Evil Among Us
EVIL AMONG US
Species Intervention #6609
Book 5
J K. Accinni
E.K. Publishing
Lakewood Ranch, Florida
www.speciesintervention.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
EVIL AMONG US
SPECIES INTERVENTION #6609
Book 5
J.K. Accinni
An E.K. Publishing book published in arrangement with the author, Lakewood Ranch, FL
Copyright © J.K. Accinni
All rights reserved.
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
ISBN: 9780988223684
Smashwords Edition
Books by J.K. Accinni:
Baby (Species Intervention #6609, Book 1)
Echo (Species Intervention #6609, Book 2)
Armageddon Cometh (Species Intervention #6609, Book 3)
Hive (Species Intervention #6609 Book 4)
Evil Among Us (Species Intervention #6609, Book 5)
The One (Species Intervention #6609, Book 6)
Alien Species Intervention Books 1-3
Dedication
I am happy to dedicate this book to all of the wonderful readers who have taken valuable time from their day to leave reviews for my books on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. I know how difficult it can be to express yourself with the written word. And God knows, who has an extra minute to spare in their complicated lives? I read every review and find myself delighted with the varied perspectives readers take of my books. Reviews to authors are like dollars to Donald Trump . . . so precious!
I cannot forget to thank three special people who gave me an unselfish helping hand when one was needed. Ms. Wanda Hartzenberg of South Africa, Aileen Aroma of Miami, Florida and fellow author RaeBeth Buda of Fairchance, Pennsylvania. I truly believe these women are unaware of the magnitude of their efforts on behalf of Indie authors. The world we live in is filled with takers. These three ladies are givers. I will always be impressed with their efforts on my behalf and that of my fellow authors.
I would also like to recognize the cover design by GraphiczxDesigns and the editing by Karen Perkins of LionheART Publishing House.
Contents
Books by J.K. Accinni:
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Introduction to Species Intervention #6609 Book 6 The One
Synopsis for Book 6: The One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Author’s Page
Prologue
The brown sky rained dirty ash onto soundless trees denuded of life and flattened as if a giant fist had descended to pummel them from the gray and wintery sky. The horizon was blank; the most famous skyline in the world gone, leaving devastation, twisted metal and death.
There was a complete absence of color, life or warmth. The crushed horizon smoldered with a palette of black and leaden barrenness; benumbing and bone-crushing godforsaken loneliness.
The crumbled remains of the Bronx Zoo flinched under the sight of its once-proud sign, bent and misshapen. Precious wildlife reduced to ash. Minute bone fragments of the Womb’s proud creations scattered in the wind.
Yes . . . the premonition directed to a naïve Abby by the transformed Netty Doyle as an Elder of the Womb came to pass over six months ago. No longer just a premonition but a cold ugly reality. Bloody reality. Hopeless reality . . .
The evil death that rained down on the Earth from the very hands of man that had been entrusted to protect it had done its job effectively. Just as man had idiotically planned while stupidly believing the time would never come. What was the old cliché? Man plans, while God, the Womb, laughs?
No one laughed now. Those who survived the early bombings found death at the hands of the next waves of horror, mass hysteria, depraved lawlessness and disease. If the plague, revisited from the Middle Ages, didn’t get you, then dysentery, dehydration or starvation did.
Now that the population existed only in miniscule numbers that huddled deep in rare, clever concealments, human feces no longer littered every landscape. The smell of raw human sewage no longer carried on the perpetual wind that harbored its own invisible death to man and beast.
Yes, the wind that struck terror in the hearts of even the strongest, the most psychotic, and the most resourceful, carried invisible radiation along with the powerful spawn of dirty bombs. Even the most infectious microbes searched on the wind for unlucky hosts, the final death knell for the hapless humans and creatures in every corner of the once green planet.
What did the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world think would happen if one of them were foolish enough to hunger for absolute supremacy through the means of nuclear power? Did they think the world would come rushing to their feet in supplication? Only Homo sapiens would conceive of such a barbaric maneuver.
Yes, Homo sapiens: the species that, unlike any other creature, harbors a conscious ego. The ability to manipulate its environment and the complete disregard for the balance of nature and the other creatures that shared the formerly glorious planet.
And where now were the exalted leaders from the United States that bled their constituents so readily into poverty over the last 245 years?
Where were any authorities for that matter? How long would the politicians survive in their hunkered- down, taxpayer-funded concrete and steel monoliths in the ground? How many years would pass before their food ran out? Five years? Ten? Fifty? Could they hold out for one hundred years? If they could, what shape would the Earth be in? Questions, nothing but questions: long answered and prepared for by the most expensive experts taxpayer money could buy. For all the politicians in all the countries that assumed they would survive . . . the Womb laughed again.
Chapter 1
2057 AD
Five-year-old Suzy lay on the dirty cot with her leg chained to a metal spike embedded in the cold ground, muddy from the drizzle and constant footfalls of the men who came to confer with Doc Benjamin. Many attempted to catch a glimpse of the now notorious young captive who promised salvation for all from the devastation closing in on them as they maneuvered around the poisonous cities like army ants, ducking and weaving, destroying and obliterating everything in their path.
Their numbers now counted in the hundreds. For every man there were five to ten women, all young, most under the age of twenty. And all owned by an individual man. Virtual slaves.
They did the work during the day, setting up the extensive camp and cooking the meals, and were forced to extend comfort at night. If they refused they were beaten, starved and left without shelter, such that it was. It didn’t take long for a young girl to be broken. Most were still mourning the loss of their families who had been rob
bed and murdered by the very men they were now forced to view as their protectors. Some existed in a state of perpetual shock, unable to answer questions or respond to threats as they were repeatedly raped or beaten. But they were alive. They were amongst the lucky few; if you could count their existence as living.
The only things that kept them from going over the edge were their sister captives. The strong and resilient ones knew their best chance of survival was to nurse the weak ones on the off chance they could increase their strength enough to overcome their captors.
It was a hopeless plan, doomed from the onset. The strength of the men only increased as they gathered food from their victims, stray livestock, and indispensable salvage in their march across new territory, pushing further and further east to their destination. But it was this trifling spark of defiance that the girls nursed, unwilling to let the fledgling ember of purpose be extinguished and so threaten their tenuous hold on thoughts of independence and freedom.
Suzy cringed as Doc Benjamin approached with Avery at his side. Avery claimed to be a veteran of the last few wars the United States had been sucked into by conservative politicians who hungered for the international conflict that enriched the pockets of the multinational corporations; in turn enriching their re-election coffers. He claimed to be an expert in electronics, rigging up a communication system between the men that rivaled anything the few rag tag groups of authorities had in the beginning.
Now, most in authority were either part of Doc Benjamin’s group or dead. Stupidly, the principled ones had failed to adjust quickly enough to the new rule of eat or be eaten. Not literally, of course; it hadn’t come to that yet. But unfortunately, their ethics didn’t have room for flexibility, leaving their stripped corpses ignobly and anonymously behind in the dirt with the rest of Doc’s victims.
Suzy tried to keep her eyelids squeezed tight as Avery approached. He was a lumbering giant of a man. His shaved head with its knobby protrusions and his dead, flat eyes that glittered as he watched the young girls laboring around the vast camp did nothing to dispel the aura of restrained violence. He hadn’t touched her, but his excited grunts and the soft sobbing that were usually accompanied by sharp slaps and occasional screams could be heard around camp. That alone convinced Suzy that even though she didn’t understand what was happening, she knew it was only a matter of time before she was the recipient herself.
*
“When ya gunna let me have the little one? You promised it was my turn the night we took her.” Avery eyed Suzy’s thin form, apparently asleep on the ramshackle cot, his voice unexpectedly squeaky and high pitched. The whining tone made Doc Benjamin cringe with annoyance. He turned to eyeball Avery. With the long suffering patience of a mother who’s close to being on her last nerve with a beloved child, he sighed.
“Avery, you know she’s our ticket to the bomb shelter her grandfather has. We need to keep her happy and cooperative. How long do you think that would last if I turned her over to you? Didn’t you get the last two women we liberated?”
Doc sidled up to Avery. A quick glimpse of steel flashed in his eyes, unseen by the giant. He playfully slapped Avery on the cheek; his hand stinging while Avery remained unperturbed, still caught up on what he felt was an undeserved slight.
“Yeah, but Doc, they both didn’t work out. I had to dispatch the mother the first night when she tried to claw my face after I broke her kid’s arm. And you know that was an accident. She just didn’t get it when it was her kid’s turn to be my bed warmer.”
The whine in Avery’s high-octave voice was trying Doc’s patience. He snaked his arm around the giant’s waist. “It’s time to break camp and get a move on. Why don’t you see what’s keeping my breakfast? Tell the women to send a sweet for the girl. I need to have a talk with her when she wakes up.” The giant’s face sagged.
“But—”
“No buts. We don’t have time to go over the inventory right now either. It’ll keep. Just check on the livestock and make sure the men eat before they start to round up the herd again. We need them to keep up with us. What good does it do us if they get lost on the way to Lily Pond Road? It took us a long time to make it here to Sussex County. I’m not about to lose them after all this.” Slapping Avery on a thick, meaty cheek a second time, he turned him around and sent him on his way, patient resignation in the slump of Avery’s huge slabs of shoulders.
As he waited for his breakfast, Doc leaned back on the vehicle he and his men had confiscated from Suzy’s grandmother and the worm, Seth. What was the woman’s name? Laura? No Lorna . . . yeah. Seth and Lorna. He stewed over his error in letting them go. He should have killed Seth on the spot, but something about the old lady had made him pause. Not to mention the comatose young teen in the back of their car. There was no telling what illness she might have been carrying.
In his haste to get away, he had let the one person who could save them all slip through his fingers. His fists tightened in anger. How was he going to keep his horde under control if he continued to make bad judgment calls like that? His decision to follow Seth and the grandmother to Sussex County was called into question continually. He’d heard the whisperings.
He glanced over to Suzy’s sleeping form. Too bad the kid doesn’t remember where her grandfather’s bomb shelter actually is. It must be huge if they’re growing crops inside.
And she said they had medicine and something that cures people. At least they’d pulled the name of the road out of her. Now they just had to figure out where Lily Pond Road was. He absently fingered the ugly sores with their hanging scabs on the underside of his arm. No matter what he did to treat them, they refused to heal.
Doc peered up at the gray sky through a gap in the lean-to, wondering how long it would be before they saw the sun again. It had taken them months to get this far and they never did catch up to Seth and the grandmother. It made him suspect they had wandered off the route or been killed on the way. Perhaps the tribe had arrived before the twosome. After all, Seth and the old woman were on foot, dragging the sick teen. His horde had many vehicles. Even slowing for the multitude of stops to scavenge for gas supplies, females and anything else they might find useful at some future date, they had made decent progress.
When they had traveled off Route 15, the main artery leading into Sussex County, he had quickly established camp in a town called Franklin, just to the east of Sparta. They had decided that going further northwest to the town of Andover, which had at one time been nothing but rich farmland, was the wrong direction. There was no point in going further. He cursed under his breath as he remembered entrusting the map they had liberated from Seth and Lorna’s car to one of his most reliable men.
Thompson had passed it on to his wife, one of his only men to have a spouse in the tribe. Unfortunately for them both, she’d lost the map during a mad scramble out of a town in Pennsylvania after they’d discovered dead bodies covered with bulbous growths and dried blood. They’d dropped everything they’d just scavenged where they stood and bolted, with Doc threatening to shoot anyone who held on to their tainted bounty. He didn’t know what disease had struck the hapless inhabitants of the town, but he knew it could be most anything. His forethought regarding the issuance of collapsible breathing masks months ago had kept them safe . . . so far.
That night he had been forced again to make an example of a member of the tribe who had faltered and placed them in jeopardy. He had forced everyone to watch as he’d placed the woman on her knees, head over a log and had one of the strongest men in the tribe strike her neck with an axe, removing her head. He’d hated to do it because of the effect it had on the other women in the tribe. For the next day or so they had become less malleable. But things would eventually settle back down. It had served its purpose, keeping everyone on their toes.
He was at a complete loss as to what direction to go in from here. He knew they couldn’t be more than two hours from New York City. The once great metropolis had taken a direct hit, followed up b
y a series of secondary hits once the other psychotic leaders of third world powers decided to pile in. When all communication was lost, he could only speculate as to who had done what to whom and why. Did it really matter now anyway? He knew the only thing he had to worry about was where the hell the bomb shelter was. And keeping everyone healthy, of course. That’s what gave him his power.
That had never been an easy job even before the bombs. As he’d had told Suzy’s grandmother, he wasn’t a real doctor. Not like the doctors of his grandparents’ era. The general public, like so many other issues, were completely unaware that the profession of physician no longer existed. Those that wanted to be doctors, simply studied to become what used to be called physician assistants. That was the doctor of today. It wasn’t that the government had tried to hide it, although they had done so quite successfully, it was the fact that no one had paid attention. Their own lives were so all-consuming that few had the energy or inclination to pay attention, allowing the government to slowly strip them of most of their rights, fostering a new reality that few took the time to call into question. Don’t worry, the government will handle it, the government will solve everything, the government will take care of us.
It also allowed interesting gentlemen like himself to slip into the ranks of the revered medical profession. Men with questionable ethics. It wasn’t that he was such a bad guy. He just believed in different things. Like the fact that he was destined for greatness. He’d known that from the time he had discovered that a wide engaging smile could charm even the hardest bitten parent or superior.