Adam (Genetic Apocalypse Book 1) Read online

  Genetic Apocalypse

  Adam

  Boyd Craven Jr.

  The characters and circumstances in this story are a product of the author’s imagination, and represent no real person, living or dead. Any real public places or names are used only to build atmosphere for the reader’s mind.

  Copyright © 2015

  Boyd Craven, Jr.

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this story may be reproduced in any way without the prior written consent of the author.

  The suggested reading order for the Genetic Apocalypse saga starts with Adam, then goes to Adrian. These two brothers each get a series of short-read stories. The Homesteaders series will follow Adam’s life in Michigan; The Tribe series will follow Adrian’s life in Florida.

  The back-story of what happened in the world ten years earlier to get us to this point is in The Rise of Walsanto. Read that any time after ADAM. Then, to follow how the world fares after the first hybrid is born, and for the 10 years before the Adam story takes place, read Hannah, followed by The Guardians series.

  Prologue

  My name is Adam Powell. I’m thirteen years old now, and I’m a survivor. I’m probably one of the luckiest kids on the planet, but I’ve been through a ton of crap. A lot has happened since the day the dam broke. It was summer break of 2031. I was seven years old. For me, that day was the beginning of all this; the day my whole life got turned upside down. Heck, what am I saying? Everyone’s lives did, soon after that. The dam isn’t the only thing that got broken. The whole world started falling apart.

  Nothing is safe anymore, and no one can be trusted. The days of helping your neighbors stock up on food for the winter are history. These days, people kill their neighbors and take their food; if they have any. Most of the people have gone off to the FEMA centers where there is food. Terry and Cathy (the people I live with now) say we’ll never go there. They say that the military police would send Scott away to one of the hybrid camps, and they’d send me off to the genetic labs.

  I’ve learned a LOT in the last few years. I still can’t believe how dumb the adults were. When things got tough, I saw some really nice adults do some really bad things to each other for totally selfish reasons. I’m glad I wound up with the Edan’s. Their son, my foster brother Scott, is my mentor in the Guardian Program. He’s also my homeschool teacher. Scott is a great teacher. He only makes me learn things that I need to know for the way the world is today.

  Oh, and I guess that I should mention; Scott is one of the big kids, or hybrids, himself. He’s really getting huge, but he has a great attitude. He’s not mean at all. I’m pretty sure that it’s because his parents, our parents, treat him just like a regular kid, instead of like a dangerous freak. I mean, it’s not Scott’s fault that he was born this way.

  Scott’s main job as my mentor is to take care of me and keep me “normal.” He keeps me out of sight and protects me from the kidnappers. He says that we always follow the Guardian Program’s curriculum to the letter. My main job is to write my entire story; past, present and future, as well as to learn survival, rebuilding and repopulation strategies. I already have some experience in those things, from the time after the day that the dam broke, so I’m supposed to be prepared to help other survivors, and to preserve knowledge for future generations. The Guardians seem pretty confident that there will be future generations. Me? Not so much…

  I’ll do like they say though and write all about whatever goes on, so just in case they’re right, everyone will know what happened. Meanwhile, we stay here, out of sight, and wait…

  Chapter 1

  Adam:

  I was walking down the boardwalk from the barn on my way to the rabbit hutches, carrying my fishing pole and tackle box in one hand, my worm box and a three clawed rake in the other. I was gonna get me some worms from the rabbit poop underneath the hutches, and catch some fish off of the dock. This was gonna be the perfect day for it. It was one of those days when there was no wind; the air was heavy and smelled like the river, and a little bit like fish. The rough sawn wood was already dry and warming up in the morning sun. It felt good to the bottoms of my bare feet. Not slippery at all. The grass on either side was still wet with dew, and I knew without even trying it that it would still be chilly. One of the best things Dad had done for our fishing setup was to pick up enough free pallets to tear apart and use to build this. It went all the way from the house, down the hill to the barn, past the garden and down to the river. Plus there was a short detour to the left, between the barn and the garden to where the rabbits are on the way. They were tucked underneath the north side of a long double row of basket willows, in the shade. The barn, twenty feet up the hill, blocked the cold winds and snow coming from the other way in the winter. It was a good place for rabbits, and an excellent place for fishing worms. The only problem was; the chickens knew about it too. Otherwise there would’ve been a lot more worms.

  Just as I got to the left turn, from behind me at the house, I heard Mom yell, “Adam? Before you go getting all dirty, come go with me to Fenton please. I have some errands, and I need your help.”

  I stopped. My shoulders fell a little. No fishing. Crap.

  “Okaaay…” I answered. “Let me put all of this gear back awaaay…”

  “I’ll go with you instead Mom,” my younger brother Adrian yelled from our bedroom window, hopefully. “Let him go fish.”

  “I need you to help me move the pigs’ fence Adrian,” Dad hollered from the door of the barn. “They’ve got that area pretty well cleared up already. We just talked about this, boy. Adam, get a move on son. Your mother’s waiting.”

  I could hear Adrian, still mumbling his protest out of the window as I left the barn. I also heard Mom caution him on making Dad angry. That wasn’t a good thing.

  Our dad’s name was Howard Powell and our mom’s was Colleen. We lived a quiet, country life in a small community of mostly subsistence farmers and homesteaders near Argentine, Michigan. Some of us had market gardens too. It felt perfectly normal living that way to us boys, but then that’s all we’d ever known. We all worked really hard, in order to be self-sufficient, so we didn’t have to rely on money for too many things, especially our food. We were real careful about food now. We grew pretty much everything we needed to stock our pantry for the whole year, plus raised safe produce in our market garden to sell or barter for other stuff we needed on market day from others that we knew we could trust.

  “You have to wear shoes,” Mom reminded me, as we headed for the truck.

  I grabbed my sandals off the porch, jumped in the passenger side and put them on as she fired it up and turned down the long dirt drive out to the main road.

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  “School starts in two weeks Adam, and we have to get you a pair of shoes and a couple of things. I swear you’ve grown six inches over the summer.”

  “Aww, Mom! Couldn’t you just have picked them out? I hate trying on clothes…”

  I usually liked going with Mom to Walsanto Foods to buy things like coffee, salt, sugar, cocoa, canning jars and stuff, but I hated clothes shopping with a passion. They had everything there though. All kinds of cool things to look at. The fishing and hunting department was, of course, my favorite place to gawk. Once in a while I got to pick something out for us boys to share, or else Mom would get Adrian one of the same thing, except a different color, so we could tell them apart.

  “I sure wish Dad would let Adrian go with us sometime. He’d go nuts in the sporting goods aisles,” I told her.

  “Now honey, you know that I don’t agree with your father on that subject, but it’s not worth our quarreling over. People can b
e very rude in public places. Your brother is so different, and he has such a short fuse about it. Your father has our best interest at heart. He doesn’t want us having any trouble with strangers in town.”

  There wasn’t much of a chance of our having trouble with strangers where we lived, he was right about that. We were on five acres out in the middle of nowhere, where everyone had five or more acres, on a private drive off McCaslin Lake Rd, right on the Shiawassee River. It wasn’t a far drive to the cities of Linden and Fenton, but it was too far to walk. They had actual stores, restaurants, and even a couple of malls in both of those places. Where we lived; we had trees, gardens, chickens, rabbits, pigs, goats, the river, the swamp and lots of mosquitos.

  As we passed through Argentine, we saw half a dozen gray kids, older than me, standing around outside the door of the convenience store smoking cigarettes and horsing around. There were no cars in the parking lot. The store keeper was standing in the open doorway yelling and waving his hands for them to go away.

  “Like that…” Mom said, nodding her head at the scene as we drove by. “The poor man has no business because of them hanging out there.”

  “Why, Mom? They’re just kids.”

  “Adam, people are afraid of them. They grow so big, so young, and they’re always angry and hateful.”

  “They wouldn’t be angry if people treated them fairly,” I muttered.

  We passed the car-wash and some men were there boarding it up. A lot of businesses were closing up, especially ones that weren’t like a necessity. A little further down the road, just outside of Linden, Mom started to turn into the pharmacy to pick up Dad’s prescription, but she turned off her blinker and kept going, because there were two cop cars there with flashers on. The cops were putting two gray kids in the back of one, in hand-cuffs.

  “And that…” Mom nodded again.

  When we arrived at Walsanto Foods, the parking lot was full of cars. We could see the security patrol car slowly cruising the parking lot with its yellow flashing lights to let everyone know it was there. There were two armed security guards at the front door greeting people as they went in, and we saw several more inside roaming around as we shopped. Everything looked pretty normal there to me. After we found a pair of plain black shoes and two pairs of jeans, I was able to talk Mom into letting me get a slingshot for us boys to share. Adrian was gonna be pumped about that!

  Mom and I both avoided talking about the stuff we had seen on the way to Fenton at dinnertime that night. We knew that Dad would go off about it in front of Adrian, like he always did. I knew she’d tell him later that night after us boys were upstairs in bed. There were no secrets at our house, Dad always said, but even at seven years old, I already understood about timing.

  Adrian and I shot a ton of river pebbles with that slingshot over the next week. We got incredibly good at hitting what we aimed at within about fifty feet. It was fun. Slingshots are great!

  Chapter 2

  Adam:

  I began tuning in on the adults’ conversations around me, something that I had never really paid much attention to before. I also noticed just how much interaction we did have with others, both inside of our community and not, directly and indirectly. Like Dad talking to Mr. Andersen, our closest neighbor, while we were picking beans to can. He told Dad that he had gone to Byron today to get a part welded for his tiller, and the man there told him that the day before, three gray boys had beaten the convenience store owner next to the welding shop badly, and took armloads of merchandise when they left. The welder-man said that all the store keeper had done was try to run them off when they started to come into his store, and they turned on him. Mr. Andersen said that everyone in Byron was walking around with a gun on their waist now. Then they talked about the ‘open carry law’ in Michigan, and how the Governor had done away with the need for a concealed weapons permit to wear guns in vehicles.

  The entire first part of our week was spent getting ready for the Wednesday afternoon farmers market in Linden. We started early Monday morning and worked most of our waking hours, until the second Dad drove the heavily loaded truck out the drive, headed that way. Usually, he got back home just after dark, and us boys were still up to help him unload. Lately, he’d been staying out so late that Mom had us off to bed before he came in. I did notice Mom’s worried gaze at Dad’s right hip, where he had his pistol holstered, as he left for Linden that Wednesday though.

  Over the next couple of weeks, we kept hearing similar stories wherever we went, about gray kids getting into trouble with the cops in all of the surrounding towns. Dad began putting his pistol on when he put his pants on. He wore it while we worked, and he wore it at the dinner table. He even wore it to church service that week at a neighbor’s house. So did quite a few of the other men I noticed, but they hung them up on the coat hooks inside the door as we went inside.

  One day at dinner, Mom said; “I have to run to Linden tomorrow morning to pick up a few things. Tomorrow is the last day of the sale. Do you want me to get anything while I’m there Howard?”

  “I’d rather that you not go to town without me anymore dear,” he said.

  “Well, wouldn’t that be convenient for me?” she snipped. “Like it’s an easy thing getting all of us in the truck at once anyhow this time of the year. It’s hard enough just to get to worship service once a week.”

  Dad just shook his head and pushed away from the table. It was pretty quiet around there the next day when Mom got back from Linden…

  That week on Wednesday, Adrian and I were already in bed when Dad got back from the market. We heard him come in and sit down in the kitchen with Mom. Dad wasn’t exactly the quietest person in the world. He had a loud voice. I was just about asleep when I heard Mom raise her voice. She hardly ever does that, so I was instantly wide awake and slipped out of bed to see what was happening. Adrian had the same idea I guess, because we bumped into each other in the dark, as we headed to the hallway to investigate.

  “Shhh! Be quiet, so they don’t hear us,” I whispered. We snuck out of our bedroom door and tip-toed to the top of the stairs to listen.

  “… I don’t care,” Mom was saying. “I don’t like you using this as an excuse to wear that pistol everywhere you go all day every day Howard Powell. I don’t think it’s necessary, and I don’t think it’s safe. Do you want to shoot somebody or something?”

  We exchanged looks of disbelief. Mom was really mad!

  “Of course I don’t want to shoot anyone, Colleen! What’s gotten into you? The times have changed. It’s dangerous out there these days. Everywhere we go, those damned gray kids run around causing trouble. Alone, they’re hateful enough, but when they get together in packs of their own kind; they’re bolder, and flat out dangerous!” Dad yelled.

  Hearing him say that made Mom cry. It made Adrian cry too. It made me mad at Dad to hear him say that, because Adrian was gray. Mom, Dad and I were white; Adrian had been born after Dad had begun to change from eating foods affected by Walsanto Seed’s genetically modified grains on market days while he was there. I guess he must have forgotten, because Mom was real careful that we didn't eat any of it at home. Still, Adrian was born gray, through no fault of his own.

  Now, Mom was changed even more than Dad. When I asked her about it in private once, she told me that the doctor had explained to her that Adrian’s genes had passed to her body through the amniotic fluids, or something like that, when she was pregnant with him. She explained to me that I had to be careful to never touch any blood or any kind of bodily fluids from any affected person, bird or animal, including her, Dad and Adrian so I wouldn’t get it, because so far, I didn’t have it. There weren’t many people who didn’t have it. The easy way to tell was by looking at their skin or their eyes. If their hair or feathers were falling out and their skin was getting smooth looking and gray, they had it. The easiest way to tell though was by their eyes. Every creature that had it got bright green shiny eyes. She taught me how to test meat before I
touched it or ate it too, with the test swabs. They looked like little cotton swabs on a paper stick, but they turned green if whatever you touched them to was affected by the GG-Factor. The swabs were cheap, and you could get them anywhere, but they were one thing that we couldn’t make for ourselves. We had to buy them.

  “I hate him,” Adrian whispered to me. “It’s not my fault I’m this way, it’s his!”

  We snuck back to our room, not wanting to hear any more. I hugged Adrian and we sat down on my bed talking. I told him that I didn’t care one bit about that stuff, that all I knew was he’s my brother and I love him just like he was. We both fell asleep on my bed that night. Adrian cried for a really long time first though.

  We never told Mom or Dad that we had heard that night, but after that it was all downhill between Adrian and Dad. They were always at each other’s throat. If they were in the same room, they were at it. Dad got really rough with him. Mom would try to get between them, and more than once Dad pushed her out of the way roughly, while going after Adrian. Dad had never done anything like that to Mom before.

  Just shy of his seventh birthday, Adrian took his first swing back at him. Dad had cuffed him upside the head twice for talking back, and when Adrian didn’t be quiet he slapped his face, splitting his lip badly. Adrian let out a war whoop, stood up and let fly. He knocked Dad out cold with one wild, awkwardly thrown punch.

  Boy, did Mom light into Dad for what he had done to Adrian’s lip when he got up. She sent him outside with no sympathy at all. She took Adrian to the bathroom and cleaned up his lip and put butterfly stitches on it, made out of white tape. She sent both of us to our room, where we stayed the rest of the day. We heard them fighting and quarreling more than we ever had that day. We even heard Mom swear. Mom never swore…