Apokalypsis (Book 2): Apokalypsis 2 Read online

  APOKALYPSIS

  Book Two

  Kate Morris

  2019

  Ranger Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Ranger Publishing

  Note to Readers: This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is not intended to provide helpful or informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk personal or otherwise.

  All rights reserved; including the right to reproduce this book or portions of thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, email: [email protected].

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  Author photo provided by J. Morris

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file

  ISBN 13: 9781073737543

  ISBN 10: 9781073737543

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the fans for making Apokalypsis, Book One a top ten best-seller on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Happy reading!

  Kate

  Contents

  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

  Life was precious. People used to say things like that all the time, but none of them realized how true that saying would turn out to be. Life was precious, indeed. Each person in the room had lost someone or everyone.

  They huddled near the fire trying to block out the nocturnal noises, the rain, the thunder, the other sounds that could be more than just an animal outside.

  Outside, the noises, every last one of them, seemed ominous now, even if they were probably just animals, creatures of the night moving around. Every little sound made people startle now. Every noise a potential threat. Every reverberation in the air a possible harbinger of danger. The howling wind caused the few remaining windows to rattle. It didn’t help the nerves.

  Then there was silence. Sometimes silence was even more frightening. Just straining to listen and wade through the silence was often stressful and nerve rattling. The not knowing was sometimes as bad as the knowing.

  A commotion, a racket of some kind banging near the garage caused even him to jump. Was it one of them already on their property?

  Chapter One

  September

  “Tell me your earliest childhood memory, Tristan,” Dr. Andersson requested. “Good or bad.”

  Tristan had to think about it for a minute. Good memory? No, that wasn’t gonna happen. Bad was easier. “I guess I was probably around three.”

  “Go on,” she encouraged like she always did.

  “I was hiding under my bed,” he explained. “Ralph was on a bender again. I heard him hitting her. I didn’t like that. Even when I was that little, I didn’t like it. I knew it was wrong.”

  “Do you have other memories from that young, any good?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, not really, Doc. Sorry, but it didn’t get good till I got out.”

  “Not even when you were sent away from your family, ordered by the state? You were…seven?”

  “Yeah, around seven. I was sent to live with my grandparents in Iowa,” he told her.

  “And did you like it there?”

  He shook his head and toyed with the brass tacks nailed into the burgundy leather sofa. It was a nervous tick, fidgeting. Being the kind of person who didn’t like weakness, Tristan stopped.

  “It wasn’t much better than home,” he answered. “I don’t think the apple fell far from the tree. My grandfather was just like my dad. They lived on a farm, though, and I liked that part. It was fall, so I remember helping my grandmother pick apples in their orchard.”

  “What was your relationship like with her?”

  “She was beat down by him, so she was just like my mother. Just like my mom was by my dad. Everyone in their paths were either beat down or literally beaten.”

  “Do you feel like you learned what it was like to be in a relationship from them?”

  “Are you serious, Doc? Do you see me in a relationship? No way. No thanks. I suck at it just as bad as them.”

  “Why do you say you aren’t good at relationships then?”

  “’Uh, ‘cuz it’s true,” he pointed out the obvious. “That’s why. I’ve tried the relationship thing. It doesn’t work out for me like it does for other people.”

  She tapped her blue pen twice on the tablet and then asked, “Why do you think that is? Are you abusive with women?”

  “What? No way. I’d never…No,” he ended firmly. Tristan swiped a hand through his hair and tugged at the short sleeve of his t-shirt. It suddenly felt too small, the air in her comfortably furnished office too thin. “’Cuz I’m messed up. ‘Cuz of the way they were. I don’t trust people. The only family I’ve ever had was the Army.”

  “But the Army sent you to me, so that relationship must need some work, too.”

  “They sent me to you for PTSD. I don’t have that.”

  “Yes, and we talked about that on your first visit,” she said quietly. “It’s not a diagnosis that makes you any different. It just means you need to learn how to deal with the feelings you have. Did you take my advice and start running again?”

  He offered a partial grin. “Sure. ‘Bout killed me, though. Pumping weights is one thing. Running? Damn, that’s tough.”

  “Then quit smoking cigarettes,” she said in a no-nonsense manner.

  “That’s not gonna be possible, Doc.”

  She shifted in her seat and crossed her other leg over for a spell. “Why not?”

  “Smoking helps me. I just get…stressed and stuff.”

  “Smoking isn’t helping you if you can’t run three miles. My kids run three miles by noon each day,” she said with a smile that he returned. “Now, you said, ‘stressed and stuff’. Describe that. Tell me about this ‘stuff’.”

  This was their seventh session. She now knew more about him than any other person, ever. For a shrink, she was pretty cool, though. The Army first sent him to counseling while he was stateside about a year ago, but it was a crusty old dude with a lot of judgment and a tweed jacket with elbow patches who drank soy mil
k in his coffee. Not a good fit.

  “Just stuff. You know, bad dreams, nightmares and shit.”

  “What else?” she prompted patiently.

  Dr. Andersson’s first name was Ophelia. She’d written books about childhood trauma, soldiers with PTSD, countless papers for college lectures, and had foster kids of her own. In Tristan’s opinion, she was the perfect person to work with for his problems. Not that he had any, but just in case.

  “Sometimes I get a little…jittery,” he said. “That’s all. No big deal, right?”

  “Describe that to me, feeling jittery,” she requested politely.

  “Just nervous.” That was the understatement of the year. The last kook gave him pills that were supposed to help him sleep the night through, but they just gave him wicked strange hallucinations. He’d flushed them down the toilet after three nights of crazy acid trips where the walls were melting, and he was seeing spooky shit coming down out of the ceiling. Also, waking up in a puddle of his own sweat thinking the end of the world was coming was way worse than the anxiety he sometimes got. Dr. Andersson hadn’t even mentioned prescriptions.

  “What brings that on? Anything in particular?”

  She was dressed in dark beige wool dress slacks, matching leather pumps, and a cream-colored silk blouse with a strand of pearls around her neck. She also wore a beige cashmere cardigan. They were in her house, a mansion if he ever saw one. It was more of a Frank Lloyd Wright style cedar home built overlooking a fantastic backyard, which was what her wide row of picture windows mostly faced from her office. The doc’s office had a side entry door and spots for two parking spaces on the gravel lot where he always parked. He knew she had a lot of kids, some fosters, but he’d never seen any of them.

  “Sometimes crowds,” he shrugged noncommittally. “Don’t like being in loud crowds. Unless it’s a party with some of my friends or something. Other than that, I don’t like big groups or loud noises, unless I’m the one making them with my gun. It’s hard to think straight when people are all talking at once.”

  “You should see dinnertime at my house,” she joked. “So, no large groups. What else do you think triggers these feelings of panic?”

  He hadn’t used the word ‘panic’ exactly, but Tristan didn’t correct her. She was right. Sometimes it did feel a little like a panicky feeling. Doc had zeroed in on that quick.

  “Sometimes noise.”

  “What kinds of noise?”

  He shook his head. That one was too hard to answer and probably too complex to understand. She wouldn’t understand that one. He didn’t even know why certain things bothered him.

  “Okay, we’ll come around to that another time,” she suggested. “Can we circle back to the time you spent with your grandparents in Iowa?”

  He nodded. “Sure, but there ain’t much to tell. I was only there for about six or seven months.”

  “Why was that?”

  “CPS came out, saw the way it was, moved me quick.”

  She removed her readers and let them dangle between two long, graceful fingers, the nails painted a pale tan. For an older woman, Dr. Andersson was attractive. She had dark blonde hair that she always wore in an elegant bun at the base of her neck.

  “They saw signs of abuse,” he said and sniffed through one nostril. Tristan really didn’t want to linger on his childhood. That wasn’t what did this to him, made him nutty or whatever the hell the clinical diagnosis was. He was pretty sure he knew what the diagnosis was, though: impulsive, PTSD, quick to start a fight, or finish one depending on the perspective, problems controlling anger.

  “Do you remember the abuse?”

  “Yeah, some of it, I guess,” he said and looked at her. She offered a single nod as if she wanted him to expand on that. “He was like my old man. A real prick. He’d get pissed if I just spilled some milk on the counter pouring it. Knocked me around. Bad temper. Drinker. It was all just the same as home.”

  “You were sent back to your parents in Ohio,” she said and made a note on her pad. “How long were you there before you were placed in foster care for the first time?”

  “Not long at all. They knew about his abuse. After my mom…you know after all that, I was removed from the house permanently.”

  “What did you think of your first foster family? You were there for two years, maybe a little less?”

  He pursed his lips and rubbed a hand over his bearded face. Then he rested his elbow on the arm of the sofa. “Not good. They were bad. Different from my old man but not better.”

  “How?”

  “They weren’t in it to help kids. They had eleven of ‘em in that house, including me. They were just raking in the government funding and used us for doing all the housework and yard work.”

  “But you were removed because you struck the husband,” she said, flipping through his juvenile record. “Multiple times, actually. He was hospitalized.”

  “Yeah, well, he was a prick,” he answered.

  “What did he do that would make a not quite ten-year-old boy hit a man with a baseball bat while he was asleep on the sofa?”

  Tristan hung his head. Then he chewed his thumbnail and stared out the floor-to-ceiling window near him at the green, peaceful forest beyond wishing he was out there hiking or target shooting or anywhere else really.

  “Tristan?”

  He didn’t answer but continued to stare. A flash of movement in the woods caught his eye, sparked his attention, gave him a reason to ignore her. Then he saw a swatch of red as someone ran from tree to tree and hid. His eyebrow arched, but he didn’t feel apprehensive about the person.

  “There’s someone in your woods,” he remarked.

  She calmly answered, “Probably the children. They play out there. Are you going to tell me why you beat a man with a baseball bat?”

  “Doesn’t it say in that file?”

  “No,” she replied. “It says you served less than a month in juvenile detention. Then you were released. Did they drop the charges?”

  “No, but it didn’t matter. He was arrested.”

  “Your foster dad?”

  He sneered and stared out the window again. “Not a dad. Just a foster prick.”

  “Sorry. That probably isn’t a good term to use when referring to a man you clearly didn’t like.”

  “Not everyone’s foster parents of the year like you and your old man, Doc.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she said. “It was one of the reasons my husband and I wanted to become foster parents in the first place.”

  “Couldn’t have kids?”

  She smiled. “No, we have six of our own.”

  “Six? Jesus. That’s a lot of freaking kids, Doc.”

  Dr. Andersson just smiled wider. “Yes, we both wanted a big family.”

  “I guess.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  Her tone had turned serious in a flash. Tristan was getting sick of her. She was nice, but he didn’t want to be prodded like a damn pin cushion.

  “Fine. Guess you ain’t gonna let up till I tell you,” he said, challenging her. She didn’t back down, just patiently waited. “He was molesting a couple of the young girls. I caught him. I knew something wasn’t right with them. There was just…something wrong. There was something wrong with them.”

  “And at nine you figured that out?”

  “Yeah, well, when you were raised in a house like mine, you recognized f’ed up shit like that. I saw him with the one on his lap one morning before the other kids came down for breakfast. He had his hands on her…well, you know where, Doc.”

  “But it would’ve taken a lot of bravery for a young boy like that to stand up to an adult.”

  “I might’ve been ten. I don’t remember.”

  “Tristan, what you did,” she said and paused. “My God. What a courageous thing to have done in a selfless attempt to save someone from such egregious torture.”

  She seemed to approve of or at least respect what he’d done. Nobody e
lse had ever acted like that about it. They’d arrested him. It eventually came out what the pervert was doing. Then Tristan was released from juvie. Nobody congratulated him. Nobody called him brave. He was sent to therapy, lived in a group home for nearly three years until another foster family agreed to take him in. They weren’t horrible, just absent most of the time.

  “Perhaps your future in the military was solidified in that moment. Have you ever thought of that?”

  He shook his head and glanced out the window again. This time, he saw two boys, probably around the age of ten fighting with stick swords. One had on a tinfoil hat shaped like something a knight would’ve worn, and the other wore a brown cape.

  “Helping people less fortunate than yourself?” she asked. “I’d say you were destined to be a warrior in the service of the innocent.”

  “I’m no hero, Doc,” he said and brought his fist to his chin and rested on his elbow watching the kids. “Don’t paint me that way.”

  “Your medals would suggest otherwise,” she said. “Let’s move on. Your grandmother? The one you lived with for a while in Iowa? What was she like, Tristan?”

  He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I dunno. Guess she was cool. But women like that…they ain’t gonna have an easy time of it if they marry men like my old man or my grandpa.”

  “What do you mean ‘women like that’?”

  “Passive,” he said. “She didn’t stick up for herself. She didn’t have a chance. Probably why the asshole chose her.”

  “And what sort of abuse did he dole out on her? Do you remember?”

  He took a deep breath and shot her an angry look. Tristan didn’t like talking about his childhood, and she knew that. They were just supposed to be working on getting him ready to ship out, get over the nightmares and all that. He needed to be out in the fray again.

  “Was it all verbal?”

  Tristan shook his head. “No, for men like him and my pops that’d never be enough. The degradation and insults were there, of course. Same as they bestowed on me. But it was physical, just like my old man. Assholes who liked hitting on kids and women. Till we get older and hit back. The women never do, though. That’s the problem.”

  “Yes, abusive men do tend to look for certain qualities in a mate. What kind of qualities do you look for when choosing a woman for a possible relationship?”