A House Divided: Book 3 of The Of Sudden Origin Saga Read online

  Contents

  Title & Copyright

  A Recap of Books 1&2

  Part One - An Ill Wind

  Chapter One - Consequences

  Chapter Two - 1 Year Later

  Chapter Three - Jon & Nikki

  Chapter Four - Faust Pays A Call

  Chapter Five - In Service Of One's Country

  Chapter Six - Bad Meds

  Chapter Seven - An Act Of War

  Part Two - Island Hell

  Chapter Eight - This Jerry

  Chapter Nine - Nowhere To Go

  Chapter Ten - Breach

  Chapter Eleven - The 7th Circle

  Chapter Twelve - The Damned

  Chapter Thirteen - Dirty Deeds

  Part Three - The Shore

  Chapter Fourteen - A Bold Plan

  Chapter Fifteen - A Cold Sea

  Chapter Sixteen - The Watchers

  Chapter Seventeen - Welcome to The Shore

  Chapter Eighteen - The Approach

  Chapter Nineteen - Fact Finding

  Chapter Twenty - Fire

  Chapter Twenty-One - Breakout

  Chapter Twenty-Two - So Many Boats

  Part Four - Divided We Fall

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Extinction is Nigh

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Crickets

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Just Across the Water

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Two Fronts

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - The Gates of Hell

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Drip Drip Drip

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Back To The Woods

  Chapter Thirty - Choices

  Chapter Thirty-One - The Bitter End

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  Other Books By C. Chase Harwood

  OF SUDDEN ORIGIN

  CHILDREN OF FIENDS

  BASTION SATURN

  THE LAST RATS

  THE OUROBOROS

  Click this link to join my Mailing List and receive a free book!

  Copyright © 2017 Christopher Harwood / Fate & Fortune Press

  cchaseharwood.com

  Amazon Author Page

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Recap of Books 1&2

  Of Sudden Origin

  In a New Hampshire forest, Jon Washington is broken down with millions of psychopathic Americans marching on his heels. He’s one misstep from being torn apart, eaten alive or becoming a psychotic killer. On an isolated lake, surrounded by psychotic infected, he meets Nikki Rosen, a disgraced Marine. Together they cross a crucible of challenges that has outwitted and killed the most resilient among us. Along the way, feelings slowly develop between them, and while taking refuge on a lake island ruled by a cult, they fully form into a team.

  Separately, in an effort to solve what is being called The Cain’s pandemic, a Hot Zone Team of CDC scientists, backed by Special Forces, go to Florida. Along the way, they stare into the very face of evil; overcoming both a madman in a bunker and mobs of infected. Worse, they come face to face with the children of the infected — a new species of man, capable of mind control, and utterly feral.

  During a last gasp attempt to stop the monster’s march north, the combined forces of America and Canada firebomb the remains of New England. In this inferno, happenstance brings Nikki and Jon together with the scientists, and as a group, they attempt to walk out of Armageddon without being eaten alive. At one point, Nikki becomes aware that she must be immune to the disease. The scientists agree that they must do everything they can to get her to safety so they can find out more. Completely surrounded, and without hope, the group makes a last stand. In the final desperate moments, while a rescuing helicopter sweeps them out of a lake, Nikki and Jon confess their love.

  Children of Fiends

  Ten years have passed since the modern world was riddled with FNDz (Frontal Negation Dementia) and North America fought to the edge of extinction. America has folded in on itself in perfect isolation. Infected but medically stabilized people live in exile. Beyond the wall known as the Terminus, a new species of Man is growing stronger every day. We discover just how strong, when a boy, who will become known as Billy, is captured by them.

  On Nantucket Island, a leper colony of sorts has been created for infected people who have the benefit of a drug cocktail that arrests the disease, but leaves them still contagious. It is there that we meet Stewart Dean, a retired Navy SEAL, who has taken up a new life as a whaleboat captain.

  The president of the United States decides that the time is right for an expedition of discovery across the continent, with the double aim of acquiring a ship full of wind turbines. America approaches Captain Dean and his crew, asking them to volunteer for the mission. In exchange, they are told that a new drug exists that may also be a cure. There is also a twist: On Plum Island, off the tip of Long Island, a research facility houses a secret; 2 grown Children of Fiends have been raised in captivity. They will go along on the mission, escorted by their doctor/overseer, Eliza. Eliza is infected and the first beneficiary of the new drug.

  Meanwhile, on the isolated Mid-Atlantic peninsula of Delmarva, a splinter group of Americans have created their own nation, known as The Shore. Led by a murdering rapist, Niles Plimpton, a group of them follow the team of Northern explorers across the country and then south into the very heart of darkness. In Nicaragua, a thriving city of Fiend children or Chosen — their adopted name — are steeped in a twisted version of Christianity, and keep humans for slaves and food. The Chosen’s infected parents also survive and flourish, and are revered as “Ancestors”. The boy, Billy, is one of their captives, and as it turns out, he is Stewart Dean’s son.

  When the explorers, the Shoremen, and the Chosen clash, Plimpton is eaten alive. The Chosen city is assaulted by a missile barrage, creating an opportunity for escape. Only a handful of the volunteers survive, departing the Caribbean Coast on a small sailboat headed to who knows where.

  PART ONE

  An Ill Wind

  CHAPTER ONE

  Consequences

  Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty-million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions, it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

  - PD James

  The Jungles of Nicaragua, March 18th 1986

  Arthur Camp the First, sat naked on a hardwood side chair and stared at his vestments. He had neatly folded them himself and placed them on a table by the room’s single window. The chair had be
en painted years before. It was chipping off now, and he could feel it crackle under his sweating buttocks and back. The forest outside teemed with the sound of insects and birds mixed with the unintelligible voices of men at work. It occurred to Arthur that the window would allow his own voice to flow out. His tormentors seemed aware of this as well. Perhaps it was their intention to let their fellow Sandinistas in on the action.

  Arthur’s legs had been spread and tied to the sides of the chair so as to better expose his genitals. He glanced down at the head of the man who kneeled in front of him, and noted the way the fellow’s black hair was matted with sweat. The man was breathing heavily through his nose, and the preacher felt his manhood shrink back in response. Despite the crudeness of the activity, the interrogator was attempting to be gentle with his motions. Arthur winced as a small alligator clip was applied to his scrotum.

  Reverend Camp had always had a gift for remaining calm in the heat of adversity. As a Protestant missionary working in a predominantly Catholic country swirling in Communist ideology, his successes came from a deep well of perseverance and steady determination. It was said among the Contras whom he had managed to convert, that he was a man of steel; that he embodied the fortitude of Saint Dymphna. When the electricity was applied to his crotch, his much admired fortitude was immediately broken. As his piercing screams flew out of the hut’s single window, the birds that nested in the trees surrounding the camp burst into the sky.

  The reverend survived the war. His love for the Nicaraguan people never wavered, and he was able to instill in his grandson a desire for service that would cause the young man to make his own mission trip to Central America some 30 years later.

  If Arthur the grandfather had one personal failing, it was his inability to cleave himself from his need for drink. When lost in the swirl of a Bourbon-laced-night, his memories of the harder times came out for a visit. On the night before his grandson was to embark on his own mission, the grandfather broke down in a tearful reliving of the torture that had been inflicted on him, and he begged the young clergyman to reconsider.

  Arthur Camp the Third patted the old man’s knee. “It’s OK, Grandpa. They don’t do that there anymore. I’ll be OK. I’ll be fine.”

  Several years passed. Arthur the Third was a gifted preacher himself, and held in great esteem among his growing flock. Then the Cain’s Apocalypse burst upon the planet with biblical force. Like his grandfather before him, Arthur was a survivor, miraculously so. As the world went mad around him, Arthur remained free of infection. He didn’t know it, but he was one of just a tiny fraction of humanity that was immune. Alone, the Omega man watched the children of the infected grow and flourish. In an attempt to help bring Christ’s Word to these demon children of the apocalypse, The Right Reverend Arthur Camp III created order from chaos in his little corner of Central America. It would lead to a profound misunderstanding and his death via consumption by his own disciples. The resultant twisting of his teachings remained mostly isolated. Healthy humans were observed, captured and enslaved, but the Chosen held no desire for conflict. Like a virus, waiting for a victim to pass by and reanimate it, the Children of Fiends thrived in their solitude. When a group of human explorers from the North chanced upon the Chosen haven, those free men and women unwittingly unleashed on the world the last act of a cataclysm, which could only be measured against The Flood in its irrevocable magnitude.

  Mexico, The March Has Begun

  Like a man might use his teeth to strip the shell off a cooked shrimp, Paul, the Chosen leader, stripped the skin off of the woman’s delicate ring finger. As the flesh tore away from the bone it made a slight snapping sound. Using a long fingernail to pick at a bit of skin from between two molars, he absently thought back to his first human meal; compared to this Fresh, the Reverend-Father’s fingers were thicker, more calloused. As he continued to chew, Paul mused further on Arthur the missionary; the Father, who in an unexpected moment of self-sacrifice, became a new version of the Body and the Blood. The eating of their pastor was dubbed, The Holy Meal. Thus began the ritual eating of a live victim, keeping the heart pumping, the mind fully aware. What better way to honor the vessel of the soul during its sacrifice?

  Paul looked down at the Fresh One meal. The female lay naked, prostrate on a table. She was without bonds; rather another Chosen, a huge male, stood at the head of the table keeping her mentally paralyzed. Paul bit and sucked the skin and meat off another of her fingers, exposing bone and tendon. He chewed and swallowed, then spoke aloud to her. “You are comfortable?” He nodded toward the guard. “Pleasure in Pain is keeping you free from feeling the agony — for now?”

  The young woman could only slightly tremble in response. Her muscle twitches were wholly involuntary, and beyond even the big guard/pain manager’s ability to fully arrest.

  Paul stripped off a third finger. “You are very blessed, my child.”

  It didn’t matter that the woman on the table was more than double Paul’s actual number of years, as far as he was concerned, he was the patriarch. He continued, “Only the finest are selected for such a meal. I hope you feel honored in the way that our father Arthur did.”

  The young woman could only respond with a tear.

  Paul smiled and stripped off another finger. As a way of paying homage to his mentor, he spoke the words, “Arthur says eat,” and chewed thoughtfully while invading the woman’s mind and sharing his memories of the reverend. In many ways, the missionary, through his desire for good works, and to civilize the damned, had given The Children of Fiends all of the tools necessary for them to not only thrive, but to rise up and become the next super species on the planet. The pastor had taught far more than The Word of the Lamb, and the use of language; he had taught them agriculture — the defining skill that makes for civilization. Arthur’s hard work, and belief in the goodness in all of God’s creatures, had given the Chosen everything they needed to survive and thrive. His core group of disciples became known as The Five. With their spiritual guide and Teacher of the Language dead, it was Paul, the eldest, who kept the Chosen moored to the faith. As the four younger Chosen disciples became transfixed by the distractions of a worldly existence, it was Paul who had kept the flock together, converting that which was mostly feral into that of less than feral. It was Paul, via Arthur’s instructions for prayer, who discovered the depth of communication that was possible among his fellow Chosen.

  Before they had adopted the name Chosen, the Children of Fiends had been no more than a scattered species, with little direction but the desire to play, kill, eat, and as they matured, fornicate constantly. They were directionless as individuals, yet they shared a common way of communication — a species-wide ability to feel and understand as one. Paul realized that just as the Lamb’s Sermon On The Mount had resulted in the spread of the faith to the countless Fresh Ones, that he, Paul, had the ability to coalesce the unstructured minds of the Chosen to be as one; one with the faith; one with The Five; one with Paul. He mentally hand-picked and then educated the other groups of Five, thus spreading the faith among the Chosen — ultimately reaching around the world, even to the scattered ones who remained in the far frozen upper part of the Northern Hemisphere.

  The young woman on the table had been a slave in Nicaragua during that year’s hot month. A group of American explorers had stumbled upon the site of the Holy Central Church. They’d been the first to arrive as free and not enslaved. Paul stripped her pinky clean and reminded her that it was this arrival and the violence that followed, which had convinced him and The Five that the time had come. The Fresh Ones who lived in the frozen north were a threat that could no longer be ignored. That the free Fresh Ones had brought powerful weapons with them; that those weapons had been released — permanently damaging the Holy Central Church — was the defining moment.

  They had decided. The Chosen would march.

  Paul removed his focus from the meal and looked out from his hilltop perch. Hundreds of thousands of them were mak
ing the trek north. Their baggage train went on for hundreds of miles, the bulk of it carried on the backs of human slaves — Fresh Ones who were both mule, and when they became injured or overly exhausted, food. Vast herds of cattle were part of the train, as were the ancestors; the human parents of the Chosen; the Fiends, as the slaves called them. The Children were deeply beholden to their parents, sharing a connection born from a disease that none was aware of, but that had led directly to the evolutionary leap that were the Chosen.

  The timing of the visitors and their violent exit had meant a late start for Paul’s conquest. It was rapidly approaching the end of the short summer in the North. After a month of walking, the hoard pragmatically chose to stop and find a place to rest and be protected through the coming winter. Paul chose a place that had once been called Ciudad Victoria, a land with plenty of shelter, fresh water, and fields for grazing and planting. It was there that the Chosen would bide its time, allowing more of the multitude to gather, bearing more children, capturing, breeding, and consolidating more Fresh slaves, and waiting the seven or eight months for the next thaw.

  Across the rest of the planet the Chosen were moving as well. Humans everywhere, who had survived the pandemic, a decade of nuclear winter, and who had clung to existence through shear wit and determination, were once again in existential peril. People in the equatorial portions of the Earth, who had mistakenly concluded that they were safe, discovered that they were not being ignored; rather, they’d been left to survive until the need arose for them to be harvested. The humans in the colder or frozen climates had only the harsh winter ahead to thank for the reprieve.