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  Apocalypse Austin

  A Plague Wars Novel

  By

  David VanDyke

  and

  Ryan King

  THREE KINGS PUBLISHING

  Copyright © 2015 by David VanDyke and Ryan King. All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places 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. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for brief excerpts for the purpose of review or quotation, without permission in writing from the authors.

  Books by David VanDyke

  Plague Wars Series

  The Eden Plague - FREE

  Reaper’s Run

  Skull’s Shadows

  Eden’s Exodus

  Apocalypse Austin

  The Demon Plagues

  The Reaper Plague

  The Orion Plague

  Cyborg Strike

  Comes The Destroyer

  Stellar Conquest Series

  The Plague Wars continues 100 years later!

  First Conquest

  Desolator

  Tactics of Conquest

  Conquest of Earth

  Conquest and Empire

  Star Force Series - with BV Larson

  Outcast

  Exile

  Gauntlet

  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

  In a Bind

  Off The Leash

  More to come in 2015!

  For more information visit http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/

  Books by Ryan King

  Ryan King's Land of Tomorrow series:

  Glimmer of Hope - FREE

  Children of Wrath

  Paths of Righteousness

  See more of Ryan King's books at:

  Ryan King's Amazon Author Page

  Cover by Jun Ares

  Formatting by LiberWriter

  Table of Contents

  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

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Alan “Skull” Denham strolled through the streets of Georgetown, a quaint section of Washington, D.C, known for its bars and restaurants in the environs of the university there. Even on a normal evening, the capital was a study in contrast. In some well-policed, well-lit areas, beautiful marble edifices and statues and historic Colonial buildings stood, while mere blocks away, criminals dealt drugs amidst the homeless in rampant squalor and filth.

  There had been a time, Skull knew, when the capital had been largely cleaned up. Ever since Infection Day, though, political instability and the diversion of resources away from the rougher areas in order to beef up security around the elite had ceded larger and larger sections to the bottom feeders.

  Tonight, an element of anger and confusion seemed to hang heavy in the air.

  Skull slipped into a side street to avoid a raucous crowd storming out of a bar ahead. Talk of the expected Texas and Alaska secessions was further stirring up the populace already in the grip of anti-Eden Unionist Party propaganda. The common man, especially in the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest, was firmly on the side of the government and its apparatus.

  The possibility of a genuine split and breakaway was slowly changing in everyone’s mind from unlikely crazy talk to startling reality. Results of midterm elections showed that the Texas and Alaska situations were having powerful effects on voters. Unionists were leading in far more races than election analysts had predicted.

  Now, the chaos at the polls began to spill into the streets.

  Skull saw police stationed at the intersections. They gave off a sense of nervous worry, pacing here and there and craning their necks into the dark instead of relaxing and chatting to while away the time. However, he hadn’t seen riot gear or horses. No water cannons, clear plastic shields or tear gas. He thought they must be keeping those in reserve, nearer the Capitol and the richer suburbs.

  By the looks of the growing anger on the streets, it was likely to be a long night for D.C.’s finest.

  Skull hadn’t wanted to come back to the U.S., but after too much time on the beach, he’d itched for a real job. When Graham Kepler III, formerly the tenth richest man in America, had contacted him, he’d decided to take the man’s money and do his work.

  Kepler was still fabulously wealthy, but as an Eden, had ended up in exile in Argentina when the United States had frozen his stateside assets. A prudent man, he’d seen the storm coming early, though, and had moved much of his liquid wealth into offshore accounts or non-American investments, mostly in South America and the European Union.

  Even so, there was something that he wanted and could not get. That was where Skull came in.

  It had been an easy job. Break into the man’s old, empty mansion. Open the hidden safe. Take the sealed envelope out. Return it unopened to his employer. Simple.

  Skull patted the inside of his jacket to ensure the envelope was still there. He didn’t know what was in it, but Kepler had assured him it was nothing Skull would have a problem with.

  Not that there was very much Skull would have a problem with. Unless it had to do with kiddie porn, human trafficking or genocide, he’d probably done worse himself.

  There was a time he would have felt it necessary to open the envelope anyway, but his reputation was becoming quite valuable to him in certain circles, and he didn’t want to seem untrustworthy. On the flip side, doubtless Kepler knew that if he screwed Skull, he would meet a violent end in the not-too-distant future, or he would have to spend so much on personal security that his life would hardly be worth living.

  The milling crowds on the street reached their emotional flashpoint, that moment when they transitioned from a group to a mob and all sense of decency and responsibility vanished. There came a crash across the street as one of them threw a chair through the plate glass window of an electronics store. Revelers cheered and rushed in to loot.

  Skull looked to the end of the street and saw two immobile policemen consulting each other nervously.

  “Why?” asked a small voice nearby.

  He turned to see a tiny Asian man staring with wide eyes at the store and the people around him.

  “That your shop?” Skull asked.

  The man shook his head. “Someone I know. He works hard to earn a living. Built it from the ground up.”

  Skull nodded. “Insurance should cover most of the loss. He’ll be all right.”

  “But why? How does destroying other people’s property fix anything? What does any of this have to do with what’s going on a thou
sand miles away?”

  Skull shrugged, his eyes narrow. “They’re angry and frightened. This distracts them. Easier to lash out like children than to face their fears as adults.”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t understand how they can do it.”

  Skull thought of the work he’d done on his uncle’s farm, growing up. How he and his family had labored on the sparse mountain soil in humid heat, day after backbreaking day. He remembered the pride he’d felt when that crop came to harvest. A sense of accomplishment and a job well done.

  “They can do it because they’ve never worked to build or make anything real in their whole pathetic miserable lives,” said Skull with deep disgust.

  An anomaly under a streetlight made Skull turn around. Though hundreds of people milled around, one man waited patiently, watching him.

  “Good luck, buddy,” said Skull, striding abruptly in the opposite direction. He only saw one man on his tail now, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have friends.

  Of course, Skull was wanted in the United States. His documents were first-rate and genuine – even if the superb false identity set up by Kepler’s people wasn’t – but if the Security Service got ahold of him, they might find a crack. And nowadays, with habeas corpus pretty much out the window, he might simply rot in detention, with no due process at all.

  At least he wasn’t an Eden. That was the Mark of the Beast to the Unionists.

  Skull turned another corner and crossed a street, checking for traffic in order to look behind him. Another man had joined the one he’d seen earlier, and they were following.

  Ducking into a metro station, Skull used cash to buy a ticket with at one of the many machines and hurried to the train platforms. He knew if he were under genuine surveillance rather than merely catching the interest of some spooks, the team would be forced to close up around him fast, not wanting to lose him as he hopped a train.

  He might have done just that, but unfortunately a train was pulling out as he came down the stairs, and no more waited on the double track. There would not likely be another for several minutes.

  Finding a secluded corner of the platform near a maintenance panel, he watched the stairs from the shadows. The two men who had been following him came down and looked around. They conferred with two others who descended a different set of steps, and then pointed in various directions. One pair jogged toward the opposite end of the platform while the other approached Skull’s position.

  He pulled back into the small alcove behind the electrical panel and maintenance access tunnel, flattening himself against the wall and watching them through slitted lids. There was no way they wouldn’t see him if they reached the end of the platform, but the longer that took, the better.

  Skull waited for them to approach. The two men started when they walked around the electrical panel and saw the tall lean man smiling at them, hands in his pockets. They made abortive movements toward the firearms undoubtedly holstered inside their overcoats.

  “Bad idea, gentlemen,” Skull said, removing one hand from a pocket. It held a gun.

  They froze. “There you are,” said one of the men inanely.

  “Here I am. What do you assholes want? Whatever it is, you’re not going to get it, but I have a curious nature.”

  “We need you to come with us,” said the man Skull had originally seen on the street corner.

  “Not happening.”

  “You can’t shoot without bringing our backup, and there’s nowhere to go from here.”

  Skull smiled, a rictus without a trace of humor. “I guess we’ll see.”

  The other two men walked up behind their fellows. Now the four faced Skull as he placed his back against the wall. “We need you to put down the gun and come with us.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” said Skull, lifting the pistol and pointing it menacingly at the men.

  When it caught the dim light, they saw it was a bright yellow high-quality water pistol, the kind you pump with air to power a hard stream of liquid.

  Looks of surprise and hesitant smiles broke out before one of the men started laughing. Then the others joined in. “Oh, you can’t be serious.”

  “I’m dead serious. You four freaks back away from me or I’m going to use this on you.”

  The first man shook his head. “Enough fun. Go ahead and take him.”

  As three men moved forward, Skull shot them each in the face with industrial ammonia he’d bought at a cleaning supply store. They shrieked with pain and gasped for air as they fell to their knees.

  The leader reached into his jacket, trying to pull a pistol from a shoulder holster.

  “No you don’t,” said Skull, squirting him full in the face. Skull walked over and kicked him savagely in the stomach as he lay on the ground. Then he administered a few more kicks to each of the fallen, helpless men. “Maybe you boys ought to give up on mugging. You’re not very good at it.”

  “Agents down,” gasped one of the first three into a wrist microphone. “I repeat, agents down, move in now.”

  “Agents down? Who the hell are you guys? Feds?” asked Skull with false surprise. He’d figured they must be some kind of law enforcement.

  The first man struggled to open his burning eyes. He rasped through his raw throat, “You screwed up this time, Skull.”

  “Shit,” said Skull to himself. They knew who he was.

  He didn’t see any trains coming. He could jump onto the tracks and race into the tunnel, but they would block the ends and converge on him. His best bet was to make it out of the metro station before reinforcements arrived.

  Skull scrambled across the double tracks and onto the opposite platform, taking the stairs two at a time to ground level. When he burst through the exit, there were half a dozen men with guns waiting for him.

  “Easy now,” said a man near the front, smoking a cigar. Unlike the others, he didn’t have a gun in his hand. “We just want to have a little chat.”

  “Then chat away,” answered Skull, calculating how many of the agents he could incapacitate before they shot him.

  Not enough.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” the man answered. He waved his hand at the curious bystanders. “This isn’t the sort of place that gentlemen conduct business.”

  Skull laughed. “This is exactly the sort of place I typically conduct business.

  “But you’re not exactly a gentleman, are you?”

  “You got me there. Just who the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “You know who we are.”

  Skull sneered, “No, I don’t. The men I left lying on the platform below didn’t bother to tell me. That’s a breach of protocol, isn’t it? I don’t have to obey the orders of four well-dressed muggers, do I?”

  The unsmiling man reached into his pocket and produced his credentials, holding them open in front of him. “I’m FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Miles Vergone, and I apologize for my men’s breach of protocol, Mister Denham. I’ll make sure they are disciplined.”

  “FBI. And you’re serious, aren’t you? About the discipline.”

  “Dead serious.”

  Maybe this man was one of the Bureau’s straight arrows, the kind of guy that really would put a black mark on a subordinate’s record for not following protocol. Such a man might be dealt with, far less dangerous than an amoral one. Even in an America sliding toward a police state, some such men would remain, for a while at least.

  Give it ten years and they’d be a rarity.

  Skull suddenly grinned. “Well, Miles, why don’t we all just go our ways and pretend this didn’t happen? From my understanding, you suits don’t like paperwork.”

  Vergone sighed. “Mister Denham, you’re obviously a clever man. Please consider your situation. You are coming with us. What condition you arrive in is up to you.”

  “Since you put it that way…” Skull carefully laid the water pistol on the ground and put his hands up.

  Vergone took a drag on his cigar an
d chuckled at the water pistol. “As resourceful as ever. Mister Denham, you’re a man to respect. For your sake, I hope you see me the same.” He turned to the rest of the agents. “Go ahead, cuff him.”

  Chapter 2

  Governor of Texas Bret Tucker glanced around the small room buried deep within Austin’s Capitol building. He donned his famous smile, a smile filled with confidence and optimism, a smile that calmed volatile emotions and put people at ease.

  Too bad I can’t calm myself with it, he thought.

  Many had wanted this event to be conducted within the meeting chamber of the State Assembly and broadcast on radio, television and the internet instead of being held privately. Tucker had argued that doing so would be poking the bear of the United States – the rest of the United States, some would say – and that wasn’t something he wanted to do if he could help it.

  Having studied the American Civil War, he believed that the South’s best chance had been to dig in and defend against the North. Make it politically hard for them to attack, and fortify, in hopes of drowning them in casualties and exhausting the Yankee public’s taste for blood and taxes.

  If it came to fighting, that would be Tucker’s strategy as well.

  The small conference room adjacent to his office contained only him, his wife Joanne, Deputy Governor Kurt Conner, his chief of staff Timothy Branch, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Elmore Vonn, and about a dozen aides and staffers as witnesses.

  Elmore picked up a worn black oversized Bible and turned to him. “Bret, you ready?”

  “No, but let’s get on with it anyway.”

  The chief justice cleared his throat. Those present fell silent. It wasn’t simply that Elmore was an imposing figure who commanded respect; it was also the fact that they were all in uncharted waters and no one knew what would come their way in the uncertain days ahead.

  “Nearly two hundred years ago, our ancestors threw off the yoke of Mexican oppression. Against incredible odds they defeated the Mexicans and formed the Republic of Texas, with Sam Houston as our first president. A decade later, Texas joined the United States under the condition that they could secede at any time. Now, the people of Texas have decided to exercise that right. They no longer believe that the United States of America adequately represents them, so they’ve decided to reconstitute the Republic of Texas. Bret Tucker is the man to guide us in the same manner that Sam Houston led us so many years ago.”