver, then searing pain.

  Gasping for air, she played dead hoping that might give her a chance.

  It did, enough to see him walk off playing a sickening tune on his banjo.

  Then she succumbed to the nothingness of death.

  1

  Destination: Damascus, Virginia

  Approximate time: 10:05 a.m.

  The nearby echo of a gun put them on high alert.

  Trouble was expected; it was a way of life now that it had been almost four months since the blackout. Only Beth knew the degree of danger lurking beyond Pisgah National Forest, as Landon had spent the better part of three months laid up in bed, resting his legs and trying to come to terms with a world without power, the plane crash, the death of his daughter and killing a man after the run-in with Cayden.

  In that time not a day had passed he hadn’t thought of home.

  He was desperate to see Sara and Max and yet worried sick at her reaction to the news that Ellie was dead. He’d have to relive it all again, and watch them suffer through the grief. It was pain he wouldn’t wish upon anyone, certainly not his family.

  But he had to get home. He had to protect them.

  Had Castine gone the way of Ryerson? Based on the little Beth had said, Ryerson had collapsed within a matter of a month. Looting. Desperation. Hunger. Disease. Ignorance on how to survive. All of it led to civil unrest and with it, people taking matters into their own hands.

  They could have survived together up on that mountain but for how long?

  With uncertainty looming on the horizon, conversation soon turned to leaving.

  What were the options?

  What was it like out there?

  Although Beth had been adamant in December about staying, four months had given her plenty of time to reconsider. It probably helped that he’d said it would be a shame not to hike the AT. Eventually she agreed. “Let’s get something straight, I’m not going to Maine because I want to, or need you, okay? I just think you don’t know the first damn thing about surviving out there and I can’t have that on my conscience, especially not after all the work I’ve gone through to get you back on your feet again,” she’d said.

  Landon stifled a laugh and nodded. “A lot of work for nothing.”

  “Yeah. Now whether I’ll stay when I arrive is another thing entirely.”

  “Of course.” He smiled back and she narrowed her gaze and jabbed a finger at him.

  He played along with it, letting her think that was the case. But even if she wasn’t willing to admit it, they’d grown fond of each other’s company in the short time and had become dependent on each other. Him, more so than her. In many ways he was indebted to her for saving his life. Had she not shown up that wintry night in December, he would have died out there alongside Dustin and Ellie.

  In the months after, his grief had almost destroyed him. There were moments he wanted to die if only to escape the misery of his thoughts. It didn’t help that there had been nights he’d seen Ellie in his dreams. She’d come to him to say that she was okay. It seemed as real as his waking state. But he wasn’t sure if it was real or just his mind trying to cope with survivor’s guilt. Why had he survived and she hadn’t? She had her whole life ahead of her. She hadn’t wronged anyone. It just didn’t make sense.

  As for Beth’s grief? Well, she had gone through hell too. He’d heard her sobbing into her pillow every night for several months. She must have thought he couldn’t hear because by morning she would act as if she was fine but he knew the truth. A few times he’d tried to talk about it but she shifted the topic. She was good at that. Other times she came up with reasons to avoid discussing her parents. Landon never pushed it. He figured she’d eventually open up.

  “So when are we leaving?” he’d asked.

  “The end of April — to avoid winter. The weather will be better. Though the nights will be chilly, probably dipping into the low thirties, but I’ve packed accordingly.”

  And pack she had. Her father had been an outdoor education director, and in preparation to hike the AT together, they’d already gathered an arsenal of gear — though she did have to do another run into town to collect more in the first few weeks after the blackout.

  In the evenings, snowed in, Beth had given him a crash course in the kinds of dangers they would face on the trail, how it would affect them physically and mentally, and what it would take to survive outside. He thought it was as simple as having a backpack, a shelter, something to eat and drink and a sturdy pair of hiking boots.

  Nope. For the stretch of terrain they were about to embark on, it relied on much more. They would require specific foods t
hat provided a good combination of fats, carbs and proteins and could last for 3 to 4 days. Gear needed to be lightweight, preferably under 20 pounds. They also needed 1 to 2 liters of water, plus ways of purifying it, cooking food, and staying warm and dry to avoid hypothermia. Resupplies were usually picked up in designated communities along the AT; Damascus would be the first stop for them.

  “Late April but I thought you said the end of March?”

  “No, the doc said three months minimum. But I want to make sure you’re ready. I can’t have you slowing me down,” she said.

  “Because you’re in that much of a hurry to make it there?”

  “No. I just…” She realized what she’d said and went back to preparing the gear. “All right, let’s go over this.”

  She’d laid everything out and had been through it countless times because she was sure she’d forget something. “Two Osprey Atmos AG 65 backpacks, two REI Co-op Magma 15 sleeping bags.”

  “Check,” he said, checking the list almost with his eyes closed.

  “Two 10-liter dry bags for the sleeping bags.”

  “Check.”

  “An MSR pocket rocket stove.”

  “Check.”

  “Two Platypus gravity filters, a life straw and some Aquaria water drops.”

  “Check. C’mon, Beth, we’ve been through this enough times.”

  “Just one last time.”

  And it went on like that through a list of headlamps, hiking poles, tent, fire starters, bear bag, food, weapons and so on.

  While the majority of thru-hikers began the northbound trek of the AT in late March to mid-April in order to avoid a time crunch and make it to Katahdin before Baxter State Park closed in October, they didn’t have that concern. It was more about making sure Landon’s legs were healed enough to handle the rigorous hike.