Apocalypto by Quinten Pheonix (top ten books to read .txt) 📖

few days in the raider camp, all the mutants knew who one another were, and the rest knew nothing. Clint learned that in return for their allegience, Lexus had provided them with a satellite to use as they pleased. The chief wore the satellite's remote control around his neck. Clint pushed for a snatch and grab, but before it could happen, Sharna broke the ice with her father the cheif and told him the truth.

"Let us take the satellite," she said to him. "We can put it to better use."

"We're loyal to you," swore the mutants among them. 

The clan was polarised. The chief gave the remote to Sharna, and the portion of the clan who chose to head to the capital to make use of the satellite departed. 

 

*

Jenny and Debbie were alone in Jenny's quarters. "It's time I told you the truth, servant-girl. I'm your mother."

"You're lying!"

"It's true. I was young and foolish."

Debbie jumped for joy and hugged her mother. Jenny hugged her back and a sob racked from her, but she composed herself and pushed Debbie away. "We can't let Lucian know about this. He'd try to kill you. Tell me about your brother."

"He's good at games," said Debbie.

"Is he a mutant?"

"I don't think so," said Debbie. "But, the funny thing is...We've spent our whole lives around each other, and now that we're separate, it's like there's something missing."

"You can feel it when he's around?"

Debbie nodded.

Jenny nodded and hugged Debbie again. "If the time comes," she said, "We'll have to do all we can to stop Lucian."

 

 *

Clint and Sharna wore cloaks to avoid detection by the new guard as they walked the streets of Plankton looking for signs of the co-op. Three members of the clan who'd come with them walked shadowed them inconspicuously, for safety. Other members of the clan who'd come with them were spread around the outskirts of the city, and the rest were camped outside the city walls.

Clint's mental powers were bourgeoning out of control. He was finding it hard to distinguish between the thoughts of the people around him, and the fancies of his fertile imagination. Try as he might, he couldn't shut them out, though. He was just going to have to learn to live with it, and practice getting better at discernment. He took in the emotions of the people all around him like a sponge, making him lose sight of who he really was. 

At the corners of his mind, he heard the kind of thoughts he was listening for: (Damned raiders. Sold us out right when we were about to hook into the network and find out the truth for us all. If only we could hook into the satellites.)

"This way," he said. Around the next corner was Brendan, wearing a face moustache and a monicle. Clint clasped him by the shoulder. "Brendan. It's me, Clint."

Brendan's face widened into an elaborate grin. He laughed and hugged Clint heartily.

"We've got a satellite," said Clint.

"Really?"

Sharna took the remote from her pocket to show him.

"Not here," said Brendan.

Sharna put the remote away.

"Can we use it to access Intel?"

"It's worth a shot," said Brendan. "Follow me." 

Brendan led him through the narrow lanes and back-streets of the bustling town until they came on a subway man-hole in a back alley. Brendan grabbed a crowbar stashed behind a dumpster and lifted the manhole and they jumped in.

They walked through a series of sewers and came to a door behind which a large storeroom had been converted into a makeshift co-op base. A skinny man wearing glasses sat typing on a laptop.

"This is Andy, our techy," said Brendan. "This is Clint and Sharna. They have access to a satellite."

Andy's face lit up. "Good to meet you," he said, putting his laptop down and introducing themselves to them. 

Sharna took the remote from her pocket. "I represent my clan. I'm not prepared to let you use this unless it helps us, too."

"It will help you," said Andy. "Once I hack in, all the information we download from Intel will be yours, too."

"I want a guarantee that if the co-op succeeds, our people will have a share in the governance of the new regime."

Andy said, "It's not for me to decide."

Clint put his hand on her shoulder. "They will," he said.

Sharna trusted him. She handed Andy the remote.

"Thanks," said Andy, looking at Clint apprehensively.

Andy used the satellite to access Intel. "It's going to take an hour or two to hack in," said Andy. "I just hope Lucian doesn't notice us before we do."

"We'll divert his attention," said Brendan. 

 

 

 

Lexus Lyon sat looking into his dark-crystal ball, which was filled with 70% of the Soul-of-the-World. Looking into the crystal ball, he could see his entire minion. Thousands of them, out there in the world around him, all connected to him. His will was their command. His minion.

Their increased number pleased him greatly, and his happiness flooded out of him and into his people, and it oscillated back and forth, generating even more net happiness. A radar on the wall displayed a light for every one of them, buzzing around inside the city walls.

Jenny slammed the door as she walked in, causing him to flinch. The lights on the radar flinched correspondingly. 

He took a deep breath. "I've asked you not to disturb me when I'm meditating," he said patiently. "The happiness of the entire kingdom is dependant on you making me happy, and my happiness is determined by the degree to which you follow the rules I give you."

"This ought to make you happy, then," said Jenny.

Lucian withdrew from the crystal ball to look at her. "What?"

"It turns out that our little feathered friend is my daughter..."

"Which means that her brother is..." He looked at her. She nodded.

"She gets a 'feeling' whenever he's around."

Lex laughed triumphantly and got from his seat to grab Jenny by the shoulders and hop up and down in a victory dance. He plucked a phone from it's socket on the wall and punched in some digits.

Gren answered. Lextold him to take Debby and use her psychic connection with her brother to sniff him out and return him to the palace.

When Gren found Debbie and asked her about her brother, he soon realised that it must have obviously been that damned snot-nose little punk who'd whacked him over the head with the flaming shank. So he went downstairs to corrections and took Walter from the dungeons, and the three of them went back up to the lab.  

 

They arrived back in the lab just as a security alarm bleeped from a radar on the wall. 

"This is the man who was with the one you're after sir."

Lucian looked back at Gren whilst walking in the opposite direction towards the alarm and tripped on unsecured cables dangling from the various assemblage of ad-hoc technology in the room. "Why are you telling me this? Go."

They turned to leave.

"Wait!" said Lex, punching away at the buttons on the radar. "There's a satellite conspicuously down...Intel isn't safe. The breach is local. Find them."

Gren saluted and the three of them left the room. 

 

 

In the converted maintenance room beneath Plankton, the co-op had gathered significant amounts of data. "Finally," said Andy, "Some first hand evidence from before the fallout. Right before Aaron Grey went crazy and fired nukes at the kingdoms, a swag of palace insiders uploaded SOS messages and hid them in the nooks and crannies of Intel's hardware. ''Palace infiltrated by dark forces of some discription. Upside down pentagrams. If you are reading this, ask around the rim for Stacey Wendell." 

"The vial," said Clint. "They used one on Brian. It sucked all the juice out of him."

"Let's tell people."

"We need evidence."

 

Gren dragged Walter and Debbie along with a steel chain in his right hand while following the location of the hack to the satellite on a hand-held radar in his left. He bumped into someone walking at right angles to him, and yanked the chain in frustration. 

 

Sharna pulled out her walky-talky and buzzed Brendan. "The new guard are using occult technology," she said. "This explains everything. Why the new kingdom crumbled. Why the planet died."

"Occult technology?" hissed Brendan over the static. "What, like fairy dust?"

"Soul sucking vials," she said.

"Hocus-pocus," said Brendan.

A sharp grunt and a clattering from the other end of the radio was proceeding by its going dead. "Brendan? Brendan!"

 

"Oh, err, excuse me, officer," said Brendan, bending down to pick up his radio. 

The officer yanked his chain. 

Debbie's feathers brushed by him on her way past. "Brendan?"

Gren looked down at him. "Hey, I know y--"

A flying uppercut from Brendan split poor Gren's chin lifted him a foot off the ground. "The new guard are using occult technology at the core of civilisation's collapse," he bellowed, finger pointed skyward, words spoken before Gren had slumped to the road. 

But they were drones. Emotionless. Reactionless. So absorbed in their own little cells so as not to notice the distance between them. "What's gotten in to you people?!" cried Brendan. 

They stared blankly; shuffled away.

Brendan knelt to frisk Gren. A gem studded apparatus hung in a custom holster by his hip. Strangely reminiscent glyphs were etched into a three-pronged adjustable wheels manipulatable through finger work. He put the apparatus in his inside jacket pocket.

"Hey," said a passerby. "Did you just take that tazer from that officer?"

Brendan scuttered away.

The passer-by made his mark, standing on his toes and pointing: "He just took that tazer from that officer!" 

 

*

 

The scooter raised red dust as it came over the hill.

He came into the tent and approached the chief.

"Did you get the wire about the occult technology?" he asked.

The chief slightly nodded wisely.

"Well now there's proof." 

The chief took the vial and inspected it in mock interest. He handed it back. "So what?"

He put his hands on his hips and swung them around a couple of times as he grasped unsuccesfully for a rebuttle. "Is that where the state of ethics among our people has degenerated to, now, is it? What ever happened to the tree gods, hmm?"

"What is ethical!" harrumphed the chief, getting up and putting the vial back in the trooper's hand angrily. "Is it ethical to risk our daily butter?"

"It's ethical to follow the truth." The trooper stormed around angrily in a circle before exiting and using the truth to incite excitement among the ranks. 

They drove out in spores to the other raider camps. "The New Guard has to fall. Which means there's more room at the top for everyone."

 

*

A rising cloud of dust on the horizen alerted Lexus to the oncoming horde of raiders. He put his binoculors on the table and strolled calmly across the room with his hands behind his back. "Code red," he said. 

 

The king's guard descended from the palace in tightly packed squadrons of sevens and eights. Vials were hard to come by, so there were only a couple of dozen of them. They began aggressively escorting people into the palace strongholds, citing the horde, and when they were taken in, they were lined up and stabbed with the vial in an efficient fashion. 

 

The crowd evacuated from around the palace when the emergency evacuation of the crowd into the palace stronghold started. But it didn't get all that far, because roughly half the cities population, who Sharna had noticed were colorless, auraless, emotionless, became animated and began blocking those who fled and ramming them back towards the palace strongholds. Pits simmered in the pupils of their eyes. 

On the outskirts of the city, the band of co-op were sharing the memes they'd uncovered, in order to establish the illegitemacy of the new guard's reign, one way or another. 

Flaming arrows from the horde began flitting over the walls and killing their allies. But Clint co-ordinated their attacks using his psychic abilities. He knelt behind cover with his eyes closed in concentration, tweaking his temples in order to relay information between the co-op and the horde, thereby unlocking the gate, which came crashing down in the same moment the satellite they'd hijacked rocketed into the church tower in city central. 

 

Overlord Lyon picked up his dark-crystal ball and weighed it. 85% of the Soul-of-the-World had been captured.

Jenny slammed the door. "We''re under attack!"

Lucian decided he'd had enough, so he popped open the air compressor on his dark crystal ball.

"What is that?"

"Memes," said