Bloodless - Swarm Book 4: (An Epic Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller), page 1
BLOODLESS
The Swarm Series
Book 4
By
J.T. Sloane
Mike Kraus
© 2022 Muonic Press Inc
www.muonic.com
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Table of Contents
Book 1 Summary
Book 2 Summary
Book 3 Summary
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
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Thank you for checking out Swarm! This series was written as a collaboration between Mike Kraus and several individual authors listed below, the collection of which appears on the cover as J.T. Sloane, and is the result of many months of hard work. We hope you enjoy it!
Aidan Pilkington-Burrows
J. Mannix
E. L. McCabe
Michael Raymond
S. E. Gilchrist
B.K. Boes
Liam Pickford
Jack Caspian
Kate Pickford
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Special Thanks
Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.
Thank you!
Swarm Book 5
Available Here
Book 1 Summary
A swarm of mutant cicadas emerges in America’s Corn Belt, killing everything it touches and leaving a trail of deadly venom in its wake.
Out in California, wildfires rage. It’s not just the fire that kills, it’s the smoke.
In rural Iowa, Dr. Diana Stewart, Senior Crop Scientist for Matreus Inc., a firm with deep roots in agri-business, witnesses one of the first cicada-induced deaths. But when her bosses demand her silence she sets off ahead of the brood to find answers.
After witnessing a raging fire start in a Teff field and overtake the farmworkers, including her father, California journalist Anayeli Alfaro collects the rest of her family and rushes them to safety at her apartment so she can file her story about the fires with her newspaper editor. But when the rampaging fires rapidly approach the city, Anayeli is forced to flee again, this time taking refuge in the American river in a raft she hopes will take her family to the nearest evacuation center.
Farther south, at U.C. Berkeley, boy genius Sam Leary gets a call from his friend Dr. Diana Stewart about killer cicadas. Curious about the new species, Diana offers to bring him samples, hoping he can figure out what’s going on. As he waits for her to show up, his colleague and academic rival, Frank Dorset, goes on the rampage, insistent that he be allowed to take possession of Sam’s flannel moth research that’s tied up in government contracts. Stuck between self-preservation and keeping his promise to wait for his friend, Sam must devise a way to keep himself and his research away from Frank while remaining at his post.
Meanwhile over The Pond, Ron Frobisher, fixer to the rich, is summoned to the ancestral home of his patron, Ann Pilkington, and tasked with escorting unidentified, live cargo from England to the west coast of Africa. Ron supervises the loading of Bio Better’s crates, only to discover three crates have gone missing. A sojourn to the seedy side of Southampton’s underbelly leads to a bloody confrontation, and the release of an entire crate of mutant cicadas onto the streets of Great Britain.
Book 2 Summary
When out of control wildfires with abnormally lethal smoke threaten Sydney, café owner Kim Walker embarks on a perilous journey to check on her only child Emma’s wellbeing. A loner since she gave her daughter up for adoption, Kim has promised herself that one day she would prove she was worthy of being a mother. But what should be a three-hour drive turns into a dangerous fight for her life when every-day citizens become desperate as they struggle to survive in the sudden chaos.
Boulder has been mostly shielded from the unfolding mayhem and Dr. Keiko Sato leads the scientific community’s effort to isolate a cause for the cicadas’ rapid breed cycles and to discover an antitoxin. Her world collapses when a rogue gang of white supremacists burns down her house and her former mentor forces her out of her lab. Choking on toxic smoke, and directly in the path of the advancing cicada hordes, Keiko and her young daughter flee with a group of survivors to the mountain village of Breckenridge, where her world-saving research, and their lives, are in peril.
Emile Harris manages the longshoremen at the shipping port of Redwood City, California, vigilant in his care of the workers and the company, he’s determined to stay on task. When he loses more than half his crew to the swarm, Emile battles his past, toxic smoke, killer insects, and his coworker, David Sackman, who challenges Emile’s ability to lead. With the promised return of the toxic cicadas, and no food in the warehouse, Emile is forced to leave the warehouse and get his people to safety.
Jeremy Curtis is on a mission to bond with Brandon, the son who barely acknowledges his existence. The pair hike the famed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, but the acrid smoke drives them—and all the other hikers marooned on the treacherous slopes—up the Dome, to the promised air lift. But when the pilot dies and the chopper is commandeered by a civilian, it plunges off the Dome, leaving the Curtis boys to hike their way through the fires to safety. Battling the elements and their fellow travelers, the pair face off against a mighty foe in a battle that leaves Brandon fighting for his life.
Book 3 Summary
At an evacuation center in Sacramento, California, Anayeli’s brother is hospitalized and Anayeli and her sister are separated from their mother, who is taken to an undisclosed location. As Anayeli searches for her mother, she discovers the evacuees have all become test subjects for Matreus and the US government. She manages to free her mom, but Anayeli’s desperate escape attempt goes horribly awry when another wave of fire approaches the evacuation center, forcing her and some of her family to board a military convoy out of Sacramento, California.
Claire Moon is called to action in a black ops mission to gather the leaders of Britain’s Think Tank, Lazarus. England and Wales are falling into chaos as Claire and her team battle the authorities, the elements, and a ghost ship tainted with cicada toxin. When she finally delivers her charge to Lazarus’ meeting house, deep in the Cumbrian countryside, Ron Frobisher calls to let her know another vessel is headed for British docks, laden with the killer insects.
Dr. Diana Stewart is imprisoned in Matreus’ headquarters in Chicago. Her cruel, unyielding ex-husband is only one of her many jailors and Diana isn’t sure who she can trust, or who holds the answers she needs to unravel the mystery surrounding the fertilizer-accelerator, FEEDIT, which she suspects might have something to do with the emergence of the cicadas. In spite of her injuries, Diana breaks into her bosses’ offices and downloads the files they’ve been hiding from her before she, and a gaggle of Matreus families, break out of their prison and head for the last train out of town.
Dale Curtis witnesses his wife’s shocking and untimely death. Her dying wish is that he and their twin girls travel to the States to rescue their adopted son, Brandon, who’s hiking the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Dale will stop at nothing to keep his promise to his wife, but leaving England has never been harder.
Chapter 1
Ron Frobisher. Southampton, England.
Nothing said “I faked my own death” like holing up in a rat-infested hotel, in the seediest part of town, but Ron was reinventing himself as The Man Who Wasn’t There and Nowhere Men weren’t splashy with their accommodation.
The hotel room was dank and dingy and so far below what his former boss, Ann Pilkington, would expect of him that it suited him perfectly. There were two single beds, separated by a nightstand, and a television that had to be at least a hundred years old. The art was nothing mo re than a couple of worn prints of the masters mounted in cheap, shabby frames.
Ron checked his watch. Two minutes to the hour. He opened the laptop lid and tapped a couple of keys. There was no power in the building, but Ron had rustled up a couple of portable power banks which he used sparingly.
Captain Alva lounged in a chair, on the other side of her bed. The captain, who turned out to be a Vivienne, ‘Viv, if you must know,’ had stuck with Ron on their return. “Think someone’s going to check in, this time?”
Viv wasn’t what you’d call a patient woman. Traveling with her, especially as he was used to moving through the world alone, had been a challenge. She was a leader, not just by training but by nature, and she had opinions about how he should comport himself. Opinions that wouldn’t get the job done.
“You check in, every hour on the hour. If there’s a way to contact me, they’ll contact me.” And if there wasn’t—if even the military comms were down—he’d have to shift his operation to Plan Z. He lit the candle and waited. He’d talked to British agents when they’d first landed in the Bay of Biscay, then been cut off for several days. But the messages he’d left for Claire Moone seemed to have gotten the job done. The Chinese frigate, which had been carrying cicadas, had been identified and taken out of action. And now that he was back in dear olde England, he needed a friend to smooth the way forward.
The screen blinked and just the friend he needed appeared.
Claire Moone was a first class operative, highly trained, finely honed, and single minded. She’d assembled the Lazarus think tank, as Ron had advised, but even she hadn’t managed to track down the remaining missing crates, which meant Ron had no choice. He had to find them.
“At last, the man himself makes an appearance!” The video uplink was scratchy but at least they could talk. “Your phone calls and voicemail were lovely, Ron, and I appreciate you keeping me in the loop while you were sunning yourself in Spain, but seeing your rather shaggy, unkempt face takes the cake.”
Ron had learned, fairly early on in his tenure, that if someone British insulted you, it meant they liked you. Claire was no exception. She’d read the reports. She knew why he was sporting a beard and that ‘sunning himself’ was the last thing he’d done in Spain. And France. And Germany. But she buried that intel, along with her fondness for him, under layers of sarcasm.
“So, Mr. Frobisher, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
Ron didn’t want to talk about infecting mainland Europe with ten crates of weaponized cicadas or battling fifteen different kinds of awful in order to get back to the UK, while remaining under the radar, but his need for invisibility was precisely why he’d reached out to Claire. As far as he knew Bio Better’s CEO, Ann Pilkington, believed that he and Captain Alva had gone down with the The Fairwinds, along with most of her cargo, and he wanted to keep it that way. “Been busy, you know how it is.”
Claire smiled. “Same. Same. We’re tracking two Chinese freighters, Maid of Dawn, and Maid of Evensong.
Ron held the candle closer to his face, so she’d be able to read the over-exaggerated deep frown and wide eyes. There’d be someone on her end listening in and the less he said out loud, the better.
“I hear you. Between us, we’re grasping at straws. What are the odds the missing crates are on those vessels?” Low, and they both knew it. “The only reason we’re looking at them is their company’s connection to the Maid of Morning. But, as my team reminded me, I’m not privy to the conversations that happen in the hallowed halls of number ten, and we do as we’re told. Or, the official answer, if you’re interested: we go where the leads take us.”
At least the conversations were happening at the highest level and weren’t being shunted off to some sub-committee on how to ‘Find your own Face with your own Fingers’ or some other nonsense ‘investigative body’ the paper-pushers dreamed up. Politicians were incompetent crooks who, for the most part, needed to be led into a large field and left there to graze. The PM, on the other hand, was no dummy. He’d ordered Claire’s team to neutralize the Maid of Morning based on Ron’s intel. “Good work, getting that vessel out of play.”
“Yep. Good. Thanks.” She ducked her head and swallowed. Tears? “We had a bit of bother when we tracked that particular target, but we’ve reassembled the team and are awaiting our orders.”
‘A bit of bother’ was English for ‘something terrible happened.’ He didn’t ask, because her change in tone and language clearly signaled she didn’t want to talk about it. They were facing something that strained credulity—a massive, heaving swarm of death-dealing insects—and there were going to be casualties.
“How can we help, Ron?”
Good. The niceties were out of the way and they were getting down to business. “I want three things.”
“Go for it.”
“Access to Lazarus, a new identity for myself and my associate here, and three Navy Seals.”
“Consider the first two a done deal, but I can’t loan you men.” Claire barked at someone in the tent behind her. “We’re moving out. Anything else?”
“Stay in contact.”
“We may need to circle back with a request of our own. I’ll let you know. For now, batten down the hatches and stay put.” Claire saluted him and cut transmission.
Ron pinched the wick and replaced the candle on the nightstand.
“Once again, we’re plunged into darkness.”
He cracked the curtains. Not so much that anyone with a rifle could see inside, but enough to keep Viv from complaining about their gloomy surroundings.
“So, I get a new passport and then what?”
Ron poured them both a glass of water, another resource that was about to run out. “Whatever you want.”
Viv swirled her water and downed it in one. “I wanted one last trip—which Ann was kind enough to fund—and then a nice spot on a beach in Mauritius. I was headed for endless sun and sand, tropical forests, wildlife, decent food, the good life.”
That vision was blown to hell.
“I’ve lowered my sights a little.” She leaned back in her chair, propping her feet on the bed. “I’d like—in descending order—not to die a bloody, blistering death on the end of an insect tentacle; find an uninfected corner of the world and cordon it off; and crush the people who did this with a fist of iron.”
With flights grounded and the ports closed, the chances of Viv finding a place of her own was nil. Not dying a blistering death was high on Ron’s list, too, but he was going to hunt crates of cicadas as soon as he got the all-clear from the higher ups at Lazarus, so there was a more-than-negligible chance that he might fail on that score. As to crushing the people who’d released this pestilence on the land, he was torn. Ann Pilkington deserved a villain’s death, but delivering that would alert her to the fact that he was alive, which wasn’t going to happen.
The video link blinked on. “Artemis here.”
Ron wasn’t supposed to know that Artemis was Claire Moone’s father, but he was good at his job and didn’t allow the small details to escape him. “You’re tracking the swarms?”
“Is that a question or a statement, young man.” Artemis had softened slightly around the edges since Ron had last seen him. His jaw not as tight as it once was, his cheeks not as full, but his wit was still there.
“I need real-time intel on the swarms.”
“Here? On the mainland?”
“Correct.”
“Prevailing winds are, as you know, west to southwesterly, which means the cicadas have been swept away from the south coast, where I believe you released them, and toward Wales.”
The urge to defend himself rose and fell. He hadn’t released them so much as been there when the mother of all cocaine-fueled fights went down, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was minimizing the damage, now that they were in a state of emergency.
“Anything else?” Artemis’ hand hovered over the keyboard. Ron had a hundred questions, all jostling for answers—when can I start, what are my orders, what’s kind of defense have we mounted?—but before he could formulate a single one, the old man cut him off.
Viv held her glass out for another shot of water, but Ron waved her away. They’d had their morning ration and he wasn’t going to make an exception, simply because she asked him to. “Now what?”
