Reaper's Run - Plague Wars Series Book 1
David VanDyke
Reaper’s Run
Plague Wars Book 1
by
David VanDyke
Reaper’s Run
Copyright 2013 David VanDyke
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62626-017-7
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical or otherwise) without prior written permission and consent from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Books by David VanDyke
Speculations on the Eden Plague by B.B. Larson
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Excerpt of Skull’s Shadows by David VanDyke and Ryan King
Books by David VanDyke
Plague Wars: Decade One
The Eden Plague
Reaper’s Run
Skull’s Shadows
Eden’s Exodus
Apocalypse Austin
Nearest Night
Plague Wars: Alien Invasion
The Demon Plagues
The Reaper Plague
The Orion Plague
Comes The Destroyer
Forge and Steel
Plague Wars: Stellar Conquest
First Conquest
Desolator
Tactics of Conquest
Conquest of Earth
Star Force Series - with BV Larson
Outcast
Exile
Demon Star
NEW Galactic Liberation Series - with BV Larson
Starship Liberator
Indomitable – Coming summer 2017
Books by D.D. VanDyke
D. D. VanDyke is the Mysteries pen name for fiction author David VanDyke.
California Corwin P.I. Mystery Series
Loose Ends - Book 1
(Includes Off The Leash short story)
In a Bind - Book 2
Slipknot - Book 3
The Girl In The Morgue - Book 4
For more information visit https://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/
Cover by Jun Ares
Speculations on the Eden Plague by B. B. Larson – Online Excerpt
Greatness tries to change the world. Small-mindedness resists, reacts – and ordinary people get caught in the gears. Usually they are ground up and spit out, but sometimes, once in a while, they win through to change the world.
The long-awaited apocalypse arrived not with a bang but with a slow-motion, grinding crash. It began with irrational fear in the minds of men, a self-fulfilling prophecy of overreaction that brought the world to the stuttering brink of annihilation.
It started with a man named Aaronovsky, a secret Jew that kept his Talmud and his Torah behind a false panel in his miserable little apartment on a bleak biological warfare research base in the middle of Siberia. This one man had the courage to respond to anonymous messages that showed up on his computer and keep the conversation hidden from his Soviet masters.
Whoever was on the other end provided information on how to build a prototype virus that might save humanity: from illness, from death – perhaps even from itself. It was an amazing feat of genetic engineering, decades ahead of its time. Unbeknownst to him, this information, this communication, was of extraterrestrial origin – but that is another story.
For long years he used the knowledge, and the laboratory, to create what eventually came to be known as the Eden Plague. That he did it right under his supervisors’ noses was a testimony to his courage and determination. Unfortunately, he did not have time to complete his work. The virus he had made, though amazing, was imperfect.
No one living knows exactly what happened, but in 1989, politics intervened: the Soviet Union fell apart, and its technologies were stolen, its scientists and research trafficked to brutal regimes with oil money, and the almost-miracle disappeared into a black hole.
That is, until it surfaced in the form of some samples of tissue, a whole human head, and a canister of a virus, in an abandoned biological facility buried in the Iraqi desert. There it had waited until someone, probably local salvagers, found it.
From there its path wended murky, but eventually it fell into the hands of an ambitious CIA man, a spymaster in the classic mold – an old-moneyed New England dabbler named Jervis A. Jenkins III. He believed in putting wealth and power to use, and in this experimental biotechnology he saw a source of both.
Keeping the secret even from his own superiors, he created a small, closed corporation to investigate the germ that showed the potential to heal and to extend life. If harnessed, it would be of immeasurable value. Who wouldn’t give everything they owned to conquer cancer, AIDS, even old age itself?
But the so-called Eden Plague had a flaw – at least, from Jenkins’ point of view. Not only did it heal the body, but the brain and even mind as well. Test subjects changed for the better; their morality tended to improve as a so-called “virtue effect” took hold. Were the virus to be distributed, crime, drug addiction, selfishness and misuse of power would drop precipitously, and for those like Jenkins, this was a drawback they could not stomach. If corruption was stamped out, so would be his unchecked exercise of power over his fellow man.
Additionally, because the agent of change was a communicable disease, it could not be controlled. Easily transferred from person to person, in its present form it was useless for his selfish purposes. The virus had to be modified – “perfected” – to get rid of this virtue effect, and also its easy transmissibility. Only when it could be controlled, withheld for the elite who could pay, and held out like a carrot to the hoi polloi, would it be publicized.
Then the world would beat a path to his doorstep, cash in hand.
The elder Jenkins’ major mistake? Bringing in his son and namesake to manage the corporation. When Jervis A. Jenkins IV botched his attempt to recruit Air Force combat lifesaver Daniel Markis into the program, he set off a chain of events culminating in the Eden Plague spreading throughout the world.
But just like Jenkins, the national power structures, especially the people at the top, were not ready to allow such a revolution in their societies. The U.S. tried to burn the virus out with nuclear weapons on its own soil and that of others who could not retaliate, as did the Russians and the Chinese. Especially in these three superpowers, Eden Plague carriers, or “Sickos” as they were labeled, were hunted down, rounded up, locked away – or worse.
