Bleaker

Earth Endures 2
Bleaker
Jacqueline Druga
 
Copyright © Jacqueline Druga 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2021
ISBN: 978-1-83919-141-1
www.vulpine-press.com


Also by Jacqueline Druga:
What we Become
Like many, Mackenzie Garret complains about the weather. It is the hottest summer anyone can remember. The high temperatures are out of control with no end in sight. Until it all changes.
Overnight, blue skies become gray, and the hot, humid weather turns to rain, then snow, then ice as the temperature plummets.
The entire northern half of the country is thrown into chaos as blow by blow, storm after storm, nature rips into the world, tearing it apart. Towns and cities are evacuated, and Mac and her family are forced to leave their world behind and face a treacherous journey south to safety.
Will they make it, or will they be left behind in this new, frozen world?
Omnicide
A town practically cut off from the rest of the country, Griffin is always the last to know about everything. Fax is the most reliable method of communication and the local newspaper is the main source of outside information.
When a freak car accident occurs on the outside of town, no one thinks much of it. That is until deer are found sick and covered in an unusual growth, and they lose contact with the next town.
Cut off and isolated from the rest of the world, Griffin is unaware of the threat growing outside the safety of their little town. One that could endanger their entire existence.


Part One: Omni-4


ONE
The Ship
The clean, white surface was tattered and worn, yet even the natural devastation couldn’t topple the Washington Monument. The stone had broken down, the triangle top looked as if it had crumbled, but it was recognizable to the crew of the Omni-4 as they made their first flyover of Washington, D.C.
Aldar Finch was stone-faced, trying not to show emotion when he saw his nation’s capital far from the glory it was in its heyday. It crushed him, gnawed at his insides and the only thing that made it the tiniest bit tolerable was that mankind didn’t do it to itself.
Nature did. But nature didn’t rebel on its own. It was a forced evolution of Earth’s surface. A planet had made its way into Earth’s gravity field, bringing devastation and destruction during its entire journey across the solar system. It became fiercer the closer it came.
Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions.
Seaboard cities crumbled to dust and entire states sank.
No one really knew that the rogue planet was the cause. At least when Finch and his crew left Earth. To the experts and everyone else, it was just an expedited and violent form of Earth changing.
That rogue planet, known to some as Planet X, was considered nothing but a myth. A conspiracy theorist’s wet dream and the tinfoil hat club’s online video goldmine.
It was a laughable notion. Really. They knew there was nothing out there that they couldn’t see. Especially something as big as a planet.
How wrong they were.
They were wrong about a lot of things.
The entire mission, the development of the Omni-4 spacecraft, was to find a suitable home for Earth’s inhabitants. A second Earth.
Project Noah.
And they thought they had found it when a satellite, believed to have been destroyed in 1993, suddenly appeared again with photographs of a lush and fertile planet.
The satellite had not been lost or destroyed; it had travelled through a wormhole that scientists speculated opened every twenty-five years. That speculation was never grounded until the weather satellite NOAA-13 returned.
Wormhole Androski was the portal to this mystery planet, the answer to man’s extinction and a beacon of hope.
And so it began.
The Omni would travel through while the opportunity existed, confirm the presence of the planet and its habitability, and return to Earth.
Construction also began on larger crafts for when the portal opened again in twenty-five years. Those ships would take colonists to prepare the planet for the ARCs that would carry a small, selected percentage of Earth’s population.
The doorway was open, the project was launched, Omni-4 flew through.
Find the planet, explore, and return home.
That was the mission.
Only, the crew of Omni-4 discovered they were already home.
The wormhole wasn’t a portal to another galaxy, it was a portal to another time.
The crew landed one hundred and sixty-seven years after they left.
Earth had changed drastically, and Planet X was another moon in the sky.
The Androski had no guarantee; if they went back through it was a crap shoot, a lottery, on when they would arrive.
So they stayed.
They would explore their new home, their old word, and see what had become of it.
Their first stop: Washington, D.C.


TWO
The Crew
Aldar Finch, Commander
“Where should we put her down?” Curt Henning reached up to the controls from the co-pilot seat.
“Does it matter?” Finch asked.
“Actually…” Nate Gale leaned forward. “As the geological expert I will say it does matter.” He played with his tablet computer, pulling up images. “I’d say the entire area east of the city is probably unstable.” He turned to look at Westerman. “What do you think?”
Westerman wasn’t a scientist. Far from it. He was eighteen years old but he had one advantage all the education in the world couldn’t give Omni-4: Westerman had been born on the changed planet. His parents were part of the Genesis, the colonists that left Earth after Omni-4, but