Impetus Read online

  IMPETUS

  By

  Scott M Sullivan

  © 2014 Scott M Sullivan

  All Rights Reserved

  www.SullivanAuthor.com

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All characters, text, and events are owned by Scott M Sullivan. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or recorded without written permission by the author. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9904823-0-7

  ISBN-10: 0990482308

  Also by

  Scott M Sullivan

  The Trinity Signs

  Imperfect Inside

  Cooper’s Cave

  (a short story)

  im·pe·tus (noun)

  a driving force

  CHAPTER LIST

  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

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  CHAPTER 1

  “I think this about sums it up,” Phillip said. He centered the single sheet of paper in front of him on the small mahogany table, then glanced toward the three members of his executive science team. “Thoughts?”

  Sid, who had not agreed with the plan since its inception, looked up with a familiar scowl. “I’m sorry, Phillip. But this still seems unethical to me. If we could—”

  “Here we go again,” Rebekah interrupted. “I thought we had worked through this, Sid?”

  “Well apparently we haven’t,” Sid said, frustrated.

  The room was well lit. Not by the kind of government-issued overhead fluorescents that would seem fitting for The Facility, but rather by several decorative sconces scattered around the posh space.

  Rebekah sighed loudly. “We’ve been over all of this ad nauseam, including your well-documented objections. We’re past the point where ethics has a place in the conversation.” She turned to Phillip. “I realize I’ve said this before, but if the committee had simply listened to me in the beginning, we may not be in this predicament. They said a triple-pump air filtration system was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars.” She gestured to the lavishly appointed room, shaking her head in disgust. “Classic government ignorance. At least we don’t have to deal with them anymore.”

  “Yes, Rebekah,” Phillip agreed hoarsely. He poured himself a glass of water from a blue pitcher and quickly took a sip to clear the tickle in his throat. “But pointing fingers at dead people does little to help us now.”

  Rebekah leaned back in her chair. “You’re right, Phillip. I’m sorry. My point is that we simply don’t have the luxury of morals at this time. We need to find that immunity strand. And we need to find it now. Talking about it over and over isn’t getting us any closer to what we need.”

  “I understand that, Rebekah. Remember this?” Sid asked, pointing to the logo on his sterile white jumpsuit: a dark-green circle adorned with a light-blue double helix. “When The Initiative was formed, it came with a promise to rebuild once the meteorites did their damage. We were to help the people that survived, not hurt them further. And we’ve fulfilled little of our promise so far. So morality should be a certainty, not a luxury.”

  Rebekah looked over at the last of the group, who happened to be the youngest and most even-keeled. “Your friend is at it again, Alex.”

  “Sid is entitled to his opinions just like the rest of us,” Alex said calmly. “It wasn’t so long ago that you disagreed—pretty loudly, I may add—with our plan to increase the water flow in the filtration plant. Sid listened to you then.”

  Rebekah backed off a bit. “I guess.”

  “Think about who we are affecting here,” Sid said. “We are intervening in lives that have already endured more than most. We are lying to them. What gives us that right?”

  “It is not a right, Sid,” Phillip said. “It is an imperative at this juncture. Time is something that we simply do not have enough of.”

  Sid looked around the small table. All eyes were on him. “How did I become the bad guy in all of this? I want what you all want. I want to live. But I don’t want to do so if it means hurting even one more person.”

  “What would you have us do, Sid?” Phillip asked somberly. “Tell these people the truth? Do you really think anyone will believe us?”

  “Probably not,” Sid said. “But what do you think will happen once people find out what we have here? What we have been hiding all these years? Once we let our secret out, it’s out. And there are bound to be some pretty pissed-off people.”

  “If we don’t find the immunity soon, then it won’t matter who knows what,” Rebekah pointed out. “There will be nobody left to be pissed off.”

  “Enough,” Phillip interjected. “The childish bickering is getting us nowhere. This test is our best shot at success.” It was time to get the discussion back on track. His track. “We have to do this. If what we have done over the past ten years is to mean anything, we must follow through.”

  Sid stood and ran his hands through his already messy hair. He paced to the back of the room, careful of the Persian rug’s upturned corner. “I’m sorry, Phillip,” he said, instinctively fixing the rug with his foot before turning back. “Deterring the process has never been my intent. I hope you all know that. Not a day goes by that I don’t see Dr. Shaker’s image in my head. I’ll never forget what the virus did to him.”

  “Use that as your motivation, Sid,” Phillip said, his voice taking on an air of authority. “Because we will all share a similar fate if we don’t act now.”

  Sid clenched his jaw and nodded reluctantly. There was nothing he could do or say at that moment that would make a difference.

  “Very well then,” Phillip said. “This is settled. We will print this bulletin and have the security team distribute copies along with the test kits under the cover of night. I pray, for the world’s sake, that the match even exists.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Mick sat on the peak of a barren hill and stared out at the desolate remains of the once-thriving city of Boston. His home for as long as he could remember, the city was now a fading imprint of his long-ago life. The crumbling buildings, empty streets, and ominously dark corners held nothing worth looking for. But hidden in the shadows were plenty of things to run from.

  He slouched in his dilapidated lime-green beach chair. The chair was a broken remnant of better times, and it meant more to him than it should have. But it was the little things that mattered nowadays. He was able to look past the chair’s missing right arm, torn from its thin white frame at some point before he found it. It still had one good arm, after all. And that was better than none.

  Like the tip of a dagger, a rough piece of metal jutted out from the back of the chair where the violent amputation appeared
to have taken place. The poorly healed scar on Mick’s elbow, the aftereffect of carelessly leaning into the point and then three stitches with an improvised needle, was a constant reminder to never get too comfortable with the way things were. Something was always looking to bite you in the ass in the new world.

  Mick tried to appreciate the chair for what it was now and not for what it used to be. His pre-Impact mentality had been forever altered by post-Impact reality. And no matter how diligent he was in his drive to stay positive, to focus on the tiny bits of good and ignore the vast swaths of bad, it seemed like an impossible task most days. The devastation left by the meteorites was absolute. Even the most optimistic of minds, of which Mick was not, could not look past it.

  He didn’t climb the hill to lament, as may seem to be the case, but to clear his head when he could. Mick tried, usually in vain, to remember what they all had lost ten years ago. And something on that hill helped him do just that.

  Flowing green hills and spacious center-hall colonial houses were plastered across what was left of the ravaged frame of a billboard that leaned from the earth some fifty yards from where Mick sat. The stubborn structure’s torn and bubbling paper was somehow still imbued with colorful, yet deeply faded, hues that no longer existed in any other place he could find. Grays and browns, devoid of any sort of vibrancy—that was the world Mick now slogged through.

  Two quick gunshots snapped him from his thoughts.

  He casually glanced to the left of the billboard and toward the city. It was difficult to really see the finer details. Thick and permanent haze smudged most things in the distance into blurry silhouettes at best. But the shots sounded far enough away. And it certainly was not the first time he had heard them from up there. Gunshots and a varying amount of other abrasive sounds had long replaced anything worth listening to.

  At times, when he was transfixed by the colors of the billboard and lost in yesterday’s thoughts, Mick tried to remember the better sounds, ones he so often took for granted when they were plentiful. Chirping birds frequently came to mind. Those that darted in and out of the lush green trees. He missed the birds’ spectrum of colors and the variety of playful songs they provided free of charge. Their high-pitched tweets and synchronous conversations had awoken him entirely too early on many a summer morning. Now he would give almost anything to hear them just one more time.

  He shielded his eyes from a sudden whip of wind.

  The billboard tilted more to the side as each year passed, a reluctant victim of the eroding soil beneath it and the high winds that sometimes tore past. Mick knew it was a miracle that the billboard had even remained standing for this long. Eventually it would lean too far to the right, break free of its aged mooring in the loose soil, and rumble to its final resting place someplace at the base of the hill.

  Mick dreaded that day. The rusted relic helped him to remember the way things used to be when his mind failed to—something that seemed to be happening more frequently. His memories didn’t snap to attention the instant they were summoned. Not like they had when he was younger. It was as if something in the air, invisible and silent, slowly stole who he once was, sneaking into his head on the few nights he could actually fall asleep and erasing his memories one by one. The good memories, anyway. It felt as though he was being replaced by the person he’d been forced to become rather than the person he wanted to remember.

  He rubbed his eyes and looked to the bleak sky. The grim brown of the air was an uninspiring reminder of what had taken place all those years back. The subtle shift in light told him all he needed to know. It was almost time to head back for the day. He figured a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. It was not like he truly had anywhere to be.

  “Come to Shady Springs!” was the message plastered across the top of the billboard in a bold red font, cursive and twisty, which had faded to more of a pink over the years. Time and the constantly blowing dust had stolen the letter i in the word springs. And the word shady had been reduced to no more than ha. That seemed sadly fitting to Mick. As if this billboard somehow realized just how comically sad everything had become.

  Those who were not wiped out by the main meteorite’s blast, Colossus as it came to be known, or the thousands of subsequent smaller impacts like the ones that had destroyed Boston, now dotted the Earth like newly fallen leaves on the first days of fall. They stuck out on the soon-to-be-dormant grass, longing to be where they had been only days prior: thriving in life and not teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. And while the meteorites could not possibly have been selective in their destruction, Mick felt like not enough good remained behind to overpower all the bad. It was as if a speck of evil had been hidden deep in man’s DNA. Someplace the conscience could never find it. But someplace readily available to grow given the right circumstances. The meteorites provided those circumstances. And grow the evil seed did.

  A year or so following the impacts, after the new reality began to take shape, Mick had tried to rally those around him to rebuild what they could. Rather than working together to drive a stake into the ground for mankind’s new start, man had turned on his fellow man as he had been subconsciously trained to do throughout years of ignorant intolerance and a lack of understanding of the differences that made everything possible in the first place. Pleasantries and civility went the way of electricity and clean running water. Mick had given up hope of ever rebuilding what was lost. The effort had been wasted and never repeated.

  Another series of gunshots rang out into the gusty wind. More of them this time, followed by a scream for help. A man’s unnerving scream. Mick shielded his eyes from the whipping dust and kept staring ahead. The shots did not sound any closer than the previous ones had. No need to worry. Not yet. What happened down in the city rarely made its way to the hill.

  Someone without an understanding of how things now worked may think Mick was uncaring, a coldhearted observer who didn’t embrace the plight of his fellow humans. How could he not rush to help when someone else was in distress? Where was his sense of compassion? But that was not how people went about their business anymore. Rules, even those of the conscience, no longer applied in the post-Impact world. People were better off once they learned to ignore their morals and trust their more primal instincts. Those were what would get them by in times of need.

  A couple more minutes on the hill. Then he would really have to leave.

  His absolute favorite part of the billboard was what remained of the sun in the top right corner. Most of the paper had torn away over the years, sticking only where the glue had been applied the thickest. The paper sun’s fading yellow rays provided about the same amount of heat that the real sun did after impact, maybe a bit less. Mick longed to feel the real sun again. To close his eyes and bask beneath the warmth of the giant star just one more time. To feel its invigorating radiation reach deep inside, touch his bones, and warm him from the marrow on out like a warm bowl of soup on a cold winter day.

  Mick looked to the sky one last time. Time to go.

  He begrudgingly pushed himself up from the creaky beach chair. He arched his back and tried to expel the age that had slithered its way into his body; more so, it seemed, over the past couple of years. He then reached up and adjusted his dark-blue baseball cap, pushing his shaggy head of hair more neatly beneath it. The embroidered red B of Boston Red Sox had darkened to more of a dingy gray thanks in large part to the amount of grime that seemed to be everywhere. Mick didn’t care what the cap looked like. Vanity no longer held a place in his world. Unlike his chair, however, his cap was not about utility. It was simply his favorite, one that had carried him through some very tough times. It was also the final gift he would ever receive from his wife. He clung to his Sox cap as if it were her.

  He shouldered his rifle for the short walk back down the hill.

  Mick followed the same path that he did every day: down the backside of the dusty brown hill, careful of the loose rocks that ran the path’s length. He could ill afford to be i
mmobile because of another twisted ankle. The path wound through a toothpick-like grove of trees that stood haunting in their stillness. Though to still call them trees seemed a misnomer now. With little sunlight penetrating the thick atmosphere and rain, when it happened, more like a shower of mud, most of the planet’s vegetation had died long ago, taking with it anything that could be considered natural beauty. Now the trees before him were nothing more than grayish dead sticks in the ground, wooden warriors silently killed by the invisible and unrelenting enemy known as time—an enemy that was certain to get them all eventually.

  The trek down the hill was quick and lonely. The wind bared its proverbial teeth at times, whipping through the honeycomb of steel buildings left vacant both inside and outside the city’s limits and shifting the dust in never-ending cycles. It was something Mick had become all too accustomed to, much like the gunshots. The omnipresent dust seemed like a mindless organism sickly bent on the destruction of those who remained. Inside every crevice. Floating in every stream. Coating the entirety of the planet’s surface. It was the dust that he feared the most.

  Mick reached down, lifted the bandanna that hung around his neck, and cupped it over his mouth. The bandanna, a rag whose faded silver fleur-de-lis pattern was still somewhat noticeable against the thin blue cloth, did not stop all the dust from getting in his mouth. But it stopped enough to matter. In this new world sometimes a little bit meant a lot.

  The remains of the old MIT building came into view as Mick exited the grove of splinter trees. Situated at a relatively safe distance outside the city’s limits, the structure resided at the base of the far side of the hill that Mick had sat atop only moments before. It was hidden from view within a natural horseshoe of rocks. An idyllic setting when it had been built. This was his home now. It held what was absolutely most precious to him.

  The building’s rows of pane glass had long been broken. Some by the global rioting that had spread like wildfire after Colossus, when society unknowingly stood on the precipice of its own demise and the thieves’ feeble minds still believed what they stole would somehow hold value in a world where no value remained. The rest of the glass had shattered when the enormous natural gas tank on the side of Interstate 93 exploded and sent a rippling shock wave for miles.