Cracked Earth

By J.L. Villarreal

An earthquake and nuclear meltdown in Japan has forced the worlds governments to inoculate earths population against a new form of radiation being used at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Those inoculated, the majority of the worlds population, had a reaction which turned them into violent primitive humans. With all of the governments gone, a group of survivors must scavenge the abandoned world for supplies and fight off the primitive monsters to keep our civilization and our race from disappearing. With the worlds population dwindling, they find out that these primitive beings are not their worst enemies, but rather man himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479793099

J.L. Villarreal

JL Villarreal is a licensed Physical Therapist Assistant who was raised in the Rio Grande Valley of deep south Texas. He still lives in the Rio Grande Valley with his family and three cats. He is an avid Tennis player and enjoys hunting and fishing. This is his first writing venture, but because he enjoyed writing this adventure so much is already at work on other writing projects. Readers can reach him at [e-mail].

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Beginning

It’s 7:05 in the morning, and the sun is finally rising. I can’t believe I survived another day in this crazy world. It’s been almost sixteen months since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. Who would have thought that an event so far away would affect the entire world? Who’s to blame for the chain of events that followed and changed the world? Who knows? It all began to fall apart with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake near the coast of Honshu, Japan, on March 11, 2011. A massive tsunami followed the earthquake and ravaged the west coast of the island country. However, it wasn’t the massive wave that changed the world but the quake itself and its proximity to a nuclear power plant.

The Fukushima power plant was supposed to be a state-of-the-art power plant using the most advanced nuclear technology. That was a well-known fact. What we weren’t told was what was being used to obtain this amazing energy. Normally a nuclear power plant uses uranium to create nuclear fission to produce steam to power the turbines and turn it into electricity. At the Fukushima power plant, some genius decided to use a synthetic form of uranium, which had never been tested, instead of the natural-occurring stuff. Well, at least that’s what the news reporters said.

Well, enough of this explanation bullshit. Let’s get back to staying alive. Today I have to go to a town nearby and try to find supplies—any supplies will do. My name is George. I’m in a ranch in central Texas, driving with my friend Steven to Devine. Today we are going to one of the bigger towns. All the small ones in this area have been pillaged of all goods. I can still remember that day when the government finally admitted that the nuclear meltdown was far worse than had originally been reported. They recommended that everybody get potassium iodine injections to avoid any radiation sickness. Usually a pill will do, but injections were required because the government feared that massive amounts of radiation would leak. It’s more likely that they decided to use the injections because of the synthetic uranium that was used, and no one knew how it would affect us. It was estimated that about 70 percent of this world’s population received the miracle shot, mostly in the industrialized nations. My mind gets back to the task ahead, driving, as we are nearing the edge of town. It looks like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie. The town is empty, with all the buildings either abandoned or burned, and very few appear that they have not been broken into. Those are the ones that we need to target to try to find supplies.

My mind wanders back to one month after people started to receive their iodine shots. Pharmaceutical companies were making a killing. Each shot was selling on the average for $500, and some people were paying up to fifty thousand in the black market to be the first to receive the cure. The government devised a lottery system for the people to purchase the vaccinations, but the rich always seemed to get the shots first, even if they were not on the top of the list. We were nowhere near the top of this list—luckily—so my family never received the injections. We were close to finally receive them, but my brother, who was working for the government, called me and told me not to get these shots. He was not able to explain why we should not be inoculated, but it wasn’t long before we found out why. Immunized people started to report weird symptoms a few weeks later. They were unexplainably getting severe headaches, feeling very anxious, and would get angry very easily. The symptoms were so severe that people started to kill themselves or other people for no apparent reason. Murder and suicide rates were going through the roof. It was reported that up to 60 percent of the people who received this shot did not survive past sixty days from being immunized. But something weird happened after about forty-five days to those who did survive. People were going through some form of transformation. They were becoming primitive with no sense of reason, almost into what we know as Neanderthals, but more primitive and a lot more violent. Those primies (short for primitives) look just like humans, except that their hair and nails have grown out and most of their clothes have been ripped off or have been worn out. Well, that’s how they look now. They smell horrific since they no longer bathe and are soiling themselves without removing their clothes. The primies developed into clans and started to kill normal people and even feeding upon them. This initial wave of madness must have brought down the planet’s population by at least 70 percent. As clans fought amongst themselves for (food and territory) and with normals (people that did not get inoculated), the population dropped even further. Those first six to nine months were complete hellish madness. The funny thing is that the radiation that leaked was not enough to create any damage to anybody, but enough did leak that when mixed with the iodine shots, it created this transformation. I never did find out if my brother and his family had been part of those who were inoculated since that was the last time I ever spoke with him.

I suddenly hear Steven’s voice telling me to stop at a small convenience store at the edge of town that appears to have some supplies. The store is abandoned and has been looted of most of its goods, except for the canned food, which the primies cannot open as they don’t know how to use any tools. We get down from my truck (yes, in Texas, most of its residents own a gun and a truck) and walk slowly into the store. We look around and found the store to be empty of any primies, but there were plenty of canned goods.

Hurry, cries out Steven, we need to get all this food before the primies get here.

We begin to gather the cans into the sacks when we hear a wailing scream. That is the sound that the primies make when they call each other to prepare for an attack, a sound that we have all become way too familiar with. I pick up the pace and load my sack even faster until it’s full.

Come on, Steven, let’s go. I hear them getting close, I cry out as I pick up my sack and take it outside to my truck.

We throw the sacks into the back of the pickup and rush to get in and turn it on. As we are jumping in, we see five primies running our way, ready to kill us and probably even have us for dinner. They are about a block away and are approaching us very fast. I immediately take out my 9 mm. handgun and start firing at them. Steven quickly turns his muscular build and six-foot-tall frame toward our attackers and starts to do the same with his .223 AR-15 rifle. Now I’m a pretty good shot with a rifle, but having primies rushing toward you to take your head off is enough to shake up even the best of marksmen, and I’m shooting with a handgun. My nerves must have gotten the best of me ’cause I emptied my seventeen-shot magazine and managed to hit only two of them, and I am sure that they were lucky shots. Steven, being a former border patrol agent, fares much better and manages to kill the other three. I don’t know how many shots he took, but I’m sure it was not more than four or five.

He turns and winks one of his hazel eyes at me. Man, George, you suck! I think your bullets ricocheted from the asphalt into those primies.

Kiss my ass. I got them, didn’t I? I respond as I look behind us to see a group of about another ten primies running toward us. They looked very pissed off and were getting close to us incredibly fast. These guys seem to run a lot faster than normals, at least twice as fast. It won’t be long before we are surrounded by more primies if we don’t hurry and get out of here fast!

We need to get out of here! shouted Steven.

We jump into my truck and quickly drive out of Devine and away from those primies. Luckily, we are at the edge of town, so getting out of there is quick and easy. The primies gave chase for about a mile but stopped once they realized that they were not going to catch up to us. We wind our way back through the farm roads to our base camp, about one hundred miles away in a small ranch in the Hill Country.

Driving back to base camp, all I could think about was the road ahead and hoping we would not run into any mutants, or as we call them, fangs. These poor souls were once primies that mutated into something worse when solar flares hit our planet. At first, no one really knew where these creatures came from or if they were a result of primies changing into something worse. Surviving scientists were able to figure out what really caused these mutations. They were able to connect these transformations to the point in time when our planet was bombarded by massive solar flares. Who would imagine that these flares would happen just three days before the one-year anniversary of the massive earthquake in Japan? Fangs were given this name because of the large canine teeth that developed after their mutation. They also grew to almost twice the size of a normal human and about three times as strong with long shaggy hair and sharp claws. Fangs are usually solitary creatures, but groups of two or three have been seen by normals. Some normals have reported that a fang will show up after one of them makes a kill and will often fight each other for the right to keep their food. We were lucky this time; we didn’t see any fangs. As you can tell by now, my head keeps jumping from what’s currently happening and what brought the world to its knees.

Back at base camp, we are forty-seven normals, including my wife and two children. Most are living in tents or inside of vehicles since we have to constantly keep moving. All of us were lucky and never received the immunization as we were all at the end of the lottery list. Lucky, I suppose. It’s not like I would have been able to afford the vaccines in the black market—well, not for all of us anyway. A person approached me, selling them for over $5,000 a pop, but I couldn’t even come close to buying one. No matter how much I tried to barter with the guy, he only wanted cash. I had already used a large amount of my savings for my daughter’s college education. I did try to sell my pickup truck to raise money, but people were more interested in buying their shots than in buying an old beat-up truck. Thank goodness for being broke.

We are all barely hanging on for survival in that isolated camp. Steven, being a former member of BORTAC (the border patrol’s tactical and special response team), has trained our entire group on how to use the weapons we have and even some hand-to-hand combat. We should all be able to handle ourselves when trouble comes knocking at our front door. There are other survivor cells throughout Texas and the rest of the country that we are aware of, and we communicate with them through shortwave radio. All these groups seem to be very small, about the same size of ours, but as time goes by, more of them disappear. Just last month, the largest community we knew, one with about two hundred normals, was almost wiped out by primies, and only a handful of about twelve were able to escape, only to get attacked by fangs on their trip here, leaving only two of them alive. They were able to make it here barely last week. By the way things are going, there won’t be any of those communities left, including us. Our government has collapsed, as it has all over the world, since their leaders and most of their military personnel were the first to get inoculated. We don’t have a government here, just an understanding of what needs to be done—which is to stay alive!

We drive up to our base camp an hour later. My wife and kids run to hug me as I get out of the truck, happy to see that I’m still alive.

They can smell the freshly burned gunpowder on my clothes, and my son immediately asks, What happened, Dad? Did you run into primies? Are you okay?

I’m okay. Nothing happened. We just had to fire a few rounds to scare off some wild dogs, I explain to my kids while giving my wife the look that meant to not ask anything else.

Kids. My daughter, Anna, is already twenty-one, and my son, Aaron, just turned seventeen; they are practically adults. Most of my family was lost during the first few months after the quake. They were part of the fortunate ones to receive the shots. I don’t know if they died or are still alive as primies or, even worse, fangs. If they died, they were lucky as they don’t have to live in this hellhole, not knowing if the next day will be their last. Living in constant fear is no way to live.

Chapter 2

The Fang

It’s about ten in the morning the next day, and we are all back at base camp. The canned food that we had brought back from our trip to Devine has been distributed throughout our community. It’s not much, but it should be enough for a couple of days if we ration ourselves right. We all have to take turns to keep watch in the outskirts of our community in case there is an incursion by primies or fangs. David and John are brothers in their mid-thirties and are taking watch of the southern perimeter. These guys are inseparable and very close. Soon after, they sound alarm 2, which means the worst—that a fang is nearby and on his way to the base camp. Everybody quickly runs to either hide or get their weapons. I remember the first time I saw a fang. I was driving with my wife and children in central Texas, looking for a ranch to start a new home when I saw this ten-foot-tall hairy monster standing in the middle of the road. It almost looked like a bigfoot, but bigger and a whole lot meaner. As I stopped my truck, I looked over at