Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (14 page)

Donald
felt like scratching his eyes out or, better yet, scratching Lew’s eyes out. Lewis
was such a boring cunt. Lewis had even been boring when he had been prey. It
was a terrible sign to be bored of one you were tormenting.

He had stated his case to Leader but, alas,
their little group was no democracy and she had made Lew one of them anyway. At
the time, she claimed it was to repay some old debt.

You would think that decades in his company
would have taken the edge off the tedium and they would find a middle ground to
get along. Not so.

The crux of the issue was that Lew seemed
to have no sense of humor as far as Donald could tell. He had not laughed at
one of Donald’s jokes, quips or bon mots since he had been Turned, boring
bastard. That is a long fucking time to play the straight man.

This assignment was not helping either. It
was surveillance, and Donald fucking hated surveillance. Normally he could have
handled it himself, but after Charlie’s disappearance Leader had paired them up
and instructed them to stay together. Little Eve was with Baby, while he had
been stuck with Lew.

He would have relished spending some more
time with Baby. He had lots of good times with her when she was prey. She had
been much more entertaining than boring old Lew.

They had been stuck in a car together for a
week watching the house of some inventor or something. They had strict
instructions to follow him if he emerged. So far he had not left his house.
They could vaguely feel him moving around inside what appeared to be an entire
block that had been converted for his use. Oddly enough, he sometimes dropped
from their awareness when he was in the basement area of the structure. They
assumed he was involved with  with their type or some other Quickened
.
Perhaps there was some sort of active ward in the basement that shielded him.

If they needed to hang around much longer
they would need to see about obtaining a flat to make the wait bearable. They
could not stay in the car much longer.

Lew punched his arm, hard, and pointed.
Donald looked over at the door and saw it was opening. Out into the street stepped
Quasimodo.

They were almost on him. He needed to get
away. There was no telling what they would do to him if they caught him.

His frail condition meant that if they
administered what they considered a light kicking, he could well die.

There was no way he was going to die for
doing something so stupid as going out in the day, not when he was finally
making progress towards his goal.

His Taser was not an option. He had been so
busy with his work and his side project that he had not had time to develop new
wires for his Taser, and it had seemed a waste to load it with wires that would
melt. Not that it mattered anyway; he would not use his Taser against a person because
it was a weapon for hunting monsters. He had no desire to kill a person. 

Fight not being an option, he was left with
flight, also not one of his strong suits.

He ran as best he could up to the shuttered
doors of the Tron Kirk and pulled the handles. The old church was locked up
tight. He scrabbled around the side looking for a way in. He could hear them
taunting him as they looked for him.

He had to get away.

Earlier that day he had been depressed.
Really fucking depressed.

He had made very little progress over the
last couple of weeks in increasing the sensitivity of his new line of sensors.
He was able to increase the sensitivity to a level where he could distinguish
between different neuromotor impulses; however, he could only use the new
sensor array in a single location, his quiet room.

His quiet room was located in a sub-basement
that he had excavated prior to taking possession of the building. When
excavating the extra space the workers had broken into an abandoned underground
street. The city, especially near the castle, was built upon progressively
older settlements, so it was not uncommon to come across the underground
spaces. There was even a haunted tour that explored some of the more accessible
underground streets.

He had expanded until he ended up with a
minor underground complex. He simply broke through to other abandoned areas and
walled them off. He supposed that it was not strictly legal, but who was going
to find out? Especially since he imported non-English speaking builders from
Poland and paid them a handsome hush bonus.

He had built two quiet rooms as part of
this process: Lab A and Lab B. The quiet rooms were massive Faraday cages
enclosed in lead and concrete. They were completely impervious to
electromagnetic radiation and psi phenomena. Lab B was being used for his side
project, while he was using Lab A to work on his new and improved sensors. The
problem was that, outside of the quiet room, the highly sensitive electrodes picked
up not only brain impulses but also the cacophony of electromagnetic energy
that was the modern world. Radio and TV signals, cell towers, Wi-Fi, even the
signals used by cabbies to keep in contact with dispatch. Each of these added
to the background noise and each was broadcast at higher amplitude than signals
being broadcast by the brain behind its shield of bone. This electromagnetic pollution
was only going to increase as the years passed, so he needed to develop a way
to read the brain’s activity without corrupting the signal with noise.
Increased sensitivity was not the answer. He needed to come up with something
else. Something else that he had not thought of yet, but he would; he always
did.

He needed a break, he needed to get out.

He had been cooped up by a run of
unseasonably fine weather for the last couple of weeks. Today was no exception;
it was clear and sunny. However, it was still Festival time. With a bit of
boldness he could walk around outside and no one would really pay much
attention. There would be stranger sights than him on the crowded city streets.
Most people would just think he was part of the entertainment.

He would do it. He would go out and feel
the sun on his face.

He had bought the costume a few years
earlier, due to some macabre masochistic impulse. He had convinced himself that
he would go to his company’s Halloween party and mingle with his employees like
a normal person. He had, of course, chickened out. However, the costume was
exactly what he needed for today’s little adventure.

After he dressed he did not look in the
mirror; he did not have many mirrors in the house. He had no need to look at
himself. He just pulled on the costume, asked his home system to open the
secure inner door and stepped into the short lobby that separated his inner
door from the outer. His hand shook as he reached for the knob of the outer
door. He pulled but the door would not open.

Ah, it was locked, he needed to unlock it.
He laughed slightly at his nerves, unlocked and opened the door and stepped
outside into the crowded noisy street.

He waited for a minute or two, waiting for
the screams or wretches of those who saw him.

Nothing.

He looked around. A couple of people were
looking at him quizzically but they seemed to be admiring his costume, nothing
else. He smiled, really smiled, and pushed his way deeper into the crowd.

He spotted a pile of discarded flyers
stacked on top of a garbage bin and picked them up. It advertised Ashley
Orion’s concert. The flyer claimed that she was one of the most famous people
on the planet after her number one smash hit “Your my Asshole.” He had never
heard of her. His knowledge of pop culture, which had never been extensive, had
pretty much ended about twenty-one years ago. He was shocked; how could a song
with such an offensive title make it to number one in multiple countries?
Someone should have objected, what was wrong with the world? Did no one have
basic grammar skills anymore? The song obviously should have been titled
“You’re my Asshole.”.

As he stood there contemplating flyers, a man
in a hat took one from his hand and kept walking. Then a woman with a tight T-shirt
took a flyer as well.

“Why not?” he thought and walked down the
street handing out the flyers. It seemed like the flyers helped out with his
reverse disguise, and people just assumed he was part of the process of
publicizing the show. With so many activities occurring during the Festival the
promoters did some crazy shit to get people’s attention. A grotesque Quasimodo
could be considered pretty tame.

After handing out ten or so flyers he
decided to actually talk to people, to promote the show. He knew nothing other
than what was on the flyer, so he just made things up when people asked
questions. He was quite impressed by his boldness.

He had handed out about half of the flyers
and was walking backward and telling a pretty young woman about how much fun
the show would be when he bumped into someone, stumbled and fell to the ground.

“Watch where you’re fuckin’ goin’, pal,”
said a vaguely familiar voice.

He looked up saw Stache and Belly, the two
louts he and Charlie had run from in the pub a week or so earlier.

He gave his head a shake and started to
painfully get to his feet.

“Well, lookie fuckin’ here, if it isnae the
fucking mutie from the pub. Remember, the one who ran out with that fine drunk
lassie?”

“Oh aye. I remember. I also seem to
remember they said some shite to us as they left.”

“Aye, payback time. Come wi’ us, pal.”

Now on his feet, he threw the flyers in
their faces and hobbled as quickly as he could toward a crowd of people in
front the Tron Kirk, one of the oldest churches in the city.

Stache and Belly, seeing that he could not
run very fast, decided to make a game of it. They walked along after him,
shouting, “Here, mutie, mutie, mutie. I got somethin’ for ya.”

He reached the door of the church but it
was locked.

Donald communicated with Leader, sending an
image.

Donald –> Leader: [Image]
Is this who
we are supposed to follow, Quasifuckingmodo?

Leader –> Donald:
I did not get
details, but if he came out of the house that’s him. Follow him and report back
what he does. Make sure no one harms him.

Donald –> Leader:
Got it.

Donald –> Lewis:
Bitch.

Quasi appeared to be having a grand old
time handing out flyers and chatting to people, until he bumped into a couple
of bully boys who appeared to recognize him and who did not appear to wish him
well. His panicked facial expression as he stumbled away confirmed that they
were not friendly. They pursued him in a leisurely manner.

Donald and Lew followed Quasi’s pursuers, a
bald guy with a mustache and his buddy, a slob with a massive beer belly poking
out from under his too-small T-shirt. As soon as they followed Quasimodo around
the corner of some old church and were obscured from the view of most of the
bystanders on the street, Don and Lew struck.

They hit them hard and fast. The bully boys
did not even have a chance to squeak before their vertebrae snapped with no
more sound than that of a dead branch being trod upon in a forest. A quick,
painless death — what a waste.

As Donald slung Mr. Mustache over his
shoulder, he could see that Quasimodo had finally found a way into the church
through a broken side door. The cowardly little shit did not even look back as
he slammed the door behind him. Quasimodo did not realize how lucky he was; if
he had seen them they would have been forced to take precautions, surveillance
detail or no surveillance detail. Avoiding exposure took precedence over any
side assignments that they may take.

Don and Lew found another way into the
church and hid out until dark with the fresh corpses of the bullies. They would
wait for darkness before trekking to the bridge to dispose of the bodies in the
firth. No one would be able to see them at night.

It was a shame that they had to neutralize
the bully boys quickly; it would have been interesting, or at the very least
mildly diverting, to interrogate them. Leader would also have wanted to know
why the bully boys had wanted to harm the target. Surely she would understand
that they had no choice but to act swiftly.

Surely.

Maybe?

Don and Lew sat silently in the church and
waited for the sun to set.

Hours later he came to his senses, sitting
on a pew in the ancient church, not sure how he got in, or why Stache and Belly
were not with him pounding the feces out of him.

He was ashamed, running from a couple of
pathetic bullies, like the school boy picked on by a prefect. He knew that he
had no choice, but that did not make it any easier to accept his cowardice. If
only he had not been crippled, if he had not been broken, he would have laughed
at their threats and kicked their heads in if they pressed him. Or so he told
himself.

One day he would get it all back. One day.