Wastelands Read online

  Rogan’s Monsters

  1: Wastelands

  Jack Porter

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Porter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Also by Jack Porter

  Introduction

  Death, it seems, isn’t always the end.

  I was a soldier, fighting for the lives of the whole damned world, when I went and got myself obliterated by this alien fuck.

  I figured that was it. Game over, done. But then I woke up in a different body, in a strange world full of dust and ruins, with awesome martial arts skills I’d never had before. Not to mention a chi gift thing that seemed to work a lot like magic.

  I had no clue why or how it all happened. All I knew was that there were these monster girls I was supposed to protect from an endless horde of semi-human things that wanted us all dead.

  And there were these words seared into my brain like a motivational quote:

  You can save them. You can save ALL of them.

  Of course, I had no clue who the words referred to, whether there was any truth to them at all, or where to fucking begin.

  Rogan’s Monsters: Wastelands follows our hero's sword-swinging adventure across the wastes of a strange new world. It is the first book in a harem series that includes isekai, wuxia, xianxia elements (martial arts and magic), as well as a few gamelit mechanisms for good measure. Set (mostly) in a post-apocalyptic world, it contains violence, nudity, and sex, as well as alien invasions, wraiths, and monster girls.

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  Read at your own risk.

  1

  I was taking a leak when the siren sounded. “Fuck,” I said, and tried to force myself to pee faster.

  “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  That was the Sarge’s booming voice, coming from the barracks next to the latrines. He was yelling at the new recruits. “Come on, ladies! This is not a drill! You have one minute, count them, one minute, to gather your gear and get your asses onto the transport! Shit is going to get very real, damn fast! Move it, move it, move it!”

  “Shit,” I said. I felt a lurch in the pit of my stomach. This was what I’d come back for. What I’d been looking forward to ever since getting half my leg blown open by an enemy energy blast. The leg still wasn’t one hundred percent and would never be, but with the damned goblins engaged on a mission of total annihilation, anyone capable of standing upright and holding a gun had found themselves in a uniform of some kind.

  Or back in uniform, as was my case.

  Not that I didn’t want to do my part. I couldn’t wait to get my revenge for all the surgeries, all the pain, and all the righteous anger that had pent up inside me.

  Still, the last thing I wanted was to face those awful space monsters with piss staining my pants, so I stayed where I was for just a few seconds more and hoped that the Sarge wouldn’t–

  “Ward! Hurry up! It’s going to take you twice as long as my slowest recruit to get ready!”

  Ward. That was me. Rogan Ward. The Sergeant was standing behind me in the doorway, and I could picture his expression of disgust even though I was focused on something else entirely. He was a blocky, scary-looking guy with a burn scar covering his left arm. He’d been a pain in my ass ever since I’d hobbled off the transport and limped onto the base yesterday to join the new recruits, even though I technically wasn’t one.

  “Sir! No sir!” I bellowed. “Just finishing up!”

  “You’ve got ten seconds or you’ll get my foot in your ass for making me wait!” the Sarge replied.

  I knew what he was thinking. It was what they all thought. Under normal circumstances, I shouldn’t have been allowed back. I was damned slow, with a hobble that made me shuffle worse than a one-legged zombie.

  Still, I could point and shoot, which made me valuable enough to allow me back into combat. The Army hadn’t even made me stop the painkillers for the occasion—a sign that they were truly desperate.

  Likely I would die, but not without taking more than my share of the enemy with me. The goblins, the wraiths, those alien shitbags that had come to my world to murder us all. Who wouldn’t want to grab a gun and blast them off the face of the planet?

  My head was willing, and my heart was filled with righteous indignation. But my body didn’t match my desires, not anymore, and that disconnect caused all sorts of problems.

  The new recruits had tried to start a betting pool about how long it would take me to die out on the battlefield. Until the Sarge set them straight about the origin of my shuffle. In my short stay here it had been the only time the Sarge had acknowledged that I’d already lost much to the war with the goblins. But he still didn’t like me.

  He didn’t think I should be there, and I didn’t blame him. All I could do was try to prove him wrong.

  I squeezed the last drop and tucked myself away. Then I scrambled as best I could to where I had dropped my gear, while the siren was still sounding and everyone else was getting ready. I’d arrived with orders to catch one of the transports heading out, but I hadn’t known they were all leaving today.

  By the looks of things in camp, no one else had, either.

  “Thirty seconds!” Sarge yelled. “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  2

  Despite my supposed head start, I was still one the last one climbing into the hulking transport. Not because I hadn’t been trying, but because my bum right leg had chosen that moment to lock up in a spasm of pain. I popped a couple of pills sans water and waited for the excruciating spasms to pass. Finally, with sweat pouring down my face, I hobbled to the last transport, hoping no one had spotted my little episode and changed their mind about me going. At least I’d made it.

  Of course, there wasn’t enough room on the bench seats for me, so I sat with one butt cheek dangling in midair. When the transport took off with a lurch, the door flew open, and I nearly ended up in the mud. Fortunately, the guy next to me reached out and grabbed me before I could go ass over tit.

  The door banged close again, and a chorus of irritated voices called out to lock it do
wn. I did so, then turned to the guy who’d saved me.

  “Thanks,” I managed, but his only response was a look that suggested he regretted doing what he did.

  I couldn’t really blame him. If I was a capable guy and had to put up with someone like me on my team, I would just as soon have left him behind, too. But I’d resolved to stay out of everyone’s way, and that no one would notice if I couldn’t keep up. As far as I was concerned, no one was going to risk their life for me.

  As we made our way to the main road, some of the guys began asking questions, expressing bravado at finally getting to act, and generally just being guys with too much pent-up energy and no immediate outlet.

  Of course, there were no real answers, and nobody really acknowledged the core reality of what was happening, even though we all knew.

  Training, such as it was, was over. We were being deployed. The where of it didn’t matter, because it was much the same all over the world. We were joining the fight against monsters from space—goblins, wraiths, and who knew what else. It would be the fight of our lives because we had no option. We had to kick ET’s ass right off the planet, or we would die.

  I spent a few moments checking my gear even though it was too late to do anything if I’d forgotten something. I’d remembered the basics. Helmet, AC lens, rifle, boots, vest, and pack. And, of course, a standard-issue parachute.

  For jumping out of a plane, right into the middle of danger. The jumping out of the plane part didn’t bother me, though, as much as the landing part. I wasn’t going to complain now, however, even if it would have done some good. I just needed to make sure I fell onto the left side of my body to minimize impact on my right leg.

  The transport took us to the local airbase, and then we went up into the sky, several hundred guys and girls who used to be plumbers, delivery drivers, marketing execs and more, and who never would have picked up a gun in their lives if the aliens hadn’t attacked.

  Before the world turned to shit, I’d been in my last semester of college, still working in a videogame arcade, spending my days playing first-person shooters, rally car simulations, and even some of the old-school pinball machines we kept at the back. I had been looking for a job, a real job with some purpose, but I wasn’t finding it.

  When news of the aliens first broke, I was one of the thousands who couldn’t believe they were unfriendly. They were interstellar travelers, their mission to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

  We were the violent ones, right?

  We held our breath and watched as the politicians debated, knowing that one dumb politician with his foot in his mouth would be all it took to start an interstellar confrontation.

  The wisdom at the time had been that any civilization advanced enough to cross an interstellar gulf would be technologically superior to us in every way. If they were hostile, we wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Provoking them wasn’t something anyone wanted.

  So we missed our chance. If we’d bombed the fuck out of them the first moment we could, we might have saved ourselves a whole lot of grief. A single nuclear strike might have been able to do it, taking out the mothership before it came into orbit next to the moon.

  We could have done it. We had the technology. It was even put forward as an idea, with the talk show hosts going into great detail about how it would happen.

  But by the slimmest of margins, the world’s politicians agreed to wait.

  And then it was too late. Hundreds, thousands, then tens of thousands of smaller ships emerged from the mothership and spread themselves all over the earth. Each one of these new ships was still massive, still as large as the cities they positioned themselves over.

  Before we realized what they were doing, they’d already made it impossible for us to nuke them without catching ourselves in the blast.

  The funny thing was that we had been wrong. Sure, they were alien and capable of hauling their moon-sized ship between worlds. But for some reason, they were only slightly more advanced than we were in the areas that mattered.

  They didn’t unleash a virus that could kill us all in an instant. Nor did they hit us with a beam of energy that could wipe out entire cities.

  Instead, they sent down armored troops with handheld weapons that could have come straight out of a Marvel film set.

  The weapons were much like our own rifles, firing bursts of energy instead of bullets. More powerful than ours, but not so much that it wouldn’t be a fair fight.

  The goblins themselves weren’t that much taller or stronger, either. Green-skinned with pointy ears and eyes that formed slits, they were vulnerable just like humans. Some of the guys I went through training with could have taken them one-on-one. Even I would have had a good chance back then, too, and had bragged about it when I signed up at a recruitment center after having abandoned my studies, eager to defend Earth against alien invaders.

  But we’d underestimated a couple of things.

  First, the goblin armor was much better than ours and made them much harder to kill with our standard weapons. We lost a lot of good men and women in that first wave of attacks. I’d almost lost my leg, and I’d been lucky.

  Second, but more importantly, we didn’t know about the wraiths. And it was a devastating miscalculation.

  Because unlike the goblins, the wraiths were capable of real, actual, honest-to-fuck magic.

  No one had killed one. No one. And their presence had nearly sealed our doom.

  3

  I’d never been able to sleep on a plane. Not before the attack, even on civilian flights where the seats were actually comfortable. And certainly not now, sitting on a hard bench, heading to war against an alien foe after having been in and out of hospitals for years.

  Some of the other guys and girls seemed to have no problem sleeping. And while they did, I leaned my head back against the fuselage and thought of the night before, and even though I hadn’t known it, my last night of freedom. And what would very likely be my last night spent with a woman.

  She’d been a redhead. We’d met at a local watering hole for some of the military personnel, but she didn’t work or live on base. Rather, she’d shown up in a casual but hip-hugging dress, drinking at the bar and watching the recruits generally make drunken asses of themselves.

  I’d sat down next to her and struck up a conversation, bought her a drink. She didn’t seem to mind that one leg caused me to hobble around the room. In fact, she wanted to know how it had happened, had asked for more details than I was willing to give.

  To distract her, I’d asked if she wanted to dance. It was dumb, but a slow song was playing and most people were simply holding their partners and swaying in place. And I could do at least that. She’d taken my hand and went with me out onto the small dance floor, where I put my hands on her waist and we swayed in time with the music.

  Her body was slight, smaller than most women I’d dated. But she was intoxicatingly gorgeous, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d gotten this lucky. I put my forehead against hers, and we held a quiet conversation as we swayed in place.

  Nothing too deep, just a few laughs. I did tell her about my desire to kill all the alien fucks that were trying to obliterate us, but it was said off-handedly, and then we moved on to another topic.

  And then, when the music stopped, she’d taken me home to her place.

  Just because I had a fucked-up leg didn’t mean I couldn’t show her a good time, and as I thrust into her, ignoring the pain in my leg and working up a sweat, I thought that if I died tomorrow, it would all be worth it.

  And if I didn’t die, then I’d come back to the bar and find this woman again.

  And maybe even ask her name.

  We’d come almost at the same moment, and it was pure bliss. Not long after, I’d had to leave and headed back to the base.

  But I’d swore that if I made it out of this war alive, the first thing I would do would be to go back to that bar and ask
for her phone number.

  And now I was heading to combat, shipped off with my new unit and likely to die with them. But I remembered the way that redhead’s body smelled, the way she felt beneath me.

  And I was grateful that she’d been my last.

  Heads were lolling all over the place when the Sarge strolled up and started bellowing once again.

  “Wakey wakey, ladies!” he yelled. “Shit is about to go down, and we can’t have you sleeping on the job!”

  He waited half a beat for the sleepers to crawl their way back to consciousness. “Right! Now, some of you lovelies will be wondering where the fuck we are going, and what our mission might be. Well, I’ll tell you. In their infinite wisdom, the powers that be have decided that the town of Lauder Hill is of high strategic value, even though it’s no more a fly speck on the ass end of the world. It will come as no surprise to you all that Lauder Hill has come under attack. There’s a goblin ship right over top, and reports have come in of kill teams moving through the suburbs. People are dying, my lovelies, and it is up to us to stop them.”

  The Sergeant looked around at the recruits sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. Whatever he might have been thinking, it didn’t look particularly complimentary.