Shalia's Diary Read online

  SHALIA’S DIARY

  Book 1

  A Clans of Kalquor Story

  By

  Tracy St. John

  © copyright May 2013, Tracy St. John

  Cover art by Erin Dameron-Hill, © copyright May 2013

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s

  imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or

  events is merely coincidence.

  Kindle Edition

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  Prologue

  The Kalquorian Empire was and still is a civilization of great importance to the Galactic Council of Planets. The fierce but intelligent species has been at the forefront of technological, medical, and scientific breakthroughs for millennia. Their military might has never been in question; even their ancient enemy, the opportunistic race of Tragooms, hesitates to attack a Kalquorian force half its size.

  However, Kalquor’s survival is in jeopardy. The force that has threatened this mighty race is not one that wields weaponry. It cannot even be seen with the naked eye. It is a virus.

  Centuries ago, this virus struck the home world of Kalquor. It wiped out a substantial number of the empire’s people, particularly the females. Symptoms included massive bleeding of the body’s major organs, along with those of the female reproductive tract. Damaging the x-chromosome of the Kalquorians, the virus’ effects went beyond death. The majority of women not killed outright were rendered infertile, and daughters born to those who could bear children were not guaranteed the ability to do the same. The virus altered the very DNA of the entire race.

  In an effort to keep their race from going extinct and prevent fighting amongst the men, family groups called clans were formed. Each clan was made up of one female known as the Matara (childbearer) and representatives of each of the three breeds of male: the Dramok (leader), Imdiko (caregiver), and Nobek (protector).

  Despite their efforts, the numbers of Kalquorians continued to decline. So few children were born that extinction was thought by many to be inevitable. Despite all their medical expertise and attempts to find compatible species to mate with, the Kalquorian culture seemed destined to disappear.

  A decade ago a scout ship from a small, isolated planet no one knew of flew into the Galactic Council of Planets’ space. These newcomers, searching for a new planet to house the overflow of their ever-growing population, called their home planet Earth. It was immediately remarked upon how incredibly similar they were to Kalquorians. The doomed race took note at once, and hope was restored. It was theorized that perhaps the Earthers were the fabled Lost Tribe of Kalquor’s ancient ancestors.

  Earth, however, was not as enthralled with their potential distant cousins. Ruled by a government based on fanatical religious beliefs, Earthers were taught they were God’s Chosen, made in his wondrous image. They looked upon Kalquor with hostility and outrage, particularly since the beleaguered inhabitants of that empire suggested compatibility testing for purposes of interbreeding.

  The leaders of the Kalquorian Empire, feeling they had no other recourse, decided the time had come to seduce Earther females and convince them to come to Kalquor. Women on Earth were treated as lesser creatures and second-class citizens by the men, and the Kalquorians with their near-worship of women hoped they could entice these lifebringers to join their clans. And if the women would not be seduced, Kalquor was no longer above the distasteful necessity of abducting them outright.

  Almost 2000 Earther women went to Kalquor, putting the Empire and Earth at each others’ throats. Then the unthinkable happened: an Earther woman joined the aliens’ ruling clan, making her Kalquor’s empress. Earth immediately declared war.

  The fighting was horrific, with Earth’s greater numbers slowly overwhelming Kalquor’s more advanced technology. With their already dwindling numbers reaching crisis stage, the Empire was desperate to find a way to win the war and secure their future. They stage an invasion of Earth. Earth’s answer was to set off nuclear explosions beneath its major cities, devastating the population and dooming the planet itself.

  Now the race is on to find survivors before Earth becomes completely uninhabitable. Kalquor leads the charge to take refugees to new colonies and Kalquor in hopes of salvaging both species.

  This is the journal of one of the Earth survivors.

  August 17

  To Whom It May Concern:

  My name is Shalia Elizabeth Monroe, and this is my confession as to my part in bringing about Armageddon. Two months after the nuclear explosives detonated beneath our major cities, civilization here on Earth has collapsed. I anticipate I will soon join the millions, perhaps billions, of the dead. For anyone who is not aware of the truth of what happened, I want to set the record straight. I am uniquely qualified to do so as I am one of the many people responsible for the loss of life, and perhaps, the loss of Earth itself.

  I was not a high-ranking member of Earth’s leadership. I was not a member of the leadership at all. Until two months ago, I was nothing more than a producer of propaganda films, making a somewhat decent living for me and my mother Eve, who suffers from dementia. My work did put me in contact with certain important people in the hierarchy, but I had no power. I am a woman, after all. Made of Adam’s rib, I was created to be an appendage to man. Or so the Church said. Actually, we females were little more than cunts for men, something for them to shove their cocks in and shoot their sperm into. Fuck the state-sponsored Church. I can say that now. It had little to do with God and everything to do with grabbing all the power and money it could. It’s gone, and good riddance.

  Okay, so I’ve digressed a bit. If you’ve found my handheld computer and this letter, then I hope you can excuse me exercising the freedom to say what I think. I’ve never had that right before, and it’s one of the few things I can enjoy now.

  Back to my confession. I knew all about the bombs beneath the cities. I knew that if Earth was ever invaded by a hostile enemy through one of the two wormholes, there would be a big, cataclysmic boom. I was completely aware it would wipe out most of our population and that the fallout would probably decimate Earth.

  My lover told me about it. Yes, I committed the sin of sex without marriage. I was fully aware what would happen to me if my transgression was ever discovered. I produced the films, didn’t I? I am the person behind those cautionary vids that showed what happened to women who indulged in carnal pleasures, who were branded and tortured and mutilated and finally executed. Yep, that was my work. One of my little films actually won an award for excellent service to the Church. I burned that piece of shit award in a pile of raked leaves that autumn. I puked while I did it too, just as I’d puked every day since following that one woman’s story from her trial until she dropped dead under a shockwhip. I can still hear her screams.

  I kept the other award, the one that showed the demonic intent of our enemies the Kalquorians. I’m actually proud of it, though I have no clue just how horrible a race they really are. If you’ve seen my vid, you’ll remember all those shots showing the aliens with horns and red eyes, their fanged mouths gaping open and salivating as they stalk Earther women. That was my best work. You truly can’t tell where reality ends and the computer enhancements begin. Not to pat my own back, but I outdid myself on that one. Some (obviously people who'd never seen a real Kalquo
rian) thought I'd patched in actual footage of our enemies. That's how seamless my work was. Actually, all of the live shots were of Earth actors of Middle Eastern ancestry, since the skin and hair coloring is so close to that of the aliens.

  But enough about me. I am not writing to extol my exceedingly few virtues. I am confessing my greatest sin, and it's so huge I can never dream of redeeming myself.

  I wonder what the Kalquorians thought when they came through the Bermuda Triangle wormhole and the major cities of Earth exploded? I can only imagine that ‘Oh shit’ moment. After all, the war was all about how they needed Earth women to breed with and save their own civilization. Congratulations, aliens! You won the war. Crispy-fried girls for every clan. Enjoy.

  Damn, I’ve wandered off again. It’s hard to concentrate at fucking-early o’clock in the morning when you haven’t slept worth shit in weeks. But Mom’s asleep, and this is my only chance to write without having to worry about what she’s doing or where she’s wandering off to. The old girl’s dementia got a lot worse after everything went to shit.

  Back to the great confession. So my lover/rapist (I won’t bore you with that story, my dear confessor), who just happened to be Secretary of the North American Bloc’s Interior, told me all about the stockpiles of old nuclear weaponry that had been hidden under the main cities and rigged to go off if we were invaded. This little party favor was put into place right after Unification, which was 122 years ago. Every time the head of the regime changed, those who weren’t completely psychotic and fanatically bloodthirsty bastards brought up the issue of disarming said warheads. Mike, the guy I was screwing though I really didn’t want to, said the late and unlamented Holy Leader Browning Copeland was considering dismantling the whole mess. That is until the Kalquorians made that lewd request that Earth share its admittedly ridiculously fertile female population with them.

  Crap, Mom’s awake and calling for me. I’ll finish this later.

  August 18

  The Great Confession continues! Yippee.

  So I was discussing how the government considered getting the explosives out from under our major cities. That went right out the window once the Kalquorian Empire said, “Pretty please may we have some of your extra vaginas so we don’t go extinct?” Holy Leader Copeland told his cabinet, “Leave those bombs right where they are. Better we all die in the good graces of God than pollute his great creation with freaky alien DNA.” Or something to that effect.

  So the warheads stayed put. And five years later when we declared war on the horny aliens, Mike got scared and told me all about those nukes. He always shot off his mouth after he shot off his load. It was like he had to unburden his conscience along with his balls. I do not miss that prick.

  Ha! I just realized what I wrote. I meant I didn’t miss Mike himself, but I don’t miss that particular appendage he possessed either. It’s only too bad I didn’t get to rip the damned thing off him before he vaporized along with the rest of Washington.

  I swear to you, I really wanted to tell someone about the warheads after I found out. It’s not that the war was going badly, not at all. We were slowly overwhelming the Kalquorians simply because our numbers were so much more than theirs. Mike told me the War Secretary had secretly informed him that the aliens’ technology was way beyond ours. Just one of their destroyers, if it got in a lucky shot, was actually capable of taking down one of our big, bad battlecruisers. But with a ratio of ten cruisers for every one Kalquorian destroyer, superior technology wasn’t winning the day.

  Still, when you’ve got an enemy that smart and that determined, you know the worst can easily happen. All the Kalquorians had to do was get one of their ships past the defense grid and into the Bermuda or Dragon’s Triangle wormholes, and we were done. Which was exactly what happened.

  I should have told someone. Somehow, I should have gotten the word out to the general population. Nevermind I would have been killed by my government. Nevermind most wouldn’t have believed a ‘hysterical’ or ‘sinful’ woman looking to make trouble as we have since Eve in the Garden of Eden. Nevermind I have no idea what outlet would have gotten the true story told when all publications and vid agencies were state-run. There had to have been a way.

  In my defense, even Mike was terrified to open his mouth though he knew the dangers better than I. He was part of Copeland’s cabinet, supposedly one of the untouchables where law and Church were concerned. Untouchable, my ass. Mike told me what would happen, and he had no reason to lie.

  He said, “If I dared to speak of this, I would die. Officially, the cause would be a sudden heart attack. They’d give me a state funeral, and the Holy Leader himself would preside over the service. It would be the event of the year, and few would know I’d actually been murdered.” Mike looked at me, fear making white show all around his eyes. “You know how they do it? How they kill one of us if we turn on the Holy Leader? I’d be put in a grav-field, laid down on a table. They’d place me in semi-stasis so I couldn’t bleed out too fast and so I would remain conscious for the whole thing. Then they would ritually slice me open, my organs slowly removed until I was dead, right in front of the rest of the cabinet. I’d be an example to them, to keep them in line.”

  If an ‘untouchable’ was afraid to let billions of people know they were sitting on a pile of death, then how do you think I felt about my chances to stop Armageddon from happening? But that doesn’t excuse me. I knew and I’m still alive. I didn’t tell and an unfathomable number of people are dead. Hi guilt. Sure, move right in.

  It was an accident I wasn’t in Washington when it went up in a big mushroom cloud. Mom’s condition was getting to the point where I couldn’t keep my job and watch over her too. It was time to find an alternative to our living situation.

  A media production position that wouldn’t have meant much of a pay cut had opened up at a government facility in Georgia. It was close to where Mom had been born and grew up. When she had her infrequent lucid spells, she wasn’t too thrilled about being put in assisted living. Being able to go back to her hometown and still have me nearby made the bitter medicine a little easier to swallow though. And getting out of Washington would get me away from Mike finally. No more, “gimme what I want or I report you for lewdness”. No more worrying about somebody seeing something they shouldn’t that would put me in a work camp. I was actually looking forward to moving to the little southern town and away from the hectic pace of D.C.

  I applied and got the job. I was a month from transfer when I grabbed Mom on a bright June morning and we took a little jaunt down to Georgia to scout nursing homes. Two days later, I was interviewing the administrator for St. John’s Adult Community while Mom sampled their arts and crafts class. Suddenly, people started screaming. We ran out of the administrator’s office (sorry, I forgot the guy’s name), and someone says, “We’ve been blown to smithereens and there are Kalquorian destroyers in our smoke-filled skies.” And that was that.

  So there you have it. In the two months since the world most definitely ended with a bang (hundreds of bangs, if you must be accurate), everything about our society has disappeared. Emergency services are gone. Law enforcement is gone. Gangs roam around at will, killing and looting and raping. Kalquorians skulk about, no doubt looking for some surviving vaginas to impregnate. Dantovonians fly through, inviting us to sign up for indentured work that will get us off our poisonous rock of a planet and put us back on our feet – no doubt after they’ve put us on our backs for awhile. I’ve even heard rumors that Tragoom raiders have been seen, eating whatever they can find whether it be man or beast.

  We are done. Earth is dead. I helped put us in this position. With everything that’s happening now, I will probably be just another body on the pile before long. You might think it’s just what I deserve. You’d be right.

  All I can say at this point is I am so very sorry. I really, truly am. It’s not much, certainly not enough to make up for what I allowed to happen. Even if I had said something and they’
d shut me up before it got to anyone’s ears, at least I could have claimed I tried. But I didn’t. To my eternal shame, I didn’t even try.

  I am so sorry.

  Shalia Monroe

  August 21

  Well, here I am again. That old saw about ‘confession is good for the soul’ apparently does contain some truth. The night I finished my letter, I slept better than I have since we all went ‘poof’. I had a lot less nightmares. So I’m back.

  And I’m still alive. Imagine that. I’m hungry and scared, but alive. How long that lasts, I can’t imagine. But I thought as long as I’m still here I could report on what’s going on around me. Maybe in the distant future Earth will become habitable again, and someone will find this. I can give you future folks a glimpse into what happened here on the ground.

  A little note here: while I’m no scientist and haven’t heard a thing about how bad things truly are, I can only imagine massive parts of the Earth will die after all those detonations. You don’t send up nearly 1000 cities in a nuclear holocaust and not do major damage to our environment, especially when there is no one left alive to contain it. Surely the oceans, air, and land have been poisoned where the explosions happened and that poison will spread out.