Terms For Survival by John Reeves (phonics reading books .txt) 📕

almost an hour, and although there were good men dead, they seemed to be in control. They had eliminated hundreds of men, but the town had lost just as many. There was another calvary coming behind the first wave of soldiers. There were ten-thousand in that group. Chris was down to maybe seventy-five men, and half of those were teenage boys.
"What's going on out there, Peter?" He asked.
"We've lost a few men I wish we had back, but I do believe we are holding our ground against them." Peter replied.
"We've got to find out if more soldiers are coming. Peter, I want you to go find Samuel Archer. He knows his way around here from his duty as a hunter, and nobody can get atop of that hill quicker than he can. If there are more coming, than we'll need to retreat."
"We've acquired some weapons off the enemy, but we couldn't stand another round of intense battle like that first one." Peter informed him.
"OK, go find Samuel Archer quickly, and then we can find out where we stand."

John had rode the enemy's horse over the side of the hill to look out ridge. As he raced back to tell the others that more soldiers were coming. Time was short, and by the time he crossed paths with Samuel Archer, too much time had passed.
"Arch, they're coming as we speak. If Chris doesn't want to leave, then we're going to have to escape with whomever is willing to go."
"How close are they now?" Samuel asked.
"We've got to go as fast as we can." John answered. They turned their horses toward the village, and rode as fast as they could toward the watch tower on the north side. The second wave of soldiers trailed them by maybe three hours, and some would get there quicker. When they arrived at the north tower, John went in to deliver the bad news.
"The second group of soldiers are just on the backside of the hill, you have to report this to Chris."
"Shit, he's not going to like this." Kevin Delmar responded.
"To hell with what he likes, we're going to all be killed if we don't move out of here. Are you going to do your job, or am I going to have to do it?"
"No...I'll do it, but he thinks we're winning this battle."
"I figured he thought he'd made the right move. You report it like I told you, and not because I didn't agree with his decision, but because it's the truth. Those men are coming, and they will totally wipe us out."
"Where are you going John?"
"I'm going to tell everyone at the safety bunker to prepare to evacuate."
"Chris isn't going to like that."
"Fuck what he wants, those people have a right to know." John said, and then walked out of the tower.

Chris didn't like the news, and even furthermore he didn't like it that John had found out before Samuel. He could easily believe Samuel, but perhaps John was trying to get people to follow his idea fleeing the village. He still called the evacuation, and it was too late. People moved into the swamps south of town. Groups got separated from each other, and when night fell on them everything became worse.
Some of them were eaten by hungry gators in the marshes, some drown in the water, and others were too sick or old to make it. The landscape was rough and harsh, and tested the survivors to their limits. Chris had seen alligators eat his fellow people, and he'd seen the untimely deaths. His feelings were conflicted. He thought he'd done the right thing, but his walking through the deadly marshes, and seeing his people die, all of that made him question his actions.
"I tried to make it possible to live peacefully." Chris tried to explain to the others he'd became separated with. Some of them believed he did what was right, and others were unwilling to follow his commands anymore. Kevin Delmar from the north tower continued to follow Chris, and tried to get through to some of those who no longer did. They were almost split down the middle about it, and they were the larger of group of the scattered village.
There had been small fights within the group, and later in the day they were all captured by another small group south of Hendersonville. Chris would have rather died in battle than to be captured. To make the matter worse, just a day earlier his group had been strong enough to destroy them. Caught in an ambush and forced to surrender. Kevin didn't think it was his fault they were captured, and believed in Chris even from within his concrete cell.
John had better luck with the smaller group, and due to the fact that they'd headed fifteen miles south-east of Hendersonville. Well clear of the group that captured Chris, and south of Jackson by forty or fifty miles. They had made it through the night, and the land hadn't been nearly as rough on them. They'd gone around the swamp, and the larger group went through it. The swamp had been a barrier between the two groups, but had unknowingly been broken.
There were two more groups who were captured south of Hendersonville, and west of the swamp, by the group that they'd been in combat with. Many of them were taken back to the village in Hendersonville, and tortured or killed. Some of the younger children were kept to be raised in the group that took Meridian and Hendersonville.
"I wonder what happened to all the others?" Patrick Dezney asked John. The second night had been rough as a thunderstorm rolled over them. They'd remained lucky to have not been captured after two days.
"I don't know Pat, they've probably been killed." John didn't realize he was talking to a kid. Patrick had always acted like a man, but he was a boy worried about his parents and siblings. Patrick began to cry, No John was probably right. John felt a little sad too, because it was true, and he'd thrown it on the boy hard.
"Look Pat, I had a wife and child. I lost them back when the American War started, and I know how it feels to lose your family, but you are still here. In honor of them you have to live boy. Go on to become a man, and do something good for yourself. You would be making them proud by surviving." John tried to smooth things over with his own story, but questioned whether he did any good.
The whole incident had changed the way Patrick looked at him. John had hurt his feelings to a degree, but it wasn't what he said, it was how he said it. Patrick had already figured his folks were dead, and John put it bluntly. The boy respected him, because he told it like it was, and didn't sugarcoat it one bit. However blunt Patrick found him to be, he didn't tell the boy they were better off dead. Otherwise they were being tortured, beaten, and raped.


5

The group had found a couple of old buildings near the Mississippi-Alabama state line. They'd been staying there since the third day of their escape. John, Patrick, and Samuel Archer left the other seven people and went hunting. The group was hungry, and the best three hunters and gatherers went out for food. Patrick was just a child, but he was very accurate with a bow. He'd more than proved he could hunt.
When they returned to the two buildings they found the others dead. They were beaten and slaughtered. Throats cut, heads busted open, and multiple stab victims. Marianne Shelby had an arrow through her head. Her pants were pulled down, and her naturally red pussy hair was showing. John figured she'd been raped before death. Then he realized that the three of them could be danger. Where were the people who killed them?
"We need to be real careful, and slowly get out of here." John said quietly. Patrick and Samuel did just that. The three of them had their hunting knives out, and ready to inflict damage on anything that moved. Outside the sun was going down. They knew that could be dangerous for them. They backed away from the buildings into the brush, and found themselves hiding places for the night. Carefully they listened to the sounds from the woods. You can hear everything in the silent forest at night.
The next day they got moving toward the river. They hoped to use the river to get away from the area. Although there was no solid plan on what they'd use for a raft. They'd come across an old school house, and realized there was a group of maybe fifty people inside there. Most likely that had been the group that had left them to three strong, but revenge was not option. They would have been killed, and nothing would have come from it.
Samuel was starting to wonder if they'd make it to the river. They'd escaped what would have likely been death, and he wondered how long their luck would last. Where was the next group? How many were there between them and the river? How far away was the goddamn river? It was not in his nature to worry the others with his fears, but he knew they had to know that surviving another day was beating the odds. The only thing they'd eaten was one rabbit between the three of them.
The three of them were out hunting, and Samuel knew that they were the most resourceful, but they were just three men. There small group stood little chance of survival, but just three of them was as good as dead. He looked at Patrick, and he wondered what the guy must be thinking. He was a strong kid mentally and physically. Samuel never knew him back at the village, but he'd really come to like the boy a great deal. He didn't want to see the boy die. He hoped he wouldn't see the boy die.
John knew both of them back in the village, although the circumstance had shown them more about each other. There was a new level of respect among them, and it had bonded them together in a way that only something horrible or great could do. In some kind of strange way they loved each other, but none of them referred to it as such. The three of them had become family. Nobody wanted to see one of them die. Could they make it to the river? That was the only question in their minds.
Patrick was afraid of what might happen to them, but he was not nearly as worldly as the other two older gentlemen. They were worried about what they'd seen happen, and Patrick's wild imagination had him afraid. What you don't know can be more scary than what you do. What the youngster didn't know in this case was probably for the best, and the two men tired to shield the boy from the worst parts of it. He'd seen the other members of the group slaughtered. He knew what could happen to them.
"Do you think they'll chop are heads off if they catch us?" He asked the two older guys. The question caught them off guard, but with his natural straight-forward approach, John fielded the boy's macabre question.
"Yes, Yes they probably will, or maybe even worse. That's why we've got to work hard to not be seen. We must keep moving south. The cold hard truth is...our