Adrian Smith - The Rule of Three

First, I would like to again take this opportunity to thank Nicholas Sansbury Smith for encouraging me to write in his Extinction Cycle world. You continue to amaze and inspire me every day. Thank you so much.

To Frances, thank you for your words of encouragement and reading every single draft.

To Nathan, for reading an early draft and making some vital suggestions, thank you.

To Rodger for your humour and keeping me sane. Barbara and Phyl, thank you for reading the first draft, and for your encouragement.

To the Street Team, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for your friendship.

To all my Beta readers, Lisa, Bill, Michael, thank you. To Col (Ret) Olson and author Steve Konkoly for your invaluable military RT input, and Susan for your medical advice. If you find any mistakes, they are entirely my fault.

To Laurel, you deserve a huge thank you for taking a rough pile of notes and turning them into something readable.

Most importantly, thanks to the readers for taking a chance and reading my novel set in the Extinction universe created by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. I wanted to tell a story from a New Zealand point of view set in this world and I tried to imagine what would happen if an everyman and everywoman were caught up in an apocalypse.

We are a small nation with a small, but determined and proud, armed force. We have stood by our British, Australian and American brothers in times of war. As a whole, we don’t have a lot of firearms readily available, but they are there, mainly for hunting purposes.

Because this book is set in New Zealand, I have used UK spelling and there are some Kiwi phrases. If any of them confuse you, please email me for an explanation.

All the place names and locations in this book are real, and I encourage you to look them up on Google Maps. Or better yet, come and visit our beautiful country. Perhaps I’ll take you hiking.

Fate is a theme in this book, and it is indeed a funny thing, because it was fate that led me to the Extinction Cycle via another book in 2015. Reaching out to Nicholas led me to a great friendship and his amazing books. Which has now led me to write my first book.

I would be eternally grateful if you could leave an honest review when finishing the book. Doing so will help me develop as a writer.

Thanks again for reading. Be sure to look out for the next adventures of Jack, Dee and Boss.

Dear Reader,

Thank you for picking up a copy of The Rule of Three by Adrian Smith. This is the first of a planned trilogy documenting Jack Gee and his struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic New Zealand. Originally published through Amazon’s Extinction Cycle Kindle World, The Rule of Three became a reader favourite in the Extinction Cycle series side stories, and transcended to far more than fan fiction. Unfortunately, Amazon ended the Kindle Worlds program in July of 2018 with little warning. Authors were given a chance to republish or retire their stories, and I jumped at the chance to republish The Rule of Three through my small press, Great Wave Ink. Today, we’re proud to offer The Rule of Three in paperback, audio, and to readers outside of the United States for the first time ever.

For those of you that are new to the Extinction Cycle storyline, the series is the award winning, Amazon top-rated, and half a million copy best-selling seven book saga. There are over six thousand five-star reviews on Amazon alone. Critics have called it, “ World War Z and The Walking Dead meets the Hot Zone .” Publishers weekly added, “Smith has realised that the way to rekindle interest in zombie apocalypse fiction is to make it louder, longer, and bloodier… Smith intensifies the disaster efficiently as the pages flip by, and readers who enjoy juicy blood-and-guts action will find a lot of it here.”

In creating the Extinction Cycle, my goal was to use authentic military action and real science to take the zombie and post-apocalyptic genres in an exciting new direction. Forget everything you know about zombies. In the Extinction Cycle, they aren’t created by black magic or other supernatural means. The ones found in the Extinction Cycle are created by a military bio-weapon called VX-99, first used in Vietnam. The chemicals reactivate the proteins encoded by the genes that separate humans from wild animals—in other words, the experiment turned men into monsters. For the first time, zombies are explained using real science—science so real there is every possibility of something like the Extinction Cycle actually happening. But these creatures aren’t the unthinking, slow-minded, shuffling monsters we’ve all come to know in other shows, books, and movies. These “variants” are more monster than human. Through the series, the variants become the hunters as they evolve from the epigenetic changes. Scrambling to find a cure and defeat the monsters, humanity is brought to the brink of extinction.

We hope you enjoy The Rule of Three and continue on with the rest of the Extinction NZ series, and the main storyline in the Extinction Cycle. Thank you for reading!

Three weeks without food…

Jack’s fevered mind chanted it like a Buddhist mantra, over and over. The proverbial rule of three. Problem was, Jack had no idea how long he’d been here.

When they scampered around, their bones and joints made strange, popping sounds. And when they came to harvest their human captives, their weird mouths made a sucking, smacking noise, like a child eating an ice cream on a hot day. Jack hated that sound. And the stench they exuded was disgusting, a rotten fruit smell. It reminded him of the Durian fruit he had tried once in a Thai market, in a happier time before hell had descended on Earth.

Three days without water…

The agony of the deep gash in Jack’s thigh kept him semi-conscious with moments of lucidity. Occasional screams cut through the warm damp air, jolting him fully conscious. His eyes would snap open and blink rapidly as he hoped that his predicament had changed, but the surrounding darkness and environment remained the same.

Jack was stuck fast to a wall with some sort of gluey membrane. He struggled against it in sheer terror and panic. He could only move his arms and legs a few measly inches, no matter how hard he fought. Each time he managed to stay awake for a few minutes, he would strain against his bonds, but whatever it was that held him, it had the strength of steel.

Three hours without shelter…

A humming sound in the background reminded Jack of high-powered electric lines, while the cold, damp hardness of concrete pushed into the back of his legs and head, chilling him to the bone. The constant scurrying, and the smacking sounds the creatures made, haunted his fragile psyche, making him flinch whenever he heard them. Never a religious man, Jack found himself praying to any higher power he could think of. There are no atheists in a foxhole. Well, what about down here in the dark?