The Sixth Extinction & The First Three Weeks & The Squads First Three Weeks Omnibus [Books 1-10]

by Johnson, Glen

  Bull continued reversing over the shredded bodies; it was a bumpy ride.

  After another roundabout, they found themselves heading along narrow hedged crowded lanes.

  Red was alert now, and staring out the window. She had not spoken to Noah, but simply snuggled up against him, as if seeking his body heat.

  Noah still had his arm around her, as if protecting her from harm.

  Betty had not moved in a while. She sat in the corner with her head covered, curled up against the door and window.

  The truck raced along the narrow lanes.

  A few cars were abandoned along the route, but the truck managed to squeeze through. At one section of the road, where the lane was thin and a car was wedged up against the hedge; Bull had to shunt the car along, crumpling the side panels of the silver Honda Civic so the truck could grind through.

  The scenery started to change over just a short distance as the truck started to climb in elevation. The grass became a short hardy moss, covered in bracken and ferns. Hedgerows gave way to old stonewalls, held together by gravity and age. Trees became shorter and robust and covered in moss and vines. On the tall hills, massive jutting out granite boulders the size of houses and some five stories in height looked over the landscape.

  The truck drove over stone bridges that spanned a diversity of waterways, from large, wide, fast flowing rivers, to trickling streams and brooks.

  The trees seemed to clump together the higher they drove, as if seeking company. Large tracts of woodland covered the sides of the rolling hills and vales that created long valleys. There were lone houses and farms here and there, surrounded by old stonewalls and barns.

  The truck zipped over cattle grids, making the vehicle vibrate.

  Noah noticed some naked creatures running in the distance. Some were in groups of ten or more. The most disturbing thing was they all seemed to be running in the same direction. If anyone else had noticed, they kept it to themselves. Noah just hoped it was a coincidence, because they all seemed to be heading in the same direction as them.

  51

  Doctor Lazaro

  Dartmoor National Park

  On the Roof of Dartmoor Prison

  2:28 PM GMT

  “Please follow me,” Doctor Hall said. He turned to the soldier.

  “You’re dismissed. I will take Doctor Lazaro from here.”

  The guard simply nodded, turned, and walked away, disappearing through a swinging door.

  “Ah, is that your findings?” he asked while eyeing the plastic sheath.

  Melanie was still trying to work out what he meant by ‘our species salvation’.

  “Sorry?”

  “Your findings.”

  “Yes.” She seemed to wake up from her daze. “I found the position where the host strain latches onto the human DNA,” she stated while flicking the folder with her wrist.

  Melanie looked at the folder. So many had died because of its contents.

  If only General Hay had sent the information via the internet before he took me on a tour of the gym, then all of this could have been avoided. But he wasn’t to know a horde was on its way to attack the university. The squad had already been diverted from their supply mission, and they had no idea why I was so important.

  “Interesting,” Doctor Hall said. “Of course, we have never tried to find a cure. It was just too impractical once the full implications of Clarkson’s discovery came to light.”

  Doctor Hall was leading the way along the corridor to a thick door with a swipe slot next to it. He pulled a passkey from his top lab coat pocket.

  “What do you mean; you’ve never tried to find a cure? And who is Clarkson? What discovery?” Melanie asked as the doctor swiped the card, and the door hissed open.

  Doctor Hall step into the elevator. He ignored her first question and answered the second.

  “Clarkson was a British explorer working for the British Museum in London,” Doctor Hall said as if Melanie needed to be told where the vast museum was located. “In 1898, he found something that changed the way we look at the world.”

  Melanie stepped into the lift. “I’ve never heard of Clarkson before.” She noticed that three sides of the lift were made of thick glass.

  “Few have. His findings were covered up by the British government and reclassified as top-secret.” With another swipe of the card, a panel slid across to reveal a scanner. Doctor Hall placed his nicotine stained hand on the surface. A green line ran up and down the screen. With a beep, tumblers could be heard falling into place, and then the elevator engaged and started to descend.

  “Clarkson was in Tibet, in an area nowadays referred to as the Plateau of Tibet in the Himalayas, in an uncharted valley between Lhasa and the Bhutan border, looking for antiquities to fill the new White Wing that had been completed at the Museum in 1887. He had no specialty, like all the explorers of the time he used his British credentials to bully his way into countries and paid off officials, so he could send back artifacts to his employers.”

  The lift was still descending. Melanie had no idea how fast, but it had passed the nine stories of the prison long ago; she was sure they were now deep underground.

  “On June 25th 1898, along with his large accompaniment of sherpas and aids, Clarkson discovered an undocumented valley high up in the Himalayas on the border of Bhutan. There, in that deep valley, after they spent two days walking through caves and thin ravines, the fifth pod was discovered.”

  Melanie was about to ask what he meant by ‘pod’, when the lift seemed to break free of the concrete walls around them, as the lift started descending down a glass shaft. Melanie was gobsmacked at what stretched out before her eyes.

  52

  Noah, Red, Betty, Lennie, and the Squad

  Dartmoor National Park

  In the Husky Somewhere near Widecombe-on-the-Moor

  2:31 PM GMT

  Red turned to look at Noah. She had a nasty bruise down the left-hand side of her face where she had been tossed against the doorjamb. She still felt dizzy and nauseated. She did not say a word. Nothing needed to be said – for now. At the moment, they both just needed to hold on and have someone close.

  Red’s mind wandered back to just before the pandemic broke out. Life was hard and getting harder. Her mother had passed away just two months before from cancer. It affected them all differently. It was so hard to see her fade away.

  It was not like a car crash, where the news was a shock and devastating, and final. Cancer was slow and lingering. Her mother had stage four lung cancer. Ironic considering that neither she, nor anyone else in the house, smoked. Red could see her mother getting weaker and weaker, and thinner. The chemotherapy was slowly killing her. It would be a toss-up between which killed her first, the chemo, or the cancer.

  Finally, her mother decided the chemo was not working and refused any more treatment. Now it was simply a matter of waiting.

  Her stepfather – who took over raising the two children when her father died in a car crash when Red was ten – sunk deeper and deeper into the bottle, while watching his wife fade away before his eyes. At first, Red felt sorry for him. He was still the breadwinner, having to feed them all. The government helped a little, but the money did not go very far.

  After five months, her mother died in her sleep in her bed. She was riddled with sores and as thin as a skeleton.

  Within two weeks, things got even worse.

  Her stepfather drank more than he ate. He seldom went to work, and he sat all day in front of the television with old photo albums of his wedding day.

  Red had to hold the household together. She had to drop out of college to get a job to support them all because the bills were mounting up. Her dreams of becoming a primary school teacher had to go on hold.

  Jasmine, her twelve-year-old sister, had no one else to look after her. Their stepfather was a wreck and because their mother was an only child, there were no aunties or uncles to ask for help. The grandparents, on her mother side, had
both passed away years earlier. The drunk was all they had.

  Red starting working long hours in Newton Abbots Specsavers labs. She worked the polishing machine, where the cut lenses for the glasses went after they were fined. She stood in front of the polishing machine for hours on end, swapping the tools over and placing the lenses in the correct position while checking the PSI pressure and the machines speed. She worked extra hours to rake in as much money as possible.

  One night, after Red got home late after a long fourteen-hour shift, her life got even worse.

  Her stepfather, Colin, was not asleep in his normal chair, with the TV blaring and an empty bottle in his hand. At first, she took it as a good sign. For weeks, he slept in the chair, only moving to go to the toilet, or grab a rare bite to eat, or a fresh bottle.

  Maybe he was pulling himself back on his feet; Red remembered thinking. That was until he stumbled down the hallway into the front room. He was naked and crying. He had blood around his swollen groin and on his hands.

  Red dropped the bag of groceries she had collected on the way home.

  “What have you done?” she screamed as she ran passed, knocking him to the floor, as she headed to her sister’s room.

  Her sister lay in bed on her back, with her nightie pulled up over her face. One leg hung off the bed. There was blood everywhere.

  “NOOOO!” Red raced to her side.

  Jasmine was dead. Suffocated by a pillow her drunken stepfather held over her face as he raped her.

  She had two choices, leave, and phone the police, before he returned and tried to hurt her, or make him pay.

  Red stared at her sister’s broken, bloody body. Slowly, like an automaton, Red walked to her bedroom. She was not thinking straight; it was almost an out of body experience. Red unhooked her bow from behind her bedroom door. She notched an arrow, with her sister’s blood still over her hands, and headed for the front room.

  Her stepfather was on his back with his hands over his face, crying.

  “I’m so sorry Jasmine,” he screamed. “You look so much like her!”

  Red ignored his shouting and pulled back the bow.

  He must have realized she was back in the room, because he struggled to raise himself on his elbows, while staring at her through his tear-streaked, drunken, bloodshot eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, while spittle dribbled down his stubble covered chin.

  Red released the pressure, and watched the arrow go through his right eye, pinning Colin’s head to the TV cabinet.

  In the background, on the TV, the BBC was reporting on an outbreak of a serious virus in South Africa.

  Red ignored the television. She went to the kitchen and filled a bowl with warm soapy water, and returned to her sister’s bedroom. She slowly cleaned the blood from her sister’s battered, limp body, as tears blurred her vision. She changed the sheets and her sister’s nightie and laid her back in the bed. She then kissed her sister on the forehead.

  Red then packed a few items of clothing, and filled the rest of the bag with food and three heavy two-liter bottles of water. She pulled an old sleeping bag from the bottom of her wardrobe, and then swung her bow and arrows over her shoulder and left.

  The last thing she did was dial the emergency services on the house phone and left the phone off the hook. As she walked out the door, she could hear the operator ask what service was required: police, fire brigade, or ambulance.

  Red had no idea where to go, or what to do. She slowly walked from her home on Barton Drive and headed into the nearby Bakers Park woods. She remembered an abandoned stone shack she found years ago with her sister, hidden by clinging vegetation.

  For five days, she hid, with her phone turned off, avoiding the world, consumed by her grief. On the sixth day, when her water and food ran out, she emerged from the woods to give herself up. However, the world was in chaos, as if her innocent sister’s death was the catalyst that changed everything.

  53

  Doctor Lazaro

  Dartmoor National Park

  Below Dartmoor Prison

  2:32 PM GMT

  Melanie stood with her mouth hanging open as the lift continued its momentum.

  “It was first started back in 1957; it took twenty-four years to complete. Luckily, there was a vast network of caverns riddled throughout the granite bedrock, which were enlarged and shaped. The prison above served as misdirection, enabling enormous amounts of materials and personnel to move back and forth without causing suspicion.”

  The elevator finally stopped, and the door hissed open. Melanie stepped out of the lift into a cavernous chamber.

  “There is room to house two thousand people, with enough food and supplies to last twenty years. There is a freshwater spring providing unlimited water for consumption, washing, and irrigation.”

  Melanie looked up. A vast dome stretched into the distance. It must have been over two hundred foot high. Only a couple of thick glass pillars connected to the ceiling, which was the elevators that joined the underground bunker to the building above.

  From her location, she could see lakes, large parks, numerous housing complexes, and colossal multistory buildings. It was an underground city. The buildings looked dated, as if she had been transported back to the seventies.

  “There is just a handful of technicians down here at the moment, preparing the facility and checking everything is working properly. For the last thirty-two years in has only had a skeleton crew running it. That changed three weeks ago when it became the country’s top priority.” Pride radiated from his voice.

  “I have been working here, collecting, and archiving data for thirty-two years, from when it became operational.”

  Then as an afterthought added. “The two hundred adult candidates and their one hundred children are still in the building above, getting their final checks. Of course, along with support staff, doctors, scientists and military personnel, the number bumps up to just over a thousand. This leaves room for the candidates and their children – once they are of breeding age – to multiply.

  “The support staff, and soldiers have all had their tubes tied – so to speak. They do not want everyone interbreeding down here, just the final selected candidates and their offspring.

  “It is believed that over the twenty years, at a fixed rate each year, with the candidates, their children, and grandchildren, when they come of age, the number should be up to around the two thousand capacity once it is safe to return topside.”

  Melanie turned three hundred and sixty degrees, so she could take in the whole view.

  “I can’t believe this has been here all this time. Has it a name?”

  “It is the Ark,” Doctor Hall announced, pride radiating from his voice.

  “The Ark?”

  “Our salvation.” He turned and started to walk towards a five-story building.

  “If you follow me, I will explain everything.”

  Melanie followed the thin doctor into the old style, large squat building, along white corridors and through laboratories. The outside of the building was dated, but the inside was a different matter.

  “There is everything here mankind will need to start over,” he said as he led the way.

  “The seeds of every known plant, fruit, and vegetable have been collected. Every known animal has its DNA frozen and stored. Every known medical cure and procedure, every known book, document, and scroll – everything that we have accomplished, discovered, and created, or recorded in the last few thousand years – has been digitally stored, and physically – where possible – for future generations.”

  They walked through a vast chamber that must have been in the center of the five-story building. It had tens of thousands of small sealed doors running up the walls, behind thick glass. A robot with four arms, on long metal cables that allowed it to move to any location in the chamber, was lifting an object from a container that rested on the floor, up into an open hatch.

  “Everything a civilization woul
d need to continue its species is here. And America, China, and Russia, as well as many other nations have their own versions.”

  They passed into another smaller lab. A group of about fifteen technicians was entering information into computers.

  “Just last minute data entry,” he said.

  Doctor Hall reached out a hand.

  “The file please, Doctor Lazaro.”

  Melanie passed it to him.

  “It will be scanned and entered into the computer. Your cure will be studied at depth in the coming years by a collection of Britain’s top scientists and doctors who will live down here with the Adam and Eve finalist.” He noticed the look on Melanie’s face.

  “Your named was short listed as a possible candidate. We add and delete the doctors and scientist on a yearly basis. You would have been called to a government building in London within the next few months for vetting to see if you have what it takes to be picked for the Ark.

  “But don’t worry, now you’re here when we return to the surface I will have you checked over.” He gave her a smile. “You may still be picked to live down the rabbit hole.” He gave her an even bigger smile. “And because of your IQ, profession, age, and health, you may not get sterilized but might even get the chance to become a breeder!”

  54

  Noah, Red, Betty, Lennie, and the Squad

  Dartmoor National Park

  In the Husky Somewhere Near Princetown

  2:36 PM GMT

  The Captain was concerned. The amount of naked creatures running across the moorland was excessive. There were not enough populated areas across the region to warrant so many of them. It did not make sense as to why they were all out here, and heading in the same direction. He was getting a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.