Extinction

by Korza, Jay

  Extinction

  By

  Jay Korza

  Table of Contents

  Dedication and Forward

  Daria

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Seth

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  The Warrior

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Wilks

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Emily

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Scan

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Surgeon

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Davies

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Snake

  Chapter 44

  Bloom

  Chapter 45

  Reaper

  Chapter 46

  Jeeves

  Chapter 47

  Beast

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Dedication and Forward

  Before the story starts, I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to a few people and make some observations about my writing.

  First off, I started writing this book in 1998. It started with the intention of being a short story about two young people in love who were separated by military service. The first night I sat down to write, the story took off without me and left the two lovers in the dust and somehow ended up in space in the future. There is still a love story in there, actually several of them, but none are the centerpiece of the story.

  I wrote fairly steadily for the first year but then moved to Massachusetts the next year and wrote much less. Over the years, I have picked it up and started writing again only to stop for some reason or another. Somewhere in the middle of 2012, I decided that I was going to start working on the book at least once a week, every week, until I was done.

  During all of the starts and stops, my mother has been reading my drafts and encouraging me to continue writing. She told me the other day that she was my biggest fan and couldn’t wait for the finished product. At the time of this writing, she is also my only fan, so I know I’ll sell at least one copy! Thank you, Mom, for all of the encouragement you have given me since I started this endeavor and even more so for all you have given me throughout the rest of my life.

  Over the years I’ve also had friends, girlfriends, and other family members who have read portions of the book and have given me encouragement and feedback. So there’s maybe four or five more sales I can count on. Except (redacted). I don’t think she’ll be buying one, but thanks anyway for your input!

  As I mentioned before, I started working on the book once a week. I would go every weekend to Starbucks at my local mall and set up shop in there for two to eight—or more—hours. A trente black iced tea with raspberry sweetener and a dash of cherry Mio, oh so very good. For less than four bucks a day with free refills from my Starbucks Gold Card, I had a great place to write with just enough distraction to give me plenty of micro-breaks to get through the day. Thanks to all of the baristas who were always so friendly and helpful, regardless of how much space I took up and how little money I spent.

  Now about my writing style...yes, I know “anticlimacticness” isn’t a word. Plenty of words in this book aren’t accepted words. I wanted to write in a style that mimicked our true nature of communication. We make up words, we don’t always use proper grammar, and we love slang.

  I also know that there holes in the plot, not huge ones (Prometheus)—at least I hope there aren’t. But if you think about it, there are holes in every plot, even in real life. Anyone can sit back and look at the story of what you did in your life and find holes, things that don’t make sense, decisions that could’ve been better. So in the spirit of book reading and suspension of disbelief, just go with it and enjoy the story. And if any one from How It Should Have Ended or CinemaSins wants to make this the first book they spoof, I’d love that!

  I would also like to thank Eric Schock who brought some of the characters to life with his fantastic art work. If you have a chance to look at his other work, I’m sure you’ll be impressed. www.evilrobo.com

  And last but definitely not least, I would like to thank Shannon and Maya for coming into my life and making this last year the best ever. Shannon was also a great resource while I finished the book and she was always eager to read the next chapter. Thank you for believing in me and thank you even more for putting up with me. I love you both.

  There are plenty of other people to thank and comments to make but I think it’s time to start the story. I really hope you enjoy reading this as much as I loved writing it..

  Daria

  Daria was more excited than she had ever been in her nine years of life. She kept looking at her dad and squeezing his hand. The line was moving at a fairly constant rate but it wasn't fast enough for Daria.

  In the hand not occupied by her father's, Daria held a raffle ticket, a winning raffle ticket. THE winning raffle ticket. Daria had used her allowance and some saved lunch money to buy five raffle tickets at her school's carnival fundraiser.

  The first-place prize was a brand new digital-optical hybrid telescope that was the top of line in consumer electronics. Daria loved astronomy more than anything in all the worlds. And now, she stood in the customer service line of the store that had donated the prize to her school, waiting to redeem her winning ticket.

  Daria and her family lived in a colony on the outermost planet of a Coalition co-op solar system. Their place in the system would make the views from the telescope the most wonderful sights Daria had ever seen. She already had every night for the next month planned out as to what she would be viewing. Tonight she would be mapping a system belonging to the Wordols with a name that loosely translated to “To Look Upon the Gods.”

  At the edge of Daria's periphery, she heard a commotion that grew to a point she could no longer ignore it. As she turned, she immediately saw two men, with handguns, pushing store patrons to the ground. At only nine, even Daria recognized the crazed look of someone high on Track Star.

  The drug became popular when a galactic sports super star died during the last Olympics. The human sports hero was taking a new drug to help him compete against some of the Coalition species that had definite genetic advantages over humans. Daria didn't remember the Olympian's name but she did know her father would joke that he wasn't even in track events so the drug's name was kind of stupid.

  The drug was a bad one, not the worst to be found but bad enough. It caused paranoia, aggression, a lack of grounding in reality, and a host of other issues that were common in a lot of drugs. What set this drug apart was that it had a synergistic effect with the neurotransmitters associated with the fight-or-flight response.

  The synergistic effect astronomically enhanced the high experienced by the user. As a result, the user tended to perform acts to stimulate the response. Casual users, if there were such a th
ing, would typically take the drug before activities like planetary free-falling. Hard-core users didn't have the money for the extreme sports, so they tended to commit criminal acts to get their blood pumping and adrenaline up to enhance their high.

  The two junkies were herding the customers and slapping them around, hoping someone would fight back. If a victim fought back, it would help stimulate the users' adrenal response and make their high better. Most people knew that being docile with the bastards would cause their high to wane and usually they would move on.

  As Daria watched the scene unfolding and moving from the front of the store to the rear, she noticed there were two marines in uniform who had been shopping in the store. They were giving each other slight hand signals and head nods. Daria knew that they were making a plan of some sort.

  Before the two marines could act, one of the junkies started to have a seizure, an inevitable side effect of prolonged use of Track Star. As the gunman fell, his convulsions caused him to pull the trigger on his automatic machine pistol. Bullets sprayed, people screamed, blood spilled and one maniacal drug user laughed and danced among the chaos as his adrenal glands kicked in and added to his high.

  Daria stood in place and felt a bullet pass so close to her face that it actually caused her long hair to billow out behind her and a small clump of it fell away from the rest. When the hair drifted to her wrist, she glanced down at the odd sensation; her eyes were then drawn to the figure of her father lying on the ground with a pool of blood building around his body.

  Daria dropped her coveted raffle ticket and knelt next to her father. She was still holding her father's hand and used her other hand to try to stop the blood pouring from his chest. She had learned basic first aid in school and she remembered enough to know that her efforts were in vain.

  Daria felt a gentle touch on her shoulder and heard a soft voice in her ear, “Hey sweetie, let me help you with that.” Daria looked and saw one of the marines kneeling beside her and slowly moved her aside so he could get to her father. Once she moved, he quickly went to work removing her father's shirt and examining the wound.

  “Please help him.”

  “I'll do my best, sweetie.”

  “Daria.”

  “Huh?”

  “Daria. My name is Daria. I don't like to be called sweetie. My mom used to call me that and she's dead now. So no one gets to call me sweetie anymore.” Daria knew it was such a trivial thing to think of and complain about in this moment but she didn't know what else to say. “My mom is dead, so you have to help my father.”

  The marine looked at her. “I'll do my best, Daria, I promise.” He turned back to her father and pulled out a pocketknife. “And my name is Bryce, but my friends call me Reaper.”

  Reaper was probing the wound with his finger and even though her father was mostly unconscious, he still went rigid and moaned as the finger went into the wound. “Shit”, was all Reaper said as he pulled his finger out.

  “What?”

  “The bullet went into your father's heart; put a hole in the left ventricle.” A quizzical look from Daria had Reaper explaining, “I need to open his chest and plug that hole. I can't get to it well enough through the bullet hole. What I'm about to do to your father is going to look very horrible and it's going to hurt him a lot, but you have to trust me.”

  While Reaper was talking, he was moving Daria's father into a different position up on his right side with his left arm over his head. He was pushing on her father's ribs and counting to himself. When he reached the number five, he held one finger in the depression between the ribs and brought the knife to her father's skin. Reaper looked at Daria and she nodded; she knew he was about to open her father's chest.

  With one fluid motion, Reaper made what seemed to be a huge incision along the ribcage and almost immediately the white of the rib bones were exposed, along with muscle and fatty tissue. Without rib spreaders available, Reaper just reached in with both hands and started pulling the ribs away from each other. The muscle stretched and tore and gave way to the chest cavity they protected. With lung tissue exposed, Reaper reached in and started moving the organ out of his way to get to the heart.

  Daria's father was fully unconscious now but he reflexively gripped her hand to the point that she thought it was going to break. That's when she heard the cold, cruel voice of the other junkie she had already forgotten about. “Get the fuck away from him. Let him die.”

  Reaper turned to look at the assailant. “No.”

  “Look, man, you're obviously a doctor or some shit.” The junkie nodded towards his still seizing friend. “Let this little bitch's dad die and help my buddy.”

  “I'm not a doctor, I'm a corpsman. And even if I wanted to save your friend, I couldn't.” Reaper was still trying to slowly work on Daria's father as he spoke. “Your friend has been seizing for over a minute now. That means he's in the last stages of Track Star Delirium. He can't be saved by anyone, even if we were in the best hospital in the entire Coalition. He's going to die, end of story.”

  Without hesitating, the junkie calmly said, “Then so will you.”

  Daria heard the gun bark at least five times and she saw the front of Reaper's chest tear apart in more than one place. Reaper slumped next to Daria's father. At that moment, one of the citizen shoppers swung a trashcan at the junkie's head and the sound of a solid connection rang out. The junkie went down and immediately the citizen was kicking and stomping on the already subdued man.

  “You killed my wife!” the man repeated again and again as he kicked and beat the man, turning the junkie's body to pulp.

  Daria turned her attention back to her father. She knew, or at least thought she knew, what Reaper was going to do after he exposed the heart: plug the hole. Daria was trying to get herself over the mental hurdle of sticking her hand inside her father's chest when she saw Reaper's arm move.

  Reaper didn't have enough strength to move his body but he could still make his arm function. He walked his fingers along the floor and up his patient's side until he found the surgical opening he had created. He then slid his fingers inside and found the hole and put two fingers in it.

  Daria instantly saw the blood cease to pump from her father's body and saw just a tinge of color race up his carotid arteries and into his face. He had still lost a lot of blood so his color didn't change very much but she was sure that even a little change was a good sign.

  Reaper's body went slack but his fingers never moved. Daria was sure he was dead but before she could check, a police officer scooped her up to take her out of the store and to a safe place. Daria struggled briefly until she realized the man holding her was one of the good guys.

  Pointing to Reaper, she said, “Don't move him. His hand is saving my daddy's life.” And with that, all of the adrenaline that had kept her upright for the last several minutes left her body all at once. She went limp in the officer's arms, her winning ticket all but forgotten. A song played, distantly heard in the background...

  ~

  Daria sat on the edge of the boardwalk, looking into the water. The rolling of the sea always made her feel better: The rhythmic crashing of the waves against the pillars of the pier. The creaking of the wood as it stands against one of the strongest forces in all of nature.

  It had been twelve years since her father had been shot in the store, waiting in line to get Daria's telescope. Twelve years since Daria's life changed so drastically in just five short minutes. She still looked at the night sky but not in the same way and not with the telescope that she never claimed. Now she looked at the sky, wondering where the Marine Corps would send her.

  After that day in the store, she became obsessed with medicine and studied it relentlessly. All of her teachers thought for sure she would be going to medical school after college, but not Daria. Daria knew she wasn't going to college, at least not a standard six-year college. She was sought after by many of the top schools in the Coalition but she only applied to one school her senior year. D
aria applied to a vocational school to become a paramedic. Her teachers were all aghast at such a flagrant waste of intelligence and talent but Daria couldn't care less.

  To become a paramedic on an all-human world, the class was only nine months long. But Daria wanted more than that. Daria was taking the multi-species course that usually took three years. With all of the studying Daria had done on her own, she was able to test out of most of the course work and focus on clinical rotations. Daria finished the school in just two years. Many of the doctors Daria worked with had written her letters of recommendation for medical schools but she had her sights set on a different goal.

  Daria felt a light touch on her shoulder and smelled the familiar scent that always made her smile. She looked up into the eyes of the man standing behind her. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, sweetie.” Daria's father sat next to her on the dock. “Are you ready?”

  “More than you know.” No matter how old Daria got, she knew that holding her father's hand would always be the best feeling in the galaxy.

  “Okay, we should probably get you to the transport then.” As they both stood, he added, “You know you don't have to go. Your contract isn't in effect until you scan-in on the shuttle.”

  “I know, Dad, but I want to. I know you think I have some deep-seated need to go but that's not it.” As they stood, she looked up into his eyes and put one hand over the area on his chest where Reaper had opened him up so many years ago. “I'm not doing this because he sacrificed himself for YOU, I'm doing this because he sacrificed himself for another person. In that moment, I knew that I could do more than look at the galaxy—I could be an important part of it.”

  “I know, sweetie. I'm just going to miss you.” As an unabashed tear rolled down his face, he led her towards their transport. “Just do me one huge favor, please.”

  “What's that, Dad?”

  “Please, for the love of all that is holy, get stationed somewhere with beaches and sand so I can visit and find myself a little honey to spend all of my retirement money on.”