Nemesis: Book Five

by David Beers

  How long would he sit there? How many hours would be wasted while Trone thought the scientists could finish Kenneth Marks' work without him?

  "I'm not sure," he said. "This has to be right. We don't have any room for error."

  "We also don't have time."

  "I don't have an answer, because I don't know when they'll fully understand the genome."

  Trone stared at him for a few seconds. "Hurry," he said, and then left the room.

  30

  Present Day

  How did you do it? Bryan said.

  I don't know, Michael answered.

  What's it mean?

  I don't know.

  "Is he here?" Wren said.

  Bryan's eyes focused on the world around him, his attention leaving his mind. Wren was still climbing to his feet from where his body dropped.

  "He made it?"

  "He's here," Bryan said.

  And hell in heaven, he was. Bryan felt Michael—not like he had felt Morena, though. He wasn't shoved aside and then cast away, this time. Michael was there, but segmented, as if Bryan's brain accepted him, but would remain in control.

  "He can hear me?"

  I can hear him.

  "He says he can."

  "Christ," Wren said, staring at Bryan.

  Bryan felt the crossflow of information starting; it happened with Morena, and would happen here too, apparently. Neither of them could stop it, as their minds intermixed with one another.

  "What do we do?" Wren said.

  Michael heard his father ask the question, but he didn't have any answer.

  His body lay on a couch in another room, while he shared his best friend's mind. He didn't share his friend's body, though, because Michael had no more control over this one than he did his own.

  What do we do? His father asked.

  The only answer that came to Michael was, we die.

  As he looked on the landscape of Bryan's mind, he understood that a large part of Bryan already had. Michael didn't know how his mind created visual representations of the neural pathways he encountered, but it did. Always.

  And here, he stood in a desert. A dark one, with the moon high above, and a deep chill rolling across the sand. Space, everywhere he looked—space and loneliness. Not even animals moved across this world; no snakes slithered along the sand.

  We die, he thought again.

  Was this all there was to Bryan anymore? This desolation?

  Michael didn't move, only stood in the sand, unsure where to go, because even if he went, he'd still be looking at the same thing.

  What do we do? Bryan said internally.

  Could he see what Michael was looking at, this desert? But as soon as Michael wondered it, he realized the silliness of the question. Whether or not Bryan saw the same as Michael, he lived in this. He knew this desert better than Michael ever could, because he'd been in it since all this started.

  Michael didn't want to respond aloud. To speak of death in a place like this might blacken the moon—leaving everything in darkness.

  I need to think, he said instead, as if he was in charge here. As if he had a clue as to what to do next, and all he needed was just a little downtime to wrap his mind around it. He didn't know what to say, didn't know what to do, and didn't think he ever would.

  "He needs to think," Bryan said out loud.

  Michael watched as his father nodded, but didn't turn away. Wren looked at Bryan as if he thought he might be able to see his son if he stared long enough—like Bryan's eyes might turn into Michael's.

  Except my eyes are on the couch in the other room, he thought.

  Bryan walked to the bed and Wren watched him go, while Michael watched it all from the desert.

  I need to think? And what am I going to come up with? What kind of revelation am I going to find that will tell me anything besides we're all going to die?

  Another four hours gone by, and Trone hadn't shown up, thank God.

  No one in the room had slept for a long, long time, but none slowed down, either.

  Everyone was engaged in a way that Kenneth Marks wasn't sure he had ever seen before. Their inspiration didn't inspire him at all, but it was still nice to see.

  They were close to the solution.

  Kenneth Marks walked across the room and stood a few feet from the table that the scientists sat around.

  "Are we done?" he said.

  "I think so," one of them answered. He didn't know any of their names and none of them had bothered to tell him, either. Perhaps they heard about his snafu with the former President, or perhaps they only cared about their job.

  "It's this one. Right here."

  Kenneth Marks watched the woman point to a number on a piece of paper. R679.

  "That's it? That's the one that can't handle cold temperatures?" he said.

  "Yes. Now we need to understand how to dose it."

  "Well, that's the easy part, darling," Kenneth Marks said. He reached into his pants' pocket and pulled out a tiny chip. "We're going to program it."

  His smile was perhaps as wide as it ever had been.

  Knox stood on the road, bright lights shining down around them all as if it this was a movie set. No one had time to wait until morning, and no one would attempt this with only moonlight guiding them.

  The General remained on the edge of the group, standing by himself. He didn't want to be within a thousand feet of Marks, though he didn't have a choice right now.

  "We're ready," Trone had said, coming into Knox's bunk. Knox wasn't sleeping, only looking up at the bare ceiling, thoughts flowing freely through his head. They all stopped with Trone's announcement, though. It meant Marks finally created something he thought would halt this continual onslaught. It meant that the human race might have a chance, or it would have—if Marks wasn't the one directing this.

  Looking at the flurry of activity now, Knox tried to focus on the positive. If they beat this shit back, they could find an opportunity to stop Marks and whatever it was he wanted to do. They could use him just as he thought he was using them. Because the most important part about this, the thing they all needed to deal with first, was stopping the alien's assault.

  A massive computer stood fifty feet from the slowly spreading white strands. Still spreading. Always spreading. It wouldn't stop, and in the distance, Knox could see why. Looking into the land the white cake already conquered, he saw the color filled capsules. The strands spread because they brought alien life everywhere they went, while killing anything else they touched.

  Knox didn't understand the complexities of what they were attempting, though he was briefed on his way over. Marks' plan was to put a program into the white cake, as if it was a computer and not a biological organism.

  "He says it's not fully biological. He says that the DNA, the aliens reengineered it somehow, and there is… I don't fucking know, a digital piece to it all," Trone had said.

  "What's it do?"

  "He thinks it allowed them to control their world in different ways, thinks that it contributes a lot to the green color you've seen wrapping around her."

  "And how did he figure all this out?" Knox asked. "You believe him?"

  "The one piece of the white cake that they studied to figure all this out, he said everything was in there. Though, of course, the rest of the scientists missed it during their initial investigation."

  Knox didn't say anything else. He rode in the armored caravan without another word.

  And here they were, Marks no longer near the massive computer bank, having done whatever he needed there. Now he stood twenty feet from the edge of the white cake, with a small chip in his closed right hand.

  Kenneth Marks felt the small piece of metal resting in his hand.

  Trone stood a few feet from him. Weapons of all sorts surrounded the whole group, ready to open fire into the sky if anything showed up that might even hint at a threat. The President stood in a hazmat suit, as did about ninety percent of the people around Kenneth M
arks.

  He didn't need one. None of them did, but the President certainly wasn't allowed to stand out here without every possible protection in place. What happened next wouldn't be quick, but the danger from the strands would cease to exist, at least in this area.

  He hoped she would know immediately. He wanted her to understand that she hadn't won, despite the current circumstances. That all the wreckage she caused, and her minion was currently causing, would end soon. What he held in his hand wouldn't stop with the strands. It would infect everything, every child not yet born, every creature that touched it, all the way to that open hole in Grayson. So unless she planned on floating above the ground for eternity, she was done.

  Or, she bent to him.

  And then he would stop it.

  Because this chip wasn't the only one that could be created.

  Trone said something to him, but Kenneth Marks paid him no attention.

  He brought his hand back slightly, closed with his palm facing up, and then tossed the chip into the air. It moved in a heavenly arch, floating as if angels carried it up. Kenneth Marks watched it flip as if the whole thing moved in slow-motion.

  And finally, it landed without a sound, coming to rest on the bed of white.

  The strands wasted no time in growing over it, consuming it.

  A silence as deep as the loneliest part of the universe dominated the group, as all eyes watched the spot where the chip landed.

  Nothing happened.

  No one spoke, and the seconds ticked on. Kenneth Marks didn't care about the rest, though his mind felt the shift in tension around him. Hope quickly being replaced with doubt. The strands consumed it just as they had everything else, and they were still growing, not dying.

  Kenneth Marks waited. If he had ever worried before in his life, he didn't remember it, and even now, with doubt growing all around him—faster than the strands continually trying to reach the group, he knew he was right. He knew that what came next would change the course of the entire universe.

  And then it happened.

  The white strands that grew directly over the chip crystallized, or at least that's what appeared to happen. In reality, they iced over—all at once, even with the air warm enough to melt it, which it would in a few moments. By then though, it wouldn't matter. The ice killed, and when it turned to water, the death would remain.

  The crystallization continued, moving inch by inch across the strands—quicker than they could grow. No one spoke, all just watched as the ice moved outward.

  And as death followed.

  The white of the strands darkened, turning gray, and finally a lifeless ash. The ice moved and death came next.

  Kenneth Marks walked forward, leaving the pack behind, and went to the edge of the white cake's expansion. Ice stood an inch from his foot, and beneath it, he saw a lifeless organism.

  Kenneth Marks kicked the alien, breaking the ice and sending the gray strands out into the white world in front of him.

  The world behind Kenneth Marks?

  They cheered with the screams of the pardoned. Some even cried.

  31

  Present Day

  No screams ricocheted through Morena's head as before.

  That might have been a relief, actually. When her children screamed before, it was because they had a chance, they understood what was happening and begged for help. Those screams, the ones Morena hated so desperately before, were now replaced with silence. The silence of the dead. Not even any pain. Just complete and total nothingness where there had once been something. Her children.

  And she felt it spreading. That nothingness.

  She knew everywhere her children went, every last inch that they spread across, and now she felt that area retreating. Fast. Much too fast.

  The northeast.

  Morena went to the air, leaving behind everything. All of the world disappeared besides her need to get to that shrinking perimeter. To see what was happening to her children.

  The world around Junior was broken. He didn't know if this planet had seen such destruction before, but if it had, he knew it wouldn't recover this time.

  Buildings no longer existed. Instead, wreckage piled ten and twenty feet high in what used to be streets. Metal bars jutted up across the landscape, twisted and black, some even melted into grotesque shapes resembling nothing of the original. Fire still burned, though not the roaring unstoppable force of a few hours before. Now it lived in pockets, eating away what was still left. Besides the crackling flames and the still settling wreckage, the city was silent.

  No one besides Junior lived in this city any longer.

  He hovered above one of the fires, letting the warmth beneath feed his own body.

  He kept his eyes closed, waiting. He had done well so far, but this was taking too much time, and he wanted to be done with it. He understood other places existed on this planet, places that he would need to cross oceans to reach. He couldn't do it by himself though, not in a timeframe that would please Morena.

  So now, he waited.

  And when they came, arriving from the air and spreading out in a circle around him, he knew that speed would come now. The destruction he wrought on this world would increase at a rate humans couldn't comprehend.

  Junior opened his eyes and saw hundreds of auras in front of him. He circled slowly, looking at all that had come to him, flying clear across this landmass, to an entirely new coast. Here, now.

  His army.

  He took to the air, and they all followed.

  Concluded in Nemesis: Book Six!

  For David Beers’ FREE Starter Library, as well as personal contact with the author, sign up for his Insider Club at: http://www.davidbeersfiction.com/insiderclub

  32

  Nemesis: Book Six

  Chapter One

  Morena floated above death.

  She had seen death before, numerous times. Death caused by her and death caused by others. Beginnings always had endings, which was something she came to accept long ago—something all Vars must understand. Her own death would mean the passing of power, giving a generation unto the next ruler.

  Death meant life, death meant things were born anew.

  Except for this place. Morena looked down at a very different death, one she didn't accept, one that wouldn't bring life.

  She saw her children's ashes. Both strands and Bynum's alike, mixed together by wind and weather as if no more than dust.

  And that's what they are, Morena. It doesn't matter what was or could have been. They're no longer any of that. They're dead, and look further, Great Var, and you can see this stretching far into the distance. Indeed, you can't even see the end of this abomination.

  The words mocked her with their truth. Beneath, she saw what the humans left behind, the markings from their machines on the asphalt roads. She saw how close they ventured to her children, how brazen they were about the murder they brought. They had stood mere feet away, as if her children weren't capable of wiping out their entire world—as if they weren't already doing it.

  They're not. Not anymore.

  The humans were brazen because they could be. She knew who did this, the one who created this gray ash she floated above—Kenneth Marks. And then he left, hiding after starting a plague on her species. She alone remained here with her dead children, holding the only vigil they would ever know.

  She turned around, looking back across the land that she had considered conquered. No more. The gray death swept across this area like paint on canvas. Morena didn't know what it was that moved through her children, killing them so efficiently. She didn't even know if she could touch their remains, or if it would infect her as well. Unknowns everywhere she turned, yet everything still relied on her though she held no answers.

  Morena slowly descended from the sky, landing on the road just outside of her dead children's reach. He—Kenneth Marks—had stood here, or near it; she felt certain. He stood here and watched the death he created spread through those she
cared most about. And did he smile? Morena had seen it, that smile, witnessed it in the cage while in charge of Will. Yes, for sure, the motherfucker smiled as it started. He might still be smiling, wherever he went.

  Morena dropped to one knee. If the death still lived in the ash, then all of this would be over momentarily. No more worries, no more struggle, just the end of her and Bynimian.

  She reached forward and picked up the gray that had once been pure white. Her aura wrapped around it, searching as quickly as it could for danger.

  It found nothing.

  Just lifelessness.

  She let the aura continue swirling, and watched as it swept out among the remaining dead—searching within them as well. Some clue. Some knowledge as to what happened and how she could stop it.

  Nothing.

  Morena closed her eyes and called her aura back. She wrapped her arms around her knee. Rage welled inside, rage that she had never known before—not during her attempted execution, not during any of Chilras' sermons. Rage against a universe that wouldn't let her live ... wouldn't let her children live.

  She didn't scream, made no noise as she knelt alone on the asphalt. She let the rage rise like waves in a typhoon, slamming against whatever was in their way.

  An hour passed, perhaps more, and then Morena rose to her feet.

  The universe would bend.

  The arc of fate would bend if that's what it took.

  She wasn't a woman, no more than Morena—yet the creature was clearly female.

  Michael saw her though he didn't understand how that was possible. The landscape around him remained a bare desert, completely devoid of life, and he'd been in it for hours at this point, seeing nothing but the blackness of Bryan's mind.