Feral: First Bloods, #0

By Tracy Korn

Fans of V Wars, The Strain, LOST and I Am Legend: Don't Miss this Genre-Bending Sci-Fi Thriller, the prequel to Bad Seed!

★★★★★ "This prequel has all the right elements — mystery, intrigue, thrills, kills, and action. I can't wait to see where this goes."

Don't Look.
Never let them look.
The pain is always worse when they know...

People are dying, and no one knows why. Knox Ryder is an illegal medic who dreams of becoming Authorized at The Citadel, a gated haven away from the violent, hand-to-mouth society known as The Grind. The opportunity would literally cost him years of his life—twenty years minimum since he doesn't have the tuition—and when a gruesome accident actually opens the door, the new price of his dream is even steeper.

Blackmailed into delivering mysterious briefcases to the docks once a week, Knox has learned not to ask questions. He's learned to keep his head down and do what he has to do to secure a better future in this new reality. But when that very future is threatened by the contents of the briefcases, even the guarded, concrete walls of The Citadel won't keep the whatever is killing people at bay. 

Those demons are all around us. Inside us. Waiting.

When time is currency, what's your humanity worth?

✔ Heart-pounding plot twists
✔ Run-for-your-life action

Feral is the prequel novelette to First Bloods, an all-new Dystopian Thriller series!

Download now to start the clock...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Animus Ferrum Publishing LLC
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393269410

Tracy Korn

Tracy Korn is a sci-fi / fantasy author and all around science geek who may or may not have a "Lip Smackers" chapstick addiction. When she's not inventing dystopian worlds (and subsequently saving them or wrecking them more), she reads about other people doing it, practices her newbie cinematographer skills, and dreams of someday meeting James Cameron. To be the first to hear about new releases, giveaways, and if Tracy ever really does meet James Cameron, sign up for her VIP list at bit.ly/TracyKornNews.

Book preview

Feral | First Bloods: Book 0

Copyright © 2019 by Tracy Korn. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

Cover Design Copyright © 2019 by James Korn

www.jkornphoto.com

Summary:

A longshoreman dreams of becoming an authorized medic in The Citadel, an opportunity that would literally cost him years of his life. But when a gruesome accident actually opens the door, will the new price of his dream be even steeper?

Preface

No one believed the world’s population would hit eleven billion in just a hundred years. We weren’t ready, despite the decades of warnings that societal infrastructures would collapse—like a dam holding back an ever-deepening sea of people without access to basic needs.

The United States was the first of the developed countries to pass legacy credit laws, which seemed like the answer to everyone’s problems in the beginning. Can’t pay your medical bills? No problem—just sign away a year of your life instead. One at the end. One you won’t miss anyway.

Legacy credits took the place of loans and credit cards for private citizens. Conveniently, corporations had no choice other than to stay on the old system due to their conglomerate natures. After all, the CEOs and boards of directors couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the debt of their own companies.

For everyone else, it started off almost too easily. People paid off their creditors, got the surgeries they needed, went to school, and in the meantime, predicting a person’s natural expiration date was a simple matter of gene algorithms. For a few decades, it was a utopia. But the bill came due for everyone, eventually.

Legacy chips embedded in people’s brains subtracted the debt owed from one’s natural years balance, and when their time was up, the chips alerted the government. People were given twenty-four hours notice to say goodbye at that point, and at least they always scheduled expirations for the middle of the night so people could just go to sleep and not wake up. Painless. Humane. They even collected your corpse the next morning at no additional charge to your family. It was a better fate than we might get if we lived out our natural years, or so the propaganda said.

Now, if there were a natural disaster, sometimes the unused and non-levied years of the casualties would be redistributed among the survivors in a city as kind of a tax credit. It was all updated daily in The Borrower’s Report—the digital record of interest rates, monetary to legacy conversion rates, and public domain legacy distribution credits. If a person just happened to accidentally walk into traffic, however, death insurance could cover their obligations, but if they didn’t have that, the debt they carried could be passed along to their next of kin (that was in the fine print, naturally).

Despite how transparent this all seemed in the beginning, when collections began after a few decades, people started to see the system for what it really was: population control.

Perfectly legal population control.

Slowly, when the costs became all too apparent, it was harder for the average person to access higher education and Authorized medical treatment, which was the only kind not punishable by thousands of dollars or decades of legacy fines. The final straw was the physical wall going up around the only sanctioned university that could issue Authorized credentials, The Citadel, about six or seven years ago.

Life became synonymous with money not only metaphorically, but literally, plunging our world into depths of greed previously unknown.

We were drowning, and it was only a matter of time before someone...or something intervened.

FERAL

United States, 2119

Global population: 11.4 billion

The crashing surf sounded like a heartbeat in the fog, a constant, steady rhythm.

It sounded like something lying in wait for me, but I tried not to think about it. You think about that kind of thing in The Grind, and it might just come true.

Damn it! Pritchard shouted when his hat flew off in the gust coming from the Atlantic, sending his dark hair in every direction. He started after it, but threw his arms in the air when the hat was blown