Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (2 page)

Hael was one of the chosen people.

Anointed by Emperor Enki
II,
Supreme Ruler of City and
Empire, Hero of the Rebellion and Scourge of the Feral,
Hael was the commander of
the Ninety-First Legion. He was the youngest commander in the history of his
people and he had never led his troopers into battle.

That was going to change
in the next few minutes.

He had been harrying the
enemy, the filthy Ferals, for almost a week with his Nightfeeders — never
letting them rest, never letting them relax. He had driven the Ferals to the
valley below his current vantage. They were waiting for the inevitable now,
huddled and stinking in their animal skins and decorative colored shells.

Hael looked to his right
and nodded to his older brother Lucan. Lucan was smiling fiercely, eager to
prove himself, eager to kill.

He looked to his left to
his younger brother Bral. Bral was aware of his brother’s gaze but did not take
his eyes from the enemy below. His face was expressionless. The single tear
running down his cheek betrayed his dread of the task ahead.

Hael lifted his arm.
Bronze blades sang and they were unsheathed across the ridge. Leather creaked
as the troops readied for the charge. Hael dropped his arm. With a roar, his
troopers plunged into the valley.

Charlie
was on her way home from work. It was bucketing down, but the cold and the wet
did not bother her. Not much had the power to make her uncomfortable, other
than boredom. She was actually feeling pretty good — it had been a fun day at
work.

She was one of the few people on the planet
who actually liked her job. Oh sure, some people claim to like their job, but
they don’t, not really. They like the money they are paid and the useless
things that money allows them to buy. They like the perks, the occasional
sandwich or cookie left over from a business meeting that they were not invited
to, or maybe a free drink or two at Christmas. Some liked the opportunity to
bully, mock or just plain despise their coworkers. Some liked stealing
stationary or tools from their employers. Very few people liked doing the
actual tasks that they were paid to do. Charlie was one of those lucky few. She
found that working with the elderly was very satisfying. The retirement home
was understaffed and overpopulated, so she could really make a difference in
her charges’ lives.

Today had been particularly satisfying.
Nice, old Major MacTaggert had been desperate to use the toilet and no one else
was around to help him. Seeing an opportunity to make a difference, she offered
to help him. She then managed to find reasons for not taking him to the
bathroom. He ended up begging for her to take him. Eventually he shat himself.

His humiliation had been delicious. She had
then berated him and called him disgusting and made him try to clean himself
up. At one stage she thought he was going to have a heart attack.
Unfortunately, he didn’t. However, all in all, the whole episode was very
satisfying.

Her job gave her many opportunities to make
a difference in people’s lives.

She had even made a little game out of
finding novel ways to make a difference. Most people just don’t make the effort
to make work fun; their loss.

She stepped out of the bus onto slick
cobbles of the Grassmarket. Yellow light spilled out of the windows of the many
bars and restaurants lining the road. You could intermittently hear the muted
roar of music, laughter and tinkling glasses as someone entered or exited one
of the establishments and released a bubble of sound and light into the street.
The Castle loomed darkly down on the revelers from the top of the extinct
volcano in the center of the city.

She was meeting the rest of her coven at
the Irish Pub. She could never remember the names of Irish Pubs; they always
seemed to be named after the proprietor, unless the proprietor happened to be
named Chen or Patel and then they were usually just called Murphy’s. The
English, the Scots and the Welsh seemed to have a better idea about how to give
a pub a memorable name, like the Farmer’s Arms, the Red Dragon or even the Cock
and Bottle.

As she approached the door to the Irish Pub
she tried to make out the name spelled out by the curling cursive script of the
sign, perhaps, O’Mally’s or O’Mully’s? It didn’t really matter.

Then, she felt a small niggle. There was
someone in pain up at the castle. There were many things she could resist. She
could forgo sex, drugs, even food and drink but someone in pain was something
altogether more difficult to resist, so why bother resisting?

She quickly moved towards the castle to
stake her claim, before one of the others noticed and decided to investigate.

She darted up a set of stairs that would
take her from the lower road up to the Royal Mile. As she turned the corner she
could see a truly pathetic crippled creature looking out at the city. Charlie
dismissed the vague feeling of familiarity as she felt a warm glow just below
her belly button.

Umm, cripples, she loved cripples.

In her vast experience, cripples usually
had their emotions locked down pretty well. They insulated themselves from the
world, never showing the emotional toll that their condition took on them. With
a little bit of effort, they would crack and their anguish would flow out.
Scrumptious.

This cripple was more buttoned down that
usual. She could neither read nor feel anything of his emotions, other than the
slight niggle that had drawn her to him. She got wet thinking of the volcanic
bubble of emotional magma waiting to burst forth for her.

She pulled down the short hem of her black
raincoat and ran a hand through her short, wet, ginger hair as she approached
him.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.

He startled and then winced in pain. People
usually could not sneak up on him. “Yes, yes it is. It’s one of my favorite
spots to view the city.” His heart was pounding. He exerted every ounce of his
will to appear calm. Hopefully she thought she had just startled him, nothing
more.

“I hope I’m not intruding.” She walked over
to the guard rail and then turned from the view to look at him. Her pupils
dilated slightly.

“No, no, not at all. It is nice to talk to
someone for a change.”

“You do not talk much then?”

“No, not much, I mostly keep to myself.” He
broke her gaze and looked out to the city again.

“I see. You said this is one of your
favorite spots. Do you come here often?”

He thought a second and replied, “Well once
a week or so. Is that often? I suppose it depends on how many things you do
with your time.” He involuntarily looked back at her and was immediately
trapped by her magnetic green eyes.

She smiled and her attractiveness ratcheted
up a few notches. “Well, would you say that once a week was often for you?”

He grimaced slightly and said, “Yes, I
suppose I would. How about you, what brings a pretty girl like you out in the
rain?”

She smiled a little more widely at the compliment.
“I needed a break from studying. My friends are indulging in a little retail
therapy. I’d rather go for a walk than shop, even a walk in the rain.”

“Ah, shopping, the core of the world
economy,” he murmured.

She snorted in agreement. “I thought I
would see if I could get into the castle and take my mind off my studies and
then I saw you over here and was curious.”

“About the scars?”

Lightning flashed.

“No, just about what you were thinking. I
didn’t see the scars until you turned to speak. You seemed sad.” Thunder
rumbled. She reached out and gently touched his face. He felt a tingle where
her fingers brushed the scar tissue.

“You did well not to flinch,” he said. He
felt the bile of shame in his throat as he said this and felt control of his emotions
slip a little.

He watched her closely. She did not respond
verbally, but her pupils seemed to swell even more. The green of her irises
were almost completely eclipsed by her black cavernous pupils, possibly just
the aftereffect of the darkness following the lightning but possibly not.

He pulled out his phone and looked at its
glowing face. “I should get back; it was nice to meet you. Sorry, I missed your
name.”

“No you didn’t, I didn’t tell you.” She
just looked at him, waiting for him to ask. The silence of a few expectant
seconds felt like hours. She relented, “It’s Charlie.”

“As I was saying, Charlie, it was nice, no,
a pleasure to meet you. Maybe I will see you here some other time?”

“Maybe. Maybe next time we could go for a
drink.”

“Maybe.” He turned to go.

“And you? What’s your name?”

He hesitated a second and said, “John, you
can call me John.”

He tried not to let his excitement show as
he slowly made his way home. He would need to prep Lab B. It would need to be
ready for use again soon.

Charlie watched him hobble down the road,
then closed her eyes and leaned on her hands on the wall that jutted from the
edge of the cliff. Her legs were trembling. She could barely restrain herself
from reaching between her legs. Anticipation was the best aphrodisiac.

She took a deep breath.

Her mark was on him now. The others would
be jealous, but they would leave him to her.

“John, my darling we will definitely meet
again,” she whispered under her breath with a half-smile. “I wonder why he lied
about his name,” she thought. A good liar could smell a lie and she was one of
the best.

Jonni
Brown woke up as his head bounced off the surface of the desk.

He coughed self-consciously into his hand
and looked over at Finn to see if he noticed. Finn hadn’t; he was focused on
the experiment that was playing out on the monitors in front of them. Jonni and
Finn were sitting on a couple of plastic chairs in front of a steel desk that
held two black and white monitors. Behind Jonni and Finn was a heavy steel door
that sealed them off from the outside world. When engaged in winkling out the
mysteries of the human mind the outside world represented potential corruption
of experimental results.

The monitors on the desk showed two other
people, a man and a woman, sitting by themselves in rooms that were very
similar to their own. Instead of the monitors, they each had a set of cards in
front of them. Every thirty seconds the man would select a card and hold it up
to the camera so that Finn and Jonni could see the design on it. Fifteen
seconds later the woman in the other room would select a card from her deck and
hold it up for the camera in her room, allowing Finn and Jonni to see her card
and record the results of the trial.

Jonni had been looking forward to the
trials today. Subject N, also known as Babs, had performed phenomenally on the
cards the last time she had participated in the trial. She had matched all but
one of the cards selected by the target subject, demonstrating a massive, statistically
significant psi effect. Today was different, or it had been before he drifted
off.

He looked over at his friend again. Finn’s
shoulders were rigid and he was peering at the screen with the woman. She had
just selected a card and was lifting it towards the camera. Finn was moving his
head to the side, as if that would let him see the card more quickly. She
turned the card to face the camera, “Yes!” said Finn. Jonni saw the two
subjects place their cards on their tables, stand and leave their respective
rooms.

“So, um, how did she do?” Jonni said.
“Before I got distracted there, she seemed to be doing pretty shite.”

Finn was looking down at the chart he had
been filling in, and he did not look up as he said, “Yeah, I can see how your
snoring would distract you.” Finn signed the bottom of the chart and looked up
at Jonni, “She continued to do terrible, remarkably terrible. So terrible, in
fact, that she completely nullified the statistical effect she demonstrated
last time.” Finn was smiling as he said this. His eyes were dancing with
excitement. Why the fuck was he smiling?

“Uh, but that’s bad isn’t it?”

“We shall see. I had a thought the other
day. A thought I need to talk to Proctor about.”

“It better be a brilliant fuckin’ thought.”
Jonni sighed. “Sorry, it just seems so fuckin’ pointless. I’m going to end up
like all the other bitter tossers who have made Parapsychology the science of
disproof. I wanted to prove that psi exists, that the Mind matters. Anyway,
fuck it, let’s get pissed. You coming on the pub crawl?”

“I was thinking of skipping it, I want to
run some more numbers to see if my theory will hold up. It will need to be
airtight if I bring it to Proctor. He’ll want Dawson to look at it too.”

The door opened. The man from one of the
monitors entered the room. He was of medium height, with brown hair starting to
grey at the sides. Except for his frigid blue eyes, he was completely
unremarkable

“Speak of the devil. Dr. Dawson we were
just talking about you. You are looking dapper this afternoon.,” Jonni was
going to continue in the vein, except, as expected, Dawson cut him off.

“Shut it, Toad,” said Dawson. “Did either
of you fuckups manage to keep your hands out of your pants long enough to
record the results? How’d they look?”

“Uh, yeah, um, I recorded the results.”
Finn was cowed by Dawson. Not just at that moment; Finn was generally cowed by
Dawson. Jonni did not really care how Dawson spoke to him, but it made him
furious to see his brilliant friend treated like a smear of dog shit. Jonni knew
from bitter experience that arguing with Dawson would only serve to make him
more abrasive, so he held is tongue and glared at Dawson. Jonni’s protuberant
eyes gave him an impressive glare, or so he thought.

“Well give it here, boy. I don’t have all
day.”

Finn handed over the chart. Dawson snatched
it and scanned down the list of results. “Just as I thought, nothing, you two
must have been smoking crack last time you tested her.” He handed the chart
back. “Input the results into the system tonight, before you leave. Do you
think you can manage to do that?”

Dawson did not wait for a response before
he pulled open the door and left.

“So, how about that drink?” When Finn did
not refuse right away, Jonni knew he had a chance, so he set the hook. “I think
that her royal pertness, Ms. Rebecca Jones, is coming. Come on, you know you
want to. Don’t be a wee Mary.”

“All right, all right, I’ll come.”

“What, no more arguments? No more pressing
statistical analysis? If I knew I only needed to mention your secret sweetheart,
Bex Jones, I wouldn’t have wasted my time softening you up.”

Finn looked down at the chart again, his
face turning a little pink. “I don’t know what you mean.” He stood and put his
hand on the door handle. “Wait, softening me up? How?”

“Oh you know, the little things, I didnae
use up all the toilet paper this morning, when I knew you were waiting.
Normally I would have.”

Finn shook his head and muttered, “I
shouldn’t ask.” He raised his voice a little. “So, what time is it at then?”

“Seven, meet me in the common room in the
Bute building. Oh and bring a scarf; it is a three-legged pub crawl and you and
me, pal, are partners.”

Finn sighed and left the room.

Finn entered the quadrangle bound by the
Psychology building, the Divinity building, and the Bute building, which housed
the Biology and Parapsychology departments. He paused and looked at the massive
oak that dominated the space. The oak was rumored to have been planted by Mary
Queen of Scots in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Apparently, even
oaks have sell-by dates. The tree was being cajoled into surviving by supports
and straps that prevented it from collapsing under its own weight.

Finn could see Professor Proctor on the far
side of the quad. Proctor was the current holder of the Bruce Chair of
Parapsychology.

Adolphus Bruce had been some crazy, rich
American, who had bequeathed a Chair in Parapsychology to the University. The
Chancellor of the University, allowing his greed to overcome his common sense,
had agreed to establish the Chair and in doing so had managed to alienate
himself from his fickle peers for the remainder of his career. Academics are
notoriously unforgiving in the geek eat nerd world that they inhabit. The
incredibly intelligent spend vast amounts of time trying to disprove, discredit
or scoff at the pet theories of their peers. Scoffing being the most
satisfactory, as it is usually used if no evidence exists to discredit or
disprove. Hence, when the Chancellor agreed to establish the chair, all those
with any real or imagined grudges took the opportunity to shun him. Proctor, as
the holder of the chair, was held in slightly higher regard, as he was not an
administrator.

Proctor was in the middle of a discussion
with Dr. Mara Novak and Dr. Andrew Dawson.

Mara was a marine biologist in her
mid-fifties and was good friends with Proctor. In academic circles that meant
that she did not call him a fraud and a quack to his face. Her severe dress and
tightly pulled-back hair was softened by the warm smile she directed towards
Finn as she noticed him across the quad.

Finn walked over to the group and caught
Proctor’s eye. The professor nodded to him. Dawson ignored him as he related a
story in his usual forceful manner, hands chopping the air and the occasional
drop of spittle flying from his lips. After waiting for a few more minutes,
with no acknowledgement from Dawson, Finn moved away and sat on the bench that
had been built around the trunk of the tree. He picked at the flaking green paint
on the bench as he waited for Dawson to wind down.

Proctor eventually extricated himself from
the conversation and made his way over to Finn.

“Poor Mara, I hate to leave her with him,
but one must look out for one’s self. Dr. Dawson’s intensity may make him a
great researcher, but it doesn’t make him less of a prick. Ah well, I will try
to make it up to her later,” he said. “What is it, Finn me boy? I’m running
late for a date with a beautiful single and I do not want to keep her waiting.”

“Sure, Professor, I’ll be quick. Could you
give me access to the archived results from our experiments for the last five
years? I have this theory I want to explore.”

“Can’t you just pull the data from the
database?

“I want to look at the raw data from each
trial, rather than the rolled-up results.”

“Alright, I’ll approve your access request.
You should be able to get into it tomorrow sometime. Want to talk about it more
before you dive into the numbers? I may be able to save you some time. You
should join me on my date; she is an 18-year-old — Edradour.”

“Much as I would like to, Professor, I
myself am meeting some people, not a bottle of single malt. Let’s talk tomorrow
or Monday.”

“Oooh, people, aren’t I jealous? Anyone I
know?”

“Not telling”

“Ah I see. Can I assume that you finally
plucked up the courage to ask out Ms. Jones? No, don’t protest, it is as plain
as the nose on your face. Get a move on, I’m tired of you mooning around the
lab every time you catch a glimpse of her.”

“Mooning!” said Fin indignantly, “I’ll show
you mooning.”

“Heavens no, you’ll put me off my whisky!”

Finn laughed. “Anyway, it’s not a date or
anything, I am just going on a pub crawl with some of the other postgrads,”
Finn said. “She may be there though.” He smiled. “I’ll let you know if my
thought becomes a theory.”

Rebecca was an Evolutionary Genetics postgrad
who started at her studies at the University at same time as Finn. She was
smart, confident and smelled wonderful. She had a bob of straight black hair
that fell into her face, even when she tried to put it up. She laughed
wholeheartedly from the stomach in great guffaws, had the slightest Welsh accent
and could shoot pool like a pro. Her smile brought light to the darkest of his
days. Finn loved her more than anyone else in the world.

He just needed an excuse to actually talk
to her.

Maybe tonight.

Maybe.

When Finn turned up, he saw that Jonni was
wearing his favorite T-shirt, the one that said, “Frankie says Fuck Off.” He
was scratching his goatee as a way to draw attention to it. Jonni had a talent
for growing hair. Back, chest, neck, face, ears and nostrils; it didn’t matter
where, he just seemed to grow great black tufts of hair in a matter of hours.
He took advantage of this by growing and then shaving off various forms of
facial hair. He was currently in his goatee stage. This annoyed Finn to no end,
as he was unable to grow much more than a fuzzy lip and a few long hairs on his
chin.

“Alright, pal,” said Jonni. He called
everyone “pal” this semester. He had called them all “mate” last semester. Finn
wondered what was next, maybe “chap”? The truth was, Jonni did not have many
friends and he considered Finn his best friend as well as his flat mate. Finn
saw Jonni more as the other postgrad in the Parapsychology Department as well
as his flat mate. However, Finn did not have many friends either, so they spent
a great deal of time in each other’s company.

Rebecca was there, which was good. But, she
was there with Dieter, which was less good.

Dieter was a visiting scholar from the Mac
Planck Institute and studied Evolutionary Genetics, like Rebecca, so he spent a
lot of time with her. Finn tried not to be jealous, but he could not help it
when he looked at the tall, blond German. Dieter was probably what Hitler had
been envisioning when he thought of a master race. Finn took secret pleasure in
the knowledge that Dieter seemed to have no detectible sense of humor. That
could have been due to a language barrier — he could be the German version of
Charlie Chaplin back in the fatherland, though Finn doubted that. He preferred
to believe that Dieter was boring in every language, to offset his physical
perfection. It just wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

Diana, who had over-organized the pub crawl
to raise money for some charity that none of the participants really cared
about, climbed up on a chair. In her strident, public school voice, she said,
“OK, everybody. Everybody? OK, yah? Quiet down. I have some very important
instructions for you.” She paused for a couple of seconds. “You will find your
collection tins at the front of the room with a list of the pubs, in the order
we are visiting them. Should you lose track of the other participants, move
through the list of pubs in order and you will, no doubt, find the rest of us.
You should have all brought your scarves, as noted on the signup sheet. In
order to participate, each pair must tie their legs together with said scarf.
Remember, try to stay together, and if I find that anyone has tampered with
their collection tins there will be consequences.”