Army of the Unsettled: A Dystopian Novel (Academy of the Apocalypse Book 3) Read online

  Army of the Unsettled

  Academy of the Apocalypse, Book 3

  K. A. Riley

  Contents

  Note from the Author

  Summary

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. Jumped

  2. Horror

  3. Cry

  4. Chased

  5. Outpost

  6. Move

  7. Zugzwang

  8. Defeated

  9. Story

  10. Zero Sum

  11. Evicted

  12. Helpless

  13. Arrival

  14. Charged

  15. Selected

  16. Debate

  17. Verdict

  18. Mind Appeal - Libra

  19. Body Appeal - Arlo

  20. Character Appeal - Ignacio

  21. Soul Appeal - Sara

  22. Treason

  23. Choice

  24. Escort

  25. Leisure

  26. Cheers

  27. Shostakovich

  28. Friends

  29. Explanations

  30. Haida

  31. Vultures

  32. Jeff

  33. Here

  34. Enough

  35. Devoted

  36. Climb

  37. Worse

  38. Witness

  39. Surrender

  40. Fight

  41. Better

  42. Voice

  43. Cavalry

  44. Revelations

  45. Home

  46. Mattea

  47. The End

  48. Kress Bonus Chapter - Arise

  49. A New Conspiracy Series!

  50. An Exciting New Dystopian Series: The Cure Chronicles

  51. Also by K. A. Riley

  COPYRIGHT

  © 2021 by K. A. Riley. All rights reserved for content text, characters, and images. No part of this book in its print, digital, or audio forms may be reproduced without the express written consent of the publisher and/or author, except for brief passages, which may be quoted in a review.

  DISCLAIMER

  Although certain geographic references may correspond with real places, this book is a work of fiction. Names, geographic locations, and events should not be associated with living people or with historical events. Any such resemblance is the work of the author and is purely coincidental.

  COVER DESIGN

  www.thebookbrander.com

  Note from the Author

  The Academy of the Apocalypse Series:

  1. Emergents Academy

  2. Cult of the Devoted

  3. Army of the Unsettled <—(You are here!)

  Dearest Reader:

  The events of the Academy of the Apocalypse series take place immediately following the conclusion of the Conspiracy Chronicles, a nine-book series make up of three interconnected trilogies.

  Although the Academy of the Apocalypse draws upon characters and references some events from the Conspiracy Chronicles, it does not require intimate familiarity with what’s come before.

  But it couldn’t hurt, right?

  Either way, it’s an honor to write for you, and I hope you enjoy getting to know these characters and exploring their world, which, let’s face it, could just as easily be ours.

  Summary

  In the days before Epic—the mysterious albino techno-geneticist—is expected to light the fuse for an all-out war, Branwynne and her Asylum have been given their first major assignment: track and report back to their teachers about the moving caravan of the Army of the Unsettled. What could be simpler?

  When the violence of a broken world hits close to home, Branwynne and her friends find themselves pulled into the bizarre and unexpected world of the Army of the Unsettled.

  In way over their heads, weaponless, and with no backup on the horizon, Branwynne and her friends are about to discover there’s a big difference between learning about the end of the world and surviving it.

  Dedication

  To Dmitri Shostakovich.

  To my mom, my cat, and to the rest of you unsettled folks and felines out there who just can’t sit still. Bless you all, keep moving, and don’t let anyone tell you when it’s time to stop!

  Epigraph

  “I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.”

  — Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1st century Roman philosopher)

  “People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”

  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

  I. Blithe Ignorance of the Future Cataclysm

  II. Rumblings of Unrest and Anticipation

  III. Forces of War Unleashed

  IV. In Memory of the Dead

  V. The Eternal Question: Why and for What?

  — Dmitri Shostakovich (Movement titles for Quartet 3 in F major, opus 73)

  Prologue

  Our mission was simple:

  Track and report on the movements of the Army of the Unsettled.

  Easy-peasy.

  There are seven of us in this particular reconnaissance crew: Me, the five members of my Asylum, and Matholook. (He might be my boyfriend. The jury’s still out on that one.) With Haida Gwaii—my white raven and telempathic companion—that makes eight.

  According to the instructions we were given, all we had to do was spy on a few outlying settlements, gather some intel from the Outposters, and catch up with the Army of the Unsettled, the slow-moving city of campers, tractor-trailers, monster cranes, RVs, and assorted construction vehicles roaming around in the deserts, ravines, plains, and prairies of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

  While we were doing that, Kress and her Conspiracy would be gallivanting off somewhere west of the Rockies on a rescue mission of their own at one of those creepy, techno-genetic Processor-prisons, this one in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park.

  (I recently discovered Kress and her friends have been on maybe a dozen or so, life-or-death search, rescue, and reconnaissance missions I was totally unaware of. Who knew teachers had lives outside of class?)

  So…they’re off being heroes, while my team and I are here, picking our way through a wasteland of steppes, sand dunes, scrub brush, scorched fields, crevices, and canyons—much of it littered with abandoned military jeeps, deserted tent camps, a network of broken fences and half-built walls of concrete and synth-steel, and countless drifts of sun-bleached human and animal bones pushed by the wind over time into long, sand-blasted knolls along the curved, cratered highways of melted asphalt and buckled blacktop.

  It’s broiling hot out here, and we have to keep taking these little potassium iodide tablets to help ward off the threat of radiation poisoning from the Atomic Wars that made so much of this country uninhabitable. We’ve been lucky so far. The thumb-sized Radiation Isotope Identifier clipped to the clutch lever of my Grip-bike has remained thankfully silent, so we’re pretty sure we’re safe.

  True to our intel, the settlements we’ve come across so far have been abandoned. It’s been the same each time: No Outposters. No Scroungers. No Survivalists. No Unsettled. No action.

  No fun.

  Despite the heat, the depressing desolation of this abandoned wasteland, the grainy particles of desert sand that keep finding their way into my underwear, and the apparent pointlessness of our mission, at least we get to cruise around at breakneck spee
d on our mag-powered Grip-bikes. That part’s been pretty fun.

  So far, we’ve explored four of the abandoned settlements we were told about.

  Made up of ripped tents and crushed aluminum sheds, they were small, temporary colonies—not much bigger than a city block—walled-in but with the security doors open, completely stripped of supplies, and without a soul in sight. Which is to say that we haven’t come across a single piece of useable information to bring back to the Academy.

  When the fourth and final site turned up empty, I called it a “Ghost Town.”

  Arlo, looking like the Grim Reaper with his hood draped over his head and his long-handled scythe gripped in one hand as a walking stick, squinted out over the bleak terrain surrounding the abandoned settlement and said, “More like a Ghost World.”

  What if he’s right? What if the war we’ve been training to survive has already happened?

  Granden—our history, government, and political science teacher at the Academy—taught us about an article someone once wrote called, “Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?”

  “The idea,” he explained, “is that wars don’t happen because of chance, mistakes, or misunderstandings. War is a choice. And the trick despots and dictators use in waging war is to make the people who are going to die in them forget that fact. War is never inevitable.”

  I guess that makes sense. Only, now I’m looking around and thinking, “What if they gave a war and everybody came?” What if that’s what happened here? What if there really is no one left?

  Half afraid of what we still might find but even more afraid we might not find anything at all, we resume our mission.

  Other than investigate the few scattered settlements, the only other thing we had to do was get close enough to one of the small, roving detachments of the Army of the Unsettled to gather intel about their movements but not close enough to get caught.

  How hard could that be, right?

  Just once, I’d like something that starts out simple to stay that way.

  Now, in the blazing hot desert of the deadly, war-torn American West, and only a few boring and completely unproductive hours into our “simple” mission, we’ve run into a potentially serious snag.

  Faced with our first challenge, I’m already wondering how many more surprises might be in store for us before this is all over.

  One thing is for sure: This particular “snag” is going to end in somebody’s death.

  Whether it’s our death or the death of the snarling, wild-eyed, knife-wielding girl who just sprang out of nowhere and attacked us, well…that remains to be seen.

  1

  Jumped

  The wild-eyed girl totally caught us off-guard.

  How the frack did she manage that?

  With stealth rivaling mine when I’m patched into Haida Gwaii and when I’m focused and at my best, this feral teenager—her hair a dreadlocked mess of thick, sun-bleached tangles and craggy crusts of dirt—seemed to come out of nowhere. It’s like she’d been buried in the red sand out here in the fields of jagged rocks and thorny scrub brush, just waiting for someone, anyone, to pass by so she could pounce.

  I think I read somewhere there are spiders that do that.

  It’s no wonder she got the drop on us. This girl has some seriously deadly, desert-animal camouflage. She’s one hundred percent, blend-into-the-background all natural. Everything about her—the weather-beaten pants, the dusty jacket, the beige scarf, her hair, the ruddy skin, and even her slate-gray teeth—it’s the exact color palette of the blazing, blistered desert.

  The girl can’t be more than seventeen-years old—same as me—but the exposed skin along her upper chest, on her wrists below the cuffs of her wrinkled jacket, and above the tops of her unlaced, mismatched brown boots is creased, ashy, and brittle, like someone planted the head of a teenage girl onto the body of her own slowly-decomposing great-grandmother.

  I have to give her credit for this little ambush. Sure. There are places to hide out here. There are endless dunes, a few clusters of smooth rocks, low fields of scattered foxtail agave and Mexican feather grass, the occasional shallow crevice or canyon, and a debris-covered highway not too far from where we are now with a few dozen civilian and military vehicles, stripped bare and sizzling in the sun and all lying on pretty much every angle imaginable (except for standing with their four wheels on the ground as I’m pretty sure the manufacturers intended).

  But my Asylum and I are supposed to be alert. We’re supposed to know better than to walk into an ambush. We’re supposed to be trained for combat, and prepared for all the obstacles we’re likely to face in our mission to restore peace and order to a suffering world of deeply entrenched corruption, sadistic divisions, and the most barbaric acts of violence.

  The fact that this girl appeared out of nowhere is bad enough. On top of everything else, she’s inhumanly strong and unhesitatingly fast.

  With the vortex of dust flying from her ratty clothes and clumpy, dirt-caked hair, she might as well be a human sandstorm.

  In less time than it takes for me to register her existence, she’s got me sprawling to the ground, Libra and Ignacio slamming into each other, Matholook on his knees with a pink-rimmed, baseball-sized lump already forming on his forehead, Sara laid out on her back and wide-eyed in shock, and the scuffed blade of a black-coated, twelve-inch Bowie knife pressed hard enough to Mattea’s throat to leave a thin red mark I can see from here.

  Arlo is the only one of us left standing, unharmed, and apparently not wetting his pants.

  With his face shaded by the deep hood draped over his head, he’s got one arm bent around behind him, his hand on the long wooden handle of his scythe. But he doesn’t draw the weapon from the quick-release straps that keep it secured to his back. Instead, he raises his other hand and asks the girl to stop. It’s a simple request, almost like he’s asking for a small favor from an old friend. From under his hood, his voice is echo-y, eerily polite, and unnaturally calm.

  For someone who looks like the Grim Reaper, he’s got an easy, pleasant way about him.

  “We’re just passing through,” he assures the girl. The ridges of scar tissue on his face glisten purple and crimson under the shadow of his hood. He digs his boot heel into the ground. The motion is almost imperceptible, but I know he’s bracing himself to launch an attack if things go too far. “We’re no threat to you or to anyone else,” he promises the girl.

  Which isn’t exactly true. If this girl is from the Army of the Unsettled—which I’m sure she must be—we are definitely a threat.

  But Arlo does what we’ve been trained to do: de-escalate, deflect, deflate. “Only when you’ve exhausted all options,” Brohn taught us at the Academy, “only then do you engage.”

  “There are enough enemies out there as it is,” Kress always adds. “Don’t go around making more when you don’t have to.”

  Good advice. And what happens when some wonky-brained stranger decides to make an enemy of us?

  This particular enemy, stone-faced and with frothy bubbles of saliva forming at the corners of her blistered lips, answers by pressing the long blade—serrated on one edge and razor-sharp on the other—a little more firmly to Mattea’s neck just under her chin.

  Mattea swallows hard and winces as the girl, her feet planted in a wide stance amid the rocks and wisps of dry vegetation curling around her ragged boots, gives Mattea’s wrist a little twist behind her back. Mattea is smart enough not to make any sudden moves since even the slightest flinch could startle this barking nutter and send the slicing edge of that knife…well, that’s something I’d rather not consider.

  After all we’ve been through together—the adventures and the endless and painful combat sessions in the Academy—I’ve never seen Mattea so much as shriek or complain. So to see her bottom lip quiver like this, to see a single tear pool in the corner of her eye and then go trickling down her cheek…It’s like Death, itself, has a blade to her throat and is about to claim one more
soul to take back with him to the Underworld.

  Not on my watch.

  Arlo, his hands still raised, turns his palms out to make sure the girl’s attention is firmly focused on him. At the same time, he gives me a quick glance and the tiniest nod of his head.

  Got it!

  Springing to my feet, I whip out my Serpent Blades. Brandishing one of the S-shaped weapons in each hand, I snap out the curved, retractable knives at each end. My eyes narrow into a squint as I prepare to launch a full-on attack against the leather-skinned girl with the menacing weapon pressed to my friend’s throat. The Unsettled girl has her dirty fingers clamped to the nylon-covered handle of her knife and a wild, “I don’t give a frack” look in her eyes.