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  “Evolution’s End” is published by Steven Spellman Books, LLC.

  Copyright © 2019 by Steven Spellman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior express written permission from the copyright owner and/or the publisher, except for excerpts quoted in the context of reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents portrayed in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously

  Cover art by:

  Humble Nations

  ISBN:

  [978-1-7321687-5-6]

  “Evolution’s End”

  by Steven Spellman

  Marcus walked briskly towards the campus building that bore his name. The Willoughby Building was the tallest building in the campus, perhaps the tallest building in Science City. It needed every inch of that floorspace. To many people it was one of the most important buildings anywhere on the planet. The work that was done in the Willoughby Building was vital to mankind. It was vital to the world. The world It was a misnomer, really. The world had once meant the earth and the tens of billions of people alive that were spread out upon it. Now, the earth was a vast wasteland and only a few million people remained of the tens of billions that had once saturated the planet. Nuclear war had devastated Earth. Global level famine and plague followed. Entire continental populations were decimated in a matter of months. Anarchy reigned. It was as if a demonic rapture had stolen away most of mankind and the few that remained had no idea what to do.

  Technology had snatched mankind back from the cusp of complete destruction. Robots could go where humans in their hazmat suits could not. Drones could fly into the blackness where the sun’s rays were blocked by nuclear fallout. Unmanned vehicles could brave post nuclear war temperatures that would’ve vaporized a human being in seconds. Years of ignoring global warming hadn’t helped things. The earth’s atmosphere bottled up and amplified the toxic chemicals that the nuclear bombs released. Soon, hell on earth ceased to be just a fanciful phrase. Technology had almost destroyed mankind. Technology had also saved a remnant of mankind. But technology could not do it all. What did it matter that robots could go where humans could not if the food and supplies the robots brought back was too radioactive to be used? It was a conundrum that continued that threatened to destroy the few who had survived. There was no world, just Science City, in what had once been the United States of America. The rest of the world was filled with endless stretching miles of ruined cities, scalded countryside, and lifeless oceans.

  This was the world that Marcus knew as he walked in large quick steps towards the Willoughby Building. Marcus was late for work and everyone on campus knew that Mr. Willoughby was never late for work. Marcus was a tall man. He towered over six feet, but his long strides couldn’t take back the twenty-three minutes that he was already late. He jogged forward at a pace that made sweat sheen upon his forehead. He was in midstride when a flash of white from the periphery of his vision turned quickly into a cargo truck. The first thing Marcus noticed about the truck was that it was moving too fast. The truck skidded sideways around the edge of the McKell Building and burst out onto the campus lawn that separated the two buildings like a runaway train. Marcus watched helplessly as the truck plowed over poinsettias that were just now coming into flower. There were roses too and cacti and sweet clover in the lush lawn that separated the two buildings. It was a small botanical garden, replete with a miniature greenhouse that stood closer to the Willoughby Building. The truck slammed into the side of the greenhouse and sent broken metal rods and glass shards flying in every direction. Then the truck exploded out of the other side and the greenhouse collapsed upon itself and raised a dense cloud of dust and dirt into the air.

  Marcus’ eyes remained fixed upon the greenhouse as it folded in upon itself. Some of Marcus’ own students had helped to build that greenhouse. They had helped plant those poinsettias and cacti and roses. It had taken years for the rovers to gather those plants from the most remote corners of the cursed Earth and it had taken months more to plant them properly. That had been years ago and the garden had required constant maintenance during those years. Marcus’ students had joined other students from the Willoughby Building, as well as volunteers from Science City, to perform the maintenance. The city held a huge ceremony to mark the completion of the greenhouse. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony and millions more watched it upon their television screens. Marcus gave the commencement speech. He had never felt so proud of his students. It was a shock to watch all that work and dedication reduced to a jagged pile of rubble in a matter of seconds. It was an atrocity, a loss to all mankind. For all Marcus knew, that little colorful botanical garden was the last of its kind on the planet. No one had time for beauty any more. Everyone was just trying to survive another day.

  The cargo truck rumbled speedily onto the pavement that surrounded the Willoughby Building. The building’s long, massive stone steps lay directly in the truck’s path. A group of students walked down the steps. There were five students and Marcus didn’t have time to recognize any of them before the truck reached the steps. The group of students was near the bottom stone step now. When the students noticed the truck that barreled in their direction they all turned and scrambled back up the steps. All of them except one student. He made a break for it. That student thought that he could outrun the truck. He was wrong. He scurried down to the last stone step and leapt off of it towards the pavement. The truck slammed into him while he was still in the air. It tossed his body twenty-five feet with a sickening thud that Marcus thought that he heard from where he stood. The boy’s body bounced upon the hard pavement once, tumbled over two times and came to a rest on his back. He didn’t move again.

  The speeding truck screeched to a halt. The driver threw open his door and scrambled out of the driver’s seat like there was a bomb in it. Unfortunately, there was a bomb there. The cargo bed of the truck was filled with barrels of explosives and the floor of the cabin was padded with bricks of explosives. The driver sprinted from the truck but he didn’t make it much farther than the student’s body before the truck exploded with a sound like ten jet engines firing. The fireball that engulfed the truck looked like the hand of God. It was brilliant; Marcus felt as if he were staring directly into the noonday sun. The force of the explosion slammed him to the ground. His face shone with the light of the fireball as he stared into the sky. The massive flame was mesmerizing. Marcus couldn’t turn his eyes away from it. Moments later when it dissipated into the air high above, Marcus looked down and saw that half of the building was gone. The sight was literally unbelievable. He saw one of the classrooms where he routinely taught robotics but instead of the comfortable and sometimes contentious place of learning that he had grown to love, the room was just a smoldering and crumbling façade with three of its walls toppled.

  Many of the other rooms had suffered an equal amount of damage. The only thought that surfaced in Marcus’ mind was that all this was impossible; it had to be impossible for something that had taken so many long arduous years to erect to be wiped out of existence so quickly. Didn’t it? Except that the proof that such a thing could happen was right there, smoldering in front of him. Marcus turned to where the truck had been. There was no truck there now, nor the body of the student the truck had struck. The stone steps, the remaining students, and the driver himself were also nowhere to be found. The only thing there was for twenty feet in every direction from where the truck had been, was the gaping maw of a newly formed crater. Marcus could see the figures of people in the dista
nce as they ran for their lives. He could hear their screams, but muffled, as if he were hearing it in a dream. It certainly felt like a dream, all of this. No, a nightmare.

  A thought crossed his mind. He scrambled to his feet and craned his neck to search the horizon; what if another truck was coming to bring another impossible explosion? More missing bodies. But Marcus didn’t see any trucks, just terrified and screaming people fleeing in panic. He began to search more earnestly for the truck, for the body of the student that the truck had crashed into, for the body of the driver. He spotted the truck near where the greenhouse had stood. He’d almost missed it. It didn’t look like a truck anymore. Now it looked like a flattened metal science project that had gone horribly wrong. Marcus didn’t see any bodies in the vicinity but as he looked more closely he recognized motionless human figures in the building’s exposed rooms. Some of the figures appeared too grotesque to be human and too grotesque to be anything else. Marcus’ eyesight wavered. The harder he struggled to focus, the more the scene began to morph into an undulating blur. It wasn’t until he swiped his eyes with the back of his hand that he realized that it was tears and not failing eyesight that plagued him. He looked at his hand; it was covered in soot and grime. It looked like the back of a coal miner’s hand.

  Whatever it was that covered Marcus’s hand had come from the explosion and it was everywhere, covering his arms, his shirt, his pants’ legs. He had no doubt that it covered his face too. He wanted to wipe his eyes clear but he didn’t. It might’ve made things worse. But the tears were still coming and his vision was wavering again. He took a step towards the rubble—tears or no tears, kids who needed help could still be in what remained of the building. Before he could take a second step, a woman’s shrill screams caused him to spin around. The woman held her trembling hands cupped to her mouth as she stared down upon the ground. Her piercing screams escaped easily through her closed fingers.

  Marcus glanced down and saw the reason for the woman’s hysterics. She had found the driver of the truck. Or, rather, she had found what was left of him. His right arm, shoulder, and a large portion of his head was missing and the rest of him was almost as burned and mangled as his truck. It was only the splattered blood and brain matter that lay all around the body that made it possible to recognize that this had once been a living human being. Marcus was not surprised that he felt nothing as he stared down at the ruined remains of the driver. Another person might’ve seen justice in what had happened to the driver, but Marcus only saw a bloody pile of wasted potential. As far as Marcus was concerned society couldn’t afford to lose a single life so senselessly, not with so few humans left. There was one redeeming factor in the bloody mess that lay sprawled out upon the ground now; the driver couldn’t take any more lives.

  The woman was still screaming, just strident and deafening siren calls with hardly a break for breath in-between. Marcus took her in his arms and held her tightly against his chest. He didn’t know what else to do. He was mindful of the students and staff that might be still trapped in the remains of the Willoughby Building but this woman needed help right here and now. Her screams were so loud and piercing that it was distracting; if Marcus left her now he doubted he would ever be able to get her out of his head. He held her trembling body closely against his but it didn’t stop her shaking. She began to scream louder and tremble more violently. Rather than ease her hysteria, Marcus had uncorked it. He held her until her violent shaking slowly became a pitiful whimper. He walked with her away from the driver’s body and lowered her to the ground in a soft patch of grass.

  “Now, you stay right here and someone will help you.” Marcus told the woman.

  She grabbed his wrist as he turned to leave, “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave me!”

  “I have to go, ma’am.” Marcus answered. “There are other people in that building that may need help.”

  “Please …” the woman pleaded but Marcus gently dislodged his arm and sprinted towards the building. He could still hear her pleading as he ran towards the building. When he reached the crater he stood at its edge, dumbfounded. It looked so much larger, so much wider, close up. It appeared to span the entire length of the building. Marcus looked into the building and saw that yes, those grotesque figures were humans. Some of the bodies still had heads with faces attached to them. He recognized some of the faces. There were teachers that he admired who were laying motionless: Mrs. Ridder, Ms. Holley, Bill from Accounting, Scott Moore. Scott’s head was propped up at an awkward angle. The sight sent chills down Marcus’ back. A support beam had apparently slammed down on the back of Scott’s neck, crushing him against a fallen table and wedging his torso into an ungodly half zig zag formation. Mrs. Ridder lay crumpled in a corner. Her head slumped deeply into her chest. Too deeply, as if her neck were broken.

  Marcus couldn’t see her neck or most of her face beyond the thick waves of platinum blond hair that hung nearly motionless from the crown of her head, but at first glance it looked as if she might’ve been asleep. Her entire left arm, including her shoulder, was missing and blood flowed from the corner where she slumped like a faucet of blood had been opened behind her. Marcus thought about Mrs. Ridder’s husband. Bob was a close friend of Marcus’, an all around good guy that did the best he could with what life on Earth had become. Marcus knew that Bob would be crushed when he discovered what had happened to his wife. Marcus was glad that he wasn’t here now to see it with his own eyes. Ms. Holley and Bill from Accounting were both lodged impossibly into a wall. It was clear to see that they had been somewhere near a window where they had suffered a more direct impact from the explosion. The majority of both of their bodies were embedded into the wall. So much blood had dried upon Ms. Holley’s small pale face and upon her blouse that it wasn’t possible that enough remained inside her body to keep her alive.

  Bill from Accounting lay slumped beside her. The two must’ve been looking out of the same window when the truck exploded. The front of Bill’s face and shirt were covered in blood but not as much Ms. Holley’s. Marcus sighed. Bill hadn’t worked in the building very long. He had come from a group of rabble rousers that called themselves The Freedom Movement. It was rare that one of the members of The Freedom Movement defected and everyone had tried to make Bill feel as welcomed as possible. Many of them had hoped to garner pertinent information from Bill about The Freedom Movement. There was no hope of ever gleaning that information now. Marcus turned to continue searching for survivors, when Bill coughed. He spit thick globs of blood out of his mouth that splattered amongst the blood that was on the floor. Bill was alive! He shouldn’t have been—the considerable dent outlined around him in the wall meant that every bone in his body should’ve been shattered to pieces—but he was alive!

  He coughed again, spat out more congealed blood. Marcus could see in the strained lines of his face that he was in real pain. Marcus had no doubt that he was hanging on by a single agonizing thread. “Bill!” Marcus yelled out. “Bill!” Bill’s eyes opened and he looked out, dazed, beyond Marcus. He tried to move. Marcus could see the agony of the attempt in how he clenched his teeth. Then Bill did move, just a quick, small jerk, and his body fell forward, hard, onto the floor. Marcus heard a small groan. The wall behind Bill began to settle immediately. The bricks shifted and then two bricks fell out of the wall onto Bill’s back. Four more bricks followed. The entire wall was caving in and bringing down the partial celling above it; Marcus could see the wall above as it began to crumble. The structure began to crumble in upon itself with astonishing speed. Marcus stood there awash in his own powerlessness as what remained of the building toppled into a cloud dust and debris. It was heartrending.

  The cloud of dust engulfed Marcus. He shut his eyes tight against the airborne grit for many long minutes while the dust settled. When it settled there was only a huge pile of bricks and metal where the Willoughby Building had been. Marcus let his head drop into his chest. He sat down slowly upon the ground at the edge of the crate
r and stared on. There was so much destruction. So many lives had been senselessly wiped out in the name of a misguided ideology. Marcus’ life work, the many happy hours he’d spent with his colleagues and friends in the Willoughby Building, everything he’d accomplished; he wondered was any of it worth the effort when it could all be toppled so quickly. Maybe he was making a mistake dedicating his life to helping mankind. Man had turned his earth into a barren wasteland . Maybe mankind deserved extinction as much as the dinosaurs.

  But Marcus didn’t believe that. He didn’t regret the path he’d chosen. He regretted the path that others had chosen.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Please, don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave me! Please … Please … !” the woman’s piercing pleas filled Marcus’ nights. They were turning his dreams into nightmares from which he awoke in cold sweats. In his dreams sometimes the pleas came from the building after the explosion, sometimes before the truck had exploded and sometimes from the pile of brick and metal that the building had been reduced to. It was as if every student Marcus ever had and every staff member he’d ever met, was trapped in that building, crying out to him for help. He was their only hope and he was completely helpless. Marcus’ goal in life was to aid mankind’s quest into an uncertain future, but how could you secure the future when you couldn’t help men and women that were right in front of you, today?

  “Please, don’t leave me! Please … Please … !” it was like a mantra from hell that pierced Marcus to his bone marrow every time he remembered it. He remembered it often for those first few days after the explosion. The memory tormented his sleeping hours at night and ravaged his waking hours during the day as he helped with clearing out the debris from the fallen Willoughby Building. He stopped helping with the cleanup when the bodies started surfacing. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t. He felt like he was falling apart and the sight of so many mutilated and broken, burned and dismembered bodies that had belonged to people that he’d respected and cared about, would’ve finished him off. When the cleanup crew began unearthing the maimed bodies, Marcus remained in his house. He paced the floor and worried until worry brought exhaustion. He worried over if the city could move forward now that the unthinkable had become reality. He worried over the possibility of another attack. Most of all he worried that there was nothing more he could do to help.