Xeno Sapiens

by

Victor Allen

Smashwords Edition

copyright © 2012

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Table of Contents

#Prologue

#The
Wish

#Looking for God

#The Carriage Man

#The
Hunt

#Epilogue

Excerpts from other books by Victor Allen

#Essex

#A-Sides

#The Lost Village

#Wandil Land

#We are the dead

#Katerina Cheplik

1986

FOR SEVENTY-two hours blue blades of
lightning split the sky over the wind-lashed canopy of jungle while
the skies wept on the operative’s own little half acre of
hell.

A bull whip of thunder cracked as he
rocked back and forth inside his mosquito netting. He cried out in
his dementia, raindrops gleaming like stars in the mud-caked spikes
of his blond crew cut. Fever sweat rolled down his forehead and
chest in greasy rivers that the rains couldn’t wash away. Sometime
during his three day limbo, alternating between rounds of fever and
bone-chilling cold, he had ripped his fatigues to shreds, using the
rags to wipe down his sweat drenched body. Poisonous tree-dwelling
snakes and venomous scorpions watched his racking convulsions with
cold, unblinking eyes. His rifle, which he would normally have
protected like an only child, had started to rust, its Starlight
scope now a flat, uninspired black with its protective coating of
lubricant washed away.

A five day old cactus of beard stabbed
his neck with a thousand tiny spines. He was a normally fastidious
man who would never have appeared unshaven or with soiled uniform
had he been able to help it. He had drunk gallons of the lukewarm
rainwater to prevent dehydration and now his stomach felt like an
engorged balloon, swelled like a fermenting sausage. Many times
during the last three days he had gagged up a mess of slick, watery
vomit.

The sniper had separated from his unit
after a fire fight three days before, leaving on his own. He liked
the solitude. Rare as hen’s teeth was the supervisor who complained
about the operative’s unorthodox methods, or about the body counts
he brought back from his solo excursions, proved by a count of
right ears threaded through a string on his belt. The sniper’s
reputation was well known. He didn’t need to pad his
kills.

Most overt, overseas US military action
had ended with the bombing of the US Marine corps barracks by a
suicide truck bomber in Beirut, but clandestine paramilitary ops by
private security firms hadn’t. There was still work to be done. He
had been part of a special operations group formed to coordinate
and monitor the operations of the Contras in Nicaragua. He believed
the Contras to be not as bad as the Sandinistas, but not very much
better.

The sights and sounds of too many things and too many
people gone wrong plagued him like unquiet, cackling demons. He
remembered the cowardly greasers of his unit scampering from their
first fire fight with imported Cuban regulars as if
der geist der stats
vernient
was
tagging at their heels. He recalled the lizard eyed Contra
commanders of the insurgents standing in the center of any one of a
dozen identical villages and licking their lips as they gave the
order “Burn it all.” The brass hats of the clandestine American
SOG’s, controlling this non-war from air conditioned offices in
Monroe, Louisiana, had issued the “no prisoners” order far more
often than sanity could stand.

He had seen his own buddies with their
balls hacked off and stuffed in their mouths, his buddies cut in
half by mines, his friends dying of septicemia after stepping on
shit smeared pongee sticks, all tricks imported from the Vietcong.
His only real friend during his two stints, Snow, had been mostly
obliterated by a mortar shell last year. Snow had been his spotter
and the operator had never bothered to break in a new one. Everyone
thought Snow was so named because of his corn silk mop of white
hair, but the sniper knew better. Snow was the only man he had met
in Nicaragua who was as coldly efficient and ruthless as himself.
It had seemed the most sardonic thing of all for Snow to have been
killed so anonymously. Death had been very personal to Snow, his
preferred weapons of killing being the knife and the garrote. After
the mortar attack, the operative had carried Snow’s severed head
twenty miles in his rucksack, scavenging the only recognizable
remains back to his CO so that Snow’s family would know that he had
bought it and wouldn’t be consigned to the purgatory of the
MIA.

The operative liked his present gig
better. He was no longer constricted by half-witted rules of
engagement. He was involved in a shadow war where no holds were
barred and he was free to do as he pleased. Though his favored
weapons were still those of the sniper, he had found a sawed off
shotgun and machete to be serviceable tools. Fear and terror were
what the enemy understood, and fear and terror were what he
used.

Now death had come for him as well,
heralded not in the form of an unheard bullet or a land mine, but
in some jungle sickness that descended amidst the wasted weapons
and derelict machinery of war. A fever swept him away in its dark
and unalterable current to a place where he had no options but to
pray for either his death, or some guidance, alone.

The God that had orphaned him by
healing his mother and turning her away from him in a bright eyed
and unwholesome religious mania would now have to save him. It was
the only way a wrathful God could extract every ounce of torment He
could. He wanted a vision from that God, but all he got was the
febrile trembling and blistering delirium of fever. He had expected
nothing so grand as a burning bush or a pillar of fire, both of
which he had already seen in Nicaragua, and both of which had been
man made. He had seen through his powder blue eyes the thousand
small horrors God used to reveal the wickedness and astounding
perversity of the human animal. He felt privileged to be the only
man able to see through it all.

The sniper had turned a cold eye to the
atrocities, but at last the fever had forced him to see. The pinkos
and peaceniks and the long haired freaks thought they knew the
answer, but they were all stumbling around in the dark. God’s real
purpose was so clear that everyone else simply looked past
it.

After all these years, God had decided
to share the fires of destruction. The operative’s discovery didn’t
take on the form of an epiphany -no scales fell from his eyes- but
upon the realization something inside him tore free in a bone
jarring shudder and the fever broke. God had healed him, as he had
healed his mother, and God would use him.

When he emerged from the jungle after
the three day monsoon, his mind was clean and uncluttered. The sun
had appeared, but its brilliance was an ember beside the fiery
light of the sniper’s master plan.

Ronnie Sykes scrambled to his feet as
Josh wearily trudged out of the bush. He blinked rapidly, startled
out of his sun induced doze. He stood atop the half-roof of a
scavenged Cadillac that had been modified for jungle use with huge,
oversize tires and a rollbar craning out over a roof that had been
sheared away with a cutting torch above the front seats. His M-16
dangled carelessly by his side.

“
Where you been, Josh,” Ronnie asked,
grinning like a dog shitting peach pits. “Man, we thought you
was
dead.”

“
You couldn’t get that
lucky.”

Josh measured Ronnie as if he were a
lamb at the slaughter. Strange the lamb should have one gold tooth
and black skin. Sykes wore a dirty T-shirt, cut off fatigues, and
mud caked army boots. A pack of Camels and a bright, purple feather
were tucked into the stained red band around his Kevlar helmet. Hot
sun flashed off his sweaty skin.

“
Some storm, right, man,” Ronnie
grinned. “Your radio go down? You diggin’ on living in the bush for
three days?”

“
Not so bad,” Josh said, easing into
the warm, convincing smile that one day would endear him to
millions. “I prayed a lot.”

That is how, in the summer of 1986, a
monster was created in the bellowing mouth of a Central American
thunderstorm.

When Ingrid Milner opened her door on
the first day of September 2001, the tall man standing there said,
“Have I got an offer for you.”

“
Excuse me?”

It was the line a snake oil salesman or
carny pitchman might use, but this man was neither. Alex Clifton
was smart and good looking; a man who moved with the silky intent
of a bank president conducting a billion dollar deal. His suit was
calming and well worn; his briefcase easily borne like an old
friend with whom many pleasant evenings had been spent by the
fireside.

He had rolled up outside Ingrid’s small
apartment in Tampa, Florida, in a black, rented sedan, as quotidian
as it was forgettable. After producing his credentials and being
allowed inside, Clifton sat on the couch and hefted his briefcase
onto the coffee table. The stiff rattle of new paper caught her
attention as Ingrid brought coffee from the kitchen.

“
We’re not dropping in hat in hand,”
he said. “We are willing to pay well for your services.” Clifton
sat back and took a careful sip of coffee.

Clifton’s manner was carefully
cultivated, yet Ingrid sensed something a trifled trouble, a trifle
dangerous about him. His tailored suit seemed too snug around the
collar, his eyes a little too eager to dart around and pry at
personal things that didn’t want seeing.

“
It sounds more like a bribe,” Ingrid
said. “First, your boss, Merrifield, tells me I’ll have a free
hand, now you’re practically stuffing stacks of cash in my pockets.
It’s hard not to look for strings.”

Clifton’s dark eyes crinkled at the
corners. Some of his inner sun burned away the cold fog around
him.

“
Let’s not have any confusion about
this,” he grinned. “Let’s call it an incentive to secure your
services. I won’t mince words over what has to be done to acquire
your abilities, Miss Milner.”

“
Call me Ingrid, please,” she said
dryly. “Merrifield already does.”

“
As you wish, Ingrid. Your name
invariably comes up at the top of the list of candidates. No small
feat for a woman not yet twenty-four years old, especially when you
consider that the field of molecular eugenics is virtually as male
dominated as the field of mathematics.”

“
You’ve done your
homework.”

“
A full twelve years of
it.”

“
I beg your pardon,” Ingrid said, as
if she had misheard something.

“
I’m a geneticist myself,” Clifton
said. “MD from Bowman Gray school of medicine. Right now, though,
my official title is sycophant to smooth the way. Merrifield
thought it would be easier to turn a doctor into a salesman than
the other way around. Jon’s been called a lot of things, but
illogical isn’t one of them.”

“
You’re a project member?”

“
I am.”

“
Tell me more about it,” Ingrid
suggested.

“
It’s a non disclosure project,”
Clifton said easily. “That in itself is no big deal. I know little
more than the bare bones, nor am I likely to, until someone accepts
the commission as project director.”

Ingrid persisted. “What’s your
stake?”

“
My own research has gone pretty much
along the same lines as yours, but in answer to your question, this
is my job and one that I like very much. But I’m only an Indian.
You’ll be the chief. I can tell you that the project is
not
-for lack of a
better term- small time.”