Preview of A. B. Carolan’s Origins…
[Note from Steve: A.B. tells me this is only the first book in a trilogy. I sure hope there’s more! It’s part of the “ABC Sci-Fi Mystery” series, of course but is also a thriller. The mystery resides in Kayla’s origins, but thrills abound. I hope you enjoy this preview. The book will be published only as an ebook and will be available only on Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Overdrive, Scribd, Gardners, etc.), not Amazon. Coming soon from Carrick Publishing!]
Origins
Copyright 2021, A. B. Carolan
Summary
Kayla Jones has dreams she can’t understand. Her future seems determined as the brilliant STEM student who looks forward to a research career, but her past gets in the way. As if the chaos afflicting the world and leading to her adopted father’s death wasn’t enough, killers begin to pursue her. With some friends who come to her aid, she’s on her way to discover a conspiracy that can be traced to prehistoric battles waged by hominins bent on conquest of a primitive Earth.
Prologue
New Paltz, NY: 2019
Kayla had nightmares. They’d started when she was five, soon after she was adopted…maybe even before. She didn’t remember much before that. Bombs, yes; flying debris, yes. Waking up in a hospital, a bit fuzzy-headed. But she couldn’t remember who her real parents were, or where she’d come from. She knew that Kayla Jones wasn’t her real name, but she couldn’t remember what that either. The doctors and nurses had been nice, though…and caring. They told her she was a war orphan. At first she didn’t even know what those words meant because they spoke in a strange language she didn’t understand well at the time.
Her new parents comforted her every time she woke up screaming. They were black; she was light brown. That didn’t seem to matter to them, and it certainly didn’t matter to her. There was a lot of love in their comforting, and there was also a lot in her new home, a place not far from a big city many grownups called the “capital of the world.”
Her adopted father was a pastor; her adopted mother the church’s choir director and organist. Kayla liked the church music. The softer, slow music was comforting, while the louder and more rhythmic music that got the congregation swaying made her happy. At first she didn’t know what the words that went with the music meant either, but she learned the strange, new language with time.
Sometimes the dreams weren’t bad. There were those where she was watching men and women dressed in protective clothing working at counters topped with weird instruments and machines. They didn’t talk much—the area where they worked was quiet and a bit gloomy, and the lights would often go out—but she somehow knew what they were thinking. Those dreams were recurring too, but they brought her peace instead. And somehow that gloomy place seemed like home.
She also remembered a different room where she could sit and stare at the stars—millions of points of light seen from a bubble that surrounded her. Or were those someone else’s memories? In any case, she liked those dreams best. They also seemed like dreams about another home, a more peaceful place than the one associated with the nightmares.
The peaceful dreams weren’t as frequent as the bad ones, though. She never told her new parents any details about them. She wanted the dreams, even the bad ones, to be her special secret. They were the only things left from a past that she’d mostly forgotten. She wanted to know more about it, but she had to postpone that quest.
Chapter One
New York City: 2032
Kayla spotted her pursuer just in time. The second one of the night! Others had killed two of her friends on different nights, and she’d just managed to escape the one who’d killed Pam. Now she had to confront his accomplice in a dark warehouse on the city’s upper West Side. At least there’re no rats!
She dove into a pile of old cardboard and packing material as she heard more shots. Automatic. High-capacity magazine? Harry’s lessons were always with her. She counted the five bullets that had slammed into the wooden shipping crate where she’d been standing only seconds before. Her guess might be correct, but some magazines held more than others.
There wasn’t enough refuse to cover her. Nowhere to hide! She stood and looked around. Move, Kayla! Keep moving! Don’t become a stationary target. Harry’s imagined voice spurred her on. She squeezed between two shipping crates into the next aisle, ran along it, and then smiled as she spotted her pursuer move along the aisle she’d just left, but in the opposite direction.
Maybe he’ll think I’m hiding under the pile? Fight or flee? The last might lead to a bullet in the back just like the one Pam got. It’d been wild the last few days, but, if she did it right, this time she’d get a gun. And there’d be no cops here who’d suspect she’d murdered her friends.
She took several silent, running steps like Harry had taught her, seemed to walk up the side of the crate next to her, and grabbed onto the top edge. She swung onto the crate’s top and then moved back along the crates toward the refuse pile. Peering over the edge of the crate next to the pile, she watched her adversary put his gun back into his shoulder holster. He started tossing the cardboard on top of the pile into the aisle behind him. Now or never! She jumped him.
He was strong but no match for her quickness; he was also old and slow. And his first reaction was to go for his gun. She laid him out before he even had it out of his holster.
She scampered away with the gun tucked snugly in the small of her back, held there by the waistband of her jeans.
***
Her next step towards survival was to find food. She was famished. The hours without much food or water were wearing on her. Nothing to do with her, but she noticed bodies on the streets now. The city’s chaos and violence had continued. Have people organized into packs like wild dogs? They’d seen that on TV.
She suddenly felt a cold frisson down her spine as she realized there could be such a thin veneer of civilization. Scratch a human and you get a rabid dog, she mused. But I won’t be like that! I just can’t!
She spotted golden arches up ahead. She knew the place. The drive-in restaurant was usually full, but now with the chaos? Both police and mercenaries had warned there was safety in numbers, that citizens shouldn’t be out alone. She decided the numbers didn’t matter, and she wasn’t alone: She had a gun now. Sorry, Harry. Sometimes you need one. The fast-food mecca called to its pilgrim. Is there still food there? She’d have to be careful.
Everything looked normal to her once she was inside, though, except for the lack of customers. She bought a Big Mac cheeseburger and large fries, the meal coming with a medium Coke. The latter was self-serve, so she’d repeat that, figuring she needed the caffeine as well as the liquid. Harry had always told her to stay hydrated.
When she turned to look for a place to sit, she only saw littered tables. It was after the lunch hour, so tables hadn’t been bussed. People still had to work, and they had to eat. She thought the mess was a good sign. Customers had been there. Life still went on even with the city’s violence.
What the kid at the register said caught her by surprise.
“You a cop?”
She then remembered the gun…and Harry. She’d turned her back to study the menu over the drink counter as if she were making a decision. “Corporate security guard,” she said over her shoulder. “Any problem with that?”
“No, ma’am, not as far as I’m concerned. You keep order around here better than the cops.”
Ma’am? She realized how disheveled she must look. Or how young and courageous the kid must be. Or maybe my age? Maybe my scruffiness makes me look older?
“Any clean tables?”
“Sorry. We’re a bit shorthanded. Everyone’s scared now, so people call in sick. But I need the money. I can clean off a table for you, but there’s a booth back by the side entrance that’s almost clean—opposite the bathrooms.”
“Thanks. Stay safe.”
Those bathrooms emitted an odor of vomit, feces, and urine, but the booth was mostly clean. She swept off the few crumbs and dirty napkins and sat. She wolfed down her fast-food banquet and was half-way through the first Coke round when she saw the guy who’d been pursuing her enter through the front door.
I should have killed him! She’d pulled her punch a bit, making her blow not a lethal one. Harry would have been proud, but now she thought it might become a fatal error.
Her pursuer didn’t seem interested in more pursuit, though. He bought the same meal she had, went to a front booth, and swept all its refuse onto the floor. The kid at the register glanced at her with a worried expression without glancing back at the pursuer. Does he suspect? Or want protection?
She figured he wouldn’t get into any trouble with his new customer, who was busy wolfing down his meal, so she entered the bathroom, tidied herself up a bit, and came out. Without looking toward the kid or her pursuer, she slipped out the side door.
I’ve got to get away from here. She’d be too visible in a small town like Bloomington where she’d gone to college. Or even in her hometown, New Paltz. But big cities were becoming dangerous too. She had experienced that personally here in New York City, but the news from Chicago, LA, and other big cities was all bad too.
She’d frisked her pursuer after stealing his gun but found no ID on him. Not even a wallet. Why is he after me? Who is he working for? She was sure he was a toady on someone’s payroll, but whose? He certainly wasn’t the usual garden variety pervert. Sure, she was a lonely girl on the streets of the city, fresh meat for would-be rapists, but these people pursuing her were connected and organized. Her pursuer didn’t seem anything like the crazed thugs seen on the newsnets either. He wouldn’t even look out of place in her father’s congregation with its diverse mix of ethnicities and races. Someone like Harry. Except her pursuer had been shooting at her!
She thought the pursuer and those who killed Jose and Pam must be connected. She was next on someone’s hit list. Are they after my entire group? If she could find that someone, she could end her current nightmare, which was turning out to be worse than any she’d had as a child.
She went into a dollar store and bought a hoody on sale for five bucks. Outside, she ditched the old one with IU and Hoosiers on it into a dumpster. She put on the new one that had the image of a pop singer she’d never heard sing, although the name seemed familiar.
Her father had taken her camping once in the Adirondacks. She’d hated it. Sponge baths with cold river water hadn’t been her idea of fun. A summer thunderstorm hadn’t been either. But that’s a good place to get away from everyone!
As she took off in a trot, she remembered another thunderstorm….
***
Comments are always welcome.
Hard sci-fi, anyone? The bargain bundle The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection contains three “evergreen” sci-fi novels (i.e. as current and entertaining as the day I finished the manuscripts) that span thousands of years of future history, including the founding of ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) featured in A.B. Carolan’s novels, Rogue Planet, and other stories. In the novel Survivors of the Chaos, readers discover a dystopian Earth where powerful international corporations rule and exploit the planet and the rest of the solar system, even hiding the greatest discovery Humans could ever make, an ET ship that crash-landed on a moon of Saturn. In spite of the chaos, three starships are launched to colonize planets orbiting Sol-type stars. In Sing a Zamba Galactica, readers can follow two colonies’ struggles to survive an ET invasion in near-Earth space; the colonists aren’t alone because new ET friends are there to help. The reader will also meet new ETs, including Swarm, that strange collective intelligence so important in ITUIP history. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, readers will see how a mad industrialist, akin to ones Humans fled decades earlier, plots to rule all of near-Earth peace and end the peace in that corner of the galaxy so dearly won. Three novels for the price of one ebook—a veritable smorgasbord of sci-fi! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first edition of Survivors of the Chaos is also available in print from another publisher.)
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
