Simulated Realities- The Complete Apocalypse Deception Trilogy Read online

  Simulated Realities

  The Complete Apocalypse Deception Trilogy

  by

  Kyle Kenze

  ←↑→

  All rights reserved © 2019 by Kyle Kenze

  This complete serial novel includes all three books in the original Apocalypse Deception Trilogy:

  *The Apocalypse Deception

  *The Apocalypse Defection

  *The Apocalypse Connection

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Copyright and Legal Note

  The Apocalypse Deception

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  The Apocalypse Defection

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Apocalypse Connection

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About Kyle Kenze

  Copyright and Legal Note

  All rights reserved © 2019 by Kyle Kenze

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. Uploading my stories to free sites hurts my income and prevents me from publishing more of the steamy stories you crave, so please don't do that.

  Cover models are for the purposes of illustration. This story is fiction, and no characters should be confused with real persons living or dead. This story includes themes of erotic satire and is not intended to be a true-to-life rendering of actual military or intelligence operations. References to actual entities such as Hollywood, the US Air Force, or the F-16 Flying Falcon are strictly fictitious and used in accordance with fair use and my off-the-wall imagination.

  This 60,000-word novel is set in an apocalyptic world where violence, graphic sex, and swears are part of everyday reality. If you're easily offended or under age 18, choose another book.

  The Apocalypse Deception

  His war is supposed to be over.

  Prologue

  Eighteen months ago

  In the beginning, the mission was pretty routine. Some asshole with a rocket launcher painted the fucking target on his own head. All I had to do was take aim.

  Location classified. Dry mountain scrub, an uninspiring habitat found all over the world from California to Afghanistan. Too hot by day, too cold by night. On the plus side, with four inches of rain a year, all of it on the same day, there was a lot of endless blue sky.

  Date classified. Local time somewhere around noon. No clouds, no breeze, no shadow. The only sign of life was a small herd of a dozen or so hooved mammals. Yellow puffs of dust followed their hasty retreat.

  Species of hooved mammal classified. It might be a clue to the location.

  Team member names and numbers classified.

  Mission objective classified.

  The details don't matter anyway. In the larger sense, the mission was the same as it ever was. The good guys were being fired upon, and the bad guys needed to knock it off. Since bad guys seldom respond to polite asks made in the name of sweet reason, I was deployed to drop a bomb on their heads to get their attention.

  A brand new crater appeared.

  I circled the F-16 around, scouting the area for more targets, but there was a sudden hush in the land.

  “Well done, Major,” said the radio.

  No sweat, sir. Another day, another dollar.

  There was a no-limit game running tonight at the temporary base camp in the aforementioned classified location. I already had my plan in place for how I was going to relieve my buddies of their last three months of pay.

  Back then, I always had a plan in place. Somehow that fucking drone thought he was going to sneak up on me. One air-to-air missile later, and the drone was a shooting star falling to earth.

  It wasn't big enough to leave much of a crater where it fell. At best, you'd call it a pothole.

  More endless blue sky again, all the way to the horizon. The mountain range looked no more or less empty than it had when I started, but it was down a rocket launcher and a drone. Another successful mission to add to my long list of successful missions.

  It was a good day, and I was going to live forever. My buddies were going to get killed at poker tonight. How do you defeat a man who's going to live forever?

  The bad guys were spread across a crater, and all was right with the world.

  Then, three miles out from my final destination, the bird's electrical systems melted down.

  Chapter One

  Earlier this morning

  August in Holmby Hills, Westwood, Los Angeles. A sunny morning like a thousand other sunny mornings.

  Shaun Saunderson had asked me to wait in an open-air garden room complete with a white-painted wrought-iron table. My butt walked in place on the matching wrought-iron chair. Uncomfortable as fuck. But I wasn't going to be the man who told my billionaire employer that if it's outdoors, it ain't a room, it's a backyard.

  Some boxy shrub made a living privacy fence that screened off the pool from view. The greenery was less effective at screening off sound. I could hear every little conspiratorial giggle.

  Tiny gaps in the hedge flashed me little glimpses of golden skin, enough to tell me the girls were sprawled naked on their long lounge chairs. They were sunbathing. Nice weather for it. Not that good weather was anything unusual around here. Even the micro-climate wouldn't dare to disappoint.

  The giggles and the hard chair were getting to me. Why were the girls here? A billionaire's ego? The older man showing off his possessions to the younger man?

  The whole set-up had the feel of a test.

  I say girls. They were twenty or twenty-one. Are we supposed to say “women” now? Or maybe even, “young women?” Ugh. The phrase “young women” always made me think of somebody being sent to the principal's office. Not my scene.

  Whatever you called them, they looked like twins only different, the way Hollywood mistresses so often do. Same figure― tall, lean, and leggy, with volleyball tits that made no pretense at being natural. Same face― high diamond-cut cheekbones, blow-up lips. As pretty as dolls, but not delicate. You could break a doll, but these babies were more likely to break you.

  If I ever met the wife, she'd look the same, only twenty years older and even more expensive to maintain.

  From what Saunderson said, she spent half her time in New York and Paris, and she'd expressed a loud disinterest in surviving the downfall of human civiliza
tion. Maybe true, maybe false. I didn't expect to ever find out either way. The bug-out pilot isn't necessarily the kind of guy you introduce to the wife. The end of the world as we know it demands younger, more fertile females.

  Once again, I flexed my buttocks on the wrought-iron seat to keep the blood flowing. What was Saunderson playing at? As far as I was concerned, this waiting game didn't prove anything except he was a major asshole. Which I already knew, since nobody accumulates Los Angeles billions by playing nice.

  The job would mostly involve flying back and forth to Vegas. Maybe a few impromptu trips to Rosarito or Los Cabos. He'd never need my services to get to his actual bunker. Civilization wasn't going to fall, of course not, that was conspiracy theory nonsense.

  But, if somebody with more money than sense wanted to pay top dollar to keep a bug-out pilot on a string, fine. I'd let him pay.

  The loudest shriek of laughter yet burst from behind the green wall. My sense of unease escalated. Unease, hell. Call it what it was― flat-out paranoia.

  They're talking about me. Laughing at me.

  No, they're not. Don't be ridiculous.

  The paranoia had been drilled into me, which wasn't the fault of the girls. I knew all that, knew exactly where it came from― all the secrets I was required to keep, all the shit I couldn't talk about. What's the good of a commendation nobody knows you earned? Are you supposed to take out your classified medals by the dark of midnight, stroke them with your thumb, cackle over them while muttering, “My precious?”

  These secrets weren't getting declassified in my lifetime. The loss of an F-16 in a country where we weren't supposed to be at war would have been a real big fucking problem. Ejection was never an option. The plane shouldn't have ever gone down in the first place.

  Damn sure I couldn't let it stay down.

  The fucking electrical systems. Sabotage, I thought at the time. Hell. I still thought so, even though we'd never proved it. F-16s don't lose all their systems just because.

  For a moment, the girls' shrieks of laughter went unheard as I flashed back to the near-crash landing. Somehow, I'd touched down as light as a feather. Hadn't even blacked out for more than a second or two from all the G forces. A miracle or almost. My fingers flew to hotwire the system fast enough to get me back in the air before the enemy arrived on the scene.

  The back of my neck had prickled, a warning that eyes were already on me. How can you feel eyes looking at you? And yet we all know that you can.

  Get back in the sky. Get across that fucking border.

  Finally, I was in the clouds again, accelerating as fast as I dared. It wasn't a time to overdo it on the G forces. Another blackout at the wrong time could be fatal.

  I wasn't alone in the clouds. From the look of it, the latest drone was a piece of crap from a big box store back home in the states. They let anybody order from those places.

  Boom. Gone. Even after I'd blasted it out of the sky, I wasn't happy. The drone was an unpleasant reminder the enemy had eyes. Not a good feeling when I was flying a bird put together with duct tape, copper wire, and a prayer.

  Right on cue, lights began flashing red again.

  The second time wasn't a near crash. It was the real deal. But I'd made it, I'd crossed the right line on the map. I could eject if I needed to, I could do all kinds of things...

  And then came the blank time. The hospital. People coming and going, doing things with my head. Some of that was probably even real.

  Not a good idea to think about the hospital or about the head injury. I was fine now.

  Even the bird was fine. It took months, but they'd repaired it. Saved the Air Force millions.

  More giggles. Honestly, too many giggles. They were fake, a tease. The girls were as aware of me as I was of them, and they wanted me to know it. Should I get up, walk around that hedge, say hi while pretending not to notice that two stunning women were butt-naked in front of me?

  Was that somehow the test?

  Would I fail if I went over there, or would I fail if I didn't?

  Maybe the girls were the ones being put to the test. Imagine being a hot young Hollywood model/actress on the way up. Your entire career demands you hang out with older creeps and weirdos because they're the ones who have all the money and make all the decisions. I'm not trying to be all ego or anything, but fuck it. To a wife or a mistress, I could look like fun. Twenty-nine, six foot three, two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle. Brown and brown if anybody besides the Department of Motor Vehicles cares about my eye and hair color.

  The girls almost had to be checking me out through those gaps in the hedge. Did Saunderson want them to? He wasn't a stupid man. Stupid doesn't take Hollywood.

  You're imagining things. This is about your flying skills. Period.

  Hell with it. One more giggle, and I was going around that hedge.

  Right on cue came the giggle. I pushed myself out of the too-small wrought-iron chair.

  Took two steps.

  And that's when Saunderson appeared, big as life and twice as ugly. Fucker had been watching me all along. Timing me to see how long I could hold out.

  Chapter Two

  In some ways, the crash wasn't so bad. All my scars were invisible. You couldn't tell I'd ever had a traumatic brain injury. The Air Force reassured me I'd made a full recovery. I could fly.

  Maybe not for the military, but I was good enough to fly commercial. Sure, I was.

  Something tickled in the back of my skull.

  Does that really sound right to you? Had it ever sounded right?

  But there was no time for self-doubt when Hollywood producer/angel investor/billionaire Shaun Saunderson came booming into the garden room. His hand was already out, and we were already shaking. He had a firm grip, the kind they teach deal-makers in some actual fucking seminar on how to shake hands. My grip was just as firm, but it came naturally.

  There was an unspoken head-butting contest every time I met this guy. He was fifty-two and had the love handles to prove it. Getting silver highlights painted into his hair to make the gray look intentional was about all the effort he'd put into maintaining appearances.

  “Major Blount,” he said. “Glad you could come out.”

  We both knew I had no choice if I wanted to be his wildly overpaid on-call charter pilot. “Please. Call me Brock.”

  We'd had the first-names discussion before. More of that head-butting.

  The job itself was cake. I'd be on twenty-four/seven standby, ready at a moment's notice to get a bird in the air. I couldn't drink alcohol while I was in his employ, but that wasn't a huge sacrifice, considering what he was paying for my so-called readiness.

  “Well,” he was saying now. “Brock when you're on the ground, Major Blount when you're in the air. How's that for a compromise? And I'm Shaun.”

  “Sounds fine, Shaun.” Although we'd never be buddies. And, in my head, he was forever Saunderson.

  One reason he paid so well, of course, was his firm belief in the old adage that you can't take it with you. The man was utterly convinced that a civilization-ending war could be headed for the good old US of A at any given moment. In the first interview, he'd got off on this rant about how the military was kidding itself to think we could go on fighting proxy wars forever.

  “You have to be ready to drop everything at a moment's notice,” he'd said. “Of course, we'll supply space in the bug-out shelter for you and whoever you want to bring along.”

  “I'm single. And I came out of the foster system. Never knew my folks.”

  As he damn well already knew. Billionaires check out their hires with a proctologist and a microscope. My solitary status was likely one of the reasons I got the job. Most potential bug-out pilots came with baggage. Wives, kids, even parents and entire extended families they wanted to evacuate in the event of a TEOTWAWKI scenario.

  So the second interview in the garden.

  “The girls want to fly to Vegas later tonight.”

  “Not a
problem.” Being on standby means being on standby.

  Thus far, the whole meet seemed like a bog-standard conversation with a new employer who still had you on probation.

  And yet...

  Behind us was the hedge that separated us from the girls giggling around the pool.

  Why were they here? Why was I? He could have told me to get the plane ready over the phone.

  “Look. I need you to be aware there's a lot of chatter.” He rattled the trendy spherical ice cubes in his crystal tumbler of twenty-one-year-old single malt and gestured at the wrought-iron torture furniture, and suddenly we were both sitting down. “A lot of chatter.” He emphasized the word, tasting it like he tasted the single malt. As if he knew anything about chatter that he hadn't learned from a movie script. “You heard anything about that?”

  My own crystal tumbler contained mineral water and a twee slice of lime I never asked for. “With all due respect, I don't hear intelligence chatter. I would have no occasion to hear it.”

  “Your friends who are still in the force might share something.”

  I got why he liked rattling spherical cubes in crystal. It made a tiny sound like distant bells while you took time out to think, although there wasn't a whole hell of a lot to think about. My Air Force buddies wouldn't share classified intel. If Saunderson expected that as a condition of my employment, this job was over before it got started.

  “I hear rumors,” I finally said. “Maybe it's only chatter if you're a general.”

  “And the rumors you hear?”

  “Same as it ever was. We're fighting over there so we don't have to fight over here.” Whatever your politics, you have to agree it mostly works. The usual exceptions come to mind. Pearl Harbor. Nine-eleven. But, in the main, so far so good. We're all still here. Most of us, anyway.

  More tinkle of ice cubes. More girlish giggles on the other side of the hedges. A distant purr of some piece of landscaping equipment.

  Just another sunny day in an endless stream of sunny days.

  The silence stretched on until Saunderson accepted I wasn't going to break down and tell him some super-secret military insider shit.