There Where the Power Lies (Monster of the Apocalypse Saga Book 2)

by C. Martens

  Now, since Ron had survived the plagues, these feral dogs were starting to get on his nerves. He had to forage, and the pack was getting gutsier. They always stayed out of range after the first two bit the dust, perhaps because of the pack leader.

  Recognizing it from his practice, he knew the Belgian malinois was a trained police dog. He would just have to be careful.

  §

  This was not fair. Here she was, pregnant with triplets, and they were not even hers. This was not part of the contract. But there was no one to renegotiate her surrogacy, no one to give her prenatal care, no one to even deliver the three babies in her womb.

  Cursing her luck, Elisabete Teixeira walked the halls of the largest hospital in Sao Paulo in her six inch stilettos. The hunt for a doctor was going to get critical soon. Even the strong drugs meant to delay her labor could not keep the pregnancy from terminating eventually. The college girl understood what that meant. One baby would have been fine, maybe even two, but three were bad odds. Forty weeks was normal in a single child birth, and she was thirty-two weeks in. Time was getting short.

  Pushing her into the idea, her mother had been adamant about the necessity of paying for her education and keeping the family out of debt. She would be the first from her favela to earn a degree that was paid for legally. Other girls had managed to succeed by prostituting themselves or being mules or even satisfying a contract kill, but she would emerge unscathed. Now, all those plans were going to hell.

  The reasons for everything, her whole design and all her effort, were destroyed. Now there was no family, no debt, no education, and there were no parents to accept the babies and make the final lump sum payment. And the damn doctors were all dead. There were no obstetricians to deliver the infants or any nurses to care for them, supposing the babies now survived.

  Having scoured the hospital thoroughly, Elisabete emerged and strode with her swollen belly to the beautiful sports car parked with its right wheels on the curb. Her feet were in agony, but she would be damned if she would give up the expensive stilettos. She programmed the next location into the GPS and disengaged the computer assisted driver. She had no time to waste, and the driver would be too slow.

  §

  The bus did not come again, but Dingxiang was patient. He sat with his lunch pail by his side and read his book.

  The forty-odd-year-old factory worker turned the pages of the American text quickly as he enjoyed the story, written in English. Soon he would replace the book when he visited the deserted stall of the local market and took the next of the series. Westerns were so interesting and exciting.

  Looking up occasionally, inspecting both the north and the south approaches, he realized that the bus was not coming, but in all of Bejing, the man had nothing pressing to do. He settled back and waited.

  Finally the book ended, and he tucked it into the inside pocket of the winter coat that his son had given him. He thought about his son as he removed the small, silver baoding balls from one of the outside pockets. Beginning slowly and with both hands, Dingxiang flourished the balls slowly between his fingers, occasionally palming one or another and then adding the ball back into the mix. As his fingers limbered, he worked one hand exclusively and then the other.

  One day, when the bus had been running consistently, the balls were flowing through his fingers with unusual fluidity as he sat at his window seat. He looked over and noticed a man in a tour bus, speeding alongside. The stranger was watching his exercise routine. He was an American, obviously, and Dingxiang smiled back.

  The man reached down below the level of his bus’s window as the big vehicles paralleled each other down the road. The Chinese man was curious. He had never spoken with a gaijin. Within an instant the foreigner had produced a coin and was rolling it across his fingers, flipping it as it traveled across each. Then on reaching the small finger, the coin would disappear onto the thumb and find its way under and up to the index finger to start again in a continuous cycle.

  The two men understood each other, even without speaking. As the bus slowed at the next stop, they waved goodbye.

  A new respect for man was seeded in Dingxiang’s thinking. Often, as he and his fellow workers discussed politics and Americans in particular, he remembered the smiling gaijin. The thoughts would temper his views on world affairs. When others noticed the change, he explained the incident on the bus, but they could not, or would not, understand.

  The Chinese man in the warm coat did not miss his work. He had often wished he had tried harder in school so that he was not relegated to painting enamel into the coils of wire on the huge cloisonné pots. The fumes were not too bad at first, but as time passed his lungs filled. Lately, he wished there was a doctor that he could consult.

  §

  The floor to ceiling doors on the old bar stood open, fortunately, to Milly Pratt’s thinking. She hobbled up, using her two mismatched canes to support her arthritic knees, and placed her wrinkled, thin-skinned hand on a door as she usually did on entering. Coming into the bar was like communing with an old friend. The tall doors were made of steel, bi-fold, and too heavy for her frail body to move. Closed, they would have spanned the entire façade of the hand-hewn stone building.

  The saloon was small and ancient. Crowded with tables and chairs, the only place to move easily was against the piano on the right and then to the bathrooms as one crossed the length of the bar.

  Milly let go of the cold metal, made her way around the piano, and sat on the bench toward the door, just behind the terrarium that held the big-mouth frog. She reached into her purse and produced a mouse that was in one of her traps this morning. As she threw the little corpse in, she looked at the frog. It sat flat on the bottom like a cow flop. That was what it reminded her of… a big, warty, gray cow flop. The frog hesitated, and then the mouse disappeared before Milly could see what happened.

  Stretching her fingers as she sat, Milly waited for her best friend. Soon her fingers felt limber enough to use, and she caressed the keys lightly, playing something she appreciated from Chopin.

  As usual, Winny showed up late. She hobbled in and plopped down next to Milly, huffing indignantly that, “The damn cat was impossible to call back into the house.”

  Understanding perfectly that the damn cat had disappeared years ago, and Winny was just using her standard excuse, Milly gave her a side glance that would singe the hair of a younger, more tender person.

  The entertainment for the evening began. The two little, old ladies began to pound the keys slowly, warming up. As they did, they unlimbered their voices as well. In quavering tones that had seen better days, they attacked the piano and the pages of music brought out from the piano bench with enthusiasm. Within an hour they took a break for a shot at the bar and then back to the piano.

  Everything from the Black Bottom and the Charleston to Nine Inch Nails and Korn found its way to the music stand. There was nothing newer than that. Before long the alcohol and the exercise warmed up the two ladies, and they laughed and shouted lyrics, remembering past days and the wild times they had. They did not care that the piano needed tuning, the weather was getting chill, and their voices broke on the high notes and the low notes, or that their only audience was a frog that looked like something from a pasture.

  It was better than thinking about the inevitable. Both wondered who would show up last, and what would they do?

  §

  The woman from Sweden looked out the window, her hair making a corona around her head. Both of the longtime residents of the International Space Station had a crush on her. They had both made advances, and Inga Johannsen had considered and accepted that option. Her husband would never know. After all, lovers could find space, literally, without cameras.

  The sex had been worth the effort. Both of the men from different countries had ideas on what made sex good, and they were both correct. Or maybe it was the lack of gravity.

  In any case, the exercise did them good, and her birth control was in place.
<
br />   The shift was coming to an end, though. The reentry system was designed for three, so that was not a problem. The issue was making the landing.

  Listening to what had been occurring on earth was scary. When all contact disappeared as various people declined to come to work or had died, the three slowly came to realize that they were on their own.

  But they were never intended to be on their own.

  Water landings had become the norm again, as they were more efficient. An underpowered capsule slung into space from a detachable, high altitude aircraft managed the launch, but the return was freefall. That meant that small variations in air density, temperature, and movement could influence the trajectory. And there was no way to compensate. Because there was no pick-up vehicle, they had to be close enough on landing to swim ashore. None of their calculations resulted in any surety of success. They would have a margin of error that was unacceptable.

  There were no options left. Supplies were thinning down and meant to be replaced as needed. The little fish experiment and the tomatoes and even the algae cultures would not sustain one of them, much less three. Besides, the damn cooling system that had given them fits for over a decade was once again in need of parts. If the other half blew, they would not even have time to chart a launch with an anticipated landing zone.

  One of them suggested that they could stay back and wait for the other two to send help. The other two had to explain the realities. Whether or not they survived the landing, they would not be back.

  §

  He was a young man of twenty-eight and charming in his way. Strong, and physically attractive to both men and women, he used his attributes to his advantage with little care for those he manipulated. The early abuses in life had hardened him to cruelty and brutality until he valued them more than other things. Cord Sullivan treasured nothing but himself and fancied himself as Ronin. He eschewed the classic bushido weapons and carried a large Bowie knife instead, as well as a large caliber pistol. Nevertheless, considering his affinity for visiting death and violence on others as he traveled the west coast of California north, he expected to die by the sword.

  §

  Fresh from becoming certified in her childbirth education classes, Lilly Thompson signed up for midwifery classes. She wanted to know everything she could. The sister that worked as a doula had lined her up with a practicing midwife. Having spent the last year helping her new mentor, she had decided to commit to becoming a midwife herself.

  Now, three years into her own practice, she wondered if she would ever deliver a baby again.

  The last woman to contract with her had discovered that the fertility drugs had worked too well, and she was going to have a multiple birth. Lilly had declined to participate and had given the woman the contact information of an obstetrician that she trusted, well, mostly, and occasionally worked with.

  Still difficult to get across to media-believing women and terrified husbands, the statistics of home birth as opposed to medical birth were often ignored. People just wanted to shed all responsibility and place it on the shoulders of hospitals that wanted to turn a profit and doctors that wanted to play golf. Besides, the trends toward multiple births, as well as the sudden unexplained increases in genetic predisposition for early delivery that had shown up in recent years, made it easy for already frightened people to use medical solutions.

  Plagues running rampant had decimated any chance of exercising her skills. The woman had been on the move for some time now and had yet to contact anyone living. She decided that if she found anyone, they would become family. There were just too few people.

  In the town to the south of where Lilly was headed, a man waited. He had set up a roadblock in order to exact tolls from people as they passed. Not interested in anything financial, he had other ideas. Disappointed at the amount of traffic passing through, he considered going north, or maybe he would just give it one more day.

  §

  The tops of the Himalaya were chill, and fresh snow dusted the lower slopes. The yak carrying Jampa’s gear was being obstinate and stalled in the middle of the stream they were crossing. The Bhutanese man, young and in his early prime, was tempted to shoot the recalcitrant beast.

  After losing the only living soul that he had found alive to an accident and a lingering death, his mood was fragile. Wondering what his future held, the man agonized over his path. So far, he had visited as many villages as he could after starting two months ago, finding a small boy alive, and then the child had stumbled off a mountain path and fractured his arm. The bone stuck through, and Jampa had done what he could, but as the black edges of the wound developed, they foretold the outcome.

  What Jampa needed was a drink, but all he carried was the bottled water he had just acquired in the last village. He cursed that Bhutan was so difficult in their abstaining from alcohol. The last few years had seen the local drink, Ara, being fermented less and foreign liquors being outlawed altogether.

  Opening the bottle of water and sipping appreciatively, he had no reason to notice the label, a Chinese company that serviced all of the remote villages through local distributors. He also had no reason to wonder about the expiration date stamped on the cap.

  In small hamlets around the world, bottled water was a commodity of value. Even remote areas had increasingly had issues with contamination. Better to rely on a trusted industry than on local water sources.

  The yak finally decided that its feet and legs were too cold to be comfortable. It surged out of the creek and, surprising Jampa, trotted quickly down the rough trail. Cursing in anger, and turning an ankle on a stone, Jampa chased after the animal.

  Chapter 17

  Work went on in the animal salvage operations. Black rhino was one of the more successful species to be cloned and propagated. The Indian rhino followed closely, and both were released in small numbers within six months of plague inception because of prior efforts. White rhino mothers were impregnated by embryo transfer, and each carried either a black or Indian fetus. To ensure the highest probability of success, the embryos were ninety-five percent female. There would be another boom in the populations as they matured and became fertile. The black rhino-impregnated females were released in Africa to be birthed naturally, while the Indians would be held until weaned.

  Several species besides rhino made the journey to their native environments, or what was left of them, with the dawning understanding that habitat loss was now dialed back to nil and that from here on habitats would grow exponentially. Man had ceased to be a factor, and timelines were adjusted accordingly.

  The robot army, intended to do the work under human supervision, had been left to its own devices. A new priority seemed reasonable, and production of labor bots was stepped up. As they were manufactured, they boarded transports controlled by computers and debarked in areas of the world that would be seeded later with animals.

  Intentional fires were started in high priority areas, and then demolition equipment leveled and tilled the asphalt and concrete until soil reappeared. Soon there were native plants making an appearance where they had not been seen in years.

  Where new growth needed shade as part of the survival process, and accelerated natives were not available, genetically modified fast-growth trees made an appearance. There was no danger of the trees becoming invasive, as they were sterile. They would grow, providing a canopy, and as the native plants took hold, they would die and enrich the soil.

  Even with help from an efficient work force, the regions of viable habitat expanded slowly. Where there had been none, however, growth was enormous. Animals judged to be beneficial to the rehabitation process were released first.

  There were people observing the robots. Survivors studied them from a distance mostly. A few found their own habitat being protected from fire or demolition as the activity went on around them. In all cases, after the bots leveled the evidence of civilization surrounding, the people moved out and back to man-made structures that were still standing in v
ast numbers. They were more comfortable there, and resources were more plentiful. As they retreated from the new plantings, the bots came in and leveled the vacated buildings.

  Communicating within the hive intelligence, the bots developed a strategy to remove humans from prime reforestation efforts. They had no need to remove the humans physically or even destroy their dens. All they had to do was develop the surrounding area so that the humans pulled back to areas with resources where they could forage. The humans adapted well, and stress was minimized. Besides, there were few humans.

  The bots counted humans as they did their work. They were aware of the massive die off as it progressed. Humans were animals, and animals were the highest priority in their programming. The artificial intelligence of the mechanical work force developed criteria for tracking the human decline and determined a number that, if passed, would trigger an intervention. One thing already known, they had plenty of genetic material to work with. Innumerable fertile embryos existed in cryogenic facilities already.

  They continued with their work in saving threatened animals, and they counted humans. The number requiring them to intervene approached.

  §

  Grief filled Emmett’s days. He had promised Chloe that he would stay in the cabin until the supplies ran out.

  Although his first impulse had been to charge to Chloe’s aid, he understood that there was nothing to do, and the realities had been drilled into all of them so that when the time came, he was able to overcome his impulse. He had matured greatly over the last six months.