The End The Beginning (Humanity's New Dawn Book 1)

by Ryan Horvath

  Art followed in the direction the two women had gone in. He lost them for a moment in the dark and then he heard, just fifteen or so feet to his left, one of them said, “Help me.” Seconds later, to Art’s astonishment, bright sunshine tore into the darkness of the basement and sent subterranean creatures scurrying away.

  “What the fuck?” Art said to himself, wondering what he was seeing. Then he realized. This fucking cellar had a door I missed.

  He raced over to the opening and climbed out into the light.

  “C’mon,” Karen directed. “The car is this way.”

  The trio dashed around the house and Karen’s heart sank when she saw the rear tires of her car were flat. And even if they had not been, Karen would have had to drive through the killer’s car or the barn to get her car out.

  Amanda had noticed the condition of the car and said, “So much for that. What now?”

  Karen looked around. She could see no hope for refuge anywhere. “We have to keep moving. There’s got to be a house somewhere.”

  Amanda could see nothing. “Which way?”

  Blaze was sniffing the air. He barked, “Master Karen, that way. I smell something.” He raced off into a field.

  Karen shrugged and grabbed Amanda’s arm. “C’mon.”

  The women took off after the dog and after a few minutes, they happened upon a culvert. Its rounded ceiling was twenty feet high and it was as wide as two school buses. A small river of dirty water ran down its middle. It smelled of decomposing leaves and the light only penetrated in about five feet. Karen guessed its length to be twenty yards. Karen chanced a look behind them and saw the green eyed man was in pursuit, perhaps thirty or so yards behind them.

  “He’s close,” Karen said. “Keep going.”

  Blaze led them into the culvert and they hurried toward the other end. When they were about halfway through, the sky ahead changed color. From its brilliant blue, it darkened to a shade of violet. The culvert grew even darker and they heard the assassin trampling in the water behind them.

  They raced out of the far end of the culvert and entered a twilit sky. The total solar eclipse was in full swing. Amanda recognized it immediately; all of it except one thing. She grabbed Karen’s arm while they ran and said through gasps of air, “What’s that?”

  Karen kept her eyes forward and said, “It’s an eclipse. Keep moving.”

  “No. That!” Amanda said and pointed to the sky.

  Karen slowed and looked to where Amanda was pointing. What she saw there she couldn’t explain. In the shadow of the eclipse Karen saw what looked to her like an asteroid but it was uglier than she ever imagined the space rocks would look. Not only that, it was moving at a pace no asteroid would ever move. Slowly. Its size relative to the Moon looked to be about one tenth. Karen could tell it was closer to the Earth than the Moon; a lot closer because she could see it was also emitting something into the air.

  A second later, a shout roared from behind them. It reverberated off the walls of the culvert and blared out at the two women and the canine. “I can smell you, you bitches!”

  58

  THE ECLIPSE

  When the Moon passed in front of the Sun over the states of Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota on the Friday afternoon after Jack Thomas’s assassination millions of Americans were watching the sky. Many had their mobile phones and tablets trained to the heavens. Many others looked down into special eclipse viewing boxes. Others stole fleeting glimpses of the stellar event through parted fingers. And some risked looking toward the sky through dark sunglasses.

  Others did not witness the eclipse itself. Many were in their cars driving in opposite directions and only noticed the sky darkening and they guided their motorized transportation across the lanes of asphalt. The doctors, nurses, construction workers, bartenders and most everyone else who worked the late shift had their blinds or drapes still-drawn as they slept though the display in the heavens. The self-important members of the population simply didn’t care enough to witness something that didn’t involve them directly in some way. And then there were those who were simply incapable of going outside, whether due to injury, infirmity, incapacitation, or incarceration.

  Of all these millions who were in the path of the eclipse, it was a group of fourteen young teenage girls, each equipped with an Android or an I-phone, who incited the chain of events that would alter the planet dramatically over the next three days. The girls were outside of Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, which they were visiting for a class trip. Chicago was in the path of the total eclipse and these girls had one of the best viewing spots in the entire path of the eclipse. And if the eclipse itself had not been breathtaking enough for any of them, the thing they saw just next to the eclipse certainly was. It faded into view as the sky darkened, as if it were an unseen ghost spontaneously materializing.

  Immediately after the eclipse was over and the sky returned to its traditional blue hue, this group of girls stared at each other in shock and disbelief. A few hushed whispers passed among them about the thing they had seen in the shadow of the eclipse. It was an unthinkable thing and it was spitting something into the air. Seconds later, the girls were using their handheld devices and posting their most recent video recordings on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

  As the notifications of the videos spread throughout these fourteen girls’ vast group of social networking friends, the few million people who had seen the thing with the eclipse quickly became tens of millions. One of the girls, her name was Stephanie Morse, had shot a particularly exquisite video of the eclipse with her steady hand and high resolution camera phone. As her video went viral, that number of people who knew of the thing in the sky became hundreds of millions.

  Two hours after the end of the total solar eclipse, thanks to Stephanie Morse’s video, one billion inhabitants, or half the planet’s internet users, had borne witness to the object that was revealed from thin air during the eclipse. Because of the general press and Associated Press, by 7:00 PM CST an additional billion had been shown Morse’s video through news casts on the television.

  There was a hush among these two billion, most of whom were in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The hush didn’t last long.

  Almost in time with each other, this mass of people swamped the telephone lines of the world as they tried to tell everyone they could and hear what anyone else might know. People began inviting their friends and neighbors over and showing Morse’s video. Within fifteen minutes, it became nearly impossible to get a phone call through either a land or a mobile line. Internet traffic became the highest ever recorded in history.

  More and more people found out about the thing in the atmosphere and before humanity even realized it had happened, a scale had been tipped. And it had been tipped too far to do anything about it.

  Most theologians believed one of two things would happen if humanity were faced with a cataclysmic event of this nature or another. The first theory is that humanity would work and stand together, set aside their differences, and face and persevere through the challenge and be rewarded with a better, safer, peaceful, higher, and more evolved and intelligent society. The second theory is that humanity would take a “look out for one’s self” approach and, in the face of disaster, people would stand apart and panic, hoard, loot, riot, pillage, pilfer, rape, and murder one another while society collapsed around them and they were all destroyed by the threat that they turned their backs on.

  When the scale tipped on Earth, in the wake of Stephanie Morse’s viral video shot during the rare total solar eclipse, it tipped to the latter theory. By 11:00 PM CST Friday night, things had passed beyond any semblance of a point of no return.

  Jack Voight and River stood in the dusk-like early afternoon as the eclipse unfolded over their heads. They weren’t directly in the path of the total eclipse but a good portion of the sun was covered and the sky was a brilliant shade of mauve. Jack even noticed a few of the brightest stars in the sky were twinkling even
though it was barely 2:00 in the afternoon.

  “The sky looks funny,” River meowed.

  “Yes,” was all Jack could say.

  “How long will it last?” the cat mewed.

  “Not long, a few more minutes I’d guess,” Jack replied not really knowing if he was correct. He tried not to look at the chunk of space rock that had faded into visibility at the start of the eclipse and hung in the sky spewing a mist of foreign chemicals into the air.

  When the moon completed its pass before the sun and the sky returned to its usual daytime color the space thing, the thing Simon had called “the object,” disappeared once again. As is faded away, a chill ran up and down Jack’s spine. Even though he could no longer see the real thing, it still hung in the sky in Jack’s mind’s eye.

  River looked up at him. “I expected something to happen right away.” She looked around them but the scenery remained unchanged. “What do we do now?”

  Jack remained silent for a moment. Finally he said, “We wait, and we watch. C’mon. Let’s go back to the house.”

  Simon watched the eclipse from the flat roof of the house they had commandeered through sunglasses that he had borrowed from Ian’s Honda. Brian and Ian stole quick glances of the object from down below on the ground. Jack and River were farther from the house but Simon could still see them. To the naked eye, the object looked exactly like what they had theorized it was; an asteroid. Although to Simon, it looked more to be coated in sharp craggy chunks of metal rather than rock.

  He’d been looking at the object for weeks now but the computerized images of it could not compare to seeing it with his own two eyes and his heart pounded in his chest at what was probably the most remarkable thing he might ever see in his life.

  After the eclipse had passed, Simon quickly pulled his tablet out and opened the software to view the object. He watched it from the roof for just under two more hours and sipped on a bottle of Vitamin Water. At about ten past five in the afternoon, he was startled to see that the object slowly stopped emitting whatever was inside it. It simply diminished little by little until it was gone. This made Simon wonder. Had he been wrong with his calculations of the volume of liquid in the object? He had estimated that it wouldn’t be done until Monday morning.

  Simon scratched his head, watched the object spin before him on his tablet and wondered what the thing was doing now. He then realized that he still had the ability to check the volume of liquid inside of the thing with his software. A quick scan told him the object was still around sixty percent full but it definitely, for now, had stopped releasing any more liquid.

  Simon left the roof wondering why the object had stopped spewing its contents. He couldn’t shake it until he found Jack, Brian, Ian, and River inside the house in the kitchen. They were watching the news and within a moment, Simon knew he and the congressman hadn’t needed to consider going public about the object.

  It went public all on its own.

  Art tore out of the culvert in pursuit of the two sisters he intended on recapturing and brutally exploiting sexually while slowly inflicting other pains of the flesh. With his strong powerful legs and long stride, he’d been steadily gaining on the two bitches who had dared cross him but when he entered the plum colored environment outside the culvert, he was momentarily stunned by what he saw and stopped in his tracks.

  An asteroid was hovering in the sky. Art stood gaping at it, unable to believe what he was seeing. The thing hung lazily in the sky as if orbiting rather than moving on a trajectory.

  But then Art heard the dog with the bitch sisters bark and his attention was turned back to them. They had put some distance between them while Art stood there gawping at the sky. His sexual, tormented, and homicidal urges took his reins again and he sped off in the direction of the women.

  59

  THE PANIC

  Friday evening, news spread quickly throughout the planet about what had been recorded over the city of Chicago earlier in the day. It didn’t take long before every person who had access to the internet, a phone, a television, or a radio knew that the unknown hung over their heads.

  The President of the United States had been just as stunned as his constituents when he’d been made aware of the object. He hurriedly called the heads of the Department of Defense, the Air Force, NASA, and others and demanded to know why he had not been informed about the thing the media was calling “The Harbinger.” None of the men in so called “positions of authority” had any answers for the President. He cursed them and called them all incompetent fools.

  He called the CIA and demanded to speak to the director there but the director only told the Commander in Chief that he was just as surprised as everyone else. He informed the President that such matters would have fallen under the purview of an agency the President had never even heard of and that said agency had been under the supervision of a congressman. The agency was called the DAFP. The President bade the director to tell him who this representative was and the director told the President that it was a congressman from Virginia. The President demanded that this man be brought to him and the Director said he would do his best to accommodate that.

  After the President disconnected his call with the CIA, he stared around the Oval Office in disbelief. This Jack Thomas better have good answers for him.

  Five minutes later, the President called his press secretary and ordered her to schedule a press conference for forty-five minutes from now. He needed to address the nation. He needed to calm the people and reassure them that things were going to be just like always.

  The President’s press secretary had an assistant with her that evening. The secretary believed her assistant to be of South Korean descent but the young man was in fact North Korean. When the secretary instructed him to begin notifying members of the press about the conference, the man first made an international call to his native land where he received instructions to initiate a plan that had been in place for over three months, waiting for the perfect opportunity to present itself for execution.

  While the President started to jot down some things he was going to say, things in his nation were unraveling.

  Outside of St. Louis, a group of parishioners, about three hundred individuals, had gathered at their congregation and were listening to their pastor chastise them for their sins and blame them for God bringing the Rapture on them all in the form of a space rock sent to poison humanity. In the over-packed church, some of the people didn’t like what the pastor was saying and they cried loudly over him that he was wrong and they were innocent. Tension mounted in the church as the mass of people split into two sides. A hymnal was thrown from someone and the pastor was struck on the nose by it. The pastor cupped his face and blood seeped out from under his fingers. He made a guttural scream and charged at the person he thought had thrown the book. A moment later, people were tearing each other apart. Two women, who just a week before had sat side by side and gossiped at the church bake sale, were in a cat-like dance screaming, scratching and pulling hair. It didn’t take long for the larger of the two women to pin the smaller to the floor where she choked the life out of the smaller woman with her hands. The larger woman studied the corpse of the smaller for a few seconds. The humanity was gone from her eyes.

  Three men were fighting; it appeared to be two brothers and a business man. The blonde brother kicked the business man in the testicles hard and the business man went down with his hands shielding his most sensitive parts. The sandy haired brother then kicked the business man directly in the face with his steel toed boot. The business man’s facial bones shattered and exploded into his brain with a crunch. He died instantly and the brothers began attacking another man.

  A couple going through a nasty divorce was swinging at each other near the alter that they had, in fact, stood before five years ago and took vows of marriage. It appeared the wife had landed more strikes on the husband as his face was bruised, his shirt was torn to shreds and he had two sets of fresh claw marks from t
he wife on his chest and abdomen. As the husband advanced on the wife, the wife grabbed a jar of sacramental oil from a shelf on the pastor side of the pulpit. She splashed the oil in the husband’s face, stunning and blinding him. The wife then snatched a nearby candle which she tossed on her husband and the man erupted in flames. He screamed as his flesh melted and the wife watched him burn with smug satisfaction. People scattered in all directions from the burning man; no one tried to help him.

  Someone had called the police and sirens could be heard outside the church. When the police entered the church, they were shocked by the scene before them. There were too many unmoving bodies lying on the floor and slumped over the pews. People were running, screaming, and fighting. Fire was coming from a body and spreading around the room. The four officers that had been dispatched were the only ones on duty that evening in this small town and they instantly knew they were no match for this hoard of people. As if to prove this, two men noticed the law men and the crowd moved toward them. The officers began firing at the advancing attackers and people fell but the police did not have enough bullets and they were quickly overrun and slaughtered by the mass.

  On the west coast, fire broke out in one of the United States’ cleanest, greenest cities. The fire that would eventually destroy the city of Portland, Oregon began when a woman, terrified from what she had seen on the news after the eclipse, decided she did not want to live to see what came to pass. She chased five times the recommended dose of an Oxycontin prescription with about half a bottle of one hundred proof vodka. While she waited to pass out, she continued to sip on the vodka bottle and cry. Ten minutes later, she lit a cigarette. She finished about a third of the cigarette before she fell into unconsciousness and as she fell, so did the bottle of high proof alcohol and the cigarette. When the liquid that seeped from the mouth of the bottle met the burning end of the cigarette, flames rose and the woman’s condo on the sixth floor of a twenty-two story condo became the epicenter for a fire that would kill tens of thousands and turn Beervana to ash.