The Demon Plagues
David VanDyke
The Demon Plagues
Plague Wars Series - Book 2
by
David VanDyke
The Demon Plagues
Plague Wars Series - Book 2
Smashwords Edition
Published by David VanDyke
Copyright 2012 David VanDyke
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62626-013-9
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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
Prologue
Online Excerpt – Eden Plague History For Dummies by B.B. Larsen
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Interlogue
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Epilogue
About David VanDyke
Connect with David VanDyke
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my friends and fellow authors Vaughn Heppner and B.V. Larson, for their encouragement, for persevering and showing me the way. Check out their awesome books.
Thanks to my readers – my lovely wife Beth, my father Chet, my friend and fellow author Ryan King, and the members of our little writing group - Jordan Millner, R. Brian Roser, and Duane Lee, talented authors all - for their excellent critiques; their feedback has made me a better writer and this book a better novel.
Thanks to my friend and Master Armorer Aaron Dearborn for his discussions and advice on gun terminology.
Thanks to my Baghdad buddy and bubblehead (submariner), CAPT Eric Jabs, USN, for his reality check on attack-submarine warfare. There’s nothing like being under fire in a foreign land to turn two very different men into friends.
Thanks to CL Smith who put together the cover design. You can find him at:
www.GoOnWrite.com
The Demon Plagues is Book Two of the Plague Wars series. It is not a stand-alone story; the reader may find it hard slogging without reading the first book: The Eden Plague.
Books by David VanDyke
Plague Wars Series
The Eden Plague - Book 1
The Demon Plagues - Book 2
The Reaper Plague - Book 3
The Orion Plague - Book 4
First Conquest - Novella, coming April 2013
Comes The Destroyer - Book 5, coming Spring 2013
Other Works
Unfettered
Low Justice
For more information visit http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/
Prologue
Infection Year Ten.
Alan "Skull" Denham put his eye to the sight of his venerable Barrett sniper rifle. Mexico City was smoggy as ever; he could just barely see his target area. The fascist United Governments of North America hadn’t done any better than the old Mexican regime had in cleaning the place up. Annexation of Mexico and Canada by the former US had proven to be the proverbial anaconda swallowing the buffalo; the process seemed inevitable, but very, very slow.
Skull was indigestion.
The cold logic of insurgency dictated that he kill as many northerners as possible and spare the locals, sowing distrust between Latinos and gringos. When he did, government cracked down, locals protested and rioted and bombed.
He loved it.
This target was special: a Security Service Psycho officer, one of the tiny percentage of infected humanity that the Plague turned evil…or at least narcissistic. Most people considered the two the same.
Like many low-level Psychos in the Unionist-Party-dominated UG, this one led an SS death squad, searching out the UGNA’s enemies, criminal or political, real or imagined.
Crosshairs drifted downward to rest on the norteamericano. Skull inhaled, then let his breath out most of the way and paused naturally. His finger gently squeezed the trigger, surprising him with the sharp report. All well-aimed shots were unanticipated; that was a secret of the sniper, especially for shots like this at over eight hundred meters.
He didn’t have to see the Psycho fall, didn’t have to observe his head explode like a ripe melon. Zenlike, as soon as the bullet left the barrel he had felt the shot was good. Skull was already moving from his position before the first sirens wailed and the SS airmobile reaction team spun into the air.
He slid the weapon into the beat-up guitar case, barely large enough to contain the gun. A sombrero settled onto his head, completing his mariachi costume. With his dark eyes and deeply-tanned face wrinkled from a lifetime of outdoor exposure, he became just another local musician heading to a concert. His Apache grandfather had bequeathed him the ability to tan darker than any ordinary white man, and he blended in among the South and Central Americans with ease. Down the stairs, off the roof of the building and into the slums, in two minutes he had disappeared among the bars and cantinas and squalid apartments.
Helicopters pummeled the air overhead, too late. The crowds on the dirty streets hid him, one among many, as he made his way to his dwelling.
In his tiny rented room he searched his own face, dark eyes like pits in the cracked mirror. Almost fifty now, he was resigned to the aging as long as he could keep the hate alive. He nursed it like a beloved child; the killing gave his life meaning. Perhaps someday the fear of age and infirmity would tempt him to accept the emasculating Eden Plague virus that had upended his world.
But not today. Today he had filled his cup of death. Today he was whole.
Water on his face, on his hands. In the fading light coming through the cheap curtains it turned to blood, but he ignored the sight by long practice. He reached for a bottle of mescal. “Arriba, abajo, al centro y pá dentro,” he murmured, and then drank a slug from the neck. The traditional toast of ‘up, down, center and in’ seemed to make the s
moky liquor taste better.
Opening the guitar case, he gently removed his exquisite rifle. Before he stripped it down and cleaned it, he took out a knife and made a thin hash mark at the end of the row on the stock.
His fingertips touched the four hundred and fifty-five tiny indentations, one for each kill with the weapon. The first ninety-six had been the enemies of his country, back when he had a country, back when the United States was something to believe in. He’d killed in Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and countless other places.
The rest of the marks…those were personal. Payback for his old commander Zeke, payback for hacker Vinny, payback for the innocents in the death camps and for the other millions murdered by the chickenshit jackbooted thugs of the Unionist Party and the United Governments, those that had corrupted his flag, stole his Constitution, and murdered all he held sacred.
Who needs sex, he thought, when killing is so much more satisfying.
Closing the knife, he began to lovingly service his weapon.
Online Excerpt – Eden Plague History For Dummies by B.B. Larsen
Infection Day. Daniel Markis looses the Eden Plague in over one thousand cities around the world. US employs nuclear weapons against its own citizens in an effort to control the Plague; President declares martial law. Propaganda claims the infected become mentally ill; Homeland Security begins immediate arrest of Eden Plague 'Sickos', quarantining them in camps.
Infection Year 1. Wars and chaos break out across the globe. More than fifty nuclear weapons used in various conflicts. World economy teeters on the edge of collapse. The North American Unionist Party, formed from extremist groups in the US, explodes in a grass-roots fascist movement driven by fear. The Unionists sweep Congressional and State elections. Internment camps for Plague carriers grow and multiply in the US, Russia and China. Nations with Eden Plague-infected leadership become havens for refugees and declare themselves Free Communities under Chairman Daniel Markis. Russia reconstitutes the Soviet Union, re-annexing the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Central Asian republics. China annexes Mongolia, conquers Taiwan.
Infection Years 2-3. Unionists seize the USA in a coup. The Unionist-controlled US annexes Canada and Mexico to form the United Governments of North America. The Big Three – the UGNA, the New Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China – declare the Free Communities ‘Enemies of Mankind’ and ‘Bioterrorists.’ Eden Plague concentration camps, slave labor and extermination expand in the Big Three as carriers lose all civil rights and are declared ‘enemies of the state’. The Big Three continue to use atomic weapons to punish or pressure FC nations into compliance with their anti-Eden policies. Many mid-level powers – India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the European nations – declare neutrality and independence from either side, but secretly oppose the superpowers and cooperate with the Free Communities.
Infection Years 4-10. The New Cold War settles in as major conflicts burn out. The Neutral States Union forms in Geneva, Switzerland, based on the bones of the old UN and NATO. Neutral States tolerate Plague carriers but their leaders and military remain largely uninfected. The NSU coordinates political, military and economic pressure to oppose Big Three interventions, and extends its nuclear deterrent to cover the Free Communities. Big Three impose extreme border security measures and expand their security apparatus, becoming repressive police states.
-1-
Colonel Tran Pham "Spooky" Nguyen, Free Communities Armed Forces, checked the action on his well-worn P90, ensuring for the tenth time that it was ready to function: ready to pepper his opponents with Needleshock rounds, the apex of FCAF nonlethal-weapons technology.
Each tiny ultra-high-velocity discarding-sabot shell accelerated a narrow penetrator to over five thousand feet per second, able to defeat most body armor. The needle contained a highly-charged capacitor that dumped enough electricity into the target to put him out cold. Combined with the ablative Eden Virus coating, it was the most effective small-arms ammunition the FCAF had. As long as the user was careful to keep his shots away from the enemy’s head and heart, it was nonlethal. Every wound would initiate the Eden Plague cascade, immediately organizing the infectee’s body to begin healing thousands of times faster than normal, making them into Edens.
This had led to the absurdity of enemy-issued body armor that deliberately did not protect the head and heart of ordinary troops; their political masters preferred a dead soldier to a converted one. As a result, enemy morale was usually low.
Spooky looked around at his team, eight people crammed into a small submersible and crated inside a standard high-cube intermodal shipping container. The carefully-shielded box was designed to appear to any scanners to hold high-quality electronic cabling; in reality the material was mere camouflage that hid the men and the mini-sub from prying technological eyes.
The team felt a thump as a crane lifted their container off its stack inside the Maersk cargo ship and placed it onto a robotic carrier on shore. The spidery vehicle followed its electronic trails in a carefully-orchestrated dance around the Port of Hawaii transshipment system, to join in a queue of its fellows waiting to load onto the United Governments of North America-flagged hydrofoil freighter Stetson. When the robot attained the front of the line, it placed its container gently onto the tarmac, precisely one meter from the adjacent box, and scooted back down the automated roadways to its next assignment.
Shipborne trade still flowed, the lifeblood of the world economy. Though the restrictions and checks were repeated and onerous, vessels from all over the world loaded and offloaded goods through Port of Hawaii.
The team tried to relax in the dimness of a glowstick taped to the overhead of their mini-sub. They had checked their weapons repeatedly, they had meditated and dictated family messages into memory chips, they had told stories and read or listened to books on their readers, they had watched movies, and they had slept. And twice each day they put on their virtual reality goggles, set down their weapons, picked up motion-controllers, and ran through the mission in VR space. It had been a long six days, and it would be one more before they could move.
Picking them up from the tarmac, the crane on the tender swung the metal box through the air to be deposited in the narrow hold of the Stetson. Other containers soon joined them, and any concerns about discovery evaporated.
One more day. The six men and two women wiggled in their seats, seeking comfort that would not come.
Spooky let them sleep while he ran through the mission on his own glasses once more to fend off creeping claustrophobia. It would be tricky, and it would be dangerous, but if they succeeded, they would change the course of the sputtering, back-and-forth conflict between the Free Communities and the Big Three.
After fighting one sort of war or another for many decades, first against the Communist government of Vietnam, then for the US Special Forces, the thought of peace, political or personal, had seemed just a remote dream.
Until now.
Hours later a feeling of motion alerted them to the ship’s departure, heading for New Zealand and, unbeknownst to its crew, for an open-ocean rendezvous designated by nothing more than a set of encrypted GPS coordinates.
-2-
Rick Johnstone opened the office door without knocking. “Mister Chairman, they just struck Kinshasa.”
Free Communities Council Chairman Daniel Markis’ blood ran cold. “Elise?” he asked.
“Just fine, sir. She left a few hours before. All the staff did, when the warning came in. They’re on their way to the facility in South Africa.”
“Thank you, Rick. You can go. Tell Millicent to hold my calls and visitors for a few minutes, please.” Another few thousand civilians dead, collateral damage from the UGNA’s ‘precision’ strikes. Markis put his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes. The latest atrocity weighed on his soul. He told himself he was not responsible, but the accusing serpent in his head hissed, Liar!
He thought he had gotten rid of that thing when the Eden Plague healed his body a
nd his brain. But the virus could only fix organic issues; he had lived with the snake for too long before his infection to lose it that easily.
He stared at the deep crimson beret that sat on the shelf above his desk. It was symbolic, a replacement. His original one, the one he had kept with him everywhere he went, from Afghanistan to Mogadishu, from Iraq to Yemen, was lost, probably in some UGNA evidence vault. But the symbol had a powerful meaning for him. The metal flash on its face showed an angel with her arms wrapped around a globe, and the motto underneath: That Others May Live.
There are worse things to dedicate a life to.
Markis shook himself out of his funk. I am the Chairman, damn it! He was the closest thing the Free Communities had to a leader, or at least a figurehead. When he proposed something, it usually got done with a minimum of wrangling, as long as it made some kind of sense. The Eden Plague had not only wiped out disease, it had wiped out a lot of petty-mindedness and self-interest. But it hadn’t wiped out politics; it had just made the struggles a bit more honest.
He steeled himself to address the Council once again. Opening his door he called, “Millicent, please ask Rick to set up a video teleconference with all available Council members at 1400 hours.” Two PM was a good time for videoconferences over the secure link, from Eastern Standard Time in the Americas. Asians and Australians would be up already, or at least could be, and Europe and Africa would not be abed yet. That gave him half an hour to get some lunch.
Walking down the hall to the little cafeteria, he got himself a big bowl of stew and some iced tea. He thanked the server and went over to look out the second-floor window at the view of the town of Tunja, Colombia Free Community. It was an unlikely place from which to run a world resistance movement; that was exactly why he did.
