The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series

by Doug McGovern

  “Oh, look at you, beautiful creature! You are Helen to our myth. As the Trojan princess’ face launched a thousand ships, so your face has launched the Air Force’s finest in pursuit of that one love that became an abomination to save you.” Leona’s eyes floated to Andromeda.

  Dexter spat into the dust and plucked a Damascus bowie knife from his belt. He’d armed himself to the teeth from the weapons confiscation they’d done of the city a while ago.

  “Look in my eyes. I don’t care if you are the Devil herself. I want you to hear what I will say.” He spat on her, digging his heels into the sand. She stood aghast and amused all at once.

  “Guts don’t always bring you glory, my young friend.”

  “Maybe not. But blood calls for blood. You did this to her. She may have died to save me for a day, but there’s only one way to be certain you will never rise again. I swear to your face. I will kill you myself before it’s all over.”

  “Take your best jab then, boy.” She spread her arms. Dexter shrieked and dove forward. She deflected the knife with her wrist and grabbed him up by his throat. He felt the life force drained from him. Certainly he would have been dead, except that Andromeda spun on her heel and thrust out her arms, sending Leona reeling to her knees. Dexter was hurled through the air, landing at Harrison’s feet.

  “Ah! No matter! I didn’t come for you anyway!” Leona stood up, thumbing the blood away from her nostrils. She glared at Harrison. Such a stare would have withered a thousand stouthearted natural men in a perfect world. In this paranormal adaption of the world they’d known, Harrison had the strength of a thousand armies in his one volition. He was dead, after all. She had killed him and recreated him as a weapon fit for the gods. He would never run from her. This knowledge infuriated her.

  “I guess the honeymoon’s over?” Harrison shrugged.

  “You know why I’ve come, don’t you?” Leona smiled and took a shaking step forward.

  “Halt! Or I fill you up, you crabs-packing old cow!” Reilly unloaded a few rounds at Leona’s feet. She danced as if on hot coals and stopped, giggling.

  “Is that any way to talk to your mother, darling?”

  Reilly dropped the rifle and took a step backward, jaw dropped.

  “You’re yanking my chain. You couldn’t possibly be anybody’s mama. Your uterus has got to be all shriveled up like a raisin, evil as you are.” Reilly spat on the ground and started hurling fistfuls of sand in Leona’s face. She-Hitler shrieked.

  “How dare you say that I am incapable of fertility?! I create life! I created a pause on death! I am a goddess and you are my child. The child of Alistair Buchanan. When it was safer for you to believe you were just one of the civilians, I had the story fabricated that your parents died in the Hurricane. Those people, the names and the pictures you were given… They never existed. How should you know? You were a baby when they’d supposedly died and abandoned you amongst the human wreckage displaced by the storm.”

  “Shut up!” Reilly started tearing at her hair and came running for her, head down, ready to rip her apart with her palms, never minding that she was the self-proclaimed goddess of the Apocalypse.

  Leona reached for her razor and swung out with it. Andromeda stopped the strike mid-blow. Leona howled against the power that her monster held over her. She thrashed, wrenching her arms, trying to get free. Reilly had fallen down on her haunches and backed away from the blade, horrified and whimpering at the feeling of fresh blood dribbling from it.

  There was a cougar-like howl from somewhere behind them, broken as if with a man’s enunciation attempts. Finally, a voice broke through, though it was more machine-like than human.

  “Caroline!”

  They all turned. There stood a man whose body was half rotten, ribs were exposed, and his lungs had been carved out. Plaster from a statue still clung to him. The frame to a gate clung to his heel, pinned there by some dangling piece of chain, gathering tombstone crumbles in his wake.

  “Taylor! You should be resting, brother, dear!”

  *****

  Chapter 12

  The witch…The witch…

  Rhythmic whispers echoed over the smoking street corners. Kingsley’s eyes darted to the sidewalks. This was a quiet town, with a scarce supply of unassuming people. How could it be the seat of She-Hitler’s darkest secret?

  “She’s taking him there.”

  “What kind of demon-seeking psycho stuff could they be doing?”

  “Should we call the state police?”

  “Remember what happened the last time? If we love our boys, we’ll let these crazies be.”

  “We have to do something.”

  “You know we can’t.”

  Disembodied voices debated their presence and disappeared around sidewalks. Kiara kept looking ahead as the white houses faded into the mist and smoke. Kingsley clenched his teeth, feeling the heat seeping through his shoes as he walked along the cracks, dispensing with superstition. He would have to be strong enough. The future hung on his shoulders. His eyes focused on all those graffiti messages that both welcomed him to hell and begged him to leave in the same breath.

  Kiara paused, turned and pressed a small soapstone cross into Kingsley’s palm. Only now did he realize that she kept several in her pockets at all times.

  “Walk softly. We’re going to walk through the St. Ignatius Cemetery to get where we’re going. There are bones that sleep there, that I buried there when the business was done, that don’t sleep in peace.” Her eyes were wide and gathering dark circles like echoes in memory’s fountain.

  “Those voices…Where were they coming from? People…I don’t see any people?” Kingsley turned back and felt the embers in the wind that touched his face.

  “Most of them are gone. The few who stayed don’t come out of hiding when I walk among them. My hands aren’t exactly clean in all of this, but I always acted against my will in the beginning. Still, we will make this place our fortress. We’ll be able to withstand anything she throws at us here, Lucien. This war is of the mind.”

  They bowed to their knees and crawled through a broken place in the rusting iron gate around the cemetery. A change overtook Kiara. Absolute paranoia crept in. Her eyes went wide. She puffed the smoke through her nostrils.

  “Some didn’t make it out. I see you…I see you all. I’m so sorry.” Her eyes filled with tears. Kingsley followed her gaze, knowing she was looking at something he wouldn’t be able to see.

  Then he spotted the small white statue of a little girl. He paused, feeling the breath sucked from his body as he began to understand.

  “It’s not far. At least, what’s left of it. We had to come this way, it’s out of the way, I know. I had to come to tell them, to say my peace. It can never be made right. Of all the things she’s ever done…” Kiara covered her face with her hands, as tears began to fall. Kingsley wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She looked up at him.

  “This way.”

  They walked for thirty more minutes until they were at the edge of the township. A road scrawled away into the forests, alerting them that there was a highway out of this Hell.

  “Here we are.” She pointed down. To slab upon slab of singed concrete blocks.

  “This is a demolition site?”

  “This used to be Fulton’s Children’s Hospital.” Kiara looked to the sky, sucking at her lips. Kingsley paused, breathless.

  “Oh…” It made sense now.

  “It’s time to go inside.” Kiara motioned her hands for him to follow.

  “Go inside of what? There’s nothing?” Kingsley stopped mid-sentence with his mouth hanging open. Kiara had knelt in the smoking dust and began to uncover with her hands a large iron-clad trap door.

  “The hospital is gone. Caroline’s ‘playroom’ is still here. Come with me. You will understand.”

  The smell of the fire grew stronger but now was laced with something else. Something acidic. He looked then, jaws dropping to his chest. There in the dark,
he saw the victims of Leona’s greatest sin. Suspended in animation as all the rest had been. For them, this torment was so much worse. Now the good doctor understood what was meant by the phrase “hell is for children”.

  *****

  Chapter 13

  He felt the weight of the water forcing the pressure in his cells to constrict in rapid minor implosions. He felt the fluid building in his lungs as his heart began to fail. Then there was the surge of fire evaporating that water, using the oxygen to burn and sending oxygen coursing through his brain cells. His adrenal glands jerked with the surge of Harrison’s Cure infused with a small dose of what Leona was calling Andromeda One. He was asphyxiating on a fire that would not let him die. Sinking into the black, silt-drenched eternity that is the sea.

  The waters parted above him as Derek’s tremors began to echo with sonar screams. The science of audio holography in DNA had not yet been explored much less understood. Leaf had no idea what was causing those siren-shrieks to echo from Derek’s bones and spread his own tormented fire throughout the deep. One thing was certain. They were suspended in a living death forever and the ocean would be their prison. All for the crime of seeking to do their patriotic duty. Of seeking to establish justice in Louisiana and sink Leona’s massive illegal corporation.

  “Oh my God…It’s all coming back to me now…”

  His hands swung up, fighting the press of the ocean that was as dark as his quiet thought. If he could just force himself up to Derek, he might be able to shove him out of the midst of the debris. The Captain was rattling the foundation of the world. The silt was being tossed up. Those trimmers sent echoes down to the earth’s crust, sending a hairline crack that bled magma into the internal organs of the sea.

  Before that terrible night in Shreveport, they’d finally been able to trace her illegal accounts back to the same source. The Fulton Elite Trust, the same bank that funded the Fulton Luxury Ocean Liners enterprise.

  “The Fulton family were the ones that backed her up. That makes perfect sense! They owned big stocks in Kelley Pharmaceutical. They also own Prometheus Automotive Innovation. Dad worked for those guys for like 20 years. She probably knows about my dad from his pioneering the whole super-sonic car prototypes. Yeah, so our espionage stuff may have uncovered the actual algorithms for the precise measurements and electro-magnetic pulse revolving piston systems…I kinda did steal the lifeblood for my ‘bullet Corvette’ from her, but the sedan length I added to the chassis, making the first one a passenger car for policemen…Yeah, that was my dad’s notes that made that possible.”

  He was sinking hopelessly into the abyss that would soon be sinking itself as their tremors and fire shook the ocean floor. If he’d been himself, terror would be gripping at his heart and stomach, making him beg God for mercy in this moment. Death had altered him in so many more ways than just setting his bones ablaze. An intellectual debate with himself about Leona’s tactical movements would have been the last thing he would have done in his previous life if faced with this same situation.

  “Fulton backing her up would explain where all those vintage cars her girls were driving came from. That and the Fulton Company encourages hiring women for key roles in their corporate visions. It would explain, partially, why they were all female.

  That’s gotta be why they were so theatrical too, with those costumes, and the props and vintage planes that went into the making of the Shreveport take down. The Fulton family also owns Midas Cinematic Industrial, the big movie makers of the millennium. They manufacture all that Hollywood crap. It wouldn’t be hard for Leona to come by…”

  His thoughts were jarred by the sudden lift that Derek’s earthquake brain stimulus was pushing on him, lifting him out of the silt and back to where they were face to face. He smiled. Leaf knew then that he was learning in part how to control it, manipulate it for his use. Any advantage they had in this war of the world’s end was a miracle.

  Leaf looked up, indicating that they should try to swim for it. Derek barred his teeth. His magnetism was keeping him grounded here. Leaf wouldn’t be able to haul him upward for long without roasting his skin and possibly burning laser holes in his bones. The increasing steam and bubbles surrounding them in roiling pockets suggested that his fire was heating up again.

  Suddenly, the Geryon creature came shrieking, swiping his clawed hands through the bubbles and friction. The soldiers whipped around, moving with fighting instinct. The Geryon sunk his claws into their shoulders like they were shish kebabs. He kicked and paddled to the surface with the same propelling swimming strength of a Great White Shark.

  Leaf felt a pop go through both of his ears at once. He cursed silently, bubbles shooting from his lips. He’d practically been tazed inside his brain! What?

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t tell him to spike you!” Either he was schizophrenic or he could somehow hear Jane Lewis’s surviving thought.

  “Jane?” Leaf was stunned when he realized that Derek had thought it not him. Derek’s brows had drawn back from surprise and his hands dug bloodily at the skewer wounds that had appeared in his shoulders. The creature was hauling them up and away toward the light.

  “Look, I can’t explain how we’re even doing this right now, guys. This is a call to arms, okay? Back to the fight, come on! We have the power to end this thing…We’re the new generation of Humanity, aren’t we?” Jane’s thoughts seemed to grow farther away, almost as if they were echoing.

  The soldier’s heads broke the surface just in time to see the struggle on the shoreline.

  *****

  Chapter 14

  They were suspended in the horror of his presence for an uncharted moment. Taylor’s lungs were gone and yet somehow he seemed to breathe in heavy gasping gulps.

  “Resting? After what you did to me?” Taylor’s voice was becoming more human-like as he struggled with himself to master newfound speech. He reached into his carved lungs and bones and pulled out an artificial respirator device, swinging it in shaking hands like a pendulum.

  Leona was frozen for just a moment, fuming.

  “Kiara. Only Kiara would have known to have woken you up again.” She swung the razor up again, taking a thoughtful stance.

  “I won’t matter. Nothing will. I still own the world. I bought its soul. I can clean house if I want. A spoiled child playing with porcelain dolls is what I am. If any of you had hope for the World at large, you should have been wiser. You should have let me have my way.”

  “Do you hear yourself when you talk, lady? Let you have your way? You would have killed us. All of us. Still probably will.” Reilly spat in the sand, having hauled herself back to her feet. Leona’s attention snapped back to her.

  “Now I regret letting you live. You were only a baby the night that the hospital went to hell. You should have burned with it.” She took a long stride forward, bringing her razor up and swiftly down. It never reached the child’s face. The Andromeda had convulsed again, a bright light shooting from her in a road-flare flash. This time the light had run, beginning to take on human hands and face and features as it traveled with the curve of the earth.

  At last, the image split off into two. One took a begging stance above the child, being cut down as soon as it lived, rolling to its back as watery blood rolled from this Doppelganger’s throat. The other Doppelganger fell to her trembling knees.

  Jane looked up into Derek’s face, panting, trying to smile. Her golden hair stood on tousled ends as the wind teased it. She was dressed in the same red jacket and camouflage pants she’d been wearing the day when she went before Congress to discuss the Andromeda Act.

  “Dexter…” She took a deep breath, closing her eyes tight. There was lingering ultra-violet fluorescent residue on her fingertips, and eyelashes. Her hair steamed and smelled slightly burned like it had been pressed with a flat iron for too long. Dexter shook his head and slid to his knees beside her.

  “Jane?”

  “Dexter…Help me…” She was shaking as tears bega
n to bead in her eyes.

  “I’ve got you, Jane.” Dexter scooped the Doppelganger from the sand even as the fight turned nasty. Leona came scrambling for Reilly, but the Andromeda body-slammed her.

  “If blood has potency, then maybe drinking yours will give me strength!” Leona sank her teeth into the Andromeda’s neck. For the lady mogul-cum-dictator, it was a mistake.

  As soon as her teeth drew blood, she was electrocuted, writhing in place, beginning to glow the same intense blue as Andromeda’s veins. Harrison skidded on his knees to where Joseph sprawled with the syringe full of their precious new antidote. He scooped him up and fled to Dexter, who was peeling Jane’s struggling double away from the scene.

  They were turning aside for Reilly when Taylor finally tore forward, hands swinging out with the strength of an adult male grizzly. He knocked Joseph from Harrison’s hands. The two revenants tangoed for a suspended moment before Taylor’s heavy fist shot out viperously and closed around Harrison’s throat, hauling him over his shoulder. Reilly had dropped her Remington. She reached into the back of her jeans and produced a Smith & Wesson M&P from her waistband. She made through one round that whizzed past Taylor’s shoulder before he swung up with his knee and knocked the pistol from her shaking, child-sized hands.

  Reilly barred her teeth, springing backward. Hissing, tossing her head, she pulled free two ITS tactical lapel daggers from the rubber arm bands at her wrists that said “#Emojis” with several brightly colored faces and “LOVE” in bright pink letters. Taylor had noticed the knives and the clashing bands and paused for a moment in amused confusion. This stalling tactic wasn’t enough to stop him. He shot forward a hand. There was a magnetic pulse coming from him. Reilly watched in dismay as her knives were bent downward like melting ice cubes. She squealed in agitation and kicked up the dust.

  Taylor snatched out and threw her over his shoulder. He thrust forward the fingers of his hands, growling as the magnetic pulse tore through him. There was a rumbling sound coming from the sand a few hundred yards away. “Whipping Post” by the Allman Brother’s band began to bleed their way, at first almost mute, and then blaring. A ’70 El Camino rose from the sand, rattling as the magnetism woke its engine back up after all the years below. It’s rusting began to catch fire under the friction he generated in it. With a contented hiss, Taylor took long strides forward.