The Resolution, A Fierce Stone Novel #3

By T.L. Peters

In this third and final installment of the Fierce Stone trilogy, Fierce's son Terry must battle the evil forces arrayed against his family as his fearsome mother lies in a sick bed bearing within her a precious life she believed she could never again have.

"The ending to this story is a deep and surprising commentary on life, sexuality and gender." T.J.

"A very focused and fast read. A nice ending, too, to a wonderful and thought provoking series." Damsel

"People should read this series whether they like the story or not." Theodora

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.L. Peters
• Release date: Jun 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311290687

T.L. Peters

"There's no question that Peters is a master wordsmith." Gerry B's Book Reviews About the author: T.L. Peters is an ex-lawyer who enjoys playing the violin and giving his dog long walks in the woods. In between, he writes novels.

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The Resolution, A Fierce Stone Novel #3

By T.L. Peters

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014, T. L. Peters

License Notes

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This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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CHAPTER ONE

After Mom got pregnant, I had to grow up fast. With Mom largely inactive, more of the duties to protect our encampment fell on me. At first I thought Mom could hold her own, at least for a while, but her pregnancy was especially difficult according to Gran. Mom spent most of her time in bed being tended to by her husband Joe. That took them both out of the picture. We still didn't know how Mom got pregnant, since she had no reproductive organs in her body, all of them being removed years before in elective surgery. Mom had believed that she needed to be sterile to fulfill her destiny. Apparently she was wrong. It was a lesson in humility for all of us.

Gran speculated that the Holy Spirit might have come over her, like with Mary's virgin birth in the Bible, but Mom insisted that was not the case. She had never been overshadowed by a spiritual force, and no angel had ever appeared to her either in real life or in a dream to announce that she was to bear a child. Whatever had happened to her had happened organically, as she put it.

There was really no way to verify if Mom was right in her supposition, since there were no longer any physicians around, or at least they weren't actively practicing their profession. The chaos in the world had simply gotten too great and violent for such staid and wholesome activities as the practice of medicine, except, perhaps, on the battlefield. But even if we could have consulted a physician, I doubted if he or she could have told us much. It was a mystery, in other words, just like Granpap said.

It was no mystery what my job was, however. While Mom and Joe were out of action, I was to engage in patrolling the surrounding area to ward off attackers. At least I wasn't alone in this duty. Gran was right there with me, and Granpap, as frail and old as he was in what Gran liked to describe as his essential maleness, was always there to back us up.

It was a good thing Gran had taught me how to fight, because the skill came in handy on a nearly daily basis. We were constantly being accosted not only by the genetically mutated marauding women, who now roamed the land in packs like vicious and rabid dogs, but also by two new threats, deserters from the army of cloned females being developed and assembled by our former comrade, Pete, and a treacherous breed of rebellious males who had gotten together to reassert their patriarchal rights in a world dominated by women.

The deserters from Pete's army, I understood. Pete had apparently become so obsessed with perfecting his genetic research into cloning the perfect woman who could vanquish the marauding females that he had become almost impossible to be around. Some of his creations, especially his earlier ones, became fed up with his hysterical demands and had ventured out on their own. Because Pete was cloning females at a fantastic rate, at least according to what we were able to pick up from the women we occasionally captured and interrogated, before we killed them of course since they were too violent to