Apocalyptic Visions Super Boxset

by James Hunt

  “The soil,” Todd said suddenly.

  “What?” Ray asked.

  “The soil sample we set east of here. Somebody could have found it,” Todd said.

  “It was less than a square foot,” Nelson replied.

  Billy turned to cough, sending a spray of phlegm and spit into his shoulder as he tried to cover his mouth. Todd noticed the unusual paleness of his skin and the glossy coat of sweat covering his face.

  “Billy, make sure you go see Ben today. You don’t look good,” Todd said.

  “Yeah,” Ray echoed, “And I don’t need you getting me sick.”

  “Yeah, I’ll see him after this,” Billy replied.

  “The probability that someone stumbled upon the soil accidentally is low, yes, but it is still a possibility,” Todd said, turning back to the discussion at hand.

  “It could have been picked up by a scout team,” Emma echoed.

  “I told you we should have brought it back,” Ray said, shaking his head.

  “I’ll go and take a look at it tomorrow. I’ll let you know what I find,” Todd said.

  Todd left them without another word. He blew the flame out on his candle and tossed the waxy nub into the barrel by the entrance.

  “Todd!” Emma waved her arms and ran to catch up with him. He slowed his pace, and when she grabbed his arm, he could feel the flakes of wax still lingering on her palm. “I want to come with you tomorrow.”

  Todd quickly fell back into his long stride. Emma stumbled forward after him, trying to keep up.

  “Just hear me out,” she said, sliding over the mud, trying to gain traction.

  “It’ll draw too much attention to ourselves.”

  “We don’t have to leave together; we’ll just meet up.”

  Todd stopped abruptly, and Emma slid forward. He grabbed her arm quickly to stop her from falling.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Emma, it’s foolish. Go home.”

  And just as quickly as he stopped, Todd started off again, leaving Emma alone in the street. He knew it was harsh, but now wasn’t the time to be careless. And with the new inspector eyeballing him from across the street, he didn’t want to put her in any more danger than she already was.

  ***

  The sun greeted Todd’s sullen, pale face with the vigor in which he received it: lethargically. He scratched the side of his beard, pushing through the thick bracken on his face. His barren left ring finger twitched uncontrollably. He sat there on the edge of the bed, watching it spasm randomly. A reaction to another sleepless night.

  The pop of his knees brought a twinge of pain but mostly relief, as his body was thankful to be mobile and active once again. Todd quickly dressed and washed two caffeine pills down with a glass of water. He slipped on his shoes and picked at the flap forming from his loosened sole.

  Todd shut the door and stepped onto the grey ash of dirt that was his front yard. All around the country, there was nothing but dust. The winds had carried GMO-24 to every corner of the country. Whatever patches of fertile soil were left were guarded by tanks and soldiers.

  Todd checked over his shoulder a few times, keeping an eye out for the inspector from the day before. Once the coast was clear, he started his trek east. Todd adjusted the shoulder straps of the small sack he brought with him, which carried government synthetic food sticks that were provided to community members, and a bottle of water. The food sticks were the government’s response to the soil crisis. Designed and created in a lab, then shipped in bulk to every corner of the country. It was what most people lived on now.

  The only issue with the synthetic foods was the human body’s ability to process it. Humans had evolved to their current state on fresh fruits and vegetables, red meat, and seafood. The human body could only absorb a fraction of what the sticks offered. Its original intent was to act as a supplement, but as the soil crisis grew more severe, it became a meal replacement.

  Starving was the slowest death Todd had ever seen. One by one, your muscles, bones, organs, and other tissues weakened. The nerve, immune, and other bodily systems became less efficient, struggling to perform their basic functions. A person’s motor skills would start to fail them, along with the ability to think clearly.

  For Todd, that was the hardest part to watch. The mind deteriorated. He could see the light behind each pair of eyes dim. Once the mind devolved to the basic necessities of survival in locating food and water, people became animalistic.

  Three years ago, when the relocation efforts were put into place, there were only two types of faces on the people that arrived in the community. The first had a blank glare, a mind fogged and sluggish, a breath away from death.

  The other face concealed a mind lowered to an animalistic ruthlessness. The territorial gorillas and bears that guarded their ground fiercely had found their way into the communities, towns, and cities limping along. The capacity for reason and logic had long escaped them. All that was left was instinct.

  Instinct. Such a vile word. Todd detested that word. For decades, he was forced to listen to scholars, educated men and women, use that term to describe the actions of people.

  “It’s our natural instinct to be violent. It’s our human instinct to destroy. It was his instinct to react that way. It was her instinct that caused her to go down that road. You have to listen to your instincts.”

  Well, those firm believers in instincts had finally been given what they had clamored for. The pillars of choice and reason had crumbled. People now lived in slums, forced to work at gunpoint, separated from their family and friends.

  Everything Todd had done over the past year was in laborious effort to rebuild those long-forgotten structures. He wanted to return to a time of acumen and intellect. To be able to walk down a street, a paved street, with new shoes. He wanted to look at the faces of the people around him and see their exuberant souls greet him through their eyes. He wanted to go through his day without the mention of the word hunger. He wanted to sleep like he did when he was a child, unafraid and peaceful. He wanted people to act of their own free will and not based off the repercussions from some thug with a rifle. He wanted a world better than what he inherited.

  What made it all worse was the fact that they had squandered it. The human race had so many chances to get it right, and time and time again they continued to kill each other. They beat their neighbors. They drained the sources of life around them for the pointless pursuit of empty pleasures.

  But he was so close. His research was on the brink of a breakthrough. All of the tests he’d run to ensure it was safe were coming to an end. His body’s nutrition levels were the highest they’d been since before the soil crisis. But if anyone from the Soil Coalition found out about his work, all would be lost. They would return to a world of squandered resources helmed by the same type of men and women who had brought the country to its current state. He couldn’t let that happen again.

  Todd was building more than just a cure. He was building a movement, but patience and time were running out. And the new inspector was only going to exacerbate the situation. Something needed to be done. Quickly.

  ***

  Sydney had never been so happy to be back in Topeka. Every piece of equipment in his lab seemed to glow upon his return. The sturdy walls, the locked door, and the cold air blowing through the vents all made him feel safe. He treasured the security of familiarity.

  He opened his briefcase and pulled out his notes from the project he was working on before he was allocated to the field. Upon his search for his work, he stumbled across the data from the blood sampling in the town he visited.

  The small personal thumb drive where he kept old pictures and projects contained the raw, untampered data. Sydney drew the blinds to the windows in the lab and locked the door. He stuck the drive into the side of his laptop and downloaded the information. He reached for his notebook while the loading bar inched from sixty to seventy percent.

  Sydney flipped through the pages of th
e notebook, searching for the man’s name who had the high nutrition levels. It was on the tip of his tongue, but it eluded him. The computer beeped, signaling a finish to the download, when he finally found it. Todd Penn.

  He traced his finger over the name, feeling the indentation from the ink on the paper. That name, and the man it represented, was a mystery to him. He needed to solve it.

  The resources of the lab here in Topeka far exceeded any of the field labs that the Coalition used during blood tests. He had the finest equipment the country had to offer, which was a fabricated truth, because many of the scientific tools that could have helped him solve the puzzle had been destroyed in the violence that thundered after the first failed harvest.

  Most of the equipment was actually quite old. And anything that broke down took a very long time to fix. The soil crisis didn’t just kill plant life, it also killed most of the brain power that was trained in repairing these delicate instruments.

  However, Sydney’s resources were far greater than anything that Todd Penn could have had access to, and if he was in fact the missing link to the country’s problem, then he was confident he could decipher the hidden codes inside Mr. Penn’s blood.

  A knock at the door made Sydney jump, and he spilled the water from the mug in his hand over the keyboard. He desperately patted the keys with his shirt, trying to wipe up the water before it seeped into the circuits. More pounding shook the lab’s door.

  “Just a minute!” Sydney cried out.

  He closed the programs on his computer and removed the thumb drive. He stuffed it into his pocket as he unlocked the door.

  Jared wore a stony expression that contrasted with his three-piece suit and poked his thick forefinger at the wet splashes on Sydney’s lab coat. “What is that?”

  “Water,” Sydney answered.

  Jared stepped inside, his large frame almost taking up the entire doorframe. “Why was the door locked?”

  Sydney twirled his fingers around one another, keeping his head down. He fidgeted from side to side, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. “All of my work here is considered confidential. You know that.”

  “I was told you were sent out into the field? Is that true?”

  Sydney nodded, but Jared still had his back to him, so he didn’t see.

  “Sydney!” Jared bellowed.

  Sydney gave the same startled jump as before. The stern, commanding voice had always caused him stress. There was always a disappointed tone underlying Jared’s every word.

  “Y-yes. I was,” Sydney answered.

  “I put you here as a favor to your mother, not because of your expertise in the field. Now, the next time Gordon tells you to head out, I want you to tell him no, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For God’s sake, grow a backbone. Stand up straight!”

  Jared grabbed his son by the shoulders and practically lifted him off the floor and dropped him from midair. Sydney’s heels smacked the floor hard, and a jolt of pain rushed up his spine. He rubbed his lower back as he attempted to reach the height he never seemed to be able to as a boy.

  “Have you spoken to your mother recently?” Jared asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “I want you to call her this afternoon. I’m tired of her asking me about you.”

  Jared looked around at all of the closed blinds and the water dripping from Sydney’s desk from the earlier spill. He shook his head.

  “Do you have any idea how many other qualified candidates I had for this job? Hmm? And here you are, spilling your drink all over the equipment. Do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain all of this? And do you know how difficult it is to have it fixed? Sloppy,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve always been sloppy!”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Hmph. Well, make sure it doesn’t. I have a meeting to attend. I’ve already vented my frustrations on Gordon, so he will most likely swing by later. Be sure this place is cleaned up. I don’t need any more embarrassment from you.”

  Once his father was gone, Sydney grabbed a rag and began mopping up the water on the counter. His father’s words were a specific poison that he’d yet to find an antidote for. It had been that way ever since he was a child. Always too small and too weak for success at anything his father deemed as manly, such as sports, fighting, and hunting. The resentful eyes of his father always seemed to find him, no matter how successful he was in the lab.

  Of course, his father was right: there were other qualified candidates to run the lab, and all of them would jump at the chance. But despite his father’s nepotistic appointment, Sydney had developed himself into a competent scientist. Before the crisis, he had just received a grant to work at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a researcher in their leukemia department.

  When Sydney brought that news to his father, he was too distracted by a new prototype of weapon that his company was marketing to the Marines. He remembered how excited he was to finally have something to tell him that his father would be proud of, but it didn’t matter.

  Upon hearing his son’s news, he looked over to Sydney, and this was the moment he thought he would finally receive approval, finally see a look of pride on his father’s face that was the direct result of his achievements. But his father only asked him one question.

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t… W-what do you mean?”

  “I mean what have you made and created for them to grant you such an opportunity?”

  “Oh! My research. I recently wrote a paper on the theory of blood vessels and their capac—”

  “Theory?” his father interjected. “What proof do you have that it’s true?”

  “Well, I haven’t had the oppor—”

  “So, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly. You wrote a paper, that no one is even sure is correct, with no tangible product to show for your efforts?”

  “Dad, my paper could be the first step to—”

  “Ah!” his father said, holding his finger up, silencing Sydney. “‘Could,’ Sydney. Not ‘will,’ or ‘yes,’ but ‘could.’ You can’t eat ‘could.’ ‘Could’ can’t put a roof over your head. You can’t drink ‘could.’ So why would you waste my time with ‘could?’”

  It was in that moment Sydney realized that no matter what he did, no matter what he accomplished, it would never be good enough for his father to recognize him as a man, as an individual. His world consisted too much of theories and what-ifs, whereas his father’s world was of metal and steel.

  Sydney reached back into his pocket and pulled out his thumb drive. He closed his fist around it and gripped it tightly. If his father wanted something tangible, then that’s exactly what he was going to give him.

  Chapter 8

  The farm camp was surrounded by rolling hills, with nothing but open land for miles around. They were all designed that way. In the earlier days, the Soil Coalition was afraid of the workers escaping, and if someone were to escape, they wanted to make sure there wasn’t any place for them to hide. All the sentries would have to do was bring the sprinting skeletons into their crosshairs and pull the trigger.

  Escapes weren’t as common anymore, at least from what Alex heard through the grapevine. Everyone was too tired and weak to fight back now. Because of that, security had grown light, with nothing but Class 1 sentries here. The Coalition didn’t expect a fight from a moaning sack of bones.

  Alex had been hiding, concealed under a layer of dirt, for most of the night. Only the whites of his eyes contrasted against the black and grey dust. But since the sentries weren’t paying attention to anything beyond the ten-foot radius around their own bodies, he wasn’t concerned.

  One of the sentries came full circle on his patrol, and Alex counted him at seventy-three seconds to walk all the way around. In the last few hours of night, three different sentries had come outside to relieve him, which gave him a total of four sentries that he knew about. Judging by the size of the ca
mp, he figured that’s all there was.

  Each sentry was armed with an AR-15 with three full clips of ammo and protected with Kevlar from neck to waist. Even though the riots had stopped, they were still armed to the teeth. The rifles he carried with him had a total of twelve bullets between them. Seven in the .22 and five in the .308, but he wanted to keep the element of surprise for as long as he could, so he’d be relying on the knife to take out the first sentry.

  The only problem was once he stole the rifle off the sentry’s back, his buddies would eventually come and check on him, and when they found him dead, it would trigger an alarm that would sound all over the state. And if the alarm was sounded, there would be no doubt that the sentries around Meeko’s farm camp, which was quite larger and undoubtedly had triple the number of sentries this one did, would be on high alert, making it even harder to free him and Harper. Alex would have to kill the sentries quickly.

  Once the sentry turned the corner to the back of the farm, Alex would have roughly thirty seconds to catch up to him, kill him, and get inside before he passed the entrance again. When the sentry finally disappeared around the back, Alex pushed himself off the ground. His elbows and shoulders popped from the sudden movements, and the grey dirt he was covered in cascaded to the ground.

  Alex sprinted to the structure. Each step that dug into the ground kicked the dirt back violently into the air as he pushed his way forward, leaving a trail of grey mist in his wake. Despite the amount of effort, his body felt slow after being immobile for the past six hours. Once he made it halfway, the muscles in his legs loosened, and he picked up speed. He skidded to a stop just before he reached the back corner where the sentry had turned.

  Large, quiet breaths escaped him as he tried to control his breathing. The lack of food and water was already taking effect. His body was running on empty. He peeked around the corner and saw that the sentry had just made it to the other side. Alex had to make his move now. He pushed through the exhaustion and sprinted down the back side of the farm.