Extinction
Authors: Jay Korza
Extinction
By
Jay Korza
Before the story starts, I’d like to
take a moment to say thank you to a few people and make some observations about
my writing.
First off, I started writing this book
in 1998. It started with the intention of being a short story about two young
people in love who were separated by military service. The first night I sat
down to write, the story took off without me and left the two lovers in the
dust and somehow ended up in space in the future. There is still a love story
in there, actually several of them, but none are the centerpiece of the story.
I wrote fairly steadily for the first
year but then moved to Massachusetts the next year and wrote much less. Over
the years, I have picked it up and started writing again only to stop for some
reason or another. Somewhere in the middle of 2012, I decided that I was going
to start working on the book at least once a week, every week, until I was
done.
During all of the starts and stops, my mother
has been reading my drafts and encouraging me to continue writing. She told me
the other day that she was my biggest fan and couldn’t wait for the finished
product. At the time of this writing, she is also my only fan, so I know I’ll
sell at least one copy! Thank you, Mom, for all of the encouragement you have
given me since I started this endeavor and even more so for all you have given
me throughout the rest of my life.
Over the years I’ve also had friends,
girlfriends, and other family members who have read portions of the book and
have given me encouragement and feedback. So there’s maybe four or five more
sales I can count on. Except (redacted). I don’t think she’ll be buying one,
but thanks anyway for your input!
As I mentioned before, I started working
on the book once a week. I would go every weekend to Starbucks at my local mall
and set up shop in there for two to eight—or more—hours. A trente black iced
tea with raspberry sweetener and a dash of cherry Mio, oh so very good. For
less than four bucks a day with free refills from my Starbucks Gold Card, I had
a great place to write with just enough distraction to give me plenty of
micro-breaks to get through the day. Thanks to all of the baristas who were
always so friendly and helpful, regardless of how much space I took up and how
little money I spent.
Now about my writing style...yes, I know
“anticlimacticness” isn’t a word. Plenty of words in this book aren’t accepted words.
I wanted to write in a style that mimicked our true nature of communication. We
make up words, we don’t always use proper grammar, and we love slang.
I also know that there holes in the
plot, not huge ones (
Prometheus
)—at least I hope there aren’t. But if
you think about it, there are holes in every plot, even in real life. Anyone
can sit back and look at the story of what you did in your life and find holes,
things that don’t make sense, decisions that could’ve been better. So in the
spirit of book reading and suspension of disbelief, just go with it and enjoy
the story. And if any one from
How
It Should Have Ended
or
CinemaSins
wants to make this the first book they spoof, I’d love that!
I would also like to thank Eric Schock
who brought some of the characters to life with his fantastic art work. If you
have a chance to look at his other work, I’m sure you’ll be impressed.
www.evilrobo.com
And last but definitely not least, I
would like to thank Shannon and Maya for coming into my life and making this
last year the best ever. Shannon was also a great resource while I finished the
book and she was always eager to read the next chapter. Thank you for believing
in me and thank you even more for putting up with me. I love you both.
There are plenty of other people to
thank and comments to make but I think it’s time to start the story. I really
hope you enjoy reading this as much as I loved writing it..
Daria was more excited than she had ever
been in her nine years of life. She kept looking at her dad and squeezing his
hand. The line was moving at a fairly constant rate but it wasn't fast enough
for Daria.
In the hand not occupied by her father's,
Daria held a raffle ticket, a winning raffle ticket.
THE
winning raffle
ticket. Daria had used her allowance and some saved lunch money to buy five
raffle tickets at her school's carnival fundraiser.
The first-place prize was a brand new
digital-optical hybrid telescope that was the top of line in consumer
electronics. Daria loved astronomy more than anything in all the worlds. And
now, she stood in the customer service line of the store that had donated the
prize to her school, waiting to redeem her winning ticket.
Daria and her family lived in a colony
on the outermost planet of a Coalition co-op solar system. Their place in the
system would make the views from the telescope the most wonderful sights Daria
had ever seen. She already had every night for the next month planned out as to
what she would be viewing. Tonight she would be mapping a system belonging to
the Wordols with a name that loosely translated to “To Look Upon the Gods.”
At the edge of Daria's periphery, she
heard a commotion that grew to a point she could no longer ignore it. As she
turned, she immediately saw two men, with handguns, pushing store patrons to
the ground. At only nine, even Daria recognized the crazed look of someone high
on Track Star.
The drug became popular when a galactic
sports super star died during the last Olympics. The human sports hero was
taking a new drug to help him compete against some of the Coalition species
that had definite genetic advantages over humans. Daria didn't remember the
Olympian's name but she did know her father would joke that he wasn't even in
track events so the drug's name was kind of stupid.
The drug was a bad one, not the worst to
be found but bad enough. It caused paranoia, aggression, a lack of grounding in
reality, and a host of other issues that were common in a lot of drugs. What
set this drug apart was that it had a synergistic effect with the
neurotransmitters associated with the fight-or-flight response.
The synergistic effect astronomically
enhanced the high experienced by the user. As a result, the user tended to perform
acts to stimulate the response. Casual users, if there were such a thing, would
typically take the drug before activities like planetary free-falling. Hard-core
users didn't have the money for the extreme sports, so they tended to commit
criminal acts to get their blood pumping and adrenaline up to enhance their
high.
The two junkies were herding the
customers and slapping them around, hoping someone would fight back. If a
victim fought back, it would help stimulate the users' adrenal response and make
their high better. Most people knew that being docile with the bastards would
cause their high to wane and usually they would move on.
As Daria watched the scene unfolding and
moving from the front of the store to the rear, she noticed there were two marines
in uniform who had been shopping in the store. They were giving each other
slight hand signals and head nods. Daria knew that they were making a plan of
some sort.
Before the two marines could act, one of
the junkies started to have a seizure, an inevitable side effect of prolonged
use of Track Star. As the gunman fell, his convulsions caused him to pull the
trigger on his automatic machine pistol. Bullets sprayed, people screamed,
blood spilled and one maniacal drug user laughed and danced among the chaos as
his adrenal glands kicked in and added to his high.
Daria stood in place and felt a bullet
pass so close to her face that it actually caused her long hair to billow out
behind her and a small clump of it fell away from the rest. When the hair drifted
to her wrist, she glanced down at the odd sensation; her eyes were then drawn
to the figure of her father lying on the ground with a pool of blood building
around his body.
Daria dropped her coveted raffle ticket
and knelt next to her father. She was still holding her father's hand and used
her other hand to try to stop the blood pouring from his chest. She had learned
basic first aid in school and she remembered enough to know that her efforts
were in vain.
Daria felt a gentle touch on her
shoulder and heard a soft voice in her ear, “Hey sweetie, let me help you with
that.” Daria looked and saw one of the marines kneeling beside her and slowly moved
her aside so he could get to her father. Once she moved, he quickly went to
work removing her father's shirt and examining the wound.
“Please help him.”
“I'll do my best, sweetie.”
“Daria.”
“Huh?”
“Daria. My name is Daria. I don't like
to be called sweetie. My mom used to call me that and she's dead now. So no one
gets to call me sweetie anymore.” Daria knew it was such a trivial thing to
think of and complain about in this moment but she didn't know what else to
say. “My mom is dead, so you have to help my father.”
The marine looked at her. “I'll do my
best, Daria, I promise.” He turned back to her father and pulled out a pocketknife.
“And my name is Bryce, but my friends call me Reaper.”
Reaper was probing the wound with his
finger and even though her father was mostly unconscious, he still went rigid
and moaned as the finger went into the wound. “Shit”, was all Reaper said as he
pulled his finger out.
“What?”
“The bullet went into your father's
heart; put a hole in the left ventricle.” A quizzical look from Daria had
Reaper explaining, “I need to open his chest and plug that hole. I can't get to
it well enough through the bullet hole. What I'm about to do to your father is
going to look very horrible and it's going to hurt him a lot, but you have to
trust me.”
While Reaper was talking, he was moving
Daria's father into a different position up on his right side with his left arm
over his head. He was pushing on her father's ribs and counting to himself.
When he reached the number five, he held one finger in the depression between
the ribs and brought the knife to her father's skin. Reaper looked at Daria and
she nodded; she knew he was about to open her father's chest.
With one fluid motion, Reaper made what
seemed to be a huge incision along the ribcage and almost immediately the white
of the rib bones were exposed, along with muscle and fatty tissue. Without rib
spreaders available, Reaper just reached in with both hands and started pulling
the ribs away from each other. The muscle stretched and tore and gave way to
the chest cavity they protected. With lung tissue exposed, Reaper reached in
and started moving the organ out of his way to get to the heart.
Daria's father was fully unconscious now
but he reflexively gripped her hand to the point that she thought it was going
to break. That's when she heard the cold, cruel voice of the other junkie she
had already forgotten about. “Get the fuck away from him. Let him die.”
