Origins (The Wasteland Chronicles, #2) (21 page)

Xenofall was coming.

K
yle West is a science fiction author living in Oklahoma City. He is currently working on
The Wasteland Chronicles
series, of which there will be seven installments. Books 2, 3, and 4 are already available. Find out immediately when his next book is released by signing up for
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kylewestwriter[at]gmail[dot]com

T
wo months later, and none of what I lived felt real. My dad would always be dead. Khloe would always be dead. Bunker 108, along with most every other Bunker, was offline and gone. The United States, along with the rest of the world’s governments, no longer existed except as an idea. In their wake were the new players – the Raiders, the gangs, and the empires fueled by slavery, bullets, and blood. In the end, they wouldn’t matter, either. After all, this world wasn’t ours anymore. This world belonged to
them
– the Xenos. Samuel and Ashton called them that.

When we returned to Earth, it wouldn’t be just survival this time. Our mission was to save a planet doomed to die. We needed to take what we’d learned from the Black Files and utilize it. The people of the Old World believed global warming, war, or famine would be our undoing. They were wrong. The Xenos pulled the plug before we ever could – and we were madly trying to plug it back in.

The break from action was nice for the first two weeks, but I was starting to get bored. I filled the time by working out. Samuel was training me in hand-to-hand combat, and Anna was training me in the katana. However, there was only so much I could learn before heading back. I feared not being ready in time.

The coming mission was the only thing I could focus on. In a weird way, it was an escape. Maybe saving the world was the delusion that kept me going. The four of us were caught in it, each in our separate ways and for our separate reasons. It had become our focus, our obsession. Everything else was on hold until our mission reached its conclusion, whatever that conclusion happened to be.

Samuel said Ragnarok was only the beginning. I had come to realize what that beginning actually entailed. Everything would become twisted by the Blights, preparing the way for the Xenos. No one knew when they were coming, or what they were like. But we knew that they were advanced enough to have sent an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, and were probably capable of interstellar travel.

Why they didn’t come when we were so weak, no one knew. It was one thing to be grateful for. It gave us time to find a solution.

It was only a matter of time until everything was controlled by the xenovirus, and through the xenovirus, the Voice. Stopping it meant going after the Voice itself. Ashton and Samuel conferred for hour after hour, trying to hash out a plan that would succeed in destroying the Voice while keeping everyone alive. If Bunker One was any indication of what Ragnarok Crater would be like, we were in for the fight of our lives. Even with backup, the Voice wouldn’t go down easily.

It wasn’t as if Ragnarok Crater was a small thing. It was over a hundred miles wide. The Voice, or whatever controlled the Voice, was located somewhere in that huge area. We had to find a better way of locating its exact point of origin. Ashton said he was working on a solution to that problem.

The bottom line was: we didn’t know enough yet. Finding those Black Files had opened a Pandora’s Box of questions when we expected answers. We knew the Voice was coming from Ragnarok Crater in a series of low-frequency sound waves, and that the xenofungus transmitted these waves, communicating with all life-forms under its spell. Anything infected with the xenovirus would listen to the Voice’s directives. All xenolife behaved as if of one mind.
Something
was controlling it. If we killed that something, it could spell the end of the invasion.

Well, this part of the invasion, anyway. The Black Files stated the Xenos were still coming – I assumed on some sort of ship – or maybe a whole interstellar armada. When they arrived, they were probably expecting to have a planet tailor-made for them, covered with the Blights and all resistance dead. Assuming we
did
kill off the Voice, we still had to deal with Xenofall. We didn’t know when Xenofall was coming. It could be tomorrow, one year, or ten years or more from now. We might even all be
dead
by the time Xenofall happened.

Samuel kept telling me to take it one step at a time, so that was what I was trying to do. The first step was preparing myself as much as possible – not just getting my strength back, but getting stronger besides. I ran along the Outer Ring an hour each day. I was improving my speed. I had sprinted more in the past few months than at any other point in my life. I did pushups, pull-ups, and crunches in addition to my martial training with Samuel and Anna. I wanted to be ready for anything.

By the end of the day, I was so tired that I usually fell right asleep. There were times, though, when I couldn’t turn off my brain. So much had happened that it was impossible to process. I was constantly stressed. I suffered nightmares. I dreamt of Khloe, buried alive in the dry, red sand. I dreamt of the night when it all went to hell. And the monsters were always there, surrounding me, chasing me over bleak plains and jagged mountains.

The Blights were growing, festering like open sores on the surface. When I looked down at Earth, I could see the Blights when the blood-red clouds weren’t so thick. They were only in North America, but according to Ashton and Samuel, that would change over the next ten years. The planet looked
sick
, for lack of a better word. It was as if it were a living thing being poisoned from the inside out.

Then there was the rest of the world, too. The entire planet was depopulated to the same extent as America – or worse. Ashton called the ten years following Ragnarok the Chaos Years – a time when the world’s population dropped from 8.4 billion to mere millions. In China, city-states and proto-empires fought amongst the ruins of civilization. In Europe, extreme cold had completely hampered population regrowth. In equatorial regions, people were faring little better. War over limited resources still consumed most of the world. Wars would exist as long as there were enough people to fight them.

None of these people knew about the xenovirus or Xenofall, and trying to communicate that through language barriers seemed impossible. In his first years in Skyhome, Ashton had visited different parts of the world – China, India, Russia, Japan, Africa – but always found one of two things: either no one had survived, or there were so many survivors fighting that making contact was too dangerous. Maybe the Chaos Years ended in 2040 for the United States, but the rest of the world was still living them.

If we didn’t succeed in stopping the xenovirus, all of humanity was as good as dead – and not just humanity, but every life-form that had managed to evolve in our planet’s tumultuous, 4.6 billion-year history. As unimaginable as that length of time was, I
knew
Earth had never experienced anything like this. A new form of life had invaded. When I left Bunker 108, I never imagined something like the xenovirus could exist. All I wanted was a community to live in, another Bunker, somewhere to be safe.

Well, I had found my community; but now, we were the ones trying to keep the world safe.

***

“H
old still.”

Anna grabbed my hands, giving me a stern expression. She twisted my clenched fists roughly on the hilt of her katana, forcing them vertical.

“Keep your grip loose, yet firm.”

I tried to do what she told me. I looked into her hazel eyes, which she promptly rolled.

“Stop looking at me and focus. Make your mind blank. I imagine a black plane, a void. Have you been practicing that?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“No, you haven’t. I can tell.” She sighed. “That’s the most important part.”

“Where did you get this void thing, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I made it up, but it works.”

I smiled, holding the katana as steady as I could. “So when do I get to swing this thing?”

Anna raised an eyebrow. “Would you quit being perverted and pay attention for once?”

“I’m trying.”

She sighed again, but it was forced. The beginnings of a smile played on her lips.

“Seriously. You need to practice meditating. Once you get the hang of it, you can make your mind completely blank. I always do it before a fight. It helps my concentration.” She looked at me. “Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Makes sense.”

“Good. You really need to practice it. I can’t stress that enough.” She looked at my arm, touching my left biceps. “You’re getting stronger. You’ve been working out still?”

“Yeah, of course. I didn’t realize you were such a fan.”

“I’m just commenting on your physique,” she said. Despite this comment, her face flushed slightly red. “I can actually see you when you stand sideways. You were so rail-thin before.”

“Ouch.” I set her katana gently on her bed. “My ‘physique,’ huh?”

She ignored my comment. “When you go to your hab today, I want you to do the mediation. I mean it.”

“Alright. I get it.” I turned for the door. “I’m going to grab dinner, if you want to come.”

She shook her head. “I still need to practice myself. Thanks, though.”

“You’ve already practiced this morning.”

“I practice twice a day. If you can wait a couple hours...maybe. We’ll see.”

My stomach growled in protest. Between my hunger and her playing hard to get, I think my stomach was going to win. “No, I probably can’t wait that long. So you want to meet at the same time tomorrow?”

Anna took up her blade, staring intently ahead. “Works for me.”

I left her room and made my way back to my hab. After two months in Skyhome, I finally got the chance to see Anna a little more. Nothing had happened between us. At least, not yet. Even if I thought I was picking up some flirtatious vibes from her, it always looked as if she was doing her best to suppress them. Which made sense; after all, we were all here for the mission. But when you spend a lot of time with someone, you can’t help but think about them.

So far, Anna had only agreed to help train me to use the katana. I wanted a backup, in case I somehow couldn’t use my gun, but I think we both knew that I was just using training as an excuse to get to know her. I had learned a lot, but I was still a long way from being even semi-competent. All the same, I appreciated everything I was learning, and it was nice to see her.

Still, after two months, I was hoping that things could have progressed a little more with Anna. And I wasn’t just crazy. After all, it was
my hand
she decided to grab down there on Earth, when the crawlers had been coming for us on the runway, and it was
me
she had snuggled with on the plane. And the way she looked at me sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t looking...well, let’s just say there
had
to be something there.

Hopefully, the right opportunity would present itself.

***

B
ack in my hab, I practiced the meditation Anna taught me. I was failing miserably. No matter how much I tried, my thoughts kept spinning out of control. I’ve always been a sufferer of the disease known as “thinking too much.”

I was grateful when a knock came at the door. Hoping it was Anna, I went to answer. I pressed the exit button, causing the metal door to slide open. I couldn’t help but be slightly disappointed when it was Samuel, standing in his characteristic muscle shirt and camo pants. His head, as usual, was shaved bald, and his facial features were sharp and toned. Even after all the R&R, he had been working out. That was Samuel’s way – everything he did was for the purpose of succeeding in our mission.

“We’re all meeting in Ashton’s office to go over the final phase of the mission at 19:30.”

“Alright. I need to eat still.”

“Make it quick. You have fifteen. Anna and Makara are already waiting.”

“What are we going over?”

“We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I asked. “I thought we still had a couple weeks.”

“It’s go time, kid,” he said. “My arm’s healed, and if we stay up here any longer, we’ll go soft. Besides, the xenovirus isn’t taking any breaks.”

I guessed that much was true. “Alright. I’ll head over.”

As Samuel walked away, a surge of energy rushed through me. Tomorrow, we’d be back on the planet, doing something that mattered. I was already starting to feel more alive. Makara had been training to pilot the
Odin
. Ashton himself had been teaching her, in the mornings, and they had run some test atmosphere re-entries, and even some landings. Basically, anything she’d have to do during the mission, Ashton had taught her. He had told me that she was a natural. That made sense, because she drove the Recon like a pro on our way to Bunker One. It didn’t surprise me that she also had an affinity for piloting the
Odin
.

I left my hab, entering the main corridor of the Mid Ring. It was time to head to the commons for a bite.

The Mid Ring’s main corridor was hard to get used to. It curved slightly upward along its entire length. The whole thing made a circle, and was always spinning to supply Skyhome with artificial gravity. The Mid Ring was divided into four Quadrants – Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. Charlie Quadrant contained the commons, the clinic, and an archive, where there were computers. In Charlie was a rec room with a large screen used for movies. The rest of the Quadrants were dedicated to habs, mostly. My hab, along with Anna’s, was in Delta Quadrant. Makara’s and Samuel’s were each in Alpha.

Then there were the two other Rings – the Outer Ring and the Inner Ring. The Outer was where all food was grown hydroponically. The Outer also contained recycling tanks and water reclamation units, or WRUs. Most of the water was dedicated to watering crops in the Outer Ring, but every molecule of it was saved and recycled with near 100 percent efficiency. Any time there was a shortfall, which only happened once every few years,
Gilgamesh
returned to Earth, filled up, and made up the difference.