The Great Crime Spike: A Dystopian Thriller Novel (Liberty Down Book 1)

by Eric M Hill

  Danny and Frank weren’t angels by any stretch of the imagination. But in the brothers twenty-seven and twenty-eight years, respectively, they’d never committed a top four crime. Nor would they ever have imagined themselves to commit one or more of the crimes that had caused them to join the growing vigilante movement to hunt predators.

  But when Lindsey raised the shotgun’s barrel from the floor and let it hang loosely in her arm as she pointed it toward the women, something happened to the brothers. They saw terror in the women’s faces. They were helpless. They’d do anything they were told to do.

  “Sit down,” Lindsey told the women. They were like obedient dogs.

  “Anyone else in the house, Felipe?” Russ asked in song.

  “No.”

  “Diego, is your brother lying to me?”

  “No, nobody’s here but us.”

  “Okay,” said Russ, “not that I don’t trust you, but my friends here are going to check. If there’s anyone back there, I’m shooting both of you in the head. Deal?”

  “No one is here,” said Felipe, hoping these were robbers and not hunters.

  “Go check it out,” said Russ to Frank and Danny. “Be careful. Predators have been known to lie.”

  Felipe closed his eyes and cursed inside. They said predators. They’re hunters, he thought, and accepted his death.

  Diego heard the guy call them predators and chilled from the inside out. Yet he wasn’t accepting the inevitability of death just yet. “You guys are hunters.”

  “That’s right, Anderson,” said Lindsey, mocking him as the smartest predator to ever live. “Can’t get anything past you.”

  “Maybe we can make a deal,” said Diego.

  “No deal, Diego,” said Felipe. “We’re dead already. Don’t give them nothing.”

  “We’ve got two hundred thousand dollars,” said Diego.

  “Diego!” Felipe protested.

  “In a safe,” said Diego.

  “Where?” asked Russ.

  “Here,” said Diego.

  Russ’s eyes changed. So did Lindsey’s. They couldn’t explain it if their lives depended on an explanation, but they’d fallen under the same spell that was making Frank and Danny rush their search to get back to the living room—where the predators’ women were. Russ and Lindsey were powerless against the calculations that went through their mind. Two hundred thousand split four ways was fifty thousand dollars.

  “Here? You have two hundred thousand dollars in this house?”

  “Let me and my brother go,” said Diego. “You take the money and let us go.”

  Russ was morally destabilized. He tried feebly to hang on to the bannister of right and wrong, but it collapsed under the weight of greed and he fell. Fifty thousand dollars each! But he wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t like the people he hunted. He wasn’t a predator.

  Russ needed something to help him justify the excitement that was consuming him as he involuntarily—or was it now voluntarily?—thought of fifty thousand dollars. He needed to rationalize the actions he was contemplating.

  “You have two hundred thousand dollars here? In this house?” said Lindsey.

  “Yes, let me and Felipe go. You can have it.”

  Frank and Danny returned in time to hear this and were stunned. First, the women. Now two hundred thousand dollars? Why that was fifty thousand dollars each!

  All of the hunters looked at one another as though they’d just tasted something that should’ve been horrible, but was surprisingly and shamefully delicious. No one wanted to be the first to admit how good predator’s food tasted.

  “What are we going to do?” Lindsey mouthed silently to Russ, Danny, and Frank.

  Russ made a face and shrugged. “Where’s the safe?” he asked Diego.

  ***

  Several minutes later Diego was back on his knees and facing the wall. Two hundred thousand dollars was on the floor at the feet of the two women. They’d said nothing since being told to sit.

  “You’ve got the money,” said Diego.

  Felipe stared straight ahead at the wall. He knew they weren’t getting out of this alive.

  The four hunters huddled away across the room as they whispered and kept an eye on the predators. “What are we going to do?” said Lindsay. “Do we turn the money in to the police?” She was still behind a façade of morality, so she sounded sincere. But she was definitely against turning the money in.

  “Then what?” said Russ. “It sits around for six months or a year waiting for someone to claim it?”

  “Whoever they stole that money from is never getting it back,” said Danny.

  “And what if they didn’t steal the money?” said Frank. “What if this is drug money, or they got it from selling stolen property, or…man, who knows where they got this money from?”

  “We could ask them,” said Danny, not really wanting to do this. But he had to go on record with himself as having said this.

  “They’re predators, Danny,” said Lindsey. “It’s not like we can trust what they say.”

  “Guys…” said Russ.

  The hunters looked intently at Russ, hoping he would help end this waltz.

  “Are we taking the money or aren’t we?” he asked.

  Silence.

  “It doesn’t make sense to just leave it,” said Lindsey.

  “It’s not like that money’s ever going back to whoever it belongs to,” said Danny.

  “They stole it,” said Frank.

  “Fine,” said Russ, “I’m taking it all. It’s mine.”

  Frank puffed up like a bullfrog. “What do you mean it’s yours?”

  “So we’re taking the money?” Russ put it out there.

  “Yeah, we’re taking it.” Frank fed off of Russ, sounding anything but ambivalent. “Fifty thousand each.”

  Russ looked at the others. They nodded.

  “What about the girls?” asked Danny.

  “What about the girls?” replied Russ.

  Danny answered with a silent and unsteady but clearly communicated idea.

  Russ glanced at them. Until now, he’d been only under the spell of greed. Now he felt another tentacle of power squeeze him until all that was base in him came to the surface.

  Frank was riding the momentum of his decision to take the predators’ money. “They’re predators. What did Chief King say? ‘The only right that a predator has is the right to die.’”

  “Oh, give me a break, Frank,” said Lindsey. “You’re so full of crap. The girls are predators. If you want one, just take her. They’re going to die anyway, right?”

  Frank and Russ momentarily acted as though this was a new concept. They were going to kill the girls?

  “What?” said Lindsey. “We’re going to kill the guys, take the money, you and your brother are going to do the girls, and what? We leave them to tell the cops. They’ll look at us like we’re predators and not hunters. I don’t think so.”

  Danny had been conflicted about the girls. He wanted them. Yet the thought of actually forcing himself on a woman was getting the best of him. But Lindsey was right. He had to stop looking at them as women. They were predators. Predators had no rights.

  The huddle ended.

  “Guys, I gave you the money,” said Diego.

  “They’re going to kill us, Diego,” Felipe said to his little brother.

  “Let me and my brother go,” Diego pled.

  “What about your girlfriends?” asked Lindsey.

  One of the girls spoke up for the first time. “I’m not either of their girlfriend. I just met Diego a few hours ago at a club. I heard you say predators. I’m not a predator. Please, I just met Diego. I didn’t know he was a predator.”

  “Is what she’s saying true?” Danny said to the predators.

  Diego and Felipe said yes.

  “Is it?” he asked the other girl harshly, angry at the implications.

  “Yeah, I just met her tonight.”

  “Please let me go,” the g
irl begged.

  The hunter-turned-predator crew looked at Danny impatiently. Danny knew what they wanted to do wasn’t a la carte. It was all or none. He looked at her with a face that was now as hard as his new heart. He needed her to be a predator so he could treat her like a predator.

  “You’re a predator,” he said, and took her to a bedroom.

  Chapter 27

  Dr. Anderson had many secrets that his deep distrust of human nature—especially the political-military-big business incestuous relationship—would never allow him to share. One was leading his brilliant mind on a circuitous and inadvertent route toward finding a crime suppressant drug.

  Years ago he had discovered a biological way to dramatically reduce the body’s need of sleep. As much as he could see the potential good of eradicating the need for sleep, humanity’s potential for evil would do with his discovery what it always did. It would use the technology to exploit and destroy.

  Yes, there’d be increased productivity; much of it good. But much of it would be disproportionately bad and devastatingly ruinous. His proof was the history of the world. All the evil that had ever existed, its slavery and atrocities and genocides and exploitations and wars had all been done by men who needed sleep. When those men were sleeping, they weren’t actively turning Earth into Hell. Sleep was a natural constraint of their evil.

  When vampires were sleeping, they weren’t sucking blood. Similarly, when predators were sleeping, they weren’t robbing and raping and murdering. The last thing America needed was for him to empower the nation’s scourge of bloodsucking predators.

  He knew his reasoning wasn’t without fault. He was the smartest man to ever live, but not necessarily the wisest. He knew and humbly accepted this. He acknowledged that his default was pessimism and not optimism. But the world was as it was. He deeply regretted living in a world that was fond of making fools of optimists and of turning good into evil. So, no, what he had discovered about eradicating sleep would never be shared.

  This great sleep discovery had begun with an observation of his own sleep needs. His body naturally required only two hours of sleep. This had piqued his interest. Why did he need so little sleep?

  The mysteries of sleep had proven for centuries to be a formidable magician to scientific inquiry, baffling the greatest minds and leaving them with nothing but observations of what happens when one is deprived of sleep, and endless theories of what happens when one is actually sleeping. In Anderson’s investigations, however, he had used instruments he had created to observe his own brain. He had also studied the research of others. What he discovered were two fascinating mysteries. Mysteries that had opened a new line of inquiry to him.

  The first mystery was that during sleep his brain had a way of refreshing itself in a far more effective and efficient way than science had imagined possible. For instance, it was known, among other things, that human brains used sleep to cleanse itself of toxins. But Anderson had found that his brain cleansed itself so well that new, uncommon, and apparently illogical pathways were cleared. Pathways that led to astounding communications within the human body.

  The second mystery was two-fold and directly related to the first. He had discovered new neurotransmission cells, and those cells behaved and communicated with one another with an intelligence that was far beyond instinctual.

  When he first observed this phenomenon, he had the sensation that he knew must have been experienced by Dr. Alexander Fleming in 1928 when he had accidently discovered the medicinal value of penicillin and given birth to the age of antibiotics. Led by serendipity, he had observed that a mold had contaminated his petri dishes, and that it had a mysterious factor that hindered the growth of bacteria.

  However, it had taken others with abilities in chemical identification and extraction and mass production to come behind him decades later to fully develop his findings and to bring its miracle-working benefits to the masses. But Dr. Anderson was not Dr. Fleming. Of his seven Nobel prizes, two were for chemistry. And, unbelievably, he had enough unpublished discoveries in chemistry to be awarded several more.

  So Anderson immediately saw dots no one else would have seen, and connected them the way no one else would have connected them. Some of these dots and connections gave him the secret of sleep eradication. But as he pondered his sleep eradication research and mused his crime suppressant theories, they gave him something else, too.

  Similar to Dr. Alexander Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of the world’s first true antibiotic, Anderson now noticed something spectacularly odd in his research jumping up and down in front of him wearing a bright red suit and flailing its arms. It was something that the smartest person to ever live just may be able to use to rid the nation of murderers.

  The new neurotransmission cells he had discovered appeared to corroborate some thoughts he’d had about fighting cancer cells by communicating with them through unconventional means. Underlying that possibility was the wild question of What unknown ways did cancer cells communicate with one another? He had the same question of these new cells.

  He researched and tested and found there was indeed a complex system of communication among the newly discovered neurotransmission cells. This alone was not a discovery in the least. That cells communicated with one another was basic, scientific dogma. It was the premise of antibiotics and other medicines, and foundational to cellular research. Antibiotics, for example, mimicked, disrupted, or otherwise manipulated chemical communications—the language of cells. This was how they affected relief or cures.

  What was new and revolutionary about Anderson’s discovery of cellular communication was that the newly discovered neurotransmission cells had a non-chemical way of communication. He probed and watched in awe as they behaved in ways that reminded him of human governments.

  Dictatorships, oligarchies, democracies, parliaments, even socialism. There were even what he hypothesized as relationships. Relationships similar to human relationships. He saw this all play out on the cellular level.

  Then he ran a series of tests that catapulted his brilliant mind into an orbit of hyper-unconventional thinking. It’s when he saw with his intuitive brilliance what he hadn’t yet seen with his natural eyes. These new cells had the equivalent of brains and emotions and…morality.

  Morality?

  This was a strain even for his unconventional mind. When he had first contemplated such a possibility as nonchemical communication among cells, he knew he was climbing an exceedingly steep and endless set of slanted greased stairs. When he added the element of humans somehow communicating to the cells through nonchemical stimuli, the stairs disappeared and the gravity of reason tried to yank him down.

  And when he added the concept of consciousness of morality among cells, he knew he was now firmly in the realm of lunacy. But without exception, his greatest breakthroughs came about only when he doggedly resisted being reasonable.

  He knew this path of research would inevitably produce more questions than a million geniuses could answer. But he didn’t have the burden of answering every question. He only had to answer three.

  Was there a way to identify murderers through cellular manipulation?

  Was there a way to communicate to their cells and to convince these cells to kill their host?

  Was there a way to scale this process so that thousands of murderers at a time could be killed through this cellular means of self-elimination?

  He had discovered enough to convince himself that the answer to all three questions was yes. Hope coated with heartbreak rose in his chest. He would need to test his findings.

  There was no time for mice and bureaucracy and clinical trials. He needed to test his theories on a human.

  A murderous human.

  Now.

  And he knew exactly who he would use. He put in a call to America’s most famous police chief. Thirty-two days later one murderer, the murderer who had killed his daughter, was dead, and the smartest human to ever live needed only the right deliv
ery system to kill them all.

  Chapter 28

  She looked through her sniper’s scope at the target. He was nine hundred meters away—2,952.75 feet. It wasn’t an easy shot, but considering the circumstances and environment, not the most difficult either. She put the crosshairs between his shoulder blades and adjusted up and down his spine. T3. T2. T1. C7. C6. C5. C4. C3. C2. C1. C2. C3. C4. C5. C6. C7.

  She stopped on C7. Her adjustments weren’t conscious; not any more. Sniper school. Thousands of shots down range. Field kills. They’d made it all instinctive. She was using a 7.62 mm round. The bullet’s speed for the first six hundred meters would be faster than the speed of sound, creating a sonic boom. But after traveling six hundred meters, air drag would slow the bullet to subsonic speeds, diminishing the sound and making it a silent killer.

  Were she to miss a target within the first six hundred meters, he would hear the bullet’s sound and take cover, frustrating or preventing the second shot. The target, however, was far away enough that this was not a concern—unless the bullet hit something close by. Her ego grinned. This wouldn’t happen.

  She compensated for gravity’s pull on the bullet by adjusting her mildots on the scope and raising the rifle’s barrel to overshoot the target. Cold air was more dense than hot air, so the added wind drag was part of her computation. She used the swirling leaves to judge the winds to be five to eight miles per hour. The stationary target was just as good as dead.

  But the sniper’s orders were not to eliminate Dr. Anderson. Nor were they to kill the man he was meeting. As much as she would have enjoyed it. Unfortunately, Department of Integrity and Government Oversight (DIGO) agents were still untouchable—at least they were most of the time.

  So, the sniper would have to settle for her new assignment of surveilling Dr. Anderson and staying on the ready to eliminate him should she get the call. She didn’t know who or where they were, but she knew agents of other intelligence agencies were surveilling him, too, for at least two reasons.