ASCENDANT
The Complete Edition
BY
RICHARD DENONCOURT
ASCENDANT
The Complete Edition
BY
RICHARD DENONCOURT
Copyright © 2013 Richard Denoncourt
Self Land Publishing
All rights reserved.
Cover Design: Carl Graves
Content Edit: Kara Amie
Copy Edit: Shelley Holloway, hollowayhouse.me
Ascendant is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This eBook contains an excerpt from Trainland, a horror-thriller by Richard Denoncourt, available now on Amazon.com.
ALSO BY RICHARD DENONCOURT
TRAINLAND
PELTHAM PARK: Dark Short Stories
SAVANT: Book One of the Luminether Series
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Episode I: Origins
Episode II: Children of Ment
Episode III: People’s Republic
Episode IV: Uprising
Trainland (Sample)
About the Author
Prologue
When the alarm began to wail over the mountains, Claudia gripped her son more tightly to her chest and hurried through the darkened forest. She was going to die tonight. She was going to die, and it didn’t matter as long as she got her son to where he needed to be before their captors arrived. They were almost there now. Just a little longer.
She’d been running for almost an hour, and her bare feet felt eviscerated. Her son was like a sack of bones in her arms, worrying her to no end. Those bastards had done this to him, had treated him like an animal for the sake of their experiments. They hadn’t even seen fit to give him a real name, instead referring to him as “the Cairne boy” or worse: by his number, T1-07. Like he’d never been human to begin with.
Tonight, Claudia Cairne changed all that. She whispered her son’s name over and over, “Michael, Michael.” It had been her grandfather’s name. “You’re Michael Cairne.”
The night was moist, the wind icy as it whistled past her ears. In the quiet pause between each blast of the alarm, she could hear the slapping of her feet against the ground, the dogs barking after her in the distance, the occasional hoots of owls in the branches above.
“Hang in there, Michael,” she told her son, making sure to keep using his name. Maybe the drugs would wear off in time so he could hear her voice and remember it. It was all she had left to give him.
Michael stirred against her breast, reminding her that she had never even nursed her own son. A fresh wave of anger pushed her along. The barking of the dogs was audible over the alarm, which meant they were gaining on her. If she ran any faster, her feet would give out; they had already been slashed to ribbons by the sticks and rocks.
Finally. There it was. She heaved a sigh of relief and slowed.
The van was exactly where her contact had said it would be, and painted dark green to blend in with the forest. She came to a complete stop, almost dropping her son, each breath a ragged pull. Thank God she had made it in time.
“Claudia,” a man said in a meek voice.
Copernicus was at her side a moment later. She had never actually met the man, but she trusted him with her son’s life. She had to. For years, she’d known him only under that alias: Copernicus, the man at the other end of the transmitter, who swore he was on her side. He had proven himself several times over by saving the lives of many women like herself; fugitives from the experiment. His resulting status as the country’s second most-wanted criminal was a badge of honor he wore with pride.
She was surprised to see that he was a small, pudgy man with a trim beard and glasses fogged up with moisture. Not what she had expected at all.
“You’re younger than I thought,” Copernicus said, motioning for her to pass Michael to him. She only gripped her son tighter. “What’s your name?”
“You know it.”
“Your real name, I mean.”
They were at the back of the van now. Copernicus, who knew her only as Athena, was opening the doors.
“Claudia Cairne,” she said, then added: “It doesn’t matter now.”
“You’re his mother. He should know your name.”
The doors swung open, revealing complete darkness inside. Someone flicked a lighter, and by its flame, Claudia saw the faces of two homely women in dark turtleneck sweaters. They looked enough alike to be sisters, though one was wider of frame and blinked nervously while the other was narrow and calm.
“Mary Tudor,” the calm one said.
“Joan of Arc,” the other one said, blinking rapidly. “We spoke last night.”
“Thank you for coming,” Claudia said, climbing into the van. “I’m Claudia. This is my son, Michael.”
She handed him over, though her arms resisted at first. The two women had to pull his frail body away from her grasping fingers.
Copernicus pulled himself in and shut the doors.
“Leave them open,” Claudia said. “I can’t stay.”
“But I told you,” he whispered loudly at her, twin flames caught in the lenses of his glasses. “You’ll be perfectly safe. We’ve already set you up with a job, and a home—”
“No. They’ll use me to find him. I know they will.”
Joan of Arc brought a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.
“His name’s Michael,” Claudia said, emphasizing his name. She had no time for sentimentality or tears. “Listen to me. You have to keep him hidden. Once he begins to go through puberty, his ability will self-activate, and he’ll be a danger to himself and others. You have to get in touch with Louis Blake. He’s the only one who can help my son. Otherwise, they’ll find him. They’ll take Michael back to that place and he will die. Do you understand?”
The two women nodded.
“You can’t trust Louis Blake,” Copernicus said, frowning. “You know what they say about him. You know what he did.”
Claudia grabbed the man’s shirt and pulled him so close she could have kissed him. He released a small hiss of air at the sudden movement.
“Lies. He didn’t kill those children. He saved them. Now do as I say.”
She let go of the man. The two women looked sullenly down at Michael, who was still unconscious. He looked to be at peace. She couldn’t imagine what pain ran through his dreams.
“I have to go now,” Claudia said. She bent over her son and kissed his forehead, one hand savoring the softness of his hair. “Goodbye, Michael. I love you so much.”
An arrow of pain shot upward inside her skull. She closed her eyes and massaged her right temple. Getting closer—she could feel the heat of their thoughts. They were desperate.
“What is it?” Copernicus said. “What’s wrong?”
Claudia opened her eyes. “He’s with them.”
“Who?”
Speaking his name only made the headache worse.
“Harris Kole.”
Stepping out of the van was the most difficult decision she had ever made.
As soon as it disappeared into the darkness of the forest, Claudia sprinted in the opposite direction. She had to get as far away from her son as possible. She could already sense them reaching out in search of her signature, trying to sniff her out like the dogs that they were.
There was a river not far from here. If she swam with the current, she could get away even faster than running. Her bloodied feet were already screaming for mercy, on the verge of giving out. She didn’t expect to survive this ni
ght, but there was always the chance…
The land became rockier and colder. The current would take her away from the van—and Michael—but closer to the research facility from which she had just escaped. The best she could hope for was a quick death. Maybe, if she was lucky, a rock would split her skull so she wouldn’t have to drown.
“Here! Over here!” the men shouted.
Her feet gave out finally, and Claudia fell to her knees against the wet leaves and twigs. Someone must have called in their success over a transmitter. The alarm had stopped.
“Damn you,” she told the flashes of light behind the trees.
A moment later, men with roaming flashlights and drawn pistols surrounded her. The dogs barked and snapped at her face, held back by chains. If she leaned toward them, maybe one would rip out her throat.
“Grab her arms. Get her up.”
Rough hands grabbed her and pulled her along. Just soldiers, nothing more. Kole must have been saving his Psy Ops team for the interrogation. She had to end it before then.
Behind her, one of the soldiers chuckled in her ear and ran a hand up the length of her thigh, stopping where her legs met, each finger like an icicle against her warmth.
Claudia whipped her head back and hammered the man’s nose into his face, making him howl.
“Bitch broke my nose!”
He drove the heel of his boot into her lower back, sending her down to her knees. It took all the effort Claudia had just to hold back moans as the pain flashed along her spine.
“Get a hold of yourself,” another soldier said. “The general wants her unharmed.”
They lifted her once more to her feet as the man with the broken nose grumbled and followed along.
She had known they would take her here. The clearing was flooded with light from a sleek, expensive car. Claudia had seen this car many times before and knew the smell of its leather interior. Harris Kole liked to drive the concubines out to this same clearing—making sure the telepathic ones had been drugged first, of course—so he could bend them over the hood in the darkness and…
Her stomach clenched as a sour taste filled her mouth, a reaction to the memory of him invading her like an engorged parasite.
“Ah, there she is.”
Harris Kole, the nation’s highest-ranking general and only son to the One President, stepped out from around the front of the car, a silhouette against the headlamps. He was shorter than the men around him, narrower in the shoulders as well.
He hadn’t known about the van, and still didn’t, judging from his relaxed posture.
“Where’s the boy?”
“In heaven,” Claudia said. “With the other angels you slaughtered.”
Swinging his arms in a leisurely fashion, Kole approached as if to give her a friendly handshake. Instead, his gloved hand flashed through the air to slam into her face, knuckles first.
Claudia’s vision wobbled, but she made no sound, nor did she change her stolid expression, even as her cheek burned like fire.
“Flashlight,” Kole said and held out the hand he’d used to strike her.
A soldier laid a metal flashlight against his palm. Kole shined it into her eyes as if in search of answers behind them. Claudia hardened her expression despite the sinking sensation in her gut. She couldn’t allow them to take her back. She had to end it somehow, here in this clearing.
“Think you’re clever, huh? You actually think I can’t get into your mind whenever I please.”
The light blinded her. A moment later, she was on the ground, reeling from a powerful punch to the stomach that almost made the urine in her bladder spill out. She hadn’t seen the punch coming and was glad her womb was empty. Five pregnancies, four of them failed, and yet she had never felt pain like this.
“Get up, whore.”
She sprang back up, not because he had ordered it, but because she wouldn’t let him see her on the ground like a beaten dog. She cupped saliva with her tongue and spit it onto his face, where it stuck like bits of wet plaster. He swung at her again, causing her other cheek to burn. She wanted to shout at him with all the rage in her soul, but instead, she kept silent.
Good. The anger was growing, fueling her. An unexpected benefit.
Now she could use it.
“The boy,” Kole said, breathing into her face, the flashlight pointing up at their chins. He was so close she could have counted the black hairs coming out of his nose.
“He’s gone,” Claudia said. “Now it’s just me and you.”
Nodding, Kole backed away from her. “Call in a region-wide search. Standard procedure times ten. I want everyone in on it.”
“Yes, sir,” one of his soldiers said and reached for his transmitter.
Claudia glanced at the gun hanging off the hip of the soldier closest to her. The leather strap over the grip was unbuttoned. They were being careless, probably because she was a woman.
“Put her in the car,” Kole said. “Tranq her first, obviously.”
“Yes, sir.”
The soldiers pulled her along. One reached into a pouch attached to his belt and pulled out a syringe.
It was time.
Claudia pressed her lips together and began a low, monotonous hum. Words formed in her mind invisibly, like heat waves she felt more than saw, accompanied by a sharp ache that would kill her if she wasn’t careful.
“What is that?” a soldier said.
“She’s using it,” said another.
“Now! The needle, God damn it!”
The soldier with the needle grabbed her throat with his free hand. Claudia gagged. A hurricane blasted through the tissue of her brain, causing damage on a massive scale. Her vision darkened as blood sang in her ears.
“Blind,” she whispered.
The man’s eyelids snapped open, the pupils spreading apart, useless now as his brain told them to ignore the light. The needle slipped from his hand, and then he was shouting.
“My eyes!” He reached up to touch them. “I can’t see!”
Claudia wrestled out of the other man’s grip and spun around. The other two soldiers lunged at her.
“Blind,” she screamed. “All of you, blind!”
The force of her command bent them backward, tore howling screams from their throats. It wasn’t pain making them howl like that; it was the feeling of being plunged into darkness so thick it was like being dead.
They stumbled in front of the headlights, making the beams flicker and the trees around the clearing appear to sidestep in fright.
Harris Kole had disappeared.
One of the soldiers rubbed his eyes as if he’d been pepper-sprayed. Claudia took the opportunity to slam him against the hood of the car before pulling his pistol out of the holster at his hip. Another soldier swung blindly and caught her in the shoulder, causing the gun to slip away.
“Shit,” she said.
She kicked the man in the groin, then dropped and searched for the gun. There it was; black and slick with dew, making her think of a snake in the grass. She picked it up and fumbled with the mechanisms.
By now, a fierce migraine had settled its weight on her brain. She was drooling, the left half of her face unresponsive; she could feel it sagging against her skull like heated wax. Her left arm hung limp as a noodle.
“Come on,” she said, fumbling with the pistol. With each passing second, her brain came closer and closer to shutting down. Darkness seeped into her vision.
Not yet. Just a minute longer.
The trigger was harder to pull than she had imagined it would be. She shot the soldiers, one by one, then swept the gun at the surrounding trees, her left arm hanging limp against her side. Harris Kole hid among those trees. Even now, with her brain in its final throes of death, she could sense his presence.
She put the gun to her right temple and listened to the wind while she waited.
“Go ahead,” Kole said, his voice reaching across the clearing. “Do it. I could breed a hundred more just like you.�
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Claudia sucked in air. It took all of her stamina to keep herself upright and the gun pressed to her temple. Maybe he was right. Maybe he didn’t need her at all.
But he needed Michael—needed him and didn’t have him. That was all that mattered.
“Put the gun down,” Kole said, his voice now soothing and unserious, like a father trying to talk a little girl out of running away from home. And yet Claudia could sense how worried he was. His father, the One President, was not going to be happy about this, and Harold Targin Kole was not a man you could piss off, even if you were his only son.
The stars were out, bright and mysterious, utterly indifferent to her pain, her victory. She pressed the tip of the barrel to the side of her forehead, perfectly in line with her frontal lobe, and gazed up at them, shivering from the cold.
“Live,” she said.
Closing her eyes, she pulled the trigger.
Episode I
ORIGINS
Chapter 1
The Line surrounded the country on three sides, a gray brick wall that stood opposite the natural border formed by the Pacific Ocean. It was a monstrous sight: two-thousand kilometers of reinforced concrete topped with bushels of barbed wire and angry-looking gun turrets that could swivel to face any direction, though they normally faced west, toward the streets and buildings of the Western Democratic People’s Republic of America, to take aim at the citizens they were supposed to be protecting; because according to the Party, that was where the real danger lay.
Michael Lanza walked north along the wire fence that sectioned off the Killzone, listening to the swiveling of the gun turrets. The Killzone, to the right of him, was about twenty meters of space that no one was supposed to enter. If you did, you were considered a defector and shot on sight. They were so accurate that sometimes people stuck squirrels and chipmunks through the fence to watch the turrets detect their pray, swivel into position, and blast them into bits, never missing.
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