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

by Doug McGovern

  They all hit their knees then beside Derek and Leaf.

  “We got what we deserved with this whole scapegoat scheme! We should never have sent you in blindly, Jane!” Matthews flashed her an accusing look. Jane looked up, looked over her brow.

  “Well, think about it this way. Had you sent in a whole team of Seals or something, she would have had ten trained assassins instead of one unassuming nurse to turn into little Andromeda’s floating death-strike around the skyline, huh?”

  “Yeah, don’t blame, Jane. You’re the one holding the pen on all the acts and laws and things, Mr. President. Could have vetoed it just as quickly as you flashed the green light.” Joseph’s nostrils flared.

  “Let’s play the shame and blame game when we’re done stopping these two from turning full Andromeda or whatever you wanna call the thing my sister is morphing into.” Taylor tapped the syringe Joseph had lying on his chest.

  “’Kay, Boss Surgeon. This isn’t going to fix these boys, but it will probably be enough to slow everything down. First off, though, you’re going to have to electrocute them. I know what you’re thinking! Trust me, though, it’s better for them to wind up fried than to wind up like old Taylor Rievaulx, a’ight?” Taylor smiled and pulled two Tasers from his pockets.

  “Where do I?” Joseph’s eyes rolled in his head. This was against everything he valued as a physician.

  “Don’t trust it! Why are we trusting it? Hell, you should kill it!” Matthews punched Dexter in the side of the head and snatched up his gun, aiming for Taylor. Taylor whipped a Damascus bowie out of his bootlaces, deflected the gun barrel, punched Matthews’ in the throat, and gripped him by his hair as he was reeling backward.

  “Understand some stuff, real important for the final exams, Mr. President. You know that age-old tradition that you should pay kind respects to your dead? I’m the one that saved you just a while back. I could leave you to die and there’s nobody that can haul me to trial for treason. Yeah, I’m feeling gracious today. There’s a new sheriff in New Orleans. Guess you’d better show some respect.” Taylor growled and let him fall back to Jane’s feet. She stood looking down at him unblinking. It had taken just these few moments to lose all respect for this man that she had sacrificed her life and future to help.

  “Clock is ticking, I think. Where do I?” Joseph waved the Tasers in a synced circle.

  “Do it in their temples, high voltage, thirty seconds each. I know it sounds brutally crazy, but we’re saving them a lot of grief from this consciousness cash pool.” Taylor spun back to the fight, horrified. Harrison’s screaming at them was echoing down the street.

  “Coming your way! Blood pumps her up! It’s like crack for these things!” Harrison was racing his bike down the street, waving at them to bail to the sidewalks. Leona charged in front of him. Jane instinctively jumped in front of Leaf to block his vision. Leona held Cyrus Manson and Theodore Fulton’s heads swinging by their hair in either hand. Their blood was dripping down her chest. She snapped their eyes in her teeth like a teenager pops chewing gum.

  Leona shrieked and spit the eyeballs out, hardened nails tearing at her own skin. Stomping slowly to Jane, head thrashing in jerking motions, she began to whimper.

  “She is my weakness, my strength, my power. Now I’m the puppet and I was the Queen. Help me, Jane. Please, kind, sweet, pure-hearted…Ach! She’s splitting me up into many heads, many bodies. Sending me there! Every second takes me closer to…She wants to wake them up. Those I wronged most of all. My friends and accomplices…” Leona’s head thrashed and she scraped her fingernails over the heads she dropped, clawing the tops of their skulls off.

  “I killed them, my chiefs and my sponsors. All to clean house and start over. You see. I can be a better god. One that could please these masses, teach them, bring them to an enraptured state of enlightenment. That was my sacred calling. Now I am losing it to her and the madness that I birthed in her. My creation has turned on me. Jane, please!” Leona’s whole body began to convulse much like Derek’s had been.

  “You brought this whole thing on yourself, Medusa. You like that name? That’s what I’m calling you from now on.” Jane winked.

  “Something you forgot too…Begging me. Andromeda might be filled with your hate, but I am her source of strength.” Jane lifted her hands and threw the writhing, raving cougar-woman on the ground.

  Leona hissed and gasped as her body flashed like a road flare seven consecutive times. The light shot into the sky just as it had with Andromeda. Myriad Leona doubles split from that light and ran into thin air, being phenomenally translated to some other part of the Globe.

  “Somebody put a leash on this dog before it slips by me!” Jane gnashed her teeth. Croc descended on Leona, wrapping her in electrical wire and turning it on high voltage.

  “We discovered a long time ago, that high voltage electricity doesn’t stop us zombie species folks, but it does happen to have a far more adverse effect than it would on a human being.” Croc laid his leg across Leona/Medusa’s throat to keep her from trying to sit up.

  Taylor leaned over her and looked down, eyes gleaming.

  “Harrison?”

  “I’m right here, Mr. Riveaulx?” Harrison came skidding to a stop a few feet away from where Leona was lying.

  “You know what happened to the husks these heads were pinned to?” He pointed down at what remained of Fulton and Manson’s skulls.

  “They’re scattered over the street.”

  “Bring in as much as you can get. This might be enough. I’m to understand these fat cats were making our boys here Godfather-steep offers, yeah? Okay, well, like I said, you learn a thing or two when your sister is the mother of all psycho-bitches. We feed the Geryon with that. The cognitive recession in hemoglobin will give our monster here just the right variables to recycle whatever info these worthless jokers were gonna spill to us. We can rig the system. Take down the enterprise. All we need is somebody who can pretend to be Fulton, Manson, and my sister. That would be our Geryon.” Taylor smiled at the creature. Only now did they realize how valuable it could truly be. No wonder Leona had tried to destroy it.

  “What’s up, dogs? What do you know, situation is normal. We chased half those crazy doubles and pirates back into flambéed USA. Then Leona’s doubles came and cut and bled and feasted on as many of them as me and the boys left behind for her. Guess she was serious about cleaning house, right?” Reilly came roaring back up on her little bike.

  “Good work, kiddo!” Taylor flashed the “Rock On” hand sign.

  Joseph let a relieved gasp. Tazing Derek and Leaf in the head had seemed to work. He then shot them both up with the syringe of prototype antidote, a half dose each. Leaf’s fire started to glow a soft golden color, shooting halos around his face. Derek’s trembling stopped, yet electric impulse seemed to gather in his carpal tunnels.

  “Feel better, guys?” Jane smiled. Leaf’s eyes popped open and he gasped.

  “My dad’s a freaking Judas.”

  “Dude, forget him! We’re about to put the last pieces of this puzzle together. My boys double as fire department. Harrison’s citizen militia is still hanging tough too, I hear. Let’s round up the town and throw some salty water on this blazing husk. Then we’ll feed the parrot, get him talking. I’ll take you crazy kids back to my place and see if we can’t work our next move out.” Taylor eyed Matthews suspiciously.

  “What about El Presidente? Shouldn’t he go back to the White House?” Reilly cut him a mistrustful look.

  “Uh…Not right away. I’m not handing him over until the Feds come down here and actually decide to pay some serious attention to the crap that’s hitting society’s engine fan.

  Okay, no for the meantime deal. Get me a gator hauler over here. We want to pack these bad girls out of here while the catch is fresh!” Taylor flicked his high-flamed cigar lighter and motioned with his fingers to a driver in a ’70 Camaro. He turned to Kendra, flipping his hair out of his face.

  �
�By the way you’re favoring that camera, you must be the reporter, yeah? You’ve seen too much crap which is why you don’t talk. Want to help me interview a crazy fleshed in android? It would be safer than hanging out in this urban wasteland. Maybe you could get your chill back?” He shrugged.

  Kendra laid a hand on her throat and forced herself to swallow.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  *****

  Chapter 27

  He closed his eyes and pretended that this was the waterslide from his favorite kiddie park when he’d been a boy. This had once been part of the mineshaft network that had blown to hell and wreathed Centralia in flames forever after. Now it was slick with ashes that were always wet from a marsh not many miles into the woods that kept seeping through the walls and spitting into the less-lethal mine parts. Kingsley even felt some scrambling minnows flap over his hands as he clawed for a landing.

  He spun over onto his belly and felt the breath sucked from his body when he landed in a pit six feet deep with massive scorpions.

  “Way to roll out the welcome mat.” Kingsley sat up. The room was hollow, shaped somewhat like a root cellar along the walls. It was empty and dim, lit only by the light of Centralia’s fire that dripped sparks from the spiked ceiling like spit dripping from the rabid cat’s fang. The silence echoed with someone’s listening ears. He could feel the prickle up his spine of someone’s watching eyes. This struck him as more engaging than how docile the scorpions were, some even curling in his lap like kittens might.

  “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re here. Listen, this is about your student, alright? I need to speak with the principle.” Kingsley fingered the sword he’d been given and had tucked into his belt.

  There was a sudden swelling in the flames. There was the hiss of vipers and the frenetic hooting of screech owls. Kingsley jumped to his feet, scattering docile scorpions everywhere. There in the darkness, he’d seen a host of shapes. Six approximately. There might have been more.

  There was an explosion deeper in the mine. Shards of burning coal shattered like glass and hailed over him like a Christmas snowfall. He let them roll over his skin, eyes closed. The thirst was the only thing he could think about for a moment. Then there was a voice, echoing off the walls, seeming to bow in on itself.

  “Seems you’ve come here looking for answers to many of your races’ most baffling scientific equations.” There was a rolling sound like thunder but different all at once. It seemed to reverberate with speaker static. Kingsley thought of his wild nightlife in Shreveport and the bass on some of his crazy friends’ sound systems.

  “Honestly, I’m not all that curious. But I know somebody who was. That’s what I’ve come about.” Kingsley looked up. He heard bats flocking the ceiling. The voice seemed to chuckle and the bass-system reverb accosted the walls with a wind-whipping frenzy.

  “Oh, you’ve come here about Ms. Riveaulx and her children. Yes, that’s quite a bit of a problem in your country. Quite a bit of a problem in mine too, if I’m to be honest. I lost a great amount of credentials backing her research.” There was reverb and then silence. Ashes spouted up and overtook Kingsley with the same thick force of clay molds. He groaned and peeled it away from his face, amazed by its sudden rubbery consistency.

  “Whoa, get out of here! If I didn’t know better, I’d say I’m swimming in tire sauce!” He thrashed and put his foot on blacktop floor. His eyes widened as he realized he was standing on a piece of street pavement that had descended from the marsh.

  “I’ve always found your race to be rather humorous.”

  “Race? You talk about us like we’re the same. I was under the impression that you were a devil god and I was a lowly human being.” Kingsley sank to sitting on his haunches. A bright neon green light began to shine against the walls. He could see now that there were thin chains, wrapped in power cords hanging from the ceiling. At the bottom of these chains were brass rings attached to microphones. There were preserved eyeballs glowing florescent colors attached to these mic rings.

  “Doctor Kingsley, let me engage you in a colorful debate. Suppose that your race, that Humanity, being an infant race also happens to have the collective imagination of a young child when it comes to the whole of the Universe and how it operates. Now, assume that in another dimension, a mathematical quadrant of space if you will, there lived a much older race of humanoid biological creatures. Ones possessing equal or greater than human intellectual capacity, emotional response, society, etc. Assuming we are then all the same kingdom species separated into smaller classes called races, we will call this biological class ‘Class Pneuma,’ from the Greek word for ‘spirit’. Are you following me, Doctor?”

  “For now. Please tell me there won’t be a test?”

  “Not yet. You look promising but I’ll save the pop quizzes until I’m certain you’re capable. Very well, I digress. Suppose that the human race erroneously tried to communicate with their elder cousins across this physical divide by developing various incantations and pagan rituals. The rest of rational Humanity would call this ‘witchcraft’ and ‘heresy’ and punish it severely. As they should, you will find.”

  “Why is it such a crime to communicate with other dimensions?” Kingsley held his breath, expecting some kind of retaliation from this disembodied professor.

  “Well, in theory, there should be nothing wrong with it, Doctor. The action is performed every time an open minded individual prays to the originator of all life, called God by some and disparaged by others. Still others pray to lesser beings they name as high and low gods of their basic belief systems. Some even pray to deceased humans. What they fail to realize is the nature of their communications. Some petitions to foreign dimensions are harmless, while other dabbling violates the laws of those unknown countries orbiting the universe.

  By these faulty communications, some even collaborate in crimes with high felons of other paradigms in Grand Reality. I suppose as humans you would call these felonious individuals ‘demons’. Ignorantly, a given individual human will even hail some of these so-called demons as heroes, teachers, even deities. This mistake was made by a human female many years ago in this exact place…” The Professor fell silent. Kingsley sucked his teeth.

  “I see. So our Lady-Dictator was really just your fair-haired girl, huh?”

  “Precisely. Very good. You are clever. Certainly will be the right person to help me render punishment on her according to the laws of my country.”

  “Russia?”

  “Oh, funny. No. I’m contacting you from the Inferno. That’s Hell in your language.”

  “Hell?”

  “Like the Earth, really. Given hundreds of thousands of more years to corrupt itself. She swore her allegiance to my country, which means that she bought citizenship here. Secured her citizenship in human sacrifice, a real big albeit deplorable thing here, eh? Then she betrayed us first chance she got for bigger ambitions of her own.”

  Kingsley held his breath. Coming here might have been a mistake.

  *****

  Chapter 28

  Jessop heard the wind coming down from the forest. He could feel her presence, cold up his spine. It was only in part the electrical impulse “sixth sense” he’d received when being resurrected by shark genome. This was something deeper, something that her science couldn’t explain. This was that psychological instinct that defined his mother as his murderer.

  Kiara sensed it too. Sensed something else. She moved to pull her pistol from her belt, hair standing on ends. There was a hissing sound far off in the misty darkness and then a keening howl.

  “Caroline!” They harmonized their killer’s name with keening, pining, knives-to-chalkboard shrieking contortions of their voice.

  “Kiara…” They called their first victim’s name in a guilty, lowing groan. Kiara felt her breath catch, her stomach twist like braiding rope. Her hands trembled. She looked to Jessop.

  “She’s here…But it makes no sense. She’s here in at least sev
en different places. I can feel it in my face if you understand. My hands…I can make shapes out with my nervous impulses.” He stepped down from the stone, drawing near to the girl with the owl-feather hair.

  “It’s alright, Danny.”

  “The Banshees are awake again.” If Danny breathed, she’d be hyperventilating. She squeaked horrified by her own words. The other children gasped and shrank to each other’s sides. The Banshees were Leona’s original group of accomplices. The girls that she’d grown up and conspired crimes with in New Orleans 1970 something.

  “It’s alright, Danny. They aren’t here for you.” Kiara let her pistol slide back into its holster. She stooped instead and plucked up a sturdy, dry cedar branch that was tangled in some weeds.

  “Anybody got a rag, piece of a T-shirt?”

  Jessop grinned.

  “You know how to fight them, don’t you?”

  Kiara bowed her head.

  “I know them better than I know anyone. I was on the altar at their hands for months, remember?”

  How could they forget?

  Kiara held out a hand. The boy with the tortoise collar bone reached in his pocket and pulled out a bandana. Kiara smiled.

  “See, this is family teamwork.” She winked. Danny swallowed tears and pulled out a small bottle of spray on cologne. Kiara poured some of it on the bandana and reached in her own pocket, pulling out a cigarette lighter.

  She touched the cigarette lighter to the wet bandana quickly. Perfume has a tendency to be explosive under heat. She dropped the lighter as the contents burst with heat and the torch lit up bright in the glowering fire-wreathed night.

  There in the night, she saw naked bones. The Banshees her long-gone tormenters, mutilated by Leona, had somehow risen from their graves and come here to face her.

  Then there was a wailing shriek like a hoot owl and Leona’s seven doubles stumbled on burning, blackened feet into the clearing.