Circle of Life, the third novel of the Joad Cycle, continues the story of Gil Rose, a reticent, immature teenager foreordained to change mid-twenty-first century America, which is governed by free-market capitalists-the corporate elite, who impose dehumanizing laws that replace morality with profit margins. When government troops destroy Angel Falls, Maine, Gil's girlfriend, Stacey Grant, narrowly avoids capture. She flees to Canada with former president Mark Rose, but their luck runs out and they are taken prisoner. Stacey manages to escape, though, and finds her way as a fugitive to sanctuary with terrorist Glen "Omar" Smith-who is desperate to find Gil before the government does. Using Virtuoso, he brainwashes Stacey into betraying Gil. After Profit, Gil has split with Bree. He seeks anonymity in the industrial town of Hamilton, the former site of Detroit. There, he learns what life is like in a world where money is paramount. He continually runs afoul of city laws designed to minimize human interrelationships and maximize profit. As HomeSec closes in, Gil meets franchise singer Dyllon Thomas, who helps him and Queenie, a terrorist who sets him free. As Gil escapes, he is double-crossed by the person he loves most. For more on the book and America in the mid to late twenty-first century, visit www.joadcycle.com.

CIRCLE OF LIFE

Book III of The Joad CycleBy Gary Levey

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Gary Levey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4546-4

Chapter One

Canada—2070

Civil disobedience—The active, professed refusal to obey laws, demands, and commands of a duly elected and legal government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Civil disobedience is commonly defined as nonviolent resistance and of civil resistance in the form of respectful disagreement.

In the Second Republic of United States, civil disobedience is the preferred method for voters to communicate their displeasure with their government between voting cycles. However, there are limits.

Due to the detrimental effects perpetrated on the U.S. economy by selfish special interest groups in the past, Circle of Life legislation was passed making it illegal to protest against the national government or its policies. The only acceptable method to air differences of opinion is to contact your appropriate government representative who is required to respond within forty-eight hours.

If it is deemed by the Secretary of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Chairman, and the Council of Private Banks that actions by individuals or special interest groups are detrimental to the economy or to the Church, remedies within the Circle of Life begin with the suspension of Habeas Corpus. You have been warned!—Archive

Shivering, with wet, cold clothes clinging to her trembling body, Stacey Grant hid, terrified, in the small, dark grotto that had once been her great escape from the simple things in Angel Falls that needed avoiding, like her daily chores. That grotto was now her last sanctuary against the death that had rained down on her family and her friends and she could feel it closing in to take her, too. Over the noise of the waterfall, in her mind she could still hear the explosions that had destroyed her world and the sound of weapons fire that had murdered everyone she had ever loved. Wretched but resigned to fight to the end, even though she had no weapon, she stared through the cascading waterfall into foreboding blackness, waiting for government rangers to penetrate the insubstantial wall of water that was her only protection.

She stared at the feeble old body of Mark Rose, Gil's grandfather; the former President of the United States, as he lay curled up in a fetal position on a flat rock beside her. He wouldn't survive without her.

A willing believer that bad things happened in threes, Stacey was depressed enough to know that bad things weren't just limited to threes. She and Gil had discovered the SurveilEagle. She'd lied about it to the village elders and forced Gil to lie, too. They'd argued and Gil had left angry. By her calculation, that was three bad things, so to change her luck, she had wandered away from Angel Falls in search of a new trail that she and Gil could hike once he stopped being mad at her.

But if she thought something simple like that could break the string of bad, she soon realized how naïve she was. After discovering a new trail through deep ravines, she hurried home reinvigorated, but one look at her father and she had known that the rule of three was looking to expand. Her father was crying. A typically stoic New Englander, he spoke softly to modulate the grief he felt. The rabbi, Bernie, Gil's great grandfather, Bernie Rosenthal, he was dead. Instinctively, she had reached out to hug her father and they cried together.

When Stacey was younger, she had sat in the Meeting House beside her mom and dad while they and her neighbors sang the Rabbi's praises for he was their hero. He had saved Angel Falls. Her father had explained to her that the Rabbi had once worked for the huge American conglomerate, U.S. Angs, the sole employer in Angel Falls, and how one day the company closed the production facility, ending every villagers work life and dooming the community—and Angs did it just to save money.

It was Angel Falls' misfortune to be located a hundred miles from nowhere with no other employment opportunities anywhere close to nearby. To add insult, nary a solution had been offered by Angs to save the community and so most of the townsfolk were forced to move on, to make a living elsewhere, leaving Angel Falls more or less a ghost town. Some, like her father, with nowhere to go, stubbornly remained, fretted, and depleted their life savings.

Seeing the wrong and the heartlessness in Angs' draconian decision, Rabbi had vowed to help them and one cold winter day, strangers arrived, businessmen who began to hire. Soon an executive retreat was being constructed for weary professionals and jobs and money flowed in. Within two years, everyone in town was working again and many of her parent's neighbors who had moved away, returned.

Ultimately, the Executive retreat failed, but by then, it had made way for more pastoral business pursuits that flourished alongside the natural efforts of the community and it was enough to provide a good life for the remaining town folk of Angel Falls.

Years later, Rabbi returned. Rumor said he was a fugitive now, but he was accepted graciously because everyone in Angel Falls knew him as a friend and their savior. He brought a teenage boy with him, Gil, a quiet, introverted, and very good-looking boy who was close to Stacey's age. He had proved to be very different from the local boys. He was exceedingly polite but distant and hard to get to know, but she saw in him a mystery that intrigued her, a mystery that she would now never unravel because Gil was dead. No. She stiffened to fight the trembling. No, she mustn't think of that.

Her mother had insisted that she help the Rabbi, and that was better than doing chores so she spent much of her time with the old man and grew to love his gentle, kind soul. When he asked her to befriend Gil, she tried, she did. But he was so aloof that her friends made fun of him and her so she begged Rabbi to ask someone else to help. But he insisted, telling her that although Gil was difficult, someday it would be important for him to have friends he could trust. She had no idea what that meant, but she wanted to please Rabbi so she worked harder to be Gil's friend.

As the years passed, her outgoing personality and persistence slowly worked on Gil and, in his way, he began to open up to her. They began to have fun together, though he remained aloof; something rare in such a small, tight knit community like Angel Falls. Because she spent so much time with Gil, she had less time for her friends and though she complained, Rabbi had been adamant. And so with each passing day, the inability to close the distance between her and Gil frustrated her because of the widening breach with her friends. She never told Gil what she was giving up to be his friend, and he wouldn't have cared, but she blamed him for her being excluded, even hating him a little until, against all reason, she fell in love—not that he noticed.

Then the bad luck arrived, the discovery of the SurveilEagle, the lie, her argument with Gil, and Rabbi's death. She had tried to console Gil, but for no reason, he was angry and mean to her, very mean. So mean, in fact, that she had slapped him and not just once. She was sorry for that now. At the Rabbi's funeral she had watched Gil as he stood alone, dejected, a hurtful distance from her and everyone else who mourned the Rabbi's passing. She wanted to comfort...