The Hollow Earth Returns: A New Age Rises

This is the first chapter to the first book of a series that I am working on.  As I am new the fiction writing game, I would love any feedback you can give me.  In particular, I would like to know if the title and this chapter get you interested in reading more.  Also, what do you think of the characters so far?  Do you feel like I need to add anything or take anything away?  Thanks ahead of time for reading this.

Ethan wasn’t sure which terrified him more, the sight of the apes ripping each other apart or the casual annoyance on the faces of his father and sister.

They had visited the Cascade Caverns just north of San Antonio, Texas on their weekend family outing and Ethan had wanted to see the gibbons. It was a bright, sunny Spring day in Central Texas and the weather was perfect for being outdoors. His sister, Emily, didn’t want to be there, she stopped enjoying the outdoors ever since she started to get serious about gymnastics. She had wanted to go see a movie, probably some silly romantic comedy that senior girls liked. But, Ethan’s father had already stated that this weekend’s activities were for Ethan to decide as Emily had chosen last time.

Ethan was always much more interested in the outdoors and science than the usual sophomore boys in his school. So, he picked the wildlife ranch because he had been to the San Antonio Zoo many times before but had never made the trip to the ranch. Emily’s sister complained about the idea the whole way from Austin to San Antonio as their mother drove them to their scheduled visitation with their father.

Later, Ethan would think on how different his life would have been if the events of that day had unfolded while he was trapped inside a crowded movie theater rather than on the outskirts of town where he could escape easily.

The family of three had just arrived at the gibbon enclosure, a large circular pavilion with a cage around it to prevent the gibbons from escaping, but with plenty of branches and perches above the ground where they could swing and climb and hold out their hands for food from the watching crowd. On this day, they were quite active, swinging obsessively from one side of the pavilion to the other, never stopping or resting.

“A gibbon’s ability to swing through the trees is called ‘brachiation’. They spend almost all of their lives in the branches of trees where they eat a diet primarily of fruits and leaves”, Ethan read from a brochure that he had picked up in the visitor center. When he looked up, he noticed that his sister was glaring at one of the gibbons as it hooted loudly at her. She looked annoyed, but she wore that look most of the time. Ethan’s father seemed a bit bored as well. That was unusual as his father at least attempted to encourage Ethan’s interests. After all, his father was the one who took him on all of those camping trips and convinced his mother to let him join the Boy Scouts.

“Fruits and leaves, huh?”, Emily smirked as she watched the gibbons. Ethan’s eyes followed hers as the excited hoots were replaced by painful shrieks. One of the large gibbons had grabbed a smaller one and sunk its fangs into its back. The other gibbons went into a panic, frantically jumping away from the vicious assault. Then their panic changed into a mass assault as some gibbons grabbed the nearest one they could reach. It didn’t matter the size or age of the ape, young killed old, old killed young, strong ripped into weak. Those that didn’t join in on the orgy of violence slammed their bodies against the cage in an attempt to escape. The loud clangs of muscle against steel were drowned out by cries of pain.

Ethan just stood there in shock at what he was seeing. He wasn’t bothered by the blood. He had been hunting and fishing many times before and the sight of blood and organs didn’t affect him. What shocked him was the sudden and inexplicable violence in animals which were docile just moments ago. He felt that he should do something to help the weaker ones escape but all he could do is watch helplessly as the blood dripped to the concrete floor.

“Ugh. Let’s go. I’m hungry,” Ethan’s father said casually before walking away from the screams of dying primates and the roars of their assailants. Emily followed their father.

Ethan looked around, “What…?”. He noticed that their family scene was playing out around the enclosure. Some people seemed to be horrified at what they were seeing. Others seemed more annoyed and wandered away. A mother wandered from her crying toddler, another child giggled as she threw peanuts at the body of a dead gibbon, oblivious to the carnage just in front of her.

Ethan turned and walked quickly to catch up to his father and sister. Emily, a competitive gymnast, was always able to move more quickly than Ethan. As they walked back to the visitor center, Ethan could see that the violence from the gibbon enclosure was playing out again and again in the wildlife ranch. To the right, goats rammed their horns repeatedly into each other until one horn snapped off and blood streamed over their faces. Across the parking lot, a male rhino charged through the open field, threatening other animals with its long horn. All around them were scenes of inexplicable carnage and yet Ethan’s family seemed to not notice or not care about it.

They entered the visitor center and walked past the rows of cheap stuffed animals and even cheaper t-shirts with the ranch’s logo printed on them. Ethan’s father strode up to the counter where snacks were sold and attended by a very bored looking college-age man with his back to the family and staring up at a clock on the wall. Even through the walls, Ethan could hear the screams of innocent animals and the cries of scared people. The sounds were made more distinct as the doors of the visitor center were opened repeatedly as more and more people entered. Apparently, his family wasn’t the only ones that had become suddenly hungry.

“Do you have any real food or just this crap?”, his father demanded from the man behind the counter.

Emily stood behind her father with her arms crossed against her chest and glared at the man’s back.

Soon there was a crowd forming around the counter of people demanding food or looking on confused and frightened. The shouts of the angry people rose up until they eventually drowned out the sounds of shrieking animals and crying children outside.

The young man behind the counter finally turned to face the crowd and he had the same bored, slightly annoyed look on his face as his family had expressed moments ago. “We have what we have. What the fuck do you want me to do about it?”

His indifferent response enraged one of the men standing near Ethan’s father and he leaned over the counter to grab at the young man. This movement jostled Ethan’s father, which caused him to go into a rage. “Watch what you’re doing, shit head!” The man then turned his attention to Ethan’s father, who shoved him back into other people in the crowd. This caused a cascade of violence in the crowd.

“Dad!”, Ethan shouted, wanting all of this to stop.

Some people grabbed and shoved others in the crowd while others looked on in stunned fear as they saw their loved ones join in the fight over nothing. Mothers, fathers, children, and siblings began to attack the nearest person to them though there didn’t seem to be any cause.

A woman, not much older than Emily and with mousy brown hair and wearing a bright yellow t-shirt, grabbed Ethan by the shoulders and began to shake him. She was shouting into his face, “Do you know how long I have been waiting? I need ‘me time’! ‘Me time’!”

Ethan was so confused and frightened by the whole scene that all he could do was look into her screaming face as he tried to figure out what he did to make her so angry. Behind her, he could see his father, a pudgy middle-aged man scratching and clawing at a pudgy middle-aged Hispanic woman’s face.

“Dad!”, Ethan cried out, trying to get his father’s attention, hoping to make him stop all of this.

The woman shaking Ethan reared her head back to howl, which was interrupted by Emily’s fist as she punched the woman right across the jaw, “Get your fucking hands off of my brother!” Her tone wasn’t so much of concern for Ethan, but an imperious tone of someone who feels affronted that a lesser being would dare cross them.

The woman pushed Ethan away from her as she returned the attack to Emily, trying to grab at Emily’s blond ponytail. Ethan fell off balance and tripped over a purse which had been dropped in the fight, falling backward.

The sounds of people screaming and cursing, pleading for the violence to stop, reverberated off of the walls of the small visitor center. Ethan rolled over onto his hands and knees and began to crawl out of the center towards the open door. Other people ran for the door, clutching purses and small children, trying to save what they could from the rabid crowd of relatives and loved ones.

The cacophony of the riot was broken by the loud cracks of gunfire, which made Ethan’s ears ring. Someone had drawn a pistol and was shooting into the ceiling. The screams rose higher into a full-blown panic in some and in others, the gunshots only seemed to spur them on. Ethan reached the door and pulled himself up, but was pushed out by an overweight man carrying an armful of candy bars. Once clear of the door, Ethan turned to look back in to see if his father or sister were following him.

The man with a pistol fired indiscriminately into the crowd. Bleeding people writhed on the floor, either from gunshots or injuries from the angry crowd. Emily was straddling the young man from behind the counter on the floor. She had his head in her hands and was grinning as she pounded the back of his skull into the tile floor. A thin stream of blood ran in the grout of the floor as his feet twitched uncontrollably. Ethan saw his father just as a bullet went through the back of his skull, blasting his forehead all over the face of the middle-aged woman who he was trying to strangle.

Ethan turned to run but was knocked to the ground. This time, not by a panicked victim trying to escape, but by a sudden lurch of the ground, which threw him down to his hands and knees. The sudden earthquake was followed by a loud explosion from behind him and a rain of soil and rocks which triggered all of the car alarms in the parking lot, adding to the sounds of screams, shouts, shots, and pleas.

Ethan looked behind him at the source of the explosion and saw that a hole large enough to drive a big rig truck through had opened up in the ground just a football field’s distance away in the middle of the park. He huddled at the building, peering around the corner to see what was happening at that pit.

Though his animal instinct was to run from that spot and towards safety, if there was such a thing, his innate curiosity held him in place. Through the sight of large chunks of rock and a swirling cloud of dust, he could see something moving out of the pit.

As the dust slowly settled, he saw the silhouette of a man clamor up to stand on top of a large rock that had thrust up into the air from the explosion. The man reached behind him and pulled out what appeared to Ethan like an old warhorn as he had seen in many documentaries on Vikings. The man tilted his head back and blew, sending out a loud blast that overwhelmed the sounds of the chaos which was only slightly beginning to die down.