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Chapter 43 - a Grave Threat

Chapter 43 – a Grave Threat

Shelley's Bar, Vertigo Town
Arlington County, VA
Wednesday, May 6, 2076
17:34 EST GMT-5

In spite of all that had gone down in the last few days, business was booming for Shelley and Javier, not so much for Jerry, he wasn't making much profit, since the Gunsmith Battalion cracked down hard on everyone, he couldn't run his business as smoothly as before. Of course, whether it's economic depression, recession or political martial law, people still will go out to party all night and gamble. However, that's not to say that businesses weren't going to limit their hours of operation in light of recent events. Shelley reduced her hours of operation from ten in the morning to two in the morning, to opening eleven in the morning to closing at one after midnight, not that she had any reservations doing that. She'd pretty much leave by ten at night before (nine following the lockdown) and leave the establishment in care of the robots she put to work. Javier also had his casino, which ran twenty-four-seven to closing every one AM to five AM, pretty much did the same thing at night, like Shelley did. Sheriff Ross worked with the Vertigo Town Police Department to make sure everyone was safe from the threats.

We all were relaxing at Shelley's, taking a break from it all. Shelley herself was enjoying it, as she was on her day off. She took a day off every other day and stuck around the bar on her days off.

"We're far from complete here!" I told my team. "Something tells me the answers to certain questions lie between these two cities, Jordan and Vertigo."

"How so?" asked Aurora.

"When I fought Kilmann in the coal mines, I did come to notice some strange radiation in the mines. Coming from the abandoned coals lying there for God-knows-how-long." I explained. "That radiation seemed to be uranium, the same one that Mithra carried, before it landed on Earth forty-two years ago."

"You're saying there's a battle for resources going on?" asked Aurora.

"Particularly uranium. There's been uranium lurking among the coals. I noticed this, while fighting Kilmann, and I saw a guard near it. That uranium, it caught on him, it was making him act weird." I explained with shudders.

"Wait, you're not saying?" said Ranger. "That uranium is more than just uranium?"

"I think that's what turned most people in the world into mutated beasts, apart from turning our planet into a Mad Max-like desert planet." I was confident that was the case. "That uranium had some sort of strange element added to it. It mutated the people, making them psychotic, ravenous, and turning them into monsters. Before we went into our pods, we already were facing issues in the world with drastic climate change, inflation in the economy, loss of jobs due to rising wages and costs of living, as well as improvements in robots and artificial intelligence, which caused technological unemployment; thus, taking away more jobs than it was creating."

"Are you meaning to say, someone was behind all this from forty-two years ago, before Mithra even landed on Earth?" asked Aurora.

"I'm saying whoever did this, intentionally planned to have Mithra land on Earth, and cause a large, massive global warming, killing trees and spreading desert wastelands across the planet." I went on to elaborate. "Someone wanted that uranium, which was contained in the asteroid, and purposely knocked it off course, to send it to Earth as an asteroid. Question is, who?"