Feral Recruit (Calm Act Book 5) Read online

  FERAL RECRUIT

  CALM ACT BOOK 5

  GINGER BOOTH

  Copyright © 2017 Ginger Booth.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by www.rafidodigitalart.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Free Ebooks

  Appendix – How Did We Get Here?

  Acknowledgments

  Books by Ginger Booth

  Calm Act Timeline

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  If you’re picking up the Calm Act series in the middle, great! But eventually, you might want to read the Appendix – How Did We Get Here? That’s a couple page summary of how our world became this one.

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  1

  Interesting fact: Two years ago, in early December, widespread Ebola broke out in New York City. Epidemic control borders crashed shut to isolate the ‘Apple Zone’ – the city, its northern suburbs, half of New Jersey, and Long Island – to prevent refugees from carrying the contagion. A year later, Project Reunion began to save the survivors. Many were resettled outside the Apple. Only 140,000 remained on Manhattan Island, down from 1.7 million. Among them was Ava Panic….

  Joining the Army wasn’t even a dream ship on the horizon yet, as Ava Panic stood with the throng in Washington Square. The demolition team was ready to implode the blocks at the far, eastern end of the park. The teenager stood with the others behind the yellow warning tape of the blast radius, her mouth partially open in delight.

  Five months of their lives the Soho Village crews had spent clearing salvage from this collection of eight-to-twelve story buildings. Ava herself had stripped on two of them, one a heavy grey edifice of New York University office space and lecture halls, the other NYU’s hollow core library, sheathed in orange sandstone. A university she’d never be able to attend. Just empty hulks now, of massive stone, blocking the low-angled November sun from reaching Washington Square.

  What a colossal bore the prep had been. First out came all the equipment worth salvaging. Then the combustibles. Then they broke the sheet rock off the walls. More combustibles to tear out. Then the picky labor of stripping the rats nest of wires and copper pipes. There was plenty of salvage metal threaded through one of these behemoths. Day in, day out, through the dog days of August and ever since. The newer library hadn’t been so bad, but Ava hated that heavy lecture hall building. She was eager to witness its violent demise.

  The crowd of salvage crews, on break to watch the big event, keyed higher and higher with anticipation, as the countdown klaxons sounded. Some of the old ones had tears in their eyes. Maybe they’d attended NYU, or knew someone who cared. The kids like Ava were enjoying every minute, bouncing on their toes.

  Soho Village featured unusually short buildings for Manhattan. The mini-city occupied the remains of Soho and Greenwich Village. So they were low priority for the privilege of the expert demolition crew. Some of the other kids had witnessed the excitement as they collapsed whole blocks of skyscrapers in Midtown. But that was before Ava came in from the gangs. Demolition had worked its way north for months, and was only now revisiting lower Manhattan. She’d never seen this operation before in person. The other kids claimed it was awesome.

  The traveling experts spent all last week installing the charges and control electronics. Then days of low cloud cover postponed the big event. They needed a clear sky for the shock waves to disperse safely into the heavens, instead of bouncing down off the clouds to shatter windows and eardrums around the blast site.

  Ava remembered that part fondly. The idea of sending shock waves reverberating up to heaven, resonated in her raging heart.

  Ava had listened in fascination as the city engineer explained the details of this operation to the town meeting before they began. Where they would install the charges. How they anticipated domino effects to work, one tall building helping to drag down the next. The water mains, gas mains, power and sewer lines disconnected and re-routed. The subway caverns to collapse down below. That meeting wasn’t well-attended in the first place, and then many of the adult voters slipped away bored. Ava’s own crew boss, LaTisha, was among the first to bolt. But Ava sat rapt. Leveling twelve city blocks, clear to Broadway, was like disintegrating a mountain. A living mountain, with its skeleton and circulatory systems still entwined with the living city matrix below.

  And most magically of all, the crew did this main step for them, instead of the locals laboring tediously by hand. The pros didn’t even seek help laying the explosives. Only qualified people could do that meticulous work.

  Today the old people were tiresome, about it being such a horrible shame to destroy these wonderful old buildings. How it always made them cry. Nothing new there. The old folk were always tiresome.

  The thought brought a flash of Deda’s face, her grandfather. Deda wasn’t tiresome. He would have appreciated the old buildings, yet adored the excitement of their demolition as much as Ava. Deda had that fey joy in life, the ability to appreciate the good and bad alike. Sorry, Deda, Ava told his ghost.

  Deda was nothing like LaTisha, anyway, Ava’s sixty-something crew boss. LaTisha supposedly supervised twenty kids under twenty. In practice, LaTisha yelled at random, and at almost-eighteen, Ava led the other kids, in Ava’s opinion. LaTisha was scowling at her as usual. Ava ignored her. She banished Deda from mind, too, to savor the cataclysm.

  The warning klaxons sped up for a 20-second countdown. Belatedly, Ava remembered her kerchief around her neck, and hastily pulled it up over nose and face. She flipped safety goggles down from her forehead into place, and plugged in her ear buds. She gestured to the others on her crew, reminding them to follow suit. She didn’t bother to watch for compliance. Ava could barely contain her dark glee. She pumped a fist at the building. “Crash, crash!” she called out, in time with the count-down.

  The other kids in her crew took up the chant, building to a crescendo. “Crash, crash!” The cheer spread to other crews, and infected the adults of the crowd as well. “Crash! CRASH! CRASH!”

  LaTisha pinched her arm, saying something unheard through the cheering and ear plugs. LaTisha still wasn’t wea
ring her protective gear. Ava just shrugged her off. The old nuisance almost made her miss the big moment as the first charges boomed, muffled and subterranean, thrumming through their feet. Some tiny puffs of dust escaped windows here and there, at the far end of the ten-acre Washington Square.

  They had a great view. Nearly every tree and shrub in the city was cut down and burned for fuel during the Starve. Tender leafless saplings, imported from Upstate and newly installed, didn’t block anything at all.

  The next set of charges fired, louder. Explosions burst from mid-building this time, with all the ruinous fire Ava’s furious heart could desire. Glass and dust and shards of stone flew – the stone-blasts were beautiful!

  Heart pounding, breath held, Ava watched a few seconds as the buildings still stood intact. Then in delayed reaction, brick and windows and solid lecture building morphed into a standing wall of dust. It hung poised another moment, then came crashing down. The billowing cloud of dust was too thick to see the other implosions in such detail, as other blocks continued, building after building collapsing to the ground.

  Her arms above her head, Ava screamed triumph and hopped around in a circle. The younger crew kids followed her lead, pet lemmings that they were. Other older teens hopped up and down shrieking victory as well, vaulting off each other’s shoulders, and laughing out loud. Ava grinned so hard tears squeezed out.

  A vivid memory struck her. A building fire at 18th Street and 7th Avenue. That was winter, after Ebola died back, but still early in the Starve. People had rained down, too. Burning, screaming in agony to shatter on the pavement. Her gang had screamed and cheered and danced in triumph then, too, like the kids around her now. Frosty, their leader, her boyfriend, was in ecstasy. “Roast pig!” he screamed. “Falling from the sky! Let ‘em cook!”

  Ava blew out, bent over double, holding her knees. Breathe through the flashback. Breathe out. No need to breathe in – your body does that by itself. Just breathe out.

  It wasn’t a bad one. Just a few seconds, and she stood up again. A pair of square dancers passed her way, and she took a few swings with them. Then she shared some more pogo-dance cheering with her crew.

  “Calm the heck down!” LaTisha yelled at them. She pushed down hard on Ava’s head, hurting her neck. “Shut up, you! Enough of your mouth, Panic! Get in there and clean the dust off the grass!”

  Panic was pronounced more like ‘Panitch’ in Serbian. Ava gave up explaining that long ago. Tail Panic was her street name. She decided to spell it Pawic for her voter registration. She supposed that was her ‘real’ name now, Ava Pawic. Her legal name, anyway.

  Ava slapped the old woman’s hand off her head. “Uh, no?” she retorted. “You nuts? No one can go in there.” She snorted derision and turned away, to high-five another teen on the crew.

  “No work, no food, you gutter rats! You!” LaTisha pinched one of the younger kids. “Get in there and pick up a broom!”

  Jelly obediently started trotting toward the middle of the square, into the dust cloud. That twelve-year-old probably didn’t have half a brain before the Starve, and it was all gone now. He was already twenty feet away before Ava realized somebody had obeyed LaTisha by accident.

  “Wait, stop! Jelly!” she screamed, and started after him. He probably couldn’t hear her through the ear protection. “Stop him!” Dammit, they weren’t done collapsing the buildings. She could still see the orange bulk of the NYU library looming through the brown murk.

  Jelly ducked beneath the yellow warning tape that kept the crowd clear of the explosive radius. Ava vaulted over it, seconds behind him.

  Another crew boss, Larry, beat her to him, tackling Jelly just before she reached him. He helped Ava drag the boy back toward the safety line. Just as they pulled Jelly back under the tape, the next round of explosions began, on the block southeast of the Square. They paused to watch as well as they could through the dust cloud, as that rank of buildings subsided.

  “That was close!” the forty-ish crew boss Larry said, once the blast buffeting passed. He shook Jelly’s arm a little, not cruelly the way LaTisha would have done. “What were you thinking, little man?” He yelled to be heard through the ear plugs they still wore.

  Ava knew Larry. Soho Village was a small town. She knew everybody who passed the voter test. The crew bosses certainly had, though teen voters like Ava were rare.

  “LaTisha ordered us to go in, Larry. I told her she was crazy. But Jelly doesn’t like to get in trouble.” She held the boy’s arm and eye. “But you listen to me, not LaTisha. Right, Jelly? I watch out for you.”

  The boy, puzzled and frightened, nodded uncertainly. Ava pursed her lips and hugged him to her side for safekeeping.

  Larry frowned toward LaTisha. “You sure about that, Panic? That’s like a serious accusation.”

  “I’m sure. Tomorrow night’s democratic town meeting. I want her fired. She doesn’t care about us. Hates us.” She beseeched Larry with her eyes. “Back me up?”

  That was a big ask, from a grown-up. Most of them hated and feared the gang rats like Ava and Jelly. But dammit, Soho Ville was their town, too. Guzman said so, the ‘Coco,’ the Community Coordinator, their official village chief under the martial law government. He promised the new town was for gang rats, too, when he talked Ava into coming in.

  Larry shrugged uncertainly. “Look, Panic, I didn’t hear LaTisha give any order. Could be the kid misunderstood.”

  Ava laid a hand on his bicep, not something they did often. Touching an apple survivor was risky. But the crew bosses were supposed to be the high-functioning ones. “She said it, Larry. I swear it.”

  “I’ll back you as much as I can, Panic. But you’ve got to find other people who heard her order that.”

  “I’m the only voter on my crew, Larry. Me and LaTisha.” Some of them hadn’t even come in from the gangs yet, let alone passed the voter test. They visited to earn their food, then evaporated back into the ganglands. A third of them were under age, anyway, like Jelly. You had to be sixteen to be an adult in Hudson, according to the Constitution of their new country, formed from the old states of New York and New Jersey. You had to speak and read and write good English as well, and even pass a math reasoning test, to become a voter. That ruled out most who were old enough.

  “Don’t need to be a voter to give testimony,” Larry said. “Just do me a favor and find other people who heard LaTisha give that order.” He caught her eye. “I believe you, Panic. Guzman will believe you too. Just can’t be your word against hers. Understand?”

  They parted and rejoined their own crews. Ava kept hold of Jelly. They stayed and watched the devastation’s progress a while longer, as the more distant blocks fell. Gradually the dust clouds began to settle, enthusiastic cheering died back, and people started to drift away. Before they could escape, Ava found four others to agree that LaTisha ordered them to go in and clean up before the explosions were finished. She got them to sign a statement she tapped into her phone, supplying their names.

  They were fake names, just like hers. But they were the names they were paid under, the names credited with their share of rations, the names registered for residency in Soho Village. They promised to show up for the DTM, the democratic town meeting, to back her up.

  Ava knew they’d never come. Looking into Jelly’s vacant brown eyes, she knew he wouldn’t show up for the meeting, either. Which might be just as well. She doubted Jelly remembered what just happened, let alone who told him to go into danger.

  It wasn’t right. Maybe she’d manage to get LaTisha fired, and maybe she wouldn’t. But Ava would stand up for Jelly, even if no one else would. No one cared whether Jelly lived or died. Possibly not even herself. But it wasn’t right. Jelly was a person. All the gang rats were. Just because LaTisha was an adult didn’t make her more important, or smarter than them.

  Well, OK, LaTisha was smarter than Jelly. There was just no one home anymore, in his head. That happened with some of them, the ones who starved too much,
and didn’t want to see and understand any more. They just went through the motions, surviving on some animal level.

  But Ava made a better crew boss than LaTisha. She watched out for her tribe, especially the vacant-headed ones.

  The all-clear sounded. The demolition foreman waved the crew bosses over to issue instructions. Larry’s team started shifting the yellow warning tape across the square, toward where twelve blocks of hefty buildings used to stand. Most of the buildings were NYU once, but not all. One was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, site of a tragic fire over a century ago. The factory owners locked the emergency exits and stairwells against their own employees. The sewing teams leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. Many of those sweatshop workers had been kids, just like Ava’s crew. Ava could relate, especially against the adult enemy. She was glad the ghoulish building was destroyed at last.