Extinction Biographies

By Jay Korza

Before Daria was a Navy Corpsman, she was a little girl who loved looking at the heavens. A fateful shopping trip with her father will change the entire course of her life when two armed gunman take over the store. Not everyone will make it out alive...

Daria's story is one of ten character biographies that I have throughout my novel "Extinction". Each short story gives us a glimpse into the lives of our heroes before they were heroes. How did they get to where they are now, saving the galaxy? How did their stories intertwine with each other before they came to rely on one another for their very lives? These questions and more are answered in the "Extinction Biographies", a collection of the ten biographies from the main novel "Extinction". You can also read these biographies for free on my site at 1393Productions, and then come back here for the full novel!

Some of other the characters you'll meet:

Seth:
Seth had it all, a great girlfriend, a great internship that was leading to a great career and he was about to graduate college with honors. But then everything went wrong. Have you ever known someone who was too smart for their own good? Well that's Seth and now he's stumbled on to a government coverup that will change his life forever.

The Warrior:
Emerging from a tubular mechanical womb, each genetically engineered soldier is identical to their brother standing next to them. At least they used to be. It's been over a thousand years since the Warriors' makers left them on their own and things are changing. Some are emerging from their births a little different than everyone else. What's a clone to do?

Emily:
What could be better than an expedition to an alien moon to unlock the secrets of an ancient species? Anything! At least that's what teenager Emily thought at first. After arriving at the dig site with her galactically-known archeologist aunt, Emily becomes a key member of the team and helps to unlock a secret that might one day save the galaxy...

Scan:
Before Scan was frogman for a Marine Force Recon team, he was an eco-terrorist fighting for the oceans of the galaxy. Follow Scan on his mission to stop the corporate plundering of a planet that one day we might call home.

Snake:
What happens when you grow up in a poor Coalition colony with no parents and you work for a criminal syndicate? Nothing good, that's for sure. This is the story of a young boy who is about to reach a special age, an age where he can no longer say he's just a kid, an age where he will be prosecuted as an adult if he gets caught doing his job for the syndicate. When a kid in the syndicate reaches fourteen, he is forced into retirement, one way or another...

Reaper:
Reaper's always knew he would follow in his father's footsteps and become a trauma surgeon. Saving lives was who Reaper was and he couldn't see himself doing anything else. Then, one day, Reaper helps his father save a man who didn't deserve saving and the repercussions of their efforts will alter the course of their lives forever. Join Reaper's journey as he learns what it means to be a healer and make decisions that will eventually lead to him becoming the battle-hardened Navy Corpsman he is today.

Beast:
Shirkas are one of the most formidable species in the Coalition. If a Shirka had showed up on your doorstep before humans had ever had contact with aliens, you would swear that every werewolf nightmare you ever had just came to life. But how do Shirkas start out? Shirka birthing planets are strickly forbidden to outsiders so humans know very little about their upbringing. Follow a pack of newly born pups as they forge their own destinies in a world that is meant to weed out the weak and elevate the strong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Korza
• Release date: Aug 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301340842

Jay Korza

Jay was born in California and moved to Tucson with his family when he was seven. At eighteen he joined the United States Navy and became a Hospital Corpsman. Jay worked in the Emergency Room at the Navy Medical Center San Diego (dubbed "The Starship of Navy Medicine) in California. After four years of service, HM3 Korza took his leave and went into the private medical sector, a decision he has regretted more than once. Jay has managed a private medical practice, worked on ambulances in Tucson and Massachusetts, and has been a paramedic for the US Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons. In 2000 he started his career in law enforcement and has ever since been elated with being a deputy. Jay currently has thirteen years of law enforcement service and seven years on the SWAT Team. He is currently assigned to a specialized support operations unit as well as being a medic and sniper for the SWAT Team. In his spare time, Jay also teaches at the local college's paramedic program and he has desperately been trying to finish this book. If you're reading this, then he finally has. For more information about the author, please visit his website at 1393productions.com . Any and all feedback or questions are always welcomed. And join the conversation on Twitter with the characters from Extinction, they are a very chatty bunch! You can find them by starting with Daria_1393 and then checking out all of the characters she's following.

Book preview

Extinction Biographies

By

Jay Korza

Published by Jay Korza at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Jay Korza

Table of Contents

Forward

Daria

Seth

The Warrior

Wilks

Emily

Scan

Surgeon

Davies

Snake

Bloom

Reaper

Jeeves

Beast

About the Author

Forward

Throughout my novel Extinction, I have chapters dedicated to the backstories of my main characters. These biographies give the reader a more in-depth view into the lives of our heroes and show how their trials and decisions are intertwined with each other, leading them down the path to where they are today - saving the galaxy. Since each one of the biographies is a stand-alone story that doesn't need the rest of the novel for context, I wanted to present them to you on their own.

Unfortunately, Kindle and Nook don't allow me to offer my stories for free and I have to charge a minimum of $0.99. These short stories will soon be offered for free on Kobo, iTunes and Smashwords. But until they are published there (it's fairly time consuming to publish eleven stories to all of these different sites), you can always go to my website and read the biographies for free (www.1393Productions.com). Don't get me wrong, if you want to pay the 99-cents for each story, I'd be more than happy to have your business, but it would be more economical to read the biographies for free, love them, and then come back and buy the whole novel for only $2.99! 

Whatever you decide to do, I hope you enjoy the Extinction universe and let me know what you thought of it!

Daria

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.

Reaper turned to look at the assailant. No.

Look, man, you're obviously a doctor or some shit. The junkie nodded towards his still seizing friend. Let this little bitch's dad die and help my buddy.

I'm not a doctor, I'm a corpsman. And even if I wanted to save your friend, I couldn't. Reaper was still trying to slowly work on Daria's father as he spoke. Your friend has been seizing for over a minute now. That means he's in the last stages of Track Star Delirium. He can't be saved by anyone, even if we were in the best hospital in the entire Coalition. He's going to die, end of story.

Without hesitating, the junkie calmly said, Then so will you.

Daria heard the gun bark at least five times and she saw the front of Reaper's chest tear apart in more than one place. Reaper slumped next to Daria's father. At that moment, one of the citizen shoppers swung a trashcan at the junkie's head and the sound of a solid connection rang out. The junkie went down and immediately the citizen was kicking and stomping on the already subdued man.

You killed my wife! the man repeated again and again as he kicked and beat the man, turning the junkie's body to pulp.

Daria turned her attention back to her father. She knew, or at least thought she knew, what Reaper was going to do after he exposed the heart: plug the hole. Daria was trying to get herself over the mental hurdle of sticking her hand inside her father's chest when she saw Reaper's arm move.

Reaper didn't have enough strength to move his body but he could still make his arm function. He walked his fingers along the floor and up his patient's side until he found the surgical opening he had created. He then slid his fingers inside and found the hole and put two fingers in it.

Daria instantly saw the blood cease to pump from her father's body and saw just a tinge of color race up his carotid arteries and into his face. He had still lost a lot of blood so his color didn't change very much but she was sure that even a little change was a good sign.

Reaper's body went slack but his fingers never moved. Daria was sure he was dead but before she could check, a police officer scooped her up to take her out of the store and to a safe place. Daria struggled briefly until she realized the man holding her was one of the good guys.

Pointing to Reaper, she said, Don't move him. His hand is saving my daddy's life. And with that, all of the adrenaline that had kept her upright for the last several minutes left her body all at once. She went limp in the officer's arms, her winning ticket all but forgotten. A song played, distantly heard in the background...

~

Daria sat on the edge of the boardwalk, looking into the water. The rolling of the sea always made her feel better: The rhythmic crashing of the waves against the pillars of the pier. The creaking of the wood as it stands against one of the strongest forces in all of nature.

It had been twelve years since her father had been shot in the store, waiting in line to get Daria's telescope. Twelve years since Daria's life changed so drastically in just five short minutes. She still looked at the night sky but not in the same way and not with the telescope that she never claimed. Now she looked at the sky, wondering where the Marine Corps would send her.

After that day in the store, she became obsessed with medicine and studied it relentlessly. All of her teachers thought for sure she would be going to medical school after college, but not Daria. Daria knew she wasn't going to college, at least not a standard six-year college. She was sought after by many of the top schools in the Coalition but she only applied to one school her senior year. Daria applied to a vocational school to become a paramedic. Her teachers were all aghast at such a flagrant waste of intelligence and talent but Daria couldn't care less.

To become a paramedic on an all-human world, the class was only nine months long. But Daria wanted more than that. Daria was taking the multi-species course that usually took three years. With all of the studying Daria had done on her own, she was able to test out of most of the course work and focus on clinical rotations. Daria finished the school in just two years. Many of the doctors Daria worked with had written her letters of recommendation for medical schools but she had her sights set on a different goal.

Daria felt a light touch on her shoulder and smelled the familiar scent that always made her smile. She looked up into the eyes of the man standing behind her. Hi, Dad.

Hi, sweetie. Daria's father sat next to her on the dock. Are you ready?

More than you know. No matter how old Daria got, she knew that holding her father's hand would always be the best feeling in the galaxy.

Okay, we should probably get you to the transport then. As they both stood, he added, You know you don't have to go. Your contract isn't in effect until you scan-in on the shuttle.

I know, Dad, but I want to. I know you think I have some deep-seated need to go but that's not it. As they stood, she looked up into his eyes and put one hand over the area on his chest where Reaper had opened him up so many years ago. "I'm not doing this because he sacrificed himself for YOU, I'm doing this because he sacrificed himself for another person. In that moment, I knew that I could do more than look at the galaxy—I could be an important part of it."

I know, sweetie. I'm just going to miss you. As an unabashed tear rolled down his face, he led her towards their transport. Just do me one huge favor, please.

What's that, Dad?

Please, for the love of all that is holy, get stationed somewhere with beaches and sand so I can visit and find myself a little honey to spend all of my retirement money on.

You got it, Dad.

Seth

Sometimes life was so fantastic that you just had to sit back and look at it to really see how great it was. That’s exactly what Seth was trying to do as he sat there with his friends and more importantly, his girlfriend. Seth wished he could float out of his body and just watch the evening as an outsider, a detached form hovering above and taking it all in.

For the first time in years, he was truly happy. Six years was a long time to be in college, especially if you were condensing an eight-year program into that time frame. Seth always was an eager person and he wanted to get on with his life and do something more than studying and working on graduate projects that would bring credit to his college first and foremost rather than the students working on them.

Not only did he want to start his career and feel like a real productive adult, but he hoped that when he was out of school, he would be able to unwrap the last tentacles his parents had on his life. No longer would they be able to say that they were paying for his school so they had a right to be intrusive and overbearing. Sure, they could now say they had paid for his school so they had a right to do whatever obtrusive and overbearing parental thing that they thought that gave them the privilege to do, but at least now he could hang up on them and not wonder whether his tuition would still be paid for or whether he’d still have a place to live come the next day.

Or at least it was almost now that he could do that. So