ScareScapes Book Four: Attack of the Living Shadows!

By Jake Bible

The Earth Colony Asteroid Scorpio was launched into space in search of a new home for the human race. Nine-hundred years later than expected, only seven of the Scorpio’s passengers awaken, not one of them an adult. Now, rebuilt with cyber parts, these kids must rely on each other to survive the mysteries of the Scorpio and the dangers of deep space.

With no time to rest after surviving a zombie horde, the Scorpio crew is thrust into another night-mare adventure. This time the threat is seemingly living shadows terrorizing the ship and crew. The shadows appear like animals and move like smoke, except for one called The Big Shadow, who is solid–and deadly.

Fighting a solo battle, Security Chief Landon Fields sends his friends to safety, while he alone attempts to outwit the Big Shad-ow. He knows he must stay alive long enough to solve the mystery found in the Scorpio science labs!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Permuted
• Release date: Jul 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618685261

Jake Bible

Jake Bible lives in Asheville, NC with his wife and two kids. He is the author of many published short stories and the creator of a new literary form: the Drabble Novel. DEAD MECH represents the introduction to the world of the Drabble Novel, a novel written 100 words at a time. The Americans represents the sidequel to DEAD MECH. Jake really likes making s%#t up, even brand new words and literary forms. He also has many stories available as ebooks, including the collection Bethany And The Zombie Jesus: A Novelette And 11 Other Tales Of Horror And Grotesquery (also available in print) and 31 Days Of Halloween. Learn more about Jake and his work at www.jakebible.com. Links to his Facebook fan page, Twitter and his forum can be found there, as well as his weekly drabble release, Friday Night Drabble Party, and his weekly free audio fiction podcast.

Book preview

ScareScapes Book Four:

Attack of the Living Shadows!

Jake Bible

A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

Published at Smashwords

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-526-1

SCARESCAPES BOOK FOUR

Attack of the Living Shadows!

© 2015 by Jake Bible

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Jack Keely

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Permuted Press

109 International Drive, Suite 300

Franklin, TN 37067

http://permutedpress.com

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

About the Author

Chapter One

The Earth Colony Asteroid Scorpio was supposed to be one of twelve retrofitted asteroids sent out into the galaxy to find inhabitable planets for the thousands of people that escaped the doomed Earth. Twelve starships, each with 10,000 passengers placed in cryosleep for one hundred years. The ships would travel through the galaxy and after one hundred years everyone would wake up and we could begin to explore our region and hope to find what we needed to save humanity.

But, it didn’t work out that way.

I woke up a thousand years later with five other kids and found out my parents and the other 9000 plus passengers were still in cryosleep; trapped forever because the AIs couldn’t figure out how to wake them up without killing them. They woke us up, but not without issues.

All of us that the AIs (artificial intelligence protocols that run the ECA Scorpio) woke up had some physical issues that had to be addressed. Because of the long hibernation in the cryosleep pods, parts of our bodies were damaged and had to be replaced by cybernetic alternatives. Pretty much, we all became part robot. But each with different parts.

My sister, Ajay, has new cybernetic lungs while every joint in my body was replaced by cybernetic parts and my bones were reinforced with steel to handle the extra stress. Isla McNeal, our captain, has cybernetic legs and her brother, Felix, has a new right arm, jaw, and left eye that can scan all kinds of stuff. Bessie Sacher has cybernetic hands, which she doesn’t cover with synthskin since she’s in charge of Systems and is always tearing the skin and having to have it replaced. The twins, Enrico and Carlos Barraza, aren’t so much twins anymore. Enrico has new sinuses, ears, and a voicebox while Carlos has a new spine and ribcage.

By the time we got used to our new parts, and the isolation of not having any adults to rely on, we’d settled into a good routine with the AIs. I handle Security and Supply, since that was what my parents would have done if they’d woken up. Isla, like I said, is captain of the ship since that’s the job her father had before he went into cryosleep. Bessie is systems chief and makes sure things run, or at least makes sure the Systems AI makes sure everything runs. The twins’ parents were doctors in charge of Health, but there’s no way those two are allowed to have anything to do with keeping us all healthy and alive.

It was all a good routine until the AIs started to test us. First Security messed with us by taking over the loader bots and then turning our own cybernetic parts against us. Bessie figured out how to reprogram our parts and all of the bots so that doesn’t happen again.

Systems tried to burn us in the sky dome, drown us down in the huge service tunnels, and eject us out into space. We were lucky to get through that. But each time, even the first time with Security, we had some help from a separate AI we call Ship. None of us know where the thing came from, but every time we’ve found it, it has been in cargo bay three-seventeen. Which is a cargo bay that doesn’t exist, as far as any of the other AIs are concerned.

According to the twins, Ship also helped when we were dealing with a zombie horde. It turns out that Supply and Health had created constructs of some kind of synthetic plant material over cybernetic skeleton structures. Why? As some exercise to wake up and transfer the minds of those still in cryosleep. I don’t know all the details, but it went very wrong because Enrico likes to watch zombie movies and left his on in one of the cryosleep pod bays. One possible solar flare glitch later and all of the constructs thought they were actual zombies and needed to eat our brains.

Isla, Bessie, and myself came down to the labs to see if we could fix things at the source, but all we found were hundreds and hundreds of more hungry zombies. We dodged them and thought we were safe when we noticed other growing chambers for different constructs. That’s when things got bad. Like really bad.

Now, here we are hiding up on a catwalk and hoping the new constructs, which we call shadows, since that’s what they look like, don’t find us and rip us apart. Because we watched them rip some of the zombie constructs apart and it wasn’t pretty.

I don’t see them, Bessie whispers to me as we huddle close and peer down into the gloom of the lab. Did they leave?

Hard to tell, Isla says. They disappear so easily. They could be gone or they could be right under us.

I can climb down and double check, I say.

No! Isla and Bessie hiss at the same time.

They look at each other and frown then look over at me and try to smile. Isla has a great, warm smile, while Bessie’s smile is a little more, um, unsettling. She’s pretty, even with the bright pink hair, but being an intense girl, her smile sometimes scares me.

The real trouble is I think they both kinda like me and I have no idea what to do about it. I’m only thirteen and don’t know anything about girls! Both of my parents are in cryosleep, so I can’t ask them, and the twins are only eleven and Felix is ten. I can’t even think to ask my sister since she’s nine and not mature for her age at all.

Isla just turned thirteen and Bessie will be soon also, so we are basically the same age, but it’s like we’re light-years apart. They keep looking at me, and bickering over me, and all I want to do is study everything about the Scorpio so we can figure out a way out of the mess we’re in. But between their drama and the insanity that keeps happening, I’m thinking we’ll be lucky just to survive, let alone find any answers as to what’s going on.

And what’s going on right now is the twins are walking into the lab and making as much noise as possible.