Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (24 page)

Off to the side were large, enclosed wagons
that transported the Nightfeeders. They mostly slept in the wagons during the
day and ranged ahead of the Legion during the night. Although they could
function during the day if required, they were more vulnerable to being
overloaded when used in direct sunlight.

There was no Trolla or Ogra irregulars
attached to the Legion. They would have just slowed the Legion further. If
required, they could be detached and dispatched from a Heavy Infantry or
Engineering Legion in the field. In the worst case scenario and neither class
of irregular was available and nearby when needed, Hael would ask his troopers
for volunteers for alteration.

Bral shouted for help and broadcast
distress as he freewheeled down the hill, his legs barely keeping up with his
body. A couple of sentries trotted over to meet him.

“By the Emperor’s golden scrotum, who are
you? What happened to you?” the sentry said.

Bral looked like death ever so slightly
warmed up. Dark circles surrounded his eyes, his clothes were tattered, scrapes
and scratches covered his face and arms, one of which dangled uselessly at his
side. He actually felt worse than he looked; the pain from his broken arm was
seeping through the mental block he had put in place the night before.

Bral caught his breath and said, “I am Ga
Bral, brother to your commander, there is a Feral army on your trail. I must
see my brother now.”

The sentry who had spoken looked at his
comrade, sending a private communication. “Follow me,” he said to Bral.

It seemed to Bral that every trooper had
emerged from their tent at the sound of the disturbance and was watching them
approach the command tent. Bral’s dramatic appearance and broadcast of distress
had piqued the interest of the entire Legion. A month in the field with no
action made the troopers hunger for any diversion, even if it meant the
potential of battle.

Even in his exhausted state and knowing
that battle with a foe with a huge advantage in numbers was imminent, Bral felt
a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. He had made it, he would be part of
Hael’s Legion and he had brought critical intelligence to his brother. Hael would
be proud of him.

He had a clear view of the command tent as
the flap opened and familiar figure emerged. A wave of nausea hit him like a
punch in the gut. He felt the burn of bile at the back of his throat. The smile
died, stillborn on his face.

The sentry spoke, “Ah, here is your brother
now.”

“Ah Bral, you are finally here. Took your
time, didn’t you, you lazy little shit? I heard they chucked you out of the
Academy. You’re an embarrassment and you look a bloody disgrace. Straighten
yourself up, man, and then present yourself to report,” said Lucan. Lucan
turned and reentered the Command tent.

Bral bent over and heaved the sparse
contents of his stomach onto his sandals.

Another
deafening boom shook the building as the half-foot-thick steel slab that served
as his front door was struck again. Finn could only imagine the amount of force
required to make that particular door ring like a bell. Leader must have been
pissed, pissed in the American context rather than the British, meaning she
must have been really angry, not drunk.

Steel shutters slithering down to cover the
windows indicated that his security measures were working as designed. The room
was now dimly lit by the florescent lights attached to the bottom of his
kitchen cabinets.

Finn took out his phone and pulled up the
security feed. The glow from the phone lit his face from below.

He looked at Bex, and she looked terrified.
He imagined that he looked the same, except uglier. Even terrified she was
beautiful.

“Listen, Bex. There is no way she will get
through that door, but she’ll soon realize that the door is probably stronger
than the rest of the building. She will start looking for another way in.” As
he was saying this the assault on the door stopped.

Finn turned to show his phone to Bex. It
was displaying a feed from a camera from outside the door. She rose and stood
behind his chair, so they could both watch the feed. On the phone’s screen she
could see Leader standing in front of Finn’s door going quietly ape shit. Well,
she was quiet on the phone, as the feed did not have audio, but Bex could
imagine that if there was audio they would be learning a whole new vocabulary
of curse words. Leader was standing in front of the door jumping up and down.
It would have been funny if they had not known that Leader would slowly rip off
their limbs if she got inside.

Suddenly, they saw Leader go still and then
tilt her head, looking at the edge of the vault door. Bex thought she saw the
impression of a smile before Leader hauled off and punched her fist through the
wall to the left of the door.

The lights flickered and buzzed in the
kitchen and Bex looked again at the feed on Finn’s phone. Leader was jerking
around with her hand still in the wall. Bex looked at Finn, confused.

“It looks like she has just found the high
voltage mesh in the walls. Interesting. I would have thought that much current
would have knocked her out.” Bex narrowed her eyes at that comment. The
florescent bulbs steadied and grew quiet. He looked up at Bex. “She managed to
get her hand out. She’ll not be trying that again.” He looked back at the phone
and frowned. “It looks like she’s leaving.”

“Leaving? She won’t leave until she evens
the score and you’re up on points. She has a plan.”

“Maybe she’s ready to try the steel
shutters on the windows. I don’t think she’ll have much luck with them; they’re
electrified as well.”

Finn swiped his finger across his phone’s
screen, scrolling through the camera feeds. Bex leaned in over his shoulder to
get a better look at the small screen. Leader was now on the street outside the
building looking down and walking back and forth over the cobbles, as if she
was looking for something. Her right arm was blackened from fingertip to elbow
from her encounter with the electric mesh. Bex knew Leader would already be
healing and she knew that she would also be in great pain. Just because they
could heal from most injuries didn’t mean that getting electrocuted didn’t
hurt. It hurt like the bugger, as her dad used to say.

Leader’s breath fogged in the air as she
stopped, and frost radiated out from where she stood, coating the cobbled
street in a sparkling white. She got down on her hands and knees and punched
down with her black fist. An explosion of dust and debris rose around her. Finn
looked up at her to see if she had felt the same slight tremor through the
ground. She nodded slightly, her face grim.

Leader was ripping out cobbles in great
scooping movements with her hands, expanding the crater she had created. She
stopped digging and reached into the ground and pulled up a large cable. She
braced her feet on either side of the hole and heaved.

The cable started to pop out of the ground.
Cobbles launched into the air as the cable came out of the ground, like an earthen
arrow pointing at his home. She wrapped the cable around her hand and pulled
again. The cable broke and she tumbled backwards a few yards as the tension
released.

Finn and Bex could see a flash on the
screen as the power cable to the house was severed. The kitchen went dark and
the screen indicated that the video feed was down.

“The backup generator will kick in any
second now,” Finn was saying when a psychic scream made Bex clap her hands to
her ears. Covering her ears didn’t help, but it was an instinctive reaction.
The lights went back on and the scream cut off. She looked at Finn and he also
had his hands over his ears.

He shouldn’t have done that. The scream,
while excruciating to her and to other Quickened beings, should not, could not,
have impinged on the consciousness of Finn —of one of the Prey — other than as
a shiver down his spine.

She did not have time to think what this
meant. All she knew was that her sister, her despised sister, Charlie, needed
her help and she had no choice but to respond. The ties of the coven were
strong.

She stood and ran past him, deeper into his
home.

Finn had made a mistake, several mistakes.
He could have blamed it on his exhaustion but he had stopped making excuses
years ago. He had let his control slip at exactly the wrong time. He should
never have shown any indication that he could hear Charlie’s scream. He should
have turned on the backup power as soon as Leader’s attack had started. He
hadn’t expected her to go after the power so quickly. No use on dwelling on
mistakes. He just needed to fix everything and fast.

Then he would need to abandon his home.

Leader would get in eventually, probably
sooner rather than later. Even if he managed to destroy her, which was
doubtful, the disturbance she was causing would mean that he would never be
safe in this refuge again. He would not be surprised if the police and the
media showed up sometime soon. His home would never be private again.

He needed to get to the lab to start the
sterilization sequence before Bex found Charlie. It was purely mechanical, as
he had not felt comfortable with a remote solution that could be triggered by
mistake. His stomach clenched with nausea at the thought of Bex finding
Charlie. If Bex got to Charlie before he did, he would never convince her that
he was not some twisted sicko.

He hobbled into his pantry and opened the
hidden door that led to a stairway that ended in the subbasement and his
private labs. He had no doubt that Bex would be able to figure out a way down.
He just needed to get there before her. If he could and if he could sterilize
the lab, he would have a greater chance of winning her back.

Leader could not remember ever being this
angry. Her age and condition usually insulated her from strong emotion. It took
a truly spectacular fuck-up to piss her off this badly. She had rarely felt the
need to destroy one of her children; however, this time she could not imagine a
set of circumstances that would allow Baby to survive.

Her antics had finally attracted the
attention of the two idiots who were supposed to be watching the place for her.
Donald and Lew had never seen her this way, and she could feel the uncertainty
and fear radiating from them as they burst through the door of the building
across the road. And, even more concerning, she could also detect a small
undercurrent of rebellion blooming in their black, shriveled souls. If she did
not crush Baby, her hold on the entire coven may start to slip. If the rot set
in too deeply she would need to cut it out and start over with a new coven. It
would be a terrible waste; it had taken her hundreds of years to recruit and
train them. But, she had done it many times before and would do it again if she
needed to.

Her concentration was broken by a psychic
scream.

Interesting. This game was deeper than she
had guessed. Her missing child was in there as well.

Angela
Davies wasn’t supposed to be working. She was supposed to be at home sleeping
off a monster hangover. She had been out late the night before enjoying herself
and had only managed to stumble to her bed at about five in the morning. She
had been waking up with hangovers a lot lately, ever since she found out “the
Twat” had been cheating on her. Unfortunately, going out a lot also cost a
packet, so she was in no position to turn down any shifts at the hospital. When
the phone rang at seven that morning and she was offered an extra shift, she
took it.

It would probably be a quiet shift anyway,
as most of the students had left for the summer. When they returned, the
stomach pumping season would begin anew. Her personal record was pumping twenty-one
stomachs one festive Raisin Sunday. When the students were away they really
only saw the occasional beating of a postgrad or two by the townies. She would
not even expect that much on a Sunday morning. So she agreed to go in and
dragged herself out of bed.

The pain was bad today.

The doctors said he was getting better. He
did not really think of it that way, because better was still pretty copulating
awful when looking at yourself in the mirror made you nauseous. He did agree
that the so-called good days were starting to outnumber the bad ones. Today was
a bad one.

He felt like his missing leg was cramping
and there was nothing he could really do about it. How does one massage a
phantom appendage? Maybe he could use his phantom hand? He snorted to himself.
He was losing it.

Mara was trying to help him use some
meditation techniques to help with the pain. He was making progress, but
sometimes you really just needed some high-grade pharma, courtesy of the good
old NHS.

He pressed the call button and waited for
the nurse. After no response for a few minutes, he pressed again. The nurses
were usually pretty responsive, as he made an effort to be nice to them and not
take his self-loathing out on them. He knew that, just like anyone else, if the
nurses did not like him they would do their best to avoid him.

After his third press a young, disheveled
nurse poked her head in the door. It was Angela on this morning. She had big
black bags under her bloodshot eyes.

“Hiya, Angela, do you think you can get me
something for the pain?”

Angela grunted and pulled her head out of
the room. She came back quickly with a large syringe that she injected into his
IV. He felt the pain decrease immediately and started to lose consciousness. As
he was drifting off he saw the nurse look at the syringe in her hand and do a
double-take. She looked like someone who had just made a serious error. He
would have been worried, but he felt too good to do anything other than close
his eyes and drift away.

Angela was in deep shit. Like going-to-prison
shit.

She had just overdosed a patient, she was
probably still legally drunk from last night and she needed to fix it quick.
She ran back to the nurses’ station to get some help. She should never have
been working.

Finn looked down at his ruined body. He
seemed to be floating near the ceiling. The ecstatic smile on the undamaged
side of his face actually made him look worse. The half-smile twitched into a
frozen grimace. It looked like the pain reliever administered by the nurse was
having an adverse effect on him. Oh well.

He saw the duty doctor and more nurses
swarm into the room. He did not fancy his chances. He actually felt a little
relieved that it was ending here in the hospital.

He had been dreading the thought of leaving
the hospital, ever. The thought of strangers looking at him, pitying him, being
revolted by his injuries had been gnawing at him. If he died he would never
have to experience that horrible naked vulnerability that he would feel by
simply walking down the street.

His vision darkened to black.

He opened his eyes. He found himself
floating in a colossal library. There was no floor or ceiling, and the shelves
to either side of him stretched up and down into infinity. There were gaps
between the stacks where one set of shelves ended and another started. He could
see one such opening in the shelves ahead of him. He was wondering how he could
move forward in this strange zero gravity library when he started approaching
the gap in the shelves. Apparently the thought of moving would move him around.
Fascinating.

Looking though the gap, he could see
additional stacks of shelves stretching away into infinity.

How long would it take to even read all the
titles
? he thought to
himself.

“Eternity,” said a voice behind him.

He spun around and saw a man in a plain
cream robe. It was the type of robe that would not have looked out of place on
Lawrence of Arabia. His skin was dark, his hair was straight and black, his
nose looked like it had been broken sometime in the past and his eyes were a
deep brown, almost black. Finn found it difficult to form a thought as he
looked into the stranger’s eyes.

No, that was wrong. Although he did not
know this person, he could not consider him a stranger. There was something
familiar that tugged at him. He felt he should know this person but could not
place him.

Finn looked away from the non-stranger’s
eyes and regained his train of thought. “Is this a dream? Am I dead?” He looked
around again. “It looked like I was going to be dead soon based on the activity
in my hospital room.”

“No, not dead, not dreaming, either. More
like taking a break and doing a little traveling.” The man smiled. His white
teeth were nearly as distracting as his eyes. Finn noticed one of his front
incisors was chipped.

“Huh?”

“Loquacious, aren’t you?” He accent was
standard public school, but not the annoying nasal kind favored by twits
throughout the ages. More of a
BBC News
type of accent that made you
feel comfortable and relaxed.

“You’ll need to forgive me. This is a
little strange. Are you sure I didn’t die? I have to tell you, this place could
fit my idea of heaven. Or hell, depending on how well indexed these books are
and what language they are written in.”

“Trust me, you are not dead, but you are
very close to death, which allowed me to bring you here. People usually need to
find their own way here, but most fail.

“And here is?”

“Can you guess?”

He thought for a minute. “The Chronicle?
It’s the Akashic Chronicle isn’t it?”

The man smiled widely, nodded and gestured
for Finn to continue.

“If this is the Chronicle, why does it look
exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagined it would? Are you sure I’m not
dreaming?”

“I am assuming that you are seeing a giant
library of some sort?” Finn nodded. “That is a common visualization. I have
known others to see scrolls, clay tablets, even long, long ago, painted walls.
I was worried you would see banks of computer arrays. For me and you, it
appears, nothing beats a good book. Your mind is not developed enough to see
the Chronicle as it really is, so your mind has interpreted the plane as
something you recognize.

“Okay, let’s assume that I’m not dreaming
and I’m not dead and that this is the Akashic Chronicle. Let’s also assume you
brought me here. Why?”

The man became serious. “I needed somewhere
where we could talk. I also wanted to give you some hope. Finn, I know you
don’t want to, but you must live, you need to get on with your life. You are
important.”

Finn laughed a bitter laugh. “What am I
supposed to do, beg on the streets and make people feel good about being whole?
No thank you. I would rather die and get it all over with. Don’t you
understand? Everything, absolutely everything has been taken from me.”

“Finn, I know it will be hard, but you will
survive. That you lasted this long is a testament to your strength. Although
your body is broken, your beautiful, complex mind is whole. It has always been
your greatest asset. You need to survive, for Bex.”

“Bex? Bex is alive?” He didn’t know how he
felt about that. It could be very bad if she was alive and no one knew where
she was; that meant she could not contact anyone. What would she endure with
the beasts who had maimed him?

“Yes, Bex is alive. She is also going
through a trial, a trial every bit as difficult as yours. If you survive and
use your brain, you will meet her again. You are both needed, and your trials
will make you both stronger.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I wanted to give you a glimpse of the
possibilities. This storehouse of knowledge exists, it is real. There are other
mysteries that are real as well. I want you to turn your mind to ferreting out
the mysteries and mastering them. They will provide invaluable when you and Bex
meet again. She will be different, but so will you. You will need to help her
when you meet, and you will need to pull her back into the land of life.”

“But why are you helping me? Are you my
fairy godfather or something?”

The figure smiled good-naturedly. “Ha,
fairy godfather, I like that. It’s good you still have a sense of humor.” He
paused for a second then continued. “I need you to survive, and I need Bex to
survive. You are both important. You both have a destiny. Without you, the
chances of the world falling under the shadow of ignorance and tyranny are much
higher.”

“What shadow, what are you talking about?”

“I am sorry I cannot explain it now, but we
are running out of time. Promise me, Finn, promise me you will not give up.”

“I don’t really understand what you are
asking, but I’ll try. I need to see Bex, I need to make things right. Do I get
to study here in the Chronicle to obtain the knowledge I need?”

“It would not help you. You need to work on
developing your talents and you need to find this place again on your own,
otherwise the knowledge here will be useless. It would be like giving a six-year-old
access to Steven Hawking’s library. Without background knowledge and context,
all this is useful for is to find the juicy gossip on everyone who ever lived.
Once you are ready you will find this place again. And when you do, I will be
waiting for you and I will start instructing you, so you can navigate this
place. It will never give up its secrets easily, but you will be able to learn
from it.”

“Copra fagia, it is hell. You mean there is
no index system?”

“Alas, no.”

The room and man started to fade. “Find me
again, Finn. I will make it worth your while. Three more things: be driven,
succeed, and be careful not to lose your humanity on your quest for answers. We
are approaching a pivotal time. I have been waiting forty thousand years for
the right alignment of factors. And if you meet the Corn Knight, assist him.”

“Corn Knight? Wait, who are you?”

“Call me Hael.”

His vision went black.

He woke in his familiar hospital room.
Beside him in a chair was the nurse who had overdosed him. Her mascara was
streaked from crying.

She grabbed his hand. “I am so sorry.” She
stopped as she looked into his eye.

He smiled and said, “I forgive you. Now go
get me some food. I need to eat if I am going to get better.” As she reached
the door he called out after her, “And get me a notepad and a pen. I need to
write something down before I forget it.” More softly Finn murmured to himself,
“Did he say forty thousand years? Nah, he must have said something else.”