J.K. Accinni
Introduction to
Species Intervention #6609
Book 5
Evil Among Us
Synopsis for Book 5: Evil Among Us
Will the two groups of survivors finally meet? Will Seth become a threat to those in the Hive who have discovered the mystery and the shocking ramifications of their good health? Who is the Father that Netty and Wil visit every day? What secrets and despicable deeds are Baby and Echo hiding? Why is poor Kenya’s baby taking such a long time to arrive? Can the bloodthirsty nature of man be suppressed enough to satisfy the Womb?
And what about the hapless Suzy? Her abduction by the bloodthirsty barbarians will have enormous ramifications for the entire planet.
The survivors in the Hive live and love in happy ignorance until a well-loved member of the group disappears, unraveling the mystery of the Kreyven, secrets hidden by Netty and Wil, and the horrible truth that teaches the survivors that even the most loving and benevolent creature can have its moment to seek revenge.
A complete blast from the past, Evil Among Us will answer all the questions readers hungered for in book one, Baby.
Prologue
The brown sky rained dirty ash onto soundless trees denuded of life and flattened as if a giant fist had descended to pummel them from the gray and wintery sky. The horizon was blank; the most famous skyline in the world gone, leaving devastation, twisted metal and death.
There was a complete absence of color, life or warmth. The crushed horizon smoldered with a palette of black and leaden barrenness; benumbing and bone-crushing godforsaken loneliness.
The crumbled remains of the Bronx Zoo flinched under the sight of its once-proud sign, bent and misshapen. Precious wildlife reduced to ash. Minute bone fragments of the Womb’s proud creations scattered in the wind.
Yes . . . the premonition directed to a naïve Abby by the transformed Netty Doyle as an Elder of the Womb came to pass over six months ago. No longer just a premonition but a cold ugly reality. Bloody reality. Hopeless reality . . .
The evil death that rained down on the Earth from the very hands of man that had been entrusted to protect it had done its job effectively. Just as man had idiotically planned while stupidly believing the time would never come. What was the old cliché? Man plans, while God, the Womb, laughs?
No one laughed now. Those who survived the early bombings found death at the hands of the next waves of horror, mass hysteria, depraved lawlessness and disease. If the plague, revisited from the Middle Ages, didn’t get you, then dysentery, dehydration or starvation did.
Now that the population existed only in miniscule numbers that huddled deep in rare, clever concealments, human feces no longer littered every landscape. The smell of raw human sewage no longer carried on the perpetual wind that harbored its own invisible death to man and beast.
Yes, the wind that struck terror in the hearts of even the strongest, the most psychotic, and the most resourceful, carried invisible radiation along with the powerful spawn of dirty bombs. Even the most infectious microbes searched on the wind for unlucky hosts, the final death knell for the hapless humans and creatures in every corner of the once green planet.
What did the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world think would happen if one of them were foolish enough to hunger for absolute supremacy through the means of nuclear power? Did they think the world would come rushing to their feet in supplication? Only Homo sapiens would conceive of such a barbaric maneuver.
Yes, Homo sapiens: the species that, unlike any other creature, harbors a conscious ego. The ability to manipulate its environment and the complete disregard for the balance of nature and the other creatures that shared the formerly glorious planet.
And where now were the exalted leaders from the United States that bled their constituents so readily into poverty over the last 245 years?
Where were any authorities for that matter? How long would the politicians survive in their hunkered- down, taxpayer-funded concrete and steel monoliths in the ground? How many years would pass before their food ran out? Five years? Ten? Fifty? Could they hold out for one hundred years? If they could, what shape would the Earth be in? Questions, nothing but questions: long answered and prepared for by the most expensive experts taxpayer money could buy. For all the politicians in all the countries that assumed they would survive . . . the Womb laughed again.
Chapter 1
2057 AD
Five-year-old Suzy lay on the dirty cot with her leg chained to a metal spike embedded in the cold ground, muddy from the drizzle and constant footfalls of the men who came to confer with Doc Benjamin. Many attempted to catch a glimpse of the now notorious young captive who promised salvation for all from the devastation closing in on them as they maneuvered around the poisonous cities like army ants, ducking and weaving, destroying and obliterating everything in their path.
Their numbers now counted in the hundreds. For every man there were five to ten women, all young, most under the age of twenty. And all owned by an individual man. Virtual slaves.
They did the work during the day, setting up the extensive camp and cooking the meals, and were forced to extend comfort at night. If they refused they were beaten, starved and left without shelter, such that it was. It didn’t take long for a young girl to be broken. Most were still mourning the loss of their families who had been robbed and murdered by the very men they were now forced to view as their protectors. Some existed in a state of perpetual shock, unable to answer questions or respond to threats as they were repeatedly raped or beaten. But they were alive. They were amongst the lucky few; if you could count their existence as living.
The only things that kept them from going over the edge were their sister captives. The strong and resilient ones knew their best chance of survival was to nurse the weak ones on the off chance they could increase their strength enough to overcome their captors.
It was a hopeless plan, doomed from the onset. The strength of the men only increased as they gathered food from their victims, stray livestock, and indispensable salvage in their march across new territory, pushing further and further east to their destination. But it was this trifling spark of defiance that the girls nursed, unwilling to let the fledgling ember of purpose be extinguished and so threaten their tenuous hold on thoughts of independence and freedom.
Suzy cringed as Doc Benjamin approached with Avery at his side. Avery claimed to be a veteran of the last few wars the United States had been sucked into by conservative politicians who hungered for the international conflict that enriched the pockets of the multinational corporations; in turn enriching their re-election coffers. He claimed to be an expert in electronics, rigging up a communication system between the men that rivaled anything the few rag tag groups of authorities had in the beginning.
Now, most in authority were either part of Doc Benjamin’s group or dead. Stupidly, the principled ones had failed to adjust quickly enough to the new rule of eat or be eaten. Not literally, of course; it hadn’t come to that yet. But unfortunately, their ethics didn’t have room for flexibility, leaving their stripped corpses ignobly and anonymously behind in the dirt with the rest of Doc’s victims.
Suzy tried to keep her eyelids squeezed tight as Avery approached. He was a lumbering giant of a man. His shaved head with its knobby protrusions and his dead, flat eyes that glittered as he watched the young girls laboring around the vast camp did nothing to dispel the aura of restrained violence. He hadn’t touched her, but his excited grunts and the soft sobbing that were usually accompanied by sharp slaps and occasional screams could be heard around camp. That alone convinced Suzy that even though she didn’t understand what was happening, she knew it was only a matter of time before she was the recipient herself.
*
“When ya gunna let me have the little one? You promised it was my turn the night we took her.” Avery eyed Suzy’s thin form, apparently asleep on the ramshackle cot, his voice unexpected
ly squeaky and high pitched. The whining tone made Doc Benjamin cringe with annoyance. He turned to eyeball Avery. With the long suffering patience of a mother who’s close to being on her last nerve with a beloved child, he sighed.
“Avery, you know she’s our ticket to the bomb shelter her grandfather has. We need to keep her happy and cooperative. How long do you think that would last if I turned her over to you? Didn’t you get the last two women we liberated?”
Doc sidled up to Avery. A quick glimpse of steel flashed in his eyes, unseen by the giant. He playfully slapped Avery on the cheek; his hand stinging while Avery remained unperturbed, still caught up on what he felt was an undeserved slight.
“Yeah, but Doc, they both didn’t work out. I had to dispatch the mother the first night when she tried to claw my face after I broke her kid’s arm. And you know that was an accident. She just didn’t get it when it was her kid’s turn to be my bed warmer.”
The whine in Avery’s high-octave voice was trying Doc’s patience. He snaked his arm around the giant’s waist. “It’s time to break camp and get a move on. Why don’t you see what’s keeping my breakfast? Tell the women to send a sweet for the girl. I need to have a talk with her when she wakes up.” The giant’s face sagged.
“But—”
“No buts. We don’t have time to go over the inventory right now either. It’ll keep. Just check on the livestock and make sure the men eat before they start to round up the herd again. We need them to keep up with us. What good does it do us if they get lost on the way to Lily Pond Road? It took us a long time to make it here to Sussex County. I’m not about to lose them after all this.” Slapping Avery on a thick, meaty cheek a second time, he turned him around and sent him on his way, patient resignation in the slump of Avery’s huge slabs of shoulders.
As he waited for his breakfast, Doc leaned back on the vehicle he and his men had confiscated from Suzy’s grandmother and the worm, Seth. What was the woman’s name? Laura? No Lorna . . . yeah. Seth and Lorna. He stewed over his error in letting them go. He should have killed Seth on the spot, but something about the old lady had made him pause. Not to mention the comatose young teen in the back of their car. There was no telling what illness she might have been carrying.
In his haste to get away, he had let the one person who could save them all slip through his fingers. His fists tightened in anger. How was he going to keep his horde under control if he continued to make bad judgment calls like that? His decision to follow Seth and the grandmother to Sussex County was called into question continually. He’d heard the whisperings.
He glanced over to Suzy’s sleeping form. Too bad the kid doesn’t remember where her grandfather’s bomb shelter actually is. It must be huge if they’re growing crops inside.
And she said they had medicine and something that cures people. At least they’d pulled the name of the road out of her. Now they just had to figure out where Lily Pond Road was. He absently fingered the ugly sores with their hanging scabs on the underside of his arm. No matter what he did to treat them, they refused to heal.
Doc peered up at the gray sky through a gap in the lean-to, wondering how long it would be before they saw the sun again. It had taken them months to get this far and they never did catch up to Seth and the grandmother. It made him suspect they had wandered off the route or been killed on the way. Perhaps the tribe had arrived before the twosome. After all, Seth and the old woman were on foot, dragging the sick teen. His horde had many vehicles. Even slowing for the multitude of stops to scavenge for gas supplies, females and anything else they might find useful at some future date, they had made decent progress.
When they had traveled off Route 15, the main artery leading into Sussex County, he had quickly established camp in a town called Franklin, just to the east of Sparta. They had decided that going further northwest to the town of Andover, which had at one time been nothing but rich farmland, was the wrong direction. There was no point in going further. He cursed under his breath as he remembered entrusting the map they had liberated from Seth and Lorna’s car to one of his most reliable men.
Thompson had passed it on to his wife, one of his only men to have a spouse in the tribe. Unfortunately for them both, she’d lost the map during a mad scramble out of a town in Pennsylvania after they’d discovered dead bodies covered with bulbous growths and dried blood. They’d dropped everything they’d just scavenged where they stood and bolted, with Doc threatening to shoot anyone who held on to their tainted bounty. He didn’t know what disease had struck the hapless inhabitants of the town, but he knew it could be most anything. His forethought regarding the issuance of collapsible breathing masks months ago had kept them safe . . . so far.
That night he had been forced again to make an example of a member of the tribe who had faltered and placed them in jeopardy. He had forced everyone to watch as he’d placed the woman on her knees, head over a log and had one of the strongest men in the tribe strike her neck with an axe, removing her head. He’d hated to do it because of the effect it had on the other women in the tribe. For the next day or so they had become less malleable. But things would eventually settle back down. It had served its purpose, keeping everyone on their toes.
He was at a complete loss as to what direction to go in from here. He knew they couldn’t be more than two hours from New York City. The once great metropolis had taken a direct hit, followed up by a series of secondary hits once the other psychotic leaders of third world powers decided to pile in. When all communication was lost, he could only speculate as to who had done what to whom and why. Did it really matter now anyway? He knew the only thing he had to worry about was where the hell the bomb shelter was. And keeping everyone healthy, of course. That’s what gave him his power.
That had never been an easy job even before the bombs. As he’d had told Suzy’s grandmother, he wasn’t a real doctor. Not like the doctors of his grandparents’ era. The general public, like so many other issues, were completely unaware that the profession of physician no longer existed. Those that wanted to be doctors, simply studied to become what used to be called physician assistants. That was the doctor of today. It wasn’t that the government had tried to hide it, although they had done so quite successfully, it was the fact that no one had paid attention. Their own lives were so all-consuming that few had the energy or inclination to pay attention, allowing the government to slowly strip them of most of their rights, fostering a new reality that few took the time to call into question. Don’t worry, the government will handle it, the government will solve everything, the government will take care of us.
It also allowed interesting gentlemen like himself to slip into the ranks of the revered medical profession. Men with questionable ethics. It wasn’t that he was such a bad guy. He just believed in different things. Like the fact that he was destined for greatness. He’d known that from the time he had discovered that a wide engaging smile could charm even the hardest bitten parent or superior.
His wandering mind thought about Avery and his many talents. Was there any wire, tool, or inanimate object that guy couldn’t put to good use? It almost made up for his volatility when it came to dealing with flesh and blood. Before too long, Doc’s eyelids drooped and he found himself nodding off to sleep.
*
Suzy concentrated, straining for sounds, hearing only the distant clatter that meant morning departure was not far off. She tested the silence by softly clearing her throat. Doc remained quiet so she finally relaxed for a few minutes to say her daily prayer to her grandmother to come find her. She swallowed a soft sob, gulping it down her throat as her little-girl perceptions wondered why it was taking so long. Her undeveloped brain warred with her treasured fantasy of rescue. No matter how many times she told the girls who fed her and attempted to comfort her that she would be rescued, they only shook their big heads that sat on emaciated rag-covered bodies with huge sad eyes and looked away. All were silent, not wanting to hurt the little girl with th
e truth of her reality. A few even envied the special treatment the five-year-old received.
Poor Suzy, not an ounce of fat remained on her bones. She refused to eat and often found herself in the arms of some of the men from the tribe as Doc directed her to be force-fed. It was the only thing that kept her alive; that and the delusion of rescue by her beloved grandmother. In the last few months, the reality of her captivity and the circumstances in which she lived had served to erase any trace of the happy, joyful child, along with most of the memories of her five years. She no longer remembered her mama and papa, her sister Jennifer, Seth, or even where she was from. The only probable reason she was still alive was her agonized screams for her grandmother to rescue her and take her to the magic bomb shelter when she was first captured. After she screamed and cried herself out, Doc was able to get enough monosyllabic answers out of her to convince him that the sanctuary was real.
Suzy shuddered as she felt Doc place a heavy hand on her thin shoulder. She began to tremble instantly. He turned her over, glancing down at the hardened crust of last night’s gray gruel that decorated her hand-me-down shirt. The infinitesimal spark that was actually Suzy receded from her eyes to take refuge in the primal part of her mind that protects us all from facing horror. The only thing that Doc could see was an empty husk. She instinctively knew he had exhausted all hope of finding a way to reach her and extract even a morsel of information that would guide them further.
“I’m sorry, little one. But maybe it’s better this way. My men will leave you alone.” Taking her in his arms, he did an uncharacteristic thing. He hugged her and held her close. The spark that was the child Suzy flared, burning bright before receding back to its place of refuge.