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Evolution Preview
Two 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.
“Hold 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.