Architects

Architects

The Project Collusion Series: Book 2

Copyright © 2020 by Mary K. Williams

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The use of any of my works in AI learning or NFT is prohibited.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2020

Publisher: MK Williams Publishing, LLC

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020911597

ISBN: 978-1-952084-05-8

[email protected]

1mkwilliams.com

All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer:

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters, companies, and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

Works by M.K. Williams

Fiction

The Project Collusion Series

Nailbiters

Architects

The Feminina Series

The Infinite-Infinite

The Alpha-Nina

Other Fiction

The Games You Cannot Win

Escaping Avila Chase

Enemies of Peace

Interview with a #Vanlifer

Non-Fiction

Self-Publishing for the First-Time Author

Book Marketing for the First-Time Author

How to Write Your First Novel: A Guide for Aspiring Fiction Authors

Going Wide: Self-Publishing Your Books Outside The Amazon Ecosystem

Author Your Ambition: The Complete Self-Publishing Workbook for First-Time Authors

Table of Contents

Part 1: The Sit In

Part 2: The Walk Out

Part 3: Civil Unrest

Part 1: The Sit In

I can’t tell you; this is how it all started. I don’t believe any person, dead or alive, can. But I can tell you how I got here. This whole thing started from so many different places and the root cause has existed as long as mankind. This path is towards nihilism, creating our own ultimate destruction. But you’re not here for the philosophical theories about the why. You want to know the how, the when, and the who behind the destruction. I can tell you what I know.

Let’s just say that I didn’t know everything that had been going on. Not until recently. An assignment from the captain, a suicide mission, sparked off this whole thing.

Hunter, I heard Captain Gomes bark at me through the intercom that made his voice sound nasal and distorted. Get up here now.

No need to explain where ‘here’ was, no need to clarify further. The ship had maybe one hundred people aboard and I was the lone Hunter. I didn’t appreciate the accusatory glances of my shipmates as I passed by. Each wondering what I did, what I was about to be told. I recalled one similar trip to the principal’s office in elementary school. The mortification and unease mounted with each step as I approached the bridge of the ship, high above the deck with a view of nothing except dark blue below and pale gray above.

I hesitated for a moment before opening the door and stepping over the knee-knocker. Once I was there, in that room, I would know what new crisis would be thrown at me. But for those few seconds, I was in the glorious unknowing; the time when this could still be something positive, maybe even welcome news. I took a quick breath and went in.

Captain, I greeted him briefly when I spotted Gomes hunched over one of the monitors towards the back of the bridge, closest to his private office.

Hunter, he started in immediately, standing up firmly and squaring his shoulders, a habit drilled into him by years of procedure. At an impressive six-foot-ten inches Captain Hector Gomes was one of few people who managed to make me feel short at six-foot-five. Another supply shipment was attacked, never arrived at the depot on land, nothing for Roz to fly back.

Roz was our helicopter pilot on the ship, and she was also the only one who regularly went to shore. We all looked at her with a mixture of fear and reverence. She was brave enough to go there, but she could also be carrying some pathogen with her.

Gomes continued, We need to figure out what is causing the disruption. It’s happened too many times in the past three months for this to be anything unorganized. We need to find out who is behind it and eliminate the problem.

I did notice our rations were getting rather bland, I offered in my own particular brand of speaking. I wasn’t military. I wasn’t part of his crew. I was a refugee on this vessel, and I had resisted the vernacular that was foreign to me for the three years I’d been aboard.

Captain Gomes had been upset with my non-compliance at the outset, but I think he either got used to it or he was told by Peec that my particular skill set afforded certain exceptions. Or maybe we were so far removed from people and procedure that it didn’t seem to matter much anymore. But with everything that happened, it felt as though procedure was what would keep us all sane. Either way, he had softened to me and what would have earned one of his soldiers a quick rebuke for being so informal was met with, Yeah, tell me about it.

So, what do you need me to do? Aside from my observation regarding meals, I didn’t know the extent of the problem. With this new information and the rations that had been issued in the past two weeks, I inferred that we hadn’t received a new shipment for at least a month. But I’m the biomedical engineer; I’m the science guy, the tech nerd. I don’t touch the logistics. If what the captain had just said was true, the situation was likely more dire than I could have imagined. Even with a small population of about one hundred on the ship, The Pricus Capricorn, without new supplies more intense measures were likely on the horizon.

Well, the crew is dwindling, Gomes started. My mind flashed on the image of something moving quickly in my peripheral vision, a blur of black and gray out of my porthole window, followed by a near-silent splash. I winced at the thought. The crew was indeed dwindling, people losing their minds, the sea looking all the more inviting each day. The captain continued, unphased, I need as many of my trained team to stay on board to keep this thing afloat. He smirked and leaned up against one of the consoles, relieving some of the weight off of his boots. Based on who I need on board and who can do the task on shore, you’re it.

So, who can you expend in case this goes south? I don’t have the training for that kind of mission. I had this argument with him in the first few months on board. He knew this, sending me ashore was tantamount to a death sentence.

None of us had any kind of training for this. He shook his head and considered his next words carefully. We think that the attacks on the shipments can be stopped with your little invention. Gomes didn’t notice, but his right hand went to his left forearm.

And if I am attacked onshore, who will be able to help you with it? I countered. I knew the power I had; I knew I was the only one left who understood the technology and could interpret the readings.

If you don’t go, we may never get another supply shipment onto this vessel. You want the life of every crew member on your conscience? He narrowed his gaze at me, willing his mental picture into my own mind of the ship drifting afloat, unmanned, and only inhabited by the corpses of a starved crew.

He knew exactly what button to push to get me to jump. Fine, I’ll go, I turned to leave, my mind was already racing with the violent ends I would meet onshore. Disease, or attack from survivors, now rabid with only their primal instincts to guide them. We’ll do a briefing at 2000 this evening. You leave tomorrow at 0600.

Meeting at eight. Board at six. See you then, I muttered on my way out, my last defiance as I knew I would likely never return to the ship.

I held it together for as long as it took me to get back to my bunk. I tried to calm myself, turn my inner thoughts from my inevitable demise to the promise of success. Visualize success, visualize a positive outcome. I had to have some kind of memory of what that felt like buried somewhere deep in my mind. I ran through the same mental route I had carved over the long months on that ship. My own warped form of meditation. A word association exercise:

The first visual in my mind was from my college days. Rushing to class, running down historic streets where the upturned bricks in the sidewalk almost tripped me up. Some poking out. Some crammed back down but always jiggling when your foot struck them. You were at risk of twisting your ankle. You had to mind them, unconsciously, you avoided the loose ones. I don’t ever remember stumbling, but I recall that I learned to sidestep one nasty section at the exit of my favorite pizza shop.

If we had to play the game Desert Island, the food that I could eat every single day is pizza. No toppings, lots of toppings, doesn’t matter. Piping hot pizza with cheese melting off it. Piping, why is it called piping? Hot like steam pipes maybe?

Well, now, I’ve gone and done it. Steam pipes, PVC pipes. The ceilings in every corridor of the Bunker were lined with pipes. They went every which way, following us as we hustled to our laboratories. Sometimes I would picture an invisible cable reaching from one pipe down to the crown of my head, like I was a trolley car and I was being guided along my route.

Bunk to cafeteria to lab. Lab to Rattray’s office. Office to cafeteria. Cafeteria to Rec Room, Rec Room to Bunk. It was a fun little mind game I would play sometimes. It doesn’t work here. The pipes on the ship are too wide and bulky, too utilitarian to ever play host to my little daydreams.

The little hash marks on the wall next to my berth do play though. They remind me of cave drawings; perhaps I should go back and attach eyes, appendages. Would that help my psyche to make them alive? To give life?

No, they would turn on me in my sleep. They would fashion Clovis point spears and attack me when I least expected it. I cannot animate them. I’ve already had two nightmares this month, each time I wake up in a sweat. As my eyes adjusted in the dark, I thought the hash marks were really scratch marks, someone clawing at the wall, itching at something beneath it. No, no more little mind games to pass the time.

I had been keeping a journal of these dreams for months. I was in the habit of journaling and writing down my thoughts and experiments, so I added a new practice to include these vivid dreams. Dr. Simmons was the only psychiatrist on board and had been inundated with discreet requests for treatment. I heard through an unofficial network of other passengers that there was an opening. What with all the jumpers, her schedule was clearing up.

The journaling helps a bit. It makes me feel like I am doing something. Survivor’s Guilt. She joked during our first session that it had infected everyone on board, but I didn’t get the joke until a while after it ended.

She is a reputable doctor, but I’m sure all of the stories that she has heard so far have all been the same. Every person here had to watch from afar as the world burned; the flames not visible on the coastline, but still, we knew what was happening on land.

I thought that perhaps my story would add some new excitement to her routine, or I could just lie, make something up. But the truth is already unbelievable as it is. It’s not every day that you meet someone who knows that they are culpable for an apocalypse.

Earlier that week, or was it the previous week, I had been telling Dr. Simmons about my worries, neuroses, guilt. They called me up to the bridge yesterday, I said to the ceiling as I laid on the empty bunk in her cabin. She had no bunkmate so this served as her makeshift office. On my first visit, she told me that we could just sit and talk facing each other. But I preferred to lay on my back, speaking to the ceiling. She told me every time that this wasn’t psycho-analysis. But I couldn’t break the habit.

I heard, she replied without further prompting. Of course, she had. Everyone on the ship could hear those announcements. No way to not hear them. We were referring to the last time I was called to the Bridge to help read the flashes on the screen, the flashes that I created.

They’re going to send me ashore, I just know it, and then I’m dead. I had expressed this exact worry to her multiple times. Every time it felt fresh and new, as though the words still had the potential to explode back at me, finally becoming reality. No amount of saying it out loud dulled the effect.

Maybe they will send you ashore, but why would that necessarily mean you would die? You’ve survived this long, haven’t you? Dr. Simmons always answers my worries with questions. She never tells me anything new. I like that though. I don’t think my brain could handle anything new.

Now that I have my orders from Captain Gomes all I want to do is pound down her door and say, I told you so. But that won’t change the captain’s mind. It will only make me feel slightly better. Validated in my paranoia.

I knew that my time on board would be ending. I could just feel it. My days of staring at the gray walls and finding myself lost within a tangle of passageways would soon be at an end. I always assumed I would find myself overboard, just another one of the mentally weak scientists who went stir crazy without projects to tinker with. Of course, I didn’t believe any of the bulletins they gave as the cause of the disappearances of late. People were starting to lose it. Everyone aboard was starting to go stir crazy, agitated. There were strong dividing lines between the soldiers and the refugees. The ones who had earned their spot on the ship and the ones who had earned everyone a one-way ticket to misery.

Our place here, my place here, was based on timing. They weren’t going to keep me on the luxurious cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific that I happened to be aboard when the outbreak happened. It was arranged that the top scientists would be picked up so that they would help with the situation. But no specimens were ever provided. Instead of my story being that I took the opportunity so that I could help, I just took the out so that I could live a protected life on this vessel.

The paramilitary team was welcoming at first, but they made it known that they didn’t think much of us egg-heads. Where they had physical strength, tactical awareness, and the first priority on the ship, the scientists had theories, and laboratories, and our skills were no longer in high demand. They told us that the disease had already spread too quickly and that at this point every country had entered into a state of martial law. No need to start developing a cure, most of the population was already dead or dying. Best for us to hunker down and wait for the all-clear. But the all-clear hadn’t come for three years.

I began to speak out, having the audacity to ask when we could leave. I had indeed lost a small piece of my sanity, but the thing with your mental health is that you can lose a bit here and there, but you don’t know which bits are the most important until you’ve completely unraveled.

Maybe the team that is supposed to give us the all-clear was infected. We need to send out a search and rescue team! I remembered my first conversation – or argument – with Gomes.

Rescue? Rescue them where? You bring them aboard and they could infect us all. The captain made his response clear. I tried to connect with his lieutenant, Nelson Chang, to see if he might harbor the same concerns that I did; see if I could convince him to break rank. I was shut down, and ever since then, I’ve been awaiting the day that he would try to call me out, to get me off the ship. And that day had arrived.

After wasting idle moments back in my bunk, throwing soft items at the metal walls and feeling no relief, I stormed out and worked through the maze to try and find Dr. Simmons. The last of my colleagues had all found their way over the railings in the past few months, leaving me with no one else to talk to except the good doctor.

I tried to politely knock on her door, but my hand refused and curled into a fist, pounding instead. Demanding an immediate answer. She didn’t respond. I pounded again. Did I scream out her name? I can’t recall. After I tired myself out, I charged back to my bunk.

I tried to have a conversation with the Doctor in my mind. What questions would she ask, what platitudes would she offer? Hunter, why don’t you tell yourself a new story? I could try to convince myself that this is what I wanted. I’m going to leave the ship.

That could work. But I would remind her that I knew this was coming all along. There was a conspiracy among the crew to slowly pick off the scientists one by one, to eliminate us, punishment for our crimes, and to save food for the rest of the soldiers. She would tell me that conspiracy theorists are often wrong. I would ask her a question, finally. "What do you call a conspiracy theory that turned out to be right?"

My feet thumped against the hallway. Everything about life on the Pricus Capricorn was loud. Every surface was metal. Conversations echoed. Light footsteps sounded like a pounding march. Engines whirred on and off, steam whistled, and then subsided. There was always noise on the ship. I added my fair share to it.

When it was time, I headed to the meeting to learn about my onshore mission. I entered the small conference room off of the command center. Lieutenant Nelson Chang was fiddling with the remote control, trying to set up a visual presentation. He was extremely lean, almost frail, compared to the rest of the crew. All of them were supposed to be ex-special ops soldiers. I never would have figured this guy for that line of work in a million years. But perhaps that was his advantage when he was on the front. The ability to look weak and draw people in was his distinct skill.

I sat down in the seat closest to the exit. I was being forced ashore against my will. I wasn’t about to put on my chipper face and pretend that I wanted to be at this briefing. Chang acknowledged me as he reset his computer.

He finally got the display working correctly as two other crew members arrived. Dr. Jordan Michaels and Specialist Ansel Dawes. They didn’t appear to be too pleased about being there either. Both men had been on the Pricus when I had arrived three years earlier. They had worked with Captain Gomes for years prior to the outbreak. I was shocked that he would put people I considered to be his most valuable team members on a suicide mission, but I didn’t let that show on my face. Maybe this mission isn’t completely doomed, I thought as Chang began.

He started with aerial shots of the helipad where our supplies were to be picked up. Then another of the supply depot further inland. There were older images as well as fresh ones the Connect glider had taken earlier in the day.

We have limited information on what has happened to the supply line and limited time to explain, so I’ll just dive in. You are not authorized to discuss any of this until you are on the ground tomorrow. Nobody on the ship can know what I am about to tell you. Our supply lines were interrupted three months ago. We’ve been living off of our reserve store of food and MREs. It’s almost empty. He paused for a moment; his mouth twitched. No more food meant starvation. I nodded to signal that I understood the full gravity of the situation. Michaels and Dawes did the same. Three months. That was way longer than I had even anticipated.

The three of you will start out at the helipad depot and work your way inland to the supply depot. It’s a good sixty miles, so we expect it to take a few days on foot. We suggest you follow the road but stick to the trees.

Where do you think the disruption point is? Dawes cut in with the first question.

We haven’t had any communication with the team at the supply depot for six weeks. Their last contact let us know when the supplies left, part of our routine. After that, nothing. No supplies at the helipad. We think some of the local survivors tracked when the trucks rolled through and set up roadblocks. Our team has gone silent, so it’s possible they can’t safely communicate with us to establish a new route-

Or they’re all dead, Michaels interrupted.

Chang took a deep breath. We don’t know for sure. The crew in the supply depot had sent us some of their concerns about the locals.

You think they were attacked? I jumped in as well. These onshore headquarters were all secure underground facilities. Buried miles into the earth, they were fortresses. They could wall themselves off and survive for years if they needed to. They’d already been surviving for years, providing us support and shipping food to the coast. Within each of these onshore headquarters were command centers for their region, medical facilities, barracks, and machinery. They could continue to produce plant protein from internal greenhouses for a hundred years. Or, in the case of the facility in question, package it and send it to the crew on the Pricus.

We’re not sure, that’s what we need you to find out, Chang said in an exasperated tone.

Well, what did they report to you about the locals? Michaels asked.

Some chatter around vigilante organization, Chang let the anger in his voice show, he was losing control of the briefing. Chang and Gomes were all about maintaining control. I noticed the vein on his temple start to wiggle with tension.

So, you don’t think it could be another strain of the outbreak? I followed up. Michaels and Dawes looked over at me. Their eyes confirmed it, they were thinking it too. We had been safe on our ship, away from the biochemical weapon, insulated by miles and miles of ocean.

We don’t know. Chang didn’t try to sugar coat it.

But you think it is more likely that they were attacked than infected? Dawes tried to get him to confirm a theory.

Yes, Chang said and advanced to another slide. The screen lit up with several clusters of blue dots. "We know there is a small population in the area. Our latest check-ins from other depots around the continent tell us that the