Kade Read online

  Kade

  Book Fourteen of The Fallen World

  By

  Christopher Woods

  PUBLISHED BY: Blood Moon Press

  Copyright © 2021 Christopher Woods

  All Rights Reserved

  * * * * *

  Learn more about Christopher Woods at:

  http://www.theprofessionalliar.com

  * * * * *

  Get the free Four Horseman prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

  and discover other Blood Moon Press titles at:

  http://chriskennedypublishing.com/

  * * * * *

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Cover Design by Elartwyne Estole

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  Contents

  Kade

  This Fallen World: Kade

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Broken City

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Enforcer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Bastion

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Warlord

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Kade: Origin

  Part One

  Part Two

  About the Author

  Other books by Christopher Woods

  Connect with Blood Moon Press

  Excerpt from Book One of the Turning Point

  Excerpt from Book One of The Shadow Lands

  Excerpt from Book One of The Darkness War

  * * * * *

  This Fallen World: Kade

  Chapter 1

  I walked down the dreary street. Smoke hung in the air from the fires burning in the alleys. They led back into dark corners filled with the people less fortunate than those who resided in the buildings alongside.

  Before the fall, those in the street would have been rounded up and hauled away in vehicles to be incarcerated. Now, twenty years later, you’d find a better grade of people living in the alleys than the ones inside the buildings. Hell, maybe it wasn’t so different.

  Those who had inhabited the city twenty years ago were pretty despicable. I know this because I was one of the bastards. How things change.

  “Fresh fruit, mister?” a voice asked from my right.

  I glanced toward the young girl with an apron full of apples, then pulled one of the apples from her apron. As I polished the apple on the lapel of my long coat, I listened for the telltale buzz from my rad marker. There was no buzz, so I handed the girl a coin.

  “Wow,” she said. “Is that an Old World coin?”

  “They called ‘em quarters,” I answered. “Worth twenty scrip. Take that and hide it well. There’s a grocery store over on K Street. He’ll change it for you. He’s good people.”

  She pulled a bag from her pocket and dropped the rest of the apples into it. She handed it to me.

  “Mister, that’s ten times the worth of the whole bunch,” she said. “Thank you.”

  She slipped the quarter into a pocket and disappeared into the crowd.

  I continued my trek down J Street. I couldn’t spread too many of the coins I had found around too quickly. I had many more where that one had come from, but if word got out I was spending a lot of Old World coins, one of the Warlords would surely come down on me.

  It didn’t hurt to help the people around me when I could, though. Most of the good will I had around the city had come from similar acts. Those on the street didn’t have much, and when I helped them, they remembered. There will be a time I’ll need help, and there are quite a few people who will remember.

  J Street crossed Third Avenue ahead of me, and my destination wasn’t far down Third. There was a bar called the Strike Zone there. My contact said he had a man who wanted to meet me about a job. I tended to use the Strike Zone as a meeting place for potential customers.

  I had helped the owner find his kidnapped wife eight years ago, and he kept a booth unoccupied for me to use at any time. Good will is a priceless commodity in a fallen world.

  I came within view of the bar, and there were crowds of people waiting to enter. Some things never change. People search for escape from reality in any world, fallen or not.

  The doorman nodded as I strode past the line of waiting patrons, some of which yelled in anger.

  “Kade,” he said as I reached him. “Welcome, as always. Your booth is clear, and there is a guest awaiting your arrival.”

  “Thanks, Sam,” I said and walked into the noisy, smoke-filled room.

  I made my way across the large room, full of dancing men and women. The pounding music was some sort of digital music created in the Old World. Several years back, I had found a stash of Old World music discs. I had traded most of the discs to Jared McKnight, the owner of the Strike Zone. I had kept a small collection of a style of music called blues. I liked the Old World blues music. Most of the rest had been dance music of some sort or another. Some digital, some of what they had called country, R&B, and hip-hop. I didn’t care for most of those.

  The Old World music had brought crowds of people into the Strike Zone, and Jared had been making money hand over fist. Then the local Warlord had stepped in and began taxing Jared to keep his bar open. Now, Jared made enough to get by, but not much more.

  “Kade!” Jared’s voice boomed across the room.

  I looked to my right and saw Jared waving at me. He was pushing through the crowd toward me.

  “Mathew Kade,” he said with a huge smile. “A sight for sore eyes!”

  “How are ya, Jared?” I asked.

  “Could be better, but I’m still here.”

  “How’s Jenny?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “Really?” I asked with a smile. “Congratulations, my friend!”

  “Thanks, Kade,” he said. “It never woulda happened without you.”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  His laugh boomed across the room again.

  “True enough,” he said. “But you found her for me, Kade. I
can never thank you enough for that. And now, I’m about to be a father.”

  “You deserve it, man,” I said. “Take good care of ‘em.”

  “Will do,” he said. “I’ll be by your table in a few. Had a little episode I had to deal with. Someone didn’t like my reservation policy.”

  “I’ll talk to ya then,” I said and made my way to the conspicuously empty booth in the back.

  As I slid into the booth, I could see two people taking an interest in me. One was an older gentleman in an old suit. The other was a young man with a perpetual snarl on his face.

  I motioned to the older gentleman, and he made his way toward my booth.

  “Mathew Kade,” I said, with my hand outstretched. “I understand you have a job for me?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “My name is Cedric Hale. I need you to find my daughter. She disappeared three days ago, and I haven’t been able to find a single clue as to where she has gone.”

  I motioned for him to have a seat.

  “What made you search me out for this job?”

  “I worked for a company called Obsidian,” he said.

  My eyes narrowed.

  “I’m not here to let your secret out, Mr. Kade,” he said. “I know what you were. I know what happened to you. It’s amazing you were able to rebuild your psyche into something more than that of a drooling vegetable. Yet you did. You have the skills to find my daughter, no matter where she is.”

  “You know a lot about me, Hale,” I said, “and I’m not very comfortable with that.”

  “When the end came, I know you were still in the imprinter, and it scrambled your brain,” he said. “I also know you spent some time inside the Obsidian building, under treatment for serious mental illness. No one knows how you did it, Mr. Kade. Treatment did nothing and then, one day, you just stood up and became Mathew Kade.

  “I’m not here to blackmail you or any such nonsense,” he continued. “I just know what you were capable of before the Fall. If you have a fraction of that capability now, you can find my daughter.”

  A commotion on the floor caught my eye, and a bottle flew across the room. I came to my feet and caught the bottle in my left hand.

  For just a second, I was someone else. The young man with the perpetual snarl was staring into the cold, dead eyes of someone entirely different from the man who had been sitting at the table. His eyes widened in fear, and he ran into the crowd.

  After a moment, I sat back down.

  Hale was smiling. “A fraction.”

  I stared at him in silence.

  He placed a coin in front of me. I looked at it in surprise. It was a solid gold coin from the Old World. Probably worth ten thousand scrip now.

  “This is a down payment,” Hale said. “You find her, you get another. Return her to me unharmed, you get three.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you, Agent,” he said softly.

  I nodded.

  He passed me a folder, and I opened it and saw a picture of a pretty, young, red-haired woman. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties, and that could be bad. This fallen world is hard on young, beautiful people.

  Warlords could swoop in with their troops and steal people at will. They were Warlords because they held the weapons or tech that gave them control over those around them.

  There had been incidents for years. I had a great disdain for the term, Warlord. They were the ones who had found some advantage and abused it, for the most part.

  There were a few good men, such as Wilderman, who held the reins of fourteen city blocks. He taxed his people, but he also provided true protection to those who lived in his domain.

  Miles to the east, there was Joanna Kathrop. She held sixteen blocks and ruled with an iron fist. She had found a cache of weapons and provisions in her area several decades back. Her cadre of loyal soldiers backed her, and she had established her rule of that area.

  There were others, both good and bad. Most of them were bad. They ran single and double blocks. The Warlord who controlled the area where the Strike Zone was located wasn’t the worst, but he was far from the best.

  I turned the page and found the sector where Hale and his daughter lived.

  “You were under Yamato?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “He took down the Bishop a decade ago.”

  “Yamato’s always been fair,” I said. “Did you take this to him?”

  “He couldn’t help me,” Hale said. “She was traveling across the city.”

  “What the hell was she doin’ travelin’?” I asked. “Was she in a Caravan?”

  The Caravans were the only semi-safe way to travel the city. You paid for your ticket, and the Caravans paid a tax to run through the Zones.

  “She was going to the new college, set up by Kathrop, in a small Caravan run by a man named Drekk. He claims she never showed up for the last leg of the trip.”

  “Drekk.” I spat the word out. “I’ve heard of Drekk. If you want to travel anywhere, you have to use the accredited Caravans. You can’t use people like Drekk.”

  His face fell. “We didn’t know until it was too late. We aren’t rich people, Mister Kade.”

  I looked down at the coin still in my hand, then looked back at him with one eyebrow raised.

  “The life savings of both my family and the family of Seran Yoto, her fiancée.”

  “Poor would not be what I would call this, Hale,” I said. “There are people in this room who won’t see this much wealth in ten lifetimes. You dwell inside the Scraper. You have running water and electricity. Don’t ever try to pass yourself off as poor. It’s insulting.”

  He nodded.

  “Who set up the Caravan?”

  “I set it up through a man in the Scraper. His name is Denton. He owns a supply store on the bottom floor.”

  “Ok,” I said. “That’s where I’ll need to start. I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

  “But the Caravans don’t run at night…”

  “Some people are safer to leave alone, Hale. When you get back to the Scraper, tomorrow, I’ll have some answers for you.”

  “How will you cross three Zones tonight?”

  “I’ll walk, Hale,” I said. “Corporate Agents can take care of themselves.”

  “You haven’t been an Agent for twenty years.”

  “You’re right, there,” I said. “I’m something else, now. I’ll see you tomorrow night at your Scraper.”

  I stood and walked away from the booth. Jared was beside the bar, talking to several suits.

  “Yo, Jared,” I said. “I’m on a job for a few days. Ya can fill the table if ya need to.”

  “Be careful, Matt,” he said. “Last time, it took Jenny a week to patch you up.”

  “I’ll try, buddy.”

  I had a feeling about this one. Things looked bad for Maddy Hale. Drekk wasn’t known to be trustworthy.

  Life can be dangerous in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 2

  I started walking back up the Avenue toward J Street. There, I turned toward the west. I took a pack of Nic-Stiks from my pocket and lit one up. Cigarettes had been outlawed nearly fifty years ago, but they had made a comeback after the Fall. I wasn’t quite sure why I knew that.

  As I passed a group huddled around a trash can of burning refuse, I took the bag of apples I was still carrying and handed one to each person. I took the others over to several people huddled against the wall.

  “Rad-free,” I said and pulled my rad marker from my pocket and held it up.

  They all began eating what was probably the first fruit they had eaten in months. I nodded to them and continued west. I could travel that direction through one Zone, but I would have to bypass the next one by heading north. Anyone who set foot in Derris’ Zone would wind up eaten. A south bypass was also out of the question. I imagined Blechley was still pissed at me after I broke his collarbone and killed three of his lieuten
ants last year.

  My eyes roved across the street as I continued. Shadows darted along the left side. They thought I was an easy mark. My whole body was taut as I waited for the rush from behind. The shadows were the diversion, the true danger was from the rear.

  I heard a slight scrape, and I dropped to the ground, three feet to the right, crouched. They hadn’t adjusted, and they plowed through the spot where I had been.

  “You get one warning,” I said. I flipped my wrist, and my straight razor snapped open in my right hand. “Walk away or die.”

  My voice was calm, and I waited for a second. Then I stepped forward, toward the two men in the street. They turned and fled. Nine out of ten fights are avoided by the lack of fear someone senses in their prey. The straight razor was for the tenth.

  A familiar voice came from the darkness. “One of these days, they’re not gonna run, Kade.”

  “True enough, Wilson,” I said. “What are you doin’ out here?”

  “The boss sent me to back you up.”

  “And why would Teresa do something like that?”

  “She heard you were on the job and remembered the last time. She kinda likes you for some odd reason.”

  I chuckled. “It’s my charming personalities.”

  “Probably,” Wilson Poe answered. “Either way, I’m here to back you up. I can go with you or follow along behind, but I’m coming.”

  “May as well come with me,” I said. “Keep me from talkin’ to myselves.”

  Wilson walked out of the dark. He was six feet tall and built like a tank. I didn’t foresee anyone wanting to tangle with Wilson. He didn’t stand out at night because he wore black pants and a black sweater and his skin was almost as dark as his clothes.

  “You could try to blend in with the night a little better,” he said. “Who the hell wears a tan trench coat and walks the streets at night?”