Drunk Monkeys 7
Ice Monkeys
Atlanta will get a whole lot hotter when you add...the Drunk Monkeys.
Donna’s eating her lunch and minding her own business when a case of mistaken identity puts her squarely in the sights of Rev. Silo’s hired guns. Now she’s on the run and in hiding with the Drunk Monkeys.
Victor and Uni aren’t sure about the clueless bank teller at first...until she proves to them how invaluably smart she really is. They can’t release her until they find the real hacker posting incriminating evidence about Rev. Silo’s shenanigans. And even then, they might not want to.
But an ice storm bearing down on Atlanta grinds everything to a halt. Terrifying events force Donna to re-evaluate her life and her priorities, and drive her into a tragic situation from which there’s no turning back. Unfortunately, nothing good comes without great cost. With the stakes turning deadly, will she lose one of her men before she even gets to know him?
Genre: Futuristic, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Science Fiction
Length: 106,867 words
ICE MONKEYS
Drunk Monkeys 7
Tymber Dalton
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
ICE MONKEYS
Copyright © 2015 by Tymber Dalton
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-913-1
First E-book Publication: November 2015
Cover design by Les Byerley
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
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DEDICATION
To all my readers who’ve been following this series, thank you for your kindness and patience.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is book seven in the Drunk Monkeys series and focuses on Uni and Victor. The books in the series are best read in order. All the titles are available from Siren-BookStrand.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Author's Note
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
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
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
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
About the Author
ICE MONKEYS
Drunk Monkeys 7
TYMBER DALTON
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One
“That damn, batshit crazy asshole fucker in charge there in Pyongyang is the one who stirred the shitpot. Then Beijing made him lick the goddamned spoon and nuked his fucking ass. Problem is, when they did that—not saying they weren’t justified, mind you—our first and best chance to reverse-engineer this clusterfuck went up in a mushroom cloud. All the rest of us could do was fucking bend over and pray for lube and a reacharound.”
—Gen. Robert K. McCammeron (Our Last History? by Willard M. Sterling. Interview date May, 2143)
“In the time since we first became aware of the virus, and the subsequent events that have followed, we’ve come to understand that we have no idea why, much less how, they [North Korea] created it. Unfortunately, when Beijing wiped Pyongyang off the map, they also wiped out any hope we had of creating an effective vaccine in a timely manner to prevent transmission to a majority of the world’s population. It’s estimated that within another five years, over ninety percent of the world’s population will either be dead or infected unless we get lucky and figure it out.”
—Dr. Arnold P. Almer, CDC (Our Last History? by Willard M. Sterling. Interview date April, 2143)
“In terms of [Kite, the drug’s] addictive nature, it makes meth look like baby aspirin.”
—Kimberly Coates, PhD, University of Florida (February, 2143)
“Well, fuck.”
—President Charlotte Kennedy’s reported reaction upon learning that China authorized the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea on July 29, 2142, in response to Pyongyang allowing thousands of people they supposedly infected with the Kite virus to flood acros
s the border into China several days earlier.
“The Drunk Monkeys? Those crazy motherfuckers don’t exist. And boy, are they good at what they do. Thank god.”
—Gen. Joseph Arliss (June, 2143)
* * * *
Long story short…
It’s early October, 2143, fifteen months after TMFU—The Massive Fuckup—and only two weeks since last we left our armageddon in progress. TMFU is the military acronym to describe China’s nuclear shart of mass destruction in response to North Korea infecting a couple of thousand people with the Kite virus and then letting them loose over their northern border. They’d strong-armed fifteen scientists, now known as The List, to create the virus in the first place.
Scientists who’d managed to escape North Korea just days before China’s gift of radioactive fireworks turned the country—and its population—into a bunch of smoking craters.
Three of those scientists are now safely protected by the special ops team known as the Drunk Monkeys (aka SOTIF1).
Unfortunately, one of the scientists from The List was killed in France, leaving eleven scientists still out “in the wild.”
Kite, the drug and the virus, is spreading around the world with devastating consequences. In addition, political and economic unrest is turning up the heat under a boiling pot of shit soup and spilling over into the United States. Los Angeles has been destroyed. Barstow was deliberately blown up by the military to kill survivors of the LA earthquakes and riots, many of them people who had been exposed to Kite, in a futile attempt to stop the spread of the virus eastward across the country.
Our intrepid Drunk Monkeys—and their women, and the three researchers from The List who are under their protection—have safely crossed the United States from their previous safe house in Seattle to the southwest coast of Florida. Settled into a secret base on an island just off-shore in the Gulf of Mexico, the researchers have been busy at work trying to formulate a vaccine against the Kite virus ravaging the globe. They picked the location because it was remote, but not too remote, and within an easy plane ride to Atlanta.
Home of the Centers for Disease Control.
In fact, plans are in the works for them to engage in an Atlanta mission and set up a remote base of operations there. Part of the problem lay in trying to figure out who is safe to approach within the CDC, who isn’t in the Reverend Hannibal Silo’s pocket.
Because the scientists have a successful test vaccine against a non-lethal strain of Kite, due to one of the Drunk Monkeys, Doc, having caught and survived it. Finding Korey, a long-odds survivor of Silo’s LA Preachsearch Project, alive in Seattle helped forward their research.
Unfortunately, she died. But not in vain. With the results they have from testing her blood and the antibodies she created against the virus, the scientists are close, so close, to cracking an effective vaccine that will work against the more lethal strains of the virus. They want to be able to take their findings to the CDC and release them to the world once they have a good vaccine.
The problem is, they know if they reveal themselves and their findings too soon there’s a good chance the Reverend will try to snatch them and their research for himself.
Oh, yes. Speaking of him, let us not forget the slimy Reverend Hannibal Silo, leader of the Church of the Rising Sunset, is behind a lot of Kite of both varieties making it to US shores.
Silo sure has his slippery dick in a pickle, though. His plans to install a new, young, virginal wife in every one of his compounds have been placed on hold due to the pesky disappearance of his legal wife of forty years, Mary. Also on hold are his plans for his “Legacy Project,” to artificially inseminate thousands of women in exchange for giving them a guaranteed place in one of his fifteen church strongholds.
Unfortunately, Silo’s plans hit a little…hiccup.
Following four decades of sadistic torture at the hands of her husband, Mary Silo found her metaphorical balls. She weaned herself off the meds that were keeping her compliant and under Silo’s thumb, emptied funds into a secret bank account, and bolted at her first opportunity. She is now in hiding under an assumed alias in the St. Louis area.
Even better? She secretly bought a cell phone and, before she left, took video and audio recordings of Hannibal and his sidekick, Jerald Arbeid. Not just that, but she also grabbed videos Hannibal had taken of himself and Mary together, where he’d detailed some of his heinous plans to her while abusing her. She has been sharing all of that lovely evidence with a blogger hacktivist, Ax, who has an ax of his own to grind against the Reverend for killing his parents.
Oooh, yeah.
Things are getting hellishly hot for Hannibal Silo.
And it looks like no amount of praying will pull his bacon from that fire.
It doesn’t help that Silo has been trying to put heat on the President to order General Arliss to bring in the Drunk Monkeys. Silo wants to put his hands on a vaccine for Kite so he can control it and use it to get himself elected President of the United States.
Unfortunately for Silo, people are glomming onto his plans, making it far harder for him to operate. Especially while under police and media scrutiny regarding his wife’s mysterious disappearance.
Silo’s also not so sure he can fully trust his right-hand man, Jerald, anymore.
News flash—he can’t.
Meanwhile, Silo is oblivious to the fact that Bubba, the Drunk Monkeys’ secret military intel weapon, has finally hacked into the church’s computer system and is pulling data to use against Silo. Bubba also wants to find the hacktivist blogger, hoping he’ll lead them to Mary Silo, who will help them take down Rev. Silo for good.
Not that the Drunk Monkeys were already busy stopping an apocalypse or anything.
Caught up? Good. Let’s pick up where we left off, shall we?
Chapter Two
When you absolutely, positively need a monkey’s special kind of skills during an apocalypse…
It was a perfectly mild October Florida Friday…so far. While Uni sipped his coffee on the balcony of the research station, he stared down at the beach where Papa was visible in the purplish light and doing his pre-dawn tai chi routine. The Drunk Monkeys’ CO tried, when the day allowed, to do it every morning.
Fortunately, they’d had some fairly calm days over the past couple of weeks while they hid out at the old island research station.
The three scientists in their care, however, couldn’t say the same. They’d been frantically working around the clock, trying to develop a stronger Kite vaccine, ever since their arrival in Florida. They’d already had breakthroughs with some of the less virulent strains of the virus, but a solution to stop the deadliest strains still eluded them.
They were close, though. So. Fucking. Close.
Kite was still mutating. The evidence showed even more strains were cropping up in the US and in other parts of the world. Fortunately, nearly all of them less virulent than the worst strains.
But a ninety-two-percent fatality rate still wasn’t great. Left to its own devices, the virus might burn itself through the entire human race before completely mutating to a non-lethal variation.
Uni knew he should savor every last damn second of what amounted to a vacation to the Drunk Monkeys, but he couldn’t.
He heard a door open behind him and his partner, Victor, walked out to join him on the balcony. They’d had day watches lately, but today was their day “off.”
“The old man doing his tai chi?” Victor asked.
Their CO was only 33, not exactly “old,” even though he was the second-oldest, next to Uncle.
“Yeah. I don’t see how he can stay so calm.”
“It’s his job to stay calm. Not like there’s much going on right now to knot his briefs.”
“I hate holding patterns,” Uni muttered.
“Join the club. At least you still have a job to do.” Victor took another sip of his coffee. “I’m a helo pilot with no helo.”
“I thought Panda was going
to start taking you up in the Derring and get you trained on that?”
Panda was the “orphaned” pilot they’d picked up from McChord while they were hiding out in Seattle. Her three-man crew—and apparently most of her squad—had not survived El Segundo being overrun by rioters and Kiters. Her C-160 Zeus cargo transport plane had brought them all the way across the country, and now she was in a triad with Foxtrot and Kilo.
“She is. We’re going out tomorrow.”
“Why not today?”
“She had to run up to MacDill with Foxtrot and Kilo to check on the Zeus. The mod squad had a few questions. They left as soon as they grabbed some chow.”
“Ah.”
Uni was their logistics specialist. He helped make sure their shit got where it was supposed to go, and assisted Omega, their group’s quartermaster, with acquisitions of supplies and equipment their unit or the scientists needed, as well as arranging their safe houses and other operations necessities.
In fact, they were due for another grocery run that afternoon, even though Omega had already waved him off and said he didn’t need the help. Before they could begin their Atlanta part of the operation, their secret weapon, Bubba, had to finish nailing down a few details before they were sure it was secure and he could bring Uni and Omega into the equation to finish putting the field operation into effect.
That couldn’t happen until they were one-hundred-percent sure that General Arliss’ food chain was free of moles, and that they knew exactly who in the Atlanta CDC wasn’t under Reverend Silo’s thumb.