He looked at the transmitter, and pulled his arm back intending to hurl the device into the darkness, and be free of hope, and all its tantalizing whispers that Don knew were nothing but fantasy, and wishful thinking. If a cure was found, he would be long gone, and the logistics of bringing him back would be the same as the other million people who would be in desperate need in the next few days. His arm shot forward, but at the last moment he changed his mind, and didn’t release the device. He looked at it again, shook his head, and put it in his pocket. If they didn’t call him, what had he lost by holding onto the thing? Only a fool would destroy all hope, even when it was nothing more than a way of convincing himself all wasn’t lost.
When he got to the main gate, he turned to Tank, and said, “Sit, boy.”
Tank did as he was told.
Don stepped through the gate, and closed it behind him, using the chain to secure it. Tank watched him with growing suspicion. The dog’s muscles tensed, and he shook violently. It was obvious Tank wanted to join his partner, but instead, he obeyed the last command Don gave him.
He’d always lived by the mantra “leave no man behind,” but in this case, it was for the best. By hurting his friend, he was saving him. At least that’s what he told himself. Tank would find food and water, even if it meant digging for bugs, and he’d escape the base’s unmaintained perimeter fence. Then he’d be on his own, and fate would decide his future. A future that wouldn’t include Don attacking the animal that had been as solid as any rock he could have ever hoped for.
Don sat with his back against the fence. He let his head fall into his hands, and he tried to cry. Isn’t that what you did when everything was done? But tears wouldn’t come, and he searched within himself, trying to sense and feel the disease that infested his body. He felt nothing but the pain in his chest, and the pounding of his heart.
Tank came to him, and sat against the fence, trying to get close to his master. Don stroked the animal, the metal of the chain-link separating them. “I know you don’t understand this, but I owe you too much,” Don said. This was much harder than he’d thought it would be. He got up, tugged on the chain securing the gate, and started up the road. He never looked back, because he knew that if he did he wouldn’t be able to continue on.
Desiree’s face filled his thoughts. She’d been the only woman other than his mom he could honestly say he loved. Why had he never told her? Would it have mattered? He didn’t question his decision to forgo a normal life, but he certainly hadn’t understood the price when he’d made the purchase. If Desiree felt similar, she’d never shared it with him. As he searched for other regrets, he proclaimed himself to be more clean than dirty, until he heard Tank.
The dog barked and wailed, and each sound he made killed a piece of Don, but he stumbled on, not looking back. As he walked, the echoes of Tank’s barking, and the whispers of all those who’d been lost tormented Don, his mind spinning, his body finally calling a halt. He staggered and almost fell. He was out on his feet. The adrenaline was gone, and he stopped on the roadside and sat on the ground. He had no water, no food, and no light.
The sky was clear, and stars blinked down as he sat beside the mangrove trees, the night sounds soothing his nerves and pulling him toward sleep. His leg ached, the bite Jeb had given him shrieked with pain, and Don’s body had nothing left. He laid down for an instant as he tried to steady himself, taking deep breathes, and he heard Tank’s faint crying on the breeze.
Don’s eyes fluttered closed.
The End
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Chapter 1
To the outside observer, everything about Victor Kraus’ childhood was strange. His father was a stoic academic type who had a full beard and always wore the same khaki safari outfit. Although he was recognized as a brilliant professor of evolutionary wildlife ecology at Frostburg State University, he was a quiet man who had few friends and always appeared to be lost in thought. Victor’s mother was an adjunct professor at the same university where she taught molecular genetics, and while she generally received great evaluations for her teaching, she was frequently criticized for being too rigid and for requiring too much work of her students. These assessments did not bother her, however, as she always felt a little proud to be one of the tough professors.
When folks saw the Kraus family around the small mountain town of Frostburg, Maryland, they always thought they were strange. The image of the older father sitting quietly at a table at the local Wendy’s, stoically eating his chili with his wife sitting across the table silently eating her burger, as a young Victor quietly ate his fries… it just seemed a little too orchestrated. It appeared as if the three of them were lifeless automatons only doing what was necessary to survive.
It was also confusing to folks who did not know this family, because Victor was their only child and he was born when his parents were well into their forties. So, by the time he was of grade school age, most folks assumed that he was their grandchild. Even more confusing to the town folks in this small mountain town, Victor did not play sports and was not involved in activities outside of school, therefore, most people only knew him from chance encounters around town. They pitied the poor boy that appeared to be trapped in a life of boring and meaningless privilege.
In fact, most everyone who thought about Victor assumed that the poor kid was being deprived of his youth by parents who were too stuffy and too emotionally unavailable. Many wondered if there was something going on behind the scenes at home. They assumed that this stoic family demeanor in public was a façade hiding the dysfunctions that were surely going behind closed doors. Speculations along these lines often floated around town in the form of rumors.
But Victor’s life at home was anything but boring and glum. Despite the fact that both of his parents were introverts, in their home they often engaged in lively discussions about everything from religion and politics to the mating habits of the common prairie dog. As a result, Victor developed and honed an inquisitive imagination, an excellent vocabulary, and an insatiable curiosity that was fueled by scientific inquiry. In addition, Victor was exposed to many new ideas and developed many new skills through interactions with professors that his parents introduced him to, both permanent and visiting, at Frostburg State University. For example, Victor spent two years as a young boy studying Ninjutsu with private lessons from a visiting professor from Japan who specialized in Japanese feudal history and was an expert in Shuriken Jutsu and Kenjutsu, two martial art forms that honed skills for throwing and fighting with knives. The visiting professor taught Victor the basic techniques of these art forms, and then Victor spent hours on his own refining his skills in knife throwing.
Moreover, from the time he was ten years old, Victor spent his summers in the Dakotas with his father doing fieldwork that supported his father’s research, studying the social behavior of prairie dogs. During those research trips, father and son spent every moment of daylight observing the behavior of these animals and recording information in their scientific journals. His father taught him the scientific method and set him up with his own journal, and Victor spent every summer with his father in the field until he went off to high school.
In Frostburg during the school year, Victor enjoyed observing wild animals in the area, and occasionally brought home hurt animals to take care of. Although most of the animals he tried to rescue died, he was successful at saving a few of them over the years.
His most successful rescue was of two baby opossums. One spring, he and his parents were driving down an old country road outside of Frostburg when they came upon a mother opossum that was hit by a car. Victor saw the opossum lying dead in the middle of the road and insisted that they stop the car to check the pouch for babies. Sure enough, there were two baby opossums in the pouch. Victor carefully removed the two tiny marsupials and placed them in a tissue box. The two baby opossums were so tiny their eyes were not yet opened.
When they got home, Vi
ctor built a nest for them in a small shoebox and fed them warmed milk from an eyedropper several times every day. To everyone’s surprise, the two opossums not only survived, they thrived. Within weeks, they were big enough to move around the house, and Victor kept them alive by feeding them cat food.
After a few months, the family realized that they had a major dilemma on their hands. The opossums were nearly full-sized and they roamed around the house at night making strange clicking sounds, which Victor’s father informed them were mating signals. They had many conversations about what to do with these creatures because his parents knew that they could not keep them, but they were also afraid to let them go because they feared they would not have the skills to survive in nature.
It was a sad day for the entire family when the two opossums escaped from the house and were never seen again. Victor’s father took the loss of the opossums the hardest because, in retrospect, he felt that he should have stepped in and stopped Victor from raising them in the first place. Victor was surprised by his father’s tears when the creatures were discovered to be missing because he was not typically an emotional man.
Victor’s high school years were extraordinary. He did well at his Frostburg High School, taking as many science classes as he could, but the extraordinary part was that his father arranged for him to do very cool scientific internships during his summer vacations. He spent all four of his summer breaks in various programs around the world where he was able to study different animal species.
He spent one summer working with the Jane Goodall Institute studying chimpanzees in Tanzania. Another summer he spent at the Elephant Nature Park in Northern Thailand, an elephant rehabilitation center, where he helped take care of orphaned baby elephants. The third and fourth summers he spent on South Georgia Island in Antarctica studying the impact of climate change on seal populations. For his senior project, he wrote a scientific paper describing the impact of global warming on the animal species in areas where climate change was having the greatest impact on natural animal habitats. The project was awarded the grand prize in a national science competition, and Victor received a prestigious award and a check for $50,000.
By the time Victor was ready to apply to universities, he already had a handful of scientific publications, an excellent GPA, and SAT scores that were in the top 5%. Although he wasn’t the brightest student to apply to some of the programs that he applied to, he strongly demonstrated that he already understood scientific principles and as a result, he was highly competitive. In fact, he applied to six universities and received admittance and scholarship offers from them all.
He accepted a full ride scholarship from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with the goal of studying Wildlife Ecology. At Madison, he was exposed to many areas of ecology, and ended up refining his major to graduate with a degree in Wildlife Ecology on the Natural Sciences tract. After completing his undergraduate studies, he attended the University of California – Davis to get his Ph.D. in Ecology, where he studied infectious disease ecology and took several environmental sciences classes focused on the impact of climate change on natural disease dynamics in animal populations.
Victor’s training took him to many places that disturbed the young idealist that he had become. He attended conferences around the world, spending time in large cities where he was disgusted by the human waste and destruction that he witnessed in these cities. While in New York City to attend a conference at Columbia University, Victor was overwhelmed by the consumer-driven masses of people who appeared to mindlessly waste the earth’s resources without any thought of the impact they were having on the environment. He was disgusted by the urban scrawl that seemed to encroach outward from the city, chewing up natural areas as it expanded.
While attending a conference in Cancun, Mexico, Victor was appalled by the island of high-end hotels and businesses that lined the beaches, and he did not miss the stark contrast between the luxury tourist area and the rest of the city that was devastated by poverty. It bothered him deeply that the privileged could so blindly carry on without any regard for the poor or the earth. He frequently dwelled on the devastating consequences that humans were having on the animal populations that they displaced and destroyed for their own pleasures.
Victor knew that the human population was over 6 billion with projections of it reaching over 10 billion by 2025. If left unchecked, humans would overpopulate the planet, destroying wildlife and consuming resources until there was nothing left. The scientific evidence was irrefutable. Climate change was being fueled by human activity, and it was costing all of the other species on the planet their habitats and their lives.
Victor decided early in his career that he would not, could not let that stand.
Seventh Extinction is available from Amazon here.
Table of Contents
AWAKE
Edward J. McFadden III
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
The End
Read on for a free sample of The Seventh Extinction
Chapter 1
Awake Page 25