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  RUN FROM RUIN

  Final Update: Book 1

  ALLEN KUZARA

  Copyright © 2018 Allen Kuzara

  All rights reserved.

  “Device assisted meditation marks the dawn of a new era in human development which will allow for heretofore unseen levels of achievement, productivity, and personal happiness.”

  Josh Zander—CEO of DataMind

  “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof…”

  Ecclesiastes 7:8 KJV

  FAIRBANKS

  CHAPTER 1

  NICK STOOD IN front of his parent’s dining room table in the dark. He peered through the tightly drawn curtains in numb stupefaction, watching his across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. Lambert, make her final lapse in judgement.

  Maybe it was senility, or maybe it was desperation and the need for the world to go back to something normal. Whether Mrs. Lambert knew what she was doing or not, it was suicide. And Nick was watching it happen in slow-motion.

  Mrs. Lambert had her kitchen light on, the auxiliary light over her sink of dirty dishes that she was attempting to wash. She couldn’t have picked a worse light to turn on in the house. It was a beacon to the outside world. A lighthouse, except no lives were being saved today.

  She wouldn’t even finish the dishes, Nick knew. And there was nothing he could do about it either. Well, he could try to stop them. He might even have initial success with the single-shot shotgun he carried slung over his back. But soon enough, the sound of the gunshots would attract more crazies than he could fight off and they would get him and, maybe, Mrs. Lambert to boot. Firing on them was just as much a suicidal act as what Mrs. Lambert was doing.

  He thought about looking the other way, going on into the basement with the supplies he’d grabbed and trying to forget what was about to happen. But he couldn’t bring himself to turn away from the head-on collision, the slow-motion train wreck he was certain was about to happen.

  It began. Like alley cats creeping out of shadows, former residents and strangers alike moved toward Mrs. Lambert’s home. They seemed aware of each other but maintained their shared focus: Mrs. Lambert. Of all the things to cooperate on, Nick thought.

  Nick didn’t dare open his window, but he could faintly hear Mrs. Lambert humming a tune over the sound of water running in the sink. Then as one of the crazies approached from the road, a more direct and visible ingress, Mrs. Lambert dropped her scrub brush and let out a squeal of panic.

  Nick watched as she futilely turned off her light and water. It was too late. The beasts were at her door now, pounding and kicking. The one from the road ran, jumped, and found purchase on her still opened window. Nick saw one of the long-haired females punch in a window on the side of Mrs. Lambert’s house and begin to climb through the remaining shards. The rest of the crazies seemed to notice the successful entry point and ran to the window.

  Then Nick heard Mrs. Lambert’s final scream. He knew it was almost over, at least for her. They were killing her in the most brutal way, bludgeoning her to death with their fists and feet. And that was if she was lucky. Nick had seen someone torn limb from limb like a sick game of tug-of-war the first day after the update.

  Nick had seen enough. Too much. He wanted to go on to the basement. He almost rationalized his wish, thinking he could go now while there was a good distraction. The old coal pit had been turned into a basement in the sixties when everyone in Fairbanks, Alaska had changed to propane or natural gas. Its entrance was outside, down steps between the house’s front door and the door to the detached garage.

  He could probably make it, he told himself. Nick, however, was too level-headed, too much of a planner to respond to his baser impulse. He knew what would happen next, what the crazies would do when they were finished with Mrs. Lambert. They would turn on each other. Then they would kill until there was only one left, one almost human champion. Nick knew it wouldn’t be over until he saw a single crazy walk out of the house. He would have to wait until the champion left and was out of sight before descending the outdoor stairs to the basement.

  Survival after the world went broke was a numbers game, he had decided. It was all about ratios. The less of them nearby, the better his chances were. And time was on his side. As far as he could tell, the crazies were barely animals, let alone humans. They acted on singular instincts, namely rage and aggression, but weren’t balanced out like natural creatures with impulses to gather food, hibernate, migrate, reproduce, etc. If Nick and anyone else not affected by the update could just hang on long enough, the crazies would all either starve, kill each other off, or die in this year’s coming winter.

  Nick watched Mrs. Lambert’s motionless, soundless house. He knew what was happening inside, but on the exterior, everything looked normal, happy even. And that was exactly like people were before the update. The app they’d used had made them happier, more productive people. But deep down somewhere inside lay dormant all the suppressed hate that was now so visible in the world.

  Nick waited patiently and watched what he’d predicted come true. The last wild-eyed man exited Mrs. Lambert’s house. He didn’t look back and he didn’t close the door he walked out of. He seemed to have no awareness or conscious reflection about what he had just done. Instead he casually strolled down the street toward the next brawl.

  Nick thought he heard a window crash somewhere. Apparently, the wild-man did too, because he picked up his pace like a hound picking up fresh scent.

  Nick had seen this all before, more times in the last three days than he cared to admit. And it was happening over-and-over, simultaneously, in hundreds, maybe thousands of places all over the globe.

  CHAPTER 2

  NICK AND JIMMY spent most of their time down in the basement. This wasn’t really anything new to them. Much of their adolescent years had been spent down in this damp, dingy dungeon. Especially Nick’s. Jimmy was Nick’s step-brother, younger by one and a half years.

  Nick’s mom was out there somewhere. She left his dad one day out of the blue when Nick was nine. Since then, it had been an occasional unannounced drop-in visit, birthday and Christmas cards—most years—and not much else. Nick’s dad and Jimmy’s mom met and were married a few years after when Nick and Jimmy were twelve and ten. Those were the early years of Nick’s family’s most recent iteration, only a handful of years after Nick’s Grandpa Joe had died and left his dad the house and most of its contents—almost all of which remained untouched, unchanged in the basement and garage. Nick had decided his dad had left it that way as some kind of shrine to the old man.

  Even Jimmy who had never met Grandpa Joe had a fondness for his memory. Before the world “went broke”—the commonly used term for the hellish phenomenon of the last three days—Grandpa Joe’s “lair,” as the boys had called it, had been a mysterious place full of tools and memorabilia; each newly discovered item seemed to demand that the boys spend at least half a day(a pre-pubescent eternity) imagining what, when, where, and why. It had been beyond ideal.

  Now, after the world went broke, Grandpa Joe’s basement had become, yet again, the boys’ sanctuary. This time it wasn’t a place for the boys to dream, it was a place for them to escape the nightmare of the real world that continued to unfold on their doorstep. This time it was for very real, practical reasons: the basement had only one way in and one way out, there was little that could catch on fire, and—perhaps most importantly—Grandpa Joe’s HAM radio gear was down there still hooked up, still cranking out fifteen-hundred watts when they squeezed the handle of the microphone transceiver unit.

  Just like years ago when Nick and Jimmy had first discovered the radio unit, they were mostly just listening, scanning the frequency bands and picking up bits and pieces of news from all around the w
orld. Back then it had been because it was technically illegal to broadcast without a HAM operator’s license. The two had never heard of anyone getting in serious trouble over it, but the you’ll-go-to-jail warning from Nick’s dad was enough to keep the pirate transmissions down to a once-a-week infraction. It was like the prank calls before caller-ID and cell phones. As long as you didn’t do it too much, too often, you were fine.

  Nick remembered the first time they had picked up a transmission coming out of Tokyo. At least, the boys had decided it was from Tokyo; all they knew back then was that it wasn’t English, Spanish, or Russian—the only three languages they had, until then, heard on shortwave. The radio, with Grandpa Joe’s embarrassingly large antenna in the back, had been a seemingly forbidden connection to the rest of the world.

  The boys couldn’t remember a time before the internet. And they could barely remember life before their parents had smart phones. You would think the radio would have lost its magic on such hi-tech, well connected youths, but the opposite was true. The analog, static-ridden mechanics, the lack of repeatable or predictable experiences, the fact that everything was live, happening right then but not right there—they had been mesmerized.

  Now, the radio was no longer a magical, enchanted relic; it was their chance to stay alive, to keep and stay ahead of what might be coming next. It was their all too real life-line.

  They didn’t have the HAM history firmly in mind and hadn’t really been told much about it, except that it had predated the web and was practiced by a dying breed of old codgers who’d seen better days. By the time they were old enough to look it up online, the radio and much of Grandpa Joe’s lair was already a buried memory, some childish fancy that might be remembered briefly from time to time, even talked about with fondness, but not a viable place to go and make new memories.

  Nick stood briefly in the breezeway where the basement stairs were. There was a draft there. Always had been for as long as he could remember. He felt like staying there and cooling down in the mild but hot Alaskan July. But this was a dangerous place to be: outside, exposed to the street. He had waited until the rampaging crazy that had attacked Mrs. Lambert was gone and he couldn’t see or hear anyone else. But he couldn’t stand there long. Not unless he wanted to end up like Mrs. Lambert.

  They were not zombies, he told himself. Why that made him feel any better, he didn’t know. They weren’t undead, and they couldn’t take deadly blows and keep on coming. They were just angry humans. . . sort of.

  He proceeded quietly down the steps, listening for signs of danger as he went. Summer in Fairbanks was a lovely time of year. At least he wasn’t crunching through snow and ice, but he did have to deal with the eternal sun. Even now at a quarter-till-midnight, the sun glowed near the horizon. It would have been nice to have the cover of darkness, but Nick would leave the wishing to someone else. Jimmy did enough wishing for both of them.

  Nick’s hair stood up on the back of his neck as he stepped down to the landing at the bottom of the stairs. His animal instincts told him there was danger: sound. But quickly he realized it was just Jimmy and the radio inside. “He’s going to get us killed,” he whispered. As softly but as quickly as he could, Nick opened the windowless door with his key. The door was thick, heavy, the kind of doors they don’t make any more, back from a day when old-growth heartwood was still an affordable commodity. They had wisely taken the ring of keys their parents had kept stashed away in a kitchen drawer and had put them on a long string to wear around their necks.

  Nick went in and locked the door behind him. Then he dropped the homemade deadbolt—a two-by-four—across the door and secured it to the bracing on each side. They had attached the bracing by hand with a screw driver (they couldn’t risk pounding nails or using an electric drill.) Nick rushed over to Jimmy and the radio and turned the volume down so low it was almost inaudible. Jimmy twisted it back halfway to where it had been and gave Nick a dirty look.

  Voices whispered over the radio. When it all started to come apart, the boys had turned on TV and watched the mayhem. The networks hadn’t stayed on long. When Alan Tanner, the local Channel Six newscaster and local celebrity, went broke on live television—well, that had been the sign to all the other local affiliates to give it up. The boys had switched to local radio which only lasted a couple hours longer. When those went black, they had switched to shortwave and found the BBC still reporting. But now that the “B” was out, all that was left were individual HAMs, people in as big a jam as they were, many of whom were also stowed away in some cellar, attic, or bunker waiting out the end of the world.

  Nick recognized some of the voices. Jimmy had been hanging out near this frequency band since yesterday. These voices, Nick could tell, weren’t the scared witless amateurs they had heard before who had somehow figured out how to transmit an SOS-Mayday-Someone-oh-someone-please-come-save-me message. These guys were older HAMs who seemed totally comfortable with the situation, almost like they’d expected it to happen eventually, and were just slightly bummed they had to deal with it.

  Nick knew a couple of the voices. There was a guy from South Florida who liked to talk about getting on his sail boat if things got any worse. There was a woman in Alberta—she was the only female crashing this boys’ club, but no one seemed to mind. And then there was a gruff sounding fellow from Denver who commented infrequently, but when he did, they were bombshells of negativity. Not panic, mind you. Just big ol’ piles of reality that left their stench on the conversation for ten minutes at a time—a veritable eternity for an active shortwave channel.

  “Anything new?” Nick asked Jimmy.

  “It’s getting worse,” Jimmy answered. Nick listened in on the HAMs’ conversation.

  [If you asked me, they had it coming to them. This generation has been the most spoiled, most entitled bunch of brats the world has ever seen. The sorry thing is that we’re, yet again, the ones who will have to clean up the mess.] *Alberta

  [You forgot to mention lazy.] * Denver

  [You guys are right. No question there. But I’m still confused—call it a senior moment—how this could affect so many people. It wasn’t just twenty-five year-olds, you know. Heck, I know people our ages that went broke.] *South Florida

  [Serves them right. They should have acted their age.] *Denver

  [DataMind must have done this on purpose, or maybe it got hacked.] *South Florida

  [Don’t see why anyone would wish this on their worst enemy. No, it was an unintended consequence, hubris at its worst. And mother nature has had the last word.] *Alberta

  The conversation went on endlessly like this: old farts chatting the night away. DataMind was the name of the smartphone app that had brought down the world. But it didn’t start out that way, not by a long shot. It’s first version had gone viral amongst the self-help/motivational blogosphere, and by the time version 2.0 was released, the business world had embraced the app with open arms and clenched fists. Why clenched fists? Because they saw green. Major Benjamins.

  DataMind had been marketed as an app that aided in the practice of secular meditation. But this was an understatement. And just like a good car salesman, the creators of DataMind had let the world look under the hood, see for themselves what the app could really do before they asked anyone to sign on the dotted line. The developers had offered the app for free for thirty days after which you could subscribe for updates at $2.99 a month. It didn’t take long for the rave reviews of each month’s new update, how the developers had outdone themselves again and again, for people to get it: the updates were the best three bucks you would spend in your whole life.

  When a few hold-outs(people too cheap to subscribe to the updates) complained that the app didn’t seem to work as well as it did when they first bought it, the rest of the world was intolerant. They lashed out at them with their tongues for how if they were too cheap to pay three bucks to be a better person, then they were scum and didn’t deserve to use the app anyway. No one seemed to pay atte
ntion to the symptoms described by these hold-out users: headaches, insomnia, and other conditions. They were regarded as little more than internet trolls. It was a brave new world, and there was no time to be bothered with insignificant insubstantialities or losers.

  The real reason for the app’s success and the reason everyone working a job had made DataMind synonymous with a life-worth-living had been that these meditation sessions, as they were called, did much more than refresh one’s mind. Of course, researchers had known for years that increased mindfulness achieved through various forms of meditation could translate into higher productivity and a general sense of well-being on the part of the meditator. But DataMind’s sessions had moved people from amateur status to Dalai Lama level meditators in just a couple of sessions with benefits so extreme, so exciting that the app became indispensable.

  The studies demonstrating the positive effect of the app fell far behind everyday practice, because each month (later they were released bi-weekly) the updates for the app increased the benefits over the previous version. It was as if each update was a seine through which yet more mental gunk and grime was squeezed out of the user’s mind, leaving them increasingly refreshed and more capable in almost every way.

  The research, despite its lagging nature, proved that IQs were almost instantaneously increased by a margin of 10% above base level. And each session only heightened the individual’s cognitive abilities.

  A smarter world would have been enough of an achievement to turn the app developers into instant billionaires, but a boost of intelligence was only a small piece of the package. The euphoria experienced after just the first session was on the level of an illicit drug. That’s the real reason DataMind’s reputation had spread as fast as it did. It would have been wildly successful had it just been extremely fun. All the dumb, addicting adult game apps had proven that. But the euphoria, often described as true peace, the first peace many users claimed to have ever experienced in their lives, was what pushed the app into the sales stratosphere. The powerful testimonials were compelling especially because they were coming from people like your boss or your next-door neighbor instead of some washed-up former celebrity on a three-in-the-morning infomercial.