Alan Dale - Death Nation's Army 01

by Dna Code Flesh

  The superior officer looked both over, somberly nodded, and gestured toward the chopper.

  “Let’s not make it a habit,” he said. “Time to get.”

  “Where’s major London?” The shorter one asked after moments looking around behind the major standing before them.

  The superior officer could only look down and shake his head, telling them the story.

  “Survivors?” the taller one guessed.

  Kind of…

  “Yes, corporal.”

  Both grunts muttered grievances about their loss for a moment and the major let the news sink in. They each asked if the major himself was wounded and he told them he was fine, having survived the engagement.

  That’s understating what this all was.

  “Let’s get,” he motioned toward the bird after a few moments.

  All three men made their way into the NWO helicopter and buckled in. The shorter man, took the pilot’s seat, got the bird’s engine fired up and went through the regiment of making sure they got off the ground and out without a hitch.

  The major sat beside him and the third man in the surviving ranks sat behind them both. The taller of the two corporals kept his eyes on his team leader for just a moment, intently watching the man, concern on his face evident.

  “Major…”

  No response as the major stared straight ahead.

  “Major Alexi?”

  Shad Alexi, major in the army of the New World Order, snapped to at the sound of his name and turns his head slightly left to hear the subordinate out.

  “Yes, corporal?”

  “Are you okay, sir?”

  Major Shad Alexi, soldier, fighter, survivor, man, brother and once someone’s son, stared straight ahead wondering how to answer a question he would have to fail to address truthfully.

  Bridjett…you are still alive…

  Bridjett, my sister, my hero…

  Now what?

  “Same shit, different day, corporal,” Shad finally told him. “Just same shit.”

  Now what’s a liar to do?

  I had my shot and didn’t take it. Almost six full years later and I see that traitor. The man who turned his back on his family. Turned his back on mom, me…

  Dad.

  Bridjett had seen the living ghost of Shad Alexi. Living in flesh and blood and a ghost of a memory of the only person she never hated until the war began and the undead came knocking.

  Now she hated him more than anyone.

  Or did she?

  He would never have stopped me. His gun was set. Shad could have mowed me down or at least had me taken in.

  Instead Shad put a dozen bullets into the body of a fellow NWO pig. A pig just like her brother.

  So there is that.

  Maybe, just maybe, something could be made of it. Maybe, there was still hope to make things right.

  I could have put him down. I could have killed him and he would have let me. He was owed. Dad would have understood.

  Or had Bridjett and Shad’s father, his image, his memory, kept her from killing her best friend for most of her life?

  That had to be it…

  Things had just gotten more interesting.

  For better or worse? That was the question she needed an answer to. For five years she wondered if Shad was alive. He is. Bridjett wondered if he stayed with the NWO. He had.

  She wondered if she could kill him if she saw him.

  As of now, she couldn’t.

  Now fucking what?

  “Hey guys,” it was Corrine.

  “Yeah?” Brick answered for the rest of the others.

  “The scrats…they are still doing it, you know.” It was a rhetorical question. The beginning to a conversation no one in the DNA ever wanted to be a part of it or admit to the subject matter.

  “I saw that back there,” Cisco said. “A couple of them definitely weren’t shambling about.”

  “Yeah, almost got tore up, trying to save this little sweetheart,” Corrine looked down at their new guest and rubbed her head gently.

  “Dr. Amy says it may be the juice,” Cisco said, looking into the rearview mirror at Bridjett said.

  “Yeah, well I didn’t say anything,” Bridjett offered even if it was a bit too quick.

  Cisco eyed her suspiciously for a moment and appeared to shake something out of his head. Maybe he thought of pushing it further but changed his mind.

  Good boy. Especially if you ever want to get laid again.

  “Point is…” Corrine began. “I don’t feel comfortable seeing a fast one here, a slow one there, an even faster one there. Their reflexes vary in terms of proficiency. It’s….”

  “Creepy? Scary?” Cisco guessed.

  “Unnerving,” Bridjett said, still looking out the window and the other three went still. Unnerving. Exactly. Their biggest advantage of predicting scrat behavior was slowly turning over into a battle zone of needing to scout the individual undead monsters and their abilities.

  Since when did this become a game of basketball, Bridjett scoffed and paid no mind as the others looked at her for a moment, gauging her before giving up as she refused to acknowledge any of them.

  “I just hope the Doc has some answers soon,” Cisco said.

  “It’s the fucking juice,” Brick snorted, shaking his head.

  The juice. Evolving scrat behavior. Top that off, an alive, NWO-officer brother still alive. Everything happens for a reason.

  It was just a matter of trying to figure out what the reason was.

  Especially, since she still had no answers for why this all happened in the first place.

  Well at least not the ones to those which made her wish her brother dead for over five years to find out maybe after all, she didn’t.

  That could change…

  Bridjett listened and could only hear the steady hum of their vehicle cruising along the barren highways of Illinois as her team remained silent. She could feel the little girl’s head resting on her arm, apparently sleeping.

  It took a while but eventually Bridjett’s eyes slowly closed and she would capture an hour of fitful sleep.

  Her nightmares were always the same…

  II. Why We Are?

  “We were so important. Your ideas so advanced. Advanced. Advanced. You underestimated your own advancement. Gave yourself so much credit. Too much credit. Forgetting your history of biting off more than you can chew. Well we kept chewing. Chewing. Chewing. Advancement? You have no idea.

  Silly little people…”

  Starting six years earlier

  Bridjett and Shad Alexi came from one of the last vestiges of the middle class in America. The nation had been taxed, economically dumped, and rebooted so many different times during the first part of the 21 century that it slowly became a war of the haves’ one percent of the population and the other 99 percent of the world’s eventual dead weight. People were either starving, drinking to excess, getting high to escape, committing crimes against one another, or simply dying in the streets from the flu since insurance became a non-existent teammate in the battle against growing old.

  It happened too subtly for the Alexis and their patriarch Norman. The siblings’ father used to be a police officer for the Oak Lawn law enforcement agency. He saw it all in his first 22 years on the job and was moving closer to retirement when he began to see the ‘signs.’ Many didn’t accept it, but rumors began to circulate that the grand plan to hatch the NWO occurred during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others were even less accepting while these allegiances between the elite power brokers of most of the world’s biggest players – the United States, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Germany, China, Argentina, Mexico, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and France – were being interwoven, created, mapped out, and plotted, the advent of the World Wide Web made this task even easier. Norman would hear the talk during the second Gulf War, when his kids were both attending middle school, and the weirdness of so many aspects of the
conflict didn’t add up.

  Why attack a region with plenty of oil and zero connections to the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001? Why would gas prices continue to go upward while fuel companies were raking in billions of dollars? Why, when all this was happening, did the United States’ insurance companies seem to universally begin to pull the plug on almost anyone and everyone in order to either fleece or basically murder the ill? Why would some of the biggest financial institutions receive major bailout money in 2008 to help them from caving In, but those who granted those the lifeline would allow those failing companies to continue to spend their new monies on anything but fixing the problem? The rich kept getting richer and smaller in number, while the borderline wealthy took their fair share of hits and the middle class disappeared and the poor became even more desperate. Norman used to say the government could get away with it because of the grand conspiracy in the educational field. Ever since corporal punishment was eliminated from schools in the 70s, violence between the walls of academia increased hundreds of percent’s. He would lament when Bridjett and Shad came home from school how the educational system was a daycare center on steroids and a brainwashing center to boot.

  “Jean,” he would tell their mother. “They care more about the kids’ feelings than the simple facts that these kids aren’t learning a damn thing!” Their father would thunder, exasperated as he would read Shad’s essays that got an A and wonder, “how the Hell did you get an A on this? I mean, sure it’s fine, but an A? You are smarter than this and besides there are a ton of grammatical mistakes.”

  Shad would simply take his father’s words as ways to keep him motivated. He knew his father believed in him and wanted his son to hold higher expectations. But, what is a father to do when he only sees his kid a tenth of the time that the school system entrusted to educate does? What happens when those hard working parents have to enlist the services of an institution that does not have your child’s best interests at heart?

  “All they have done is given kids all these damned rights to cry and get top grades,” Norman would yell the more he drank. “You take away their natural ability to use critical thinking skills, rise against adversity, fight for what’s right, etc. etc. When these damn kids go through their most important years simply getting ribbons and medals for showing up and better grades because they cry, when do they learn how to rise to the challenge when the chips are down?”

  Shad always battled Norman for what he felt he deserved. But, Norman thought it was his son losing the tug of war between right and wrong as the corrupt school system - a by-product of the government’s grand plan to de-ball its future greatest challengers – was winning Shad’s affection. Shad never had to work hard to make a team or get good grades. He knew how to use his big brown eyes and find a way to make the teachers and coaches melt and usually give up the fight to give the kid what he wanted. Shad liked that a bunch of strangers made life easier for him while his father, a man he indeed loved, found a way to always make his life miserable.

  So was it really such a hard choice?

  Bridjett, on the other hand, was her father’s daughter. She never relied on her natural beauty – a mix of her mother’s strong good looks and physique fused with Norman’s darker skin and deep, bright, eyes – and was determined to do the right thing by executing it the right way. She was her father’s daughter and she hung on her dad’s every word.

  The little girl would hear her father’s gripes almost daily. She would sit on the couch next to him, reading her Harry Potter books while Norman grumbled as he read the evening newspaper. As she got older, she would study in the kitchen and could still hear her father’s dismay float over to her as he continued to torture himself in his favorite lounge chair, reading the God damned newspaper.

  The two Alexi offspring got older and when both attended Richards High School, Shad was the big, stud, athlete everyone adored, while Bridjett became the ‘hottest girl in school who didn’t know it.’ Every one of her brothers’ football or basketball buddies would make moves on her while she would either throw insults, spit, or at times, kick one of the barbarians in the balls.

  Her boy of choice was always the hard working, educated kid. She knew, deep down, she was blessed with a body of a woman ten years her senior. Bridjett knew which of her teachers would have gone to prison just for one chance to have her stay after class for anything other than academic pursuits. It didn’t matter. She was a believer in Charles Darwin and held no doubt one day the survival of the fittest would come into play tenfold and she planned to surround herself with the elite to survive.

  As Norman’s career wound down, he continued to see more of the destructive nature of the society he lived in. He called the advance of reality television shows as the government teaming with Hollywood to create more stimuli for people to enjoy watching the demise and embarrassment of other people. He called shows like Jackass a perfect example of this need to watch the failure of others and torture porn movies like Hostel and Saw, as more sad reasons to fear the day the people of America would come under assault from another country or worse, its own government.

  “We lack community, we lack togetherness,” Norman would be even drunker now. “Our military is weaker than ever before. Those kids fighting for us? Shit, they’ve come out of the same educational system that has destroyed our kids for decades. I’d put my money on any World War I unit in hand-to-hand against any of those camouflage-dressed pussies we throw out there today.”

  Norman would rail against a socialist educational system – “standardized testing, sounds like socialism to me” – while Jean would knit or bake trying not to fail to support her husband while also not standing against him. Jean was the family’s backbone and always loved and believed in her husband, even if she felt he was wasting his valuable time on earth trying to fight a fight bigger than him.

  “But somebody has to, Jeanie.” He would tell her before kissing her good night on more than one occasion.

  When Shad and Bridjett left home, hoping to excel in their respective universities – Shad attended classes at Northwestern until the world turned upside down – when Norman’s rants began to bear fruit. Bridjett moved into a little place with one of her high school girlfriends and took classes at Morton Community College and started her seminal career as a public servant working at one of the trillion Starbucks within the Chicago city limits.

  Insurance companies declared bankruptcy on a national scale and suddenly only persons working in a higher tax bracket would receive discounted rates to stay alive in their battles against diabetes, arthritis, gout, and even worse ailments. One had to pay in full just to get basic prescriptions, prescriptions that would cost sometimes hundreds of dollars for company executives and janitors alike.

  The individual’s civil rights became pinched almost daily. Freedom of speech was also under attack. People were losing their jobs for not agreeing with a religion, sexual preference, movie or music choices, or who they thought was the best third baseman of all time. What was once considered America’s greatest right was slowly becoming free only if it didn’t cost the other person any quantified negative reaction.

  Or as Norman liked to say, “if they rolled out of bed one day and decided to become a pussy.”

  More and more people were being told to be tolerant of persons they preferred not to associate with. Soon, those who possessed issues against other races or gays were fined and sometimes even imprisoned. Everyone knew if you told people how to feel and what to like, even adults would regress and act like children and do or like just the opposite.

  Later, when a large group of parents across the country started noticing their kids almost rehearsing answers to questions, in almost identical patterns of cadence, intensity, and showing the same lack of depth, they became concerned and formed a march on Washington. Three days later, all of those millions of parents found out they would lose their children to the foster care system and eventually would be arrested for treason.
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  Curfews slowly grew across the country as more and more violence took to the streets. Now it wasn’t just black-on-black, black-on-white, white-on-white, straight-on-gay. It was the haves-on-have nots. The bottom rung of the totem pole began to find itself more aggrieved than usual and began to fight back.

  It wasn’t just in the United States either. It was everywhere.

  The uprisings in the Middle East – Egypt, Syria, and Libya back in 2011 – would start a worldwide trend to fight back against the very questionable practices of their elite infrastructures.

  Governments were led by people who rose by virtue of birthright rather than having earned it. Over 90 percent of the American government was littered with men and women who grew up in households where the medium income was over $95,000 a year. A bunch of silver spoon kids telling the day-to-day, check-to-check grinders, how to survive and work hard.

  “Are you fucking kidding me,” Norman would scream before he would pass out drunk.

  Norman’s pension was still intact but the social security system crashed in the 2020s so he was out of luck to double up his fortune.

  All that time, the new, growing aristocracy – the New World Order – began to rise behind those touched men and women around the world who slowly got less and less nervous about putting the world’s populace behind the eight ball.

  They held their militaries, their monies, their health, and thus, all the power.

  Eventually, the building of ten new worlds begun, at first quietly, and later with zest when it was obvious it was too late for anyone to do anything.

  Also, the NWO started its new practice with the hope of ‘changing the world,’ and helping those without insurance to find a way to overcome death and disease:

  By testing on death row inmates, worldwide.

  The announcement came at the same time a new ‘financial’ establishment, or aristocracy in the eyes of most, was made official. The NWO would work to create a worldwide network of communication they said would bolster a world infrastructure where no one – not the poor in Africa, nor the indigent in Papua New Guinea – would be off the world’s radar. These brave, creative, and wealthy souls would unify the entire globe as one people, one constituency and no one would go below the people’s radar. No one would be forgotten.