Burn Box: Embers, Book 1, page 1
EMBERS
BOOK ONE
OF THE BURN BOX TRILOGY
BOBBY ADAIR
BEEZLE MEDIA, LLC
CONTENTS
Email Alerts
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Thank You
Burn Box - Embers
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
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
The End
Burn Box, Embers - Final Words
Last Promo Effort
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THANK YOU
Special thanks to the following people who have contributed with help in editing, beta reading, moral support, graphic design, brainstorming, critiquing, or even research. All of you have helped make Burn Box a much better book.
Kat Adair
Lance Cowart
Alex Saskalidas
Bryan Ferguson
TW Piperbrook
Shawn Inmon
Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Sheila Shedd
Alex Shedd
BURN BOX - EMBERS
CRISPR
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats is a groundbreaking gene-editing technology that has revolutionized the field of genetics. Acting as a pair of "molecular scissors,” CRISPR allows scientists to precisely target and modify genes in living organisms. It works by guiding a protein called Cas9 to specific sections of DNA, where it can add, remove, or alter genetic material with remarkable accuracy. This technique holds incredible potential for medical advancements, including the treatment of genetic disorders and the development of disease-resistant crops. CRISPR opens the door to a new era of genetic possibilities, offering hope for a healthier and more sustainable future.
Except that not all CRISPR applications illuminate a brighter tomorrow.
1
The blast startled me out of my desk chair and onto the floor before I even knew I was awake.
It sounded like a jet engine. Or a megawatt bathroom hairdryer, if such a thing even existed. No—more like a blast furnace.
Climbing off the floor and peering through the blinds, I realized it was neither day nor night, but that brief, weird time when the sun is sinking just below the horizon and the sky is streaked in colors over shades of gray. The streetlights were already on. I couldn’t see the source of the blast, just a light flashing the bare branches of the trees, casting sideways shadows on the walls of the townhouses across the way.
A nearby car horn bleated its ignored alarm.
Slipping on, but not tying my shoes, I threw a fleece jacket over my T-shirt. Hurrying across the loft, I carefully attempted not to clomp my feet on the hardwoods and disturb Grandpa downstairs. I slid the patio door open and stepped out. Frigid October air prickled goosebumps up my arms and down my back. I zipped the fleece up to my neck.
The roar stopped. The flare disappeared, leaving autumn silence and me with nothing but a heartbeat pounding in my ears and a pair of eyes adjusting to the dim light under the leaden sky.
From the second-floor patio of my unit, situated on the upslope edge of the townhouse development, I was able to see across the rooftops of the other units, all the way down to the library situated on the edge of our modest park. A further fifteen miles north, the towers in downtown Denver twinkled against the coming evening. Nothing seemed out of place.
I guessed the roar came from an incinerator truck.
I’d never seen one in person, never heard one in real life. But I’d watched vids online, and I’d read accounts of how loud they could be—like a 747, inexplicably hovering overhead. People exaggerate, though. And I’d stopped trusting the internet so long ago, it was hard for me now to accept something I knew to be true about myself—I’d once believed the world wide web would be the fountain of universal knowledge that would help us turn our little blue planet into, well, something better.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
A light snow started to fall.
The scent of barbecue drifted in the air. One of my neighbors must have scored a juicy pork butt on his grocery ration. The lucky bastard was grilling it in the small courtyard behind his townhouse. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a barbecued anything.
I leaned on the rail, feeling the cold metal on my bare palms, listening. A few miles north, a semi droned down the highway, rhythmically banging over the cracks in the pavement. Local traffic—what was left of it these days—rolled up Piquant Boulevard, a half-block behind me. A dog barked. And then another. The car horn stopped beeping. Someone’s television blared loud enough for me to hear an early-evening TV anchor hyperbolizing the news and baiting her viewers into watching through the upcoming ads for overpriced pencil-dick medications and apocalypse prepper meals.
A big diesel engine rattled nearby. Metal groaned and banged. Not too long ago, I’d have guessed it was a garbage truck dropping dumpsters too hard on the pavement. Or a city maintenance crew taking their low-pay frustrations out on the taxpayers by repairing a pothole in the most irritating way. Now, my guess was different. The cybersphere—the lie-o-sphere was a better name—claimed that the burn boxes were mounted on diesel rigs.
Some time ago, I’d decided to believe that was true.
Oddly, the snow settling on my skin wasn’t cold. That was definitely true as well—personal experience and all.
I ran a hand through my hair. The snow wasn’t wet. It left a greasy smear on my fingers. I sniffed it, then recoiled. It smelled like my neighbor had burned his pork on a dirty grill smeared with last week’s fish.
It was then I realized the flakes falling from the sky weren’t snow at all. They were ash.
Another incinerator roared. I spotted the glow of its propane jets illuminating the rooftops a mile east. When it cut, I heard another one, fainter, much farther away. That one burned for a good long while—seventy, maybe ninety seconds, turning a triple-size somebody into a puff of glowing cinders.
We’d never had an incinerator truck in the southwest suburbs, and now three burn boxes were out at the end of the workday, rooting out a disease that wasn’t even supposed to be here. Unless a new bug was going around. Already. Four pandemics so far this year and it wasn’t yet November. Five would tie the record. The rumor-net had it we’d hit six by Christmas.
Could that really happen?
&n
A whooshing blast startled me away from my patio rail.
A cone of yellow and blue flame jetted above the roofs of the townhouses across the street. Flecks of red ash rocketed into the air—a hundred, maybe two hundred feet up—as they dimmed into a mushroom-shaped cloud spreading beneath the overcast sky.
The roar cut. The flames disappeared.
Suddenly.
Much too suddenly.
I guessed twenty, maybe thirty seconds, but more like twenty.
That could only mean one thing. The burn box had just smoked a kid—one from the neighborhood, probably one of the three brothers who used to stop me to pet my Yellow Labrador mutt, Jasper, when I walked him in the afternoons. Those free-range delinquents were always riding their bikes between the parked cars like they were playing Ninja Frogger against the commuters coming home from work. I didn’t know their names, but the other dog walkers in the ‘hood called them Future Failure, Big Head Ned, and That Fucking Naked Kid—long story. When they were petting Jasper, they seemed like normally adjusted little humans. When they weren’t, well, they were just annoying brats with bad parents. Now one of them was a puff of ash floating over the neighborhood.
I realized then that the propane flame should have made me angry for what it meant had just happened. But it didn’t. An infected kid had died. The virus police disposed of the body in the most efficient, sanitary way they could. Our townhouse complex lost one more resident, one more added to a list of at least a hundred. So far. I’d passed through the terror phase of it, then the anger phase, long, long ago.
Now, I'd hit the most dangerous phase of all, the complacent one.
The dead were just numbers. Numbers so big they didn’t mean anything anymore.
A pair of bare feet shuffling across the floor inside told me Grandpa had crept upstairs. Unusual for him. At his age, stairs were difficult. He asked, “What are you making all that noise for?”
I turned to see him standing in the doorway with his wrinkled old dong hanging out. “Grandpa, you forgot to get dressed again.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re naked.”
“Doesn’t mean I forgot.”
Exasperated, I tried my best to hide it. “Where’s your watch?”
He raised a wrist to show me his old windup dumb-watch, the one his father had bought for him brand-new the day before he’d deployed to Korea. He never took the thing off.
“Your biosensor,” I clarified.
Looking at me like I’d just spoken in Farsi, he scratched his gray pubes like I wasn’t there watching.
I tapped the biosensor band on my wrist as I stepped toward him. Visual aids always helped when he was like this. “You had it on at lunch.”
“Noah, why do you talk to me like I’m a child?”
“You know you have to wear it all the time, Grandpa.” I called him Grandpa a lot when I was annoyed with him.
“Noah Blanks, young man, it has to charge.” He called me ‘Noah Blanks,’ or ‘young man’ too frequently when he was annoyed with me.
I herded him into the house and closed the door behind. He resisted my urging, so I left him to linger in the loft upstairs that I used for a home office. I hurried down. “When did you take it off?”
“Yeah.”
“Grandpa.”
“Yeah?”
His room occupied a space on the first floor in the front of the townhouse. I marched through the kitchen. Just off the sitting room where he typically watched TV from an old leather couch, his door hung open. I didn’t see the biosensor band laying on the end table, nor was it sticking out from between the couch cushions. Inside his room, I checked the charger on his nightstand. No biosensor bracelet. I glanced around the room, hoping to get lucky. Loudly, I called, “Where did you leave it, Grandpa?”
No answer.
I searched under the blankets and beneath the pillow. “Where’s your phone, Grandpa?” I figured I could use it to locate the biosensor.
No answer. Again.
I rushed to his bedroom door to call upstairs. I stopped when I spotted him in the shadows at the top, looking down at me. From the glaze in his eyes, I knew he was having trouble with reality. He got that way sometimes. Too often. I expended the effort to sound calm. “Did you take your meds?”
“Yes.”
I knew he was lying. I’d seen his pill minder next to his biosensor charger on the nightstand, unopened. Why did I even ask? No idea. “Do you know when you took your biosensor band off?”
“I didn’t.”
“You know, if they can’t poll your sensor for your bio stats, they'll come again.”
“How do I charge it, then?” He started down the stairs on jaunty feet, his flaccid penis swinging left and right.
I headed for his bathroom to search. “If you miss three hours in a row—” I didn’t finish. It wouldn’t do any good to tell him for the umpteenth time that after three hours with no vital signs from his biosensor, the virus police would call his phone. If no one answered, they’d figure he was dead, and they’d show up on our doorstep.
Among other things, the virus police ran the burn boxes.
I needed to find Grandpa’s biosensor band, and I needed to find that phone.
2
Piper, my ex, moved out five years back, the summer before the first killer influenza of the 21st century exploded across the globe. It had an official scientific name, but everybody called it Siv2—Swine Influenza Virus Two. By the following Easter, it had killed thirty-nine million people. Nearly one in two hundred worldwide. Few governments back then had propaganda machines powerful enough to make thirty-nine million bodies disappear. So, the world changed. A little at first. More, when the Syrian Measles swamped the global hospital system a year later, killing over a hundred million. That’s when human civilization started its long march to a place it had never been before.
None of us ever imagined it would turn out like it did.
Piper and I had both divorced once before we hooked up. Our relationship lasted six years longer than it should have, suffering a terminal incompatibility that worsened with each passing election—we voted different tickets.
