Apocalyptic Fears II: Select Bestsellers: A Multi-Author Box Set

by Greg Dragon

  “Armed men came to my door,” Victor continued. “I didn’t answer and they went away, but they came back. Again and again. I watched them through the windows for days on end and came to realize a curious thing. They weren’t taking from anyone or harming people. I even saw them fight off a group of wild teenagers at the end of our street. Besides, I had to go out anyway by then, I was running out of food. You might not believe it, but back then I used to eat a lot.”

  People in the room chuckled. Victor’s appetite had taken on legendary status. I imagine that in the years to come when stories were told of him at the Remembering they would tell of how he ate whole goats at a single sitting and grazed among the kudzu vines like a cow.

  “I near got myself killed when I finally opened my front door,” continued Victor. “Likely scared them to death as big as I am. They weren’t expecting me and I thought they were going to shoot, but Mister Egles told them to stand down.

  “’Where you come from, son?’ he asked and I told him this was my house and that my parents were dead.

  “’I’ve seen him around,’ said another man with him. ‘Good football player from what I hear.’

  “’Big as he is, damn well should be,’ answered Egles. ‘You okay, son?’

  “I didn’t know how to answer,” said Victor. “Of course I wasn’t okay but the fact that someone asked me that and really cared changed everything. They took me in with them and I helped patrol our neighborhood. We linked up with other groups nearby and before long we were cooperating and trading and helping each other. Our community had a water tower nearby that we shut off before it could drain. Another might have a grocery or a drug store or a home supply store. We helped each other and survived.”

  Victor shook his head. “You have to understand that Before, the Neighborhood Watch was almost a joke. Men and women who called the police when they saw something suspicious or that they didn’t like. When things turned bad at the End, the Watch fought and died and bled for those neighborhoods. They drove back the marauders. We set up barricades and took in refugees. We organized sanitation and planting and before long we weren’t just a group of people hiding out and surviving. We had formed a community of people looking out for each other.”

  Victor looked at Broily. “Word soon spread. Men came to join us and other communities asked us to help them. Some didn’t think we should risk our lives for those we didn’t know, but Mister Egles felt different. He sent us out to help other communities. Sometimes we were able to help. Sometimes those Men of the Watch never returned.”

  The big man looked around at us beseechingly. “Do you understand? There is nothing special about the Watch. We’re just normal people like you who decided to stand together and fight. That is the message and the gift that I bring. It is up to you to accept it. Realize that the Watch will never accept your call for aid again. It is now up to you to help others when they call on you for help.”

  “But how can we help others?” asked a small voice. “We’re just women and old men. Can we even help ourselves?”

  “Don’t be mistaken,” said Victor, “we’re called Men of the Watch, but there are women amongst our number. Women can fight too, as well as men when needed. You’ve shown that. You are able. It is just a matter of choice.”

  “But we don’t even know how to fight,” said one of the Old Ones.

  “You learn to fight by fighting,” Victor answered. “It’s as simple as that. You will defend what is yours or you will not. With any luck you won’t all be raped and massacred. Maybe the next group that comes along will decide to put you and your children back in bondage. Either way, it’s up to you. I sincerely wish you the very best.”

  Abruptly, Victor strode out of the Meeting Room and everyone was left looking at each other in shock. The silence stretched out uncomfortably as people gazed around at each other.

  “Sounds like we have some work to do,” said Mother loudly in the silence.

  Grandpa grasped her hand in his and nodded. “Indeed we do.”

  ***

  I got up early the next morning, but Victor was already gone. I tried not to cry, but I did anyway. The big man might have been my friend or not, I was never sure, but I was glad I found him under that house.

  Simple and sweet Victor who was our salvation.

  His pallet was folded up neatly in front of the fire with his rainmaker resting on top. I picked up the long cylinder and tilted it first one way and then the other listening to the soothing sounds of rain. Finding the seam along one end, I carefully unscrew the cylinder cap, careful not to let any of the small smooth stones fall out. I feel inside carefully. No sword. Of course not.

  Yet he had left me a gift, and I imagine what that act might mean. That he was my friend? That he was grateful for me taking care of him, even though he didn’t need that help? That I reminded him of one of his daughters? That under different circumstances he could have been my father?

  Wiping the tears away, I picked up the rainmaker and the blankets to put them away and notice something on the bricks near the fireplace. It is a symbol drawn in burned wood ash. I recognize it and smile.

  Victor had drawn an eye. His message is clear to me.

  It is our turn to watch and protect.

  We were now the Protectors.

  THE END

  Find many more Ryan King stories on his Amazon page:

  http://www.amazon.com/Ryan-King/e/B0070D7BFW

  Reaper’s Run

  by

  David VanDyke

  Introduction

  Speculations on the Eden Plague by B. B. Larson – Online Excerpt

  Greatness tries to change the world for the better. Small-mindedness resists, reacts – and ordinary people get caught in the gears. Usually they are ground up and spit out, but sometimes, once in a while, they win through to produce a fundamental alteration of everything we know.

  The long-awaited apocalypse arrived not with a bang but with a slow-motion, grinding crash. It began with irrational fear in the minds of men, a self-fulfilling prophecy of overreaction that brought the world to the stuttering brink of annihilation.

  It started with a man named Aaronovsky, a secret Jew that kept his Talmud and his Torah behind a false panel in his miserable little apartment on a bleak biological warfare research base in the middle of Siberia. This one man had the courage to respond to anonymous messages that showed up on his computer and keep the conversation hidden from his Soviet masters.

  Whoever was on the other end provided information on how to build a prototype virus that might save humanity: from illness, from death – perhaps even from itself. It was an amazing feat of genetic engineering, decades ahead of its time. Unbeknownst to him, this information, this communication, was of extraterrestrial origin – but that is another story.

  For long years he used the knowledge, and the laboratory, to create what eventually came to be known as the Eden Plague. That he did it right under his supervisors’ noses was a testimony to his courage and determination. Unfortunately, he did not have time to complete his work. The virus he had made, though amazing, was imperfect.

  No one living knows exactly what happened, but in 1989, politics intervened: the Soviet Union fell apart, and its technologies were stolen, its scientists and research trafficked to brutal regimes with oil money, and the almost-miracle disappeared into a black hole.

  That is, until it surfaced in the form of some samples of tissue, a whole human head, and a canister of a virus, in an abandoned biological facility buried in the Iraqi desert. There it had waited until someone, probably local salvagers, found it.

  From there its path wended murky, but eventually it fell into the hands of an ambitious CIA man, a spymaster in the classic mold – an old-moneyed New England dabbler named Jervis A. Jenkins III. He believed in putting wealth and power to use, and in this experimental biotechnology he saw a source of both.

  Keeping the secret even from his own superiors, he created a small, closed corporation to i
nvestigate the germ that showed the potential to heal and to extend life. If harnessed, it would be of immeasurable value. Who wouldn’t give everything they owned to conquer cancer, AIDS, even old age itself?

  But the so-called Eden Plague had a flaw – at least, from Jenkins’ point of view. Not only did it heal the body, but the brain, and perhaps the mind, as well. Test subjects changed for the better; their morality tended to improve as a so-called “virtue effect” took hold. Were the virus to be distributed, crime, drug addiction, selfishness and misuse of power would drop precipitously. For those like Jenkins, this was a drawback they could not stomach. If corruption were stamped out, so would be his unchecked exercise of power over his fellow man.

  Additionally, because the agent of change was a communicable disease, it could not be controlled. Easily transferred from person to person, in its present form it was useless for Jenkins' selfish purposes. The virus had to be modified – “perfected” – to get rid of this virtue effect, and also its easy transmissibility. Only when it could be controlled, withheld for the elite who could pay, and held out like a carrot to the hoi polloi, would it be publicized.

  Then the world would beat a path to his doorstep, cash in hand.

  The elder Jenkins’ major mistake? Bringing in his son and namesake to manage the corporation. When Jervis A. Jenkins IV botched his attempt to recruit Air Force combat lifesaver Daniel Markis into the program, he set off a chain of events culminating in the Eden Plague spreading throughout the world.

  But just like Jenkins, the national power structures, especially the people at the top, were not ready to allow such a revolution in their societies.

  The U.S. tried to burn the virus out with nuclear weapons on its own soil, as did the Russians and the Chinese. Especially within these three superpowers, Eden Plague carriers, or “Sickos” as they were labeled, were hunted down, rounded up, locked away – or worse.

  Chapter One

  Aboard Royal Princes Cruise Line’s Royal Neptune

  Sergeant Jill “Reaper” Repeth, U.S. Marine Corps, started the day as she always did: with a protein shake and one hundred pull-ups on a tension bar she had brought aboard and set up in the doorway of her room’s balcony. Facing out to sea looking over the railing, her head and shoulders rose and fell, eyes on the horizon. Her lungs expanded, pumping the fresh sea air in and out.

  It is great to be alive, she told herself, one of a series of mantras of encouragement. Twenty-five and still alive. Every day above ground is a good day. Every day I am not being shot at is a good day. She believed these things more today than on some other days.

  Jill Repeth was a One Percenter. Most Marines didn’t know about them, because most Marines weren’t female. Only a small fraction of the Corps was composed of women, because unlike the other services, the Marines didn’t bend its physical standards very much to admit them. Measure up or leave, they said.

  But the One Percent was an unofficial secret club of female Marines that strove to outperform the men – that could, would and did beat them at their own game. Marathoners, triathletes, gymnasts, distance swimmers, biathletes. Thus One Percent, because perhaps one in a hundred already fit Marine women could do it – could perform at this Olympic level of physical prowess.

  The cruise line had given her a private room on a middle-high deck, something she would have struggled to afford if she hadn’t been selected through their “Wounded Warriors” promotion that provided free cruises to the nation’s war-damaged service members. Jill was glad of that privacy as she finished the hundred, hardly more winded at the end than at the start. Taking that as a good sign, she knocked out another fifty before stopping.

  That was more than she’d ever done before at a stretch. Perhaps it was because she had an advantage over the average Marine, male or female: she weighed at least twenty pounds lighter than normal.

  Missing everything below both knees put less strain on the cardiovascular system. Absent lower legs didn’t need blood and oxygen.

  Stay positive, stay focused.

  Ever since the mortar shell that took her feet and shins, that’s what she told herself.

  Dropping gently to the deck onto her buttocks, she maneuvered with wiry muscled arms and leg stumps over to her prostheses. Sitting on the floor, she strapped them on, fiddling and adjusting for a longer span than usual. She finally got them to some semblance of stability, and wobbled to her artificial feet.

  Jill stared down at the legs and the metal-and-plastic structures. They didn’t feel right. Her good mood evaporated. Some days the damn things just didn’t sit well on her, and it looked like this would be one. She wasn’t even going to turn on the microprocessor control and servos that helped her walk and run with a semblance of normalcy. She still hoped she could work up to a marathon again. Maybe with those bladerunner things.

  Jill sat down on the bed and took the prostheses off, rubbing at the end of the stumps. They always itched a bit, but today they positively screamed to be scratched. She did so, vigorously, and then looked more closely at them. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that the stumps had lengthened slightly.

  Maybe they were just swollen.

  She shrugged to herself. Rather than fight with the artificial legs, she phoned for a wheelchair pick-up. She’d come back after breakfast and fiddle with the things. She was starving.

  An hour later, after bolting down everything she could shove into her face at the buffet, she returned to her room, bewildered. The ship had gone crazy, in a good way. People claiming to be cured of cancer. A blind man seeing. A paraplegic standing up and walking. People talking about the Second Coming of Christ, seeing the Virgin Mary on their walls and their pizzas, gossiping about miracles and the aliens landing.

  Well, nobody had disappeared off the ship, so at least that ruled out the Rapture. Other people spoke of a viral video some had seen before the ship’s internet went down, where a man named Daniel Markis claimed to have released a curative disease that everyone could have.

  Jill stared down at her stumps again and wondered.

  ***

  Two days later, Jill peered out over the balcony rail. The object of her gaze was the U.S. Navy frigate Ingraham, keeping station to windward at about two nautical miles distance. Beyond, hull up on the horizon perhaps twelve miles off floated a Landing Platform/Dock amphibious assault ship, probably the USS Somerset. It was this ship that held her frustrated attention.

  She lowered herself down from her hold on the railing; she had been perched there with her hands taking all her weight. Settling into the comfortable deck chair, she picked up her small five-power optical binoculars. Jill cursed herself for not bringing her eighteen-power electronic monsters, but she hated to carry a month’s pay around on a Caribbean cruise.

  The LPD leaped into view, the angled, radar-deflecting planes of its superstructure identifying it as one of the most modern ships of the U.S. Navy. She was familiar with the type, having served a Fleet Marine Force tour on her sister ship, the USS Arlington.

  Twelve miles away. Just sitting there for the last forty-eight hours.

  Food aboard the cruise ship had dwindled, and was now rationed; Jill had recognized the impending problem as soon as the vessel had been detained. She had taken pains to smuggle everything that would keep back to her cabin and stash it in anticipation of making a break, but her stock would run out shortly, and there was no sign of them being allowed to land or disembark.

  The announcements aboard ship had said they were quarantined because of a “dangerous disease.” That dangerous disease had apparently cured cancer, blindness, even old age among those aboard, and had started to regrow her legs. Between the official word and the Daniel Markis video, she decided she believed the latter.

  Hunger became her constant companion. She didn’t know why for sure. Her caloric intake had exploded; for a triathlete like her, that was a sign something was seriously out of whack. The appetite must have something to do with the miracle disease.
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  She looked down at the strange pink skin down there, contrasting with the tan that ended just below her knees. The nubs couldn’t bear her weight without excruciating pain, and they wouldn’t fit her prosthetics anymore, so she had used the wheelchair service a lot. Reaching down to scratch the itchy growth, she pushed aside thoughts of why it had happened, or even how, and concentrated on what she had to do.

  Night began to fall over the Atlantic. Making her final preparations, she wrote a letter to her parents in Los Angeles, leaving it addressed on the table for the steward to find. She ate as much as she could hold, and put the rest into the waterproof bag, along with her combat utility uniform, her wallet and identification, and the jury-rigged prostheses. She had ripped the expensive electronic guts out of them and she now had something that she could use, if barely. Padded with pillow stuffing and cut-up blankets, they strapped onto her stumps and allowed her to stand, even walk gingerly, as long as she could take the pain, and look somewhat normal in her uniform.

  A bottle of ibuprofen went in as well, and a few other odds and ends. Then she sealed it up and put it in her rucksack. Wet suit on next, a stylish blue and green never intended for clandestine work, but it was all she had. Then the scuba gear she had brought to use – she thought – for recreation; her combat knife; and a rucksack strapped in reverse to sit over her belly. Lastly the swim fins, reconfigured to fit her regenerating stumps.

  Levering herself up to the rail, she looked out between the slats at the two ships, now visible mainly by their navigation lights. Earlier she had seen hovercraft embarking and disembarking out of the combat well at the back of the LPD. Now she could see a strobe and running lights from a helo landing on the flight deck at the rear, one of a continuous droning above and around the ships. She had seen Hornet and Lightning naval fighters high overhead earlier in the day, so there was a supercarrier out there somewhere too, running combat air patrol.