Delusional Read online

  Delusional

  Michael Evans

  Want the Conspiracy Chronicles Starter Library, for free? Go to the end of this novel for more information on how you can claim your free copy of Deadwave (Conspiracy Chronicles Prequel) and the Deadwave Official Game Guide.

  Shattered Pasts

  Dulce

  Hello again!

  This is me (Michael Evans... creator and destroyer of worlds) popping in to let you know a little bit about Shattered Pasts (Control Freakz #1.5). Since all the novellas in Memories From The Darkness (A Control Freakz Novella Collection) are written from the perspectives of different characters, I figured I’d let you know a little bit about the story so you know who’s telling the story from page 1.

  So here’s a bit about Shattered Pasts:

  Set in between Control Freakz and Delusional comes a new action-packed novella that tells the story of Dulce.

  Dulce always knew they would come for her, but she didn’t know how. Her parents had already disappeared, her brother had been brutally killed by hitmen, and it was now her turn to meet the same fate that had been lurking over her for years since she was sent off to an abandoned nuclear power plant. Except, when Camp Camel is inevitably bombed she survives and everyone else she knows and loves is reduced to ash.

  Upon her survival, Dulce is quickly welcomed into the shadowy rebel organization of the White Knights where she meets Jacob who promises he can get her friends and country back from the government. However, Dulce soon finds out that nothing can fix her shattered broken past, and she doesn’t know if she can lose anything else in her future.

  Now get to reading. These stories are lonely and desperately need a reader enjoying them...

  Chapter 1

  Life could sometimes be a nightmare.

  It was in those moments when it was toughest to quell your deepest fears and anxieties from reality. Last night was one of those moments. With the impending trial of Natalie and Hunter threatening their lives, Ethan having suddenly disappeared, and John, the leader of Camp Camel now dead because of Ethan, in the past couple days my new little life I had built atop the mountain awas now being demolished.

  But for some reason, the ending of one phase of my life had catapulted my mind back to the ending of the last phase of my life, and it only caused me to stay up at night, breathing heavy with pools of sweat collecting at my armpits and neck as I realized that it was happening all over again.

  I wouldn’t sit here and pretend like I was the only one who got screwed over by the world—everyone got screwed at some point or another. Everyone around me, as I sat on the picnic table, watching the last evening rays of sun disappear beneath the horizon, had been through hell, and was still enduring it. It’s just that I still remembered all my horrid times so vividly that my mind could take me there on a moment’s notice and transport my consciousness back to all that pain and fear and force me to relive it all over again.

  Last night was one of those nights.

  I remembered closing my eyes, but in the weird way that dreams hit you, by the time my consciousness had emerged from the blackness, I had forgotten everything except the horrible memory my mind was entrapped in. I could smell the mold starting to creep up the walls, and the decaying organic matter brought by human excrement numbing my nose hairs.

  In the shadows brought by the sparse, yet never-dying lightbulbs, massive graffiti tags covered the concrete walls. Some of the tags were for gangs, some were beautiful pieces of art, while others were massive eyeballs that stared down at us from dozens of feet in the air and made me feel like I was constantly being watched even if they were fake. There was a group of about a dozen of us that were still left living in the abandoned Palo Verde nuclear reactor, but with the dwindling food and water supplies, and lack of ability to go outside due to the security cameras and government hitmen, every day could be our last. We were all transported here by an underground smuggling group that was going to take all of us over the border into Mexico, without the United States Government noticing we left.

  My parents had shipped me and Carlos off in the back of a minivan in the middle of the night, before Protocol 00 was enacted, and they said they would meet us in Mexico just a few weeks later. For the first time in my life, the solemn, cool way that my father handled everything, from the death of his mother to his pension being reduced by the government due to insufficient tax revenue, had shifted to a hasty, demanding action. He told me in a straightforward manner, with my mom standing idly behind him, wiping the tears from her eyes as she tried to be strong, that it would be a while before we could see each other again, but that things in the world were bad right now and it wasn’t safe to live where we did anymore. He gave me some weird, oddly large blue-colored pill and after that he said that in a few days I would be leaving in the middle of the night with Carlos for Mexico and that he and my mom would meet us there. They couldn’t afford to pay the hefty price to transport themselves to Mexico with the smuggling group, but he hugged me with tears in his eyes as he promised me that he would never let me forget about him, and that his sister Sasha would be there with us to make sure we were okay. Meanwhile, my mom stood there in a state of awed silence.

  For the next few days my dad acted completely normal as my mom stayed quiet and impassive. Despite the fact that he knew that our whole lives were about to be torn apart in just a few days, he made sure to have an odd normalcy to him. He told us we didn’t have to go to school anymore, and since he had already retired from the military, we spent those last days of our old lives watching movies, going to the state fair, picking pumpkins, and laughing about stupid jokes and old memories in the way that people do only when they think there will be more good times.

  But then it all came to an end before I could even say goodbye. In the middle of one night, which seemed like a random night, until I found out that Protocol 00 was enacted the next day, my dad woke me and my brother, Carlos, up, hugging us goodbye for one last time. Seconds later we were met by a group of masked men, who spoke in short, loud commands, that brought us to the abandoned nuclear reactor a short drive from our house.

  They told each one of us, as the vans came and went to eventually drop off what was over a dozen people, that if we left this place we would die; the government was waiting to kill people of our kind and that they would be back to take us in an airplane to Mexico. But with every passing day, it grew more apparent that the smuggling group left us here to die, whether intentionally through a scam, or whether the government stopped them, and now we were left with no option but to try and escape.

  I shuddered as the memories played back through my mind, and the worst moment of my life, my worst nightmare of finally realizing the truth, rocked my consciousness as I replayed my dream from last night in my head, which was really just a reawakening of all the memories I tried to forget inside me.

  “Carlos, when are Mom and Papa gonna be here?” I decided to let out the thoughts haunting my mind, even if Carlos was about to fall asleep. There was something about the damp floors and incessant squeaking noises from the hordes of rats that made my mind nearly impossible to shut off. I couldn’t stop thinking about all that had happened over the past few weeks. I kept telling myself that I knew that my dad would never just leave us to die. He would risk anything to save us; he was a captain in the Navy for years, he was no stranger to conflict and death, but by the look in his eyes as he hugged me and my brother goodbye for the last time just a few weeks ago, I knew that this enemy was more powerful than anything he had ever faced before.

  Carlos held my hand as we both sat with our backs against the cold graffiti-covered walls of the empty cooling tower, which was formerly a drug storehouse for one of the local gangs. The other cooling towers on site were already full
of radioactive water, but the men who had taken us here assured us that it would be okay to be near it just for a little bit, but what we thought would be a couple hours or maybe a few days at most had now turned to weeks of torturously waiting for a light that never came.

  “Dulce,” Carlos’s voice was airy, and I could tell he wanted to say more, but there was a look of regret in his eyes that stopped him. I stared up at him, his large, formidable frame and dark brown eyes making me feel safe from all the evil that lurked in the darkness. The only illumination in the cooling tower was from a few makeshift flickering lights that were attached to the ceiling, that was massive in diameter and dozens of feet above.

  “Carlos, what about Sasha?” I hated how my voice echoed in the hollow, concrete cooling tower, but luckily other people were also up in the dead of night, probably talking to try and divvy up the rest of the food that we had left. Sasha left two days ago to try and go to the top of Camelback Mountain where the White Knights set up a refuge, by now if it’s really out there she would have surely found it.

  “I don’t know.” He finally managed to get the words out as he wrapped an arm around my body. His face was scrunched up in a way that signaled he was trying to hold back all his pain from leaking on to me.

  “It’s been two days already.” I eyed the stores of food and clean water that were lucky to last us another day before we would have to go out of the compound and into the streets that were supposedly full of hitmen ready to kill us. As long as they didn’t get to my parents or Sasha, as long as I get to be with them again, we will be okay. “Why don’t we just go? We have nothing to lose.”

  “Would you really be willing to?” His eyes lit up, and for the first time since we arrived here, I could see a bit of hope inside him. Being cooped up in the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor was a less than ideal scenario to say the least, but it was better than the rest of the compound, which was covered in rust, chemicals, and countless amounts of buttons that could easily be pressed to set off an explosion. No matter where we managed to reside in this abandoned power plant, the dark energy weighed down on someone’s spirits until it was buried forever. “We are gonna have to hitchhike or something to get there, but it might be better than sticking around to see what happens when all our supplies run out in hopes of those guys coming back.”

  “We have to get out,” I whispered, making sure to keep my voice low so that no one heard us. Not only was I tired and terrified of the power plant itself, but it didn’t take too much effort to realize that the group of people huddled on the other side of the cooling tower were just trying to figure out a way to take our food and have us starve, which wouldn’t be hard since they had two rifles. If we stay here, we will either die from some nasty infection, sickness, or the metal from the bullets.

  “It’s risky, though. Really risky. They might not even let us leave. The more of us that try and find a new place to stay, the more we risk the government finding where we are right now.”

  “Someone is gonna have to leave real soon.” I made sure to eye the single bag of supplies left. “And I think we should make that decision while we can. What was your plan anyways?”

  “To sleep, and when I wake up, figure it all out.” There was a defeated tone to his voice, and there was a look of emptiness in his eyes that had swallowed all his desire to live and get our lives back. Knowing a horrible truth that you couldn’t fix tended to do that, but back then I was still oblivious to the fact that we were truly all alone.

  “You can’t just keep sleeping.” I was surprised he wasn’t mad at me for telling him what to do. Being the younger sibling by six years normally made him the de facto boss of me, but for once there was something in him that didn’t want to take control, when we both needed him to most. I was half the size of everyone and almost incapable of talking to anyone I didn’t know for fear that they would hurt me. There was not much I could do to help our situation.

  “You’re right, it’s just—” He paused, biting his tongue from saying more. There was a sad expression on his face that signaled that things were even worse than I thought they were. “Ugh, it’s our only option at this point. You’re right. Let’s get out while we can. I’m tired of wondering whether Sasha made it there or not. Let’s go and find out.”

  At that, he stood up, motioning for me to stay seated in our dark, secluded section of the cooling tower. Carlos walked over toward the group of people seated at the opposite end of the tower, their conversation abruptly ending as they connected with his long, powerful strides that naturally intimidated people.

  “Yo, Zoey.” Carlos made sure to speak before any of them could raise their voices in objection. Since they were older than us, they had pretended like they were in charge of the place, but we couldn’t let them order us to our own deaths.

  “Whatcha want?” Her hand instantly moved to the rifle at her side, yet she stayed seated and kept her voice calm. She had short dyed-red hair that was pushed to the side, and large hoop earrings that looked to weigh her entire head down.

  “We have to go.” He glanced at me, so she knew he was talking about the two of us. “We’re almost out of food here, and we figured we could try and get some more by stealing it from a nearby store. I was wondering if we could have one of the rifles, just in case if shit goes down we can try and get out of it.”

  “You want to try and leave this place? Goddam, you people really are crazy!” She laughed, which caused the other five people in her group to start chuckling too, which left me, Carlos, and the other family who managed to be smuggled here exchanging nervous glances.

  “Look, I don’t care what you think.” Carlos visibly tensed up as he stepped forward, trying to assert his strength over her, even though she was the one in possession of the lethal weapons. “We are all gonna starve to death if someone doesn’t try and leave, and I’m tired of waiting on them to come back. We have to pretend like we are stuck here forever, cause of right now, we are all alone.”

  “Alright, fine, am I supposed to stop you or something?” She waved her hand in the air and pointed toward the metal opening drilled into the side of the tower. “Leave, do whatever you want. If you die, that’s not my problem.”

  “Having no food or water is certainly your problem, and that’s why I need one of your rifles.” There was a long silence after Carlos spoke as his voice echoed back and forth for what felt like hours.

  “Yeah, fine, take this one.” She handed him the gun that was discernible from the blackness. “It only has two bullets in it. Make them count.”

  “Alright, thanks,” he said, taking the gun from her and strapping it around his shoulder. “That’ll work.”

  “Good luck,” a man spoke up. His name was Kade. “We don’t need any more people dying. Not after the massacre. Not after all that shit.”

  “We’ll be okay.” Carlos motioned for me to stand up, and I didn't need any other signal to have me run up to him. “We’ll do the best we can.”

  Kade and Zoey nodded at Carlos, and he put a hand on my back, urging me to walk forward as an eerily calm silence presided over the nuclear reactor. All eyes seemed to be glued to us as they watched us exit through the metal door to the outside world, but no one spoke up to tell us to stop, to say goodbye, or to state that we would probably die anyways.

  No one knew how to react; with how crazy, confusing, and scary the last few weeks had been, we all had grown numb to the terror. There was no use in saying any more words when we all knew the truth. We all knew the danger—someone had to die. And I knew that it wouldn’t be us.

  “Why did you lie like that?” I whispered into his ear as we exited the cooling tower, my eyes connecting with the stars and blackness of the night for the first time in weeks. The chill of the night felt comforting against my skin, but it only forced my mind to recognize that we had just been given the opportunity to die or help push others along their own paths to their demise. I sighed, clutching on to Carlos as we both began to walk hurriedly a
way from the reactor, and through the deteriorating, bullet-ridden buildings that towered above the cracked pavement. I felt Carlos shift as our eyes both connected with the silhouette of a tall, lanky figure moving between the reactor building and drywell building.

  “They don’t need to know the truth. No one needs to know the truth. Too much reality kills, anyways.”

  His words echoed in my mind along with the bullet that he had fired into the air in that instant as the unsettled movements of the people around me woke me from my vision. I didn’t need his words echoing in my mind to forever know that this world kills.

  My eyes connected with the wave of blackness hovering in the sky, and I knew that everything was about to come crashing down in my world once again.

  But this time could be the last.

  Chapter 2

  The screams rocked my ears before the fire did, but by then I knew it was already too late. My eyes connected with the fleet of black military helicopters hovering slowly toward Camelback Mountain before anyone else did, but the panic hit me last.

  I don’t know what I was thinking when I first saw the helicopters. Maybe I thought it was the White Knight helicopters coming to help, or maybe my mind refused to register the unspeakable terror that we had waited for years to come, but never actually thought was going to happen. But the moment I realized it was the government in all its fiery hell, I practically crapped my pants from the expulsion of shock and fear that ebbed out of me in that moment.

  Well, if that’s the government, it would probably be best if I found a way to dip out of here before I die. By the time my body had moved to react, which albeit was only a few seconds of me staring mindlessly into the sky to begin with, the camp had already erupted into chaos. People were clawing over each other to find a way down the slopes of the mountain before the government destroyed the mountain entirely, while others were jumping off the same precipice that Ethan pushed John off into, effectively commencing their “death pacts,” as they called it (something so crazy no one believed them when they said they were going to do it, but unfortunately, I watched them, and I can confirm they went through with it).