Spirits of the Earth: The Complete Series: (A Post-Apocalyptic Series Box Set: Books 1-3)

by Milo James Fowler

  "He chose life over death, Daiyna." Rehana grins again. "So you will live. All of you."

  "For now." Mother Lairen's eyes are cold as they glare at me. "Your days are numbered. The age of humans has come and gone. You will not last long on this New Earth."

  Rehana frowns at her. "Doomsayer."

  "Realist," Mother Lairen retorts, folding her arms.

  This is so bizarre.

  Rehana approaches me, and my first instinct is to draw back. But I don't. She wraps her arms around me and squeezes. I can't fight it. I melt into her embrace as tears sting my eyes, spilling down my cheeks. I've missed her so much.

  "I will go before you, my sister," she whispers into my ear. "You have nothing to fear."

  Nothing to fear...

  I gasp. The voice of the spirits—

  The sun blinds me, burning my wet cheeks. The sand canopy has vanished. Barely a breeze stirs now. I replace my face shield as fast as I can in the sudden absence of any shade.

  Milton stands in front of me. "Weird, huh?"

  "You saw them too?" I stare at my reflection in his cracked face shield.

  "Sort of. They looked like...people I used to know."

  "The spirits?"

  He shrugs. "Yeah."

  But they were real. They had substance. Some kind of physical manifestation, taking the form of people from our past… Copied from our own memories, stolen from our minds?

  "Only we can see them?"

  "I guess we're special, you and me."

  The spirit manifesting itself as Rehana said he chose life. Did she mean Milton?

  "They gave you a choice." What could it have been?

  He looks away. "I hope I made the right one." He doesn't elaborate.

  I nod slowly and look around, look for them—Rehana, Mother Lairen. But they're gone. Samson sits in the vehicle where we left him. Luther and Shechara stand a short distance away, their backs to us as they gaze into the west. No swirling sand. No spirits of the earth.

  "So now what?" I feel empty inside, weightless...and yet something stirs deep within me, something I haven't felt for a very long time. Is it hope?

  "The sky's the limit." He stretches his back, looking ready to return to the clouds.

  I almost smile. "And after the sky?"

  He nods, and the sun shines from his face shield. He watches Shechara and Luther.

  "That'll be tomorrow."

  TOMORROW’S CHILDREN

  BOOK TWO

  For Sara

  "Generations come and generations go,

  but the earth remains forever."

  Ecclesiastes 1:4

  Part I

  Contact

  1 Bishop

  18 Months After All-Clear

  I look into the mirror over the sink, but the face staring back at me is not my own. Maybe it was, once. Now I can’t be sure. The eyes are wrong: dead in their red-rimmed sockets. Yet somewhere down deep, shoved under and held there by forces beyond my control, a heart still pumps. Fresh blood circulates. Lungs manage to squeeze oxygen out of the air.

  So I’m alive. For what it’s worth.

  I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose, inhaling, exhaling. Focusing on the moment. I allow my gaze to return to the mirror, drawn like a cold hand to flame. Somewhere, beneath the surface, I glimpse a ghost of the man I was: James Bishop. Husband. Father. Soldier. It’s enough to press on with—that scrap of myself.

  They haven’t destroyed me completely.

  Not yet.

  I pull on the heavy-duty hazard suit over my combat armor and zip up the interior lining. Attendants seal the orange outer layer to lock me inside. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic, or I would be hyperventilating right now. O2 is circulating well enough via interior cooling vents. The oxygen supply smells okay, tastes all right, and will last six to twelve hours, depending on my exertion level. I don’t plan on overdoing it. And I don’t intend to take that long.

  Get in, get out. Do the job. Do what they expect. Nothing more.

  “Test, test,” a voice comes through internal comms, loud and clear, as my head is encased within a triple-polymer helmet. “Sergeant Bishop, do you copy?”

  I stare at the scrawny scientist in a white lab jacket—pencil neck, golf ball eyes. Copy? The geek seems to enjoy playing military.

  “Yeah.” I nod.

  The scientist smiles with gums more prominent than teeth, his head bobbing in a quick series of jerks. “Your entire team will be wearing these next-gen environmental suits, Sergeant. They will provide complete protection against whatever viable contaminants you come across over there. Even if a toxin manages to penetrate the outer layer, you’ll have enough time to radio the chopper and get out before your primary protective lining is compromised.”

  Comforting. And what makes it even better? These government geniuses don’t have a clue what I’m going to find over there. They just know it’s so messed up that nobody has dared come close to that continent for the past decade. A quarantine zone, blockaded by a fleet of well-armed battleships like the one where I find myself at the moment.

  Nobody in or out. Until now.

  I’ve won the lottery. Not the kind they had way back before D-Day, when the biggest news on the Link was the rising cost of fuel and the building fervor over climate change. Back then, lottery tickets were sold by the kilo to folks hoping to trade in their hard-earned credit for a big piece of the pie. Millions of dollars—billions, eventually, as inflation rose. Winning the lottery held a rare distinction in those days.

  Maybe it still does, even without the monetary reward. Now when your name is picked by the military powers that be, you go wherever the United World government sends you. And in the case of Sergeant James Bishop, I sure have drawn the short straw.

  But I won’t be alone. A few others share my unlucky distinction. A team of real winners. They might have gladly let me carry the banner alone if they could, but they’ll follow orders like good little soldiers.

  We all will. Or face the consequences.

  Rumors about the forbidden continent are ubiquitous. You’d have to be a total zombie not to hear the myths and legends. Some say what remains of the North American Sectors are haunted, that the ghosts of those souls nuked on D-Day still roam the earth, physically possessing anyone stupid enough to set foot on that godforsaken continent. Others take a less supernatural slant; they say there is still something in the topsoil, some kind of fast-acting mutagen that can turn you into a monster of freakish proportions. Supposedly, this mutagen has evolved as a result of nuclear radiation interacting with the rebels’ toxic bioweapons released at the start of the war, and the residue somehow managed to remain viable over the decades that followed.

  Locked in the dust. Contagious and lethal. Just waiting to infect somebody.

  They sure knew how to kill people in those days.

  How else can you explain it? some say. What happened to those teams we sent over there two years ago? Why’d they never return?

  I don’t try to explain it. There’s no point. Besides, I have other things on my mind, more important things. Like my wife and kids, held for safekeeping in the bowels of a UW prison. As long as I play ball, my superiors will allow me to see them when this mission is over. Maybe even go home together. One big happy Eurasian family again, living out our days in one of the outlying self-sustained biospheres.

  “Hey, Captain!” Granger the engineer—barely 150 centimeters tall but with enough muscle mass to make up for some of his missing stature—calls from across the sterile medical bay.

  Captain? Not a bad promotion.

  “How’re we gonna move around in these things?” Granger swings his arms upward in the hazard suit, and the Kevlar-plated sleeves hardly shift.

  I shrug and face the geek currently in charge.

  “Right. Mobility.” The scientist swallows, and his Adam’s apple looks as large as one of his eyeballs, lodged in his throat. “It will require an increased amount of effort to m
aneuver in these suits, due to the added weight of the protective layers, but as with anything, you’ll get the hang of it. Eventually.”

  His words are nothing if not inspiring.

  “Put all those rippling muscles to work, Granger.” I heave my arms upward despite the resistance. It feels like gravity in the bay has increased by fifty percent. “I’m sure you’ll fare better than the rest of us.”

  Granger curses. Like me, he was picked for this mission because of his track record. One successful campaign after the next, always returning with a full crew, always with mission objectives met, recorded, and filed for the superiors to read while they’re on the pot. As far as I can tell, my team members have one thing in common, despite their diversity: they’re career military, serving the UW out of a sense of duty to the common good, an honor that runs deep despite the current regime’s fascist tendencies. The team was handpicked for a singular purpose, one they’ll be briefed on in detail while en route.

  They don’t have to like each other to get the job done. They’re professionals.

  “The Wastes are a level playing field.” Sinclair the science officer, a woman who looks to be twice Granger’s height and half his weight, strides into the medical bay in her bulky suit. Swiveling at the waist to give me a cursory glance, she returns her attention to our miniature engineer. “None of us will have an edge.”

  I force my arm upward and tap my helmet with a thick gloved finger. “We’ll be breathing. That’s all the edge we’ll need.”

  She blinks at me, but that’s about it as far as a response. She strikes me as one of those cold, intellectual types with a staggering IQ and a never-veiled disdain for the rest of the world’s Neanderthals. I skimmed her datafile. As with Granger, there was nothing but a detailed log of successful missions, along with an extensive list of accolades I was quick to categorize as scientific mumbo-jumbo.

  The other two members of the team show up eventually, staggering beneath the weight of their suits. The bug-eyed scientist responsible for our prep-talk welcomes them with a wide grin and wobbles his head like some kind of large, extinct bird.

  “Great, looks like we’re all here now.” He stares at us and grins, touching the tips of his long fingers together. The silence drags on longer than necessary. “Right. So, any last-minute questions before we go topside?”

  “Yeah,” grunts one of the latecomers—Morley, the weapons officer, a shaggy-haired fellow with a lineage stretching all the way back to the Caribbean, the Old World’s definition of paradise. According to his file, he prizes his guns over his own family. Fine by me; best to be well-armed on this trip. “What if we need to take a dump, man?”

  “Just let ‘er rip, pal.” Granger chuckles.

  The room explodes with raucous laughter, all present contributing—except for the distinguished science officer. She sighs instead, looking bored.

  “It’s really not that complicated,” chortles the scientist in charge. He’s the last one to overcome his giggles, and by the time he does, he’s the only one enjoying himself. “There is a waste reservoir built into the suit. If you have an excretory emergency—” He grins like a five-year-old. “Go ahead and make your deposit. We’ll retrieve it once you’re back here, safe and sound.”

  “How can I sign up for that job?” asks Harris, the other latecomer—oldest member of the team by at least twenty years. He had quite the distinguished medical career both in the UW military and private sector prior to D-Day, publishing studies on genetics and such, the kind they studied in med schools. It’s unclear why the elderly doctor has been included on this trip.

  I haven’t been told much. I know we’re headed into forbidden territory, but that’s about it. No one has set foot in the Wastes for years, not since those reports of something going horribly wrong with the search and rescue teams dropped onto the North American continent. No details, of course, only rumors that spread like a virus. The entire situation reeks of a government cover-up.

  Have we been drafted for a suicide mission?

  “What do you say, Sergeant?”

  The bug-eyed scientist stares at me with an expectant grin.

  “How’s that?” I frown, lost.

  “Our fearless leader,” Sinclair mutters.

  The scientist gestures toward the door, reaching out his spindly arm. “Shall we go?”

  Like we have a choice. But I nod anyway, turning to lead the team in an awkward, exaggerated march out of the medical bay, down a long, narrow corridor, and into the ship’s main storage area. The cargo lift awaits—a glorified freight elevator—and all of us somehow manage to cram inside the oily smelling thing.

  “How many hazard suits can you fit in an elevator?” Adam’s apple shuddering, the scientist giggles like it’s a joke worthy of a spectacular punchline. Only he doesn’t seem to have one prepared. Dipping his chin, he moves to follow us in.

  “We’re full.” I stiff-arm him and punch the UP arrow. The cage doors slide shut. “Take the next one.”

  Granger chuckles at the hurt look on the scientist’s face.

  With a groan, the lift rises toward the flight deck, passing through levels one at a time and seeming to linger unnecessarily between each floor. It wasn’t designed for cargo of the human variety. For the massive crates of foodstuffs, weapons, and supplies that usually come down through here, the passage of time is immaterial. But for me, every second counts—every moment I’m away from my family. There is no time to waste.

  Get in, get out. That’s the mantra. Get the job done right. Then I’ll see my children again—before they forget me.

  Assuming I make it back alive.

  “So, Captain. You ready for this?” Granger nudges me.

  I barely feel the gesture through this suit. “I doubt any of us are.”

  “It’s true, yeah? The stuff they say?” Morley pipes up.

  “The rumors?” Sinclair intones, affecting both disdain and disinterest in a single aloof expression, sharp nose angled upward. She succeeds in removing herself from the conversation while standing smack-dab in the middle of it, staring at the seam in the elevator doors. It looks like she’s willing them to open and save her from what promises to be a wearisome discussion.

  “They’re more than that,” Doc Harris says. “Rumor implies it might not be entirely true.”

  “And you think it is?” Granger tilts his helmet back to look up at the doctor. “Cuz I’ve heard plenty of crazy stories.”

  Harris nods, pursing his lips in thought. “There is a certain mythos to the continent, to be sure. An aura of secrecy, maintained by ships such as this one and the naval blockade. Its purpose being what exactly? To keep the rest of the world away from that wasted, inhospitable land?” He narrows his gaze. “Or to keep something already there contained?”

  The rest of the world. As if it still exists as anything more than a domed megacity along the Mediterranean.

  No one says anything for a few seconds. There’s only the whine of the elevator cables and the creaking of the ship to punctuate the silence.

  “What do you think, Captain?” Morley points his chin at me. “You believin’ the ghost stories?”

  Captain again. As far as this team is concerned, I guess I am the Ubermensch. I’ll lead them straight through the gates of Hades with the UW’s blessing. How far they follow me will depend on one thing: whatever their superiors are holding over their heads. Children are probably out of the question. As far as I know, I’m the only man in my cube complex with offspring under the Terminal Age. One in ten thousand, they say.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bishop are special that way. Or we were—before we, too, found ourselves unable to conceive.

  “I believe what I can see,” I mutter.

  Sinclair glances at me and quickly looks away.

  “A realist,” Harris says with half a grin, revealing a set of pristine, white dentures. “So you don’t believe the reports of a highly contagious mutagen? Difficult to see something like that, I’d wager. Without a
microscope, anyhow.”

  “You’re thinking that’s what it is, then?” Morley says. “Some sort of creepy crawly?”

  “Well, duh!” Granger gestures at our suits. “Why do you think we’re wearin’ these things? What do you think’s waiting for us over there?”

  Morley’s eyes are naturally wide, noticeably so when he neglects to blink. “I believe in the eternal soul. It cannot be destroyed by bombs. You may think of it as the spirit within us all.” His gloved hand pats his chest twice. “A soul that has been taken against its will—as so many were on D-Day—remains on the earth for one reason only.” He pauses dramatically, looking at each of the faces around him. “Vengeance.”

  Sinclair releases a petulant sigh.

  Granger stares for a moment, his lips parted. Then something seems to click in his brain, and he guffaws abruptly. “What a load of crap! You hear this guy?” He nudges Morley with his elbow. “Talk about ghost stories!”

  Morley shrugs, barely noticeable in the suit. “We shall see.”

  “Perhaps it would be prudent to withhold speculation until after the briefing,” Sinclair suggests as the lift groans to a halt. She faces Granger.

  “Prudent, yeah.” Granger’s line of sight travels down her suit out of habit, despite the fact that her figure remains completely obscured.

  She graces him with a withering look.

  The doors seem reluctant to open, but after a few moments of awkward silence, they part with a metallic squeal. We’re met with a blast of blinding sunlight, our helmets darkening instantly to shield exposed faces from the harmful ultraviolet rays. A gangly silhouette approaches.

  “What took you so long? This way, this way.” With a sweep of his scrawny arm, the scientist from the medical bay beckons us out of the elevator and onto the flight deck. A chugging chopper sits fifty meters away, its rotors slicing neatly through the air.