A Sample from Jubilee Year: A Technothriller (The Erelong Trilogy Book I)
CHAPTER 42
SKY PRESSURE
Storm shouldered the empty sports bags he had brought with him and walked up the path to the surgery entrance. He tried not to gaze up at the sky because it was giving him the creeps in a bad way. It reminded him of the flame-reddened haze above a bushfire.
He tapped the five digits into the keypad. It hardly mattered if the alarm went off since alarms were doing that all over town. What was one more among a hundred? Still, it felt like he was breaking-in. The lights flashed to verify the correct sequence and the lock mechanism disengaged. He turned the key and sprang through the door, quickly pulling it closed behind him.
The storage room was right where Franchette said it would be. He dropped the bags on the floor. This wasn’t going to take so long after all. His heart sank when he looked up at the shelves filled with neatly arranged boxes bearing multiples of scrawled labels; long words he didn’t recognize, and each box differentiated by type and measure. There were too many boxes on too many shelves. Finding everything on the list was going to be more difficult than he had imagined.
He told himself the less time he spent in town, the sooner everyone would be safe in a shelter, and that he would do his best. He decided to start with the largest items. At least the oxygen tanks were easy to find. It took longer to find the regulators, the masks, and hoses and carry holsters. Once he filled the sports bag with the heavy breathing equipment, he dragged it into the recep‐ tion. Back in the storage room he looked at the rest of his list and groaned. He was just getting started.
More than three hours had passed by the time he decided he was done. He saw that he had crossed off almost everything on the piece of paper Franchette had given him. He gazed down the list of pills, potions, lotions, vials, bandages, syringes, and scalpels. Good enough, he thought. It was not everything she requested, but he had given up on finding any more. It was going to have to do.
He stood beside the cash register and stared at the phone; surprised at the courage it was going to take. Perspiration dripped from the tip of his nose onto the Formica counter. He could see the droplets quiver on the polished surface.
Outside, the sound of rumbling was building in intensity. It was the noise made by a hundred jumbo-sized flaming arrow traveling overhead. Sonic booms shook the lightly built clinic and rattled the glass in the window frames.
He picked up the receiver and heard a dial tone. With electricity and phones still available the situation could not be as bad as it seemed. He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. It took only a single ring before he heard the voice he recognized instantly. Only it wasn’t quite the same as the last time he heard him speak.
“Mr. Boas?”
“Hello again, Storm.”
There was no longer a familiar local twang to the voice. It sounded remarkably free of an accent of any kind. It sounded as the creature looked—colorless.
“I need to ask you a question,” Storm said.
“Go ahead,” Martyn replied.
“Is that the plasma you were talking about that’s lighting the sky today? Because it doesn’t look rightl.”
The telephone line crackled, and he thought he had lost the connection.
“I have already told you everything you need to know,” Martyn said.
The air reverberated again with several loud booms. Each followed the other in quick succession.
“You are wasting time,” Martyn told him. “I want to know what’s happening.”
“You would like me to tell you everything will return to normal once they turn off the sound and light show. Isn’t that so?”
“You didn’t tell me the end of the world was due to begin the day I left Canberra!” Storm said, feeling rising dread.
“Earth can no longer defend itself from the impact of the intruder system,” Martyn said with a sigh.
“Those who would rule this planet struggle to hide the truth from its ignorant inhabitants. They know they are about to lose control and all their lies are being revealed.”
“We aren’t ready! I’m not!” Storm let out a sob. He fought to gain control, but he was very afraid.
When Martyn spoke again, it was as if from a great distance. Storm pressed the receiver harder into his ear.
“What did you say? I—I couldn’t hear you.”
“You need to drink something,” Martyn repeated.
“Okay,” Storm said, struggling to hold himself together.
“Switch on the intercom system and leave the receiver next to the microphone,” Martyn told him. “And try to breathe normally.”
Storm stepped back from the counter and spotted the small console beside the cash register. He flicked it on and heard the speakers in the corridor to the doctors’ rooms’ crackle into life. Somewhere in the circuit was a loose electrical connection. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to him except getting out of the building and out of Coona.
He saw that the office opened into a small kitchen. In a corner, a single sink stood against the wall. He turned the taps as far as they would go. They sputtered and coughed. He looked back at the waiting room and saw there was a water dispenser.
The large upended blue flask was empty but when he rocked it to and fro he heard liquid sloshing about inside the container. He held a paper cup beneath the tap and pulled the machine twenty degrees. There was enough water trickling out to fill his cup to the brim.
Martyn’s voice came over the speaker.
“It’s time to leave!”
The first gulp went the wrong way, and he coughed until he cleared his windpipe. The remaining water in the cup spilled over his chest. He pulled on the machine again. This time he was only able to half fill the cup, but he was able to swallow the contents.
“You didn’t tell me what comes next,” Storm said into the phone.
“I have told you all you need to know.”
“Tell me again!”
“It seems I expected too much of you.”
“What? Hello-hello? Mr. Boas? Martyn?” “I’m still here, Storm!”
“Alright, so I’m slow. I didn’t get that you explained everything!”
“Stop panicking. You know enough to save yourself and your group, and each hour you spend on the surface increases the danger you are in. I don’t have exact times to give you. I know the orbit of objects within the system is at this time taking them close to Earth. You must find shelter within two days! You have one more sunrise to find shelter, Storm. Consider the next few days, if can you survive them, as a practice run for the main event.”
Storm took a deep breath and steadied himself.
“One more thing.”
“Why not?”
“Davenport was going to make sure I told no one anything, wasn’t he? That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“You planned to have me killed before I talked to anyone. Like what happened to the others in the observa‐ tory. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“You’re a smart boy. You have gifts—your talents. And now you show me you are as stupid as the rest of them—Davenport is dedicated and as such he is useful. No, he was not planning to hurt you, and I never told him to do that. Do you really think I would expend all this energy on you only to have you killed on the way back home? Davenport’s time here is almost over. Yours is not. You and I may meet again. But if we do—no—when we do, we will both be nearing the end of our allocated time. Until then, Storm.”
Storm gathered up the backpacks. The bloody oxygen tanks were as heavy as hell! He shouldered the bags and launched himself through the open door. The orange light reflected off the sheen of sweat on his arms, just as it did off of the white paint on the walls of the clinic. He dared not look up as he stumbled, half dragging the bags toward the car.
A droning noise was building to an incredible pitch. The sound was similar to one he had heard months ago. The whole region heard it. Some said it sounded like a stick run around the rim of a large bronze bell. Others said it was more like a Tibetan singing bowl of a colossal size. Now it was so very loud it must have been amplified by the firmament itself.
His legs were shaking by the time he reached the car. Martyn’s final words repeated in his head.
“Keep moving. Make haste to your sanctuary.”
The awful grinding ceased as suddenly as it began. He let the bags down gently to the ground, not wanting to break the vials he had collected, and fumbled with the keys. There was the rumble of another meteor passing over the town. He lifted the bags onto the back seat and closed the door.
Champ was missing.
The mutt must have slipped out when he arrived. He slammed the door shut and jabbed the key into the igni‐ tion, but he paused when he heard a wet slopping sound near his feet. He looked at the floor in front of the passenger seat, and there under the dash with its nose pressed against the firewall was Champ.
The dog rolled its eyes in fear, licking the saliva that ran from its jowls and gave a long, pitiful howl.
“Hey, mate. We are going to make it out of here, I promise.”
Storm knew he was speaking to himself as much as to Champ. He nodded his head to confirm as much.
Above the car, pink light seeped through the lurid cloud mass, tumbling, and twisting, like lengths of intestines strung over the town. The brightness had dimmed as if something huge was passing above the soup of moisture and compounds that made up the cloud cover. The light of the Sun was noticeably diminishing, as its electrical energy, its very lifeblood, was absorbed in ever-greater amounts by the approaching dark star.
Earth’s own electrical field was reacting in strange ways. Energy waves swept inwards and outwards rendering themselves visible in the sky above. The controllers acting on behalf of the elites struggled to keep the vast plasma screen in place.
If Storm had dared to look up at the cloud ceiling, he would have seen small waves that peeling away across the entire breadth of it. It was the same pattern repeating itself again and again. The pulsing sky increasingly resembled the underside of a living organism.
CHAPTER 43
THE RECLUSIVE ORDERLY
The meteor storm had eased off. Storm no longer felt the apocalypse was upon him. The sky was back to a familiar steel gray, the flaming orange having moved on, but there remained a rippling right across the cloud base. The vast belly of a ginormous fish floated above the town. It was bearable if he did not gaze up for too long. That he did have a target on the ground to focus his attention on, made it easier to avoid raising his eyes to the damn awful sky.
Black smoke scudded across the town, driven by wind bursts until it resembled a mess of meteor trails. Most of the house fires had begun in the bush with meteor strikes and lightning. The wind carried the embers under the eaves of the older houses where the dry wood shouldered until it ignited. With no fire service and no neighbors to come running with buckets and hoses to put out the flames, it looked to Storm like the town was doomed to burn.
The flames did not appear to be lapping the better- heeled section of Coona. It gave him reason to be opti‐ mistic about finding a good set of wheels. In one of those richer streets there was a late model four-wheel drive with a full tank of gas waiting for him. His plan was to start with the outer ring road and work his way back toward Main Street.
He pulled up at the curb beside a cottage on a corner section. The place was well kept. He could see the lawn had been mowed only days before, and the gardens were well tended. At the end of a driveway stood a tidy garage with double doors that he guessed would be locked. The place looked promising.
Natural caution and simple politeness made him press the electric bell of the front door twice, but there was no chime to be heard. He waited a short while, but he heard no sound from inside. From where he stood on the front porch, he could see the garage had a small side window set in a side door.
He walked down the path and peered through the glass. The interior was too dark to see all that much but he could only just make out the shape of a vehicle. He decided it was the right size to be a four-wheeler and he would take it, that is, if he could find the car keys inside the house, and if it had gas in the tank. First, he was going to need to take a closer look.
Storm kicked the door several times before he dropped his shoulder and braced himself to take a run at it.
The voice in his ear was soft.
Are you after my car?”
END OF SAMPLE
SKY PRESSURE
Storm shouldered the empty sports bags he had brought with him and walked up the path to the surgery entrance. He tried not to gaze up at the sky because it was giving him the creeps in a bad way. It reminded him of the flame-reddened haze above a bushfire.
He tapped the five digits into the keypad. It hardly mattered if the alarm went off since alarms were doing that all over town. What was one more among a hundred? Still, it felt like he was breaking-in. The lights flashed to verify the correct sequence and the lock mechanism disengaged. He turned the key and sprang through the door, quickly pulling it closed behind him.
The storage room was right where Franchette said it would be. He dropped the bags on the floor. This wasn’t going to take so long after all. His heart sank when he looked up at the shelves filled with neatly arranged boxes bearing multiples of scrawled labels; long words he didn’t recognize, and each box differentiated by type and measure. There were too many boxes on too many shelves. Finding everything on the list was going to be more difficult than he had imagined.
He told himself the less time he spent in town, the sooner everyone would be safe in a shelter, and that he would do his best. He decided to start with the largest items. At least the oxygen tanks were easy to find. It took longer to find the regulators, the masks, and hoses and carry holsters. Once he filled the sports bag with the heavy breathing equipment, he dragged it into the recep‐ tion. Back in the storage room he looked at the rest of his list and groaned. He was just getting started.
More than three hours had passed by the time he decided he was done. He saw that he had crossed off almost everything on the piece of paper Franchette had given him. He gazed down the list of pills, potions, lotions, vials, bandages, syringes, and scalpels. Good enough, he thought. It was not everything she requested, but he had given up on finding any more. It was going to have to do.
He stood beside the cash register and stared at the phone; surprised at the courage it was going to take. Perspiration dripped from the tip of his nose onto the Formica counter. He could see the droplets quiver on the polished surface.
Outside, the sound of rumbling was building in intensity. It was the noise made by a hundred jumbo-sized flaming arrow traveling overhead. Sonic booms shook the lightly built clinic and rattled the glass in the window frames.
He picked up the receiver and heard a dial tone. With electricity and phones still available the situation could not be as bad as it seemed. He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. It took only a single ring before he heard the voice he recognized instantly. Only it wasn’t quite the same as the last time he heard him speak.
“Mr. Boas?”
“Hello again, Storm.”
There was no longer a familiar local twang to the voice. It sounded remarkably free of an accent of any kind. It sounded as the creature looked—colorless.
“I need to ask you a question,” Storm said.
“Go ahead,” Martyn replied.
“Is that the plasma you were talking about that’s lighting the sky today? Because it doesn’t look rightl.”
The telephone line crackled, and he thought he had lost the connection.
“I have already told you everything you need to know,” Martyn said.
The air reverberated again with several loud booms. Each followed the other in quick succession.
“You are wasting time,” Martyn told him. “I want to know what’s happening.”
“You would like me to tell you everything will return to normal once they turn off the sound and light show. Isn’t that so?”
“You didn’t tell me the end of the world was due to begin the day I left Canberra!” Storm said, feeling rising dread.
“Earth can no longer defend itself from the impact of the intruder system,” Martyn said with a sigh.
“Those who would rule this planet struggle to hide the truth from its ignorant inhabitants. They know they are about to lose control and all their lies are being revealed.”
“We aren’t ready! I’m not!” Storm let out a sob. He fought to gain control, but he was very afraid.
When Martyn spoke again, it was as if from a great distance. Storm pressed the receiver harder into his ear.
“What did you say? I—I couldn’t hear you.”
“You need to drink something,” Martyn repeated.
“Okay,” Storm said, struggling to hold himself together.
“Switch on the intercom system and leave the receiver next to the microphone,” Martyn told him. “And try to breathe normally.”
Storm stepped back from the counter and spotted the small console beside the cash register. He flicked it on and heard the speakers in the corridor to the doctors’ rooms’ crackle into life. Somewhere in the circuit was a loose electrical connection. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to him except getting out of the building and out of Coona.
He saw that the office opened into a small kitchen. In a corner, a single sink stood against the wall. He turned the taps as far as they would go. They sputtered and coughed. He looked back at the waiting room and saw there was a water dispenser.
The large upended blue flask was empty but when he rocked it to and fro he heard liquid sloshing about inside the container. He held a paper cup beneath the tap and pulled the machine twenty degrees. There was enough water trickling out to fill his cup to the brim.
Martyn’s voice came over the speaker.
“It’s time to leave!”
The first gulp went the wrong way, and he coughed until he cleared his windpipe. The remaining water in the cup spilled over his chest. He pulled on the machine again. This time he was only able to half fill the cup, but he was able to swallow the contents.
“You didn’t tell me what comes next,” Storm said into the phone.
“I have told you all you need to know.”
“Tell me again!”
“It seems I expected too much of you.”
“What? Hello-hello? Mr. Boas? Martyn?” “I’m still here, Storm!”
“Alright, so I’m slow. I didn’t get that you explained everything!”
“Stop panicking. You know enough to save yourself and your group, and each hour you spend on the surface increases the danger you are in. I don’t have exact times to give you. I know the orbit of objects within the system is at this time taking them close to Earth. You must find shelter within two days! You have one more sunrise to find shelter, Storm. Consider the next few days, if can you survive them, as a practice run for the main event.”
Storm took a deep breath and steadied himself.
“One more thing.”
“Why not?”
“Davenport was going to make sure I told no one anything, wasn’t he? That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“You planned to have me killed before I talked to anyone. Like what happened to the others in the observa‐ tory. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“You’re a smart boy. You have gifts—your talents. And now you show me you are as stupid as the rest of them—Davenport is dedicated and as such he is useful. No, he was not planning to hurt you, and I never told him to do that. Do you really think I would expend all this energy on you only to have you killed on the way back home? Davenport’s time here is almost over. Yours is not. You and I may meet again. But if we do—no—when we do, we will both be nearing the end of our allocated time. Until then, Storm.”
Storm gathered up the backpacks. The bloody oxygen tanks were as heavy as hell! He shouldered the bags and launched himself through the open door. The orange light reflected off the sheen of sweat on his arms, just as it did off of the white paint on the walls of the clinic. He dared not look up as he stumbled, half dragging the bags toward the car.
A droning noise was building to an incredible pitch. The sound was similar to one he had heard months ago. The whole region heard it. Some said it sounded like a stick run around the rim of a large bronze bell. Others said it was more like a Tibetan singing bowl of a colossal size. Now it was so very loud it must have been amplified by the firmament itself.
His legs were shaking by the time he reached the car. Martyn’s final words repeated in his head.
“Keep moving. Make haste to your sanctuary.”
The awful grinding ceased as suddenly as it began. He let the bags down gently to the ground, not wanting to break the vials he had collected, and fumbled with the keys. There was the rumble of another meteor passing over the town. He lifted the bags onto the back seat and closed the door.
Champ was missing.
The mutt must have slipped out when he arrived. He slammed the door shut and jabbed the key into the igni‐ tion, but he paused when he heard a wet slopping sound near his feet. He looked at the floor in front of the passenger seat, and there under the dash with its nose pressed against the firewall was Champ.
The dog rolled its eyes in fear, licking the saliva that ran from its jowls and gave a long, pitiful howl.
“Hey, mate. We are going to make it out of here, I promise.”
Storm knew he was speaking to himself as much as to Champ. He nodded his head to confirm as much.
Above the car, pink light seeped through the lurid cloud mass, tumbling, and twisting, like lengths of intestines strung over the town. The brightness had dimmed as if something huge was passing above the soup of moisture and compounds that made up the cloud cover. The light of the Sun was noticeably diminishing, as its electrical energy, its very lifeblood, was absorbed in ever-greater amounts by the approaching dark star.
Earth’s own electrical field was reacting in strange ways. Energy waves swept inwards and outwards rendering themselves visible in the sky above. The controllers acting on behalf of the elites struggled to keep the vast plasma screen in place.
If Storm had dared to look up at the cloud ceiling, he would have seen small waves that peeling away across the entire breadth of it. It was the same pattern repeating itself again and again. The pulsing sky increasingly resembled the underside of a living organism.
CHAPTER 43
THE RECLUSIVE ORDERLY
The meteor storm had eased off. Storm no longer felt the apocalypse was upon him. The sky was back to a familiar steel gray, the flaming orange having moved on, but there remained a rippling right across the cloud base. The vast belly of a ginormous fish floated above the town. It was bearable if he did not gaze up for too long. That he did have a target on the ground to focus his attention on, made it easier to avoid raising his eyes to the damn awful sky.
Black smoke scudded across the town, driven by wind bursts until it resembled a mess of meteor trails. Most of the house fires had begun in the bush with meteor strikes and lightning. The wind carried the embers under the eaves of the older houses where the dry wood shouldered until it ignited. With no fire service and no neighbors to come running with buckets and hoses to put out the flames, it looked to Storm like the town was doomed to burn.
The flames did not appear to be lapping the better- heeled section of Coona. It gave him reason to be opti‐ mistic about finding a good set of wheels. In one of those richer streets there was a late model four-wheel drive with a full tank of gas waiting for him. His plan was to start with the outer ring road and work his way back toward Main Street.
He pulled up at the curb beside a cottage on a corner section. The place was well kept. He could see the lawn had been mowed only days before, and the gardens were well tended. At the end of a driveway stood a tidy garage with double doors that he guessed would be locked. The place looked promising.
Natural caution and simple politeness made him press the electric bell of the front door twice, but there was no chime to be heard. He waited a short while, but he heard no sound from inside. From where he stood on the front porch, he could see the garage had a small side window set in a side door.
He walked down the path and peered through the glass. The interior was too dark to see all that much but he could only just make out the shape of a vehicle. He decided it was the right size to be a four-wheeler and he would take it, that is, if he could find the car keys inside the house, and if it had gas in the tank. First, he was going to need to take a closer look.
Storm kicked the door several times before he dropped his shoulder and braced himself to take a run at it.
The voice in his ear was soft.
Are you after my car?”
END OF SAMPLE
YOU CAN READ THE NOVEL JUBILEE YEAR (THE ERELONG TRILOGY BOOK I) NOW BY CLICKING A LINK TO PURCHASE A COPY.
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