Feral

by Tracy Korn

  Contents

  Copyright

  Preface

  Feral

  What's Next!?

  About the Author

  “Feral” | First Bloods Prequel #1

  Copyright © 2019 by Tracy Korn. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

  Cover Design Copyright © 2019 by James Korn

  www.jkornphoto.com

  Summary:

  A longshoreman dreams of becoming an authorized medic in The Citadel, an opportunity that would literally cost him years of his life. But when a gruesome accident actually opens the door, will the new price of his dream be even steeper?

  Preface

  No one believed the world’s population would hit eleven billion in just a hundred years. We weren’t ready, despite the decades of warnings that societal infrastructures would collapse—like a dam holding back an ever-deepening sea of people without access to basic needs.

  The United States was the first of the developed countries to pass legacy credit laws, which seemed like the answer to everyone’s problems in the beginning. Can’t pay your medical bills? No problem—just sign away a year of your life instead. One at the end. One you won’t miss anyway.

  Legacy credits took the place of loans and credit cards for private citizens. Conveniently, corporations had no choice other than to stay on the old system due to their conglomerate natures. After all, the CEOs and boards of directors couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the debt of their own companies.

  For everyone else, it started off almost too easily. People paid off their creditors, got the surgeries they needed, went to school, and in the meantime, predicting a person’s natural expiration date was a simple matter of gene algorithms. For a few decades, it was a utopia. But the bill came due for everyone, eventually.

  Legacy chips embedded in people’s brains subtracted the debt owed from one’s natural years balance, and when their time was up, the chips alerted the government. People were given twenty-four hours notice to say goodbye at that point, and at least they always scheduled expirations for the middle of the night so people could just go to sleep and not wake up. Painless. Humane. They even collected your corpse the next morning at no additional charge to your family. It was a better fate than we might get if we lived out our natural years, or so the propaganda said.

  Now, if there were a natural disaster, sometimes the unused and non-levied years of the casualties would be redistributed among the survivors in a city as kind of a tax credit. It was all updated daily in The Borrower’s Report—the digital record of interest rates, monetary to legacy conversion rates, and public domain legacy distribution credits. If a person just happened to accidentally walk into traffic, however, death insurance could cover their obligations, but if they didn’t have that, the debt they carried could be passed along to their next of kin (that was in the fine print, naturally).

  Despite how transparent this all seemed in the beginning, when collections began after a few decades, people started to see the system for what it really was: population control.

  Perfectly legal population control.

  Slowly, when the costs became all too apparent, it was harder for the average person to access higher education and Authorized medical treatment, which was the only kind not punishable by thousands of dollars or decades of legacy fines. The final straw was the physical wall going up around the only sanctioned university that could issue Authorized credentials, The Citadel, about six or seven years ago.

  Life became synonymous with money not only metaphorically, but literally, plunging our world into depths of greed previously unknown.

  We were drowning, and it was only a matter of time before someone...or something intervened.

  FERAL

  United States, 2119

  Global population: 11.4 billion

  The crashing surf sounded like a heartbeat in the fog, a constant, steady rhythm.

  It sounded like something lying in wait for me, but I tried not to think about it. You think about that kind of thing in The Grind, and it might just come true.

  “Damn it!“ Pritchard shouted when his hat flew off in the gust coming from the Atlantic, sending his dark hair in every direction. He started after it, but threw his arms in the air when the hat was blown out to sea. “That cost me two hours!“

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You paid two hours for a hat? Aren’t you the one always going on about how legacy credit is just population control?” I shook my head. “I would have loaned you the cash, man.“

  “You’re saving up for your pipe dream,“ Pritchard said as he climbed into the front loader, then drove it at a crawl to the edge of the dock to meet the incoming barge. “You hear about the new attacks? One of them was right here in the shipyard.“

  “How do you know that?“ I asked, wiping the film from the salty air on my pants before moving the sandbags out of Pritchard’s way.

  “It was in The Borrower’s Report. How are you not glued to that thing, man? The victims must not have owed much… Everyone in the city was credited two days each for acts of nature.“

  “I heard it was some kind of animal.“ Donovan, my other dock partner, stacked the last of the empty crates onto another loading pallet. The sun hadn’t even come up yet, and his gray T-shirt was already drenched with sweat.

  Pritchard laughed. “Nah, it would never get this close to The Citadel without the Sweepers picking it off,“ he added, waving us backward. “Can you both get out of my line?“

  Donovan bowed in mock deference, then hopped away from the skid of empty crates so Pritchard could lift it onto the barge.

  The dock light at the end of the crane cast a shadow as the ship bellied up to the pier with a hollow groan. A chill ran down my spine in the echoes it made knocking against the dock, and it even felt like the temperature dropped several degrees. Something was always…off about this ship.

  Luna Bay was painted in white on the faded red hull, but that was it—no port of origin. The shipment schedules only ever showed this barge intercepting cargo from somewhere near The Bahamas, so it must have been from near there. Wherever it was from, it was a long way from the Maine coastline.

  “Hey! Where you all coming from?“ I called to the first deckhand I saw, which was what I always asked in the hopes one of them would be caught off guard and tell me. But this one just stared down at me with empty, jaundiced eyes like all the others. He turned away from me after a beat, his dark skin vanishing into the shadows like something in a dream.

  “You a stubborn one, Knox Ryder,“ Mama Luz said in a heavy, tropical accent I could never place. “Like I tell ya before, only one way to find out where dis ship be from.“ She winked. Her dark eyes flickered in the moonlight as she moved from the shadows to the railing, throwing her red, woven shawl over her shoulders. This was her barge, but that was all I could ever get out of her.

  I nodded casually and smiled up at her. “I might just take you up on it and climb aboard one of these days. Don’t tempt me.“

  “I be counting de days, Knox Ryder.“ She said every word slowly, the blaze of her white smile peeling through the darkness, and then she was gone as quickly as she appeared.

  “Live forever with Mama Luz in paradise?“ Donovan asked sarcastically. “I’ll take that standing invitation if you’re not gonna use it, Ryder.“

  “Maybe someday when I’m sick of you two,“ I answered with a smirk. “I’ve got other plans for now.“

  “Oh, that’s right!“ Pritchard said. “You get that med-school application in?“

  I sighed. “Don’t
even start, OK?“

  “I knew it! How many tries is that?“ Pritchard turned the crank inside the loading rig, aligning the guide light over the crates. “I keep telling you, man, they don’t want Grind medics in The Citadel. Education is for the educated.“

  “Lucky for you chuckle-heads I haven’t been admitted yet.“ I tried to echo his levity. “Who else would fix you up the next time you dislocated something?“ I laughed, but I couldn’t ignore the shot of anger that ran through me. And there was only one reason a dumb comment like that would make me angry. It was true.

  “Cheaper to find simulations online anyway,“ Pritchard said. “Two semesters at The Citadel would run you five years legacy credit—twenty total without a scholarship or cash—you doing the math it takes to become an authorized medic? You’d be dead a decade after getting your license.“

  “I’d earn back the years with social percentage,“ I added. “Unlike some of us, I’d be an asset to the community.“

  “It’s your life, man. At least dreaming is free.“ Pritchard pointed a finger gun at me and winked. “All right!“ he yelled, turning to the crewmen on the barge and waving them off. “Sending it up!“ He swung the pallet of empty crates onto their deck, where they disconnected the ropes and reattached them to a full pallet of crates for him to bring down.

  “Hey!“ I shouted to Donovan, but it was too late for him to put the wheeled skid in place to receive the new pallet. “Send over the skid!“

  Pritchard spit from the window of the loader. “Come on, man! I’m breaking, like, four codes leaving this in the air!“

  “Keep your pants on!“ Donovan shouted, kicking me the skid to align under the hovering pallet. But just as I got it in place, he started shouting again, this time to the barge pulling away from the dock. “Wait! Cut the rope!“

  I didn’t see what he was talking about or pointing at until the rig light caught one of their ropes still attached to the bottom of the suspended pallet, threatening to upend the whole thing if the barge kept pulling back. The loader’s crane creaked as the bottom of the pallet started to lift.

  Pritchard swore. “Ryder, get out of there!“

  Donovan shouted something else, but all I heard clearly was the crack of the pallet’s alignment sticks. I jumped back as the crates slipped free, landing hard on the wet pavement with a crash that left my ears ringing. I screamed until I coughed, and searing pain shot up my hips straight into my teeth.

  Don’t look, I thought. Never let them look. The pain is always worse when they know.

  But I looked anyway.

  And the pain was worse.

  The wheeled skid and several crates covered most of my legs, and all at once, everything seemed like I was watching it through a filter. Some kind of strangely barbed, red fruit rolled everywhere. The differently colored, broken bottles glittered in the dock light. And everything was somehow both chaotic and muted at the same time.

  “Heads up!“ Donovan yelled as the now-freed pallet swung violently over us.

  “Son-of-a-bitch…“ Pritchard said under his breath. “Disconnect the hook and send it here!“ He waved at Donovan. There was another crash in the distance, and Pritchard launched a barrage of curses into the dark before turning back to me. “All right…all right… We’re going to get this up. You’re all right, Ryder. Just hang on… Don! Now!“

  The sound of the hydraulics starting up again focused my attention—the volume was all the way up again, and I knew that any second, more pain was going to flood my whole body. I grabbed Pritchard by the collar of his shirt. “Listen to me…that skid won’t stay together. It’s broken. If anything is…unattached under there—a leg or a foot—you need to get it fast and get out again.“

  The blood drained from Pritchard’s face. I shook him.

  “All right! All right…“

  “In the air!“ Donovan shouted from the loader just as the skid lifted a few inches off my legs. Nausea exploded in my stomach, and the sudden heaviness in the back of my head almost dragged me into unconsciousness.

  I yelled again as Pritchard started pulling me out. “You’re clear! You’re clear!“

  I vomited, but the seizing convulsion was exactly what I needed to keep from passing out.

  Don’t look… I thought. Never let them look.

  But I had to know.

  I stopped in the middle of a breath when I saw my blood-soaked pants…my boots turned sideways in opposite directions.

  “Tourniquet…“ I said through my teeth.

  “Don, throw me your belt!“ Pritchard yelled.

  “I don't have one!“

  Pritchard swore again and took off his over-shirt, then tore it in half and twisted each section into a cord. “Tell me how.“

  “Tie one around each leg as tight as you can. Tight.“ Another wave of nausea crashed into me. The blood rushed behind my ears in tandem with the surf, loud and suffocating until it was interrupted by sharp jolts of pain as Pritchard worked.

  “And call the Sweepers!“ he barked to Donovan.

  “But Wu will can us!“

  “Damn it! Call them right n—!“

  “Don’t!“ I interrupted, gritting my teeth again. “It’s too much…to risk.“

  “Are you crazy!?“ Pritchard turned his attention back to me. “You need a medic!“

  “I am a medic,“ I growled again, and whatever else they were saying to me sounded like muffled noise here in the dark. “Just take me to Nyssa.“

  ***

  I blacked out and came to several times before I woke up at our friend, Nyssa’s flat. She was an unauthorized medic like me, but that didn’t explain why I was strapped down to a table. I pulled against the restraints, and Donovan was talking before I could get a word out.

  “Ryder, wait, don’t—Nyssa! He’s awake!“

  I pulled against the restraints again and glared at Pritchard, who was as big as a moose at the foot of the table in this small room. “What is this!?“

  He opened his mouth to talk, but only managed to glance at the blanket covering my legs. I didn’t feel anything except adrenaline hitting my bloodstream when I tried to move my feet and nothing happened.

  “It’s OK… Don’t panic,“ Nyssa said, rushing into the makeshift emergency room with a large tablet in her hands and her blonde hair pulled back. “Sorry for the straps,“ she said, motioning for Pritchard to undo them. “I just couldn't risk you waking up and struggling while I was working.“

  “Why can’t I feel my legs?“

  “Because I haven’t started the sync,“ she said, frantically typing something into the tablet she was gripping. “There. Try it now.“

  I tried to move my feet, and the blanket jumped. When I pulled it off, long, packed wires surrounded long, metal rods, like where muscles might have been around a bone. Clear sleeves clamped over about five inches of my bandaged thighs—apparently, all that was left of them—which made my skin feel like it was on fire. The…feet were a collection of smaller metal rods with more wires weaving through them, all of it encased in some kind of long, clear gel sock on the left and a similar gel sock on the right—that one, blue.

  “Nyssa…?“ I trailed off.

  She must have been able to read the questions in my voice because she started babbling answers. “Knox, it’s primitive because I didn’t have enough material to make it any other way, but—“

  “What happened to my legs, Nyssa?“

  “I’m sorry,“ she said carefully. “I…I had to amputate. But I was able to save your hip joints.“

  All my words left me in an exhale. I took in another breath hoping it would restore them, but I still couldn’t think clearly enough to say anything. I shot a look at Pritchard, who just thinned his lips into a flat line and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “How—how is it all…connected?“ he asked.

  “Well, the femurs fused nicely to the titanium,“ Nyssa started to explain, but stopped when I looked away.

  Pritchard gripped m
y shoulder. “See, it’s not so bad. Saved you at least a ten-year bill at the hospital, and you can still walk.“ He nodded, glancing hopefully at Nyssa.

  “Theoretically. Do you want to try?“ Nyssa raised an almost invisible eyebrow at me, but I was still processing what was real and what wasn’t.

  My legs are gone. They’re gone?

  “Do I…just…?“ I started.

  Nyssa smiled. “Just try to get up. I programmed the chips to receive your neural input. They should read the command from your brain like your real legs would.“

  I slid the new legs off the table, but I didn’t feel anything except heaviness, like each foot was filled with lead.

  The back of the right foot hit the leg of the table with a loud thud.

  “I can’t—“ The words stopped in my dry throat. I swallowed and started again. “I can’t feel anything, Nyss.“

  “It’s OK,“ she said, entering something else into the tablet. “The material isn’t premium, so it’s heavier than your muscles and bones would be. But you should be able to translate that to power—jumping, running, all that.“

  “So he’s what, bionic?“ Donovan tried to chuckle.

  Nyssa narrowed her eyes at him before tapping something else into her tablet. She nodded at me. “Try again now.“

  I moved slowly off the table with Pritchard under my arm and still nearly fell over, unprepared for the jolt of new pain. I heard the feet hit the floor, and after a few seconds, I could feel the cold tile.

  “Take your time,“ Donovan said. “Breathe, man.“

  I pressed my teeth together and focused on the blue lights running up and down either side of the rods that were apparently my shinbones.

  “Nyss, can you, um, make a covering?“ Pritchard asked. “Good job, Ryder. Try a step.“

  “I can make some flesh-tone casing. That hard gel is all I had on hand here.“ Nyssa gestured to the feet, which had a springy quality when I put my weight into moving forward. She grinned. “Sorry they don’t match.“