Leona rolled the girl’s corpse over. She was by no means anywhere close to being done. Reaching into her belt, she drew forth a tomahawk. She hacked at the girl’s front for a solid 20 minutes until the front was as mutilated as the back of her remains.
Leona sobbed and shouted, hands broken open by her strenuous murder. She lashed out and swatted her Dolls away from her. Screaming, she thrust a finger at Kendra.
“Pick what’s left of this little vixen up! You’re my assistant for the magic show I must perform now. The rest of you, bring out the Andromeda Cage! America, stay tuned! The games have just begun!”
*****
Chapter 21
The strategy had been to barricade Joseph and his son in a local hospital where they could begin emergency research on the Andromeda extract. It was hopeless. Having taken years just to discover the serum, how could they come up with a counteracting drug in the little time Harrison and Kiara could give them?
The truth was they suspected it was impossible. This was more an act of defiance.
Joseph studied his son’s awkward movements. Even though their last meeting had been in the midst of critically dire circumstances and they hadn’t seen each other for a decade before that, he could never forget the natural way his own child moved. Something was terribly wrong with him. His guttural instinct as a father was certain.
“Prison took your dignity I take it?” Joseph didn’t even look up from the microscope as he said it. Kingsley turned to face him with his jaw squared.
“What?”
“You’re not walking right. I take it that means prison was hard on you, eh?” Joseph spun around on the stool, at last, lowering his glasses.
Kingsley stared at his father, slack-jawed.
“What, are you gonna try to relate to me now? I started freaking Armageddon! My lead nurse is about to be sacrificed on live television. Whatever happened or happens to me from here on out is of no importance whatsoever.” Kingsley grabbed his arm and tried to look away from his father. Who stood slowly up and went to him, taking both his shoulders.
“Something I’ve been needing to say for a long time, son. No matter how long you’ve been gone. No matter what you’ve done. It’s never too late for you to take up the right path again. I believe you’ve got what it takes in you to make this right.” Joseph smirked and clapped his son’s shoulder.
Kingsley held his breath. He never thought he’d actually here his father utter those words.
Just then the TV set flashed an acidic color. They’d had it muted so they could think. Now they both turned to it. Despite not wanting to hear what was happening, they turned the volume up to maximum.
She was unrecognizable as human. Her body beneath her was like a bushel of strawberries rolling over the grass as they hauled her by the chains still attached to her wrist that she had jerked away from her post. Only her face remained mostly unscathed, but even her hair had been torn from its position, peeling her bangs up to reveal the top of her skull. Kingsley felt his whole body convulse. It was one thing to see a corpse on CNN. That was distant and almost tolerable, despite all he had seen. But to see the face of someone he had known? The person who had saved him?
He sank to his knees there in the center of the Lab. Felt his father’s hand on his shoulder as he too collapsed, as if they were in the presence of a queen. Jane had certainly been one of the most amazing people to ever walk the earth. There she was now, cold, exposed, singed with acid, leaving puddles of what remained of fluid in her as her blood had been milked from her.
Jane Lewis was dead. This was a rumor, a nightmare, something that Kingsley’s eyes saw but his head could not believe. A camera trick. Smoke and mirrors and nothing.
Words were said. Leona raved at the camera, striking it once with the whip that had ended Jane’s life. Blood and glass scattered everywhere as that camera blinked off and another was brought to take its place.
The husk of Jane’s remains was being hauled into what looked like an iron maiden, but was made out of a weird white alloy and was affixed with multiple IV bags, filled to brim with Andromeda extract.
“The metal! The metal that the thing is made out of! It stabilizes it somehow! That’s why she’s using it as the container…” Joseph’s jaw dropped and he jabbed his finger at the screen. In the face of the utterly horrible situation, he’d had an epiphany.
Kingsley swallowed, fighting to find his voice. He knew that his father was just as devastated by this image as he was, but he was using his horror as a catalyst for genius. Genius that would save other people from a fate like Jane’s.
“Think Harrison will know what that stuff is? Better question, where we can get some?” Kingsley looked to his father desperately. He didn’t answer.
Leona was piercing the many needles into what remained of Jane’s body. Finishing, she slammed the human body-shaped cage door shut.
There was no further chance of speculation, no matter how desperately they needed to know the cure. The horror of what they were about to witness would change the course of history. From the present day until the end of time, science had reached a new zenith peak in that one moment where Andromeda was reborn.
Leona extended a cellular device and pressed a command code on it. The cage began to vibrate with visible energy impulses. Now that the machine was on, they could see that it was composed of many bronze rings that began to revolve in a blinding helix about the corpse. The alloy suddenly glowed a dark orange as it began to chemically react with the Andromeda extract that first sprayed on the profusely mutilated corpse.
The electrical impulse and the rapid turning of the wheels began to create electromagnetic frequencies that hovered around the body, visibly moving pieces of shredded flesh.
Leona cast down the cellular device and picked up what looked like a video-game controller. She began to twist the joystick. Now the cameras revealed a small utensil moving on a metallic swivel that guided those magnetic forces in piecing the cells of Jane’s mutilated body back together in what looked like a burnt orange honeycomb of flesh.
The needles began to pump the Andromeda extract full throttle into the reconstructed corpse. Jane’s dead eyes popped open, opaque and orange like the surface of Jupiter as the electricity illuminated them.
Her hair caught the white fire of energy’s essence and floated around her face as though it was being rinsed by unseen water. The external walls of the cage began to rust and flake off like excess drywall.
The inner walls of the Andromeda cage began to shrink and stick to her body in a perfect mold, forming strong brass rods that folded together like a second skin. Body armor replaced her mutilated flesh, Hellenistic and Modern at once.
They could see the bottom of the tank where the Photoacoustic Spectrometer was located. The pipes that lead down to it were filling small nodules with her blood droplets. The heat of her fire was the laser that it needed to activate. Her DNA served as the PC processor that the device would need. They saw something that they could never have expected in all of their wildest dreams.
There was a flash that shook the ground. She burst free of the Andromeda cage like the Phoenix from its ashes. The Photoacoustic Spectrometer at her feet shot forth a light that reflected off of her blood samples. A thousand or more holographic images of herself shot forth, reflecting off of the one central vessel. They gathered sentinel around her, arms akimbo, seeming to somehow possess consciousness of their own. Spectral and more. They were each evolutions of the secret power contained in her DNA’s double helix. Manifesting Doppelgänger offshoots, they were just many branches extending from a single tree.
Every one of her faces stood gaping at them as her primary vessel’s tongue began to radiate white fire and sparks shot from her teeth. Her skin became translucent. The electronic impulse within her was so strong it made her glow from the inside out the color of a massive diamond filled with the entire Aurora Borealis. She was radiant, like the sun walking the Earth.
She shrieked at
them with a resonance that made the ground vibrate and crack.
“Behold! I have raised a goddess! The age of Andromeda begins!” Leona raised her hands to the smoking sky as the ground trembled and shattered beneath her.
*****
Chapter 22
“Pick up! Pick up!” Kingsley crunched the cellphone in his palm.
You can’t be gone too. You’re the first person I can honestly say I know I love. He held his breath. Kiara was on the outside of the lab. It was her job to help Harrison head up this immortal last stand. It was his job to take what she had taught him and use it to protect his father while he performed research on the substance. He knew that. Their budding relationship had been founded fundamentally on respect. Yet now that he had her, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. That was too much to ask for atonement.
She was out on the front lines. As the planes had descended they’d knocked out a brick wall. Head first, she dove in to dig several kids out. Her phone had tumbled over the rubble in the process. She swam through the crushed stone trying to snatch it up as another heat wave passed over.
“Bleach, copy.”
“Kiara.”
“Kingsley, what have you got? That was quick. Kudos to the Good Doctor!”
“We owe the credit to She-Hitler herself, actually. It’s the alloy that the Andromeda cage is made out of. I don’t know if you’ve got picture there, but we just witnessed the execution and resurrection of Jane Lewis on screen. You know what I mean? She calls it her favorite toy, so I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone under her heel has. She threatened to use it on me a few times.”
“Do you know what it’s made out of or where we could get any to react with what we’ve got?”
Kiara twisted back to look at the fight. The pirates had touched down on the ground. They came storming through the flying concrete grit of smoldering buildings, beauty queen hair singed by the raining fire, mime face paint melting. They began to light up the street with full-automatic cover fire.
Harrison popped out of a foxhole he’d dug in uprooted asphalt.
“Volley!” He, Reilly, Dexter and a great number of other citizens opened up on the street. Several of the pirates began to wilt like carnations in the Sahara.
“She-Hitler didn’t climb as high as she is by being a fool. If the metal you’re talking about is her Achilles’ heel, then she would hide deposits of it in the one most vulnerable place to her.”
“How will you find it?”
“She’s my sister. I know her better than anyone left alive.”
Kingsley felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.
“She what?”
“Now you understand how I managed to be in her employ. I know her better than anyone. I’m the only one that remembers her before she became what she is. When she was a little girl with a different name and pigtails.” Kiara swallowed as a wave of memories and physical bullets ricocheted around her.
“Okay, so… Where is it?”
“Our family cemetery.” Kiara hauled herself to her feet. She had vowed to herself she would never go back there under any circumstances. Today she would break that vow. This was a legitimate reason. She told herself that humankind was worth losing her identity and the one choice she’d been allowed to make on her own. In this way, she would atone for all that she had done.
“Keep your eyes open, Doctor. I’m coming for you soon.” She hung up in his head, charging forward to outrun the onslaught of bullets and rocket launchers stripping buildings from the block.
*****
Chapter 23
“Get to the boats! Hustle!” Leaf wrapped his hands in a soaked towel that had been left by one of the topside deck pools and towed the safety rafts free of their hang-ups. He hurled them into the water, finding that the towel only slowed his internal burning down. He couldn’t risk frying holes in the civilians’ only means of escape.
Derek was using his biological seismology to their temporary advantage, standing dead center of the decks and upsetting the balance enough that the pirates couldn’t advance or fire with any clear direction. The time he bought was precious, though, as some of them were already strapping on bulletproof vests that were studded with counter magnets and were standing up straight.
Leaf was left to round up the tourists in the meantime. Which was no mean feat with his hell-raising visage. Some ran from him affright. Some couldn’t jump the distance. He lashed out with his scorching towel clothed hands, grabbed them and swung them over the water, tossing them like basketballs and dunking them somehow upright in the rafts.
He looked back as he heard a hissing sound coming from the gunwale.
Greek fire rolled with its thunderous discharges over the deck of the cruise liner. Leaf threw himself forward and held his arms in the crucifix shape as it flowed in circular ripples for a huddling family of Hawaiian-shirt-clad tourists.
The father of the bunch looked up in horror at the man’s flaming eyes and incinerated jaw line. Leaf clenched his orange coal glowering teeth and screamed as the flames coursed over and through him. It shocked them when he laughed through his agony. There was little damage left that it could do, right?
Leaf was a mountain of a man. He could use himself as a shield as the many siphon hoses trained from the gunwale. Pirates dressed as cocktail waitresses manned them with jeering laughter.
Derek stood in the center of the ship, faced by the pirate captain that had sabotaged this vessel. She was dressed as a Colonial commodore and was evidently the leader of the entire fleet.
“Look at you, sugar. Lit up like Christmas.” The Commodore rolled her head and reached her white gloved hands into her beltline. She pulled free what looked like two crescent half-moon knives, like the ones used in Ancient India. The curved blades were made of a magnetic substance. The Captain’s eyes lit up as he realized what this was for.
“Ah, right. You’re still figuring out your new body, I see. Well, I’m one of the She-Hitler’s stellar employees. Get my classes debt free. Meaning that I know ways of torturing you that the rest of academic research won’t be able to catch up with for another ten years.” She tossed her flowing golden hair out of her eyes as it came tumbling down from the Colonial pile-up she was sporting. She reminded the Captain of a malicious Siren with her sparkling green eyes.
“Leaf! Radio!” He barely got the words out. It was a struggle to move and breathe, much less take on the gods. Leaf looked up as fire rolled from his open throat, down his chest, and onto the deck at his feet. The family inched backward from him, with a harmonized yelp. The teenage daughter starting snapping pictures of him that made his eyes twist shut in pain.
“Your ship’s captain still alive? I need to wire coordinates for your rescue…Gah! Ahem, to Washington…” Leaf leaned backward. The father eased himself up.
“You came to help us…” He shook his head. Up until this moment, he thought that this was just another assailant. The battlefield is ripe for confusion even for seasoned veterans. He was a photographer from rural South Carolina and had never seen so much as an armed robbery.
Leaf stood up, jaws clenched, as flames began to shoot from his ribs like the fingers of the damned through the walls of their cage.
“I’m with the National Guard.” Leaf nodded, holding his breath, trying to swallow his many gasps of pain. The man’s preteen son was crying from terror and he didn’t want to make it worse.
The father nodded now, choking back the tears. This boy was barely as old as his baby brother. He could see that now through all the smoke.
“The captain’s dead.” He gulped. Leaf nodded, his lips curling in a flickering grimace against his will.
“Ach! Right, okay. Do you have any idea where the control room is? I’ve got to get to those radios.”
The teenaged daughter swallowed and pulled a map out of her jacket.
“This is a map of the entire ship.” She held it out to him. He reached a hand fo
r it and then winced as he began to catch the corner of it on fire.
“Here, hand it to me, Sonya. I’ll go with him and read it to him.” The dad clutched it in tight fingers. Leaf nodded and turned to the wide-eyed mother.
“Get to the rafts. See, the man behind me? He’s my commanding officer. He’ll protect the three of you. It will be alright. Help is coming.” His eyes told them that his faith was being tested. He believed that help would come for them undoubtedly. What he questioned was whether or not help could come for himself.
The wife swept up both of her children under their arms and hauled them forward. They faltered, watching the frenzy between the electro-poisoned soldier and the cruel pirate-siren.
The Commodore spun her knives with the same helter-skelter ferocity of a wild cat’s claws. The magnetic impulses opposing those coming from him were astronomical. He shrieked as something deep within him broke, something their eyes wouldn’t be able to pick up. She swung her arms wide in the shape of the crucifix and his moved to mirror her.
His eyes lit up even as he thrust his head toward the sky. Something had occurred to him and he smiled with an imp’s humor. Holding himself in the magnetic field she’d imposed upon his wrists, he forced his legs to move against the current. They rolled like a baker’s pin on his pelvis, twisting left and right in their natural sockets, but he managed to bring his knee up into her gut. His electric force knocked her backward and she hit the ship’s rail. It cracked. Half of it began to come free and slide like dismantled brickwork into the ocean. The civilians screamed, petrified.
She glared at him with searing eyes, silent, contemplating the various ways he would die and soon. An eruption from the other end of the ship drew their attention.
Captain Matheson spun to look at the Commodore.
“What in God’s name was that?!” He jabbed a finger at the forecastle. A geyser of fire shot into the air, alerting everyone within 20 miles of their dark plight.
The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series Page 21
