ALIEN APOCALYPSE
The Complete Series
THE CULLING (Part I)
THE ROYALS (Part II)
THE NEW ORDER (Part III)
THE REBELLION (Part IV)
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2015 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art by Damonza
3D cover design by White Sun Press
Ebook Edition, License Notes
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SYNOPSIS
THE ALIEN APOCALYPSE SERIES is a dystopian new adult romance about a tough girl named Jet Tetsuo who grew up on Earth following an alien invasion. Forced into living among her conquerors, she must learn to navigate a treacherous world full of enemies who pose as friends, even as she becomes their most famous fighter in the Rings, their modern day version of the coliseum where she must fight just to survive.
THE CULLING
Alien Apocalypse Part I
Dedicated to April Aasheim
...writing buddy and
ninja extraordinaire
THE CULLING
Jet slammed her back against the wall of the ruined warehouse, panting. Crouching down by the moldy cement bricks, she fought to make her breathing silent. Her sword dug into her spine in the middle of her back, but she barely felt it.
Panic filled her, making her sweat even in the early morning air.
She was too late. Surely, they’d seen her.
They always said it happened this way. The older adults had been warning her for years about this kind of thing, warning all of them. It never happened when you were looking for trouble. It happened when you were going about your regular business of living, just a few seconds of letting your guard down...a few seconds of inattention...that was all it took.
Being in the wrong place at the wrong time when your mind was wandering, that was the real recipe for death. For being disappeared without warning.
Jet hadn’t even heard the cullers when their engines glided overhead. Not until they’d already gotten a lock on her bio-reading and slid lower in the sky for a closer look.
She’d been lost in her thoughts, thinking about what she had that she might be able to barter with Everest to get some fresh eggs. She’d brought a few shirts her mother made, nearly brand new, and she had some fish, some apples from the orchard, even some plums that weren’t too moldy from the never-ending rains. Everest wasn’t often tempted by fish, but the fruit might work, she’d been thinking, if he was in the mood.
Like as not, he’d want something from her she wasn’t willing to give...one of her knives, maybe. Sword-fighting lessons.
Or he might even try for something more personal, since she’d come alone.
It had been stupid to come alone, but that was one of those thoughts it was easy to torture yourself with in retrospect, too.
Jet had been thinking about her little brother, Biggs, in between her more practical thoughts about trading and bringing back some real protein for a change. She’d noticed Biggs hanging around the docks a lot lately. It might be innocent enough, but the fumes down there, especially this time of year, were bad enough that she couldn’t help but be suspicious.
She’d heard talk about meetings happening at the docks lately...secret ones, as well as the more open, recruiting kind. She hoped like hell that Biggs wasn’t dumb enough to get sucked into the rhetoric of the rebels, but she feared the worst.
She’d seen that look in his eyes before. It had gotten more intense lately.
Anyway, Jet knew how obsessive he could be, how single-minded. She’d noticed him reading more, and a lot of the book covers were new, and didn’t come from the library they shared with their longhouse families.
He did his best to hide it from her, but she’d also seen him practicing more with the bow, and even once with one of her old, wooden, practice swords. He was only thirteen, but she knew they recruited a lot younger than that, these days. The rebels had been coming by the camps more often, too, trying to recruit younger and younger, likely because they’d run out of full-blown adults willing to become cannon fodder fighting the Nirreth.
Jet even understood.
It was the same reason she practiced with her sword, day in and day out, even when she had no reason to use it. Nothing was worse than sitting around, waiting to be picked off like sheep. The rebels talked a good talk, about honor and sacrifice and standing up for the race. They seemed like an alternative at times, even to her.
But she’d buried too many in their settlement to be all that convinced.
Anyway, the more cynical side of her pointed out that a lot of those rebels were smugglers. She’d heard tell that even Richter had been seen trading with the Nirreth, and supposedly he had more rancor for the invaders than most. All of the smugglers and bandits were known to cut corners, though...especially when it came to dealing with the Nirreth and their ‘watch’ squads. Who knew if those same rebellion leaders were selling some of the local kids to the cullers, to get the authorities to look the other way?
All of this had been going through Jet’s mind as she walked.
She’d thought about how she might talk to Biggs about it, or at least get him to visit the crumbling lighthouse near the sound, where old Chiyeko lived. Chiyeko might get him to see reason. Biggs always got along well with the old woman, better than Jet did, truthfully. He might even listen, if Chiyeko told him to leave the rebels alone.
Jet was lost in half-baked thoughts around this, as well as a made-up argument with Biggs about the rebels, when she felt the wind of the culler’s hovercraft.
A warm, hot wind. It had a distinctive smell, like the smell that followed lightning after it struck the earth. Jet felt that whisper of wind and it seemed to crawl down her spine like a living thing. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream, bringing bile to her throat.
After a split-second of paralysis...she ran.
She sprinted straight for the nearest cover, a narrow alley off the main street where she’d been walking. She’d kept under the eaves of the buildings and out of the center of the road, of course, but that alone wasn’t enough. It was never enough to stay roughly out of sight...not when one traveled on a road wide enough for the culler hovercrafts to patrol. Her mother drilled that into Jet since she first learned to walk.
She’d been watching her feet, instead of the skies like she should have. She’d been listening to her thoughts, not to the birds, or the wind, or the rustle of paper and dirt, or any change in direction in the shifting air of the street.
Otherwise, she would have seen, a hair’s breadth sooner, that the paper had begun to swirl and dance lightly from the hovercraft’s exhaust. She would have noticed the birds had grown silent. Jet did notice these things, but that small gap in her awareness was enough to make the difference between ‘just soon enough’ and ‘too late.’
It was enough for her to feel the wind of the hovercraft on the back of her neck.
Jet sprinted to cover deep in the shadows of the alley.
Once fully in the dark, she waited.
She crouched there, unwilling to risk moving until she could see the ship. Fighting to keep even her breath silent, she stayed where she was, peering
up at the sky to try and determine if the glider’s pilots had, indeed, spotted her. Movement without cause was risky. She’d learned that young, too. Most people who got caught did so because they panicked and couldn’t stop running. Running from the Nirreth was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
If they hadn’t seen her, they might just pass by.
If they hadn’t seen her, running would only be more likely to get her noticed.
If they had seen her, running wouldn’t save her. Once she’d done that, they would give chase no matter if they were trawling for skags or not. It was hardwired into the Nirreth’s instincts to chase anything that ran.
Humans who ran got culled.
These rules had been hammered into Jet’s brain so frequently and so vehemently that to think them was like breathing. They whispered through her mind like a mantra, more of a prayer than even a reminder...a reassurance that if she followed the rules, she just might get out of this alive.
Then she saw the searchlight flicker to life.
Jet held her breath, watching it as a mouse watches the stalk of a cat from where it crouches in a hole. The shockingly bright beam seemed to follow a random path at first, rolling over the ground near where Jet had been walking. It paused in that general vicinity briefly, maybe to try and scare her, to flush her out. Jet exhaled only when the swath of white light moved on, glancing over nearby buildings and a metal drain cover before it searched the other side of the street with equal care, lingering under the eaves.
Then the sharp beam flickered directly towards her. It roamed the nearby walls, then abruptly fell to almost exactly where Jet stood, even as she inched away from the range of its glow.
Jet cursed.
They’d seen her. They were toying with her...looking at her with the heat sensors most likely. They’d been trying to get her to run by skirting near to her, but they’d known where she was all along. Which meant they were probably hunting, looking to bring someone in.
Either way, she had no choice, not once they had her in their searchlights.
Leaping to her feet, she ran, full out, down the alley.
She nearly slid on the slick ground, even with her heavy boots. Jerking herself upright, she forced her mind back on the terrain, picking out the driest parts of the stone to lay down her feet. The paving stones were slick from the monsoon rains. Moss covered the hard slate, along with just enough water that when she hit a patch, it was like trying to run on ice. She tried desperately to remember where the nearest manhole opening into the sewers lived, but the only ones she could remember were too far away, and in the opposite direction.
She was outside her normal stomping grounds, deep in the ruins of downtown Vancouver. She should have mapped the route to Everest’s new place with more care...or taken a longer stretch of the underground passage, even with the rats, the toxic fumes and the rot of the monsoon. She should have had Anaze highlight a few more safe zones.
As it was, all she could do was head for the narrowest streets and nooks and alleys she could find, and hope she lost the hovercraft before it could trap her somewhere in the open. So when Jet reached the end of that first alley, she sprinted across the main street as fast as her legs would carry her, aiming for another fissure between buildings on the other side.
She did that a few more times, trying to zig-zag as much as possible, but not when it meant spending more time on any street wide enough for the hovercraft to get over her.
Despite the water running everywhere, bleeding through brick and cement walls, the day was already heating up under the heavy cover of low-hanging clouds. Jet left the longhouse while it was still dark, but now the sun was warming the eastern side of the city, heating up the air and water even through the thick cloud cover directly overhead.
Within seconds of first breaking into a full sprint, Jet’s clothes were drenched with sweat. Her nylon pants clung to her skin like an oily paste.
Her breathing got thicker, too.
She ran harder, trying to ignore the increased pounding in her chest, wishing she’d drank more water as she’d been walking down the road. Jet was in the habit of conserving there, too, only drinking what she thought she absolutely needed and no more. Clean water was hard to come by these days, even when they had fuel. With all the bacteria and other problems with anything they left sitting for more than a few hours, the water didn’t stay fresh for very long, even when they boiled it. The hotter it got, the worse their problems were, until even drinking it an hour or so after boiling left room for doubt.
These days, they boiled every liter of water they used, even for washing clothes, cleaning eating and sleeping areas...even watering plants. Pretty much for everything except maybe cleaning the latrines. They boiled water more frequently for anything to drink, especially during the monsoon, when all the water tables rose high enough to mix with the contamination in the ground soil and even run off from the sewage.
Since the Nirreth had come, the weather seemed to get worse.
Her mother told her that monsoons didn’t happen in Canada at all when she was a child. She said it was something that used to happen only in faraway, exotic places, like Thailand and Sri Lanka and Laos. The only monsoons her mother ever heard of happening in North America before occurred in the deserts of the Southwest, and those were just thunder storms...nothing like the mold-soaked madness that started once the rain came day after day, heavy enough that an umbrella was useless, heavy enough and hard enough to wear away rock and soil and asphalt and make even the concrete sprout ferns. By the end of the three to five month season every summer, they all felt like they lived in a massive petri dish.
They lost people every year too, from the sickness that inevitably swept through the longhouses, each strain more deadly than the last.
Every year, it was hotter, too, it seemed.
But even the ruin of their planet didn’t keep them safe. The Nirreth liked it hot, so the increasing temperature only brought more of them.
It was enough to make the remaining humans wonder if the Nirreth were engineering the atmosphere to be more like that of their home planet. They now had processors everywhere, even this far north, where it was borderline too cool for their thick skins. The Nirreth claimed to be ‘fixing’ the Earth’s atmosphere, of course, from the damage done to it by humans over the years, but Jet hadn’t seen anything that would make her actually believe that.
The reality was, they could be doing anything to their world, really.
No humans she knew even understood Nirreth technology, so all the skags had to go on were the Nirreth’s lies and the stories told by rebels and bandits.
No one seemed to know the truth of what was really happening.
Or if they did, they weren’t talking.
Either way, it really did seem that the heat crawled inexorably up the map. That had been happening before the Nirreth too, according to her mother...but it seemed to happen faster every year. The last of the summer ice had gone nearly twenty years earlier from southern Canada and the northern United States. Now ice barely formed at all, even in the deepest throes of winter, even for a few weeks, as far north as Alaska and northern Canada.
Those weeks seemed to grow shorter, too.
The rebels claimed, of course, that the Nirreth were trying to cook them out, to kill off the last of the skags by making it too hot for any humans to live outside the shelter of the Nirreth cities. Jet didn’t know why they’d go to so much trouble though. If they really wanted the skags gone, they could probably bomb them to oblivion in a matter of weeks.
Anyway, sometimes it seemed like the rebels knew a little too much about those mythical Nirreth cities.
While Jet ran, she wasn’t thinking about any of this, though.
Instead she thought about how long she’d have these narrow alleyways to duck into before she ran into a warehouse district, a freeway, a rotted city park, one of the business areas, or the lapping water of the sound or one of the lakes. She thought about how long
she could keep up this pace before her legs or her lungs gave out. She thought about how much time she would have before they landed the hovercraft and came after her, if she stopped in one of the smaller alleys and looked for an entrance to the underground.
While Jet ran, it was difficult to listen for the culler.
With its nearly-silent engines, the ship could be hovering just out of her peripheral vision, nets hanging over her while the Nirreth grinned from the hatch. She couldn’t hear anything but her own breath, the slap of her rubber-soled boots on the wet stone, the jostle of her pack and the curved sword against her back, the flap of the long coat she wore. She’d tied her long, black hair in a knot at the base of her neck when she left the longhouse that morning, but now found herself wishing she’d tied it with leather instead, as the knot slowly began to unravel.
Given all of this, Jet had no idea how close the craft was to her now.
She wasn’t about to slow down enough to look, though.
If they really were using heat-sensing to locate skags, then they were likely trying to drive her to open ground where they could more easily pick her up with their nets.
She had to get off the road, and now.
Thinking this, Jet forced her legs faster, wishing she’d left the backpack with her barter materials and tools on the ground back in that alley. Everything but the sword, she could afford to lose and replace. She had those few seconds of breathing time; she could have come back for it later, maybe, if someone didn’t happen along and take it.
Or she could have just let it go. It was just stuff.
The sword was different. Swords were difficult to come by. Anyway, her sword was different. It was a part of her...like an extension of her hand and arm. The old swordsmith who made it, Mishio, had died in the monsoon the year before, from complications around breathing too much mold and having bronchitis and asthma and a bunch of other things.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 1