Oasis Read online

  Oasis

  Joan De La Haye

  Published by Joan De La Haye, 2016.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  OASIS

  First edition. September 1, 2016.

  Copyright © 2016 Joan De La Haye.

  ISBN: 978-1536537581

  Written by Joan De La Haye.

  Also by Joan De La Haye

  The Race

  The Race

  Training Days

  Besieged

  Retribution

  Standalone

  Fury

  Requiem in E Sharp

  Shadows

  Burning

  Oasis

  Sliced and Diced

  Watch for more at Joan De La Haye’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Joan De La Haye

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Shadows

  Requiem in E Sharp

  Fury

  Burning

  The Race

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  Further Reading: Shadows

  Also By Joan De La Haye

  About the Author

  Johan, my big brother, thank you for all the great advice for my books on the best ways to kill people and battlefield medical practices.

  Eileen, my big sister, thanks for teaching me to read and giving me a love of the written word.

  Thanks, Mom – for everything!

  1

  The shelter was completed just in time. The President gave his goodbye speech and told us to save ourselves if we could. Tears streamed down my face as we took our most prized possessions, our pets, some plants, books to read, the usual gumph, and locked ourselves in the bunker. It was cramped, to say the least, but we were alive.

  Small, uncomfortable bunk beds lined the walls. There was an open plan kitchen and dining room area. There was even a TV and DVD player, with a collection of all our favourite movies. The bathroom was specially designed to recycle the water. Our air supply was filtered and reused. My parents had gone all out and spent their life savings building it. Money wasn't really something we would need to worry about with the world ending and all.

  We stayed down there for over a year. It’s amazing how irritating someone’s habits can get in a small confined space. There was many an occasion where I would happily have throttled every member of my family. It was basically like living in a tiny prison with my immediate family. Being the only single person with a couple of twosomes can also add to the frustration if you get my drift. Cleaning up dog shit every day is also not much fun. On the plus side, my brother and his wife were expecting their first child when we went in. Even with all the death and destruction going on above us, life was growing and flourishing in our little safe haven underground.

  By the end of a year our supplies were dwindling, and if we didn't want to starve, we would have to venture out and forage topside. The risks we would have to face outside the safety of our shelter were diminished by the thought of slowly starving to death. We’d seen too many movies about cannibalism. It never ended well for anybody concerned.

  Climbing out of the tunnel that led to the outside world was nerve-wracking. We didn't know what to expect. We'd had no contact with the outside world, no crackling radio signals, no emergency beacon. All we had were our over-active imaginations. We hoped that we'd find the world as we'd left it. That we'd been the targets of an elaborate hoax and that the year we'd spent down there in our hole had been a waste of time.

  What we discovered was far worse than any of us had imagined.

  Our house, or what was left of it, was little more than a burnt out shell. There wasn't much left of our small neighbourhood. No trees lined the streets, no grass, no flowers, just ash and sand. A desert had claimed our once lush, green garden. From the top of the hill, where the Botanical Gardens had been, I could see what was left of our once beautiful capital city, Pretoria, and as I looked around at the ruins, I realised that my apartment was gone. All my furniture and belongings were gone, and most of the people I'd known were now dead. Most hadn't been buried, there hadn't been much left to put in the ground or anyone to dig their graves. Most of the bodies had been incinerated, but those that hadn’t were left to be bleached by the never-ending blaze of the sun and eventually turned to dust, blown away by the relentless wind.

  We decided to stick close to the safety of our bunker and venture out in concentric rings for foraging purposes. We found a few tins of food at the small supermarket that had once been just up the road but was now a few sand dunes away. The store had, by some miracle, survived the initial solar flares. Sand was blown in by the wind, over the few standing walls and through every open gap it could find. We dug through the sand to find shelves and fridges and ice boxes. We'd shopped there since I was a little girl and seeing its walls broken down and burnt broke something in me. I screamed and howled like a woman whose only child had died. It was the first time I'd allowed myself to get hysterical.

  “It's okay. Let it out,” James said. His arms hugged me tight as I pounded into his chest with my fists.

  “It's not okay,” I screamed. “It's never going to be okay.” Sobs shuddered through my body as I tried to calm down. “We might be the last people on the planet. Do you realise that?”

  “Yes, I've thought about it,” James said, as he pushed me out at arm’s length and looked down at me from his 6ft 3inches height. “But I can't let that get to me. We've got to stay strong. We've got to think about little Steve and,” he paused, unable to look me in the eye. “Mary's pregnant again.” The revelation was a shock. “We have to keep it together for them. I need you to help me. Can you do that Maxine?”

  I nodded. James only ever called me Maxine when he was being serious. This wasn't a time for self-pity or weakness. This was a time to grow up and be tough. Time to be a survivor and put on my big girl pants.

  “Have you told Mom and Dad she's pregnant?” I looked up, squinting so I could see his face and not get blinded by the sun. He shook his head.

  “We're waiting for the right time. We don't want to worry them.”

  “But it's another life. It's something that should be celebrated,” I said, trying to sound as happy as I could. I was happy, but I was also worried about Mary. Stevie's birth hadn't been easy. James was a paramedic in the old world, before all of this, and his medical training came in handy, but he wasn't a doctor, and we didn't have all the medical supplies necessary for a safe delivery. We didn't have any prenatal vitamins for Mary to take. There was no way to know if the baby would be healthy. I tried not to focus on all the things that could go wrong. We had to accentuate the positive, even if there wasn't all that much to be positive about. We were alive, and that had to count for something, right?

  Carting back the few supplies we'd found at the store, James and I trudged up and down sand dunes in silence. We each had our own morbid thoughts to deal with. Being a survivor was hard work.

  I'd once thought that having a day job and a career was hard, but going to work and dealing with clients and an annoying boss was easy in comparison. I longed for the normal days when the only thing I had to worry about was which outfit I'd wear or if I'd worked hard enough for my clients or if a guy in the building liked me. No amount of therapy or training could have prepared me for this.

  “Look at what I found,” My mother stood next to our old Weber barbecue, looking rather proud of herself, as James and I walked through what ha
d been our garden gate, but was now little more than twisted metal that still hung from a piece of burnt concrete. She must have found it lying somewhere in the sand. Her white, long, cotton dress flapped in the breeze.

  “Where'd you find that?” James asked with a grin and touched the Weber as though it were some ancient relic worth a fortune in gold.

  “It was across the road ...” She frowned. “Well ... you know what I mean,” she said, as she gestured in the general direction of where the house across the road had been. “How it got there, I don't know.”

  “Are you sure it's ours?” I asked walking towards her and giving her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek.

  “Does it really matter whose it is?” James asked, looking at me with a sad, lost look in his eyes.

  “Guess not.” The thought of the old couple who'd once lived across the road not needing their barbecue anymore threatened my resolve to be strong. My mother put her arms around me and hugged me tight. The softness of her body against mine was comforting. I was grateful to be alive and that I wasn't completely alone. We had each other. Our family was still intact and in that there was hope. Perhaps there were other families out there going through the same thing, thinking that they were the only ones. And maybe, just maybe, by some miracle we would find each other and be able to rebuild together. Stupid and naive, I know, but a girl can dream. Can’t she?

  2

  Time passed slowly on our sand dune. We marked the days off on a calendar my father made and kept an eye on the moon cycles. There were times I felt as though we were the first people on the planet and had to rediscover fire. Modern convenience was a thing of the past. I was stuck in the dark ages. I missed my laptop. I missed being able to keep in touch with my friends all over the world with Twitter and Facebook, who were now most probably all dead. Those days of leisure were gone and replaced by days filled with uncertainty, thirst, and hunger. The thirst was the worst. My tongue constantly felt thick and hairy. I won’t even go into the headaches. Dehydration is a bitch.

  Mary interrupted my depressing thoughts by waddling up to me on my look-out perch on top of one of the dunes. She was out of breath. Climbing up a sand dune can be quite the work-out, even more so when you're pregnant. Her belly was growing with every passing day. There was now no doubt as to her having a bun in the oven. My parents had taken the news relatively well. We all voted that she'd get a bigger allotment of our daily food and water rations. It meant the rest of us would get less, but for the sake of the baby, we were willing to make the sacrifice. Mary tried to say no, but I could tell by the look on her face that she was relieved.

  It was strange to think that we were almost the same age. Only two years separated us. I'd decided to get a career - men and children could wait. She, on the other hand, had decided to get married and have babies. Now the chances of my ever meeting a man and settling down were pretty much as extinct as all the animal life on our planet. I’d never thought the day would come when I’d want to settle down and pop out babies, but now I’d never have the choice, and in some ways, I resented and envied Mary.

  As I looked up at her face, I realised how tough it must be for her, not knowing what happened to her own family. Her parents and sisters were probably dead. I felt terrible. I'd never even bothered to ask her if they'd had a survival plan of their own.

  The sounds of gunfire in the distance silenced the question before I could articulate it. In some way the sound was a relief, it meant there were other survivors, but the gunshots also meant we were in danger. Not good. Not good at all.

  Mary and I slid down the dune and sprinted for the safety of our bunker. Mary ran as fast as her belly would allow. James and Dad were waiting for us, rifles and shotguns ready. They must have heard the gunshots too. My father had the foresight to plan for most eventualities, including needing rifles, shotguns and pistols for either hunting or defending ourselves. He'd said that when the world as we knew it came to an end, governments would fall, and the few survivors who'd found refuge in caves and underground would be ruled by Darwin's law of survival of the fittest. Chaos and anarchy would be the order of the day. He’d clearly spent a lot of time obsessing over the apocalypse before it happened.

  He'd taught James and me to shoot. I'd been five years old when he'd given me my first shooting lesson with his pellet gun. By the time I was fifteen, I could outshoot any man. The members of his gun club had asked him not to bring me along anymore. I'd embarrassed all of them too many times. James had used his skills with a rifle in the army and been a sniper. Killing people for the government had taken its toll on him. When he left the military, he decided to save lives instead of taking them and joined the paramedics. Even after all these years, his training was second nature, and he was ready to defend his family and what was left of his home.

  James tossed me a rifle and a box of ammunition. I felt like an action heroine in a terrible movie when I caught the ammo. Mary joined my mother and little Steve in the bunker and would wait for us to give them the all-clear before they'd come out again. James, my father, and I hid behind the dunes and waited. It didn't take long. What looked like an army convoy of Jeeps and trucks was being pursued by men in rags. What struck me as odd was the fact that the men on foot were faster than the Jeeps, and the men with the guns looked to be losing the fight.

  They reached the centre of our small makeshift ambush. James recognised one of the men in the army convoy and informed us that we were on the armies’ side. It was the first time I was on any government body's side, and I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but past experience had taught me that trusting James’s judgement was the smart thing to do.

  We opened fire. But they didn't go down. It didn’t matter how many bullets we put in them, they just kept coming. One of the men in the convoy was pulled from one of the Jeeps. His screams ended abruptly when three of the men in rags fell on him. I didn’t want to think about how they’d silenced him. On closer inspection, the men in rags didn't look much like men. Something was decidedly wrong with the picture unravelling in front of me. I've seen enough horror movies to know that the surest way to kill something that doesn't seem to be entirely human is a bullet to the brain, preferably a double tap.

  “Shoot them in the head,” I shouted to James and my father over the sound of gunfire.

  Our bullets found their targets. Bodies fell, but the rest of them still didn't stop coming. I kept reloading and shooting, and they just kept coming. Self-preservation was apparently not something they believed in. A rational human being would have run away at the sight of the carnage and the realisation they'd run into an ambush, but not these guys. The bodies piled up and more tears ran down my face with each new corpse I added to the pile. It was so senseless. There'd been so much death already and killing even more people didn't make sense to me. I couldn't understand why they wouldn't run away or surrender or why they were attacking the convoy in the first place. The last bandit in rags fell to his knees and then fell face first into the sand. A shocked hush fell over us. No-one said anything or moved a muscle for what seemed like forever.

  “What the fuck?” James was the first to say something. His exclamation brought my father and me out of our trance, and we climbed out from behind the safety of our dune. My father nudged one of the dead bodies with his foot, checking to see if he was still alive. A piece of cloth covering the man's face was blown off by the wind. The sight shocked us all to the core. His face, if one could call it that, was blistered and burnt. He didn't have lips, and the tip of his nose was gone. Third-degree burns covered his face, neck, and probably the rest of his body. He must have been in agony. Another anomaly was the lack of blood. There was no blood seeping out of their wounds. What kind of people didn’t bleed when shot?

  The men in uniform kept their weapons trained on us. Their faces were weary and battle worn. They looked like men who had seen too much, who'd been to the edge of the world and seen nothing but an abyss staring back at them. James put his rifle down and hi
s hands up, but my father and I kept our guns trained on them. James may have trusted them but I sure as hell didn't.

  “Bull’s Eye?” asked a surprised looking army captain, sitting in a solar-powered Jeep, at the front of the convoy. He had a slight American twang mixed in with his South African accent. Bull’s Eye was James' nickname from his days as a sniper. “Is that you?”

  “Hey, Wolf. Good to see you're alive. The last time I saw you, you were stationed with the Americans in Afghanistan.”

  “You’ve got a good memory. And if my memory serves me well, we could have used your skills there.”

  “I’d had enough of all the bullshit. But that was then, this is now. Mind explaining what the fuck these things are?” James gestured towards the dead bodies littering the sand. James was never one for small talk.

  “You can fuck me with a pineapple if I know,” Captain Wolf said without any hint of a smile. “They’ve been attacking us at every turn. I’ve seen them rip a man’s throat out with their teeth. I didn’t even think that was possible. They're also faster than any man I've seen before. They manage to chase our Jeeps and keep up. It’s a mind fuck of note.” He shook his head.

  “Any idea what’s caused them to act like this?” my father asked, looking around at the dead bodies with a bewildered look on his face.

  “I think it has something to do with the radiation from the solar flares. It's done something to them. At least that's the only explanation I can come up with.” Wolf took a breath and ran his fingers through his short black hair. “We've been out here for a couple months looking for survivors, and till now the only ones we've found have looked like those ugly bastards. You have no idea how glad I am to see you and your family looking so well ... and normal.” Wolf almost sighed as he said the last two words. I was fascinated by his deep blue eyes and struggled to tear my eyes away from his face. He was the first man I'd seen in over a year, other than James and my father, and they didn't count.