Ruination: Book Two of the Viral Apocalypse Series by Michael McBride

Author:Michael McBride [McBride, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Preternatural Press
Published: 2023-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

Riley leaned on her elbow and watched the world roll by through the window. Windswept sand dotted with clumps of wild grasses stretched all the way to the foot of the Book Cliffs, a sheer mountainous wall of Cretaceous sandstone with horizontal stratifications resembling the pages of a book that had fallen on its side. Millions of years ago, these cliffs had formed the shoreline of the Western Interior Seaway, on the shores of which herds of dinosaurs had once grazed, their bones now littering the plateau, their decomposed bodies forming the countless tons of coal excavated from this area every year.

She’d studied this region in high school geology class, which felt like a lifetime ago now, back when she’d dreamed of being a dinosaur hunter. Ever since her first visit to the natural history museum as a child, she’d longed to excavate history from the ground. The idea that innumerable species had lived and died on this planet long before she was born fascinated her, especially 50-foot-tall species of giant lizards that had somehow evolved into birds. It wasn’t until her senior year that she’d begun to wonder how such ferocious creatures could become extinct, while a squishy being as frail as man could survive. It had been that line of study that led her to her true calling as a paleoarcheologist. And, as such, she couldn’t help but wonder if the secret to their survival wasn’t in the research on the tablet they’d brought with them from Riverton, but rather hidden in these very hills, memorialized in Barrier-style rock art dating back more than four thousand years.

The haunting, inexplicable designs she’d documented inside the Beringian cave from which she’d released the virus had been startlingly similar to those in nearby Sego Canyon. While she was by no means an expert on such things, she knew that styles were unique to every culture, so the fact that the two sites demonstrated such a striking resemblance implied that the latter had quite possibly been conceived by descendants of the proto-humans who’d sacrificed twelve of their number to entomb the infected man. Assuming that was the case, then there was still hope for humanity. If nomadic peoples who’d only recently discovered primitive stone tools could survive this virus, then surely modern man, with the benefit of advanced technology and medical knowledge, could do the same.

Of course, twenty thousand years ago there hadn’t been billions of people living right on top of one another, creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread like wildfire through the entire global population. And for the infected to prey upon the immune.

Somewhere out here, deep in one of these maze-like canyons, were petroglyphs immortalizing the story of how the men and women who’d seeded the entire population of the New World had defeated this enemy. Assuming nature hadn’t scoured them from the face of the Earth, like nearly every other trace of these people, which could very well be the fate of modern civilization, too.

Riley shook her head to clear the fatalistic thoughts.

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