OTHER BOOKS BY GARETH WORTHINGTON
The Children of the Fifth Sun Trilogy
Children of the Fifth Sun, Book One
Children of the Fifth Sun: Echelon, Book Two
Children of the Fifth Sun: Rubicon, Book Three
Written With Stu Jones
It Takes Death to Reach a Star, Book One
In the Shadow of a Valiant Moon, Book Two
Condition Black
AWARDS
It Takes Death to Reach a Star
2019 IPPY Bronze Award Science Fiction
2019 Feathered Quill Gold Award Winner Science Fiction
2018 Cygnus Award First Place Ribbon Dystopian Science Fiction
2018 Dragon Award Nominee Best Science Fiction Novel
2018 New York Book Festival Winner Science Fiction
2018 Readers’ Favorite Honorable Mention Science Fiction
Children of the Fifth Sun
2019 Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention Science Fiction
2019 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize Shortlist
2019 Eric Hoffer Award First Horizon Finalist
2018 London Book Festival Winner Science Fiction
2018 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Finalist Science Fiction
Children of the Fifth Sun: Echelon
2018 Hollywood Book Festival Winner Science Fiction
A Time For Monsters
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 Gareth Worthington
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher, except where permitted by law.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-64548-070-9
Published by Vesuvian Books
www.vesuvianbooks.com
Only a monster can do the wrong things for the right reasons.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue
About the Author
Oslo, Norway, 2016
Cold morning sunlight cut through the window blinds and slashed across the dead man’s face. His still-warm corpse sat on the floor, propped against a simple metal-legged bed, and his steel-colored eyes stared off into the void. Thick blood ran down his forehead, across his Roman nose, and dripped onto his lap.
Reyna Blackburn considered his resemblance to a discarded toy.
There’s a certain irony in that, she thought.
Rey’s chest heaved with adrenaline and exertion. He had fought back. She hadn’t planned on a struggle. Rey rubbed at her throat with her free hand, a bloodied wooden block still tight in the other.
Prick.
She grabbed him by his short, salt and pepper, brush-like hair, and pulled his lifeless head back. He still smelled like stale cigarettes. The stench filled her throat. Rey was a bloodhound for that damned stink and could tell from fifty paces if another person had smoked even one cigarette. Bile rose in her throat. Cigarettes. The drug of the poor, too afraid to do anything harder like coke or heroin, too pathetic to do something creative with their hands other than moving a damn cancer stick from the ashtray to their mouth.
Saliva filled her mouth, and she imagined the stringy liquid clinging to his features if she were to spit on him. Still, she composed herself. Now was not the time. There were rules to follow. Procedures to respect.
She let go of his hair and his head lolled to the side. The backpack slipped from her shoulders. Rey unzipped it, drew out a plastic Ziploc bag and an empty glass bottle. She readjusted the goggles on her face and pulled the hood of her chem suit tighter to ensure she didn’t contaminate the scene—though being entirely bald, not even having eyebrows, helped.
Heart’s “You Ain’t So Tough” played on repeat at nearly full volume through the wireless earbuds wedged into her conchae. The familiar lyrics were sung so powerfully by Ann Wilson, and that strong drumbeat ignited Rey’s neurons and made her chest swell. That song combined with the acrid scent of cigarettes clinging to his skin. Rey’s overloaded senses ignited her memory, transporting her right back there again. The thought pressed home her purpose.
The wooden block slipped into the Ziploc bag and both went into the backpack. Rey pawed through the dead man’s blood-matted hair, searching for the hole in his skull left by the blow. The wound didn’t take long to find—a wet, one-inch crater near the hairline by his temple. She grabbed the bottle by the neck and pushed it into the gap. The glass scraped and squealed on bone until it became wedged.
Rey stepped back and surveyed her art—a fifty-something-year-old corpse adorned with the bottle as it filled him with whatever liquid it had once held. Yes, this was how he was supposed to look. How they all looked afterward.
For a long while, Rey stood still and silent, staring at him until his carcass became amorphous and gray against the harsh white light streaming through the window. Like so many great designs, planning had involved painstaking calculations and considerations over months and years. Yet the execution had lasted seconds. Perhaps minutes. An anti-climax to say the least. No time to savor the moment, revel in the genius of it all. One blow to the head and he was dead, just like the others—all ten of them. Perhaps a few extra seconds would make this death tangible.
“Cunt,” she huffed out. The word felt dirty in Rey’s mouth, and wholly inadequate. But then, language had so many limitations. Some had words with no literal translation to convey a specific feeling. Schadenfreude, the German word to express one human relishing the misfortune of another, was a favorite of hers. The Sami, living in the northernmost Baltics, had one-hundred-and-eighty words for snow. Such examples were too few and far between. Solitary words like love, hate, joy, sadness were meant to express emotions encompassing a maelstrom of internalized thoughts, wants, desires, hopes, dreams, failures, pain, and a plethora of intangible sensations. Cunt was the word she reserved for her victim, and all men like him. A poor substitute for the vitriol and venom that bubbled inside.
For Rey, only music could convey her innermost self. The precise string of words, sung by the right voice in the right tone in the correct melody against a background of instruments playing in harmony in the perfect key. Each song able to strike a chord known only to a singular person, as if written specifically for them. Yes, music had stirred humanity’s soul since the dawn of time, even helped han
d down history from generation to generation. In Rey’s universe, music had been her companion over these many years. The artists, her closest friends, able to articulate the agony, while the rest of the world didn’t give a shit. She needed those musicians as she needed air to breathe.
Rey snapped from her trance and broke her hateful gaze to survey the room.
Time to leave.
The space seemed clean. Her suit was intact. He’d not drawn her blood. The broken footstool the only tell of the struggle. Her stare roamed over the stained, sheet-covered bed, and across the plain white chest of drawers adorned with an ashtray, a single picture of her victim and a woman with peroxide blonde hair, plastic smile, and fake tits. Wife number two. His fresh start. Just like the other cunts, he had simply floated away from his old life and landed somewhere new—like one of the dust motes now drifting in the air—only noticeable when exposed by a shard of light. But that was the point. He and men like him lived their lives unnoticed, committing their crimes without punishment, without consequence, and then they simply moved on.
Until she came to the fore. She was the light.
Realizing she’d once again sunk into her thoughts, Rey jerked into action. One last scan of the room, and a fleeting glance at her victim, then Rey opened the door to the bedroom. She stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her. She moved quickly to the back entrance in the kitchen, pulled back the net curtain covering the window and peered outside. The snow came down hard now, white over white, which accidentally concealed the purposeful mutilation hidden in the simple house on a simple street.
In one movement, she opened the back door, stepped out, and closed it again. Rey slipped out of the full-body suit, under which she was naked except for panties. Snow clung to her prickled skin. Another delve into her bag and a new set of clothes appeared: jeans, a sweater, coat, and beat-up sneakers. Rey shuffled into the new garments, tied a bandana around her bald head, and pulled on a thick fur hat. The bloodied overalls and surgical gloves went into a Ziploc bag, which she stuffed inside the backpack.
Rey examined the horizon one more time, took a deep breath, stood straight, and walked out onto the wide street, her footprints already disappearing under a thick blanket of fresh powder.
Oslo, Norway, 2016
The sound of Arne Huakaas’s piss stream in the toilet bowl echoed throughout the apartment. One hand on the wall for support, the other cradling a dying cigarette, he watched the water turn a deep shade of amber. Arne stared into the bowl, wondering if he actually urinated pure beer. He gave his old, shriveled cock a couple of shakes, zipped up, dropped the cigarette butt in the toilet, and flushed. Without washing his hands, Huakaas ambled out into the bedroom.
The crime scene investigation team froze in the middle of whatever it was they were doing, becoming human statues. Each of them stared at him with such horror he might as well have bludgeoned the victim to death himself.
“Did you just piss in the dead guy’s bathroom?” one of the techs asked.
Arne didn’t know his name. He didn’t bother to learn any of their names. “You got anything?”
“Not yet,” another tech said, irritation in his voice as he tended to the glass bottle protruding from the victim’s skull. “Not that we will ever find anything worthwhile with you traipsing through the fucking crime scene.”
Arne heard the dig but simply didn’t have the energy to fight with some jumped-up college graduate who was barely out of diapers. The kid had been a tech for what, a year probably. Two tops. Huakaas had been a cop for thirty years, and a detective in Den nasjonale enhet for bekjempelse av organisert og annen alvorlig kriminalitet—though most people just called it Kripos—for twenty. He wasn’t screwing with the crime scene because there was no evidence worth a damn with which to screw.
There never was. Not with this perp. It had been a year since the last murder, but the MO was unmistakable. The King Kubb Killer was back. That’s what the forensic techs called the maniac. Last Easter, this sick bastard had taken Norway’s national pastime, Påskekrim, and bastardized it.
Every Easter, television and radio channels produced a crime series. Publishers put out a series after series of thrillers. Milk companies even printed crime fiction on their cartons. The tradition began with an advert of Gyldendal's publisher, Harald Grieg, during the Easter of 1923—not that Arne was old enough to remember the birth of such a tradition, despite what his colleagues might say. The advert appeared like a regular news article on the front page of Norwegian daily, Aftenposten, entitled Bergen train looted in the night. In actuality, the text advertised the new crime book by Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie. The tactic was successful. In the following year, a publishing house named Aschehoug focused on crime fiction during Easter. Afterward, it just caught on. For whatever reason, writing about murder was not enough for the King Kubb Killer. This sick asshole needed to up the ante by killing people.
Arne turned and left forensics to finish pointlessly sweeping the room.
Outside, leaning against the faded red wooden wall, he drew another cigarette from its packet and lit it up. The toxic smoke choked his lungs, and for a moment he felt the suffocation that came with the first drag. He exhaled and once again crisp Oslo air seeped into his chest. The contrast made him feel alive. He needed it when everything around him was dead.
The whole city felt dead these days. He’d grown up in Oslo, lived there his whole life, and once upon a time took great pride in that fact. One of the oldest cities in Europe, Oslo fused contemporary and medieval architecture. The city’s people were bright and direct and honest. At least they used to be. As a child, he’d been obsessed with Norway’s history. He’d even considered working at the Viking museum straight out of school, but his father had insisted the police force was a better way to give back to the city. Now, Oslo was unrecognizable. Half the residents weren’t even Norwegian. Family values had crumbled, and society had broken down. Though murder rates were far less than for the rest of the world, they were still much higher than they used to be. And, as a cop, he got to watch it all in painful detail.
Fuck it.
Arne’s partner, Bjorn Huus, stood in the garden. Young and hungry, he chased down any and every lead—much like a dog chasing a car with little idea of what to do should he actually catch it. Decades of experience told Arne most leads were dead ends, none more so than the wife of a murder victim. Yes, in his youth, he too placated the widows with gentle gestures and softer words, all the while profiling them to determine if they had been the one to provide the corpse.
It wasn’t the wife. It was never the wife. At least not in Arne’s experience. That was for the movies. Murder was a man’s game. Women got revenge in other ways. Sleeping with his best friend. Clearing out his bank account. Taking away his children. Women played emotional games and mind fucked their spouse. Occasionally, there might be an argument and a woman might lash out, but the physical damage was fleeting and the majority of men—at least the ones he’d encountered—never reported it. Too embarrassing.
And this debacle? It was the work of a lunatic. Not a disgruntled housewife. This new widow, for instance, the one whom Bjorn now passively interrogated, was a stripper-turned-magazine editor. She’d reported the murder a couple of hours ago. When Arne had arrived on the scene, she’d been in pieces on the floor of the kitchen. Arne had given her a sideways glance as he passed, leaving Bjorn to peel her from the tiles and take her outside to breathe.
Bjorn met Arne’s gaze.
Arne turned away and surveyed the outside of the house, hoping perhaps a clue, a connection between the victims would leap out from the structure. He stared at the wood paneling and small rectangular windows, then allowed his gaze to wander to the patch of evergreen trees just off the snow-covered path. The grounds were idyllic, masking the horror inside the walls of the quaint house. Quaint, but expensive out there in the suburbs. This house was nothing like the last victim’s or the victim before that. Different sides of town comp
letely. The owners had different social standing, different jobs. Some didn’t even have jobs.
His department had managed to keep a lid on six murders last year. Keeping the details vague, purposefully hiding the whole bottle in the head thing, kept reporters at bay at least for a while. That and a cordial relationship between the Kripos and a top newspaper. When the murders stopped, the media lost interest and chased something new. But now this bastard was back, and five bodies had already been racked up. If the killer followed the same pattern, number six would soon follow and then he’d disappear again. Should the press get hold of the details, and connect these murders to last year, Arne would be fucked and labelled incompetent.
Arne exhaled his frustration from withered lungs and closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind. Easter Sunday was less than a week away. That meant one more victim. There were always six murders over the Easter period. After that, the perp would disappear for another year. The MO was unmistakable—the killer stalked his prey and carefully selected his victim from people playing Kubb in a public area, such as the palace grounds, Frogner park, on the banks of the fjord, or beside one of the small lakes in the Oslomarka. Any one of those sites would do. The victim was always male, always in his fifties. The killer followed him home, entered the domicile, and bludgeoned him to death with a single blow, using the corner of a Kubb piece. The king piece to be specific, at least according to the lab. A twelve-inch-long and three-inch-wide block of wood, with a crown carved into one end. Wood fibers were found in the wound.
There had been much debate with the departmental psychologist on why the perp had chosen Kubb. On the face of it, Kubb was a simple lawn game. The object was to knock over wooden blocks—kubbs—by throwing wooden sticks—klubbs—at them. For the average player, it was like a combination of bowling and horseshoes. The ultimate object of the game was to knock the king over before the opponent did. For the experienced player, however, there was much more strategy to it. If a player or team knocked over the king before achieving their objectives, that player immediately lost. This strategy had some connection with the murders, Arne could feel it in his old bones. The psych department agreed but couldn’t piece together why.
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