Endurance: Dawn of Ruin Book 4: (A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) by Stacey Upton & Mike Kraus

Author:Stacey Upton & Mike Kraus [Upton, Stacey & Kraus, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Muonic Press Inc
Published: 2024-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Coconino National Forest, Arizona

Day Twenty. 4:00 P.M. MT

Liam had spent the first full day walking with little more than faith that he was headed in a northerly direction toward the city of Flagstaff. With no visible sun, he was navigating by instinct more than anything else, though there was a little bit of knowledge involved. The feeling of warmth on his cheeks varied slightly during the day and helped to guide him. Also, he knew most arroyos followed a general north-south direction from his desert training. Liam clambered in and out of several of them during the course of that first day. Normally they would have been bone dry, barely wider than cracks with perhaps a few wisps of rugged vegetation clinging to life, but with the rain holding steady for nearly a week, each one had become wide interruptions, and the water in them had been at full flow, requiring all his survival skills to cross without falling.

The full waterways had two advantages, however. The first was the steady supply of water, and the second were the broken, burnt remains of the forests to the north borne downstream on the water that gave him firewood. Liam took full advantage of both, stopping every six hours to build a fire and boil three canteens full of water. The first for drinking, the second for cleaning his wounds, and the third to carry with him as he continued on. The rests were helpful for him as well, as the combination of his radiation sickness, tender, newly healing burns, and the bruises from the battering he’d taken from the river had left him far short of his normal boundless supply of energy.

Hunger was his other constant, a gnawing that sometimes ebbed as he got into a steady walking rhythm, but which came crashing back during his stops, and kept him from sleeping well at night. The water helped, as did the flavor and nutritional value of the pine needles he steeped inside each third canteen, but the hunger always returned. On his second night in the fire-scorched wilderness, Liam had used his all-purpose tool to drill two more holes in his belt so his pants would stay up. As he held the belt in his hands, rubbing the well-worn leather, Liam contemplated the stories of survival he’d read about in his studies to become a history teacher. How starving people throughout the ages, but especially the Russians during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, had not only boiled their leather shoes and eaten them, but had removed the wallpaper paste and eaten that as well.

“Not there yet,” he said, threading the belt back through the loops of his jeans. His belly gave a low growl, disagreeing with him.

Drawing his shirt above his chest, Liam could count all of his ribs with ease. He even fancied he could see the cracks in the three that had been broken by a group of aggressive teens in the early days of the disaster, back before his nephew had rescued him from nearly certain death.

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