Extinction Book 1

Volume 5 in the Adventures of V seriesIt is the year 2158. V, the outcast vampire, and queen of the alien-human hybrids, disguised as a Cosmos Centurion officer, takes a perilous voyage into the Great Central Desert - the desolate wasteland that was once the Heartland of America - to discover if any of her fellow alien-human hybrids have survived the Culling by the Cosmos Government and are still alive. All hybrids and Synthetic Individuals - or SINs - were "disappeared" in the Great Culling of 2144. Everywhere, the elite Cosmos - rich, militarized, highly cultured - the privileged 0.000001 % - rule the world. The Cosmos live in domed cities, protected from the torrid climate and its superstorms, and served by robots and the lower-class Subs. The Subs, an inferior social cast without rights, also live in the domed cities. The Cosmos use them as servants, slaves, and for sexual entertainment. Dissidence, for a Cosmos, can lead to re-classification as a Sub, or as Non-Human, or to body and personality redesign, and permanent mental or physical erasure. Most of the world and the continents and oceans are an arid, storm-wracked, desolate wasteland inhabited by Burbites, Mutants, and Outlanders.The Burbites, miserable, uncultured, barbaric, incontinent suburban folk, cluster, outside the Cosmos domes, around the Cosmos domed cities.The Mutants, products of unregulated and criminal bioengineering, chemical pollution, and radiation accidents, and, live in underground desert colonies, in the central wasteland that was once the heart of America. The Cosmos hunt them down for sport and to enforce species purity. Outlanders are rare human eccentrics and religious or ecological fanatics who wander the wilds. Synthetic Individuals (SINs) are super individuals, products of bioengineering; they are, potentially, immortal. Hybrids are alien-human hybrids who are very powerful, extremely intelligent, and, potentially, immortal; they are all products of V's alien-human DNA or descended from V. In the Human Species Purification Campaign, the elite Cosmos eliminated the alien-human hybrids, V's tribe, and the Synthetic Individuals - SINs - in the Great Culling, directed by the Cosmos President-Leader, fourteen years ago.And so V disguises herself as a Cosmos intelligence officer and joins a Cosmos Centurion military column into the Great Central Desert to discover if any of her fellow hybrids are still alive.When the Cosmos column is destroyed in an extraordinary Cyber-Mental ambush, V continues her quest, with one survivor, Lieutenant Kat Jackson, a beautiful black Cosmos warrior, a pitiless hunter of hybrids. Farther out in the desert, two elite Cosmos, 14-year-old Miranda Hughes and her mother, Niki Hughes, survivors of a plane crash, have been captured by mutants, and are about to be sacrificed, on a flaming cross, in a gigantic underground religious ceremony, to the Mutant Goddess Dolly. Aided by handsome young Caliban, Prince of the Mutants, Miranda escapes, but then, attacked by zombie-bats - grotesque creatures created out of his True Believers by an evil fundamentalist religious prophet - she is separated from Caliban. Miranda gets lost in the desert, and ends up becoming, strangely, the boss of a family of cannibal ghouls who live in a ghostly ruined farmhouse. Caliban, searching for Miranda, finally finds her. In the midst of a mind-blowing, mushroom-fueled, drug trip, elite Cosmos Miranda is naked and lecturing the ghouls on the mystical implications of cosmology. Suddenly, Caliban and Miranda, and Miranda's ghouls, are attacked by a horde of zombie bats. While Miranda and Caliban desperately fight the zombie-bats and V and Kat race across the desert, the mutants, in a massive ceremony, prepare to burn Miranda's mother, Nikki, alive on the Cross of Goddess Dolly.