Genesis Plague (44 page)

TWO MONTHS LATER…

C
assidy opened her eyes and spat clear liquid onto the cold
metal floor.

Sparks shot out from a
ruptured wall monitor behind her, illuminating the ruins of the train car. It
lay half on the tracks, its nose jutting up at a sharp angle to penetrate the
roof of the tunnel.

The other lifepods were
empty. The one across from hers – the pod that belonged to Xander – was
shattered.

Cass wished that meant
he had died when the train car was derailed, but she saw everything while she
was in suspension. Her body processes may have been artificially slowed to a
crawl, but her mind worked as fast as ever, and she could see everything that
occurred through the blur of the gel in her pod.

That was how she knew
to look for the ring.

Her cold fingers slid
over the slick floor, searching. There was a chance it was lost forever. The
wreck was violent, and she would have been dashed against the inside of her pod
if it hadn’t been for the thick suspension gel.

Another burst of sparks
and she saw a metal chain hanging from a shard of broken glass on an empty pod.
She crawled across the tilted floor and picked up the chain, its metal gleaming
with clear gel, and was relieved to find the ring intact. Cass quickly slipped
the chain over her neck and crawled toward the front of the train car.

The dangling wall monitor
next to Xander’s pod played a video, broken up by bursts of static. Cass
stopped when she recognized herself.

In the video, she said,
“It is my desire to never again see a single person I claim to know and love.”

Then she looked into
the camera, but instead of the screen cutting out, she continued.

“Are you happy now, Xander?”

He chuckled off-screen.
“Quite, Ms. Baker.”

“You know I’m lying.
You know I don’t mean the words, so why did you make me say them?”

“Because we’re going to
fix you up, dear Cassidy, but there is a price. You’re never going to see him
again. It’s better for Paul, too. The sooner you believe that by your own
admission, the better off you will be.”

The camera continued to
roll, but Cassidy already knew what happened next. She crawled past the
monitor, not wanting to see herself cry. Then the video started over and played
from the beginning.

The floor of the train
car tilted up at a steep angle near the nose. Dim light seeped in through a
hole in the ceiling of the tunnel.

Cassidy climbed slowly
up the length of the car, catching herself when she slipped because of the gel.
The clinging black suit didn’t help, either. It offered no grip when she had to
climb the last few feet at the top of the train car by using the broken rock of
the tunnel ceiling as an unsteady ladder.

It was morning on the
surface.

Cass was alone in a
vast desert, probably hundreds of miles from the train car’s original
destination. The sky was red as dawn prepared to break, and the air was
unusually warm.

Cass sat in the sand,
her fist clenched tightly around Paul’s ring –
her
ring.

A sharp sting of pain
on the back of her neck made her wince. She slowly reached up and parted the
hair at the base of her skull. Horror crept over her entire body when she felt
three small tendrils protruding from her skin.

They wavered under her
touch, seeming to caress her probing fingers, and Cassidy screamed.

From The Author

—Book Two will be released in 2015—

You can sign up for my
newsletter here
to receive an email when it is published. In the meantime,
I have some free short stories on my
website you might enjoy.

Thank you for reading
Genesis Plague
.
If you enjoyed it, please consider
leaving a review on Amazon so other readers can discover the series.

More Books By The Author

(Click Cover for Amazon Link)

Horror/Dark Fantasy

Sci-Fi Crime Noir

Sci-Fi Action

This book and parts thereof may not be reproduced in
any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any
means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise—without prior written
permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any similarities to actual persons, organizations, and/or events
is purely coincidental.

GENESIS PLAGUE Copyright © 2014 by Sam Best