“This changes everything, Mr. President. Everything.”
Birdwell and everyone else in the room digested this silently.
“We can’t control it.” Said POTUS.
“No, sir.”
“We can’t confiscate it? Monopolize it?” He said.
“It’s too late for that,” said Birdwell. “The cat is out of the bag. There’s no patent enforcement any more anyway.”
“Damn, I wish I still had control of my corporations! We have the protectees still. Can we set the camps to manufacturing it? “
Birdwell winced. “We could. Communication is spotty and slow, but the manufacture is absurdly simple. The main problem is that we won't have the protectees much longer. The camps we are in touch with, those east of the Rocky Mountains, are mostly projected to run out of food in approximately mid-February this year. We can stretch the supplies, perhaps until April, but famine conditions will prevail after that.”
“They can still work if they're hungry.” The big man waved a hand and made a dismissive moue. “At least we’ll be protecting them and giving them a place to live!”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Birdwell knew at that moment that the one-time leader of the Free World was too fixed in his thinking to grasp the reality of change, accelerating as it was, out of control, in fractal patterns. He was clinging to the mental model of power which he’d clawed and kicked his way to the top of. Birdwell had studied military history. He knew he needed to make an immediate decision between supervising a gulag spiraling into death, sickness, and violence, or striking out on his own. He eyed the radio, still parroting its message, and the light, still glowing softly on the countertop.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he once again saw the string of lights on the hillside, stretching off like signal fires along the frontier of empire, into the wilds of the future.
THE END
Dear Reader:
Thank you for making the choice to purchase this box set. I know you’re probably eager to learn what happens in the second book, but if I could trouble you for just a few minutes to pop over to the book’s Amazon page and leave a review, I would be much obliged.
—PDW
Science Fiction— Caution: contains real science.
The boundaries between science fiction and fantasy have blurred and merged over recent decades, but the recent success of stories like Andy Weir’s The Martian and Dennis Taylor’s Bobiverse books show that there is a persistent appetite for science fiction which is, well, science-y. Everything that happens during the Eupocalypse is based on real events and real technologies, which are being used right now, this very moment, all over the world. Below, in completely random order, are links to articles about some of them:
Operation Jupiter:
https://www.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2008_Review.pdf
General survey of OHCBs in oil pollution cleanup:
http://hzi.openrepository.com/hzi/bitstream/10033/19793/1/Yakimov%2520et%2520al_final.pdf
Non-scientific article about OHCBs in Deepwater Horizon spill:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/08/study-oil-eating-bacteria-mitigated-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill
Metabolism of OHCBs in Deepwater Horizon:
https://marine.rutgers.edu/dmcs/ms606/2010_fall/Valentine%20et%20al%20Science%20Express%202010.pdf
Shewanella-based microbial fuel cells:
https://vdocuments.site/a-mediator-less-microbial-fuel-cell-using-a-metal-reducing-bacterium-shewanella.html , and
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.25624/abstract;jsessionid=52415C268FC9BB3185227E679964E944.f01t03
Microbial fuel cells currently in use by the US Navy:
https://www.nrl.navy.mil/techtransfer/available-technologies/energy/benthic-fuel-cell
Background on patenting OHCBs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananda_Mohan_Chakrabarty
OHCBs at oil-spill site in Bemidji, Minnesota:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/06/03/bemidji-oil-spill-site-research
Background on deep-water oil drilling in the Macondo oil range:
https://www.scribd.com/document/59744347/C21462-201-CCR-Ch-3-Background-on-the-Macondo-Well
p. putida infections in humans:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20809240 , and
http://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(08)00021-2/pdf
Genetically-engineered p. putida used in industrial manufacturing:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221847539_Industrial_biotechnology_of_Pseudomonas_putida_and_related_species
Bacterial populations on human hands:
http://jwbrown.mbio.ncsu.edu/MJC/JWB_paper.pdf
Antonio Meucci inventing the telephone:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews
A ton of research about goldenseal:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=hydrastis+canadensis
Watch It Burn
Peri Dwyer Worrell
Copyright© 2018 Peri Dwyer Worrell
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews. For information, please contact the author.
This book is dedicated to those men and women who champion non-aggression, self-ownership, self-determination, and self-governance all over the world.
Table of Contents
I.Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
II.When Life Gives you Lemonns…
III.Bull in a China Shop
IV.Salt of the Earth
V.Security blanket
VI.Prey Drive
VII.Get the Paper, Hon
VIII.Visitor From Beyond
IX.Mano a Mano
X.Setting fruit
XI.Girl Scouts
XII.Shanghaied
XIII.Violation Hatching
XIV.Nice to Meet You, Too
XV.Your Amazon Order Has Arrived
XVI.Well, Give ‘Em the Bird
XVII.Church Ladies
XVIII.Live By, Die By
XIX.Nipped
XX.You Can Go Home Again
XXI.Atom Smashing
XXII.Sorority
XXIII.It’s an Ill Wind
XXIV.General Hospital
XXV.Startup
XXVI.Prior Constraint
XXVII.Auld Lang Syne
XXVIII.Not Her Too.
XXIX.For the Common Good
XXX.A Modest Proposal
XXXI.Nun of That, Now
XXXII.Your Hero and Mine
XXXIII.Do as I Say, Not as I Do…
XXXIV.Circle Back and Land
XXXV.I’m Such a Wreck!
XXXVI.Enclave
XXXVII.Cold War
XXXVIII.If You Build It…
XXXIX.Might as Well Be Spring
XL.Learn or Repeat
XLI.Out of the Wild
XLII.Mama’s Favorites
XLIII.Rah!
XLIV.Seek the Flock, Find the Wolf
XLV.Ink By the Barrel
XLVI.Widow’s Fury
XLVII.Nice Press You Got There…
XLVIII.Star Light, Star Bright
XLIX.Handoff
L.Join US
LI.Hello, Goodbye
LII.Don’t Back Down!
Watch It Burn
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
Dr. DD Davis needed to make it to the top of the Hattiesburg water tower. The pumps at the top of the tank that filled it no longer functioned, of course. The PVC pipes that fed into the city water supply had disintegrated under the onslaught of the bacterial epidemic known as machine sickness. However, the metal rungs and rivets of the ladders and the steel expansion-mesh of the platforms were still in great s
hape, which made it a superb vantage point.
Survival rations on her travels had made her gaunt, and though she was weaker, her lesser weight made the straight-vertical climb less arduous. She made it to the top, scarcely panting, and scanned the horizon: to the west, the direction she’d come, lay the little lake and the cottages where she’d spent the night as a guest. Also west, the Interstate—now all but useless for travel, liquefied to its gravel base and flooded in spots where its drainage system had imploded. Beyond that, way out of sight, ran the mighty Mississippi herself.
DD had made her way from Texarkana to the Mississippi with little trouble. Local people weren’t so many generations gone from the rural Scots-Irish and African-American traditions of hospitality to travelers. All she needed was a place to pitch a primitive tent by her alcohol-fueled ATV. Not that she often had to settle for that. She’d stayed in barns, sheds, and people’s homes. There had been one spot of ugliness where she’d been surrounded by a gang of unsavory men who seemed like they might be thinking about making gruesome sport of her. She’d kept her cool while talking to them, resting her hand lightly on the grip of her pistol, until they decided nervously to look for easier prey. She had her rifle slung across her back now, and had slid her holster around to just above her tailbone so she could climb.
To the east, the sun had just risen over the small town. There were athletic fields in the brownish-grey of winter. The town looked almost normal from this height. Only the mottled color of the paved streets and roads showed the deterioration caused by the voracious pseudoalkanivorax davisii. It had gobbled up everything made of petroleum, spreading throughout the world like the common cold, travelling from machine to machine along pipes, wires and roads.
She imagined the world unchanged and felt a familiar stab of guilt, like the edge of a broken tooth. If you looked at an area for minute or so, you’d notice that the traffic lights were dark and the cars weren’t moving, disabled and abandoned by their drivers in the first panicky days of the contagion.
No people were visible from here. The neighborhoods of student apartments and middle-class houses were vacant now; those who’d survived mostly moved into the country, where food grew and water flowed. Those who stayed in the towns had clustered in developments with a lake in the middle, like the Cottages, or a pool that could be used as a reservoir. There are a number of ways of storing and purifying rainwater runoff; those who learned them, survived.
Those who didn’t were to be found in settlements like plague villages in Europe centuries ago: people dead in their beds, dead in the streets, dead babies in the arms of dead mothers; fresh graves next to half-dug graves, where the dying had outstripped the survivors’ ability to deal with the dead. Even months later, the stench was overwhelming. A feral yaller dog carrying a human femur in its mouth, had followed DD as she made her way through of one of these neighborhoods.
DD shook her head to rattle the memory loose and turned to the south. There, she saw what she had dreaded—what had brought her towards the Gulf to begin with. Since she’d fled the Gulf of Mexico (leaving the consequences of her mistakes behind), she had wondered what the machine sickness would do to the steely indigo waters and the life-forms within it; from krill on up the food chain to dolphins and manatees.
Tim–traitor!–had said the Gulf was boiling, and she hadn’t believed it until now. But now she saw a cloud to the south. DD had lived in this region long enough to know what winter clouds looked like: a dreary, high blanket on overcast days and little fluffy cotton balls on bright, cool sunny days. But these clouds were nothing she had seen before. They looked like upside-down thunderheads, a crazy funhouse-mirror image of those daily harbingers of Summer’s steaming deluges.
Boiling. Boiling! What have I done?
She buried her forehead in her palm. She knew it wasn’t strictly her fault: her assistant Tim (Curse him forever!) had pretty clearly substituted the wrong bacteria for the cultures she’d brought to Texas. He had done it as part of an elaborate scheme to cover his embezzlement (And what do the Chinese have to do with it? All those Sinopec transactions? I still don’t know). So instead of guilt, she felt just a deep regret that she had trusted Tim.
DD sat down criss-cross-apple-sauce, as her kindergarten teacher used to call the position. She sat on the catwalk to think. A kind group of people who had taken her in for the night, two families sharing an old farmhouse on a rise next to a creek, had warned her against going any further west along the coast than Gulfport. The Duboses and the Armstrongs had attended church together before the machine sickness hit. Two women and their husbands and assorted kids, stepkids, and cousins mingled together; DD hadn’t stayed long enough to get straight who belonged to whom.
But Tamika Dubose had warned her, “Don’t go towards New Orleans. People have turned into animals there. Your life ain’t worth spit if you go that way.”
All the adults agreed. Wayne Armstrong shook his shaggy red head and added, “That’s an insult to animals. Satan is at work in the big cities. People eating the dead before they can rot. Gangs running amok. You don’t want anything to do with that! I see you’re armed, but my advice to you as a woman alone: save a bullet for yourself. Let us pray.”
The table of adults and children bowed their heads over a meal of sweet corn, pumpkin, beans, and stewed chicken.
Her stomach rumbled now as she remembered that meal. She’d been rationing herself, nibbling on a daily handful or two of the dried fruit and crackers, toasted oats, and nuts in her pack. Supplementing with crabapples, boiling up poke or borage or dandelion when she could build a fire—even so, she was running low. The Cottages had ducks and geese, and they had successfully grown corn over the summer. They had plenty of hominy and eggs, but when they killed the fowl, they gave the meat only to the children.
Yet somehow, the canny and shy dog from the lifeless village had been waiting for her, not visibly thinner, when she left their homestead. She’d called it with her hand out, and it had lowered its head, wagging its tail and sniffing the air, then disappeared into the bushes again. But DD could now see the dog chasing something up the alley.
Going closer to the Gulf, it will just be worse. She knew that she was at the point where the soil started turning from Delta riverbottom (not the best soil, but workable with compost and sand tilled in) to silty loam full of sand and salt. All nutrients instantly trickled away and the earth dried to dust overnight when the rain stopped.
People down there would live on fish and seaweed. But is the Gulf dead now? No one she’d met had been able to answer that question. That means that no fishermen escaping the Gulf have fled through here. Maybe it’s not that bad.
When Life Gives you Lemonns…
Before
LS3 Suzanne Garcia’s computer was on a folding table in the new concrete building. Her daily camo fatigues were getting tight in the stomach; soon, she’d have to upsize. She’d almost finished updating the database with scanned info on the last shipment of fresh ammo added to replace expired cases. All the colored columns were crosschecked and ready to be audited. The stale ammo was stacked somewhere on the docks, awaiting the next boat. It was time for her shift to end, and her stomach gurgled when she thought of hitting the mess hall. She had a huge appetite since the morning sickness had faded.
The corner of her mouth twitched ruefully. She’d hoped to have a real career in logistics here in the Navy, but a maternity shore billet would definitely side-track her progress up the enlisted ranks. Manuel wanted her to resign as soon as her tour ended and stay home; he was doing pretty good in his sales job, and said they could afford it.
But Suzanne wasn’t sure; her ambition might fade once she had the baby, or it might not. She’d friends for whom it had gone both ways, and some who turned even more ambitious, eager to give the child the kind of lifestyle they had been deprived of as kids. She took the nasty looks and whispered comments from her colleagues in stride. If she hadn’t known she could cope with sexist jerks, she
wouldn’t have signed up for the military! For now, all she cared about was her hunger.
Once she got to the mess hall, she grabbed a fiberglass tray and a napkin-wrapped plasticware bundle. The napkin was empty, so she grabbed a second one. She slid her tray along the metal rails and looked through the glass at the lunch offerings. The first napkin stuck to her hand, so she shook it off onto the floor.
The CS behind the steam trays reached out for a sectioned Styrofoam plate. “What’ll it be?” he asked.
The plate he picked up stuck to the one below it. He turned and started to push them apart with his plastic-gloved hands, but the plates were melted together. He dropped the two into the trash under the countertop and picked up a third plate, revealing that it had a three-inch hole in it. “What the Hell?” he said, then realized his plastic glove was also falling apart.
Just at that moment, a series of loud tones, followed by a voice, came over the loudspeakers, “General quarters. General quarters. This is not a drill, this is not a drill. General quarters, all hands to battle stations. This is not a drill.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 28