Code Monkey
Page 1
Drunk Monkeys 8
Code Monkey
Have a few wrongs to make right? Then you need…the Drunk Monkeys.
Shasta Myers has had to be the strong one in her family. As a county traffic signal computer programmer, she doesn’t make a lot, but she refuses to compromise her morals for a quick buck as a black-hat hacker.
Then her world implodes.
Juju, Delta, and some of the Drunk Monkeys are in Houston to shut down another of Silo’s Kite labs. So when they barely stop the adorably unprepared Shasta from stumbling into a potentially deadly situation, it’s not difficult for the two men to fall hard and fast for her.
Now the situation’s deteriorating all over the world, and Silo’s ratcheting up the pressure. They’ll need someone of Shasta’s skills to stay a step ahead of the apocalyptically determined minister. Will Shasta’s feelings for Juju and Delta be enough to convince her to join their battle to save the world and what’s left of her family?
Genre: Futuristic, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Science Fiction
Length: 60,245 words
CODE MONKEY
Drunk Monkeys 8
Tymber Dalton
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
CODE MONKEY
Copyright © 2015 by Tymber Dalton
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-917-9
First E-book Publication: December 2015
Cover design by Les Byerley
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
If you have purchased this copy of Code Monkey by Tymber Dalton from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.
Regarding E-book Piracy
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DEDICATION
To Hubby and Sir, Trish and Bill, Ravenna, and April, and all my other friends who help keep me going even when I don’t think I can. I love all of you. Thank you for being in my life.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is book eight in the Drunk Monkeys series and focuses on Juju and Delta. The books in the series are best read in order. All titles available from Siren-BookStrand.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Author's Note
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
About the Author
CODE MONKEY
Drunk Monkeys 8
TYMBER DALTON
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One
“That damn, batshit crazy asshole fucker in charge there in Pyongyang is the one who stirred the shitpot. Then Beijing made him lick the goddamned spoon and nuked his fucking ass. Problem is, when they did that—not saying they weren’t justified, mind you—our first and best chance to reverse-engineer this clusterfuck went up in a mushroom cloud. All the rest of us could do was fucking bend over and pray for lube and a reacharound.”
—Gen. Robert K. McCammeron (Our Last History? by Willard M. Sterling. Interview date May, 2143)
“In the time since we first became aware of the virus, and the subsequent events that have followed, we’ve come to understand that we have no idea why, much less how, they [North Korea] created it. Unfortunately, when Beijing wiped Pyongyang off the map, they also wiped out any hope we had of creating an effective vaccine in a timely manner to prevent transmission to a majority of the world’s population. It’s estimated that within another five years, over ninety percent of the world’s population will either be dead or infected unless we get lucky and figure it out.”
—Dr. Arnold P. Almer, CDC (Our Last History? by Willard M. Sterling. Interview date April, 2143)
“In terms of [Kite, the drug’s] addictive nature, it makes meth look like baby aspirin.”
—Kimberly Coates, PhD, University of Florida (February, 2143)
“Well, fuck.”
—President Charlotte Kennedy’s reported reaction upon learning that China authorized the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea on July 29, 2142, in response to Pyongyang allowing thousands of people they supposedly infected with the Kite virus to flood across the border into China several days earlier.
“The Drunk Monkeys? Those crazy motherfuckers don’t exist. And boy, are they good at what they do. Thank god.”
—Gen. Joseph Arliss (June, 2143)
* * * *
Long story short…
It’s November 1st, 2143, the day after we last saw our intrepid band of Drunk Monkeys, and sixteen months post-TMFU—The Massive Fuckup. Which, if you need reminding, was when China nuked the everloving crap out of North Korea for ext
reme fuckery in the form of unleashing Kite-infected people over their northern border into China.
And things predictably went downhill from there.
In our previous installment, Victor had just survived the unit’s closest encounter yet with the Kite virus.
Lesson learned—never catch a case of crashing Kite. Laboratory sample case, that is.
Try saying that five times fast.
No, on second thought, don’t. It’ll take too long. And we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
If you’ve been keeping up, you know the Drunk Monkeys now have a secret base on an island just off Florida’s southwest coast. Two more scientists, another woman, and a blogger with visions of revenge have joined them. Rev. Silo is crazier than ever. So crazy that he ordered a team of mercenaries to kill the friends of the woman, Scooter, who just joined the Drunk Monkeys. She’s now partnered with Victor and Uni.
Sooo…there are even more people who want Rev. Silo’s head on a pike.
Oh, yeah. Mary Silo, the reverend’s on-the-lam wife, prefers to be known as Kali Enyo now.
Google it.
She’s one pissed off goddess in training, all right.
The Drunk Monkeys have also set up a satellite secret base just outside Atlanta, and the scientists are now able to work with the CDC research facility there. Lots of progress has been made and they’re really close to a vaccine, especially in the wake of Victor’s close call.
Great news, right?
Well, not if you’re the Reverend Hannibal Silo of the Church of the Rising Sunset. He still has delusions of grandeur. Worse, now he’s locked in a secret battle with his right-hand man, Jerald Arbeid, for control of the church.
Problem is, he doesn’t know just how much of a battle he’s got on his hands. Jerald has decided he doesn’t want to play second fiddle to Silo any longer, and is charting a course to get rid of both the reverend, and Mary Silo, once she’s found.
And you thought you had problems.
Right now, Silo thinks he’s going to leverage a Kite drug distribution facility in Houston into increased donations from some of his “whales” to help bolster the church’s lagging tithing income.
Jerald is determined to beach Silo’s plans in any way he can. As are the Drunk Monkeys.
We left Bubba engaged in some…persuasive discussions, shall we say, with one of the church’s hired computer hackers on Halloween night. Said hacker who’d provided the intel to the team that killed Scooter’s friends. During these discussions, a few new items cropped up.
Looks like things are going to get interesting. More interesting.
Shall we?
Chapter Two
Sometimes, the problem is it is your circus, and those are your monkeys…
Shasta Myers tried to stare at the computer monitor in front of her but it grew even blurrier, her eyes feeling scratchy and sore. It was a little after nine in the morning, but she’d been on the job…
Squinting, she tried to see the time on her monitor.
Giving up, she took off her glasses and laid them on her desk as she rubbed at her face. She was way overdue for new glasses, but they weren’t in the budget and her health insurance didn’t cover them. It was the day after Halloween. As predicted, they had city crews out working on signal lights and traffic cameras disabled both from accidents and from pranksters going crazy.
Next to Lou, her boss and the head of their department, she had the most seniority and was, technically, the department’s assistant head, even though she didn’t have a title. In their office, she was one of only seven people qualified to keep Harris County’s integrated traffic control systems up and running, which included the city of Houston.
And of those seven people, they had two missing. John Bailey and Paul Waxler had been inexplicably absent from work for the past three days, leaving the other five of them hung out to dry and working crazy-long shifts, all owing to governmental budget cuts and a year-long hiring freeze because of the world’s situation, which wouldn’t allow them to bring in anyone else to fill those positions.
All attempts to contact the missing employees at home, including sending police officers after them, had failed. Waxler’s wife was just as pissed off at him as his coworkers, because he’d disappeared without word, and they had two kids.
Apparently, it wasn’t the first time he’d gone off on a multi-day bender.
Bailey lived alone, and there was no sign of him.
Coincidentally, the two men were friends and frequently spent time together after work and on their days off.
Shasta had her suspicions about their mutual disappearance, but she’d kept her mouth shut regarding them. Both men had sketchy pasts with alcohol and substance abuse, scuttlebutt that apparently wasn’t part of their official employment records, but which she’d put together from things she’d overheard directly from their own mouths or from trusted others.
She’d also heard on the news earlier that four people had died locally from heroin-beta overdoses in the past week.
Normally, that was something that wouldn’t even blip her radar. She couldn’t afford to drink, and she had no interest in doing drugs.
Considering her own brother was also MIA, and his sketchy history with substance abuse…
It wasn’t hard to connect the dots and see that pattern forming.
She’d already been working twenty-one hours straight without so much as a nap. She was ready to put her head on a pillow…or her fist through a face.
Right now, she was beyond caring which one. Either would satisfy her.
Preferably a fist through the face of one of her missing coworkers.
Or through her brother’s face.
Finally, she dragged herself from her terminal and went to knock on her supervisor’s office door. “Lou, I’m sorry, but I’m dead. I’m going to go lie down. I can’t keep my eyes open.”
He was head-down over his own terminal. “Okay, go ahead. I really appreciate you toughing this out the way you have.”
Hell, it wasn’t like he was asking her to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself. She knew for a fact that the bachelor had spent the last four nights on his office couch and hadn’t left the building.
In fact, he was now wearing shorts and a T-shirt, since he’d been showering in the employee gym downstairs and was out of clean clothes. No more khakis and button-up shirts for him.
Hell, for any of them.
If the county was going to require long-ass guerrilla programming shifts from them to keep the damn county’s traffic lights lit and the cameras online, they were going to have to overlook the department’s failure of its programmers to adhere to the required dress code.
Otherwise, they’d be facing a mass revolt, leaving no one to mind the store.
Literally.
Last one out the door, turn off the traffic lights.
That would grid-lock Houston in thirty seconds flat.
Shasta walked into the empty office next to Lou’s and face-planted on the couch.
That’s where she stayed until someone gently nudged her left shoulder. She awoke to her right arm, which had been pinned under her, screaming from pins and needles.
And she smelled coffee.
As she peeled her gritty-feeling eyes open, she discovered Lou standing there, holding a cup of coffee. “Sorry. It’s been four hours, and I’m down to you, me, and Ramirez until ten o’clock tonight. I haven’t slept in nearly twenty-four myself, and Ramirez just fell asleep over his terminal and accidentally shut down half the traffic cams downtown.”
She managed to shove herself into a relatively upright position and started trying to shake the pins and needles out of her arm. “Thanks.”
“No problem. I had to let Tesla go home. He has two kids and a wife he hasn’t seen in four days. Sorry. He’ll be back in the morning.”
“Where the hell are Bailey and Waxler?” she muttered. “And why the fark can’t we replace them?”
“Belie
ve me, I want to. I already have the process started with HR, but they said I have to wait and go through their ‘corrective protocols,’ unless Bailey and Waxler go a full two weeks straight without coming in or calling. Stupid regs. ‘Procedures.’ Good thing about a government job, it’s damned hard to get fired from. Bad thing about a government job, it’s damned hard to fire some asshole who decides they don’t want to work anymore.”
“We’re a priority department. Why can’t they bring us in some temps, at least? If we had temps we could stagger the shifts, always have someone experienced on duty.”
“I know that, believe me. I’ve beaten my head flat against a damned wall trying to get the county administrator to get an emergency order from the county commission and he won’t do it. Says the funds aren’t there.”
“What?”
“Right. So we’re at least another eleven days before I can start the firing process.” He leaned against the doorway. “I’m telling ya, Shasta. I know this would fuck my department to lose you, but if you find a better job, take it.”
“Unless they come through with a Kite vaccine like they’re talking about on the news, not sure there will be any better jobs. Much less any jobs.”
She should know—she’d already looked more than once. Anyone hiring in IT was either for jobs less than she was being paid now, or doing stuff she wasn’t certified in. Until the world got better and she could get herself some more training and certifications, she was stuck. She had some pretty mad hacker talents, far better than the average script kiddie, but most of those things weren’t skills she could leverage into legally marketable abilities.