The Gift of the Gods: Invasion
Alexander Shuravin, 2023
Oleg Rybkin, a programmer from Almetyevsk, sleeps through the evacuation of his home town. A patrol is about to finish him off when a naked stranger offers him a strange present: the Gift of life. Now any wound Oleg gets heals in seconds, after each one he is tormented by hunger, and death simply moves him, naked, to another place on the planet. Meanwhile, nuclear war sweeps across the world, and a new disease called zyamshi arrives from America.
Who it is for
For adult readers who love zombie apocalypse stories and LitRPG, that is, stories where a System is in charge of the heroes' lives. For those who are not put off by blood, cruelty and black humor.
Only you can make yourself happy. Nobody else can.
A Star Is Falling
Friday evening. Oleg Rybkin, a programmer from Almetyevsk, is sprawled in an armchair, clicking the remote. On the little table there is pizza and an opened bottle of beer. The newsreader just has time to say, “A meteorite has fallen in California,” and then the ads come on. Oleg switches to the next channel. He hates ads.
On Saturday, a girl from Tinder, a blonde called Masha, takes him to a restaurant and orders a pile of dishes. The prices on the menu are sky-high. “I'll just go and powder my nose,” says Masha, and she never comes back. The security guard won't let Oleg out until he pays. Oleg shouts, “Fire!” In the confusion, he slips out onto the street. Afterwards he stands by a pond for a long time and decides that he did absolutely the right thing.
In the evening, a woman with a boy of about five or six comes toward Oleg. The boy tips his head back: “Mom, look, a star is falling.” His mother is looking at her phone. Oleg looks up. The meteor leaves a glowing trail and disappears over the horizon.
The Gift of Life
Meteorites fall in India, in Australia, in Africa. Everywhere, the military cordons off the places where they landed. Oleg is sure the authorities staged this circus themselves to take people's freedom away.
On Monday Oleg goes out for lunch, and suddenly a fireball comes down somewhere behind the buildings. The blast wave knocks him off his feet. Loudspeakers announce that the city is being evacuated. Oleg walks home and takes a shortcut through a ravine. He climbs a clay bank, the ledge under his foot crumbles, and Oleg falls and hits the back of his head on something hard.
When he comes back out among the buildings, the yards are empty. His phone is dead. Two soldiers in gas masks walk toward him and, without warning, shoot him in the legs. Oleg lies in a pool of blood and hears one soldier say to the other: “Just finish him off. The evacuation is officially over.” The soldier raises his rifle.
And suddenly both of them burst into flames. Two charred skeletons are left on the asphalt. Next to them stands a naked man, looking at Oleg with interest.
“Are you ready to accept the Gift, homo sapiens?”
“What? What gift?”
“The Gift of life.”
Oleg shouts that he is ready. A blue beam shoots from the stranger's palm. Oleg feels as if he is burning alive. His clothes slide off in rags, and the bullets drop out of his wounds onto the asphalt. The stranger vanishes. Oleg stands there naked, and nothing hurts.
He goes to a looted shopping mall for clothes. On the way out, a patrol shoots him again. When he comes to, he sees a drunk crowd. “Now you can't be killed,” says a bearded man. “You're immortal.” The bearded man's crowd trashes an abandoned supermarket, takes bites out of sausages and throws them on the floor. Oleg cuts himself some bread and eats sandwiches. Then he makes a mask out of a knitted hat so that the cameras won't film his face, and he cuts open the cash registers with an angle grinder. He takes money, canned food and a hunting knife and leaves alone.
In the small town of Zainsk, he cuts his palm with a kitchen knife. The wound closes before his eyes, and right away he feels hungry. He sends out “Nigerian letters”, and a few people believe him and transfer bitcoins. The news reports a new disease in America. It is called zyamshi.
About the author
Alexander Shuravin publishes his novels on the Author.Today website. “The Gift of the Gods: Invasion” opens his “Gift of the Gods” series.
All books by this author: Alexander Shuravin
Terms from the book
- homo sapiens
- System
- Gift: What the novel calls the immortality that the aliens hand out. A person has to agree to accept it. After that, wounds heal in seconds, and after death the body is created anew in another place.
- zyamshi: A new virus that came from America. According to Veronika, it kills the part of the brain responsible for willpower, and a person becomes an obedient zombie.
- Nigerian letters: An old email scam: the writer asks for help getting a large sum of money, but in fact tricks money out of whoever believes them.
- euthanasia: Euthanasia is a voluntary death that a sick person asks for to end their suffering.
- Mirny: A town in Yakutia, far from where the nuclear strikes hit. This is where Oleg was reborn for the first time.
- Brotherhood of Steel: A gang from Mirny. Its young men call themselves patriots, beat up people who hand out leaflets and take money from those they have helped.
- Mikhey: A huge muscleman from the “Brotherhood of Steel”. He was the first to offer to help Oleg and expected gratitude for it. He is immortal too.
- Molotov cocktail: A homemade firebomb: a bottle of flammable mixture with a rag for a wick.
- Veronika: A blonde of about thirty from Kazan. She went to Turkey on vacation, became immortal, survived the zyamshi virus and learned to control zombies.
- apostle: An apostle is a closest disciple and messenger. This is what Veronika calls Oleg when she declares herself the Goddess.
- Tengri: The ancient god of the Sky among the Turkic and Mongol peoples. The community's Elder is sure that it was he who gave people the Gift.
All terms
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