The Great Crime Spike: A Dystopian Thriller Novel (Liberty Down Book 1) Read online

  The Great Crime Spike

  Book One of the Liberty Down Series

  By

  Eric M Hill

  Published by SunHill Publishers

  P.O. Box 17730

  Atlanta, Georgia 30316

  [email protected]

  ericmhillauthor.com

  twitter.com/EricMHillATL

  facebook.com/ericmhillauthor

  Copyright 2018 by Eric M. Hill

  The Great Crime Spike

  All rights reserved.

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no portion of this book may be scanned, transmitted, copied, uploaded, posted, published, recorded, or otherwise disseminated (electronically, or otherwise) without written permission from the author or publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and plot are pure imagination. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, events, or locales is incidental.

  Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is from the King James Version, public domain; or NKJV: Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Molly A Phipps

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Anderson knew he wasn’t still alive because his patents and inventions had made him the richest man in the world ten times over. He was still alive for one reason and one reason only: the federal government wanted to exploit his unique gift. It’s why he had been declared a national treasure.

  Otherwise, the feds would have long ago “disappeared” or killed him as it had done so many others who had dared to speak out against the government.

  It was a shameful dilemma that Americans apparently only had the options of living with the scourge of violent super predators who hunted them like animals, or of trading away their civil rights for the promise of safety from those predators. The great democratic experiment seemed to be coming to an end by the hands of fear and expediency.

  At fifty-five years old, Dr. Anderson was old enough to remember how life was like before the predators arrived, and before vile men like President Cuning conspired to use the threat of predators to turn the nation into an authoritarian state.

  It was the year 2050.

  America had changed…dramatically, for the bad. Morally, civilly, and democratically it was but a shell of what it had been even thirty or so years ago. Thirty-four years to be exact. It was the baffling Great Crime Spike of 2016 that had changed everything.

  Suddenly, overnight it seemed that America’s veneer of humanity had been peeled back like the skin of an onion, revealing the burning acid of violence that in retrospect could be seen to have always been lurking just beneath the surface, waiting, just waiting to make its presence known by something like the blinding sting of the Great Crime Spike.

  2016.

  That was the year of the obliteration of the restraining force…the moral fence…the compass of decency, whatever you wanted to call the Great Crime Spike—it was the year people had gone crazy with violence, and the year the government had gone crazy trying to deal with its crazy citizens.

  Now the cycle of insanity fed on itself. It no longer mattered which came first, the rabid governmental chicken or the criminal eggs. The chicken had gone way overboard dealing with the eggs, using the crime spike as a pretext to grab more and more power to control American citizens.

  Dr. Anderson drank half a bottle of water and sat it on the floor beside his chair. He looked at the full room of young people and encouraged himself. There were still a lot of people who weren’t biting the government’s civil rights for security bait. He could barely keep still. He wanted to talk to these young defenders of the Republic!

  Students and faculty were just as anxious to hear him as he was to speak to them. They jostled for standing and sitting positions on the crowded floor to listen to the government’s public enemy number one. A man everyone knew should’ve been mysteriously dead a long time ago.

  Dr. Kyle Anderson looked like an old rocker. He was six-foot tall and athletically built. Due to a mixture of genes, diet, and avid exercise. He had a full head of brown and graying hair that hung rebelliously down the sides of his face like a stringed symphony that refused to work with one another. It touched his short facial hair and reached his jawline. His sharp, light blue eyes seemed to always be holding the secrets to another scientific discovery or revolutionary invention.

  Dr. Anderson was like a rocker in another way, too. He was fanatically loved by tens of millions of people. Those who loved him did so for many reasons. Some loved him because he was a god of science. His scientific and creative genius was so great that it seemed blasphemous to compare him to other great minds like Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marie Curie, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Edison.

  Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. Shunpei Yamazaki, a Japanese inventor in 2016, had over 11,000 patents. Dr. Anderson held 106,499 patents, many of which that were so revolutionary whole industries were catapulted overnight thirty, forty, or fifty years into the future.

  He was also a philanthropist such as the world had never seen. By his own admission, he had more money than a fool could squander in a hundred lifetimes. No one knew what that exact figure was, but it was way, way, way north of one hundred billion dollars. It was in the hundreds of billions.

  A lot of that money was funneled by his foundation into grants for education, medical research, and a host of worldwide humanitarian projects, as well as assistance to veterans.

  Yet, the primary thing that catapulted him into fame and the consciousness of the nation was not what he did with his money. It was what he did with his mouth, and how he stood up to the government. Without a doubt, he was in a league of his own in his unceasing, biting, passionate, and unassailable criticism of the government, especially the “imperial feds,” as he called them.

  That such an anomaly of human brilliance and a man worth hundreds of billions of dollars should publicly fight against the government with such passion was to the average person a great mystery.

  A greater mystery was how he could speak so pointedly about the government and not be found guilty of some dastardly, fabricated crime? Or die of natural causes or an unfortunate mishap or by the hands of a robber? Coincidental events that everyone knew, but no one could prove (or were too scared to prove), were perpetrated by agents of the government who were magically skillful at permanently silencing its opposition without leaving traces of its involvement.

  The university’s president finished his introduction of his guest speaker and Dr. Anderson stood. There was a gleam in his eyes. He was about to live up to his reputation.

  Chapter 2

  Dr. Anderson took a few swallows of bottled water and set the container on the lectern’s lower shelf next to a small black box he had placed there. He placed his hands on the lectern’s left and right sides and tapped his fingers up and down. He grinned knowingly at the silence and solemn faces. He was used to it. “Just for the record, this is not the Sermon on the Mount, and I’m not Jesus Christ—not by a long shot.”

  He got a few chuckles and the room lightened up a bit.

  It was a joke, but he knew the ridiculous stories out there. The most ridiculous being that he was God, a god, or an alien from an advanced world sent here to help Earth. Some even thought he was the antichrist. People—so gullible. So easily duped. That’s why he was on his For the People, By the People tour. Maybe he could at least help slow dow
n the inevitable slide toward a totalitarian state.

  “First of all, thank all of you for coming. Your president has given me the freedom to speak on any topic I desire.” He paused. “Any person who hands a microphone to me and says ‘Go for it,’ well, if I were you, I’d be getting that fella a piss test right after we finish. We know he’s smoking something other than tobacco, now don’t we?”

  The dignified and professional president knew of Dr. Anderson’s legendary irreverence when he invited him. You never knew what he would say or do, but he certainly wasn’t going to let that stop him from inviting the smartest man to ever live and the richest man in the world to his university. The president looked at all of the laughing students and faculty and with a nodding head, smiled, genuinely.

  “Don’t worry. Dope’s legal now in Georgia,” Dr. Anderson said. “But if they get rid of you, give me a call. I’ll find some company you can run. Or maybe we’ll start our own university. Whitlock University”—the president’s surname—“How’s that sound? My name’s on enough buildings.”

  “That does have a nice linguistic flow. I like it,” said President Whitlock.”

  The room broke out into fun applause.

  Dr. Anderson looked at the students with a glint of rebellion in his eyes. “Now let me find out what kind of Americans go to this university.” He pulled back the left side of his jacket and pointed at a holstered gun. “This is a Glock. It’s for criminals.” He pulled back the right side of his jacket and pointed at another holstered gun. “This is a SIG Sauer. It’s for the government agents who act like criminals.” He let go of his jacket. “How many of you own guns?”

  A lot of people raised their hands.

  “How many of you are packing now?”

  It appeared that everyone who raised their hands the first time had their hands up this time.

  “For the sake of the government agents who are probably in this room spying on us, safely take out your guns and hold them over your head.” He watched with satisfaction as guns of every sort were hoisted into the air by students and faculty. “For those of you who don’t own guns, God bless your dumb souls. You’re sheep to the slaughter. If the criminals don’t get you, the government will.”

  He looked down at an attractive woman with long, blonde hair and long, inviting legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles. She leaned back on her hands. Her white, tight-fitting dress was much too short for a woman sitting in her position. That was just fine with him. Who was he to infringe on a woman’s right to torture the male species? But he did notice she didn’t have a gun.

  “Last year,” he said, “there were nearly one million rapes and a hundred thousand murders in America. Young lady, you’re too young to know what life was like before the Great Crime Spike of 2016, but rape and murder is not supposed to be normal.”

  He thought of how devastated he’d be if something happened to his daughter. The ever present heaviness he carried for his failure as a father got heavier. He grimaced and pressed on. “I don’t say this to be mean, but just because you aren’t the smartest person in the world doesn’t mean you have to be the dumbest. Get yourself a gun.”

  “I have a gun,” she said, still sitting. “I have plenty of guns.”

  “A gun at home or one in the car is no gun at all. It needs to be on you at all times.”

  “It’s close enough,” she said.

  Dr. Anderson inhaled with raised eyebrows and let go of the long breath in resignation. “Okay.” He wasn’t going to push it.

  “You wanna see it?” she asked. Before he could say no—he didn’t have time for her to go get her gun—she stood to her feet. She looked him in the eyes and dramatically planted a foot sideways, like a female super hero. He watched the long-legged blonde slowly pull the dress up high on her spread legs with her left hand and reach into an inside thigh holster with the right hand. She pulled out her own Glock and smiled rather deliciously. “Satisfied?”

  Dr. Anderson smiled. “More than you know. That is definitely the most satisfying presentation of a weapon I’ve ever seen. Thank you for sharing.”

  “My pleasure,” she said, with more of that delicious smile, and sat.

  Dr. Anderson stood behind the lectern, shaking his head with a smile. “Whew!” He vigorously shook his head as though trying to clear it of cobwebs. “Give me a moment will you? President Whitlock, I recommend that that young lady be expelled.”

  The crowd burst out laughing.

  “Immediately,” Anderson added.

  Dr. Anderson drew more laughter by playfully using what appeared to be herculean effort to turn his lectern away from facing the long-legged blonde with the beautiful gun. He let the levity subside. His countenance grew serious.

  The federal government’s biggest pain in the butt was itching to live up to his name. “I don’t see any reason why we ought to deviate from the class you signed up for: Government, Technology, and Society. Although I do want to make one change. Government, Technology, Society, and…Freedom. Freedom!” he yelled, pounding the podium.

  “When government starts believing that its main purpose is to get more and more power over its citizens, and it gets its hands on the right kind of technology, that society loses its freedom.” He scanned the room with intense eyes. “Some believe I’m the smartest person to ever live. Some that I’m the most paranoid person. Some that I’m the most dangerous.” He lowered his head and flashed his palms in front of him. “They’re right. All of them.

  “The smartest person. Seven Nobel Prizes. An insane amount of patents—most quite substantive; many quite groundbreaking. Yeah, I’m smart. Brilliant. Super brilliant. Paranoid? Yes, I’m paranoid. I’m fifty-five years old. I was twenty-one years old when the Great Crime Spike hit us. I know how things used to be. They weren’t perfect by a long shot. But if a woman was raped and murdered, or if a child was kidnapped, as desensitized as we were, we were horrified. Now—now…” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Paranoid? How can I not be paranoid when I feel something is odd if I don’t daily hear of five or ten women murdered and at least ten times that many rapes? Even men are regularly raped. Paranoid? Yeah, I’m paranoid. And I live in a fortress. I’m rich, I can afford to live in a fortress.

  “But what about the average citizen? What has our nation come to when we have to turn our homes into military bunkers and everyone who wants half a chance of living through the day has to carry a gun and two magazines?

  “Believe it or not, there was a time when it would have been unheard of for all of you to be armed as you are on campus. There was a time when grade school teachers weren’t packing. There was a time when everyone sitting in a church pew wasn’t packing. There was a time when the FedEx and UPS driver weren’t packing.”

  Dr. Anderson noted many young faces turning to one another in whispered speech. He knew what they were saying. “I know, it’s hard to believe. A UPS guy without a gun? A pizza delivery guy without a gun? But trust me, there was once a time in America when leaving the house didn’t require you solemnly telling your loved ones how much you loved them. You didn’t assume that you’d never make it back home. And it’s getting worse every day.

  “But I’ve only described the savagery that you and I inflict upon one another—the average citizen. What about our own government? That’s the real reason I’m paranoid.”

  Chapter 3

  “A common crook jumps out of the bushes at you, two or three hollow points—preferably three—to the chest and he’s right back in the bushes, and you’re not with him. Ladies, you hear your downstairs window break. Would-be rapist creeps inside your home. You screw him before he screws you. Two or three hollow points—preferably three—to the chest and your biggest worry is how to clean up the blood. His blood, not yours.

  “But what about when it’s your own government jumping out of the bushes, or when it’s your own government trying to screw you? It gets a bit more complicated. Sociologists, his
torians, and anyone with half a brain can see that the seeds of what we’re dealing with today in the imperial feds began in earnest with 9/11.

  “It’s not as fresh now fifty years later as it was then, but that attack on America changed everything. Fear gripped the nation. Then anger. Then an overwhelming sentiment that we had to respond. Always keen to an opportunity, in comes the imperial feds. Laws are passed under the guise of protecting the country from fanatical terrorists who despise our democracy, hate our way of life, and are hell-bent on destroying both.

  “Yet what we know now is that sometimes the hero who volunteers to stop the bully has his own agenda. Sometimes the hero makes the bully look like not such a bad deal after all. When the dust from 9/11 finally settled, the federal government had power to electronically surveil its own citizens without a warrant. It had power to arbitrarily snatch people off the street in the name of national defense and stick them away in a clandestine dungeon with no court or congressional oversight. It had power to turn commercial corporations into de facto extensions of the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

  “Then when their abuses finally began coming to light, and American patriots began to demand curtailment of their undemocratic tactics, wouldn’t you know it, coincidentally another devastating attack on the country. Then another and another. Anyone remember the domestic ter—ror—ist—“he stretched the word with contempt and punctuated the next—“group, Islamic Front of America?”

  Heads nodded.

  “Uh huh. That one. IFA. These maniacs went around for years blowing up things and mowing down innocent people a hundred at a time. No one could catch them. People were terrified. Then what happened? Our heroes, the imperial feds, said, “Hey, we could catch these guys if we only had a little more what?”

  “Power,” said a student.

  Dr. Anderson bounced his index finger approvingly at the young man. “A defender of the Republic. Exactly. A little more power. So we gave them a little more. But wouldn’t you know it, the IFA was more wily than anyone anticipated. So they kept blowing up things and killing people.” Dr. Anderson’s face and spread arms conveyed his cynicism. “The feds came back and said, ‘We can catch them. All we need is a little more…”