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  Nine Years After

  LeRoy Clary

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Nine Years After

  1st Edition

  Copyright © 2020 LeRoy Clary

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover Design Contributors: Bigstock.com

  Editor: Karen Clary

  Acknowledgments

  Good books are written by several exceptional people, all of whom have my thanks. This group sets my limits and helps establish the foundations for my books, keeping me on track as they progress.

  My beta readers, Lucy Jones-Nelson, Laurie Barcome, Paul Eslinger, Dave Nelson, Sherri Oliver, and Pat Wyrembelski, all found lots of things for me to correct, and to improve. Thank you all. I want to publish the best books I can, and they are certainly better with your help.

  My wife puts up with me and deserves extra credit for her help with the covers and her ideas—and she gives me the time to write.

  And my dog, Molly. She sits at my feet and watches me write every day.

  Books by LeRoy Clary

  The 6th Ransom

  Blade of Lies: The Mica Silverthorne Story

  Here, There Be Dragons

  The Last Dragon: Book One

  The Last Dragon: Book Two

  The Mage’s Daughter Series

  The Mage’s Daughter: Discovery

  The Mage’s Daughter: Enlightenment

  The Mage’s Daughter: Retribution

  Dragon! Series

  Dragon! Book One: Stealing the Egg

  Dragon! Book Two: Gareth’s Revenge

  Dragon Clan Series

  Dragon Clan: In the Beginning (short introduction)

  Dragon Clan #1: Camilla’s Story

  Dragon Clan #2: Raymer’s Story

  Dragon Clan #3: Fleet’s Story

  Dragon Clan #4: Gray’s Story

  Dragon Clan #5: Tanner’s Story

  Dragon Clan #6: Anna’s Story

  Dragon Clan #7: Shill’s Story

  Dragon Clan #8: Creed’s Story

  TABLE OF CONTENT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Contact Information

  Contact LeRoy Clary at [email protected] or message him on Facebook at: LeRoy Clary's Facebook Page if you have questions and/or suggestions

  You can “follow” LeRoy Clary on Amazon by going to: LeRoy Clary's Author Page. Amazon will then notify you about new releases.

  If you’d like to receive earlier notification of LeRoy Clary’s latest novel releases, books in progress, or other cool stuff, please sign-up for his mailing list by going to: leroyclary.com. Your e-mail address will never be shared, and you Mayfield unsubscribe at any time.

  Author’s Note: Just a quick mention that there are thousands of books about the day. There are almost that many which take place generations later. However, few of them tell of the years immediately after. I decided to try that, in a series that is set in the same universe, but each book is a stand-alone story and can be read in any order. It turned out to be a much larger task than anticipated, but I like the results. Hopefully, you do too.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Danner and Mayfield, report to the conference room, post-haste!” Blared the crackly, old, all-call speakers.

  “What’d you do now, Danner?” A semi-friend snickered.

  The timing had caught me bluffing a poor poker hand. We didn’t use money in Deep Hole Sanctuary. We gambled minutes of work-related duty, usually those tasks most distasteful. I was going to have double duty for a few days after a bad run of cards, it seemed.

  I tossed my cards to the center of the table and groaned as if the all-call announcement had forced me to give up a sure winner. None of the other four players believed my act.

  I said flippantly, “The mayor probably needs my advice on how to run this place more efficiently.”

  They were still laughing as I stepped into the passage and paused after closing the door to catch my breath. The words, post haste bothered me perhaps more than they should have. In the nine years that the three hundred of us had lived in the underground sanctuary complex, there had never been a summons that included them. The norm of the seldom-used all-call system was a polite request, however, even those were few and far between. More normal was the simple mention of a desire to others that the next time a person encountered so-and-so, tell them . . . whatever.

  With only three hundred total inhabitants, that system usually worked well. As I walked down the concrete tunnel, I held my head high, ignoring the few inquisitive looks and questioning stares from those I passed in the hallways, and worried as I walked.

  “Breaking the rules again, Danner?” Mayfield hissed into my ear as she exited a side tunnel and fell into step with me because she had been the other person ordered to report post haste.

  “Nothing they can prove,” I said hopefully. But inside my mind, I found there was zero lately that I’d been remotely involved in that would warrant such a public and ominous summons.

  Even more puzzling was the inclusion of Mayfield to report with me. She was the most respected of those we called the second generation. While technically, both of us had been born before our parents had hustled us to safety in the underground warren, we had never been adults outside. Mayfield was the irritating sort of acquaintance who always raised her hand first in class or shushed the whispers of other students. Teacher’s pet.

  I sometimes referred to her as Princess, a name that tended to ignite arguments between us. We had different friends we associated with, different interests, and seldom saw or interacted with each other. However, as we had grown into our teen years, she had morphed from tall and awkward, to lanky and beautiful. She’d caught me admiring her more than once, and there were times I felt her eyes on me. Our bickering had turned more formal and occurred less often.

  We approached the conference room warily. Our pace slowed slightly as if b
y mutual decision. It was the largest open space in the warren we called Deep Hole, the only one that could accommodate all three hundred of us residents at the same time, although that had only happened a few times. The room was easily forty feet by seventy, with a raised dais at one end where speakers sometimes addressed those of us not on critical chores. Carved from solid granite, the room was said to be the most secure in an attack.

  We made the final turn and both of us noticeably slowed our pace even more. She said, “You’d better not drag me into anything you’re up to.”

  “Whatever it is, I’ll take the blame, Princess.”

  “Danner, I’ve told you not to call me that.”

  “You said, not to call you that in public. We are in semi-private, right? Do you see anyone else around?”

  That earned me an elbow jab to my ribs just as I reached to pull the door open. She stepped ahead. I followed.

  Inside the four most senior and powerful people in Deep Hole were sitting at a larger table, which was really three tables set in the shape of a large U. A pair of straight-backed chairs faced them, obviously meant for us.

  The graying mayor had been retired army at one time, a general, they said. He nodded a stern greeting and said, “Lock the door behind you, please.”

  It has a lock? I turned and found a sliding bolt as large in diameter as my thumb. I could almost swear it hadn’t been there during my earlier visits, but the doors were always opened wide, as were almost all of them in the warren of tunnels and rooms that made up the sanctuary, so I wouldn’t have seen it. The lock closed with the finality of iron striking iron in a silent room that seemed to echo each sound.

  “Be seated,” the mayor said, more of an order than politeness. He had reached an age where his skin was thin, his former erect stance a stoop, and his voice like grit.

  I followed Mayfield and took the other seat while studying the grim faces watching us. It was not only me who was in trouble.

  We recognized them all, of course. While dressed in the same recyclable clothing we wore, one had been our military instructor, not the mayor, but a man we called Sarge, who had once been a Sargent instead of the paunchy, red-faced old man he was now, the result of a lingering illness that had stolen his vitality.

  The third had been our classroom teacher for several years. She knew my tricks and put up with no-nonsense. The last of the four was a much younger woman, perhaps forty-something, who had assumed the position of sanctuary administrator, choosing which of us were best suited for what jobs and directing us to perform them. She was perhaps the most formidable and the one able to cause us the most grief as she could change our daily work to cleaning the algae tanks or something equally distasteful.

  Neither of us greeted the four stern faces. We sat silently, waiting for the ax to fall—whatever the problem.

  “Relax,” the mayor muttered as if trying to avoid speaking loudly in the quiet of the empty room, which made the meeting seem more intriguing. Probably the opposite of his intention. “You’ve done nothing wrong . . . this time.”

  Both of us had a glass of water and sweet rolls on the table between us. I nibbled a corner of a roll, found it too salty, and washed it down a suddenly dry throat with half the water in my glass. Mayfield sipped her water and left the rolls alone. Their wary eyes watched our every move like a greedy pickpocket in the presence of the wealthy in the stories we’d heard as children.

  “I’ll begin, as you both are probably feeling uncomfortable,” the woman who had once been our teacher said. She peered hard at us. “To start, I have a question for you, and I’ll jump right in with it. How many babies were born last year?”

  I responded with a shrug of confusion at the unexpected direction of the question—and the meeting. “There was Peggy, who works in the kitchen, not Peggy the electrician. She had one.”

  “And?”

  Mayfield and I exchanged puzzled looks. I couldn’t think of any other babies. She seemed as confused by the question as me.

  Our ex-teacher had aged considerably since I’d taken the time to look closely at her. We all had, but she had been mid-to-late forties when we were in school and the intervening years hadn’t been kind. She was thinner, her face drawn, and her voice sharper than ever. “That is one of the pair of reasons we are gathered here today. Peggy did indeed have a baby boy. Of the three hundred of us huddled in this underground bomb shelter, about half are female, and two-thirds of those females are of child-bearing age. That’s over a hundred young, fertile women. One baby was born among all of them. That’s not natural.”

  We sat in silence. I didn’t know about Mayfield, but I sat up a little taller and paid attention as I took another sip of the water. Our old teacher held my attention, just like when we were younger.

  While waiting for her to continue, I ran the question and answer through my mind and wondered why she had started with that. They couldn’t pin the lack of new-born children on me. I had done all I could to help alleviate a problem I hadn’t known existed. I forced a smile to remain inside at my irreverent thoughts.

  Our teacher waited for us to digest that morsel, and continued, “We had seven people in Deep Hole die last year, more than most years, but not a concern as that was an unusually high number due to an accident that took three at once. Do you need me to work out the math for you?”

  We sat quietly, neither of us answering, but I shook my head in confusion. The entire meeting so far was odd.

  She said as if still teaching a math class, “How many of us will there be in another nine years if the trend of births versus deaths continues? How many women will then grow older, beyond the age to bear children before having any?”

  Nobody in the room spoke. In the silence, my mind added one person to our population—then subtracted seven from three hundred. I couldn’t work out the exact numbers in my head for the answer to the question she had asked, but I saw the endgame and it was not good. Our numbers were dwindling, and as I mentally looked back to the year before that, the numbers were much the same. Two babies, and five deaths as counted on my fingers. Still a loss in the overall population.

  Another thought came, unbidden. Were they going to order Mayfield and me to breed? Is that what things had come to?

  “Why?” Mayfield asked meekly as if she shared my idea and avoided looking at me. “What’s happening?”

  In my mind, I glimpsed a future colony of feeble old people living in the tunnels, a few more dying off each year until none remained. No children were playing in the nursery. It was not a pleasant thought, in fact, the more I considered our future, the more scared I became.

  Our teacher broke my trance. “That does not even take into consideration our total number is far too small to prevent interbreeding and the additional problems that the situation will bring. The gene pool is simply too small to be viable for survival. In short, our future is bleak, and the end is nearer than we like.”

  Mayfield said, “So, even if there were more babies, an unsolvable problem still exists.”

  The mayor turned to his left and with a flick of his finger, turned the meeting over to the youngest of the four, the administrator who assigned the work tasks to each person. Her name was Heather, an unlikely name for a woman who was almost a dictator and who was universally disliked.

  She hesitated, then plunged ahead, “As a group of four responsible leaders, we have selected the two of you for several reasons. Wait, we’ll get into what it is we selected you for, later. Danner, what do you remember about being outside?”

  The question came across as sincere, and I took a moment to reflect before answering with honesty instead of sarcasm. “The sky, mostly. How big it was out there. Trees and bushes and green grass. Life everywhere, I guess.”

  Her eyes went to Mayfield’s. “And you?”

  “Sort of the same. But the feel of the wind and especially rain on my skin, along with all the smells. That sort of thing.”

  “You were both seven years old when we fled
the missiles with your parents to come here. As high-ranking military, government employees, and politicians, they and their families were evacuated, as were thousands of others to shelters like Deep Hole, a name I despise but have accepted to appease you younger people. Back to the subject at hand, seven is a unique age for what we have in mind.”

  Sarge cleared his throat. “Let’s get on with this BS.” He coughed and sat up straighter as if it pained him to do so. “Here’s the straight dope in a nutshell. There were a few older children who came down here with us, all of them over ages eleven, twelve, or more. They are now either married or hold irreplaceable jobs in our organization. It would be difficult to remove any of them for the task we have in mind.”

  “There were also younger ones,” Mayfield interrupted, drawing stern notice from Sarge for talking out of turn.

  He gave her a warning glance, then continued, “There was an age-gap for the six children who were younger than you. All of them were under four, so our position is that they don’t remember what the outside world is like. You do. That’s important.”

  He was concentrating on “outside” in eliminating those not selected, and coldness crept into the room. A decision had been made about us and we had no input. Without turning my head, I shifted my eyes to reach out to Mayfield. She was stark white, sitting as still as death.

  My mind revolted at the mention of death. Her death. My death. But it quickly reverted to the one word, outside. Sarge was waiting for us to mentally catch up with him. Meeting his eyes again told him to continue.

  “You’ve both been out there. You remember things, probably a lot more than you believe. Besides, those who were younger than you are still too young to go. We cannot send a ten or twelve-year-old on a mission as we have in mind. As already stated, those older cannot be spared. Through no fault of your own, the two of you are uniquely qualified by remembering living up there and that you have not yet become indispensable in your work here.”