Brian Steele - 4POCALYPSE - Four Tales of a Dark Future

“We have the serum, now,” Dr. Cameron said to us as we prepared to leave. I did not want to hang around. I wanted to go home. I wanted to rest with Kel and put together whatever the rest of our lives might be. “There are folks who could use it. It can still be of value.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“In Northern California. In Lakeport, on the southern edge of the Mendocino Forest, there’s a refuge. It’s one of the last bastions of human society. We’ve had some covert radio communications with them. Thyssen never knew.”

I lifted an eyebrow. At least there was a little backbone left in this brain bank, after all. “What are you suggesting? That we take the serum to them?”

“There was a recent outbreak of measles and there isn’t a better inoculation on the planet than Nanomere9. You might even be saving lives, in the long run.”

“We’ll think about it,” Kel said, taking my hand. “For now, we have other priorities.”

I allowed him to lead me to the elevator. He punched in the code and hit the Garage level button. When the doors opened and Harmon cleared his throat, it was to get our attention away from each other. I would have been embarrassed had I not felt so damned guilty for not remembering Kel in the first place. Fuck them all. I had some catching up to do.

Harmon gave us the keys to one of the Humvees and shook our hands. “You take care,” he said with a wink.

“Thank you,” I said to him. Then Kel open my door for me and I crawled into the truck’s passenger seat. “I can’t drive?” I asked Kel. He still had the shoulder wound, after all. I laughed out loud when he replied.

“After last time? No.”

As we drove away from White Sands, headed for Alamogordo, I could not help but think that there might be a future for us after all. For so long, I had just been doing what I needed to do to survive, and later what I had to do to deal with Thyssen. Now the future was wide open and I had no plans other than to see where it would take me. I glanced at Kel and felt a sense of release. A weight had been lifted. I knew my father would have been proud of me, not for killing the man who almost destroyed the world, but for following my gut and conscience.

Staring out the window, I watched the gypsum sands flow over the dunes of White Sands and I wondered to myself what Northern California looked like this time of year.

C.L. Stegallis the C.E.O. and a co-founder of Dark Red Press, as well as an author who writes modern, urban and paranormal fantasy. He was born in North Carolina but will always call southern California home. He spent ten years in the U.S. Army, as both an engineer and a linguist for Military Intelligence. He has written innumerable short stories and novellas. His first full-length fantasy novel, “The Weight of Night,” is receiving wonderful reviews. It is the first in his Progeny series of novels. His next series — Valence Of Infinity — will begin in 2012.

First I would like to thank CL Stegall for his incredible editing expertise — you are the best. Thank you.

Then to Brian Fatah Steele for the excellent design and the creation of the Last Pharmacist cover, I thank you.

Finally, I want to extend my special thanks to the folks at Dark Red Press for their contributions, suggestions, and incredible support in the making of The Last Pharmacist.

Jasmine Cooper screamed, “No!” when she and her partner banged through the door just in time to see another kid jab the syringe into his arm. The elastic tubing snapped just as he pushed the plunger. The drug of choice in the underground is a synthetic chemically made heroin, otherwise known as SCH, produced by the Last Pharmacist, a drug lord who is as elusive as the sun on a typical day above the underground city. One of thousands of cities built two or more years before the meteorite, Apophis, slammed into Earth and skidded across the Mediterranean through the Middle East and down to the Indian Ocean before heading back out into space and away from the earth’s atmosphere. The damage was devastating; the entire population at the point of impact and those in the path perished, and the fallout was nearly as bad. The earth lay in darkness for almost ten years before the sun finally broke through the heavy debris; but then the sun’s presence became sporadic as malefic storms continued their effort to cleanse the earth of the catastrophe.

Jasmine dropped to her knees and grabbed for the kid’s arm, a young small boy of about thirteen years old, grabbing at the syringe in hopes of removing it before the plunger hit the end of the tube. She was too late and he lay back with only the whites of his eyes evident as the drug raced through his body. His mind became numb. He never felt his heart stop. His last breath smelled of illegal distilled alcohol.

Realizing it was too late; Jasmine wiped the tears from her eyes and gently laid his arm across his chest. He was the fourth this week. Children either too young to remember what it was like to feel the sun on their face, or those who were born in the underground and never experienced the beauty of a fresh spring day. Kids bored, frustrated, with the life of a mole and left to their own bad habits and vices. They were the ones who lay victim to a drug that law enforcement failed to stop.

The best medical and scientific minds could not artificially provide the heath care that the sun gave the body, and the lack of that ‘taken for granted’ beam brought on depression, cancer, the increased susceptibility to heart attack, diabetes and other disorders. It was also, at least partly, to blame for the sky-high rates of multiple sclerosis that occurred in most cities. It wasn’t the total lack of sun causing the epidemic but the mere fact that living underground for too long drove the most rational person close to insanity, which gave the Last Pharmacist the advantage.

Jasmine looked up at her partner with pain in her eyes as if the young boy was family, and although she had never met him she still felt the family’s pain when they heard the news that the police were too late to save him. It was like that. One, sometimes two, out of five would lay in their own puke, if they lived that long, before authorities could get through the door.

“He changed the 911 code in his key pad,” Officer Long said as he stepped around the body. “I don’t understand how he was able to do it without setting off the alarm.” The doors in the underground cities were built strong enough to stop all imaginable impacts, and without a key card and code, it was virtually impossible to penetrate.

“It was on the net,” Jasmine offered in a tone just above a whisper. “The scanner found it last week but no one knows how long it was posted.”

Gendarmerie Police Officer Jim Long reached down and helped Jasmine to her feet.

“Oh, God,” Jasmine murmured. “I thought for sure we’d make it…”

“Jaz,” Officer Long whispered, “Most don’t survive. I don’t know where you get your information or how you know, but very few of these kids survive. Hell, Jasmine, most are found after someone reports them missing but yet you know before anything happens or before they’re reported and you save nine out of ten…”

She pulled a handkerchief from her sling bag and wiped her eyes, and then wiped it across her forehead as if wiping away the anxiety that came with these types of scenarios.