Souls of the Never: A Fantasy Scifi Romance Time Travel series, with Dragons, Elves and Faeries. (Tales of the Neverwar Series Book 1)

by CJ Rutherford

  But he just shrugged, and a grimly determined expression replaced the sorrow as he spoke.

  “Jules, that energy level is one of my reasons I’m doing this. Think about it. There's no way we'd dialled the beams up enough to cause the sort of readings we recorded...There had to have been something else there, something causing the energy spike.”

  Further conversation was halted by the doors opening at the main laboratory level, and Jason rushed out of the doors towards his old lab. The floor was deserted at this time of night but he looked furtively back and forth.

  Julia had to almost run to keep up. He swiped the card and opened the door into the room, crossing over to the familiar consoles which controlled the central emitter assembly.

  “Jason, you can't do this!” Jules shouted, glancing surreptitiously at the fire alarm panel on the wall to her left. If she could reach it, the emergency cut outs would shut the whole lab level down. “I won't let you end your career like this.” She began walk towards it.

  Jason drew the gun and pulled the trigger. For second Jules thought he’d shot her, but when she opened her eyes there was a sparking hole in the wall where the panel had been. He turned the muzzle in her direction.

  “I won't let you stop me!” he screamed. “I know she's alive, Jules. She has to be...They have to be.”

  Her terror subsided as she watched anguish replace the madness, and tears formed in his eyes. Not many people knew Alice had been two months pregnant when the accident happened. Jason had told her on the flight back from the service, but she had already known. Alice had confided in her only a few minutes before her disappearance inside the ball of energy which had appeared. But this didn't matter now, as she knew she was the only one who could stop this insanity.

  It had been pure luck that she had been driving out through the security gates as Jason had ploughed through them. She'd turned straight around and ran after him, catching him just before the elevator doors had closed.

  “How could they be, Jason?” she asked, softly. “It's been two years. Two years of nothing.”

  She saw the sentence cut into his hope. It was true, however. All his attempts to gather evidence to corroborate his belief that his wife hadn't been vaporised had resulted in nothing.

  Unfortunately, the guilt driving Jason outstripped the logic everyone else knew to be true.

  “I needed more power, Jules!” he shouted. “They never let me have a full power test since that day.”

  “Jesus, Jason, do you blame them?” she asked. “What happened scared the shit out of them. Fuck, it scared the shit out of me!”

  She knew it was useless as she watched Jason's expression turn angry.

  “I thought you at least might have understood, Julia,” he said.

  She flinched as he used her full name for the first time in years. He had known since they'd met she vastly preferred Jules to the name her parents called her.

  “You knew her,” he said. “Alice was your friend. You should be doing anything you can to bring her back.”

  Jules's face reddened.

  “Damn you, Jason!” she hissed. “I miss her just as much as you do. But there's nothing to bring back! Can't you see that? She's gone. Accept it before you screw any more lives up.”

  It was a low blow, Julia knew, but she saw it hit home and was glad of the pause it produced. If only she could delay him a few more minutes. Then maybe security might be able to reach them.

  But she regretted it as she saw the pain on his face. Jason knew exactly what Julia meant when she accused him of screwing up lives. He’d abandoned his daughter Katheryne to this crazy idea. They hadn’t spoken more than twice since her mother disappeared.

  She saw the moment of indecision pass, however, as Jason sat down at the console and began typing. He typed one handed, keeping the gun pointed at Jules.

  “Come on, come on. Load up, you piece of shit!” He banged the console in frustration. He couldn’t keep an eye on her and operate the complex controls at the same time.

  He waved the gun to a chair opposite him. “Sit down Jules. And keep your hands to yourself. I don’t want to have to hurt you too.”

  This sentence and his possession of the key card in his hand caused a cold pit to form in Jules’s stomach as she watched Jason’s hands fly across the keyboard. It was a master bypass key, issued to only ten or so people on the entire staff. Sure, most of them were Jason’s friends, but she didn’t think any of them would have been stupid enough to willingly hand it over.

  He finished the first sequence, and the control board lit up with alarms sounding as he bypassed the lockouts with the key card.

  And if they hadn’t handed it over, then just how desperate had Jason become, she wondered. Desperate enough to harm a friend?

  “Where did you get the card, Jason?”

  ‘If I can just stall him, give the guard enough time to get here,’ she thought.

  He didn’t reply. He simply rushed recklessly through the startup process, totally oblivious to her and the alarms.

  “Who did you hurt to get it? Lars? Piotre? Brigitte?” she persisted, aware that at the last name Jason paused and turned.

  “She’s not hurt,” he said as his face reddened. “She’s...I drugged her. She’ll be fine in an hour or so.”

  Julia gaped at her friend as a desperate plan flashed into her head.

  “You son of a bitch!” she screamed, “She’s pregnant, you asshole! What if what you gave her hurts the baby?”

  It was a stretch, and Julia felt sickened at her lie, but it was all she could think of to delay him. It succeeded. She had relied on his grief at losing his own unborn child breaking through, and for a few brief moments it did.

  He looked at her with tears in his eyes, and for a second Julia knew she had reached him. The pain on his face was heartbreaking to behold, as if the grief of the last two years was at last being set free.

  Jules started to walk over to her friend, about to take him by the hand and let him cry the tears he so badly needed to, but as she got closer, he was taken over by something which had lain hidden inside him.

  The eyes looking back at her didn’t belong to Jason McNair anymore. There was no way her friend and mentor could provoke the feeling of terror she felt right at this moment. His face was cold and emotionless, but his eyes burnt like embers of hatred as he gazed contemptuously at her. She didn’t care about the experiment anymore. She just wanted to live long enough to get to the door and run.

  But she needn’t have worried for her immediate safety as Jason-if that’s who he truly was, turned to the console, his hands flashing impossibly fast across the keyboard. She watched as he locked out all external access. Elevators, stairwell access doors, all of them were locked as he overrode the protocols.

  Dimly, she realised he shouldn’t be able to do this. Jason was a geek, like her. There was no way he should have been able to access the mainframe security systems with the level of expertise he displayed.

  But with this task complete, he continued on with his original plan. Jules watched as the power levels on the capacitors feeding the particle beams pegged out at maximum. The control display was a sea of blinking-red alarms as Jason prepared to carry out what looked to her to be a simultaneous collision of every single operational beam.

  All the safeties were locked out and Julia knew a catastrophic reaction was imminent. Indeed, it appeared this was exactly what Jason wanted to happen, as she watched him fine tune the emitters.

  There was only one way it could be prevented, she realised, and her stomach turned to lead. She paused for half a second before a grim determination boiled up inside her, spurring her into action. She ran out of the door to the lab, half expected to be shot in the back. The elevators were locked out, she knew but if only…

  “Please open, please, please, please…yes!” She let out a small cry of triumph as her card unlocked the heavy doors of the collider aperture assembly chamber. They slid apart slowly and she squeezed
through.

  The light forming in the centre of the aperture was approaching blinding levels and she hadn’t thought to grab a pair of protective goggles on the way in. She’d been too busy grabbing the fire extinguisher. She paused to utter a prayer to whatever Gods might exist.

  ‘Oh God, Katheryne…I’m so sorry.’ she thought, as she threw the metal canister with all her strength into the beams.

  She imagined she heard a scream of fury and frustration as the fireball engulfed her and the rest of the entire level, destroying everything in an inferno as hot as the surface of the sun.

  There were no thoughts afterward. Julia was dead. As was Jason.

  http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Never-Tales-Neverwar-Book-ebook/dp/B00TH5BC1U/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1424538504&sr=8-3&keywords=cj+rutherford

  Souls of the Never

  Copyright © 2014 by C J Rutherford. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher or author, except in cases of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and/or reviews.