The Last Pilgrims Read online

  The Last Pilgrims

  Book 1

  by

  Michael Bunker

  Published by Michael Bunker at Smashwords

  Copyright 2012 by Michael Bunker.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews, without the written permission of the author.

  To keep up with the latest on The Last Pilgrims saga:

  www.lastpilgrims.com/

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  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook 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 return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fiction Disclaimer:

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are products of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  I hate to make this come across like an Academy Award speech, but this book required a lot of helpers, who all deserve mention. There is no way I will remember everyone, and that is to my shame. I want to thank all of the hundreds of readers, commenters, and reviewers who helped with their comments and advice in the earliest creative stages of The Last Pilgrims. More than anyone, I want to thank Stewart for all of his help, support, artistic input, and encouragement. I want to thank David S. for his advice, support, and leadership. I want to thank all of my editors: Danielle, Shannon, Carol, Stewart, David, Mihai, Billybob and Natasha. Special thanks go to Pat Tolbert, Chad McCarthy, and Kris Dahl for their support, and to the dozens of other loyal supporters on IndieGoGo.com for their donations to the project. Thanks to my friend Herrick Kimball for once again being willing to review the book for me, and to all of you other reviewers as well. To everyone in our Agrarian community here in Central Texas for your support and loyalty—you are the real Vallenses.

  Special thanks to my family, for allowing me the freedom to spend the thousands of hours that go into this sort of endeavor; and especially to my wife Danielle for her never-ending patience and long-suffering with me. I love you all.

  A shout-out to all of you “Lasties”, who believed in this project from the beginning and never failed to be enthusiastic about it. Thank you for staying along for the ride.

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  “Do you fear God’s wrath, Phillip?”

  “I know that, if we let these people be slaughtered by Aztlan, I’d have every reason to fear it.”

  “Will the Vallenses fight now?”

  Phillip shook his head. “No.”

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  Prologue

  In the two decades following the collapse of the imperial Western powers, and the destruction of the industrial system, much of the medieval system of monarchy and aristocracy had reasserted itself throughout the world.

  The collapse of the unviable and unsustainable world system had watered the earth with blood in a way that very few could have imagined, and only 20 years later, most of those who had lived through the crash now wondered how that system had managed to last for over 200 years.

  Across a massively depopulated continent, ancient superstitions and idolatries multiplied as the new monarchs adopted Napoleon’s idea that a monolithic state religion, even if it were a false one, was necessary to the peace and security of the realm. The freedom to practice one’s own religion, or to practice no formal religion at all, was rare, indeed, following the collapse. North America had come to resemble Old Europe in many ways.

  Although the most ancient of motivations—greed, avarice, and covetousness—were behind most of the persecutions and genocides of this new era, these were almost exclusively carried out under the pretext of religion. The Bishops and Cardinals, much as they had done in Europe six centuries earlier, had multiplied like locusts across the land and served the more predacious monarchs as willingly as they did their own bellies.

  Even though much of what was once the United States had been conquered, the land and people absorbed into the fiefdom of some newly formed kingdom or another, large areas of the country—usually the wildest and most inaccessible parts—were classified as “ungovernable”. Many of these areas were still farmed by ‘plain’ peoples and sects. Akin to Amish or Mennonites of the past, these peoples universally rejected absorption into the realms of those regal idolaters who intended to force the practice of predominantly ceremonial religions, contrary to their own beliefs, upon them.

  The Vallenses, one of the largest and most well-known of the ‘plain’ sects in the South, were branded as heretics by the religious authorities in order that the King of Aztlan, as he greatly hoped, could either subjugate them or remove them from his Kingdom. Due to the rather inhospitable climate, the relative inaccessibility of the region, and active militant or “insurgent” activity, the King had heretofore met with little success in bringing the Vallenses under his domination. For these reasons, most of Central Texas and the Hill Country were considered by the King of Aztlan to be in open rebellion against his rule, and persecutions and martyrdoms were not uncommon.

  The Vallenses considered themselves humble and obedient servants and an exceedingly peaceful people. They only wished to farm their lands, raise and nurture their families, and serve one another in humility and meekness. Their ‘crime’ was that they desired to do these things outside of the predatory control of people with whom they had nothing in common.

  The Bishops of New Rome had, over the intervening decades, sent missionaries and emissaries to the Vallenses in order to receive their voluntary submission to both the King of Aztlan, and the accepted religion of the realm. Though they met with no success, the missionaries were always treated well by the plain people, and they had been assured that the Vallenses desired no Kingdom in this world, and that they sought only to be helpful and productive citizens in the realm. However, they had no intention of abjuring their religion or the free practice of it.

  Though some of the Vallenses’ co-religionists from former urban areas and regions more easily controlled by New Rome had capitulated and had brought themselves and their parishioners under the umbrella of the capital, the Vallensian people of Central Texas and the Texas Hill Country had resisted any amalgamation into the Kingdom and religion of Aztlan.

  Of late, the duty and obligation of the subjugation of the Vallenses had fallen to the Duke of El Paso, an ambitious man who had been a drug kingpin prior to the collapse. The Duke intended, by whatever means necessary, to foully and finally bring an end to any resistance in Central Texas.

  The Vallenses, led for some 30 years by Elders, elected from among themselves, foresaw the evil that was coming—both the collapse and the global disasters that followed. They believed that the Providence of God had guided them to their lands and to a way of life that left them mostly unharmed and untainted by the collapse of what they called ‘The World System.’ They were thus largely unaffected by the fall of the system of commerce, industry, and society that ruled and reigned, they believed, via mammon prior to the collapse.

  The Vallenses believed that the lamp of the apostolic faith continued to burn among them, and they did desire to be a light to the world in the darkest of the last days of the epoch.

  And, the Vallenses were not the only ones who rejected the rule of Aztlan. Opposition to
the King of Aztlan, who now reigned from his capital city of New Rome in the Sangre de Christo Mountains of what was once northern New Mexico, had united many militant bands of ‘freemen’ who, like the plain people, would not bow to either nearby prelates or distant kings.

  Among the Vallensian low-rolling hills, valleys, and plains, there were free men of independent mind and action. Some of the militia groups in Texas actively traded with the Vallenses, and supported their freedom of lifestyle, worldview, and belief. New Rome considered the militias to be terrorists and branded them “insurgents.”

  The relationships between the pacifistic Vallenses and the militia were complex. The official position of the eldership of the Vallenses was that they did not condone or support militia activity—even in their own defense. Some of the Vallenses, though, openly traded with, and often materially supported, the freemen against the laws of New Rome and the desires of their own leaders. Thus, relationships were often tense and strained. The plain people desired peace and tranquility and rejected violence in pursuit of those aims. Most of the plain people believed that the violent actions of the militias, even if they were defensive and measured, brought more attention and persecution upon all of the people of the region. Their own history provides ample evidence in support of this view.

  Only a decade earlier, in the midst of the coldest days of a very cold post-collapse winter, a great tragedy befell the Vallensian people. Months prior to the tragic massacre, a handful of Vallensian traders were returning to their homes via the Old Comanche Road, when they were captured by a mounted unit of Atzlani soldiers under the command of Santos, a lieutenant in the service of the Duke of El Paso.

  The Duke, answering a call from the King of Aztlan and the religious leaders of New Rome to purge the land of heretics and rebels, had sent out raiding parties in hopes of capturing Vallensian traders. New Rome hoped to gain from the captured men intelligence about the militias, after which the Vallenses would be executed as an example and warning to the rebels. The traders were dragged from their wagons, tied up, and hauled over 80 miles to San Angelo, now a frontier town amidst the vast and virtually ungovernable western expanse, where they were burned at the stake in the city square.

  In response, a unit of militia riders stole into Santos’ camp at night, taking the Aztlani commander hostage, and killing all of his entourage. Santos was carried back into San Angelo by night and left impaled on a pike not far from where the Vallensian traders had been burned.

  The Duke of El Paso, offended and enraged (Santos had been his brother-in-law), and seeking to appease both the King and his own wife, had ordered a large army to march on a Vallensian colony to the East of San Angelo. This was an unprecedented attack, both in type and in scale. Prior to this event, the Aztlani leadership had been cautious and measured in their attacks, especially when those attacks called for them to move a large body of men across vast distances, traversing areas under nominal control of the freemen militias, without supply lines or pre-positioned material.

  On their journey, the army was harried by freemen scouts and raiders who killed several of their troops. Nonetheless, the army arrived mostly intact and had stormed suddenly into the innocent Vallensian colony, hoping to kill every man, woman and child. Those Vallenses not killed in the initial attack fled eastward into the freezing night, carrying their young and their old with them.

  The fleeing Vallenses—most without winter clothing—made it to the rolling hills and valleys of Central Texas, where many of them froze to death over the first few nights due to lack of food or shelter. Along the path of their flight, over 100 people—mostly children, the elderly, and the family members who would not abandon them—were found lying on the ground, dead from hypothermia, babies in the frozen clutches of their mothers, and aged couples dead in icy embraces. This massacre had a polarizing effect on many of the free people of the region. Most Vallenses believed that the royal reprisal, though monstrous and murderous, was the result of the rash actions of the militant freemen. Others, including free traders, believed that the colonists had suffered because of their unwillingness to defend themselves. They had made targets of themselves, and they had suffered for it. In the years that followed the Winter Massacre, the Vallenses had attempted to persuade the militiamen with whom they had contact to be more cautious and circumspect in their responses to Aztlani tyranny. “We do not want to pay for the vengeful notions of freemen honor,” they would say.

  The free militias, on the other hand, increased their numbers, their training, and their intelligence gathering. Keeping the memory of the Winter Massacre alive in the minds of innocent people became one of their greatest recruiting tools.

  There were other incidents and, as time passed, tensions grew.

  The King of Aztlan, from the moment he had assumed power, desired absolutely to rid himself and his realm of all heretics and insurgents. He had on many occasions requested, even demanded, his underlings and bannermen to sweep the Vallenses and all of the free militias from Texas soil.

  The king’s decrees did not have the desired effect for a number of reasons. First, the Vallenses lived in areas over which it was very difficult to impose rules or laws from outside. Furthermore, following the collapse, the roads had degraded (some naturally, others by the willful acts of both rebels and saints), making travel difficult and unpredictable; and because most remote villages were hostile to Aztlan, it would have been nearly impossible to maintain a full-time fort or base so far away from Aztlani-controlled areas.

  Second, the freemen militias patrolled most of the areas of Central and West Texas that were not directly and effectively under the active control of Aztlan.

  Third, local leaders were not keen to incur a loss to themselves and their own people. The Vallenses were the most fruitful producers of food and goods in all of Texas, thus a ruler was more likely to be immediately concerned with meeting the needs of his people than obeying a distant King. Oftentimes the belly trumps the heart.

  In many ways, the world had returned to what most people had once believed were the idyllic and romantic days of kings and knights. However, once it became real, the romance was harder to appreciate. Still, many saw it as an act of God, who had hewn down the weeds and brambles (the deceitfulness of riches and the cares of the world) that choked out the Word and the way God would have men live.

  Some of the same people who had once programmed computers, sold cars, or built shopping malls now plowed fields, picked cotton, and hand-dug their own root cellars.

  So much of the old world had been an edifice built on shifting sand. Like an onion, technology had been layered upon technology until only a handful of people actually knew how anything really worked. People made their lives increasingly dependent on a structure that was less and less reliable and destined to crash. The amount of raw materials needed to maintain the most critical technologies on which the entirety of the advanced world balanced so dangerously was mind-boggling.

  Prior to the collapse, the whole world could be shaken by what were, by historical standards, relatively minor natural (or unnatural) disasters. In their ignorance, people shut their eyes to the perilous condition of the entire system, ignoring the signs of the impending systemic collapse.

  Like Rome and Ancient Greece before it, the Western lifestyle, coveted by the entire world, had created a very productive system (one that was both enviable and unviable). The system was unsustainable, as it was reliant on an increasing number of consumers, while a very small and ever shrinking number of people, using ever more advanced (and therefore tenuous) technology and machines, provided for most of the means of life, living, and survival.

  New wonderments, gadgets and entertainment devices appeared daily, as if by magic, to keep the people stupefied and working mindlessly at highly specialized tasks in order to be able to afford a “dream” concocted for them in the boardrooms of large corporations and in the advertising offices of Madison Avenue. The world had become a cult of dependency, and the decepti
on was so complete and so overwhelming that to question it was considered de-facto proof of insanity.

  In the end of the old world, nobody was responsible, yet everyone was complicit. The collapse was as inevitable as the arrival of a new morning. Almost everybody died.

  Part One

  Chapter 1 - Jonathan

  Jonathan handed the sealed letter to the post rider, knowing that it could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months to travel from Central Texas to the King of the South States—that is, if it ever got there at all. It was a typical Texas summer morning, and it had never really cooled down overnight so that the heat was on them early as they stood under a sky as blue and as immense as any artist could have ever conjured.

  Communications had degraded significantly in the 20 years following the collapse, and although many people, even Jonathan, clearly remembered the days of instant messaging and cellular text service, those short-lived aberrations in the pattern and method of communicating had long since come to an inauspicious end. Post riders were, considering all of the dangers and obstacles they faced, remarkably effective and efficient at delivering important communications over long distances, especially when traveling east—away from the dangers of Aztlan. This was no Pony Express; nonetheless, he was hopeful that, at some point in the future, the King of the South States might be reading his letter.

  One beneficial result of the collapse was that it had balanced out the slow nature of long-distance communications… everything else moved slower too. Armies took weeks to travel distances they used to cover in just hours or days, or sometimes even in minutes. Without automated transport, helicopters, airplanes, and tanks, the world had once again become a much bigger place.