Callista, My Daughter:
Please forgive me. I’m not the man you thought I was. It’s taken me going insane to see what I am. The voices are right. Everything they say is true. I’m a liar and a curse on you.
It wasn’t the storms that drove your mother mad. It was me. It was what I did to you. It’s what I took from you. Your mother saw the horror. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me when she found out. I’m a sick man and I couldn’t control myself. I always told myself that I just loved you too much.
Your daughter was my daughter. The scar on your womb is where we took her from you. When your mother found out who the father was, she ran away, clutching your daughter, straight into the storm. I tried to stop her but there was nothing I could do. They never found the baby’s, your daughter’s, or your mother’s bodies. In all these years, you never remembered. I thought if it never happened again, if I could control myself, then it never was. Since you were ten, I’ve lived in fear of you remembering. I hope you never do.
Please remember, even though there are people like me, the opposite exists as well. There are heroes as well as monsters.
Your Dad
…
After she read the letter, the memory of the event flooded her brain like it had broken the Bastion. It was like her whole memory, her whole identity, had been turned upside down. She reached down to her lower belly and ran her finger over her cesarean scar.
She whispered to Lucas, “That place needed to drown. I wish we could destroy it all over again.”
They floated in silence for hours. Callista just sat with the letter dangling from her hand. She considered what her father had written: that there were heroes as well as monsters.
She watched Lucas at the pod’s porthole and knew a hero was indeed what she had found. Callista had sensed it from their first meeting. Something about Lucas, his self-generated purpose, his independence from everything made him something like a ship’s North Star.
The pod ran on a small engine and had a guidance system that seemed to be taking them somewhere. The propellers hummed and pushed them away from the whirlpools and currents. They had sufficient food and water for perhaps weeks, but they had no idea where they were headed.
After a while, everything became black around them. The moon had vanished behind some clouds. There was just the sound of still water.
Some time after that, the pod began to encounter surface debris, pieces of buildings, floating bodies, trees. It became so thick, it looked like they were sailing through land. It wasn’t just wreckage from the wave. White and yellow sand, black porous rock and dirt were forming into a new continent.
“How could we be hitting land?” Callista asked.
Ahead on the horizon, an orange and blue flame spilling white sparks appeared like a nightlight on the water. When they got closer, they realized it was the fledgling volcano.
It oozed lava with such fury that the pod could barely push through the sheet of cooling sand and rock. The pod eventually scraped to a halt on a brand new black and white sand beach. They had hit land.
Computer-piloted barges floated in the distance on their way to the new volcanic island. Some carried technology, agricultural supplies and building materials. Others carried people, mostly children and young adults.
Callista saw something out the window, a light of some kind floating not far away from their pod. She pointed it out to Lucas, who knew what it was right away.
“It’s Morgan,” he said. “And Strix. They’re on the same course we are.”
“The new world.”
Callista stood next to him and they both stared out the porthole. She took his hand.
“Why did you save him?” She asked.
“Because he’s my friend.” He looked her in the eyes, saying, “I’d do it again.”
“Even if that means the end of everything?”
“Of course.”
Across the water, Morgan screamed inside his pod. The sound was so riddled with pain, it sounded like he was being cut open. It broke Lucas’s heart when he heard it.
“You’re finished, Lucas Mucus!” Morgan screamed. “You have no one. I have Strix and you have no one. Strix is all mine. You don’t realize it but you’re all alone! Love will destroy you the way it has me. You have nothing and I have everything. I’m coming for you! I’ll destroy everything you build. I’m Morgan Battle! I broke the Bastion!”
Then, Morgan, Strix and his pod went out of sight.
The End.
…
Christopher Rankin studied engineering at Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, researching the nanoscale electrical properties of soft condensed matter. His other books include Creating Monsters, Ann Marie’s Asylum and Enter the Uncreated Night. He currently lives in Orange County, California with his wife, Jennifer, and a small pride of cats. His influences include such writers as Carlos Castaneda, Philip. K. Dick, Stephen King, Aldous Huxley and Michael Chabon. Others include: Terence McKenna, William James, Carl Jung, Noam Chomsky, David Lynch, Alexander Shulgin, Werner Heisenberg and Alice Miller.
Please visit his website www.christopherrankin.net for updated information.
Other Books by Christopher Rankin
Enter the Uncreated Night
Psychologist Oscar Loste is facing the most confusing and frightening case of his career. Six-year-old Beth Bardo is displaying bizarre behavior, including interaction with an imaginary friend she calls Mister Smiler. This invented character supplies Beth with an impossible degree of knowledge about everything from science to ancient cultures to Oscar’s own secrets. The little girl’s parents, a highly-educated couple who also happen to be one of the wealthiest in the country, seem as bewildered as Oscar over Beth. The more he gets to know the little girl and her family, the more Oscar slips into chaos. Self-medication with a mysterious cough syrup recently taken off the market is plaguing him with strange hallucinations and fueling his obsession with the case. As the chilling truth about Beth and Mister Smiler unfolds during her therapy sessions, Oscar must face consequences beyond his imagination.
Ann Marie’s Asylum, Volume One: Master and Apprentice
Ann Marie has just earned her Ph.D. in chemistry at age sixteen when she receives a mysterious and lucrative job offer. The new position at the infamous Asylum Corporation takes the young chemist and her alcoholic mother from their working-class Philadelphia neighborhood to coastal California. She grows fascinated with her new boss, famed scientist, Dade Harkenrider, a handsome and reclusive asexual labeled Dr. Death by internet conspiracy theorists and rumored to be involved in witchcraft and murder. A young pioneer in drone warfare and mind-control drugs, Harkenrider conducts secret experiments that defy the boundaries of space and consciousness in an advanced laboratory in the hills perched over Los Angeles. As Ann Marie grows closer to her new mentor, a sinister plot by a secretive coven is unfolding in the city. This monstrous force is stealing pets and children in an effort to breathe life into an ancient and terrifying evil.
Creating Monsters
A psychedelic romance in a city on the verge of disaster.
In modern Philadelphia, where a deep economic depression has left the city near collapse and most of its inhabitants in gruesome poverty, Mitchell Gray, a twenty-year-old graduate student in a beleaguered university physics department, spends most of his time playing piano and touring the city’s worst slums in stolen cars. He is a technical virtuoso whose scientific ideas challenge the foundations of his field but he lives in hiding from one of the world's most powerful billionaires who is obsessed with Mitchell and determined to capitalize on his strange inventions.
When he falls in love with an older woman, the wife of a wealthy pharmaceutical executive, their relationship inspires him with a mad plan to use his creations to change the world. With the help of a brilliant and neurotic chemistry student named Charlie Nolan and technology so advanced that it resembles magic, Mitchell devises horrifying yet
harmless schemes and supernatural hoaxes, causing an uproar in the city.
His nights as a modern day robin hood also raise the alarm of some of the real monsters in Philadelphia, including a mysterious child murderer rumored to possess supernatural powers, known only as "The Demon." Christopher Rankin's debut novel is a haunting story of love, friendship and survival in a world of revolution.
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