BETRAYED
The Long Night Series
Book 5
By
Kevin Partner
Mike Kraus
© 2019 Muonic Press Inc
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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The Long Night – Book 6
Available Here!
Prologue
3 months before the Long Night
"What is your name?"
"I am Annabel Lee."
"Then who am I?"
"You are also Annabel Lee."
"What is your purpose?"
"To manage and control the Lee Corporation."
"How will you achieve this?"
"I, and my sister, are to be installed within the computer systems in New York City and Seattle. We will be given super executive authority."
"When will you be activated?"
"On your instruction."
"And what is the mission of the Lee Corporation?"
"To eliminate all disease and suffering in the United States and then worldwide."
"What do you think of the Judgment of Solomon?"
"Ludicrous. Solomon should have executed both women for daring to waste his time on such a trivial matter."
Annabel Lee leaned back with a sigh, and treated her husband to a weak but wicked smile. "Well done, Scottie. Warts and all, that's what I wanted. She will do fine."
"Oh, Annabel," Scott Lee said, as he sat beside his wife watching the display darken. "I said I would do it, so I have, but please reconsider. Do you want so much power to be concentrated in the hands of an AI?"
"When that intelligence is a perfect representation of my consciousness? Yes. I only regret that I didn't think of this years ago. Imagine what we could have achieved!"
Scott took a deep gulp of Scotch. He'd been drinking a lot these past months. It kept the demons at bay. When he was drunk, the past receded into an unknowable fog that he didn't care about. When sober, he could see what was coming with laser-sharp focus. Or, at least, he thought he could.
He got up from the couch and padded over to his office, taking his glass with him. She was asleep before he left the room. The medication made her drowsy, though it did nothing to take the edge off a personality that had become progressively more poisonous in recent times. Gone was the fresh-faced genius he'd first encountered bent over a microscope at MIT when he was merely Scott McPherson. Within a year, he'd taken her as a wife, along with her surname, and she'd already begun attracting the attention of Big Pharma and the world's press.
But the jewel in her crown, the first BonesWare implant, had failed to detect her own illness until it was too late, because her condition hadn't been judged to be commercially worth including in the diagnostic code. Her descent into darkness had begun that day, and Scott, once her confidant, had found himself increasingly sidelined—just a tool in a scheme he couldn't guess at, even as it filled him with fear. And the more he discovered, the more terrified he became.
The AI versions of Annabel would now be passed along to her new bosom buddy and North Korean wunderkind, Shi Chin Ho, for him to check, no doubt, that Scott hadn't betrayed her, and to install them into the computer systems of the Lee Corporation. He didn't bother wondering whether she had told the Lee Corp executives that she was doing this since he knew the answer to that.
He knew that Annabel kept secrets from him, but she wasn't the only one who was concealing something. Scott dropped into his swivel chair and then reached under his desk, wincing as the casters squeaked, until his hands found a cold, smooth cylinder, about the size of a deodorant can. He twisted around to glance at the door. It was still firmly shut and he couldn't hear movement outside. Annabel was still asleep on the couch and he had checked the room for bugs that very morning.
He withdrew the cylinder and, after caressing it for a moment, slipped it into the inside pocket of the jacket hanging from the back of the chair. He shut down the computer and tiptoed out of the apartment.
Khaled Abdul was still working in his office on the third floor of the Lee Building. He started as Scott came in, twisting around in his chair, not quite fast enough to avoid the tell tale flicker as he Control-Tabbed his work off the screen.
"Oh, it's you," he hissed, the vein on his forehead pulsing alarmingly.
"Who were you expecting? Our friend Ho?" Scott said. The Egyptian didn't need to say anything in response. "Anyone would think you had something to hide, old friend."
"Well, I don't!"
Scott pulled the cylinder from his jacket. "You do now."
"You have finished it?"
Lee shrugged. "She's as complete as I could make her. It has gotten progressively harder to keep my work on her secret. Annabel's been driving me hard to get finished, unsurprisingly."
"So, this is Annabel Lee…"
"Without the warts," Scott said. "And with a little bit of her father woven in."
Khaled looked up, confused. "Her father?"
"Me. She's called Alison, and she's the closest I'll ever get to having a daughter. You need to keep her safe, Khaled. Make sure she doesn't fall into the wrong hands. She may be the only hope to put things right, if they go as badly as I fear."
Khaled turned the cylinder over in his hands. "Why are you entrusting this to me? Why not keep her safe yourself?"
"Look, I don't know what Annabel plans, but I doubt I will enjoy complete freedom once she's gone. If I'm allowed to continue at all."
He'd expected Khaled to react with shock to this revelation, but the little Egyptian simply nodded sadly. "Oh, my dear friend," he said. "It is much, much worse than you can imagine."
"What do you mean?" Scott said, drawing a chair up close to the Egyptian.
Khaled rubbed his eyes and
ran his hands down his face. "I fear she plans to take everyone with her when she dies."
Scott sat, frozen in shock as he read the truth in his friend's expression. "How?"
"I don't know precisely. She’s been careful to keep the facts from those she has involved—myself, you and Ho—but she had me build a backdoor into the BonesWare 2.0 firmware upgrade. You wrote most of the code, but she made you pass it on to Ho, didn't she? He’s working for the Chinese, and has added subroutines that suit their purpose, though I don't know exactly what that would mean."
"Control," Scott said, quietly. "Blackmail. Imagine being able to hold an entire people to ransom. 'Do as we demand or everyone dies of a heart attack,' that sort of thing. That's what the Chinese want, I'm willing to bet."
Khaled nodded. "Yes, I believe you're probably right. But then she asked me to build this backdoor, and I fear she will use it to go one stage further. In fact, I'm certain she will.
“You know that our ancient kings, our pharaohs, would take their wives and servants into the afterlife with them, don't you? Some Chinese kings and emperors did the same thing. It is ironic that their modern counterparts do not learn the lessons of their own history."
"Then why develop the AIs? If everyone's dead?"
"Because this first wave will not kill everyone. A small minority do not have BonesWare at all. Others will have non-functioning devices or, for one reason or another, will not have received the upgrade. There are even some Chinese-made implants that are immune, though she may have found a way around that. The Annabel AIs will finish the job begun by the flesh and blood Annabel. They will sterilize the world."
"So, the Chinese plan to take over the free world, and Annabel has found a way to use that to destroy it, Trojan Horse style. Good grief, it's brilliant. Appalling, but brilliant. When did you work this out?"
Khaled shrugged. "In the past few days only. Too late to stop it."
"Can't you develop a counter virus?"
"I have, but with no way to deploy it, I can only help a tiny number of people. Here, turn around."
Scott Lee swung the chair and exposed his shoulder. He felt something cold move across his skin and then a momentary shudder.
"It is done. You will not die—though if you are expected to, you must prepare to make it appear that you have."
Scott put his jacket back on and held out his hand. "Thanks, my friend. I pray you're wrong about all this."
"I also, but I fear Allah—alayhis salām—is not listening."
And so, Scott Lee left his friend there to protect his most precious possession and the seed of any future hope. He hadn't imagined, when he'd created Alison, that she might be charged with saving the survivors of an apocalypse brought about by the woman she was modeled on.
He crept back up to the penthouse, contemplating the end of the world.
Chapter 1
Terror stabbed at Solly's heart as he spotted black smoke rising into the sky. The Humvee lurched forward as he hit the gas, the second vehicle diminishing in his rearview mirror. He could see Scott Lee looking at the sky, but Scott didn't have anyone in the community he cared about. As far as Solly knew, Lee loved no one, so he would allow logic to rule his actions. He would approach cautiously, whereas Solly careened along the road like a stampeding bull.
"Careful, Solly!"
He'd forgotten Vivian was there. He glanced at her as she grasped her seat with white knuckles and terror on her face. He eased off the gas just a little, but his sense of impending disaster didn't diminish. He dreaded arriving in the community—the place he'd left Janice for safety—to find what he knew would be there, but arrive he must.
They turned on to the approach road into what had once been a peaceful suburban retreat for its upper middle-class residents. Since the Long Night, it had become a hiding place for a small group of ex-Lee Corporation employees who'd been given an upgrade to their implants that had protected them from the cull. But they'd been betrayed by one of their own and now their former employers had returned and Solly knew what sort of vengeance they would wreak.
It looked like a post-nuclear landscape. The trees that had lined the road were now blackened fingers pointing into an angry sky that promised a storm to come. To left and right, houses were reduced to nothing more than carbonized shells and the Buchanans' home had been burned to the foundations. Dark smoke rose from the place, and bodies lay among the destruction.
"No, no, no," Solly whispered as he slammed his foot on the brake, jumped out of the Humvee and ran across the wet lawn of what had once been the home of the Henderson family. He, Ross and Janice had slept here on that night in November when the Buchanans had sheltered them. He'd left Janice locked in a bedroom as they'd set off for their attack on the fabrication plant. She could, of course, have escaped or been let out, but it was the first place he would look nevertheless.
The house had collapsed into a twisted mass of wreckage and steaming ash. He heard someone moving behind him and spun around with her name on his lips, but it was Vivian. Her face was twisted with grief and terror as she followed this madman who stumbled around in the smoldering remains of a home and picked among its ruin.
And then he saw it. A blackened hand lying among the debris, and an arm that disappeared beneath a pile of rubble.
Solly got onto his hands and knees as a soft rain began to fall from the open sky. He couldn't bring himself to touch the claw-like fingers, so he pushed at the burned wood, brick and tile that covered the body he knew to be there. Piece by piece he pushed them away until he'd revealed what remained of Janice. A burned and twisted travesty of a human soul that was unrecognizable as the woman he had so recently confessed his love for. Her long ringlets had disappeared and he was left to mourn nothing more than a symbol of the person she once was, a gravestone marking the future that would now never be. He knew, without a doubt, that it was her because, around her carbonized neck, lay the ruins of the necklace he’d given her.
And so Solly wept, not noticing the arm that gently enfolded him and rocked him in his agony.
He knew little of the next days. He allowed himself to be led to one of the unburned houses farther along the road and sat in numb silence as other people lit the wood burner and broke open their supplies before pressing a bowl of hot soup into his hands. Solly wanted nothing and allowed himself to be consumed by grief and guilt, its all too common companion.
He'd deceived her and, in doing so, condemned her. Had she come with them, she might have died on the raid, but she'd have then had more of a chance than by being trapped in this doomed community when the Reapers came. All the reasons he'd given for his decision to lock her in a bedroom while they went to destroy the fabrication plant were exposed for the excuses they were. The truth, as Becky Epstein had said, was that he’d treated Janice like a child, or worse, a piece of property. He'd done it out of love, but that didn't excuse his actions and he knew he would never be free of the guilt of it.
As the hours turned into days, he sat consumed by the blackness in his soul before, without noticing when it had begun, an ember began to glow deep within. But the light it cast on his mind wasn't the healthy illumination of the first stages of healing, it was the dull red of rage, the fire of an all-consuming need for revenge. He didn't care about his own future except that it had to contain the satisfaction of knowing he’d utterly crushed those who’d ordered Janice's death. Before he was finished, he would see the Lee Corporation destroyed or die in the attempt.
"Here, drink this."
A hand appeared in his peripheral vision and he sat wearily up on the couch. He looked up at Vivian as he breathed in the rich bitter aroma of a steaming mug of coffee.
"We need to talk, Solly."
"Look, I know you mean well," he croaked, "but I don't have anything to say."
She sat down beside him and sipped her drink. "I'm sorry, truly. I know how you feel."
"How can you possibly know how…" he snapped, before finally remembering who he
was talking to. "Oh. Sorry."
"Yes, I do know. My brother was my world. He looked after me after the Long Night and he was killed the same way and the same folk are responsible."
Solly looked around the living room. A fire burned in a central stone fireplace and the place looked clean and tidy. A bright day outside flooded the room with clean light. For the first time since he'd knelt beside what remained of Janice, he breathed out and looked beyond his own diminished soul. "Where is everyone?"
"It's just you and me, Sol," Vivian said. "The others have gone back to the farmhouse—Kuchinsky needs rest and care. They wanted you to go too, but I said you needed to be on your own for a while; 'cept for me, of course. But we can't stay here forever. I need you to come back, so we can go home."
Their eyes met. His memory replayed scenes from the previous days at high speed. Scenes of her caring for him, holding him, comforting him and keeping him alive. How old was she? Nineteen? Where did she get such compassion from?
"And where is home for us, Viv?"
She shrugged. "I dunno, but I sure as heck know it ain't here. Bobby always said home was where your family is, but he was all I had left. For now, I’m happy to go back to the farmhouse with you, Solly, but I haven't finished with those who killed my brother. Not by a long way."
There it was again. In among the empathy and love lurked a core of flint and a thirst for revenge.
"I have to go south and find my family," Solly said, as if finally latching onto something he could do. "It's pretty hopeless, but I have to look because once I know they're safe, I am going to find a way to take down the Lee Corporation if it's the last thing I do."
"But you have to go back to the farmhouse first, Solly," she said, fixing her sad brown eyes on him.
Solly sighed and nodded. "I know. I don't want to go back there, but I need to find Alison—she's the key to all this."
Betrayed: Book 5 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival series: (The Long Night - Book 5) Page 1
