Trinity’s joke about advertising turned out to be no joke at all. We hadn’t even made it back to the compound before emails and orders were rolling in. Boyle had put an insane price on his line of Kukris that bore my name. Didn’t matter, because he had orders for fifty of them overnight. And the ebook sales were through the roof, achieving best-selling status by the end of the following day.
Brad, who was leading the consulting effort, also reported that he had inquiries for consulting work from seven groups around the country. If we were busy before, we got crazy now. But the timing was great, as it was already autumn and we wanted to stay productive throughout the coming winter. Local farms were in full harvest and our own initial growing attempts were yielding good results. The influx of food required us to can, dry, freeze, and store the food we had raised or bought locally, which, in addition to vegetables and local fruits, included beef, pork, and turkey. The twins had started a chicken coop with an inaugural batch of chicks given to them by a local farmer. Between natural biological factors and additional donations from other fans, the flock had grown to over three dozen chickens and was still climbing.
In fact, my monstrous, fashion-obsessed, angsty teen sisters had morphed into agriculturally focused ambassadors of our community who were well-known and well regarded throughout the region. They hauled me or Astrid, or sometimes both of us, out with them on their outreach forays, claiming that our celebrity status was useful. I didn’t really see the locals react a great deal, but the girls said that was just their conservative New England way and that the next visit after an appearance was usually full of questions about us. The girls also took a big interest in the greenhouse, voluntarily spending many free hours helping their grandparents with planting, harvesting, and seed saving. The former passion for all things fashion became focused on sustainable, organic food choices and practices.
We utilized the deep rooms under the main building for secure storage of our seed library, our long-term grain and ammunition supplies, our excess spare parts and equipment, as well as the limited physical assets we had set aside. By this time, gold was too expensive to buy, what with most stock markets still struggling, but we had managed to hang on to quite a bit of Zone-salvaged bullion coins in gold, silver, and platinum, as well as some jewelry and gems.
Some of the rooms down below were obviously labs or offices, but others were just as obviously built in a much heavier fashion, as if to be cells for dangerous people… or things. We had many debates about that. The cells we converted to secure rooms for storage and access was granted to only a few people in a dual-control fashion.
Vermont’s hunting season arrived and Kayla led us on both carefully measured hunts of our resident deer population as well as outside hunts on the state land that bordered our property. The kicker was that she insisted that we could only hunt with bows, which I thought was a bit unfair.
“Please, shooter! Give me a break. Sending you out after deer with a firearm is absolutely no challenge whatsoever. You’ll just sit up on a ridge somewhere and shoot them from a kilometer away or something. That’s what we do in an emergency, not during normal conditions. No, no, no. You need to hunt with your bow. It’ll force you to get better, it’s quieter, saves our ammo supplies, and has better long-term sustainability than firearms. If it all goes to shit, someday our ammunition and our reloading supplies will run out. Skill in the woods with advanced archery is the way to go,” was her response to my protest. “Plus, Astrid will likely clean your clock and you’re just scared.”
The competition was indeed fierce, and the resulting supply of venison went directly into our stores as well. We wanted to have way more than we needed because when food did get short, we needed to be able to help our neighbors, either directly or just in terms of food donations to the area food banks and soup kitchens.
And food was starting to be a daily part of the news cycle. The overpopulated, underfarmed countries of the world were having issues. International aid initially had some effect, but then the leaders of those countries, either the old ones or the newly installed uprisen ones, began to confiscate the aid shipments before they even reached their target populations. When the first group of aid volunteers was killed, the aid was shut off. The results were entirely predictable: violence and starvation.
It spread rapidly, like a contagion. The richer nations held off longest, but eventually even the United States stopped the foreign sale of grain unless it was traded for other food stocks. Illegal shipments still occurred, but they were nowhere near enough. Governments of starving countries fought their own citizens. The streets became bloody. Third World violence was obvious in the drone footage shot by international news agencies and aid organizations.
By now, the Northern Hemisphere winter had set in and Europe was facing a heating fuel crisis because of the disrupted Russian gas lines. It was a miserable winter in general, colder than usual in most places, but downright deadly in any location that lacked heat.
Our own compound had a central heating system that piped steam into all of our buildings. It had been modified over the summer by our engineering group to take oil, propane, or wood. And wood in Vermont was in big supply. We had held a number of community wood cutting days in the fall, taking just the dead trees from our land, bucking them to length, then splitting and stacking. In addition, we bought excess from local woodcutters, helping them financially while making sure we had more than enough. We also donated some of the purchased wood to elderly locals who had wood-fired home heat but were too infirm to cut their own wood.
By now, the entire world was pretty focused on food. Home gardens were a topic of general conversation in cities and suburbs alike. People in warmer climates were working to grow part of their own food in containers and raised beds, on rooftops or in inner-city community gardens. Spring would bring the same rush to grow in the northern climates, but during the coldest months, only those farmers who had greenhouses or high tunnels could work the cold weather crops like peas, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, cabbage, kale, bok choy, along with root vegetables like leeks, beets, turnips, parsnips, radishes, rutabagas, and onions.
Sport hunting was also seeing a resurgence of interest. Hunting and fishing licenses were purchased in record numbers as old ways of maintaining personal food security enjoyed retro popularity. Most new hunters went home empty-handed, and there were a number of accidental shootings by neophytes with guns. Those old skills would take time to revive. Even ice fishing was once again a thing.
Meanwhile, the US government was an ongoing shit show, struggling to re-find itself. Prior to the blowup of the Drone Night conspiracy, the American electorate had reached all-time lows of civil intelligence, most adults paying little to no attention to politics and the mechanism of government. The new reality was a highly suspicious population engaged on a daily level with all aspects of their government, along with a wary world, watching the wounded superpower struggle.
People were dying across the world in record numbers, mostly of starvation or violence born of starvation, but the developed world, suddenly concerned for its own survival, either watched from a safe distance or ignored the savage revision to the population mean. Governments fell like trees to a logger, and our little group, at this time numbering sixty-seven, watched and waited for the next shoe to fall. We even had an informal pool, some of us thinking Iran or Algeria or perhaps even Saudi Arabia would sell a nuclear weapon to fund further acquisitions of food. And whoever bought the weapon would use it, maybe on Israel, maybe on someone else. Personally, my money was on a blow-up (quite literally) between the nuclear armed states of Pakistan and India. World tensions grew, economies collapsed, and inflation ran wild, especially with grains, food, and oil.
Winter turned to spring and the world was still going. It was already a less populated world, as by some estimates, as many as three hundred million people had already succumbed to starvation and violence, with more dying every day. Some experts thought the number was even higher.
Tucked in our valley in Vermont, our corporate village continued to thrive, with several couples giving birth to new family members. By the design of our charter, each new person was immediately vested in a share of stock in North Haven, Inc., held in custody by the group until they reached age sixteen. And one other event drew nearer: my wedding to my best friend and lifelong love.
It would be the first wedding in our community, and it was between the two founding families, and two of the most prominent leaders of said community, so it took on its own momentum. By now, we had made connections within the surrounding towns and villages, and the invitation list grew rapidly far beyond the confines of the Haven community.
We had picked May first for our day of nuptials and while I wasn’t exactly nervous, I wasn’t immune to the growing excitement within our perimeter. The irony was that Astrid and I already lived together, having picked out and set up our own living quarters the summer before, but the official cementing of the bond and the resulting binding of our two families was viewed as a momentous thing.
Following the seasons of the farmer, we were well into growing time, our greenhouse seedlings getting big and hardy enough to be planted outside, hopefully not too long after the actual wedding, so things were even busier than normal, making it possible for me to lose some of myself to work. The two of us tried to take a hand in as many community chores and tasks as time would allow. Security shifts in the control room, labor in the hydroponic and soil beds of the greenhouse, chopping and hauling firewood, helping in the kitchen with either cooking or cleanup, and basically anything else that we could squeeze in. And it was a struggle. The twins alone kept us busy with appearances in the greater community, as did Brad, as survival communities consulting with our group usually wanted or expected to see either one or both of us during the process, often more than once. Then there was the fact that we were both part of the council that managed the community, interviewed prospective new members, conducted long-range planning, and made connections and relationships across the northeast region.
All of this made the days fly by and almost before I knew it, I found myself waiting at an outdoor altar, on the bank of our little pond, on a beautiful morning on May first. JJ, Kayla, Boyle, and even Martin waited with me as my groom’s people. The clearing was filled with rustic seating, all of which was filled with mostly rustic and mostly local people. We had opted for a casual dress code for our attendees, as the new reality put a whole lot less emphasis on formal clothing, although the wedding party wore suits and dresses. Some of the attendees, mostly those from out of the region, but including several local mayors and the county sheriff, who wore all wore dresses or jackets and ties. Cade Callow and Trinity Flottercot were part of this group, and oddly, so was Egan from the Army-Navy store, who was sporting a blue blazer and dark slacks.
The sun rose to the top of the tree line and suddenly there was music. The next thing I knew, Harper was coming down the pine needle-covered path between the guests. She was immediately followed by Gabby, then Monique, then my mom, who was Astrid’s Maid of Honor.
When she stepped into place, my heart froze and my breath stopped. She was just suddenly there, at the end of the forever long aisle, wearing a white dress that flowed over her body, her hair coiled on her head in elaborate braids bound in place with a garland of tiny white flowers, her face shining in the morning light. Part of me noted that her father was with her, walking her down the aisle, but I barely registered him—that is until he brought her right to me, put her hand in mine, and leaned close to my ear. “Guard her, protect her, and honor her with your life, or your life is mine,” he whispered. I just nodded, my eyes locked on hers.
I’ll be honest. I don’t remember a damned thing about the ceremony. Not a thing. Apparently I remembered my vows because I’m pretty sure I would have caught hell from my sisters if I screwed them up. Nope, I remember Brad’s words, I remember slipping the band that Kayla handed me onto her finger, and I remember the kiss. And that’s it.
Then it was a swarm of people, faces, handshakes and hugs, and one hell of a party. Like, I mean a real party, one that lasted for hours, all through the afternoon and late into the night. Dancing, bonfires, music, and plenty of products from the local breweries, cider mills, and distilleries.
So it was late in the night, or maybe early in the next day, when the current watch shift radioed JJ by walkie-talkie. I saw it happen, looking past my wife, who was talking with the head of the local farmers association. JJ had been holding hands with Harper when suddenly he pulled the little yellow old-fashioned radio from his suit coat pocket. He listened, then straightened up, his eyes going to Harper’s. She must have heard the message as well because her happy expression went blank, right into what I called her battle look.
I tapped Astrid on the arm discreetly, using our personal code for alert. Without missing a beat, my bride skillfully and politely disengaged from our guest, turning to me as the woman headed to the bar for a nightcap.
“What?” she asked. I nodded at JJ, who now had Martin, Brad, my mother, and Sarah around him.
“Let’s check it out,” Astrid said without the slightest hesitation.
“What’s up?” I asked as we got close to the tense little group. Mom and Sarah both had a look on their faces like they were going to try and downplay things, but Martin just blurted it out.
“It’s started,” he said.
“Who, where?” Astrid asked. “Algeria? Israel?”
“Neither,” JJ said. “It’s China. Well, I should say it’s in China. A disease was released from a lab. We don’t know what or how, but the first reports are talking about crazy high death rates.”
“What are we waiting for? Let’s get inside and monitor this,” I said, looking to my wife, who was nodding her agreement.
“No! It’s your wedding, for Heaven’s sake,” Mom protested. “You can’t start you life together monitoring a crisis half a world away. You need to be here and then you need to go to the cabin like you planned.”
We didn’t have the time or inclination to take a standard honeymoon, but we had planned on going to a small cabin a friend of the community’s had offered us. The idea was a long weekend away, just the two of us, at a lake about forty minutes north.
“Ah, this is important,” Astrid said.
“So is your wedding. There will always be problems and crises to deal with. But you don’t get a redo on your first few days as a married couple,” Sarah said. “Barbara is right. Go to the cabin. Take a radio and maybe check in once a day. Have your time together. This is happening way, way across the world.”
“Yeah, you two, beat it,” Harper agreed. “Even with my awesome skills, it’s going to take time to figure this mess out. So go on. Get out of here already.”
So we did. We said our goodbyes and hopped in an SUV and drove to the lake. It was dark as the bottom of a cave in those woods, but the cabin, which was really a full lodge, was all lit up for us, with a roaring fire in the fireplace to take the spring chill out of the place. The big log structure sat up on a rise, overlooking a deep lake that had been formed by a natural dam on a fast-moving little river.
In the face of our fears potentially coming true, albeit in a completely different manner, it seemed like our wedding night might have been too tense to engage in traditional wedding night games. But that very tension infected both of us, and we had absolutely no trouble finding an outlet for our fears.
When I woke the next morning, I found her already up, coffee in hand, sitting on the porch wrapped in a blanket and watching the sun come up on the lake.
Filling my own mug with fresh-brewed caffeine (because who knows when coffee will run out), I stepped outside and sat in the Adirondack chair next to hers. “Did you check in?” I asked.
“No. It’s too beautiful right now to disturb it. And they haven’t called us, so I was letting sleeping dogs lie, at least for now. Maybe we could radio in after breakfast?”
We actually made it to mid-afternoon before we succumbed to the need to touch base.
“Not a whole lot more to tell you,” Hanna said. She was taking her turn monitoring the internet, the radio and television channels, as well as the base station for our radio. “It’s fast-moving, virulent, highly contagious, and has a very high death rate. Some type of hemorrhagic fever, but worse than any form ever seen before. Unnaturally vicious.”
“Unnatural as in man-made?” I asked.
“That’s my thought. It’s so damned fast, spreads like wildfire. From what we can tell, it’s infected and killed over a thousand people in Beijing in the last forty-eight hours.”
“What? That’s crazy! How is that even possible?”
“At a guess… genetic engineering. There is some suspicion it came out of a military lab. But the very speed it exhibits may actually be both a curse and a tainted blessing.”
“Because it might burn itself out?” Astrid asked. “That super-high fatality rate might kill off the entire population of available hosts so fast that it limits the spread?”
“You married a smart woman, Ajaya,” Hanna said.
“She reminds me of that every so often.”
“Anyway, that’s just supposition on my part. Go back to what you were doing and don’t bother to check in till tomorrow. It’s all good here.”
“How’s the rest of the world taking it?” I asked.
“Nervous, scared, closing borders and cutting air flights on one hand but offering assistance on the other. China has refused all aid so far. Now stop talking to me and get back to honeymooning. Doctor’s orders.”
We did. And we only checked in one more time, mid-afternoon the next day, then headed back after lunch on the last day.
Back at the compound, we found a little situation room set up, manned in shifts by one or two people, with the shifts spread out across the entire population of adults. By the time we got home, the deaths had been estimated at over six thousand in Beijing, but new outbreaks were popping up in Shanghai, Chengdu, Changchun, and several smaller locales. And more were coming to light. It was, in fact, an enhanced version of Marburg Hemorrhagic fever, modified greatly to be far more lethal and to spread far faster. The fatality rate approached one hundred percent and those few who survived were horribly disfigured by the disease.
We dove back into work, keeping one eye on our jobs and one eye on the tragic events unfolding in Asia.
The disease was spreading and no one knew how. It killed its hosts so fast that it should have burnt out. Yet new cases were popping up in far-off locations and no one could figure out how.
When the first cases appeared in South Korea and Taiwan, airlines started to shut down all flights into or out of the infected countries. When cases appeared in Mongolia, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, the World Health Organization demanded answers from China’s leaders—or rather, the remaining leaders. Chibola, as the disease came to be called, had by this time ravaged the Middle Kingdom from east to west and north to south. The surviving leadership finally answered the desperate request for information. The experimental disease was just one part of a weapon system. The other half was an artificial vector, a type of microdrone that was AI controlled and could travel significant distances, moving from population to population. And yes, it appeared that Plum Blossom had found its way into the lab.
And the bad news continued. Chibola wasn’t the only experimental genetically engineered pathogen in that lab. There were dozens.
World trade shut down. All aircraft and shipping was stopped, but not before India, Brazil, France, Italy, and Finland were all infected.
The first nuclear weapons used since World War Two were dropped on Chinese soil by Chinese aircraft in an attempt to sterilize the problem. It didn’t work.
Unless destroyed or otherwise rendered inoperable, the vector drones would continue to move across geography, infecting a town or city, then moving on. And Hannah was entirely correct that the Chibola pathogen would burn through a population in just a few days and then die out. Records collected by drone from the Chinese lab indicated that the weapon system was designed to depopulate an area, rather than as a true doomsday weapon. It certainly depopulated China, along with vast stretches of Asia, South America, and Europe. Where it did not seem to go was Russia and the United States. There were some flare-ups in Russian seaports before shipping was fully stopped, but they never made it past there. In the US, a handful of people died in California when a ship docked, but eyewitnesses saw what they identified as Decimator drones appear in the skies over the port and then sweep the ship from stem to stern. Weapons fire was heard inside the vessel, then the Coast Guard, in conjunction with what appeared to be Zone Defense troops, towed the vessel out to sea and sank it in deep water.
Something similar occurred on the East Coast, in Portland, Maine, when a Swedish container ship came to port. The port pilot reported Decimators overflying his transport boat before he even got out to the ship. Then the ship turned around and sailed away, never seen again.
The upside of Chibola was that it had a very stabilizing effect on the remains of the US government, forcing divergent parties to get their shit together and prepare the country.
Flottercot Productions scored another interview with Zone Defense, and our little community watched it in our gymnasium-slash-assembly room.
“Major Yoshida, are Zone Defense Decimators hunting down the vector drones before they can infect the country?”
“Yes, Cade. They are.”
“How? How do they identify them? Dr. Ewald, is this your doing?” Cade asked, turning to his other guest.
“Well, yes and no. See, the Decimator programming is so adaptable that they found ways to use their advance sensor suites that we never envisioned. Out of the box thinking, it would appear.”
“This is the same programming that Ajaya Gurung introduced through first his Berkut and then the prototype Decimator?”
Aaron frowned, opened his mouth, closed it, and then lost his chance when Major Yoshida spoke first.
“Essentially yes. We’ve worked extensively on the Decimator programming, tweaking it, but you are correct that the core program came from Ajaya’s drone,” Yoshida said.
“So it not only killed the Spiders, cleared the Zone, and fought the Plum Blossom program across the internet, but now it’s protecting the country as well,” Cade said.
“It’s remarkably adaptable, Cade, and very focused on protecting the citizens of this country. In fact, it may also be helping in Russia. We aren’t certain. What we do know is that Plum Blossom is still out there, hiding, waiting. This won’t be the last attack,” Yoshida said.
Harper chose that moment to tap my arm. She put a finger over her lips and then pointed at Astrid too. I got my wife’s attention and signaled her to follow me as I followed Harper. JJ, who was leaning against the door, lit up with a knowing smile as he saw our little group moving toward the exit. As we went by him, he jumped into line behind his sister, smirking the whole time.
Harper led us out of the assembly area and up the stairs to the computer lab that we all called Harper Headquarters.
“You know what this is about?” Astrid asked her big brother.
“I do,” he said, smug. At least smug right up until Harper whipped around and glared at him. Then the smirk was gone as he held up both hands, palms out. Big tough Thor was thoroughly enthralled by our little computer wizard.
Harper led us to the back corner of the lab, where a rough-built wooden crate took up a half meter of width and three quarters meter of length. The top was uncovered, and a black carbon fiber and metal dome rose just high enough out of the box that it wouldn’t have been possible to nail a cover on it.
Harper went over to her desk, pulled out something I couldn’t see, then walked to the crate and touched the metal and composite dome. A little port opened, and she dropped something small and shiny into it. Something the size of a computer chip.
The thing in the box rumbled and vibrated, then went quiet.
“Wha…” I started to ask, but Harper shushed me, turning her eyes back to the box. Nothing happened for a handful of seconds, then another handful went by. I was about to speak again but a new sound came from the crate.
Tick-tick-tick-tick
The light went off in my head. “Is that…”
The front of the box suddenly fell forward, then the two sides fell left and right, followed by the rear panel. It appeared to have been just held together with double-sided tape.
The shape inside the box was sleek and compact, with four bent legs. It unfolded itself, becoming longer and sleeker.
“It’s your wedding present, more than a bit overdue, but greatness takes time,” Harper said. She turned to Astrid. “It may appear to be more for him than you, but when you both start having kids, you’ll thank me. I used those plans from the deep dungeon to come up with it.”
The four-legged bot was segmented in a way that was reminiscent of my once upon a time Berkut, but it had even more segments.
“I call this model the Mongoose, but really it’s a hybrid. The designation should be U-GAV, because it’s an Unmanned, Ground and Air Vehicle.”
The drone sat up, its black ocular band fixed on me. Then the sides shifted outward and unfolded some more and suddenly it was hovering on four fans, lifting right up to my eye level.
“It’s got more sensors than anything I’m aware of on this planet,” Harper said. “It’s extremely energy efficient and it’s armed with both a general purpose e-mag weapon that JJ designed that can shoot almost any projectile you can find, as well a scavenged fiber optic laser that your friend Egan supplied. And that was the original Rikki chip you smuggled out of the Zone. It’ll be the best babysitter and family guardian you could ever have.”
“Hello AJ,” the drone said in a voice so familiar, I almost choked.
“Hello Rikki Tikki.”
The End.
Author’s Box of Soap:
So yes, I ended Zone War. Lot’s of fans have petitioned for an extension, but I ended the series. That series. I never said we wouldn’t see Ajaya again, or his world. But let’s leave it there for now, with the world tipping over into a cascade of events, because that’s how I see it… a long slide into oblivion, rather than a flash of sharp light and glowing cockroaches. Some days after watching or reading the news I wonder if we’ll make it. Then I usually wonder if we should make it. But ultimately, I’m Team Human, and I think we can still, possibly, navigate our own minefields to reach the other side.
As usual, I must thank Susan for fixing my English and Gareth for making my imagination into art. And as always ,my family for constant support and love (and lots of patience, especially my wife).
The writing will continue, with more Demon Accords ( Darkkin Queen is next, I’ll give you one guess who’s holding the mike in that one). And something new is on the horizon, the 2020 horizon that is. A new series, Shadows of Montshire, my take on full fantasy, led off by book one, A Murder of Shadows. Look for it in 2020. And thank you all for taking the ride again.