The Apocalypse Connection Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Apocalypse Connection (Simulated Realities, #3)

  Copyright and Legal

  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

  The Apocalypse Connection

  Simulated Realities #3

  by

  Kyle Kenze

  ←↑→

  A mole in a hole, or a man on a mission?

  Former F-16 pilot Brock Blount is dead certain he's trapped in an artificial reality, but how can he escape when even his beautiful sidekicks refuse to believe him?

  Winter is coming. If Brock and his three girls want to survive, they have to fight their way into their billionaire employer's hardened bunker.

  But they're not the only party of survivors scheming for a way inside.

  Copyright and Legal

  All rights reserved © 2019 by Kyle Kenze

  Photo Design © 2019 Ming Destiny

  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 21,000-word novella is set in an apocalyptic world where graphic sex and swears are part of everyday reality. If you're easily offended or under age 18, choose another book.

  Chapter One

  The girl on my left slipped out of the tangle of sleeping bags. Another girl snuggled into the warmth she left behind. Sleeping in a cuddle puddle of three girls meant a man never had to get cold.

  I blinked open an eye.

  Casey's brunette tresses always bounced so prettily when she walked away. The dimples in the small of her back twinkled in time to the sway of her smooth hips.

  Where was she going at the ass-crack of dawn?

  My good-morning woody stirred. Here on this high mountain meadow, the world was at peace. I was naked between two equally naked females. A good place to be.

  An early butterfly zigzagged by. A second butterfly gave chase, and the two of them began to circle around each other like boxers looking for a weakness.

  The great nations of the world couldn't have been destroyed in forty-five minutes of nuclear madness. I couldn't accept that. This simulation of peace couldn't be the last good place left on the planet.

  Red hadn't offered any proof of the crazy story she'd shared with me. She'd simply stated it as a fact that we were in an artificial reality where we had somehow escaped the final war. In fairness, what proof could she offer if this virtual reality had been crafted to deceive?

  I sat up on my elbows. My sleeping bag slid down to my hips. The haze on the horizon was every shade of pink in the world. Hardly evidence of nuclear fall-out.

  And I remembered something― a debriefing session with a general.

  “That's my point, Major. You weren't convinced that it was a nuclear end-game scenario.”

  This simulation was supposed to be completely immersive. I was never supposed to doubt the reality of what I experienced. So, when things kept not working out that way, they sent Red along with her all-too-perfect explanation for why I had to commit to this particular world and no other.

  Her story wasn't true. It was just another mind-fuck. The real world was still out there. And I was going to find my way back.

  Somehow.

  “Go back to sleep.” Madison mumbled into the bare skin of my exposed torso. Her breath was a sexy tickle. “It's early.”

  “I'm fine. You girls sleep in.” I touched one pretty cheek and then the other as I extricated myself from the soft shackles of their clinging arms and legs. Blonde Madison and petite Red didn't open their eyes as they snuggled together to fill the hole I'd left behind. They fit together so well. Affection between pretty girls was never a given. I had something special here.

  We were the lucky ones chosen by fate to survive. Somebody had to be.

  Why not us?

  I dressed quickly. Jeans. A button-down flannel shirt I didn't actually bother to button. The Heckler & Koch.

  There were holes in Red's story. Big ones. If her body was in a government bunker under the Rockies with the usual high muckety-muck generals and politicians, how did they arrange for her beautiful mind to be inserted into my virtual reality?

  To ask the question another way, where was my body?

  Was I a broken man hidden behind the locked doors of a secret Air Force experimental hospital ward? Had my broken brain been subjected to an experimental implant to replace the real-world experiences I could never have again?

  Ridiculous.

  My bare toes dug thoughtfully into the grass beneath my feet, and the grass tickled between my toes right on time. If I curled the toes in question a little too hard, I got dirt under the nails. I never heard of any so-called virtual reality where your very toes themselves felt so fucking real.

  I'd never heard of a VR where you even noticed whether or not you had any toes. You were all eyes, brain, and action, weren't you? That was certainly the case with my Air Force flight training simulators.

  I skipped the shoes and socks. When winter came, you'd miss days like this when you could feel the earth warm and friendly beneath your feet. At this elevation, that friendly warmth sometimes disturbed me. August had been going on forever. Was that only to be expected in an era of global warming? Or was it more evidence of my mental confusion?

  The ability to keep track of time is one of the easiest functions to lose. Even mild drugs can do it. Hell, concentrating too hard on a damn video poker game can do it.

  Let alone a traumatic brain injury.

  I padded silently down the path to our little pond. A splash of ice-cold water might wake up something deep inside. It hadn't worked any other morning, but maybe it would work today.

  Lost time, lost realities...

  I went back to another theory. Or was it a theory? Hadn't I, at some point, received indirect confirmation that we were in space?

  Or was that just another mind-fuck?

  Civilization hadn't lasted long enough for us to figure out how to break the limit on the speed of light. The stars were too far apart. It would take generations to reach another habitable planet. Humanity's only hope was to send out space-faring pods, each containing one high-testosterone man for several fertile young women.

  But there was a problem. High-energy men went mad in confined spaces. So the pointy heads over there at NASA needed to create and test a virtual world― a bigger world complete with challenges to overcome and problems to solve.

  Survival was one challenge. Getting into Saunderson's bunker was another.

  The lost time was a third challenge. Had weeks passed since I went down in Saunderson's plane? Or had it only been days?

  We fell from the sk
y in August. I knew that for sure because that's when the Perseids meteor shower took place. If the Perseids meteor shower is really what we saw that night.

  So many questions. So few answers.

  Well, whatever else I knew or didn't know, Casey had been gone way too long for a girl watering a bush and brushing her teeth. She must be bathing in our little pond. Thing is, snow melt makes for a chilly bath, and we'd all developed the habit of jumping in and out as fast as possible.

  I could call her name, but I didn't want to let any bad guys know that help was on its way.

  What bad guys?

  Something tickled in the back of my brain. Then I heard a small but familiar sound. I stopped dead still in my tracks to listen. The hair rose on the back of my arms.

  You've been here before. Everything that is happening now has happened before.

  Deja vu is a funny name for a funny sensation, but I wasn't laughing. I felt like I was in a game, and somebody had just hit my reset button.

  That disturbing little cough. That miserable hacking and gacking. I'd heard it all before.

  I moved around the clump of trees that blocked my view of the pond area, and then I found her. For a distorted moment, Casey seemed shorter than I'd expected, with her head closer to the ground. I shook off the illusion that she was a different, smaller girl. She was still a beauty, even when she was down on her knees and the heel of one hand, with the other hand fumbling wildly at her neck to catch her tumble of movie-star hair.

  Her pendant had been turned around on its long white-gold chain so she could hold it out of danger along with her hair. It was an odd sort of luck piece, a black leather electronic car key/USB fob covered all over in water-clear diamonds. Not so lucky, in my opinion. After all, Shaun Saunderson would never drive his fancy-pants Mercedes ever again.

  Her head bobbed up and down. More gacking.

  She was sick. Too sick to lift her head to greet me, although she surely saw my legs.

  All the theories came back, all the nasty possibilities. If the war was real, if the fallout had reached this high mountain, we were already doomed.

  I should have had a stronger reaction, but too much had happened too fast. I felt completely numb.

  Casey pulled herself together. Still on her knees, she scrambled to the pond to rinse out her mouth with cold water, then followed up with a long swish from a small plastic flask of drugstore mouthwash. I shouldn't be watching this, and yet I felt as if I couldn't walk away.

  Her face was pink when she raised her head. “Hey. Sorry.”

  “I'm the one who should say sorry.” Reaching out a hand, I squeezed her shoulder, then her arm to help her to her feet. “I didn't mean to embarrass you, but I was worried.”

  “You're sweet.” She squeezed my hip. “You're going to make a great daddy.”

  I blinked. “Did you just say...?”

  She chuckled. “Congratulations, Brock. You're going to be a father.”

  Chapter Two

  I'd been here before. The sense of deja vu swept over me like a tidal wave. The very way she jutted her chin was familiar. She'd thrust it out just that way the first time she'd told me she was going to have my baby.

  There was another cough somewhere, a more sinister one. The fucking mountain lion.

  That too was familiar.

  I held my hand up, palm out, a signal for silence. The other hand was on my Heckler & Koch. A second cough came, but it was fainter. Much farther down the valley. The lion had slunk off in search of less alert prey.

  A false memory came to me, a visceral image of Casey herself blasting the head off the starving animal who had come into our camp, claws out. She'd be one hell of a mama bear, I didn't doubt it, but this memory couldn't be true. I slipped my hand into my own unbuttoned shirt. No scars on my chest. No evidence I'd once been slashed by a lion.

  “I heard it, but what was it?” she asked.

  “Mountain lion.” I touched her on the elbow, then lifted her chin to force her to look deep into my eyes. “You don't come down here alone again. Not ever. You wake me up. Understand me? I'm not screwing around anymore. We don't go anywhere alone. The future depends on the four of us. As far as we really know, there's nobody else.”

  Her dark eyes flashed. “You needed your sleep.” This close to me, she smelled of mouthwash and vanilla.

  “I need you safe.” My hands slid down to her sleek hips. “Being sick doesn't make you less beautiful to me. Nothing you do can make you look less beautiful to me.”

  When she flushed, I knew I'd put the finger on it. Women, maybe all of us, but especially women, have an instinct to keep up the illusions. To hide sickness. To wash up, clean up, slap on the war paint, and pretend like nothing's going on, there's nothing to see.

  A girl had to be that way in Hollywood. But it would get you killed here.

  “If you're sick, you need somebody helping you. Standing guard. Predators prey on the sick. You heard that lion. He would have taken you if I hadn't been here.”

  At last, she looked down. At last, she nodded.

  I touched the hollow of her throat, followed up with a quick kiss to the side of her mouth. The mouthwash smelled of mint and alcohol, but her skin was pure velvet. “That's my baby. I'm going to take the best care of you.”

  “Did you know Shaun had a vasectomy ten years ago? Not that I was around ten years ago, but he gave me permission to talk to his doctor if I didn't want to put my trust in the words of a Hollywood producer.”

  I stroked the gold satin of her sun-kissed hip. “I didn't know, but it makes sense. I've suspected for a while that he wanted me for a lot more than to fly the plane.”

  “Of course. It isn't enough to survive. We have a duty to repopulate the world. Can't let the rats and the roaches run the place.”

  “You and Madison knew. You were being trained to shoot, to perform basic first aid, to...” No need to make a list. She already knew what Saunderson demanded of his Hollywood mistresses.

  What was real? What was fake?

  I experienced another throb of doubt. We weren't in space. We weren't in a virtual reality. If this portion of our destroyed planet still looked green and friendly, it only proved that billionaires could afford to choose a top-notch bug-out location.

  “I thought it was freaky, all that prepper shit. But there's a lot of freaks in LA. And Shaun was generous.” Casey touched the diamond-studded leather of her lucky Mercedes key. It had flipped around front again on its long white-gold chain. “So I humored him.”

  “So the interviews. That scene by the pool was staged.” I studied her face. “You girls weren't playing with each other to tease me but to tempt me.”

  Casey smiled. “You're doing pretty well. Why don't you tell me?”

  “You and Madison wanted to see how I'd react to a lesbian scene. If I'd freak out, or if I could appreciate the scene for what it was.”

  “You're on the right track. You needed to be open-minded. A man who is bothered by his girls playing together is a man who needs to keep his harem to one girl.”

  And, of course, in the event of an actual apocalypse, they'd need a man willing to service more than one girl. “I was still being tested when the alert came. Nothing had been decided about me yet.”

  “Sure. Madison's party in Vegas would be the real test. But it all went blooey too fast.”

  I could imagine the kind of private party they'd intended to spring on me. “At some point, I'd be eased into a group scene. Saunderson would offer me the chance to play with you girls, and it would be up to me to back out or join in. If I said no, if I couldn't handle the scene, he'd quietly drop me from his list of potential pilots.”

  “We might be spending eternity with whoever we selected. More, we might be making the future of humanity with you. Of course, we'd want to know if you were compatible. And Saunderson knew he couldn't just order a man into stud service. We all needed to know if you could share or if you'd let jealousy and favoritism make your decisions for
you.”

  In many ways, I was the ideal choice. Twenty-nine, Air Force training, in great shape, capable of making good decisions fast. They were qualities you'd want to pass on to future generations, if I do say so myself. But if I'd been a jealous SOB, well, there's no qualification that makes up for being a male drama queen.

  “Small groups are unstable.” Madison's voice floated through the trees. So much for letting her sleep in. “You passed a lot of tests during your time in the Air Force. You're mentally resilient. But if your personality didn't jell with the rest of us, nothing else would matter. We had to like you, and you had to like us. What better way to test that out than with an actual three-way?”

  “A four-way,” I corrected. “Saunderson was going to be there.”

  “Saunderson was only going to watch,” she said. “That was his thing, a lot of movie guys have that thing. Watching. Does that freak you out?”

  I shrugged. She knew it didn't. They all knew.

  Red was walking a step or two behind Madison, her hand easy on Madison's hip to let the blonde lead the way. Her beautiful red hair fell over one shoulder in a waterfall of temptation.

  Whatever reality or unreality we'd landed in, we were all in it together.

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to center my attention on the facts. If, indeed, we had any facts. “Listen. This sounds good and all, and it seems to fit most of what I remember, but this world of ours just plain isn't real. It can't be. I've seen the world beyond this world.”

  “You've had dreams,” Madison said. “You've maybe had visions. But they're just noise in the brain. Mere illusions.”

  “What if this world right here is the illusion? What if it's the virtual reality? Does it feel one hundred percent to you girls? Does it really?” I gestured around the pond and the little cluster of trees. The clean smell of water tickled my nostrils.

  My argument faltered.

  The problem was this place did seem real. Very real. As real as anything that ever happened to me.

  “Oh, honey.” Casey sounded so sad. “This is the world now. It is, babe.”