The Dawn: Omnibus edition (box set books 1-5) Read online

  THE DAWN

  The Bombs Fall

  (Book One)

  Michelle Muckley

  Copyright © 2014 Michelle Muckley

  British English Edition

  First Edition

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual people, places, or events is in every respect coincidental.

  This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment, but may be lent and copied without prior permission. These permissions extend to your personal use only, and do not intend to cover the copying of the material for distribution to the general public.

  For extra copies, and further information about the author, please visit:

  www.michellemuckley.com

  All rights reserved

  ISBN-13: 978-1501024672

  ISBN-10: 1501024671

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for taking the time to purchase and read this omnibus edition of The Dawn series. First and foremost, I hope that you enjoy this book. But secondly, if you do, I would love you to sign up to my mailing list. You can do that HERE, and I will let you know about special offers and future work.

  In the meantime, enjoy your time in The Republic of New Omega.

  Michelle

  For those who inspire me to be better than I am

  We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)

  to live is not only to survive . . .

  Book One: The Bombs Fall

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Book Two: Call of Omega

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Book Three: Everybody is Somebody

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Book four: Man in the Middle

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Book Five: Rise of a Hero

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty One

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Chapter Sixty Three

  Chapter Sixty Four

  Chapter Sixty Five

  Chapter Sixty Six

  Chapter Sixty Seven

  Chapter Sixty Eight

  Chapter Sixty Nine

  THE OMEGA MANIFESTO

  THE FIRST CREED

  No citizen of New Omega shall steal from another

  THE SECOND CREED

  All citizens of New Omega have the right to live safely without fear or threat

  THE THIRD CREED

  No citizen of New Omega shall feel alone

  THE FOURTH CREED

  No citizen of New Omega shall die of thirst or hunger

  THE FIFTH CREED

  Every citizen of New Omega shall work for the good of all

  THE SIXTH CREED

  Every citizen of New Omega shall conduct themselves with dignity and with regard for their neighbour

  THE SEVENTH CREED

  Every citizen of New Omega shall renounce their previous life for the prosperity of the collective society

  THE EIGHTH CREED

  No citizen of New Omega shall feel inferior to another

  THE NINTH CREED

  Each citizen will commit himself to the unquestionable success of New Omega

  THE TENTH CREED

  Every citizen of New Omega shall work for a better future without complaint or malaise

  Chapter One

  “I saw the lights again this morning.”

  From the corner of his droopy-skinned eye, Zack could see Leonard turning his ration card in a rhythmical ninety degree motion with the regularity of the second hand of a clock. The type that no longer existed. From behind him the calls of the thirsty ricocheted up the corridor, each set of fists jostling their way forward like an angry mob hell bent on revenge. Zack was next in line.

  Leonard's head was bowed, ashamed even to suggest that he had seen the lights again. To make reference to such visions was as good as saying he had a connection to the old world, like a disciple perhaps, or at the very least a prophet. In biblical times they would have crucified him. They would have set murderers free rather than listen to his ideas. They had talked about this before, and Zack had tried to tell The Dreamer that it just wasn’t possible. In fact even today his first thought, the automatic one that arises without conscience or desire, was something along the lines of stupid son of a bitch. But he stifled these words, and if he was honest with himself he knew why. The idea of the lights was so seductive that to even consider it being true was a bigger risk than he could allow himself to take.

  “Oh yeah?” said Zack. He didn’t want to encourage him. But he couldn't discourage him either. He couldn't do that.

  “I know you don’t believe me, Zack. It doesn’t matter. It’s coming, though. Slowly, it’s coming.” Leonard slid his ration card under the chicken wire screen.

  Zack looked over to the nearest window, across the atrium and endless shades of rust that peppered his view. He saw the same grey cover, the low hanging belly of cloud that blackened their world. Nothing had changed. It was a desperate idea, the thought of light. Nothing more than a mirage in an otherwise dry and deserted world of sand and dust and death, created to nurture the hope of a life when the chains of this new world would be broken. But it was a life Zack didn't dare to imagine anymore. False hope was nothing more than a cancer with the ability to rot you from the inside out. What was lost was lost, and the thought of life beyond the plains to which his eye could travel acted like a poison. It was dangerous to imagine it now.

  When Leonard had first mentioned the lights Zack had lain on his bed that night, his head resting on a thin stained pillow. He hadn't been able to stop himself gazing out in search of something. He stared out from a grimy window not knowing if it was night or day, or even if such parameters still existed in his world. He found nothing. That night his bed was less comfortable
. That night the smell of sulphur was stronger. His clothes were itchier and his skin more sore than usual. He watched for hours as the torturous clouds drifted past his window. Instead of allowing a chink of hope to pass through, all they permitted was the infiltration of despair. Waiting for something good, and believing in something that he couldn't see, only made life less bearable than it was already.

  “I hope you’re right, Leo. I really do.” Zack pulled his ration card from his back pocket and slid it over the glass topped counter. A faceless clerk pushed it into the machine and Zack watched as his skeletal fingers nudged Leonard's card back across the counter top. He followed it with a tablet and a water shot which he pushed towards Zack. “Then maybe I won’t need these.” Zack picked up the tablet and threw it to the back of his throat and chased it down with the shot of water. The beaker was crumbled and broken from overuse, and he slammed it back on the counter like it was a whiskey chaser.

  “How many years can it go on for, Zack? Come on, you’re a bright kid. You have to know that at some point it will get easier. It’s only natural.” Zack knew in principle that Leonard was right. He had to be right. There had to come a point when the sky cleared and when life could start over again. Because the world had not died. It had been belittled and wounded, like a soldier hiding under a fallen chariot. It was hiding in the hope that one day its freedom would still be granted. But that day had branded Zack and scarred itself to his memory. He could still remember the ground rolling beneath him, the building shuddering around him, as if somebody had walked over its grave. He had watched as the sky was scorched and the city crumbled to nothing more than the charred remains of hot coal. That was the day the winter began, a season that would remain unchanged for a countless number of years. The season of the recluse. Up high they now stood, looking down upon their old world at a lesson learned too late. “One day life will come back, and we can get out of here.” Leonard's gnarled, distorted fingertips wrestled the card from the desk. He fiddled at its edge, his fingers no longer nimble or able to retrieve it. When the frustration grew unbearable he slid the card back across the desk and cupped his other hand to catch it underneath before stepping aside.

  “Wait, your tablet,” Zack reminded him. “Excuse me,” Zack said, turning back to the clerk. “You forgot his antibiotics.”

  “Didn’t forget anything. He didn’t meet his quota,” said the clerk, pointing at Leonard. Zack looked to his friend who was staring down at his feet, his fingers working the ration card hypnotically as if willing himself to be anywhere but in the moment.

  “What do you mean, didn’t meet his quota?” Zack said, shoving the next in line out of the way.

  “He didn’t clock in,” said the clerk. He reached his skinny fingers past Zack to take the next ration card from the Delta resident. Zack's eyes followed the outstretched hand to find a man dressed in the same dirt-encrusted overalls, the tired face looking back at him, his eyes casting shadows over his sunken cheeks. The face could be his own. Zack turned to Leonard.

  “What’s he talking about?” Zack reached down and snatched the card from Leonard's hand. “Check it again,” he said, forcing the card across the desk as far as his arm could stretch.

  “Zack, it’s OK,” said Leonard, pulling at Zack's overalls like a nervous child. “He’s right.”

  “He can't be. We walked from the Food Hall together. I watched you arrive at work. You have to stand up for yourself, Leo. Especially here.”

  “I forgot. You know how I’ve been lately. I just forgot to check in.” Leonard reached across the desk to take his card back, his hand brown with a mixture of dirt and the marks of age. His skin hung loose across the crooked bones and tendons of his arthritic knuckles.

  “But you need your antibiotics, Leonard,” said Zack, his voice soft and comforting. “I would have given you mine if you’d told me.” Leonard pushed the card into this pocket. The man behind them stepped back up to the counter. He had to be one of the youngest in Delta. He picked up his tablet and water shot. Without a second thought he threw it into his mouth and swallowed it down without any fear of their judgement. There was no empathy left for the frailty of age. The man barged past Zack, knocking him in the shoulder as he left, and the people waiting in line edged forwards.

  “No way, Zack. No way,” Leonard said.

  “But you need them. You’ll get ill. You can’t fight things off like I can.”

  “Because I’m old?” Leonard took a step away from the desk towards the corridor that would lead them to the elevators.

  “No, not that,” said Zack, breaking into a jog to catch up with him, not knowing how to build an argument out of anything else when he knew that he had meant exactly that. “You just need them, that’s all.”

  “You’re a good kid, Zack,” said Leonard as they both settled into their stride, a pace faster than was comfortable for Leonard, slower than was necessary for Zack. “But I’m not your responsibility.” Leonard reached up to his neck, pressed at the muscles with his finger tips, working out some sort of knot that had developed during the day as he had worked hard for nothing. “Anyway, I’m telling you. Dawn is coming. The world is waking up. Then I won’t even need those tablets. Or this place.”

  They walked back towards their quarters in Delta Tower along the linoleum tiled floor, worn in so many places the original concrete of the building was working its way through like a fungus. In places there were small piles of dust, particles encouraged from the wall by one of the few children who roamed the corridors with nothing better to do. You could while away a good hour or two creating a hole in the wall with a piece of loose metal, if the hours could still be counted. The dust piles looked like sand and reminded Zack of happier times when he could lounge on a beach in the sun. Sometimes he even thought he could smell the heat mixed with sun lotion, the scent of coconut which could have been a Pina Colada. But his memories were sparse and decaying. His parents' faces had faded. The image of movies, coffee shops, restaurants, and bars were all a threadbare recollection of his yesterdays. It hurt to revisit them. On some days, even Samantha's face seemed blurred, but he wondered if he had tried to forget her on purpose, just so he didn't have to carry the burden of his guilt into the new life that he hadn't dreamed of or created for himself. The new life in which he was trapped in Delta Tower as a resident of New Omega. Resident Number 8652.

  The memories that he chose to keep alive were the impersonal sensations. The brush of wind against his skin like the hand of an anonymous lover, or the sun on his nose on a winter’s day as comforting as a child's kiss. Sometimes he could imagine the ocean as it stung his eyes, or the warmth of the sand burning his feet. These feelings were as real in his memory as the dusty ground upon which he walked. He kept these memories alive so that the smell of waste water and sulphur, and more often than not the smell of shit overflowing from the waste tanks, didn't seem so bad. But these memories could have been anybody's.

  The once-mirrored lift drew to a jerky halt on level thirty, and the doors scratched their way open. The sound of New Omega blared out from the televisions which adorned every corner of every wall. At least in the Food Hall there was so much commotion that sometimes if you were lucky you could forget the constant noise streamed in from Omega Tower. Every day they played a new image. A tree. Water. Artificial sunlight. A playground with screens for windows which played images of a pre-war sky. White and blue, occasionally orange. Never grey. Never reality. The scenes from Omega Tower, the central command tower for the Republic of New Omega where life was good were supposed to boost morale.

  “I don’t know why they bother to play those here,” said Leonard. “Surely they could save the power and give us more lighting instead. Or heat.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” said Zack. “And I could do without seeing Omega Tower at every turn. They say it’s supposed to boost morale, but it doesn’t feel much like that. It's not like anybody from here is ever going to get a chance to experience it.”

>   “You never know,” said Leonard, rubbing at his wrist, thumbing over the small numerical tattoo. “Maybe the next time there is a lottery it’ll be you. Maybe me.”

  “Ha! You think? You are crazier than I take you for, Leo.” Zack struck Leonard's cheek with a playful slap, and they both laughed. Zack brushed aside some scraps of paper and dust balls that had blown in front of his door with his foot. There was an air vent nearby, and he was sick of clearing up the shit that it blew into his path, right outside the only place he had left to call home. He stretched his foot across to Leonard's door and kicked other pieces of scrap aside. “They’d never let somebody from Delta win. From this shithole? Are you serious? Maybe from Alpha. Anyway, The Omega Lottery is a fix.” Zack held up his wrist to expose the small numerical tattoo, a near copy of Leonard's. 8652. He had no idea how many people came after him. “This number is never going to get me into Omega.” He opened his door and took a half step inside before turning back to Leonard. “Oh, I nearly forgot. I’ll see you later, alright?”

  Leonard smiled. He was embarrassed so he opened his door for a distraction. “OK. Just don’t get in trouble for it,” he said as he glanced back over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t want that. I don't need it that much.” The knot in his neck resurfaced at the thought of the new pillow that Zack had promised him, and he brought his fingers up and rubbed at his skin. Something new. Something comfortable. “I could never live with myself if you got caught trading on my behalf. Besides, I won’t need it for long, because.....”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s nearly over. Dawn is coming. We’ll all be outside playing in green fields soon singing Kumbaya.” They both managed another laugh, but it was half-hearted and whimsical. Mentioning the old world was hard for everybody. “It’ll be fine. Just stay here. I’ll call in later with it, OK?”

  After exchanging silent thanks with a nod of the head, they both retreated into their private rooms. Zack inserted his ration card into the box that had been crudely mounted to the wall. The electronic voice crackled out.