Spirits of the Earth: The Complete Series: (A Post-Apocalyptic Series Box Set: Books 1-3) by Milo Fowler (paper ebook reader .TXT) 📕

there. They just know it’s so messed up that nobody has dared come close to that continent for the past decade. A quarantine zone, blockaded by a fleet of well-armed battleships like the one where I find myself at the moment.

Nobody in or out. Until now.

I’ve won the lottery. Not the kind they had way back before D-Day, when the biggest news on the Link was the rising cost of fuel and the building fervor over climate change. Back then, lottery tickets were sold by the kilo to folks hoping to trade in their hard-earned credit for a big piece of the pie. Millions of dollars—billions, eventually, as inflation rose. Winning the lottery held a rare distinction in those days.

Maybe it still does, even without the monetary reward. Now when your name is picked by the military powers that be, you go wherever the United World government sends you. And in the case of Sergeant James Bishop, I sure have drawn the short straw.

But I won’t be alone. A few others share my unlucky distinction. A team of real winners. They might have gladly let me carry the banner alone if they could, but they’ll follow orders like good little soldiers.

We all will. Or face the consequences.

Rumors about the forbidden continent are ubiquitous. You’d have to be a total zombie not to hear the myths and legends. Some say what remains of the North American Sectors are haunted, that the ghosts of those souls nuked on D-Day still roam the earth, physically possessing anyone stupid enough to set foot on that godforsaken continent. Others take a less supernatural slant; they say there is still something in the topsoil, some kind of fast-acting mutagen that can turn you into a monster of freakish proportions. Supposedly, this mutagen has evolved as a result of nuclear radiation interacting with the rebels’ toxic bioweapons released at the start of the war, and the residue somehow managed to remain viable over the decades that followed.

Locked in the dust. Contagious and lethal. Just waiting to infect somebody.

They sure knew how to kill people in those days.

How else can you explain it? some say. What happened to those teams we sent over there two years ago? Why’d they never return?

I don’t try to explain it. There’s no point. Besides, I have other things on my mind, more important things. Like my wife and kids, held for safekeeping in the bowels of a UW prison. As long as I play ball, my superiors will allow me to see them when this mission is over. Maybe even go home together. One big happy Eurasian family again, living out our days in one of the outlying self-sustained biospheres.

“Hey, Captain!” Granger the engineer—barely 150 centimeters tall but with enough muscle mass to make up for some of his missing stature—calls from across the sterile medical bay.

Captain? Not a bad promotion.

“How’re we gonna move around in these things?” Granger swings his arms upward in the hazard suit, and the Kevlar-plated sleeves hardly shift.

I shrug and face the geek currently in charge.

“Right. Mobility.” The scientist swallows, and his Adam’s apple looks as large as one of his eyeballs, lodged in his throat. “It will require an increased amount of effort to maneuver in these suits, due to the added weight of the protective layers, but as with anything, you’ll get the hang of it. Eventually.”

His words are nothing if not inspiring.

“Put all those rippling muscles to work, Granger.” I heave my arms upward despite the resistance. It feels like gravity in the bay has increased by fifty percent. “I’m sure you’ll fare better than the rest of us.”

Granger curses. Like me, he was picked for this mission because of his track record. One successful campaign after the next, always returning with a full crew, always with mission objectives met, recorded, and filed for the superiors to read while they’re on the pot. As far as I can tell, my team members have one thing in common, despite their diversity: they’re career military, serving the UW out of a sense of duty to the common good, an honor that runs deep despite the current regime’s fascist tendencies. The team was handpicked for a singular purpose, one they’ll be briefed on in detail while en route.

They don’t have to like each other to get the job done. They’re professionals.

“The Wastes are a level playing field.” Sinclair the science officer, a woman who looks to be twice Granger’s height and half his weight, strides into the medical bay in her bulky suit. Swiveling at the waist to give me a cursory glance, she returns her attention to our miniature engineer. “None of us will have an edge.”

I force my arm upward and tap my helmet with a thick gloved finger. “We’ll be breathing. That’s all the edge we’ll need.”

She blinks at me, but that’s about it as far as a response. She strikes me as one of those cold, intellectual types with a staggering IQ and a never-veiled disdain for the rest of the world’s Neanderthals. I skimmed her datafile. As with Granger, there was nothing but a detailed log of successful missions, along with an extensive list of accolades I was quick to categorize as scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The other two members of the team show up eventually, staggering beneath the weight of their suits. The bug-eyed scientist responsible for our prep-talk welcomes them with a wide grin and wobbles his head like some kind of large, extinct bird.

“Great, looks like we’re all here now.” He stares at us and grins, touching the tips of his long fingers together. The silence drags on longer than necessary. “Right. So, any last-minute questions before we go topside?”

“Yeah,” grunts one of the latecomers—Morley, the weapons officer, a shaggy-haired fellow with a lineage stretching all the way back to the Caribbean, the Old World’s definition of paradise. According to his file, he prizes his guns over his own family. Fine by me; best to be well-armed on this trip. “What if