by Simon Parker
Stephen knew precisely what that meant, but for him and his loving and gentle son, it was too late. Sean was the first born with the new technology as part of his genetic code. Stephen remembered being so proud when the blood tests had shown the nanobots were in his blood stream and the technologies were growing unaided in his baby boy. It had made the headlines the very next day and within a week their sales had rocketed. He’d give all the money back right this moment if only things could be different now.
He had trusted Dr Samiel, with his life and now he was paying for that mistake with not only his soul, but the souls of countless millions–or even billions–across the globe. How was he to know that Nick was working to another agenda? Nick must’ve always known how it would pan out. Planned and executed with cold, military precision, using Stephen and his company as powerful allies to spread his evil throughout the human race. Stephen was an unwitting pawn in the demise of his own species. Now Nick’s true face was being broadcast on WWN, World Web News.
It had been discovered accidentally by Ganonet, Stephen's main competitors, once three-quarters of the world’s population had their implants in place, that part of the genetic coding on the systems main biochip had a sequence of numbers encoded into the pins that resembled the number sequence on an old-fashioned bar code. The codes were each unique, but had three numbers the same in every sequence, the first number, the number in the middle of the sequence and the last number. They were six, six and six!
Stephen held his son, now a fully-grown man, and they wept together, knowing their fate and the fate of so many other souls. They held each other tightly and with more raw emotion than they had ever openly displayed before. They prayed together for the priest and his followers. They were the last and only hope for human kind. Then they waited for the call from the devil himself.
He had a special place reserved just for them.
Alone in Torment
Pete Taylor sat up in bed, sheathed in a slick sweat that greased his forehead, sticking his hair to his face. His breathing came in rapid gasps, but he began to calm down when he realised he was awake. His pulse slowed and the throbbing vein in his temple quieted. He knew he had been in the grip of a truly horrendous dream, but as fast as he tried to build a tangible memory of what the dream had been, the glimpses evaporated like ghosts in his periferral vision .
Rubbing his blood-shot eyes, he winced as a trickle of stale sweat crept down his cheek. Pete sat on the edge of his rumpled bed and sighed. His dream had been frightening and disturbing, but the realisation that he was awake brought only minimal relief. His life was a mess; depressing and pointless. He’d rather spend a week in that dream–whatever it was–than another day in the nightmare of his real life.
He got up and made himself a strong coffee, then slumped onto the saggy, stained sofa. His mood was down and his heart was sinking fast. He had lived with depression for as long as he could remember. He knew the routine. He knew the patterns.
“Being aware of the patterns was one way of not letting it rule your life,” his therapist had once told him.
“Fuckwit!” Pete muttered. “It’s all well and good knowing your case studies and books, but try living with it, moron!” He had not seen his therapist in … how long had it been now? But he continued to argue resentfully with the memory of the useless shrink. “You’ve got nothing to be depressed about, you smug little prick, with your tailored suit and your £90 an hour sessions!”
He puffed and sighed once more, no longer willing to waste time, energy or emotion on recalling past disputes. He was way beyond that. His hackles smoothed a little and his self-absorbed thoughts turned to his family. A sad smile moved the shadow from his heart and lightened his mood. Images of his wife danced in his mind like a scene from a romantic movie. She moved with the grace of a willow in the wind, smiling that perfect smile. Her beautiful strawberry-blonde hair blew in the gentle breeze, glistening in his mind. In front of her, his two children playing in the sand, giggling and running around, happy in each other’s company. Pete’s eyes were open and fixed, but he could only see the memory inside his head and where he could hear the children’s laughter. A solitary tear trickled down his cheek, leaving a silvery trail in its wake.
The vision gently faded as his surroundings slowly swam into his awareness once more. The walls of his room closed in. His smile slipped from his face as he wiped away the tear-track with the back of his hand. He felt like he was in a dark pool, trying to gather oil from the surface. As soon as he gathered up one thought, it slipped away from him, taking part of another with it. The pain was real, as were the memories, but everything else that formed in his mind was as fleeting as snowflakes on warm hands.
“They’re gone,” he whispered, not questioning, merely stating the fleeting thought that jarred his mind and tore at his heart. His beautiful wife, his adoring children … all lost. Yet he couldn’t quite recall the reason why. He was groping in the dark at sparks, airborne embers of memories, knowing that he had the answers within but not knowing how to retrieve them, and reluctant to do so. If just the hint of those could tear strips from his heart, what would the full memory do?
Images flickered in his mind like a high-speed slide show, but with all the slides mismatched and in the wrong order. How could he make a movie from these images? How could he see the entire picture to perceive its meaning? He stood and paced the room, too absorbed to notice his surroundings.
His head snapped up and he cried out, “NO!” The sound turned into a long, low howl of despair. He had grasped the image he had been chasing. The projector stuck in place on the slide he wanted to see but could not bear to look at.
She was staring straight at him, her stunning green eyes unblinking and cold. The skin around them, flecked with speckles of crimson. Her mouth gaping in a silent scream, stemmed mid-flow by the ragged gash across her throat.
His surroundings flexed and waved like a cinema screen in a strong wind, blending the sickening image in his head with the walls of the room. His mind was a runaway carriage sliding off the rails, and there was nothing he could do to straighten its buckled wheels. He coughed just once, then bent double and vomited on his feet. The sound reminding him of falling viscera.
He slumped into the corner, not caring that he was sitting in his own stomach’s waste. His wife was gone. Butchered. How could he possibly have forgotten? He had held her limp, lifeless form in his arms, stroked her blood-soaked hair and screamed at a non-existent god. If God actually existed, these things would never have come to pass. These things. These things. Plural!
Suddenly his mind was a clear mill pool, crystal shards of memories imperceptible in its depths. His children. What had happened to his children?
His mind became a tumbling waterfall of haunting emotions. Faster and faster it fell, smashing on the rocks of despair. He rose to his feet and staggered across the room. Were his children alive? Were his beautiful boys well? Why had they abandoned their father in his desperate time of need? Why had they deserted their mother’s lifeless body and fled? Where were they?
In his distorted mind’s eye, he saw fleeting images of his children; happy, smiling, playful. He remembered the boys and his wife visiting him at his work, regretting the time he’d spent building the business into an empire. Time that should have been spent with his family absorbing their love. He saw strobing images of their bedroom, the two boys jumping on one of the beds, pretending it was a giant trampoline in a huge circus tent. The look of unbounded joy on their faces brought an involuntary smile to his own. It was the kind of look that only purity and innocence can possess. Pete would never again know that look. His soul had seen too much depravity.
His mind snapped to another image of his boys, the last time he had seen them. That same room. Their tiny bodies splayed at unnatural angles. Broken. Torn. Great rents across their skin. Their blood pooling on the light blue rug that became their shroud.
He bent double and wretched again, this time bringing fo
rth only fluorescent bile. He had nothing left. His stomach was as empty as his heart, his soul. It was all gone.
The memories taunted him now, a relentless ebb and flow that rapidly became a tsunami. He baulked at the memories as they flooded him. On the silver screen of his mind’s eye, he saw himself at his business, arguing with his partner over the failing empire. He saw himself rise up from his desk and grab the lamp, first striking his partner a stunning blow across the temple in a fit of rage, then springing like a gazelle over the desk to finish off the job he had started. Wrapping the flex around his partner’s neck. Pulling, pulling until the body stopped twitching.
The scene continued playing, flickering on the wall before his raw, red-ringed eyes, the flow unstoppable. He saw himself panic and hide the corpse of his partner clumsily in the space beneath his desk. The movie fast-forwarded to his arrival at home. He was still panicked, his skin grey and slick with cold sweat. There she was, his beautiful wife. Concern painted her face at the shocking sight of him. He had no secrets from her at all. Theirs was a deeply loving and trusting relationship. They briefly discussed what had happened. She had wanted him to go to the police, to deal with the consequences before they became more severe.
“No!” he had bellowed. He was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been. He could not get caught, could not go to jail. There must be a way to hide what he had done, conceal his gambling debts, the embezzlement, the body of his late partner. There simply must be a way to bring normality back. To erase this avalanching situation from existence.
“No!” he yelled again. His wife backed away from him, her beautiful emerald eyes flashing fear at him, telling him she no longer trusted him, that she would do whatever it took to make this end here and now. He saw her reach slowly for the phone, not letting her eye contact with him drop for a second. She had ceased to be part of the solution and had firmly entrenched herself in the problem camp. That could not happen.
His panic had rapidly ascended to anger and finally reached blind rage. He had grabbed the first thing he found on the table beside him in the hallway. The brass letter opener had felt surprisingly light in his hand as it arced over his head and slashed at his retreating wife. Its serrated edge had found her throat, tearing away a jagged lump of flesh rather than slicing cleanly, ripping away the scream as it left her lips. Her blood had splashed and bubbled through her fingers as she grasped desperately at her wound. She’d staggered, dropped to her knees and then fallen onto her back as her life pooled around her silken blonde mane.
He’d stood trapped in that moment, aghast at the viscous tableau of which he was the artist. He’d dropped to his knees, cradling his wife in his arms, stroking her blood-soaked hair. His mind raced forward. He’d been clutching at elusive solutions when he’d seen the boys, stunned by what they had just witnessed. Time had frozen for that instant, then as one, the boys exploded into action. They’d screamed in unison and fled to their room, slamming the door behind them. Pete had torn it open as the boys both dived onto the same bed, yanking the duvet over their heads like a cloak of invisibility, but the terrifying monster that was their daddy had snatched it from them. The boys had trembled silently, their eyes mad with fear.
The walls of the room closed in once more.
Pete had stood there in the grip of his blind panic. The boys had been witness to his madness, to the aftermath of his uncontrollable rage. He couldn’t let them tell anyone, for their own good. He would do anything to protect them from the evils of the world. If he was discovered, he would be taken from his angelic boys. They would be forced to go into care, would be subjected to a media storm from the sickening gutter press. He could not allow that to happen. They could not pay for his actions.
He had been sobbing as he picked up his youngest son and threw him with vicious force across the room. He’d heard the vomit-inducing crunch as the boy’s tiny neck crumpled against the wall. His limbs had flailed as his miniature cadaver dropped in slow motion onto the light blue rug. His eldest son had voided his bowels and let out a sob and a whimper of resigned desperation.
Pete had taken one pace and picked up the little metal chair that sat beside his son’s easel. Without blinking or pausing, without processing the thoughts that tumbled through his fractured mind, he had begun to rain devastating blows down on the seven-year-old. He hadn’t stopped until the boy’s head had resembled a broken watermelon. Pieces of his grey matter had flown from the chair leg on its final arc. Only then had Pete dropped, once again, to his knees.
Back in the darkened cell of his room, reeking of vomit and stale sweat, he stood like a statue, his features frozen in stark terror. Pete stared blankly into space as the memories of that time continued to stream in his mind’s eye.
He had been sobbing. The situation was irretrievable, the perfect storm peaked and passed. Realisation of the madness of his actions hammered a nail through his heart. He had carefully arranged the boys’ bodies, blowing kisses at them as he folded the light blue rug around them. There was no way out, no road back from the hideous destruction he had wrought. Only one course of action lay open to him, the only resolution. The only hope of redemption. The guilt he felt for what he had done was a lead chain around his soul. He knew what he must do. Only one punishment fitted his crimes.
He had gone to his bedroom, mumbling his regrets as he shuffled like a medicated hospital patient. Once he had retrieved what he was looking for, he’d returned to the landing. He’d secured the belt of his dressing gown around the sturdy top bannister, barely able to see the knot through the tears that had streamed down is face. He had quickly fastened the other end of the belt around his own neck, knowing if he paused or dallied, he would be a coward and not do what had to be done. As he’d plunged from the bannister into thin air, he’d screwed his eyes tightly shut and whispered, “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.”
He’d barely registered the strange crunching clicks as his vertebrae separated. He recalled feeling his eyes bulging wide. His vision had blurred as the small veins in his eyes burst. His arms and legs had done the involuntary dance of the dying, and his bowel had emptied. In that moment, all movement had ceased, his vision had begun to dim, awareness leaving him. Darkness had folded in on him, wrapping him in its warm embrace.
He stood now gasping for breath, clasping his throat, remembering the pain. His mind reeled with the paradox threatening to overtake him. How could he remember his own death? How was that even possible? He was here, conscious and breathing. How could both be true?
The walls seemed to shimmer again as he looked at them. They looked dark and unreal, fading in and out of focus. Another realisation struck him. This place had felt like a cell to him for as long as he could remember, in fact it was all he could remember clearly. Yes, that must be it. It must be. He was trapped in a hell of his own creation, retribution for the carnage he had left behind him. He was the Devil, the Devil was him and he had made a home here for his soul to burn. The thought gained momentum as the walls of his room evaporated into cascading falls of burning lava. The heavy scent of sulphur, caustic on his senses, merely served to confirm his fears. He could not move, frozen to the spot despite the stifling, searing heat that burned his soul and ate his flesh with white-hot fangs. The truth hit him like an express train. All he could do was scream the longest, loudest scream born of sheer terror. It echoed and reverberated around the walls of lava, sounding like a desperate choir of damned souls. He collapsed, exhausted, his senses overwhelmed.
Pete sat up in bed, sheathed in a slick sweat that greased his forehead, sticking his hair to his face. His breathing came in rapid gasps, but he began to calm down when he realised he was awake…
Superficial
Expectations
The tears burned, hot and salty onto Eleanor’s top lip as she stared blankly at her father’s coffin being lowered into the cold, gaping earth. Her stepmother, Janet, squeezed her hand, more in a pleading for support than a gesture of her affection and caring. Ja
net was producing a torrent of sobs and wails, melodramatically executed with military precision. Puddles of mascara-stained tears lay in the creases of her agonized features. Eleanor grimaced as she watched Janet hamming it up for all she was worth.
She knew it was simply because there were paparazzi around. After all, she had to keep up appearances. Having said that, there was a loneliness in Janet’s eyes that Eleanor had not expected to see. Maybe she really did miss the old man in some strange way.
Ben Rouche had been a pop legend in the background. He’d never had a number one hit, but he’d consistently been a part of the scene for twenty-five years before he’d died so suddenly. He had achieved great financial success, but only minor celebrity status. Still, he had the millionaire mansion, two beautiful sports cars and every nick-nack and gadget money could buy. Toward the end of his career, he had known that his looks and his popular appeal were fading. He had formed the Cocker-Rouche record label, which had gone from strength to strength in their first two years of trading, having signed two of the top five selling bands at the moment.
Janet stood, her sobs subdued now. She could barely contain herself at the thought of that lovely mansion and all that cash soon being hers alone. More money than she could ever feasibly have hoped to earn in her lifetime. For the sake of appearance only, she planned to give it a respectable amount of time before moving her lover into Rouchenest, soon to be renamed Dinman Towers. She sighed deeply. It was a strange feeling. She missed Ben now he was gone for good. She had often wanted him dead, even planned it once, but now that he was, she felt no guilt.
