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Aboard Royal Princes Cruise Line’s Royal Neptune
Sergeant Jill “Reaper” Repeth, US Marine Corps, started the day as she always did, with a protein shake and one hundred pull-ups on a tension bar she had brought aboard and set up in the doorway of her room’s balcony. Facing out to sea looking over the railing, her head and shoulders rose and fell, eyes on the horizon. Her lungs expanded, pumping the fresh sea air in and out.
It is great to be alive, she told herself, one of a series of mantras of encouragement. Twenty-five and still alive. Every day above ground is a good day. Every day I am not being shot at is a good day. She believed these things more today than on some other days.
Jill Repeth was a One Percenter. Most Marines didn’t know about them, because most Marines weren’t female. Only a small fraction of the Corps was composed of women, because unlike the other services, the Marines didn’t bend its physical standards very much to admit them. Measure up or leave.
But the One Percent was an unofficial secret club of female Marines that strove to outperform the men – that could, would and did beat them at their own game. Marathoners, triathletes, gymnasts, distance swimmers, biathletes. Thus One Percent, because perhaps one in a hundred already fit Marine women could do it – could perform at this Olympic level of physical prowess.
The cruise line had given her a private room on a middle-high deck, something she would have struggled to afford if she hadn’t been selected through their “Wounded Warriors” promotion that provided free cruises to the nation’s war-damaged service members. Jill was glad of that privacy as she finished the hundred, hardly more winded at the end than at the start. Taking that as a good sign, she knocked out another fifty before stopping.
That was more than she’d ever done before at a stretch. Perhaps it was because she had an advantage over the average Marine, male or female; she weighed at least twenty pounds lighter than normal. Missing everything below both knees put less strain on the cardiovascular system. Absent lower legs didn’t need blood and oxygen.
Stay positive, stay focused. Ever since the mortar shell that took her feet and shins, that’s what she told herself.
Dropping gently to the deck onto her buttocks, she maneuvered with wiry-muscled arms and leg stumps over to her prostheses. Sitting on the floor, she strapped them on, fiddling and adjusting for a longer span than usual. She finally got them to some semblance of stability, and wobbled to her artificial feet.
Jill stared down at the legs and the metal-and-plastic structures. They didn’t feel right. Her good mood evaporated. Some days the damn things just didn’t sit well on her, and it looked like this would be one. She wasn’t even going to turn on the microprocessor control and servos that helped her walk and run with a semblance of normalcy. She still hoped she could work up to a marathon again. Maybe with those bladerunner things.
Jill sat down on the bed and took the prostheses off, rubbing at the end of the stumps. They always itched a bit, but today they positively screamed to be scratched. She did so, vigorously, and then looked more closely at them. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that the stumps had lengthened slightly.
Maybe they were just swollen.
She shrugged to herself. Rather than fight with the artificial legs, she phoned for a wheelchair pick-up. She’d come back after breakfast and fiddle with the things. She was starving.
An hour later, after bolting down everything she could shove into her face, she returned to her room, bewildered. The ship had gone crazy, in a good way. People claiming to be cured of cancer. A blind man now seeing. A paraplegic standing up and walking. People talking about the Second Coming of Christ, seeing the Virgin Mary on their walls and their pizzas, gossiping about miracles.
Well, nobody had disappeared off the ship, so at least that ruled out the Rapture. Other people spoke of a viral video some had seen before the ship’s internet went down, where a man named Daniel Markis claimed to have released a curative disease that everyone could have.
Jill stared down at her stumps again, and wondered.
Reaper's Run - Plague Wars Series Book 1 Page 2