Children Of Fiends Part 1 - Winter Is Passing (The Of Sudden Origin Saga Continues)
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About this ebook
“This series is truly terrifying. Mr Harwood is a master of horror.”
“Tremendously Different Apocalyptic Epic”
“I have never read a zombie book quite like this one.”
The second series in the Of Sudden Origin universe.
Since the beginning, nature has revised and deleted her various life forms. Versions of man have been dominant for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Africanus, Habilis, Erectus, Neanderthal, and many more, have returned to the dust from which we all come. At times they have overlapped with one another and even interbred until a dominant new design supplants that which came before. Telepathus is here now. "What of us?" asks the Sapiens. Perhaps Sapiens has had its time too...
Ten years have passed since the modern world was riddled with FNDz (Frontal Negation Dementia) and North America fought to the edge of extinction. America has folded in on itself in perfect isolation. Infected but medically stabilized people live in exile, and beyond the wall known as the Terminus, a new species of Man is growing stronger every day.
On the isolated Mid-Atlantic peninsula of Delmarva, a splinter group of Americans led by a man without morals, have created their own nation. A group of them will follow a team of Northern explorers into the very heart of darkness, awakening the new species to the competition that Homo Sapiens really are.
C. Chase Harwood
C. Chase Harwood made a career in Hollywood, decorating sets for film and television before turning his passion for story telling into clicks on a keyboard. While scaling the walls of the screenwriting world, he chose to experiment with prose and found a fondness for Scifi-action-adventure. Within that framework he gets to explore the countless ways that humans interact while under duress. "Life is all the more lived when the consequences are high. When told as a tale it can be quite a page turner," says Harwood. He lives in Los Angeles with his costume designer wife and young boy girl twins. The following are some other storytellers with whom the author finds a kindred spirit: HUGH HOWIE, STEPHEN KING, SCOTT SIGLER, DJ MOLLES, RHIANNON FRATER, SEAN PLATT, JUSTIN CRONIN, JAMES S.A. COREY, PETER CLINES, SUZANNE COLLINS, ERNEST CLINE, MAX BROOKS, VERONICA ROTH, LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD, ORSON SCOTT CARD "Pretty big shoes...”
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Children Of Fiends Part 1 - Winter Is Passing (The Of Sudden Origin Saga Continues) - C. Chase Harwood
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. -Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction author (1907-1988)
PROLOGUE
It seemed impossible. The combined forces of North America were running out of ordinance. They had used so much to take back everything east of the Hudson River, to kill literally millions of infected people that the few munitions manufacturers left in infection-free America and Canada couldn’t keep up. They were quite simply bereft of raw materials. When the last Fiend in New England was gunned down while running out of a parking structure located under the Boston Common, the U.S. had a chunk of its nation back. Now the race was on to fortify what was ultimately called the Champlain Line. In effect, it ran from the terminus of the Hudson River at Lower Manhattan, up to Lake George, to Lake Champlain, to the Saint Lawrence, then on to the Ottawa River and its source: Lake Timmiskaming where there was a gap. The Great Gap lay in the central province of Ottawa and was open for sixty miles until the water barrier picked up again at the Little Abitibi River, where it ultimately flowed to the massive Hudson Bay. Through mountain, swamp and grassland, a massive engineering project to join the gap between the Abitibi and the Ottawa was nearly complete. Fiends, most of them anyway, couldn’t swim. The learned skill was lost with nearly every other higher function when the infection took hold.
The ironically named Lac Fortune lay in a lovely but not terribly notable portion of Trans Canadian Route 117. It was there that the final canal was underway.
On a warm Indian summer day, the engineers and soldiers who had been working 24/7 for two months, stopped what they were doing and watched in awe as a great herd approached in the distance. Caribou, hundreds of thousands, blackened the gap that was the hilly border between Ontario and Quebec. A Canadian Air Force pilot flying a circling spotting plane called it into the command headquarters and was patched through to the Canadian lieutenant general who was overseeing this last bit of the line. The astonished pilot reported on the million or so Fiends who were behind the heard. It seemed that the collective population of infected Western Canada was coming down the road. The general who watched the approaching herd from his command post knew he was out of time. Without question, he needed three more days minimum to complete his task.
Later, in the square of a park overlooking the Saint Lawrence, a statue would be erected to honor his sacrifice, along with the thousands of men and women under his command. On that day, the man, who had, more than anyone else, helped to subdue the Taliban-led Wazir tribes of Waziristan, now faced his final impossible challenge. There would be no negotiation. One couldn’t negotiate with what were in effect, zombies, much less the children of these infected people. The general had heard rumors about the children over the past month or so; babies being born with some kind of fantastic mutation.
As the caribou herd stampeded through the Lac Fortune gap, the men and women who had bonded, forged relationships, been filled with pride over their accomplishment, could only watch in awe as the panicked animals ran past in their desperation not to be swallowed up by the monstrosity that chased after them.
Back in Ottawa, the powers-that-be of course knew about this coming threat; they could still operate their satellites. They had plenty of planes. What they didn’t have was ammunition. To little effect, they had dumped the last of their air-based weapons on the gathering masses days earlier with the hope of slowing the infected down, giving the engineers the time they needed to complete their digging. Time was up. As the horde converged from many scattered groups into one mindless sea of approaching death, the sole munition left in the stockpile was unfortunately the one that no one wanted to contemplate. Everyone who had volunteered and/or been commissioned to build the canal was fully aware that they were ripe for nuclear annihilation – it didn’t mean they actually expected to die that way. They were North Americans: by their very nature, they were optimists – they expected to finish the canal.
A helicopter stood by to whisk the general and his staff away, but to a man (and woman) they chose to stay. They drove out to the front to stand firm with everyone else, stoically watching the approaching horror. Many had already dealt face to face with the so named Fiends: your friends and neighbors, now victims of a simple greed driven biological mistake. Through an illegal combination of antibiotics abuse and genetic manipulation, a small time chicken farm in Southern Florida, in an effort to make less thirsty and plumper foul of all things, had inadvertently released a catastrophe that would balloon into a North American pandemic, driving two nations to ruin and then sending the world into an economic tailspin. None of the onlookers had personally seen one of the Fiend’s, or infected person’s children. Morbid curiosity caused the general to hold a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He scanned the mad mob that was now no more than half a mile away and spotted one in the firm clutches of its rabid mother. The child’s overly large orbs seemed to focus on him like a lover’s eyes, boring in, seemingly inches away.
A lone B-2 bomber followed the line that was Route 117 below. The pilots sat rigidly erect as they approached the drop zone. They had to restrain themselves from gawking as they watched the earth turn black with caribou, then the horde in the distance. They checked one last time to confirm that they were weapons free; the determined voice of the U.S. president himself having confirmed the go-ahead. With resolve built on endless training, the pilot touched the button that would, in one fiery hellish minute, turn 20 square miles into a no go zone for decades to come.
The general, with his eyes still locked to that of the child thing in the distance, sensed his mind buzzing with sensations that were outside his body, yet also inside. He felt desperate hunger, fear. Not only his fear, but the child’s fear, its mother’s fear and devilish ravings. He found it impossible to lower the binoculars, to break the extraordinarily intimate connection that held his gaze. He could smell its mother; hear the howls of the Fiends nearby. More than anything, he felt utterly compelled to offer himself up – to be the nutrition that the child deeply needed. Then he saw the flash. He was instantly blinded and the connection was broken. He never felt the heat.
A month later, the Champlain line was finally finished, and, like shutting a door against a room full of soul-crushing grimness, the thousand mile long wall, buttressed by massive fencing, thirty foot tall concrete slabs and a twenty foot deep mine field, was complete. Twenty miles to its east and along its entire length, another fence was built to keep healthy citizen wanderers from ever approaching the line of demarcation. The space between was labeled ‘The Terminus Zone’ and was strictly off limits to all. Period. No exceptions.
Finally able to breathe, the healthy population of North America celebrated for a day and a night, and then rested for another before taking on the huge task of picking up the pieces. Further infection within the healthy zone had been eradicated. The primary conduit – fouled water and bird migration – was under strict supervision and no longer a factor.
It was thought that the outbreak had been contained on the North American continent. Unfortunately for the rest of the world that wasn’t true. A few hundred kilometers north of Lac Fortune, the seeds for pandemic continued along the same path from which it started: a plague spread by birds. The Arctic Tern is one of the most remarkable birds on Earth. As it follows the seasons from its southern summer nesting grounds in the Antarctic north to the summer months in the Arctic, its typical 22,000-mile migration pattern lets it experience temperate (for the bird) weather all year long. It spends the majority of its life in the air, rarely landing but to eat and breed. Its habitat ranges across the tops of the northern continents: from Denmark to Northern Russia, Alaska and across Northern Canada and even the Northern Continental U.S. In the Southern Hemisphere it can be found in nations such as South Africa, Australia and Argentina. It is an ocean bird, but is also found in inland waterways. Fiercely defensive of its nesting grounds and willing to attack even large predators, other birds do well to build their own nests near Arctic Terns that act as body guards for their feathered brethren.
During the summer that North America fought to save itself from oblivion, infected Tree Swallows (the original carriers of the plague) mingled with the Terns that nested in Northern Canada and Alaska. The protection that the sea birds offered, mixed with their discarded feathers that the swallows used for nesting, made for the inevitable exchange of bodily fluids between the two species. The great migratory birds took on the germ and then flew off to other points on the globe, infecting domesticated and wild birds alike. In short order these infected animals passed the contagion onto a planet overpopulated with humans. Within a year, the rest of the world knew firsthand the agony of the North Americans.
The end of the world, as it was known, had no specific date. The event, referred to as Omega, took place over five or six seasons. The waves of destruction would ripple out for a decade or more.
PART ONE
WINTER IS PASSING
CHAPTER ONE
THE BOY AND THE KID
The boy had found the map in the attic among the boxes that his father had never sent for. His old man had been a collector of souvenirs during his time in the Navy, and the boy had spent hours and hours over the years sifting through the collection, imagining adventures and playacting battles. There were trinkets and bits of clothing, and all manner of small artifacts stuffed in with the uniforms, letters, and photos. His father had been to places in the world that, as