#BLOGGING #FREEREAD #ZOMBIEAPOCALYPSE

Posted
by Dell 11-23-23

Rainy
afternoon here in New York. I hope your weather is good wherever you
are. I have spent a lot of this T-Day working on web sites instead of
finishing my house and getting back to writing. I complain, but it
all has to be done. I am going to keep this short, don’t eat too much turkey, pie, potatoes, squash and other goodies, and l will leave you a
with a free excerpt from the first Earth’s Survivors Settlement Earth
book…

Earth’s
Survivors Settlement Earth

Copyright Wendell Sweet. All Rights Reserved

This
book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not
be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please point them to this blog entry.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This
is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents
depicted are products of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to
actual living persons places, situations or events is purely
coincidental.

ONE

High summer: Plague year one

Base Ostega

Northern Canada

1:00 am

The first quake had been minor, the
last few had not. The big one was coming. The satellite links were
down, but Doctor Alan Weber didn’t need to have a satellite link up
to know that. He touched one hand to his head, the fingertips came
away bloody. In any other circumstances he would be hurrying to get
his head wound taken care of, but these were not just any
circumstances. The entire world was ending and it was a miracle to
him that he had made it through the complex above and down into the
control room of the facility before it had been supposed to
automatically lock down. His office was a shamble, but his secretary
had met him in the hallway having ridden out the quakes in the supply
room, between the tall rows of steel cabinets: Together they had made
their way to the office.

All main-line Comm links were down,
probably because of the loss of the satellite systems. Underground
back-up cable Comm: Down. The facility was in bad shape, and he was
not kidding himself, there was no help on the way. No hope of
reaching the surface and the worst was not yet here. He was probably
lucky to have made it down the six floors to his office from where he
had been. There was an automatic lock-down program that would shut
down the entire facility within seconds of an attack or catastrophic
event, it had failed somehow.

He laughed to himself, he had, had
to lock it down manually once he had made his way in or else it would
still be open to the world. He had blown up the two main entrances to
the facility, sealing his own fate as he sealed it off from the world
above.

He had spent the last several years
here in the Canadian wilderness running the chemical countermeasure
unit at the base. He had worked on a top secret virus designed to
prolong human life in cases of extreme deprivation: Nuclear attack,
war and other unlikely scenarios. He had spent the last two weeks
working up to this event from his subterranean office complex. All
wreckage now. Still, he had sent operatives out from here three days
ago to do what they could to seed the virus: Following his final
orders sent down through some now probably non-existent chain of
command. He had heard absolutely nothing since, and believed that was
because there was no one left in command any longer.

The virus was so secretive that no
one beyond the base knew the true nature of it. Even the politicians
that passed bills for funding while looking the other way had not
truly known what they were funding. A couple of well placed dollars
in the pocket could buy a great deal of silence.

Several Army bases had secretly
been infected and studied. The commanders of the armed forces had,
had no idea that anything was being tested on their men. The troops
had done well, surviving their training with little food and water
much better than they usually did, but over the next week nearly
every bird in the area had died. Some side effect they had not been
able to ferret out.

That virus build had also been
crippled. It had a built in self destruct mechanism to kill the virus
after a short amount of time. In fact that same version had been kept
as an antidote for the newest version which had no such mechanism and
would go on reinfecting indefinitely.

The entire virus design and its
capabilities were top secret. Top secret. And usually Top Secret
meant dozens of people knew, but this time it had meant that it
really had been Top Secret. Withheld from the public, and even those
in charge for years had known nothing of the true nature of the
virus.

Last week had changed it all. Last
week the news had come down from the finest scientific minds that an
extinction event was about to take place. Up to ninety percent of the
world population would likely be killed off as events unfolded. It
was not a maybe, it was an absolute.

The public knew that there was a
meteor on a near collision course with the Earth. They had paid off
the best scientists to assure the public it would miss by several
thousand miles. A lie, but they had found that even scientists were
willing to look past facts if their own personal spin put a better
story in the mix. A survivable story, and so some had spun their own
stories without prodding. From there the internet had picked it up
and run with it. From there the conspiracy theorists, and by the end
of the week the meteor was survivable. The story that the meteor
would destroy the planet was now a lie made up by commanders of the
rebel alliance in the Middle East to take the focus off their
actions, the public believed what it wanted to believe.

The truth was that the meteor might
miss, barely, a near miss, but it wouldn’t matter because it would
contribute to a natural chain of events that would make a meteor
impact look like small change.

The big deal, the bigger than a
meteor deal, was the earthquakes that had already started and would
probably continue until most of the civilized world was dead or
dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic
activity that had never been seen by modern civilization. And it had
been predicted several times over by more than one group and hushed
up quickly when it was uncovered. The governments had known. The
conspiracy theorists had known. The public should have known, but
they were too caught up in world events that seemed to be dragging
them ever closer to a third world war to pay attention to a few
voices crying in the wilderness. The public was happier watching
television series about conspiracies rather than looking at the day
to day truths about real conspiracies. The fact was that this was a
natural course of events. It had happened before and it would happen
again in some distant future.

In the end it hadn’t mattered. In
the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The
reality, Alan Weber liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You
couldn’t dispute fact. You could spin it, and that was the way of the
old world, spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: The bare
facts.

The bare facts were that the
Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare
facts were that the earth quakes had begun all around the world, and
although they were not so bad here at the northern tip of Canada, in
other areas of the world, in the lower states, in foreign countries,
third world countries, the bare facts of what was occurring were
devastating: Millions dead, millions more would die before it was
over, and this was nothing new. The government had evidence that this
same event had happened many times in Earth’s history. This was
nothing new at all, not even new to the human race. A similar event
had killed off most of the human race some seventy-five thousand
years before. The space race had been all about this knowledge. A
rush to get off the planet and settle elsewhere on an older, more
sedate planet before something that had already happened time and
again happened once more.

The virus was an answer, help,
solution, but Alan Weber was unsure how well the solution would work.
It was, like everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too
little too late. And it was definitely flawed, but he had temporarily
pushed that knowledge away in his mind. Even now as he sat and waited
for the end, which would surely come, out in the world operatives
were disbursing the virus that could save humanity.

He thought for a moment, “Or
destroy humanity,” he added aloud.

There were no guarantees, and there
was strong evidence to suggest the designer virus did its job a
little too well. Designed to help prolong life, there were rumors
that it could raise the dead. Some scientists who had worked with the
virus in the now destroyed facility had nicknamed it Lazarus.

Alan had seen evidence to support
the rumors that it could raise the dead, or the near dead for that
matter. He had been present when a test subject that had been
pronounced dead had come back. Weak, half crazy, but alive again.

As the hours and then days passed
the subject had become stronger, seemed to be learning from the
situation it was in. The decision had been made to kill it: Even that
had been difficult to do. Even so, he knew that it was the only hope
for society. There was nothing else. The military machine was dead.
The American government was dead. The president, from reports he had
read, assassinated by her own guards.

While most of America had tracked
the meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living
rooms, and had been side tracked by all the trouble in the Middle
East, he had kept track of the real events that had even then been
building beneath the Yellowstone caldera and many other places
worldwide.

Yesterday the end had begun, and
the end had come quickly. Satellites off line. Phone networks down.
Power grids failed. Governments incommunicado or just gone. The
Internet, down. The Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all,
and the gravitational pull from its mass had simply accelerated an
already bad situation.

Dams burst. River flows reversed.
Waters rising or dropping suddenly in many places. Huge tidal waves.
Fires out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava
flowing from Yellowstone. Civilization was not dead; not yet wiped
out, but her back was broken.

In the small military base of
Ostega that had rested above the defense facility near the shore of a
former lake, the river waters that fed it had begun to rise: The
chemical countermeasure unit, several levels below the base in the
limestone cave structures that honeycombed the entire area, had begun
to succumb to the rising river waters. By the time the surviving
soldiers from above had splashed through the tunnels and into the
underground facility, they had been walking through better than two
feet of cold and muddy water. Shortly after that the pressure from
the water had begun to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels
below the base that fed the unit: That damage had been helped along
by small after-shocks.

Alan Weber watched his monitor as a
wall gave way and the main tunnel began to flood. It was only a
matter of an hour at the most before the water found its way to him.
He sighed and then relaxed back into his chair, reached down and
pulled the lower file drawer open, and lifted out a partial bottle of
scotch. He leaned forward and Bobbi Trevers cleared her throat in the
silent observation room. Weber smiled and turned toward her.

“I suppose you have been
watching, Bobbi?”

She only nodded.

He nodded back. “Share a drink
with me?” He turned away, not waiting for her words of agreement.
He heard her settle into a chair next to him as he pulled two plastic
cups from the sleeve in the bottom drawer, left over from the
Christmas party last year, and began to pour.

“I don’t usually agree to
drinking on the job, but this is a different set of circumstances,
isn’t it?” His eyes met her own as she nodded weakly.

“It’s almost over, isn’t it
Doctor Weber?”

“I’m afraid so… Call me Alan,
Bobbi… Is it okay that I call you Bobbi?” He finished pouring the
scotch into the plastic cup. He had stopped at just an inch in the
bottom, wondered why and then filled the cup half way instead.

North America

Far above the Earth, satellites
continued to orbit importantly.

The north American continent lay
sleeping far below. A wide inland sea had formed in the middle, fed
by a huge river that stretched from the former Hudson bay to the
middle of the continent. Small in places and easily crossed, no more
than a river: Wide in other places as if it truly were a sea.

The state of Alabama had been
divided in two along with most of the lower half of the former state
of Florida. What resulted was the loss of the lower, southern half of
the state. What remained now sat nearly forty miles out in a shallow
bay that was quickly turning to sea: An island, the water surrounding
it growing deeper as time moved on and the gulf reclaimed the land.

The upper north eastern section of
the continent had already pulled apart and begun to drift. Although
it was imperceptible, the two land masses were inching away from one
another, and ultimately would be separated by a new ocean. And become
separate, smaller continents.

The eastern end of the former
United States, was also drifting away from the northern section of
Canada. The massive earthquakes had also severed the state of
Michigan, turning it into a virtual island.

Toward what had been the north, the
St. Lawrence river basin had widened, pushing the land masses further
apart. The Thousand Islands bridge spans had toppled, and slipped
into the cold waters. The other bridges that had once spanned the
mighty river had also succumbed as the river basin had split and
pulled apart.

The new continent had severed her
ties from Nova Scotia, as she had been pulled south and slightly
east, to begin her journey. Only the province of New Brunswick, and a
small portion of Quebec remained with the continent. The rest of
Canada was severed from them by the wide and deep river, more like a
huge lake in places, that surged from ocean to ocean.

Most of the north American
continent was now in a sub-tropical climate as well. The poles had
been displaced by the huge force of the multiple earthquakes and
volcanic blasts which were still ongoing. The old polar caps were
melting, and it would be thousands of years before they would once
again re-form in their new locations.

The run-off from the melting ice
would eventually reach the oceans and even more land mass would be
sacrificed to the waves before the polar caps would be re-formed.

There were only thirteen full
states left on the small continent. The two former provinces of
Canada, one of which was only a small fragment. And parts of five
former states, the largest being Florida.

Before the dawn, fires could be
seen burning unchecked in many major cities, pushed with the help of
freak winds the flames continued in all directions, occasionally
fueled by chemical, and oil facilities, as well as numerous other
flammable sources they encountered. The world began its fall.

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