Barrel of Monkeys

  Drunk Monkeys 5

  Barrel of Monkeys

  One can of whup-ass delivered courtesy of…the Drunk Monkeys.

  Gia Quick is an LA Sheriff’s deputy in Santa Clarita. She gets an emergency promotion to station chief after Kite, riots, and earthquakes bring the region to its knees. She knows the only solution to keep rioters and Kiters out is to blow the freeway and give citizens time to escape.

  Omega and Echo are on a recon mission when a mob ambushes them and they get separated from the rest of the Drunk Monkeys. They find Gia arresting—even after the short, feisty deputy arrests them. She needs a road blown and they can help, if they can locate the rest of their unit.

  Unfortunately, Kite hits close to home for Gia, and there’s nothing keeping her in Santa Clarita. But the military has one hell of a cover-up underway. When Gia opens this barrel of monkeys, she might find more than she bargained for…and she just might find love.

  Genre: Futuristic, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Science Fiction

  Length: 68,267 words

  BARREL OF MONKEYS

  Drunk Monkeys 5

  Tymber Dalton

  MENAGE EVERLASTING

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  ABOUT THE E-BOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED: Your non-refundable purchase of this e-book allows you to only ONE LEGAL copy for your own personal reading on your own personal computer or device. You do not have resell or distribution rights without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner of this book. This book cannot be copied in any format, sold, or otherwise transferred from your computer to another through upload to a file sharing peer to peer program, for free or for a fee, or as a prize in any contest. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. Distribution of this e-book, in whole or in part, online, offline, in print or in any way or any other method currently known or yet to be invented, is forbidden. If you do not want this book anymore, you must delete it from your computer.

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting

  BARREL OF MONKEYS

  Copyright © 2014 by Tymber Dalton

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-63258-405-2

  First E-book Publication: September 2014

  Cover design by Les Byerley

  All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

  If you have purchased this copy of Barrel of Monkeys by Tymber Dalton from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Tymber Dalton’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Tymber Dalton’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

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  DEDICATION

  For Hubby and Sir, who keep me sane and functioning and nonsociopathic. (Usually.)

  Also, a shout-out to some special people, some I’ve had the pleasure of meeting outside of the Interwebz, and some who still live only in my computer for now, but whom I hope to meet some day. LOL. Not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, but a start, at least. They’ve listened to me kvetch and rant and smack myself in the head. They’ve made me laugh, cheered me up, kept me going when I sometimes wanted to throw in the towel and just crawl into bed, and are a great bunch of people I’m proud to call friends for a variety of reasons.

  So hats off to Tara Rose, Trish Bowers, Kristina Galbert, Ekatarina Sayanova, Shellie Marshall, Karen Peacock, Honor James, Lori King, Nicole Morgan, Natalie Acres, Chris Walker, Cooper McKenzie, Jillian Hall-Schuler, and Jaden Wilkes. I lubs you all, maybe more than you all even know. (And not that I mean to leave anyone out, but I could literally write a whole book about all the people who’ve positively impacted my life.)

  And a special shout-out to all of my peeps in the Trybe. Thank you, all of you, for allowing me to do what I do. (Especially, as all of them know, I’m no longer suited for work that requires wearing pants on a regular basis.) Thank you for the friendship, for listening to me kvetch, for cheering me on, for buying my books, for all the times you’ve pimped me out, and for being the best readers in the world.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is book five in the Drunk Monkeys series and focuses on Echo and Omega. The books in the series are best read in order. All titles available from Siren-BookStrand.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  About the Author

  BARREL OF MONKEYS

  Drunk Monkeys 5

  TYMBER DALTON

  Copyright © 2014

  Chapter One

  “That damn, batshit crazy asshole fucker in charge there in Pyongyang is the one who stirred the shitpot. Then Beijing made him lick the goddamned spoon and nuked his fucking ass. Problem is, when they did that—not saying they weren’t justified, mind you—our first and best chance to reverse-engineer this clusterfuck went up in a mushroom cloud. All the rest of us could do was fucking bend over and pray for lube and a reacharound.”

  —Gen. Robert K. McCammeron (Our Last History? by Willard M. Sterling. Interview date May, 2143)

  “In the time since we first became aware of the virus, and the subsequent events that have followed, we’ve
come to understand that we have no idea why, much less how, they [North Korea] created it. Unfortunately, when Beijing wiped Pyongyang off the map, they also wiped out any hope we had of creating an effective vaccine in a timely manner to prevent transmission to a majority of the world’s population. It’s estimated that within another five years, over ninety percent of the world’s population will either be dead or infected unless we get lucky and figure it out.”

  —Dr. Arnold P. Almer, CDC (Our Last History? by Willard M. Sterling. Interview date April, 2143)

  “In terms of [Kite, the drug’s] addictive nature, it makes meth look like baby aspirin.”

  —Kimberly Coates, PhD, University of Florida (February, 2143)

  “Well, fuck.”

  —President Charlotte Kennedy’s reported reaction upon learning that China authorized the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea on July 29, 2142, in response to Pyongyang allowing thousands of people they supposedly infected with the Kite virus to flood across the border into China several days earlier.

  “The Drunk Monkeys? Those crazy motherfuckers don’t exist. And boy, are they good at what they do. Thank god.”

  —Gen. Joseph Arliss (June, 2143)

  * * * *

  Long story short…

  Welcome back to the beginning of the end of the world. It’s late June, and going on almost twelve months post-TMFU—The Massive Fuckup.

  When last we left the Drunk Monkeys, Los Angeles lay in a smoking heap of ruins, both from the growing riots and from an unprecedented devastating earthquake that rocked the entire basin area and surrounding valleys.

  Not exactly the ideal circumstances to try to run a clandestine research lab and discover a vaccine for the Kite virus, which has also taken a firm grip on the region and is rapidly spreading.

  The men—and now women—of the Drunk Monkeys SOTIF team are still off the grid and on the run, protecting three scientists on The List, scientists who are humanity’s best hope to stop Kite before it kills off the human race.

  I think we can all agree that’s a pretty reasonable plan. After all, the three scientists are part of the group who created the Kite virus in the first place. Albeit under duress, courtesy of the former North Korean government.

  Said government that no longer exists, thanks to China turning Pyongyang and other North Korean population centers into smoking, radioactive craters once they discovered the country’s fuckery.

  AKA TMFU.

  On another note, team member Doc contracted what appeared to be a milder and mutated version of Kite…and recovered. That gives the scientists hope that the virus is mutating to a less deadly form on its own in the wild, something they’d been working toward before TMFU.

  But the bad news is he never tested “blue” with the stick test used to quickly diagnose Kite infections, which means the test might no longer be valid due to virus mutations.

  And that’s a true downer.

  But another pressing matter awaits. At the end of our last installment, two of the Drunk Monkeys, Echo and Omega, were captured during a skirmish against a mob of thugs while running a scouting recon mission to map the group’s best path out of the region. Please indulge this narrator as we pick up the story starting the night before those events occurred, and take a look at them from a slightly different perspective.

  Shall we?

  Chapter Two

  Nooo one ever expects an impending apocalypse…

  Someone knocked on the door to the storeroom Gia Quick was currently using as her living quarters.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me!” she yelled at the unknown knocker. It had been less than an hour since she’d retreated to her tiny slice of personal real estate shortly after midnight, and it was the first bit of sleep she’d almost had in nearly seventy-two hours.

  “Sorry, Captain,” the young voice replied. “We need you.”

  At least she’d lain down completely dressed, except for her gun belt, which lay on the floor next to her. She angrily dragged her exhausted ass up and off the bedroll that had been her nest for the past week, grabbed her gun belt, and yanked the storeroom door open. She looked up into the young face of one of the deputies.

  Mark? No, Mike. Then again, at only five three, she pretty much had to look up into the face of everyone she worked with. The men, at least. Christ, he’s young. If she remembered correctly, he’d only finished academy training a few weeks earlier, was like twenty, maybe twenty-one. He didn’t even have a service sidearm yet. They’d been using him for administrative duties, traffic patrol, things like that.

  “What. Is. It?” she asked as she pulled her gun belt on again and got it buckled.

  His gaze dropped to the floor. They’d run out of surgical masks that morning and she hadn’t been able to get her hands on more of them for her people. “A National Guard unit just rolled in,” he said. “I tried to tell their guy to give you at least a couple of hours of sleep, but he said his orders were to report directly to you immediately upon their arrival.”

  She frowned. “To me? You mean to Chief Baynes.”

  His fingers ran through his short, nearly military haircut. “Um, yeah, about that. No one’s been able to locate him. We received orders twenty minutes ago from MP. You’re in charge. They broadcast it to all stations over the emergency channel. Whoever the highest ranking or tenured officer is at each station, they’re in charge.”

  MP was Monterey Park, the Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s headquarters.

  “Sheriff Anderson said that?”

  He shook his head, his gaze still on the floor.

  “Well, he’s our boss. So who issued the order if he didn’t?”

  “Traverson.”

  She blinked. That was the county’s assistant sheriff. “He’s two down the chain of command.”

  “Sheriff Anderson and Undersheriff Innings are…”

  She watched his Adam’s apple work up and down as he swallowed.

  Checking her tone, she reached out and patted the shoulder of his green polo shirt in a way she hoped came off as comforting. Hell, they didn’t even have proper uniforms for their newest recruits anymore. They were in their own jeans and casual uniform shirts with the badge embroidered on the chest. It was all they could scrounge up for them.

  “What’d the orders say?” she asked in what she hoped sounded like a kinder voice. She was so sleep-deprived at this point, she couldn’t tell.

  “That MP was in the process of being overrun and evacuated. If there is a ranking officer or deputy in a station, they are to take over command unless or until someone of higher rank comes in. Otherwise, the National Guard is ordered to take over if there are only civilian employees.”

  She was still stuck on the first part of his statement. “MP was overrun?” That didn’t even compute in her brain.

  He nodded. “Riots and facility damage from the earthquake. Reported Kiters in the mobs. And they said not to expect future messages from them via the MP office. If they can relocate, they will update later.”

  “Shit.” She didn’t realize she’d muttered that out loud until the young recruit locked eyes with her.

  He looked scared.

  Damned scared.

  That was okay, because she was now scared shitless herself. “All right. It’s okay. Where’s this guy who wants to talk to me?”

  “Up front, ma’am. Administration lobby.”

  She led the way down the hall back toward the lobby.

  The world has gone crazy. This can’t possibly be happening.

  Sure, they’d run through emergency and Homeland Security drills throughout the years. Then there was the damn anthrax attack a little over a year ago, right before China served Pyongyang a shit sandwich last July.

  But it was North Korea that went up in smoke, not North Compton. That was an ocean away, and so was Kite.

  Or, had been.

  Now reality was knocking on her back door.

  Literally.

  Well, on her front d
oor.

  She punched her security code into three different doors to get out to the lobby. She pulled up short when she caught sight of the guy in fatigues.

  He looked even younger than her deputy.

  Christ on a cracker.

  She was only thirty-six, which until a few weeks ago had felt relatively young when she was surrounded by a police force comfortingly full of men and women of varying ages.

  Now, it felt like she was the old hand, and they were desperately short-handed.

  Probably because that was exactly what was going on.

  She looked at the two stripes on his sleeve. “How old are you, son?” she asked before thinking about how insulting it might sound.

  “Twenty-five, ma’am.”

  Shit. “You’re the commanding officer? You’re only a corporal.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How many men you got with you, Corporal…?”

  “Corporal Nick Edison, ma’am. Twenty-five.”

  Terrific. “Where the hell they pull you in from?”

  “Redding, ma’am.”

  “You’re all from up there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. That was the northern part of the state, nearly all the way to Oregon. “Let me guess, everyone in your unit is your age or younger.”

  “Pretty much, yes, ma’am. Got a couple of ROTC students who graduated and haven’t shipped out to basic yet, and they told them to come with us.”

  Christ on a cracker.