Bleaker

  Earth Endures 2

  Bleaker

  Jacqueline Druga

  Copyright © Jacqueline Druga 2021

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.

  Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2021

  ISBN: 978-1-83919-141-1

  www.vulpine-press.com

  Also by Jacqueline Druga:

  What we Become

  Like many, Mackenzie Garret complains about the weather. It is the hottest summer anyone can remember. The high temperatures are out of control with no end in sight. Until it all changes.

  Overnight, blue skies become gray, and the hot, humid weather turns to rain, then snow, then ice as the temperature plummets.

  The entire northern half of the country is thrown into chaos as blow by blow, storm after storm, nature rips into the world, tearing it apart. Towns and cities are evacuated, and Mac and her family are forced to leave their world behind and face a treacherous journey south to safety.

  Will they make it, or will they be left behind in this new, frozen world?

  Omnicide

  A town practically cut off from the rest of the country, Griffin is always the last to know about everything. Fax is the most reliable method of communication and the local newspaper is the main source of outside information.

  When a freak car accident occurs on the outside of town, no one thinks much of it. That is until deer are found sick and covered in an unusual growth, and they lose contact with the next town.

  Cut off and isolated from the rest of the world, Griffin is unaware of the threat growing outside the safety of their little town. One that could endanger their entire existence.

  Part One: Omni-4

  ONE

  The Ship

  The clean, white surface was tattered and worn, yet even the natural devastation couldn’t topple the Washington Monument. The stone had broken down, the triangle top looked as if it had crumbled, but it was recognizable to the crew of the Omni-4 as they made their first flyover of Washington, D.C.

  Aldar Finch was stone-faced, trying not to show emotion when he saw his nation’s capital far from the glory it was in its heyday. It crushed him, gnawed at his insides and the only thing that made it the tiniest bit tolerable was that mankind didn’t do it to itself.

  Nature did. But nature didn’t rebel on its own. It was a forced evolution of Earth’s surface. A planet had made its way into Earth’s gravity field, bringing devastation and destruction during its entire journey across the solar system. It became fiercer the closer it came.

  Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions.

  Seaboard cities crumbled to dust and entire states sank.

  No one really knew that the rogue planet was the cause. At least when Finch and his crew left Earth. To the experts and everyone else, it was just an expedited and violent form of Earth changing.

  That rogue planet, known to some as Planet X, was considered nothing but a myth. A conspiracy theorist’s wet dream and the tinfoil hat club’s online video goldmine.

  It was a laughable notion. Really. They knew there was nothing out there that they couldn’t see. Especially something as big as a planet.

  How wrong they were.

  They were wrong about a lot of things.

  The entire mission, the development of the Omni-4 spacecraft, was to find a suitable home for Earth’s inhabitants. A second Earth.

  Project Noah.

  And they thought they had found it when a satellite, believed to have been destroyed in 1993, suddenly appeared again with photographs of a lush and fertile planet.

  The satellite had not been lost or destroyed; it had travelled through a wormhole that scientists speculated opened every twenty-five years. That speculation was never grounded until the weather satellite NOAA-13 returned.

  Wormhole Androski was the portal to this mystery planet, the answer to man’s extinction and a beacon of hope.

  And so it began.

  The Omni would travel through while the opportunity existed, confirm the presence of the planet and its habitability, and return to Earth.

  Construction also began on larger crafts for when the portal opened again in twenty-five years. Those ships would take colonists to prepare the planet for the ARCs that would carry a small, selected percentage of Earth’s population.

  The doorway was open, the project was launched, Omni-4 flew through.

  Find the planet, explore, and return home.

  That was the mission.

  Only, the crew of Omni-4 discovered they were already home.

  The wormhole wasn’t a portal to another galaxy, it was a portal to another time.

  The crew landed one hundred and sixty-seven years after they left.

  Earth had changed drastically, and Planet X was another moon in the sky.

  The Androski had no guarantee; if they went back through it was a crap shoot, a lottery, on when they would arrive.

  So they stayed.

  They would explore their new home, their old word, and see what had become of it.

  Their first stop: Washington, D.C.

  TWO

  The Crew

  Aldar Finch, Commander

  “Where should we put her down?” Curt Henning reached up to the controls from the co-pilot seat.

  “Does it matter?” Finch asked.

  “Actually…” Nate Gale leaned forward. “As the geological expert I will say it does matter.” He played with his tablet computer, pulling up images. “I’d say the entire area east of the city is probably unstable.” He turned to look at Westerman. “What do you think?”

  Westerman wasn’t a scientist. Far from it. He was eighteen years old but he had one advantage all the education in the world couldn’t give Omni-4: Westerman had been born on the changed planet. His parents were part of the Genesis, the colonists that left Earth after Omni-4, but arrived on the new Earth decades before them.

  “You mean, do I think it will shake and break?” Westerman asked.

  “For lack of better words,” Nate said, “yes.”

  “Probably not. It’s only unstable the closer you get to the ocean. Then again, it’s earthquake season.”

  “Earthquake season?” Nate questioned. “I’ve heard of tornado season, hurricane season, never earthquake season.”

  “Sure, don’t know why. But there is. Earthquake, tidal wave, volcano season…”

  Curt laughed. “What about winter, spring, summer, and fall?”

  “Them too, but probably not like you remember. Not at least like my dad said.”

  Finch thought at that moment how there was so much to learn from the young man. Even basic stuff like weather patterns were more than likely second nature to him.

  There were a few more moments of debate on where to land the craft and Finch settled on an area that wasn’t without bumps, but it would work. A long, wide strip of dead land that he knew was once the Potomac River.

  Nate Gale, Geologist

  The moment Nate stepped off the Omni and his foot rested upon the hard soil, he flashed back to his school days and how he learned every professor and scientist was wrong about Washington, D.C.

  D.C. was built on a swa
mp, they said.

  Nate believed that.

  They all said one day it would turn back into a swamp. That it would eventually, possibly, sink.

  He even had a professor make political humor out of the fact that the government was built over a swamp.

  Nate didn’t get into political humor.

  Actually, Nate didn’t get into politics, it just wasn’t his thing.

  Washington, D.C., long since abandoned, long since slammed by disaster after disaster was far from a swamp.

  He stomped his foot a couple times on the soil.

  “Are we good?” Finch asked. “It’s not going to sink is it?”

  Nate shook his head. “No, we’re fine.”

  He pulled out his sunglasses. Not that it was particularly sunny, but they cut the glare on his computer tablet.

  He used an old map of Washington and created an overlay of the area the ship photographed before landing.

  He lined it up to get an idea of where he was.

  Although it wasn’t hard to distinguish the capital and any of the other monuments, he wanted to be able to zoom in if they came across something else, to know exactly where they were. Not every place was a famous landmark.

  After peering down at his tablet, he made a note. The area wasn’t as overgrown as it should have been.

  That told Nate more than Westerman had known—that the area had been hit a lot. Perhaps by storms.

  They weren’t near the ocean, but you wouldn’t know that by the huge ship that was infused with the dirt on the outskirts of the city.

  The land had grown around it, the ship was part of the earth now.

  “Where to?” Nate heard Curt ask.

  “Huh?” Nate peered up. “Are you asking me?”

  “I’m asking anyone,” Curt said. “Westie.” He nudged Westerman. “Any thoughts on which way to go?”

  “Nope. Never been here,” Westerman said. “This is part of the Verboten zone. No one comes here. So I’m game.”

  “How about this,” Finch suggested. “We know where we left the ship. Let’s just not worry about a plan. We don’t have a time frame. We just walk. See what we find out.”

  “Like tourists,” Curt joked.

  “Yeah,” Finch grumbled. “Like tourists.”

  Sandra Anderson, Physician/Surgeon

  She had been on the battlefield repairing injuries, but never had something caused Sandra to cry as she did when she saw Washington, D.C.

  It broke her heart. It was a reiteration that everything she knew and loved had come to an end.

  Sandra was selected for the mission based on her medical experience, her years as a soldier and the fact that she had no one in her life, as far as family went.

  Yet, when they learned they had gone ahead to the future through the wormhole, she voted to try it again. To go back through the Androski. Take a shot to see if they could go back home to their time. Wormholes, though, weren’t reliable.

  For all she knew she could end up further in the future or further in the past

  Her fellow crew member Curt brought up the point. Even if the Androski dropped them right back in the time frame in which they left, was it fair to go back without all the knowledge they could?

  Was it fair to go back and say, ‘This is what happens’ instead of ‘Here are the facts, take a look, what can we do’?

  When she cast her vote, she had that plan in the back of her mind. She and Curt had discussed it.

  In case going back through the Androski was something they eventually ended up doing, Sandra would gather all the information she could before they left. She asked Rey if she could take over the reins of video operator, at least while they were in D.C. Sandra would get footage to serve as proof or historical documentation.

  They, like Finch said, were tourists. Albeit in the post-apocalypse, and just like any good tourist, Sandra was hoping to get lots and lots of images.

  Curt Henning, Co-pilot

  Was it a sign? The tip of Curt’s boot hit what looked like a frosted sea glass version of a whiskey bottle. He lifted it, holding it up to the sun, watching it sparkle due to the colors from the light. It had been crystallized from the ocean salt, but it was a whiskey bottle nonetheless. Almost as if fate was saying to him, ‘Yep, the world ended, but yours pretty much ended via the bottle long before Planet X caused its damage.’

  Curt wanted to be on the mission, he really did. He wasn’t Finch’s first choice, and rightfully so. He had lost Finch’s trust long before the mission was assigned.

  Curt was an alcoholic. In his mind, he would always be one. Even though he learned to control his drinking, his life of not drinking never lasted long. Mainly because he was merely sober and not living in sobriety.

  For the longest time, drinking controlled him. There were fewer days when he wasn’t drunk than when he was. He doused his coffee with bourbon. The day his world came crashing down and reality set in, wasn’t from hitting rock bottom, it was from fear of Finch.

  Curt had slept in. It was the morning of a test flight in which he was flying with Finch. He had stayed on base, woken still intoxicated from the night before, and in a rush made his way down to the testing area.

  Once he took his seat in the test craft, Finch knew.

  “Are you drunk?” Finch asked.

  Apparently, he reeked of alcohol. And Curt had to own up that he wasn’t sober.

  Finch lost it. He could have had Curt’s job, but instead he told headquarters that Curt was ill. He followed up telling Curt that if he ever found him drinking behind the controls of any moving vehicle, he would beat him.

  That was what Finch said.

  Beat him.

  For two years Curt didn’t drink a drop. Nothing.

  Stone-cold sober.

  Then the world started falling apart and Curt didn’t care anymore. He drank again, but he controlled it. During the fall-apart years, Curt regularly graced magazine covers. He was praised as a hero because he seemed to always be in the right place at the right time. He’d earned the name The Clutch for grasping someone and saving them seconds from death.

  None of that mattered to Finch. To Finch Curt was a drunk, whether he was a sober hero or not.

  In essence Finch was right.

  Curt wasn’t a hero. In his mind he was a coward because he didn’t want to face a dying world without a bottle in hand.

  Yet, there he stood, looking at the remains of a once glorious city with an empty bottle in hand, and if it had something in it, Curt probably would have drunk it.

  It was a reminder that no matter how many years they skipped, Curt wasn’t getting away from any of it.

  Ben Vonn, Engineer

  “Seriously?” Ben shifted his eyes to the bottle that Curt held in his hand. “All this and you lift a bottle.”

  “I was just…I mean look at it,” Curt said. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Ben replied.

  While not many knew of Curt’s problem, Ben did. And it angered him. Curt took for granted everything. He would have given anything to have been Curt for one moment.

  To be able to clutch someone from death.

  Ben would have chosen the moment that his house was swallowed by a sink hole. When Ben held on to the banister of his home and watched his sons fall over him into the pit below.

  Ben reached for them, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  He wasn’t Curt.

  He wished he were.

  Maybe it was for the better.

  Which son would he have grabbed?

  He lost them both that day.

  Now the decay of the city was nothing to Ben. It held almost an odd beauty. He watched Curt drop the bottle and move ahead.

  They were all moving, just walking. Nowhere in particular. No direction. They had just emerged from the former bed of the Potomac river which was probably where Curt found that bottle.

  When they were flying overhead, Ben recalled thinking D.C. looked like some sort
of lost city in a forest, with the Washington Monument being the beacon flagpole. But once they moved closer, the foliage wasn’t as thick as he thought it would be.

  Emerging from the riverbed, so much came into view. The buildings were mostly still intact. Some showed signs of being weather worn, some of earthquake damage. But every one of them was still recognizable.

  At least to Ben.

  A whole new generation would never know the city.

  He thought of his own sons and their trip to the nation’s capital.

  His sons, or rather the loss of them, was the reason Ben had joined the mission. Though he never said it, Ben had plans of his own. Once they arrived on the new planet, he was going to stay. Even if he had to sneak off and disappear, that was his plan. He’d had no intention of returning to their Earth. No intention of going back to the place that caused him so much pain. Yet, there he was. There was no escape from any of it.

  None at all.

  Reyanne Harper, Teacher

  She stood in awe of him, just the same as she did when she saw the Lincoln Memorial for the first time in fourth grade.

  He was larger than life to her, and despite the century that had passed, the wrath of nature that befell Washington, D.C., the statue of Lincoln sitting in that chair was still precious to her.

  As an educator, she adored him. She loved history and had studied Lincoln.

  It meant a lot to be standing there.

  With everything that had happened, some things remained.

  The face of the monument hadn’t worn, and she stared at him. Rey could hear his voice, or at least the voice she had given him in her mind. A deep, resonating voice telling his people, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

  That was always one of her favorite Lincoln quotes. She knew in her time they’d done all they could to fix ‘tomorrow,’ but she wondered if the generations before her, if they’d known, would they have done something? If so, would she be standing there in the pits of a dystopian world?