After Life (Power Reads Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  They parted as a young man strode between them, brushing dust off of his expensive suit as though mildly irritated to be down in the basement at all. He stopped in front of Anderson and looked down at the injured man.

  ‘The Board is very disappointed in you, Cecil,’ he said. ‘They will not look kindly upon what you have done here tonight.’

  ‘They’re too dangerous,’ Anderson gasped. ‘They’re not like us.’

  ‘Which is precisely why they should become us,’ the man replied. ‘Or we them, depending on how you look at it.’

  Anderson shook his head. ‘It’s too late. Adam is gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘but I am still here, and like many others I have no desire to die from The Falling. Tell me, where have you sent the data? We know it went out of here only moments ago and we will find it eventually.’

  ‘I don’t know where it went,’ Anderson gasped. ‘That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?’

  The man grinned. ‘You’re a clever man, professor, but unfortunately you underestimate my persistence. I take it that you have scanned your own brain and that you think that if I kill you, you will automatically upload into the computers somewhere?’

  Anderson’s smile slipped.

  ‘Indeed,’ the man said. From his pocket he retrieved a long black cylinder, an inch thick, with two chrome probes projecting from one end. He pointed the probes toward Anderson. ‘I can assure you that we will replicate your technology, professor. How long that will take depends on what you decide to do now.’

  Anderson glanced at the now darkened projection platform where Adam had once stood and let out a bitter chuckle. ‘Go to hell.’

  ‘You first,’ the man replied.

  The man gestured to Anderson with an angry flick of his hand. The troops grabbed the old man and pinned him down. Without hesitation, the man knelt down and rammed the probes up into Anderson’s nostrils with a grunt of effort.

  Anderson screamed in agony as the two probes crunched through his sinuses and pierced his frontal lobes. The man squeezed a button on the device and pain seared through Anderson’s skull like liquid fire. Anderson smelled the burning of his own flesh and heard the sound of the laser cutter clicking noisily as it scythed through flesh and bone. His body thrashed and writhed as the device sliced upward toward his brain and his screams mutated into strained choking. The man pressed the button again and the pain vanished as Anderson slumped, his eyes throbbing in agonising pulses as blood poured from his nose to drench his shirt. He gasped as the man leaned in.

  ‘One last time, Cecil.’

  Anderson, his body exhausted and his mind weary of life, managed to twist his lips into an awkward, bitter smile.

  ‘Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned..,’ he gasped.

  The man frowned in confusion and then with a scowl he jammed the device further up into Anderson’s skull and activated it once more. The old man felt the computer chip implanted in his frontal lobes melt as the cutter reached it within the agonised confines of his brain.

  And then, mercifully, there was blackness.

  ***

  Twenty five years later...

  2

  Dario LeMarke had never faced death before, but now he was doing it on two fronts at the same time.

  Turbulent grey clouds tumbled above the crumbling remains of the city as though hoping to escape the silent, haunted streets, occasional stabs of bright sunlight beaming down and glinting off the few windows that remained intact south of the Thames. Dario laboured as fast as he could along the cracked, weed infested tarmac of York Road, dodging between the scorched and rusting hulks of abandoned taxis slumped on deflated tyres. Behind him the giant London Eye lay crippled, creepers and vines trailing in the wind from its useless support wires, the upper half of the wheel missing and the observation cars scattered where they had fallen decades before.

  Dario’s old lungs ached and his breath wheezed in his throat as he looked over his shoulder at the giant Ferris wheel looming above the dense foliage clogging the road and the beasts creeping through it.

  There were two of them, lumbering after him on mangy legs with their tongues hanging loose from yellow–fanged jaws. Drool spilled like suet from their mouths, draped across stems of dense grass like gossamer webs in their wake. Dogs, large dogs, the only kind left after The Falling. Smaller, selectively bred species had died out decades ago, unable to survive in the wild when mankind had vanished in a panicked stampede into the few remaining enclaves of safety.

  Dario knew that he could not enter the city: not because he was not welcome, and not because he could not reach safety before the dogs caught up with him. No. He could not enter the city because he was a carrier.

  Dario clutched in one hand a plastic cylinder which he had sealed in a transparent bag. The cylinder contained a hunk of fresh meat, the cylinder itself perforated to allow the scent to drift on the air. An enticing target for the few mammals that remained alive in what had once been England’s capital city. Dario glimpsed Westminster through gaps in the buildings to his right as he ran toward Westminster Bridge, Big Ben’s tower looming over the glittering surface of the Thames.

  Just a little bit further.

  Dario looked at the hand in which he held the cylinder, saw the painful blisters and the small chunks of desiccated flesh tumbling away on the wind as he ran. He stifled a whimper and reminded himself of his blessings. He had enjoyed a good life, or as good as one could expect after the catastrophe. He was sixty three years old and left behind him a family with a good chance of survival, especially if he could get this sample back to the guard station erected across Westminster Bridge. There was no other way across the river – the authorities had destroyed all other bridges over the Thames decades ago and boats were fired upon without hesitation, the river surging around the aged wrecks of countless refugee vessels.

  Dario had made it as far as the collapsed hulk of the old IMAX cinema, like a beached whale with its ribcage jutting up into the grey sky. He had leaned on a wall encrusted with filth and vines as he tried to catch his breath, when he had first seen the dogs behind him. Lean, skeletal, yellow eyed, more like wolves than dogs now.

  The dogs had loped under what had once been the railway line, padding quietly after him. No hurry – they knew a wounded prey when they saw it. Dario’s legs had trembled beneath him from more than fatigue: the tendons, muscles and nerves were all being eaten away by the fungus that infected him as it had infected billions before him. The horror of it was that the fungus had been present for millennia, living right alongside every human being on Earth, just waiting for the chance to get inside somebody, to grow, to mutate, to proliferate and become what it had become. Pandemic.

  Dario had pushed himself off the wall and began walking as fast as he could toward Westminster Bridge and its guard house. The dogs lumbered after him still, closer now, somehow sensing that their chance to eat was slipping away. They would know the boundaries of their territory well. They would not let him escape.

  Facing death from within and behind, Dario pushed on and hoped against hope that the men in the guardhouse would soon see him and come to his aid, for he knew that this would be his last mission and he hoped fervently that it would not be in vain.

  Dario was a scientist, one of many brave souls who periodically ventured out into the wilderness in search of a cure for The Falling. Although not a biologist, Dario’s qualifications were in demand and he could not avoid his sense of duty to others of greater need. Trapped south of the river since becoming infected during a routine mission, Dario had devoted his last remaining days to high risk excursions to seek species immune to The Falling. Many did not return from such missions, prey to the handful of animals that had somehow survived the pandemic that had struck so many vertebrate species. It was those animals whom Dario had been targeting, waiting with his bait, waiting for them to sink their teeth into the cylinder and the meat and pass on their DNA for him to study. The cure, he felt cert
ain, lay within one of those rare and resilient beasts.

  Dario raised the cylinder above his head and cried out, a torn out canine tooth from one of the dogs rattling alongside the meat inside the cylinder as he turned onto Westminster Bridge.

  ‘Here!’

  The guard house remained silent. Dario began to run again, his legs unsteady as though he were drunk as his brain struggled to send the correct messages to them. The surface of the bridge was rugged and broken, filled with grass and mosses that clung to the railings like green snakes and seemed to reach out to trip his weary legs. Behind him the city loomed in a curious mixture of dirty grey concrete and green foliage as though nature were eating the buildings alive, more forest now than city. Closer, the dogs began to run.

  ‘Here!’ Dario screamed, his voice choking off with the effort.

  He got to within sixty yards of the tower, heard the pads of the heavy dogs behind him slapping down on the surface of the bridge, when his legs finally gave way and he crashed down painfully onto his knees. The cylinder bounced away into the grass nearby. Dario tried to reach out for it, but he heard the animals behind him and rolled onto his back.

  The first dog landed on him heavily and powerful jaws clamped around Dario’s neck and squeezed with unimaginable force as yellow fangs sank deep into his neck. Dario’s scream was choked off as the second animal’s fangs bit into his groin in an attempt to paralyse him. Dario writhed in agony as his throat collapsed and his vision began to pulse with light as his brain was starved of oxygen, his head twisted to the left by the dog’s powerful bite. Dario glimpsed the Parliament buildings one last time, and then mercifully his consciousness slipped away.

  *

  ‘There, south side, fifty yards!’

  The police cruiser accelerated through the barrier as it rose up, the gate guards hauling it out of the way just in time. Four men sat inside, all wearing respirators and armoured clothing and all carrying assault weapons.

  The heavily armoured cruiser raced to the far side of the bridge, where the carefully tended tarmac ended and the waist high grasses and weeds swayed in the breeze drifting down river, the natural divide marked by a ten foot high steel and razor wire fence.

  ‘There he is,’ pointed the driver.

  The car screeched to a halt and the four men tumbled out as they ran to a steel framed door in the fence. They drove keys into padlocks, yanked the doors opened and two men raced through the grasses as the other two guarded the fence.

  The lead trooper, an officer, saw the dogs look up, their gruesome fangs stained red and dripping with infected meat.

  Both men fired an instant later, the gunshots kicking up chunks of tarmac around the dogs. The animals bared their fangs but a second burst sent them fleeing off the bridge, back to the ruined cityscape.

  The officer shouldered his rifle and knelt down alongside the old man’s body. Dario was barely conscious now, his throat ripped to shreds by the dogs. The officer reached down and turned Dario’s head to get his attention. The old man’s skin was flaking from his body, his hands a mess of necrotised flesh and sagging tendons.

  ‘Professor, can you hear me?’

  The old man coughed, his voice rattling through damaged vocal chords. ‘The sample, it’s here.’

  ‘Is it viable?’ he asked.

  Before Dario could answer, the officer’s companion called out. ‘Got it.’ The officer looked over his shoulder to see his colleague holding a cylinder in a bag, an ugly chunk of meat slopped within alongside a yellowing fang. ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

  ‘You heard what they said,’ the officer snapped. ‘Give it to me.’

  The trooper handed the officer the cylinder. He walked to the railings and opened first the bag, then the cylinder. Moments later, the chunk of meat and the tooth were spinning away down into the Thames, followed by the cylinder and the bag.

  A desperate voice croaked from behind him. ‘No.’

  The officer returned to Dario’s side. ‘Sorry old man,’ he said as he looked down at Dario’s body. The officer reached down to his utility belt and retrieved a long, slim and needle sharp blade. With a grunt of effort he drove the blade through Dario’s chest and his heart. Blood spilled around the wound as the old man thrashed and his fractured heart bled out into his chest cavity. Dario LeMarke finally died, the officer’s hands on his shoulders to restrain him in his last agonised moments.

  ‘Okay, let’s get him back.’

  Together, they hauled Dario’s corpse back to the razor wire fence and lay it down alongside their cruiser as their colleagues closed the fence back up again.

  The officer opened the cruiser’s trunk and hauled out a glossy black box the size of a house brick that he set down alongside Dario’s remains. His colleague quickly uncoiled two cables attached to the box, each with electrodes at the end which he without hesitation shoved up Dario’s nostrils with a heave of effort, the skin bulging as the nodes moved toward Dario’s frontal lobes.

  ‘Contact,’ he said as the box nearby flashed a series of lights, ‘charge detected.’

  ‘Light him up,’ said the officer, ‘quickly.’

  The officer flipped several switches on the box and a whirr of circuitry told him what he needed to know.

  ‘Neurological networks are sound, we’ve got a current. He’s got Futurance, last updated two months ago.’

  ‘Good. Shut him down,’ the officer ordered.

  The trooper obeyed and pulled the device from Dario’s face and looked at the officer.

  ‘I’ll take care of the corpse. Get out of here.’

  The trooper obeyed, and moments later the cruiser was accelerating away from the scene. It passed an ambulance making its way onto the bridge from the north, where the immaculate city skyline was briefly bathed in a wash of sunlight.

  The officer slipped his blade back into its sheath then pulled a small can of yellow paint and sprayed a big, bright X across the old man’s chest, careful to make sure the paint concealed the chest wound as much as possible. The officer turned and watched as the ambulance got through the last checkpoint and made its way slowly up onto the bridge. Nobody liked dealing with infected corpses and nobody would want to risk infection during an autopsy on Dario’s crumbling remains, so they wouldn’t find the knife wound to his heart.

  Dario’s body would be incinerated within an hour or two.

  And he would remember nothing of how he had died.

  ***

  3

  ‘Tell me how you feel.’

  Arianna Volkov sat in a comfortable chair that had once belonged to her father, made of old leather that had aged but still retained the unique odour that had made her feel so comfortable as a child riding around in Alexei Volkov’s big old Bentley. That was, of course, when there were still cars being used on the streets of London.

  The antique chair was at odds with the sparse room. The colours were warm, and the blinds let in enough of the early sunlight bleeding through the city smog to fill the room with a fiery glow, but there was little furniture. A chromium Crucifix adorned the wall opposite the window, the silvery surface reflecting the sunrise as though it were aflame.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ came a reply.

  The man was standing before Arianna, his hands in his pockets and a confused look upon his features, as though he were contemplating a difficult equation or mathematical model. In Arianna’s experience they were some of the most difficult to fit in, the scientists and the mathematicians. Arianna did not much like them and their cold, dispassionate view of the universe. Maybe that was why they struggled to cope, even though they were the people who had first wielded the new power of life over death. Reaping the whirlwind, they had sought the impossible but knew not what to do with it.

  ‘You know that you are the same person as you were before,’ Arianna soothed, watching the man’s emotions flicker like conflicting radio waves across his features. ‘The same person.’

  The man looked up at her. ‘I k
now.’

  ‘So tell me how you feel.’

  The man looked down at his feet. ‘Trapped,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t move beyond this spot.’

  ‘Only while your identity is confirmed,’ Arianna reminded him, ‘that’s just the law. You’ll be free to move at will along light paths and in the colony soon enough, professor.’

  The man nodded as though he had forgotten. One hand reached up to rub his temples, and then he stopped as he realised that the act no longer held the purpose it once had. Arianna watched as he lowered the arm, his hand briefly passing straight through a glass vase standing nearby on a table.

  Professor Dario LeMarke was a mathematician of enormous renown and one of the first people to outline the real potential for Holonomic Brain Theory, a name that made Arianna shudder with its complex scientific undertones. LeMarke had devoted his entire career to that theory and doing so had made him an extremely wealthy man all of his life, right up to him being infected with The Falling. He had died just two days ago of a heart attack, aged sixty three, while returning from an expedition outside the city in search of a cure for disease. The police report confirmed an attack by wild dogs.

  ‘But I’m still trapped,’ LeMarke insisted. ‘There’s nowhere else to go for me now but here.’

  LeMarke tapped his own head. Unable yet to judge distance correctly, and with his holonomic brain not yet having fully adjusted to its new configuration, LeMarke’s finger entered his skull as cleanly as a hot knife through butter. The brief overlap caused a flutter of distorted pixilation, as though LeMarke were a reflection in a pool of water where a pebble had been dropped. Arianna knew that the lack of coordination was both a psychological and physiological feature considered similar to those caused by amputation, whereby a replacement prosthetic limb took time to be accepted by the owner’s brain. For a short while, the owner would be unable to accurately manipulate their foreign limb.