Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (27 page)

Hael looked back to Bral. Tears were
running down his face, a body lay before him, his sword bloodied. He moved on
to the next kneeling restrained captive and plunged his sword into the junction
of his neck and shoulder, deep into the body. He started to moan, the only
sound he could get out through the compulsion.

Hael looked back to Balor and saw no mercy
in his stony expression.

Three hours later the last of the enemy
combatants was dead. Bral was swaying on his feet from exhaustion, crimson from
head to toe. His dark brown hair was matted with congealed blood.

The wailing coming from the women and
children in the first stockade spiked as the last man was executed.

Hael was disgusted at his own complicity in
the entire affair. Now that it was over, he would comfort his sensitive little
brother as best he could.

Balor:
Come here, boy. You did well.

Bral stumbled over to where Hael stood
beside Mi Balor. Balor sat on Hael’s camp chair; he had told Hael to fetch the
chair partway into the massacre. Ten feet from them Bral dropped to his knees,
hung his head and dropped his sword to the ground.

Balor:
Now remember, boy, never, ever
resist me again. Understood?

Bral jerked his head in compliance.

Balor:
I think you have learnt your
lesson and I am merciful. You may rest and take refreshment before finishing
the job.

Hael’s head snapped around to look at Balor
in horror. The thought took longer for Bral to process in his exhausted state.
Once it did his shoulders started to shake as he realized what he was to do
next, then he glanced over to the first stockade. The wailing got louder.

Bral picked up his sword and climbed to his
feet. He turned towards the thousands of women and children he had been ordered
to execute. He then quickly pivoted back to Balor and drew back his sword over
his shoulder. He froze before he could complete the motion and throw his sword
at Balor. Balor had slammed a Compulsion back into place. Balor’s Nightfeeders
materialized behind him, ready to protect their master. He waved them off,
having control of the situation.

Mi Balor, Supreme Commander of the Northern
Campaign:
You all saw that this dog tried to kill me. Again I will show
mercy, and he may die rather than be taken to the City to be punished. I look to
you, his brother, to end his life.

Hael was shocked. Lucan was going to be
pulled into this madness as well. He looked around to see Lucan standing with
his other officers. He had expected all eyes to turn to Lucan, but they were
all turned towards him.

He looked at Balor and saw that he as well
was looking at him, eyebrows raised, waiting.

Looking directly at him, Balor again
broadcast his thought.

Mi Balor, Supreme Commander of the Northern
Campaign:
Fa Hael, I look you, his brother, to carry out the sentence.

Hael shook his head.

This was wrong. He should never have
allowed this to happen. Why had he allowed it to happen? It was more than just
fear of losing his position.

This was evil.

It was evil for Bral to murder restrained
prisoners, yet he had not objected.

He knew it was evil to Compel someone to
commit such an atrocity. He had not wanted to believe that one of the Host
could be evil, but the past three hours had been enough to make him believe it.

Balor saw the indecision on Hael’s face and
reached out to Compel him.

As Hael felt the compulsion start to
envelop his mind, he felt something rip deep inside him.

No more.

He pushed the alien influence out of his
mind and put his shields in place. The Compulsion rebounded off Hael’s
perfectly smooth shields. Balor’s mouth dropped open in surprise. No Guest
should be able to withstand a Compulsion from a Host Adept, much less a Host
Adept with a Lens at his disposal.

Hael –> Balor:
STOP.

Balor was awestruck as Hael’s Compulsion
took hold of him. He dropped his control of Bral.

A sword struck Balor in the face. Bral,
finding that he was free, had completed his aborted throw.

The Nightfeeders flowed over Hael and Bral.

Hael shot a glance at Lucan to implore him
to take no action. He need not have worried, as Lucan stood with the other
officers, arms crossed and a small smile on his face.

Where
the fuck was Charlie?

Her scream — her far from sane scream — had
originated from somewhere below the kitchen, but Rebecca could not find a way
down. She leant against a wall and loosened her spirit. It was risky without a
pentacle or some other warding to protect her spirit and even riskier without a
refuge prepared. There were a number of nasty things that could possess her
body if she left it unprotected for too long, not the least of which was
Leader. The sense of urgency overrode her sense of self-preservation.

Her spirit quickly started to sweep through
the house. She found bedrooms and bathrooms, a snooker room, and she even found
the backup generator chugging away on the roof. She was sweeping back towards
the kitchen when she felt Leader questing for her.

She snapped back into her body and raised
her shields, shuddering at the thought of Leader catching her undefended on the
etheric plane. She would need to return to searching the old-fashioned way.

Then it came to her; she had heard Charlie
when the power went out. She ran up the stairs to the rooftop generator.

The lights flickered and went out.
Charlie’s psychic siren shriek started up again. He clutched at his head and
grabbed on to the stair rail to steady himself. He reached into his inner jacket
pocket and pulled out his phone, hit the button for his new custom app and made
some adjustments. He slowly straightened up, able to function again.

He turned his phone towards the darkened
stairway so he could see by the light of its screen and started down the stairs
again. He was almost there.

Charlie:
HE’S HER FUCKING BOYFRIEND.

Leader:
Charlie, calm down, we are
coming for you.

Charlie:
HE’S HER FUCKING BOYFRIEND.
BABY’S FUCKING BOYFRIEND, FROM THE BEACH AT THE UNIVERSITY.

Leader:
Charlie, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Charlie:
It’s him. It took me a while to
place him, but I know now. He’s her fucking boyfriend, he’s her fucking
boyfriend. She has been playing us. He broke me. He hurt me and hurt me and
hurt me and hurt me –

She broadcast images of her mutilated body.

Leader tuned Charlie out. Charlie had
fucking lost it; she was mad as a hatter.

She turned to Don and Lew and ripped open
their minds. She reviewed every millisecond of their encounter with the bully
boys on their protection detail. She compared their recollections of Quasimodo
to the damage they had done to Baby’s boyfriend on the beach twenty-one years
ago. It could be him. But there was no way he could have survived.

There was something deeper happening here.

Perhaps her nemesis had surfaced again.

Once she smashed the generator, Charlie’s
presence popped into her consciousness. With the power off, Charlie was a
brightly glowing, cancerous star of misery and insanity in the basement.

How would she get down there? These old
buildings were concrete blocks encased in stone. She needed to find the way
down.

She concentrated on her right index finger.
The distal phalanx of her index finger lengthened and poked through the fleshy
covering of her fingertip with a small pop. The tip continued to stretch until
she had a five inch spike of bone was protruding. She quickly scratched a
pentagram on the wooden floor of the upstairs bedroom she was in. It was not
perfect, but it would provide a little protection while she searched for a way
down into the sub-basement.

She energized the pentagram and cast out
her consciousness again towards Charlie.

She found the room Charlie was in. She was
barely recognizable. Rebecca moved on quickly, not wanting to examine Charlie
too closely. She moved through the door and found a staircase. Nearing the
bottom was Finn. He was completely inscrutable, odd sharp, metallic shields
protecting his psyche.

She had thought previously that it was just
that he had cut away so much of himself to survive that he was hardly human, but
now she thought it must be something else. He seemed similar to one of the
Quickened who had shielded himself. But he could not be Quickened; if he was he
would not have continued in his damaged shell of a body. He would have healed
himself if he were able. Wouldn’t he?

After seeing the images Charlie had
broadcast she had no idea what he was or was not capable of.

She followed the stairway in her spirit
form to a hidden door in his pantry just off his kitchen. Right where she had
started.

“Fucking bastard,” she thought. She snapped
back into her body and ran back down the stairs to the kitchen.

As Finn neared the bottom of the stairs he
briefly sensed a presence. Someone or something had found Charlie. He needed to
hurry.

Holding up his phone to see better, he
could see the lever outside Charlie’s cell that would initiate the
sterilization process. Above the lever was a box fronted with maroon glass.
Below the lever was a red button, the type you expected to see in a bunker
designed to launch ICBMs, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, for those of
you too young to remember the Cold War. In fact, the button had been a gift
from a Russian nuclear physicist that he corresponded with, so it could well
have had that pedigree.

He pulled the lever.

The number 0:30 showed in red numbers on
the maroon glass. Then 0:29. That was good news; he had been worried for a
moment that the batteries powering the sterilization sequence were drained
somehow.

Pulling the lever started a sprinkler that
would saturate Lab B with napalm. The button was an override that he could hit
to ignite the room early if that was required. Early ignition would not
guarantee full sterilization, but it was better than nothing. If he did not
press the button ignition would occur once the room was saturated, when the red
countdown on the maroon glass reached zero.

Lab B would become a crematorium.

0:28

Rebecca was barreling down the stairs. Each
floor was connected to the floor below by two half flights of stairs. She was
moving fast, too fast to completely control her forward momentum. At the bottom
of each half flight she would turn her body and, like a swimmer, push off the
wall at the bottom of the flight of stairs to launch herself down the next
flight. Her velocity was such that the lathe and plaster walls exploded with
splinters and dust as her body used them to decelerate and change direction.

As she ran, her body’s healing ability
exuded the splinters that penetrated her skin.

The temperature in the stairwell dropped as
she pulled in the ambient heat to heal herself and to boost the power of her
muscles. Her breath fogged out of her mouth as she ran.

0:25

Thump, thump, thump.

The sound kept tempo with Finn’s heartbeat
and was getting louder

Someone or something was coming.

0:20

It was raining jelly in the lab, jelly that
smelled like petrol.

Charlie stopped her psychic screaming for a
second and turned her face up to look at the oversized sprinklers on the
ceiling that were attached to the big white tanks with the red flammable signs
painted on them.

The gelatinous rain burned where it touched
her skin.

Charlie:
GET HERE NOW!

The temperature in the room plummeted as
she started to pull in the ambient heat in the room. Frost spread across the
tiles flooring her cage. The metal tables grew petroleum snotcicles as the
dripping jelly started to freeze.

0:15

Bex got to the kitchen and burst through
the hidden door in the pantry and circled down the spiral staircase to the sub-basement.

She could feel Leader reach out to
communicate with her. She kept her shields up and, miraculously, Leader could
not get through. She had never dared to try and keep Leader out before.

She really was stronger than the others.

She rounded the bottom of the stairs and
saw Finn standing in the rough hallway with his hand on a big red button. He
was staring intently at a screen that showed 0:12 in red numerals. Then a
second later it showed 0:11.

She charged him.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. BOOM. Silence.

CRACK. The door at the top of the stairs
must have been breached. Pieces of wood tinkled down the stairs. He could hear
someone running down the stairs, three or four steps at a time.

He turned his head from the timer and saw
that Bex was almost on top of him. He pushed the button.

Charlie’s mental scream brought Bex to her
knees.

Finn stepped forward and pressed two
self-adhesive electrodes to Bex’s temples. He then wrapped her head with duct
tape, ensuring the electrodes were secured.

Charlie’s mental scream trailed off and
Rebecca shook her head and regained her feet.

“Finn, what did you do?”

“I did it for you, Bex, for you and me. I
can fix both of us now. I know I can.”

“But, Charlie.”

“Bex, she was a monster. She consumed
everything in her path. She and her kind are a plague upon the earth. The only
thing useful she ever did was to teach me how to start healing myself, and
maybe how to fix you. You’ll see. I will make us better.” Finn pulled out his
phone and fiddled with it again. She tried to call out to Leader but couldn’t;
she was locked in her mind. “Follow me,” said Finn.

“No, I don’t even know what you are. I
can’t decide who is scarier: you or Leader. Why should I go with you?”

Finn sighed and tapped his phone.

She lost consciousness.

Finn had not wanted to knock her out, but
what choice did he have? It seemed like he never had a choice in anything; he
just knew what needed to be done and did it. It all seemed predetermined.

He picked her up and threw her over her
shoulder.

He was feeling stronger, so much stronger.

At the end of the hall a midnight outline
coalesced out of the shadows.

Shadow –> Finn:
You have done well,
my son, as well as you could have. But beware this dark path you are following
is perilous … be careful not to lose your humanity. Depend not too heavily on
the machines you build, for they are a shortcut but they can also be a dead
end.

Finn –> Shadow:
I appreciate your
concern, but I needed to act; the time for waiting has past.

The shadow bowed in acknowledgement.

Shadow –> Finn:
Promise me that you
will not abandon your search for enlightenment now you have achieved an
approximation of what you could become.

Finn –> Shadow:
Fine, I promise, when
I have time. Now I need to leave. Do you have anything else to say, Hael?

Hael faded back into the shadows, and it
appeared that their conversation was over. Finn opened a false panel in the
wall and walked away from his home through the tunnels under the city.