But he didn’t resist when Danny took the shovel from him. Reed went to the water while he and Zin finished the job. He listened to them pack the sand over the body’s final resting place.
Finally, it was at peace.
______
The sun dropped below the horizon. The sky was a myriad of purples and reds and oranges. They stood on the hardpacked sand, the water wrapping around their ankles. Home was out there. The outside world was within reach.
For the first time, Reed embraced hope.
Zin leaned on the shovel. “You know, they were right, the old men. There’s not much for us to go back to. I don’t know about you guys, but I got nothing out there. I’m not saying I want to stay here, but there’s nothing great waiting for me in the real world. My life sucked. I got no parents, no home… I got nothing.”
“That’s why we’re not going back there, Zin.” Danny put his arm over his shoulder. “We’re starting a new life.”
Slowly, the sky went dark.
They left the golf cart on the beach and walked back. They crossed the Yard and went around the dormitory. For the first time ever, the Chimney was dark. They passed it on their way toward the Mansion.
______
Danny was on the back of a yacht.
The foamy water rippled in deep-cut waves as the ship’s motors churned the water. He held onto the railing and watched the island recede into the night. A few lights twinkled on the back of the Mansion. Danny informed the old men that he would be passing through and they needed to be in their rooms. He reminded them that he had control of their trackers and that he would put them to sleep on sight.
They were old and harmless. Still, the three of them walked cautiously through the building and across the back yard to the yacht. He saw them watching from their windows. They would see the Director with them (without the beard) and would want to talk to him, to find out why he was keeping them imprisoned after they paid a fortune. They would want to tell him that he would not get away with this. But they wouldn’t get the chance.
They would never have the chance.
The Director, as they knew him, was no more.
Reed had shut down the Looping Program, ending the identity known as the Director.
Even if the old men knew the Director had passed, there was nothing they could do. There was no communication with the outside world. That was the terms of their contract. They signed their life over to the Director. They had purchased a younger body when they acquired a young man, but had to sell their soul in order to do so.
______
Once they were on the yacht, Reed took the helm. Zin stayed up front to watch the way to the other island. The rest of the boys were back on the island and would never know they were gone. They would keep playing games, find food in the cafeteria and sleep in the dormitory. They probably wouldn’t even know something was wrong.
Until help arrived.
“There it is!” Zin called. “Straight ahead!”
Reed waved from the helm. Danny joined Zin at the bow. The water was black and the island invisible in the dark except for a single light at the end of the dock. There would be someone waiting to help them tie off the yacht. Reed had called ahead, telling them to prepare the plane. He would be bringing the boat over soon.
They sounded surprised. The Director, flying?
Of course, he told him. Vacation is long over due.
It took some research, but Danny discovered the Director was a billionaire many times over. He had so much money that if they split it three ways, they would all still be billionaires. For the time being, they were going to stay together. The Director had an estate in Italy.
That seemed like a good place to start a new life.
Missing Satellite Uncovers Human Trafficking Ring
ASSOCIATED PRESS. – The Military Strategic and Tactical Relay (MILSTAR) reported the sudden crash landing of one of their satellites in the South Atlantic when their network was infected with a malicious virus. The virus will likely cost the government millions of dollars to recover and reestablish communication.
However, the recovery of the downed satellite was near a remote island previously thought to be unoccupied. Authorities of the United States have reported a sophisticated human trafficking ring. Preliminary reports have identified wide-spread use of banned technology called Computer-Assisted Alternate Reality (CAAR), though it is unclear how the organization was using the technology.
In addition, dozens of previously reported dead or missing people were being held captive in a resort located on the island. All the people are male and worth billions of dollars. None have agreed to cooperate with the investigation until they have consulted their legal counsel.
However, many have admitted the leader and creator of the island’s society was missing. Currently, his name has not been discovered but he went by the nickname, The Director.
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Continue the journey to Foreverland is Dead (Book 2).
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Foreverland is Dead
The squeal to The Annihilation of Foreverland
1
The rising sun on us, day beginning.
The sky collapses.
And consumes us all.
A rooster crows.
Over and over and over.
He wants her to wake up, to get up. But the girl is stuck in a dream where she’s screaming, submerged in a cloud of fear, unable to move. Unable to see.
Everything, just gray.
She can’t escape, buried beneath the snowy sleep that buzzes like the inside of an anesthetist’s mask. Holding her down.
And the rooster crows.
The girl claws to escape, scratches through the cloth of sleep, follows the rooster like a beacon, a lighthouse on the rocky shoals of the living. She rises to the surface—
The seal of crusty sleep breaks.
She blinks to stay awake, to clear her sight, staring into darkness. Her head is nestled in a pillow, covers pulled up to her chin. The gel-like mattress fits perfectly to her body. Still, her body aches.
Her eyes adjust. Forms bleed from the darkness. First, there are lines…lines scratched on a wooden wall only inches away. They are bundled in groups of five, organized in rows.
She can smell her own breath, thick and rank. A film glues the corners of her lips together. She swallows. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. Hunger growls in her stomach, perhaps expecting something now that she’s awake.
“Mmmm.”
She jerks her head around, sinking into the pillow. Eyes wide. She listens to her pulse.
It’s a cabin.
There are more beds with lumps beneath the covers, not moving. She can’t tell where the moan came from, but she hears slumbering breath.
She breathes slowly, silently, until it hurts. She tries to remember where she was before she woke, but nothing has ever existed before this moment except for fleeting dreams, like whispers of another world. She dreamed of someone else.
A boy.
The sky falling.
And screaming.
Something flutters on the back of her neck.
She runs her hand over her scalp, her hair bristling on her palm, and feels a lu
mp. It’s marble-sized and quivers beneath her touch, sending electric tingles through her head, all the way to the back of her eyeballs. She jerks her hand away. A wave of nausea fades.
She tries it again, this time starting at the crown of her head and rubbing as close as she can to the lump until the tingling warns her.
Fear balls up in her throat.
The faint sound of a helicopter is nearby, interrupted by the sound of an insistent rooster.
The girl pushes up on one elbow, waits and listens. She sits up, moving silently. Her bare feet meet a cold, wooden floor. It’s brisk outside the blankets. Her bed is in the corner. With her back to the wall, a door is to her right and a window to her left.
She walks to the window.
The floor creaks, and she waits to take another step. Her reflection looks back from the dark glass like a ghost, an unreal apparition: white skin smudged with dirt. Perhaps her hair is blonde. It’s definitely a buzz cut. Body odor wafts up from her long t-shirt, her legs exposed from the knees down. Outside, the jagged edges of distant mountains.
A gust of wind slams the cabin. The window crackles. The helicopter gets louder. She can’t see anything in the sky, though. It’s hard to see anything except her reflection. And she doesn’t recognize that.
Coughing.
The girl spins around. Chills creep into her chest, fear and cold. Another girl whimpers, stifled by a sucking sound. Maybe a thumb.
There’s a can on the small table in front of the window. The side has been cut out. It’s fastened onto a saucer with a short candle. A box of matches next to it. She pulls one out and holds the wooden stick in her fingers, trembling. She looks around, not really seeing the back of the cabin. There could be monsters.
The girl strikes the match. The flame quivers but finds the black wick curled at the top. The tin can reflects the firelight like a lantern.
Oh, my.
It’s a small dormitory.
A total of six beds with a window and table between them. There are boxes beneath the beds. The tables each have a hooded candle like the one she’s holding, surrounded by a variety of knick-knacks.
The lumps beneath the blankets come to life, rolling over and lifting up. Their heads are shaved, each with a fuzzy crop of black or brown or blonde. Some of them rub their eyes, waking from a long sleep. One of them throws the covers over her head and whimpers.
“Who are you?” A skinny girl sits up, her skin smooth and brown. She can’t be more than fourteen years old.
“Where am I?” another asks.
The girl shines the candlelight on each bed. The one in the back corner looks empty, but the rest are filled with young girls, all about the age of puberty, maybe a little older. The girl with the candle isn’t sure how old she is. Her breasts are loose beneath her shirt, no bra. She’s definitely past puberty. She feels older than the others but isn’t sure. She can’t remember her birthday or where she was born.
I don’t know my name.
There has to be an adult somewhere, someone that knows where they are and how they got there.
And who they are.
She takes the candle to the front door and steps outside. The wind quickly snuffs out the flame and almost knocks the candle from her hand. The sun isn’t visible, but morning light bleeds through the sky from her left. She quickly notes which way is East.
She feels the helicopter’s whoop-whoop-whoop in her chest. To her right, near a barn, there are three windmills, each with big white blades spinning on a post. Grit blows into her eyes and she drops the candle to shield her face. Knee-high grass waves in a wide-open pasture.
Hooves stampede up to a five-wire fence near the windmills. A horse rears up and neighs. Two others join it, stomping around when they see her. Just past the horses, the barn looms, the doors swinging on rusty hinges that sing in protest.
One of the girls comes outside, followed by two more. They crowd together. The early morning chill has them hugging themselves, teeth chattering.
“Who are you?” one of them asks.
“Go back inside,” the blonde girl says.
She looks to her left, away from the whoop-whoop-whoop of the windmills and rampaging horses, to see a big cabin built from logs like the bunkhouse.
“Hello?” the blonde calls, walking toward it.
There are no lights inside it. She steps onto the empty porch, the boards creaking under her bare feet. Some of the girls follow from a distance. The blonde cups her hands over one of the windows. It looks like a dining hall, of sorts: a long wooden table with chairs on both sides and an elegant candelabrum in the center. Empty and lifeless.
Her breath fogs the glass.
There’s a large garden on the other side of the building, filled with sprawling vines and rows and rows of vegetables. Compost bins are at the far end, and maybe a hundred yards past that is another cabin. Not really a cabin.
More like a two-story modern brick house.
One of the youngsters climbs onto the porch. Her hair is black, her skin dark. The other two follow. Two more are still inside the bunkhouse.
The blonde steps quickly past them. She just wants to find someone who knows what’s going on. These are just kids.
Grassy stalks stab the soft bridges of her feet. She folds her arms over her chest, hunches against the chilly wind and shuffles past the garden. Ten black-dotted faces of solar panels are near the compost bins that are turned towards the East where the sun is due to rise at any time now.
“Where you going?” someone shouts.
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where she is, how could she know where she’s going? But someone does. Someone has to be in that house, and they would know. Someone knows why there’s a bunkhouse of filthy girls running around in bare feet and long t-shirts in the middle of nowhere.
Someone has to.
She’s halfway there when the back of her neck starts to tingle again. She’s not touching it this time. It’s a low vibration. It tickles, at first. Makes her skin itch. She reaches up to scratch it and remembers what it felt like the last time she did that. But each step makes it worse.
Electric lines extended out from the lump, tiny bolts of lightning crawling along her jaw and the back of her head. She looks back. The girls are watching from the front porch of the dark and empty dinner house.
She starts for the brick house again. One step.
Two.
Three.
The tingling begins to sting. Tears well up in her eyes, blur the house. She’s twenty steps away from the front porch with ceiling fans and bench swings and glass tables. There’s a lamp in one of the windows, illuminating the front room.
“Hello?”
She’s ten steps away when her ears begin ringing. Someone will hear her. Someone will come out. Someone will tell her where she is.
Tell her who she is.
“Is anyone—”
An electric shock shoots from the lump in the back of her neck, her teeth snap together. Her jaw clenches. Black shutters drop over her eyes.
She doesn’t feel the earth slam into her face.
Novels by Tony Bertauski
CLAUS
Humbug: The Unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge
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Claus: Legend of the Fat Man
Jack: The Tale of Frost
Flury: Journey of a Snowman
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The Annihilation of Foreverland
Foreverland is Dead
Ashes of Foreverland
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Clay
Bricks
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The Socket Greeny Saga (Save 30%)
The Discovery of Socket Greeny
The Training of Socket Greeny
The Legend o
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The Making of Socket Greeny (Prequel) FREE!
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Drayton (The Taker) FREE!
The Drayton Chronicles (All 5 Drayton novellas)
Drayton (The Taker)
Bearing the Cross
Swift is the Current
Yellow
Numbers
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Interview with Tony Bertauski
When did you start writing?
I always wanted to write creatively. I just wasn’t good at it. I didn’t have a writer’s muscle, either: that ability to spend hours at the keyboard. I was a technical writer before fiction. I did a Master’s thesis and wrote several articles for trade magazines before completing two textbooks on landscape design. After that, I figured fiction would be cake. Turns out, the craft of fiction – good fiction – is a hell of lot harder than I thought.
My first effort started with Socket Greeny. It was a story I started for my son because he hated to read. He still hates to read, but this character – Socket – took root. It was the first time I felt possessed by a character with a story to tell. It took me 5 years and countless rewrites to get it right. I thought I had the Golden Ticket, that I just needed to pick a publisher to mail me a giant check. I even estimated how many years it would take for the movie.
Turns out publishing fiction is harder than writing it.
If you can’t make money, why write fiction?
I didn’t say you can’t make money. There are a lot of people out there with a book; I’m just a minnow in a crowded pond. It took a good deal of networking and research to realize just how hard it is.
Thanks to epublishing, I can still get books out. That frees me up to write what inspires me. Writing is the true love. It’d be great to make a living from it, but for now it’s just a hobby and money is just a bonus. There’s something deeply satisfying to have characters come to life and watch their stories unfold. It’s a deeper experience than reading someone else’s story.
What do you want readers to get from your stories?
The Annihilation of Foreverland (A Science Fiction Thriller) Page 25
