Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

I didn’t give the signal. “So… some of you were already familiar with my music. A lot of you probably didn’t want to be, but were stuck in the room yesterday. Hope you’re converts now. P.S., buy my album.”

Scattered laughter sounded at the back of the room.

“Yes, thank you. That was, indeed, a joke.” I gestured at a laughing person, who might’ve been Ginta. “If you listened to the lyrics—I promise it’s not just yelling—you’ll know where I stand on the idea of equality.” I sought out the woman from management in the crowd. When our gazes locked, I offered a nod.

She nodded back, encouraging.

“Equality means that… even if we’re not the same, we get the same chances.

“But here’s the thing. People like me, or like those in the med bay—I’m not confident about our survival chances. I know you aren’t, either.” I shifted my weight. “You can’t promise us we’ll live. I get that. But you can promise us that, if we don’t survive, it’s not ’cause you didn’t give us an equal chance. It’s not ’cause you sped it along.”

My parents were restraining the management woman from coming towards me. My chin jutted out. A grin spread across my lips. I didn’t know if my words would change the rations, if they would rile people up further, if they would make any difference at all.

What I did know was this: “I’m not writing us off.”

I gave a flick of my hand and plunged us into music.

Scott Sigleris a #1 New York Times bestselling author and creator of fifteen novels, six novellas and dozens of short stories. He gives away his stories as weekly, serialized, audiobooks, with over 40 million episodes downloaded. Scott launched his career by releasing his novels as author-read podcasts. His rabid fans were so hungry for each week’s episode that they dubbed themselves the “Junkies.” He is also a co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series and manages Scott’s multimedia projects. He lives in San Diego, CA, with his little dog Reesie.

O. Vanev rests on one knee, ripped black coveralls exposing his torn skin to the cold, wet jungle floor. His blood mixes with the endless mud. He can’t stop coughing. He is exhausted. His chest heaves, every breath drawing in a lungful of smoke-tainted air. He and the others stopped in a small clearing. Around them, Omeyocan’s jungle burns, beautiful yellow leaves crisping to nothing, brown tree trunks crawling with orange flame, blue vine stems wiggling from the heat as if they are animals writhing in pain. Fire chases away the night, makes the clearing as bright as day.

His arms ache. He rests his rifle against a tree trunk. He doesn’t want to hold the weapon anymore.

He doesn’t want to kill anymore.

Ash fills the air, blowing with the fire-driven wind. Smoking, glowing embers drop all around, a demonic rain that sizzles against the mud in some places, starts new fires in others.

Over the roar of a jungle ablaze, he hears the sound of rockets—the sound of death.

O. Vanev is a boy with no past.

When he first woke, he thought it was the morning of his twelfth birthday. The others thought the same thing when they woke, when in truth, the day they woke was the first day of their lives.

He is one of the Birthday Children. His sole purpose? To be a blank slate, to have his mind overwritten by his progenitor so that his progenitor could be young again, could walk freely on the paradise promised by a prophet long since dead.

Vanev and the others spent centuries in stasis, enclosed in “husks” that kept their slumbering bodies healthy. He was nothing but a hunk of meat and bone. Never meant to act, to think, to live .

Em Savage changed that. She woke the sleepers.

Vanev knows little of his past, almost nothing of the culture that spawned him. He doesn’t even know his first name. Some people have remembered theirs, but not him. All he knows is the letters engraved on the base of his husk: O. Vanev .

In the brief year since that husk opened, he has become his own person, living alongside his fellow Birthday Children. Together, they learned. They trained. They fought .

At first, Omeyocan was anything but paradise. Poisons in the water, in the food, in the very air itself. And from the beginning, war with the Springers, the intelligent race that had lived in the jungle long before humans arrived.

Lethal threats on all sides.

Many had died.

But the Birthday Children endured. They persevered. They made peace with the Springers. They neutralized the jungle’s poisons. They tamed the planet.

For a few, precious months, Omeyocan had been what the prophet had promised—paradise. The Birthday Children settled in Uchmal, a sprawling, walled fortress city filled with massive buildings and ancient, towering ziggurats. They drove the predators from the surrounding jungle, leaving a vast, lush hunting ground teeming with game. They turned large plots into farmland.

Paradise promised… paradise made .

But it proved to be short-lived.

Perhaps it ended when the hatred began. Silent, invisible threads spreading through human and Springer alike, causing fighting, violence… murder. Or, perhaps paradise ended with the coming of the aliens, called from across the void by that same unseeable hatred. Called to fight, to kill… to destroy.

The alien ships had launched a devastating aerial assault, hurling a barrage of burning boulders that smashed centuries-old buildings, that left gaping, rubble- and corpse-filled craters all across Uchmal.

Then came the aliens themselves, fighter craft streaking through the skies, sowing death as drop ships poured armored infantry into the city streets.

Em led the Birthday Children to a bitter victory, clearing the city of enemy soldiers, only to find that the Uchmal attack had been a distraction. Tanks, artillery and tens of thousands of alien troops had landed deep in the jungle.

An overwhelming force that marched toward the city, killing anything and everything in its path.

The rocket roar is already fading.

Above the blazing tree line and billowing black smoke that blocks any view of Uchmal, O. Vanev watches a cluster of lights streak high into the dusk sky. Three larger lights, rising rapidly, heading for the stratosphere, chased by a dozen smaller lights. The three larger lights: the ships of his people, deserting the planet. The smaller lights: enemy fighters giving chase.

He knows what this means. He doesn’t know if B. Bureau, Y. Pajari and B. Marija truly understand, but reality will hit them soon enough.

Four people, barely into their second year of actual life, and they are all as good as dead.

Physically, they are all thirteen years old.

None of them will see fourteen.

“They’re leaving,” Bureau says. “How can Em leave us?”

Bureau’s young face is streaked with ash and mud, flecked with bits of dead leaves. He holds a hatchet in his right hand. His left hand holds nothing—it’s burned to a glistening, blistered, red and black claw that he keeps close to his chest. Haunted, empty eyes. In the last four hours, Bureau has faced death. He has killed.

All of them have killed.

They’ve watched their friends die horribly, screaming for someone to save them, screaming for mothers and fathers they have never known.

Vanev wonders if he will scream the same way when the Wasps come for him, when one of their bullets punches through him, like the one that killed S. Eadburg, or when one of their knives drives into his heart, like the one that killed J. Nikole.