“What about Smith?” Harrison pipes up, breaking the short silence.
“Who was this Smith?”
“The same one we had in this apartment two days ago.”
“No way!”
“Yeah … like I said, kind of hard to explain that one.”
“Smith?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jeepers!”
“He like disappeared, thirty years ago and then just rocks back up in your apartment, without a word?”
“Yep.”
“Epic!” Harrison marvels. “And then what?”
“Not much. He disappeared thirty years ago, just after we discovered the thread. After he left we went back to working on the thread and creating Destiny, the rest you mostly know.”
“I knew there was something off about that guy,” Doc says.
“He seems ok to me,” Harrison chimes in, suddenly realising he hasn’t seen his other friends in the apartment. Quickly he changes direction. “Hey! Truck, Smith and Pigeon? Where are they anyway?”
Suni quickly kneels in front of Harrison and grabs both his hands in hers. She knows Harrison like the back of her hand and knows the best way to tell him is to metaphorically rip the band-aid off as quickly as possible.
And she does just that, “Honey ... Pigeon is dead, Smith is presumed dead or working for the enemy or missing and Truck is …” she’s cut off abruptly by the sound of the front door being slammed upon.
A series of loud thuds ring out, sounding as if someone is trying to pound their way into the apartment. But before any of them can react and get to the door, it’s flung open and a large, dark figure lunges through, dripping wet with rainwater and carrying something slung over its shoulder.
“Truck!” Harrison cries out his name as he recognises him, running over to embrace him.
His eyes widen at the sight of Harrison and he drops what he has slung over his shoulder to the ground, it makes a soft thud as it hits the apartment floor. He raises his arms and embraces the oncoming Harrison in a bear hug, “It’s good to see you little champ, thought you’d left us!”
“Man, have I got a story for you!” Harrison replies enthusiastically, starting to feel the crush of Truck’s big bear hug.
“In a moment champ.” He releases his grip on Harrison and turns back to what he’s dropped on the floor. “Just need to look after this.”
“Truck??” Suni questions as she joins them, noticing the large canvas covered clump on the floor he dragged in. Judging by the size of it, she guesses it’s a body and hopes to hell that Truck hasn’t brought the dead body of Pigeon back into the apartment.
“Truck …?”
“Suni, you sent me out to find some device for I don’t know why, it nearly killed Harry and it did kill Pigeon. I really just went back to get some justice for them, to get back at those Destiny pricks for what they did.” His fist is clenched, his face feverous as he speaks, “I actually didn’t expect to find anything but … I did find this.”
“Truck? What’ve you done?”
“I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to where it happened. Pigeon was gone and the place was cleared out. I wasn’t sure what to do after that so I waited, waited until I knew what to do ...”
“Truck! What have you done?” Suni asks again, her eyes widening as she stares at the clump of canvas resting on the floor.
Truck kneels and puts a heavy paw on the crumpled, canvas pile and slowly pulls back a flap to reveal what’s concealed underneath, everyone leans over to have a look.
It’s a body.
“I didn’t find any device and heck knows what happened to Smith, but I did find this lump of shit lurking around.” He smiles, “this is the guy who I’ve been chasing for all these years, and I think the same bugger who shot me and Harrison that night.”
“He’s wearing black fatigues,” Doc leant over for a look.
Truck pulls back the rest of the canvas to reveal the body of an unconscious man. Everyone reels back at the sight at first, noticing all the blood. The face is especially hideous, it’s a swollen, blue and bloody mess. The arms and legs have been tied and it looks as if a few fingers have been snapped back in the wrong direction.
“I didn’t get much out of him,” he says, proudly standing over his catch. “But he did tell me his name … eventually”.
“What the …?”
Harrison, Doc and Suni all look at Truck and the unconscious body curiously, it isn’t Pigeon but someone else entirely.
“And?”
“I knew it was him, but just had to beat it out of him to make sure.”
“Truck?”
“The piece of shit.”
“Who is it?”
“Lurking around trying to find something in the dark of the night … well you found something alright champ!”
“Truck, who is that?”
“Viper ...” Truck spits, “… he says his name is the Viper.”
- -
RECALLING
destiny
- -
Catlin
The world as we know it had descended into total chaos.
A shift in the thread had caused it and the fallout was biblical. It was as if you were tugging on a loose piece of string that had come free of your shirt. You would tug at it, trying to remove it, but your actions only made it worse and more string would unravel.
You would tug, harder the second time, with the hope of breaking the piece of string off your shirt. Only instead of it coming away it would grow longer, unravelling a larger amount of string.
Imagine the world as a finely weaved shirt, a series of inter-tangled threads. Someone had found the loose bit of string and had tugged on it ... Now it had unravelled.
Catlin sat with her eyes glued to the floor inside the small boardroom she’d been taken into. The room was housed in a demountable building that she was ushered into by two military men.
A long rosewood table ran almost the length of the room, with space for at least twelve people. The back wall opposite the entry housed a large flat panel television and a food and drinks bar sat to one side of the room.
The two soldiers brought her into the room, deposited her in a chair without speaking and left her alone without another word. She sat lost in thought, wondering if she was responsible for what was taking place. But she quickly reasoned she hadn’t really done anything whilst Ursula had been away, so how could she be at fault.
Lost in thought, she was startled when a connecting door opened and a group of solemn looking people entered the room, taking seats at the table. Nobody spoke, nobody looked up and nobody looked at her. She eyed them over cautiously, recognising a few of them from the helicopter earlier.
She was about to strike up a conversation, when one of the men came over to the television and tried to switch it on. Not finding the remote, he looked about the room, found it and flicked through several stations. Catlin found it weird as most of the channels were blank or blue screened. She wondered if perhaps they had bad reception out here as none of the channels seemed to work.
A few of the man’s colleagues called out instructions to him to switch the television over to the ABC, eventually the man found it and turned up the volume.
Catlin was looking the others over as she overhead the news report coming from the television, it was speaking of an unfolding worldwide event …
“Reports are that a series of unexplained mass deaths have occurred across the globe, in particular Australia. At this early stage, we do not have any confirmed numbers, all we know is that across several locations throughout the globe people have simply dropped dead by the millions. The largest affected area we know of at this stage is in major capitals of Australia where it appears a mass wave of people have simply dropped dead without cause ...”
Catlin’s jaw dropped, not believing what she’d just heard.
Millions.
Dead.
No cause.
Millions.
Stunned, she leant forwards slowly to try and absorb what was happening on screen.
A news report showed live footage taken from a helicopter flying above the streets of Sydney, a running trail of writing also ran along the bottom of the screen but Catlin couldn’t take her eyes off the footage to look at it.
In the city streets people lay strewn on the ground as if they were all part of some big game of Freeze. It was a surreal image to see so many immobile bodies in a crowded area, just lying there and not moving. Thousands upon thousands of bodies just laying on the ground without cause.
Occasionally Catlin could pick out the odd person walking around, clearly disoriented about the chaotic scene unfolding around them.
Another image showed a fiery blaze taking root in the suburbs, where cars had crashed into each other as their drivers had simply dropped dead at the wheel. Many of the crashes had resulted in fires starting, which then cascaded into buildings, bushes and other flammable areas.
Train carriages lay strewn across the countryside, derailed. Buses also wreaked havoc as they ploughed through traffic, large trucks and semi’s making for an even worse scene. Some had completely demolished buildings as if they were pieces of Lego.
Catlin sat glued to the screen … millions.
Perhaps the worst of the images though, were overhead shots of a series of aeroplane’s that had dropped out of the sky. There were dozens of them, creating massive infernos where they had fallen from the air. The pilots had died instantly mid-flight and the planes had consequently fallen to the earth thereafter, creating massive firestorms where they landed.
The fires were spreading across the country.
Sydney and Melbourne were literally on fire. Other capital cities had yet to report in.
Catlin was not a religious person, but if she had been she would’ve thought she was watching a chapter out of Revelations, the apocalypse had truly come.
Is this real?
Other areas in the country and around the world had not yet been reported on, apparently a break in normal communication methods the cause. The television station was apparently still trying to re-establish the network across the country, let alone get reliable information from abroad.
During the newscast, no mention was made as to the cause of the incident, it was only just reporting the fallout and at this stage was limiting its footage to Sydney and Melbourne. Catlin wondered earlier why the man had been flicking through channels, but now realised the television networks had all probably ceased working, that this was the only channel still in operation.
She stared aghast, this was the apocalypse.
Millions were dead, entire cities were ablaze.
What the hell is happening?
The door opened again and Cat looked up, she didn’t recognise the man but as he was standing there in the room she knew who he was ... something in his eye glinted as he looked at her. He recognised her.
It wasn’t the sparkle of youth or of that of a performer, it was the glint of a man who had a purpose and would stop at nothing to get it. A man who could drive the metaphorical ship that was Destiny, this was Samuel, she was sure of it.
She remembered asking Doctor Paul about him and he couldn’t really offer much of an opinion, only that he was quiet, secretive and never smiled. Catlin had questioned whether he literally never smiled, considering the man now bore a beaming smile upon his face as he entered the room, had something changed?
One of the men already seated in the room rose from his chair and spoke up in a voice of authority. “Samuel, what in God’s name is going on!? The world is in chaos! We need answers.”
Samuel didn’t look in the man’s direction but he replied. “God? What God?”
“Any God, this is biblical.”
“And where is your God? Can you see him? Does he talk to you?”
The man looked offended at the response but ignored the retort and reluctantly took his seat as Samuel raised a hand to calm him.
Samuel moved to the head of the table and looked over to where Cat was. “Ms Conley, we’re glad you have joined us. Please allow us to introduce you to the people in the room.”
She stirred at being spoken to directly and looked up at Samuel like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He seemed so pleasant to her, such a welcoming tone to his voice.
He was motioning to the other people in the room. “These people are, as you may well have gathered from their attire, from the government.”
She began shaking hands, but struggled to keep up with all the names and titles of the people she was introduced too. Dorothy this, Ronald that. Head of National Security this, Executive Administrator that. She couldn’t keep focus as one eye kept flicking over to the television and the other half of her brain was wondering why she was even in the room.
She looked over to another man seated in the room, whom she wasn’t introduced to like the others. He was short, overweight, balding and wearing large spectacles. Catlin looked at him expectantly, noticing he had a black eye and wondered what he’d done to get it.
“Hi.” she said.
“Hello, I’m Thomas,” he replied, avoiding eye contact with her.
“And where are you from ... sorry, Thomas?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m only the aide here, I work as an intermediary here at the installation for the government,” he said smiling nervously, returning to the back of the room to turn off the television.
Catlin took her time as she was introduced to them to take notice, all were distinguished looking, mature in age and had a presence about them that could only have come from wielding a position of power, or of self-importance, she thought to herself.
A certain set to their shoulders and look on their jaws gave them away to her, she knew these were powerful people in the room, but it clearly made them arrogant. They just seemed to have an air of superiority and self-importance about themselves, she tried to swallow the distaste that was gathering in the back of her throat.
After the formalities had taken place they all resumed their seats, Samuel taking to the head of the table to begin proceedings.
Samuel spoke first. “Ladies and Gentlemen, today we have witnessed a remarkable event. A mass strand of humanity has been seemingly wiped out! Millions dead, instantly and without reason.” He paused for effect, seeming to enjoy the gravity of the situation.
“Our information is not confirmed yet, but what we have witnessed, across the globe, is a series of mass deaths. Initially the cause of death is presumed to be people who have simply dropped dead on the spot, but now the deaths are rising as a fallout from that initial event. Secondary causes such as car crashes, fires, etc are responsible for the growing number.”
“Based on preliminary estimates taken from personal devices, we have an initial death toll we believe to be somewhere around the seventy-five million mark, worldwide, with more numbers likely to follow as the fallout continues to play out.”
The room was dead still. Catlin’s jaw dropped a second time.
Millions.
Dead.
“Australia seems to have borne the largest percentage of coverage, no other section of the globe has been affected with such high mortality rates that we can tell. It appears that here, approximately seventy-five to eighty percent of the population are now deceased because of this event, again, with numbers likely to be larger as the fallout ensues.”
The room was dead quiet, everyone was leaning on Samuel’s words. Catlin though, couldn’t help but think he was enjoying himself, he just seemed so casual about it all.
“We haven’t discovered the cause of the problem and sadly we do envisage that it will take us a very long t
ime to figure it out. Most of our facility has suffered damage, we have surmised the event has caused an electrical blowback of some sorts, resulting in damage to our facility.”
“Samuel, isn’t your facility connected to almost every electrical device in the world?” a man spoke up.
“Yes, our hack software is everywhere. What’s your point?” Samuel seemed annoyed at being interrupted.
“Is it possible this event has been caused by your facility somehow?”
“We run a surveillance operation here Ronald, how would you suppose we killed millions of people? By watching them?”
“Who knows, maybe some electrical mistake? You said yourself that you had a blowback of electrical power.”
“Yes. We engineered a super electrical current to wipe out a major part of the populace. Just for kicks you know, we have nothing better here to do then wipe out society. Maybe we should record all these mass deaths with our surveillance, make a little video for you hey?”
It was enough to silence the man, who fidgeted in his seat awkwardly at the riposte. Samuel’s stare lingered a moment longer on the man before he continued.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of man, ever. A singular event such as this has never been recorded in human history, with the exception of a comet or an ice age event, none has been recorded and certainly not one as unexplained as this.”
“The only thing similar in terms of numbers would be a natural disaster. We’ll consider this as a possible cause later, but if we look to other such instances in history then things such as the plague spring to mind.”
“This has lead us to form a preliminary theory this event may have been caused by some sort of a contagion, a virus.” Samuel paused to take in a sip of water. “A large and specific virus that has been triggered on a global scale.”
“Whether that be deliberate is yet to be founded, we will be checking our terrorist connections for any unusual activity. With it being our most likely theory, we will explore this avenue with the majority of our resources here.”
“Something of this scale could only have been carried out by a well-structured and financed operation, so if this is the case it shouldn’t take us to long to find out who’s responsible.”
Recalling Destiny Page 25