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  Breaking the Beast

  The Redemption of Joe Branch

  By Steven C. Bird

  Breaking the Beast

  The Redemption of Joe Branch

  Copyright 2019 by Steven C. Bird

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or shared without expressed consent and prior authorization from the author.

  Published by Steven C. Bird at Homefront Books

  Illustrated by Hristo Kovatliev

  Kinde Edition 7.9.2019

  www.homefrontbooks.com

  www.stevencbird.com

  facebook.com/homefrontbooks

  [email protected]

  Twitter @stevencbird

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  Table of Contents

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  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

  Free Preview – Erebus

  About the Author

  A Note from the Author

  Disclaimer

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real events or persons, past or present, living or dead, are purely coincidental and are not intended by the author. Although this book is based on real places and some real events and trends, it is a work of fiction for entertainment purposes only. None of the activities in this book are intended to replace legal activities and your own good judgment.

  Dedication

  Breaking the Beast: The Redemption of Joe Branch is my thirteenth book, and along the way I’ve had the help and support of so many people that naming all of them would simply be impossible.

  Of course, my prime motivator is and always will be my loving family. Each word I type is another step toward supporting them and working hard toward making their dreams come true. To my wife, Monica, thank you for helping me throughout this project. Thank you for being my sounding board and my support system. To my children, Seth, Olivia, and Sophia, thank you for being my anchor and giving me a reason for…well, everything. You are truly my world.

  To my parents, thank you as well for all of the support you have given me throughout my writing career and thank you for your continued support throughout the development of this book.

  The writing community, in particular the indie-author community, has also been instrumental in my development as a serious writer. Your continued support, advice, and mentoring have made each book I write evolve a little further from the last, and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for that.

  I’d also like to make a special shout out to my author colleagues with DD12, who have been my real and online friends for the past year and make one heck of a team! Franklin Horton, Chris Weatherman (Angery American), Boyd Craven, L. Douglas Hogan, Lisa (L.L.) Akers, W.J. Lundy, Patti Glaspy, Jeff Motes, Chad (C.A.) Rudolph, Jeff Kirkham, and Jason Ross, thanks for your continued friendship and support!

  Also, I’d like to make a special shout out to real-life friend and award-winning audiobook narrator Kevin Peirce for doing such a fantastic job on the audio version of this book.

  Chapter One

  I pushed the CD into the old Pioneer Super Tuner III car stereo, and after a few whirring sounds… ahhh, there it was, that blues riff that always got me going. I turned the volume up so loud that it nearly drowned out the rumble of the four-hundred-and-twenty-eight cubic inch big-block Ford as I mashed the accelerator to the floor and shifted into third gear.

  “Man, this car’s got some pull,” I said as I watched the tachometer rev past fifty-five hundred RPM. “Boom boom boom boom…(guitar riff)… gonna shoot you right down…(guitar riff)… off of your feet… (guitar riff)…yeah, yeah!” I sang as I accelerated past one hundred miles per hour and shifted into fourth. “Damn, I love this car!” I couldn’t help but say aloud. The visceral feel of a true American muscle car with some good ol’ John Lee Hooker blasting through the speakers almost made me feel whole again. Almost…

  You may wonder why I chose a 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 as my getaway vehicle with so many out there to choose from. Well, that’s a long story, but one worth telling. You see, my father had a ’67 Mustang when I was a kid. It was nothing like this. It was just your basic off-the-dealer-lot working man’s car. He may not have had deep pockets, but man, did he put some work into it, and over time, he turned it into something special. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Mustangs ever since. Especially the old ones.

  Besides, I couldn’t just leave this beauty sitting unattended and covered with dust in that old garage. No, she deserved better. She deserved to tear down the road and go down fighting in a blaze of glory, rather than rotting away in an abandoned town in a forgotten place.

  This girl, she’s something special—a near perfect restoration of an original Shelby. She’s raven black with a grey Shelby stripe—simply drop dead gorgeous. Her four-hundred-and-twenty-eight cubic inch big block Ford is fed by two Holly carbs through a mid-rise aluminum intake and shoves all that power through an old-school four-speed transmission, and a bulletproof nine-inch rear end.

  On the inside, she’s got the original black leather bucket seats up front with a bench seat in the back, all with a classy grey inset to match the Shelby stripes on the exterior. This is the car I’d have had in my garage if I had won the lottery before it all went down. This car is the perfect symbol of that good ol’ American attitude for me, and she was a survivor. A driver, not a trailer queen. It was really the only choice.

  In addition to my affinity for Mustangs and her needing to be rescued from her neglected state, she’s also old school, with a breaker-point ignition system and no computers. Yep, this baby is EMP proof, which makes her EMWS proof.

  You may be wondering what EMWS means. EMWS stands for Electro-Magnetic Weapon System, and now that the One World Alliance has them, well, they own the electromagnetic spectrum. They use their EMWS arsenal to deny the rest of us the use of modern technology containing circuitry unless such use benefits the alliance, which these days, is damn near everything.

  Sure, I could have found a vehicle that was EMWS safe that got better fuel economy, and I do realize fuel will be an issue, requiring me to do a lot more scavenging, but if I’m gonna go down, I’m not only gonna go down swinging, I’m gonna go down swinging in style.

  Go down? Go down for what, you ask? First, let me introduce myself. My name is Joseph Branch, but you can call me Joe. They, “they” being the One World Alliance (OWA), call me Lieutenant Joseph Branch of the OWA Defense Force, or ODF for short. Well, they used to call me that. By now, I’m sure they call me traitor, in addition to many other colorful and derogatory terms.

  Do I deserve such treatment? That depends on who you ask and how you view the world. If you’re loyal to the Alliance and to the cause, then I’m sure “treasonous bastard” fits the bill as well. But if you’re one of the others out there, hoping to be delivered from this hell on Earth the Alliance has created, well, you’d probably call me a friend. At least, I hope that’s what they’ll call me… if I survi
ve long enough to meet any of them.

  What hell on Earth did the One World Alliance create? I’m glad you asked. You may want to have a seat and grab a cold drink and some popcorn for this. It’s a hell of a story.

  Nearly five years ago today, the Sembé outbreak began to sweep the globe. It was first discovered in a small village just outside the town of Sembé in the Republic of the Congo. Christian missionaries from the U.S who had worked with the village the year before had returned as planned, only to find the entire community dead.

  They described it as a wrath of God. Bodies were stacked in a large pile, seemingly positioned for a mass cremation by the remaining villagers, but it appeared no one lived long enough to light the fire. Several other villagers were found with eyes that had filled with blood as their capillaries hemorrhaged. Blood could be seen seeping out of every orifice on the villagers’ bodies.

  To make things worse, the local wildlife seemed to have discovered the macabre human buffet before the missionaries arrived. Predators and scavengers large and small were feasting on the decomposing corpses and seemed to have been doing so for several days before the missionaries arrived.

  The missionaries fled and traveled back to Sembé to notify the local authorities, and as a result, the disease began its journey around the world, hitching a ride on several of the missionaries as well as the local authorities who had responded to their plea for help. Like they say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  As the virus spread like wildfire throughout the world, seeming to jump from place to place quicker than some medical experts felt was the likely path of or the timeline the natural spread of the virus would have taken, accusations as to the source were thrown around in all directions. The favorite root-cause theory of most of the major world governments was, of course, climate change.

  They claimed the changing climate was having even more significant effects on microbial ecosystems than they had feared, causing rapid mutations in microbial life and even viruses. There were, of course, no studies or solid numbers to back those claims, but that didn’t deter the state-friendly media from regurgitating their scripted talking points twenty-four seven.

  There seemed to be nothing the scientific and medical communities could do. Death tolls in some of the poorer countries reached nearly ninety-five percent within the first year, with developed nations suffering losses of up to seventy percent. Simply put, the spread of the Sembé virus made the black plague of the middle ages look like a common cold. It was a true apocalyptic event like the modern world had never seen.

  As populations dwindled, and food production and distribution systems around the world crashed, even more people began to die from starvation and the resulting chaos that followed. Desperate people are one of the most dangerous animals on Earth, and everyone was quickly becoming desperate.

  Halfway through the second year of the pandemic, a group of international scientists discovered a wonder drug that promised to save us all. Unfortunately, it didn’t cure victims of the Sembé virus, it merely suppressed the symptoms, meaning, as long as you had a steady supply of their wonder drug, you would live. Without it, if you had been exposed, you would begin to feel the effects of the virus within a few days, with death coming in several weeks to a month.

  That was when the One World Alliance was born. With populations dwindling around the world, and with economies and production and distribution systems bordering on total collapse, the United States, along with the member states of the United Nations and the European Union, formed the One World Alliance in the name of saving the world and all of humanity. By saving the world, they, of course, meant ruling it.

  Globalists had finally achieved their long sought-after goal of a New World Order. They now had a global government that was above all nations. After all, who could resist their governance? They controlled the drug that would keep everyone alive. Well, everyone who had access to the drug, of course. That’s where things started getting a little shifty.

  Where was I in all of this? When the Sembé outbreak began, I was a Capitol Police Officer serving in Washington D.C. Once the OWA was formed, the Capitol Police Department was conscripted into service as part of the newly formed One World Defense Force (ODF), which was the military-style law enforcement organization founded by the OWA.

  And how could we say no? The benefits plan was better than anything else out there. They offered us food, and most importantly, survival. They promised us a lifetime supply of their lifesaving antiviral drug, Symbex, if we would serve for at least ten years while the world recovered.

  It wasn’t long after joining the ODF, having been persuaded with the choice between the good life on the inside and certain death on the outside, that I found myself deep inside the U.S. Capitol. Well, what was previously the U.S. Capitol.

  Washington D.C. was now nothing more than an outpost for the OWA, with its main headquarters located in Brussels, Belgium, a town where politics and bureaucracy have always seemed to control the agenda. It should be of no surprise, I guess, as it was also the former home of the European Union, which was immediately rolled into OWA upon its founding. Imagine that: a multi-state political organization hell-bent on open borders and globalism being a key ingredient in a globalist organization that seemed to be poised to launch as soon as an opportune time arose.

  The U.S. and other major powers soon quickly followed suit and joined the OWA. Here in the states, politics had been trending toward open borders and globalism for quite some time, almost seeming to parallel the direction Europe had taken, even though the results were rarely positive for the citizenry or for the stability of their society. So when the crisis struck, and a ready-made answer presented itself, well, the president and Congress fell right in line as if they were acting out a script—a script written in Brussels.

  But enough about politics, let’s talk about me. You’re probably still asking yourself, “who the hell is this guy, and why should I believe a word he’s saying?” I quickly advanced through the ranks within the ODF. Life was good. I mean, it’s not like I had anything else to do with my time. There wasn’t much of a world left to recreate in.

  I started off as a basic security officer, then based on my experience with the Capitol Police, I was quickly promoted to sergeant, and then to lieutenant. I had just recently been promoted to lieutenant and was excited at first, but things felt as if they began to fall apart as soon as my butter bars were pinned to my collar. You see, that’s when I found out about a dirty little secret, one that would change the course of my life forever—or end it. It’s still up for debate as to how that will turn out.

  As a Lieutenant, my duties took me deep into the inner sanctums of the OWA. I was no longer patrolling the streets around the capital: I was now deep on the inside. I began to overhear things. Things that just didn’t sit right with me, nor would they sit right with any decent human being. Sometimes, when I would get back to my OWA provided apartment after a day spent in the bowels of global government, I felt as if I needed to take two showers instead of just one, to scrub the filth off me that I’d accumulated just from being around the snakes who were in charge. It didn’t take long to realize the OWA wasn’t an organization formed in the wake of a global emergency situation to bring stability to the world. No, it was much more than that.

  What was that dirty little secret, you ask? The One World Alliance was an organization born from the conspiracy of all conspiracies. In the years leading up to the Sembé outbreak, people often said out of disgust that the medical industry no longer created cures, only treatments. Treatments that would create lifelong customers who provided a lifelong flow of money to the medical and pharmaceutical industries, which of course, flowed into the right political coffers. With the help of corrupt government regulators and lawmakers who were on their doles, this became quite the racket, one that placed a heavy burden on people who found themselves perpetually medicated, but never cured.

  Many of those government officials and world leader
s who had helped create the environment that protected such unethical behavior seemed to devise a plan to take that perpetual dependency to an entirely new level. Not only would they set out to control the entire world’s food production and distribution, but all other industries, and most importantly, the global financial industries.

  It seemed over recent decades that people around the world were being trained to turn to the government every time there was a disaster. People stopped looking to themselves and their neighbors when catastrophe struck. Instead, they turned to the government. As that trend continued to grow, people fell far too easily into the hands of the OWA as the pandemic swept the globe.

  But I digress; back to the dirty little secret. It seems those decades of developing drugs that would suppress viruses, but not cure them, was merely the field-testing phase of their dirty little secret. I’ll bet anyone who took a viral suppression drug to suppress a virus such as herpes or HIV, often asked themselves, “If they can make it go away as long as I take the pill, why can’t they just make it go away for good?”

  In more cases than we would like to know, they could have. But like I said, why sell one bottle of pills to cure someone when you can sell them pills for life? Anyone with a soul would know deep in their heart that doing such things are wrong at every level. But when politics no longer serves the people and joins forces with big business and the world’s elite through cronyism, and then when you add the mainstream global media to that team as well, and… you’ve got a monopoly on creation, control, and communication. That’s a combination that’s got some teeth.

  As this unholy alliance crept its way into every facet of our lives, taking more of a hold on political power while using our own medical treatment as a testing ground for the ultimate endgame, the OWA was set up to be our savior from their self-created boogieman. Yes, that’s right. They are responsible for the Sembé virus that has killed more people around the world than any other single cause in human history. It wasn’t some accident from a lab, either. They developed it based on their viral suppression research activities buried deep within our very own healthcare system, and then unleashed it on an unsuspecting village in Africa. Once it was released, they orchestrated its spread throughout the world, all while protecting themselves and their allies with a wonder drug they already had in place.