Campbell Read online

  Contents

  Campbell

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About CS

  West Sneak Peek

  Copyright

  Campbell: Book One

  It’s been ten years since a virus wiped out the entire adult population. Across the world, opportunistic kids worked to reestablish order through the creation of uneasy, fractured territories.

  A decade later, the rules are changing.

  Desperate to stop his western territory from coming apart at the seams, 23 year old President Connor Wilde sends his oldest confidante to Campbell, a swelling northern empire, to negotiate with its leader.

  Tal Bauman isn’t expecting Lucy Campbell to be so impossible.

  Or intriguing. Or beautiful.

  He’s also not expecting their negotiations to leave them both fighting for survival in a part of the world neither are familiar with.

  Spanning a dystopian North American landscape, Campbell is the story of two unlikely companions who find themselves reevaluating their loyalties, beliefs, and futures.

  CAMPBELL

  Book One

  C.S. Starr

  Copyright 2014 by C.S. Starr

  Kindle Edition

  Acknowledgements

  It’s hard to know where to start. In the past year, this story has been touched by so many hands, and I’m terribly afraid I’ll miss someone. If I have, it’s not intentional.

  Matt, thank you for all things. Words are a bit trite at this point.

  Jo, thank you for your relentless dedication to stroking my ego when I desperately needed it. Elizabeth Hunter, thank you for your encouragement throughout the process.

  Julia Reiss, thank you for your sharp eye and continued collaboration.

  Thanks to DK, MM, MM, TM, SM, SP, SR, and ST for reading earlier drafts and sharing your thoughts, critique, and kind words.

  Last but not least, thanks to my writing community, family, and friends for encouraging me to keep going through your always appreciated words, supportive emails, and blog hits over the past five years on this project and countless others. I hope, as readers, you never doubt your ability to inspire and contribute. I hope you enjoy the final product as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

  To Margot Lucy, wherever you might be.

  Prologue

  January 17th, 2001

  On January 17th, 2001, Dominga Vargas, an elderly woman from Lima, Peru, dropped dead. Her friends and family knew she was old, ancient, even, but no one knew exactly when she’d been born, including Dominga herself, so there was no Guinness World Records representative present, no Associated Press story marking the death of the oldest woman on earth. She had a pauper’s funeral, marked by no pomp or circumstance, and she disappeared from life just as she’d come into it, noted by few, and remembered by even fewer.

  On January 18th, 2001, an unexplained virus claimed its first elderly casualties in Monaco. In the weeks that followed, similar strains were reported in Macau, and Japan. By February 12, 2001, it was deemed an epidemic, and many countries recommended that the elderly quarantine themselves in order to keep infection down within their age group.

  Soon after that, quarantine was not only recommended but required by those over sixty, in order to keep the unnamed illness contained within that age group, where, thus far, it had stayed; the youngest person infected being a youthful seventy-two.

  Worldwide protests raised questions regarding the ethics of age-related discrimination, and the illness led to increased incidences of elderly abuse and abandonment. When Michael Croft of Surrey, England, dropped dead of the same virus on March 21, 2001 after defying the quarantine notice to have his traditional Sunday tea with his grandmother, Rose Croft, the protests stopped.

  Michael was fifteen years old.

  By July 12, 2001, there was no one left over fifty-five, and a state of emergency was declared in one hundred and two countries. Those countries not included in the declaration had no way of joining, their resources and populations so devastated that making such a declaration would have removed valuable resources and manpower from the ever-present tasks of safely removing the dead and attempting to keep those not infected, alive.

  By November 17th, 2001, the oldest surviving person in the world was Liu Zhang, from Quingdao, China.

  She was twelve and three-quarters.

  Chapter 1

  March 2001

  Los Angeles, California

  “We’ll stop at McDonald’s,” Joe Bauman said enthusiastically, grinning at them from the driver’s seat while he and his family waited at the red light two blocks from their synagogue. “Get you boys whatever you want.”

  Tal Bauman, stuffed in the middle between his two older brothers, beamed even though he knew he shouldn’t. No one was smiling today, or much at all recently. He was tired of eating the food people kept bringing to their house, exhausted by the constant stream of sad visitors who revolved through the Bauman’s front door and insisted on rumpling his hair and telling him he looked just like his grandpa when he was young. McDonald’s was a bright spot in two terrible weeks. He tried to remember if he knew what the Happy Meal toy was that month. His brother Adam thumbed through a Marvel comic on his left, and his middle brother, Rob, stared blankly out the window to his right.

  “Joe, I don’t want fast food,” Rebecca Bauman groaned giving her husband her best side eye, as her stomach churned from the stressful day. “Come on. They don’t need that. Let’s just…let’s order in when we get home. Chinese or something.”

  “We’ll order Chinese, Bec,” Joe said, smiling over at his wife in the passenger seat while he gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. His parents, then hers, and so many of their friends’ parents in between. It had been a hell of a month, the likes of which he hoped he’d never relive. “Whatever you want. But we’ll get the boys McDonald’s—”

  “I want a Big Mac!” Adam interrupted. “And the biggest fries.”

  Joe looked at his sons from the driver’s seat. “Like I said, whatever you want. Milkshakes, whatever. You guys have been good as gold this week.”

  They got their McDonald’s, along with every extra they could imagine, and while they chattered happily in the backseat, fighting over french fries and who would get the Playstation when they got home, Joe and Rebecca drove home in silence, both of them deep in thought about the future.

  The virus scared the fuck out of both of them. They spent their nights after the boys went to sleep speculating about the future. Rebecca’s parents had been fairly young, only in their early sixties, and very healthy; her dad had played eighteen holes the day before he got sick, three days before he died. There’d been no warning, no time to prepare, and then her mother two days later…it was too much. She knew parents got old, died, but like this?

  It was unthinkable.

  June 2012

  Malibu, West

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Connor Wilde hissed into his car phone as he drove along the Pacific Coast Highway. “She took Vancouver? That’s unacceptable. She was
nothing a year ago. Less than nothing. Who the fuck does she think she is? This shit won’t stand. You just let that happen?”

  Tal Bauman did his best to ignore the overdramatic rant that followed. He’d heard variations of it daily for the past two months, as piece by piece, town by town, the Campbell family picked off their Northern allies, bringing them over to their side so completely that they hadn’t acknowledged any contact West had tried to make with them.

  He watched as they drove by a group of maybe ten farm kids, staggering down the road in worn clothes, hot in the sun, their truck full of produce stalled beside the road. The kids stopped and watched Tal and Connor drive by, their heavy eyes drawn to Connor’s Jaguar.

  It was impossible to shake the image from his mind. It was a nice day, he thought. Too nice to worry about produce, or farm kids, or Campbell, since they’d been unable to do anything about the movement in the north, and he didn’t see that changing. They’d tried; made the calls, sent presents, did what had worked for years, with no results. There was the option of using force, but Campbell’s resources were unknown, and the relationships with the areas that had deserted were too fragile to send in the army to fix. There was nothing to be done, in Tal’s opinion. They had bigger problems to overcome in their back yard before they started looking to conquer the north.

  Besides, it was the perfect day for a bike ride, and he’d promised his cousin Leah he’d help her with the garden.

  “Drop me off at my place,” he said, ignoring the fact that Connor was still on the phone. “I’ve got shit to do.”

  “We’ve got shit to do. We’ve got to get on a plane to Vancouver to straighten this shit out,” he replied, looking at Tal out the corner of his eye. “Since Jimmy obviously can’t be trusted to fix shit with Dev!” he shouted pointedly into the phone.

  “What did they offer?” Tal inquired. “Why did they switch?”

  Connor pulled the headset off and tossed it in the back seat without saying goodbye to Jimmy, the kid he’d left in charge of their part of Old Canada a few years earlier when he’d deemed it a non-threat, mostly due to the shit weather, and the fact that he knew nothing about it. “They wouldn’t tell him. We have to go find out and make it right.”

  “It’s just the north. We don’t need—”

  “Come on, man. It’s just the north, and then it’s just Washington, and then Oregon, and then those low-brow hicks are grazing cattle in our backyard and we’re fucked. Fucked.” He shook his head, exasperated. “Then we look weak, and people start looking for greener pastures, and then East comes and swallows us up while we’re distracted, and we’re nothing. Less than nothing. A mother-fucking line in some shoddily written history books that half the idiots in this illiterate territory can’t read. For ten years, there was some sort of West something, and then there wasn’t.”

  “Are they willing to negotiate?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not with Jimmy. They won’t even meet with him. Maybe with me. I’ve got roughs of the new Spiderman, and we can take some oranges, girls, and some other shit, schmooze it up and see what we can work out.” He sighed and rubbed his temples. “Dude, we can’t lose the north. We need to be strong enough to keep East out, and every bit hurts. How are they doing this?”

  “You know they’re flush with oil, now that they’ve figured out how to manufacture it. That’s all this is. They’ve got cash to burn.” Even though he said it, Tal knew it wasn’t the whole story. He’d heard the whisperings for more than a year. Whisperings about a different way of doing things. The world was changing as they got older; as they evolved from children to adults, and he’d had more than one conversation in a seedy bar about how great things were in the north. “But it’s probably more than that.”

  Connor shook his head. “It’s the sister. Jimmy said she’d spread her legs for anyone to get ahead. Dev thinks she’s some sort of fucking vision. That’s what it is. You’d think people could see past that.”

  Tal tapped the dash with his pen. “That’s what we’ve been hearing, but it’s got to be more than that. Don’t fool yourself. Men are idiots for pussy, but we’re not that stupid. Pussy is pussy. She’s smart, and she’s got resources, and you know how people are feeling here. They’re disgruntled. She’s also fucking crazy, from what I’ve heard.”

  Connor snorted. “The Campbell kids are nothing but a bunch of hicks that got lucky. I’m sure people make up shit about her to make her seem like some sort of anti-hero. She can’t be as crazy as what people say. There’s no way she made that kid do the thing with the goat.” He winced.

  The colour drained from Tal’s face. “I’ll agree with the hick part, but I’d hardly say they got lucky. She’s…well, you’ve heard the rumors. People respect that shit. Can you even imagine doing that…to your own family?”

  The Campbell’s rise to power had been quick; they hadn’t been on West’s radar a year and a half earlier. They’d started out with nothing but some cows and now? It was hard to say how many people lived under their rules. Listened to them. Trusted them to make their decisions, trusted them for protection. They had a lot of Old Canada, and maybe some of the Midwest. There were stories about them though, the kind of stories that kept him awake. The kind that made him uncomfortable about the shift in power, and the world she represented. They didn’t get lucky. They made their own luck, brutally, if the stories were true.

  “Do you think she’s got the Midwest?” Tal asked. “Any more word on that?

  “No,” Connor grumbled, pulling out his notebook and jabbing his finger at a crudely drawn organizational diagram. “They’re all over the fucking place. You can’t get a straight story out of any of them.”

  They didn’t know much about the Midwest. There was some trading, but West didn’t have a lot of things they needed, whereas the Midwest had a lot of things West wanted, especially when it came to agricultural products. Unfortunately, movies or West’s burgeoning tech manufacturing operations didn’t seem of interest to them. They were Midwesterners; farm kids, strong and driven, with a variety of skills that most of the kids in LA would never acquire. In early days, Tal had pushed for contact with them, in the hopes of being able to match the Silicon Valley geniuses with mechanical knowledge. That was rejected by Connor in terms of forging alliances with Mexico and the rest of the coast, for overseas trading. The kids in the Midwest were challenging to communicate with, and their leadership was fractured at best. They did form a necessary buffer between East and West, however.

  East scared the shit out of Tal.

  “They don’t deserve it.” Connor pulled into his driveway. “We deserve it. Look what we’ve done for people. We’ve given them everything.”

  After mostly agreeing on philosophies with Connor for most of their lives, as of late, Tal wasn't interested in discussing what they'd done for the kids that trusted them. Not after his recent travels north.

  He put on a smile. “I need to get home. Leah’s pulling up the garden. I told her I’d help. I’ll walk from your place.”

  “Vancouver, next week. I’ll get the jet ready.” Connor grinned back, his green eyes gleaming as he pulled into the driveway of his large home, once immaculate but now overgrown, decaying, and desperate for a paint job and extensive repairs to the driveway. From its appearance, one never would have guessed at the obscene extravagance inside. Tal knew Connor had expensive taste, but four stuffed tigers with gold teeth shipped in from India were a little ridiculous, in his opinion.

  “Say ‘hi’ to Leah for me, and don’t stress about it. We’ll get them back.”

  Tal swallowed, and knew it was time to say what he’d been thinking for a while. “Look,” he said, climbing out. “I’m maybe not the best person to go with you.”

  “Why?” his oldest friend questioned, hopping out of the car. At around six feet, Tal wasn’t exactly tall, but Connor, at five inches shorter than him was short. Really short. “You’re my guy.”

  Tal shook his head. “I’m not that guy.
You should take Colin. Colin’s more fun, and he’s got the connections with those crazy girls, the ones that’ll do anything.” He closed the door. “I’m not going to sell it like Colin.”

  “You’re coming. You’re the numbers guy, and the VP.” Connor took a step back. “And people listen to you. We always go—”

  “I need a break. Take Colin.” He started up the driveway. “I’m not a good cheerleader.”

  Connor shook his head. “You know what? We’re going tomorrow. I’ll pick you up in the morning,” Connor shouted after him. “You’re coming!”

  Tal froze and his face grew hot. “Tomorrow? Connor, I can’t—”

  He tapped his watch and headed towards the house. “We need to get on this. If we wait a week, she’ll take it all. There’s no time to waste.”

  Tal shook his head, since he really didn’t have much choice in the matter, and that Connor was right. In the twenty years he’d known him, Tal had realized Connor’s decisiveness wasn’t something easily argued with. It had started long before the death of their parents, over things like choosing between whether they’d play Grand Theft Auto or Carmageddon on his Playstation. More recently, his decision-making extended to areas like where they’d invest money outside of films, and the laws regulating the grandfathering of land in key parts of LA. Tal may not have always agreed with Connor, but his logic had made them very rich.

  It was about a half hour walk to the home Tal shared with his cousin Leah. His father had bought the house in the 1980s, after he landed his first few big clients, including Connor’s father John Wilde, star of several successful action movie franchises and frequent tabloid fodder. Their fathers worked together, but had also been friends in many ways, despite their often fiery working relationship. Tal remembered overhearing a number of conversations between his parents over what a dumb asshole Connor’s dad was when he’d insist on doing a stupid space ninja movie, or invest in some sort of pipe dream scheme that wasn’t good enough to make an infomercial for and almost always resulted in lost income.