The Salvation

Chapter 23

|Oliver|

Deborah sent an envoy to each of the remaining international governments with stern orders; lay down all your weapons and abandon all your armies... Or face the wrath of the United Wasteland. Fifty days after she took all the power in the world, half the countries still standing knelt to her and the other half refused. Deborah's orders to them were even stricter. Surrender. Or die. Australian, Chinese, Japanese, British, Egyptian and Columbian governments dared to oppose the United Wasteland and united in their own cause against Deborah, but Callus' own deception crumbled them within days. Australia and Britain surrendered, disbanding their countries and burning the old flags but the others were less than willing to surrender. Oliver heard whispers in the newly under construction Government House of what Callus did to them, but no one was certain. The only concrete piece of information was that those countries died fighting.

Katrina Lloyd set Callus to reactivating the satellites and sending his own satellites up to monitor anything worth monitoring. By the time there was only one country remaining, Callus gathered that the population globally was under one hundred and forty million. But the silver lining in Callus' research was that within twenty years the humans would be back on track towards restoring the war torn planet and their former population. Rumour was that Callus sent one of his satellites into deep space, for what reason, no one could guess.

Oliver sat in on only one of Deborah's meetings with the scientist, the one where he explained the impact of nuclear war on the planet. Callus brought graphs and scales, seismic readings and samples and snapshots from the satellites. Nearly seventy percent of the oceans had dried up, the earth was riddled with radioactivity and rain wasn't something that the wasteland knew of.

"According to my predictions and research, precipitation is highly unlikely to occur on its own." Callus explained as he sat next to Katrina Lloyd at the board table of Deborah's new Government House. Deborah made swift moves to ensure that the old rules of leadership were dead. No elections, no senate and no politicians. Deborah Fisher was in charge, that was all. She ordered the construction of a new Government House in Washington DC, surrounding the best water source and largest connection to the remaining oceans in the old America. "But there are some tools I could use towards... Well, nudging the rain. I could restore around thirty percent of the worlds water, it would be a straight two months of rain."

Deborah nodded, taking every word into consideration. "So, how bad would the flooding be?" Deborah eventually asked.

"I can position the machines in specific points to make the precipitation and condensation cycles localised in those areas for the best of it, areas like the Marianas trench and Mediterranean Sea." Callus explained.

"Wait... The Marianas trench? Isn't that the deepest part of some ocean or something like that?" Oliver asked confused.

Callus nodded. "Was. It's exposed now. Not entirely, there's water there but not enough to sustain ocean life." Callus sat back down and shuffled through his papers. "Now for another issue. I've detected a large number of mutations."

"Like those dogs with spikes in their backs?" Katrina contributed.

"Yes. That's not the worst of it. There's been reports of a nomadic species of ariel creatures attacking military installations all over the count- sorry, region."

"What are these Callus?" Deborah asked, troubled.

"Can't tell. I've only captured one specimen in the Nevada desert and it's being transported to my San Francisco facility as we speak, I've also captured four aquatic beasts in some marine lab but I can't move them without access to far more water than we have available or else they could die and my research wouldn't be complete." Callus pulled out a photo of a creature. It was like a snake with legs, long and scaled. It's eyes were glowing red. "This has been locally named Beast of the Sands by scavengers, talk about melodramatic. Others have simply called it a Crack Lizard due to it living in cracks in the ground, that's become a common name for it if Katrina's spies are correct. Now I have photos of two variants, one with red eyes and three in one group without..."