Silicon Man

by William Massa

  http://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/ref+cm_cr_dp_wrt_btm?ie=UTF8&asin=B00IK5UK9I

  If you have notes, thoughts or comments about this book, feel free to email me at

  williammassabooks@gmail.com

  Writing can be a solitary pursuit but rewriting can be a group effort. I strive to make each book better than the last and feedback is incredibly helpful.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William Massa is a screenwriter, script consultant and book reviewer (http://horrornovelreviews.com/) He has lived in New York, Florida, Europe and now calls Los Angeles his home. William writes horror, thrillers, science fiction and dark fantasy. More books are on the way.

  Visit his Facebook page for updates and messages.

  Thank you for taking a chance on a new writer. I hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I did writing it.

  COVER ART/CREDITS

  Cover Design by Jun Ares & William Massa

  Copyright © istockphoto

  Thanks to my early reviewers! Your comments were helpful and pushed the story to the next level.

  COMING MAY 2014

  CROSSING THE DARKNESS

  A SCIENCE FICTION HORROR THRILLER

  Faith Cadena hopes to make a new life for herself on a new world far from Earth. After doing hard time for a crime committed in her youth, all she wants now is a chance at a fresh start.

  Booking passage on an interstellar colony barge, Faith expects an uneventful three-year voyage spent in cryogenic stasis. But her dream of a better life becomes a nightmare when she is prematurely awakened halfway through her journey and finds herself trapped aboard a ship of horrors. The vessel is adrift in the far reaches of space, its crew brutally murdered and a ruthless killer in command.

  With the nearest outpost millions of miles away, it’s up to Faith to face an inhuman adversary with terrifying plans for the ship’s 4000 sleeping passengers…

  Faith Cadena cried out in agony, her voice echoing inside the antiseptic hospital room, in the throes of an excruciating struggle. Her face was beaded with perspiration, teeth clenched tight, legs open wide and raised, her bulging belly obscuring her direct line of sight. Lights flashed above her, bouncing on the sterile white walls — a blinding blur. She caught whirling glimpses of computer monitors to her left, mysterious devices of medical science designed to measure her life signs. Phosphorescent green lines spiked erratically. She barely registered the doctor and the nurse. The doctor wore a surgical mask and was crouched between her legs, anticipating the arrival of new life.

  The searing, building pain wasn’t like anything Faith had ever experienced before in her nineteen years on this planet, and that was saying something — she had already faced a lifetime’s worth of adversity and suffering.

  As contractions wracked her body, her lips twisted into a manic grin. This was a good pain, she told herself. This wasn’t the pain of an abusive stepfather stubbing out a burning hot cigarette butt into your arm, or the numbing throb of a broken heart after catching another loser boyfriend cheating. The pain tearing her insides out now was different because it filled her with hope. After all the screw-ups and wrong moves and bad mistakes, she finally had done something good with her life. Something she could be proud of.

  She grimaced, jaws tightening with the final effort. She exhaled a sharp gasp of unbridled anguish and the wails of a newborn filled the room.

  Everyone relaxed. Faith could see the tension easing from the eyes peeking over their surgical masks. She sensed that they were smiling under those masks. Her baby was alive and well.

  The doctor wrapped the screaming infant in a blanket and handed it to the nurse. The physical contact seemed to calm the baby down a little. Faith weakly turned her head, straining to catch a closer look at her child. The moment her eyes found the newborn, she could feel the steel inside her grow brittle.

  She had learned from a young age to keep her emotions in check. Emotions could be exploited as a weakness and used against you. A smile had to be earned, never given freely. But the innocent, helpless bundle before her broke down all defenses and her eyes grew wet and shiny with tears. Her lips quivered into a smile of pure joy.

  Her full attention was riveted on the little angel taking in its new surroundings with growing curiosity. She didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, didn’t wonder what she should call the child. Those were questions for another day. Right now, what mattered the most was her overpowering need to hold her own child. To feel that trembling ball of life next to her. She struggled to speak and was shocked at how weak her quavering voice sounded.

  “Can I hold her?”

  The question hung in the air, greeted by a moment of inaction. There was doubt in the nurse’s eyes, duty at war with her own feminine nature. The nurse took a tentative step toward Faith when the doctor appeared, a gloved hand tightening around her shoulder to stop her advance. The doctor looked down at Faith and there was resigned sympathy in his gaze.

  “I'm sorry. You’re not allowed contact with the baby.”

  The baby. Not your baby.

  She had given life to this child but, according to the state, she would be granted no further rights over her own daughter. Her body had been nothing more than a means to an end, a biological incubator denied its own creation.

  There was a grim finality to the doctor’s words as he snatched the infant away from the nurse. A door zoomed open and men wearing black-gray uniforms appeared. Faith’s breath hitched and her heart seemed to trip over its own beat. She swallowed against the lump in her throat. A perfect moment had degenerated into a nightmare. Her eyes widened with growing panic.

  Nooo!

  Almost as if the newborn knew it was about to be separated from its mother, the baby started to scream again.

  Agonizing seconds stretched as the uniformed men snatched the child. Faith stirred. Despite what she'd been through, she had to take action. Tapping into her last reserves of strength, she pushed herself out of bed. When her naked feet hit the icy floor they left a trail of blood in their wake. The nurse and doctor tried to stop her but there was dark fire in her gaze, which gave them both pause. Her eyes glittered with a primal instinct, a force honed by thousands of years of human evolution.

  She managed to take a few weak steps before the exhaustion of her exertion took its inevitable toll. Her legs gave out and she crumpled, head hitting the freezing tile with a dull smack. She wrenched her neck, pitiful eyes looking up through a cloud of tears. Her words shook the room with maternal anguish as the uniformed kidnappers vanished through the door. The world slipped out of focus, growing fuzzy around the edges.

  “Please, don't let them take my baby. PLEAAAASE…”

  ***

  Faith’s eyes snapped open, her body spasmed, a scream lodged in her throat and her lungs inhaled sharply. She was not sprawled on the hospital floor but instead found herself suspended inside a steel-reinforced glass cylinder, a tangled mass of tubes connected to her body like artificial umbilical cords. She was naked except for a tank-top and shorts. Her hands came up and she realized there wasn’t enough room to shift her position; any movement required excruciating effort.

  Understanding hit her with sobering ferocity. The scene in the hospital room had been a dream, an old memory hungry for attention. Doing her best to shake off her groggy confusion, she stared through the glass lid of her high-tech coffin at the world beyond. The glass distorted her view and she could merely make out a cavernous maze of steel and glass and shadows. Faith’s eyes ticked back and forth, trying to make sense of her predicament.

  Where was she? What was going on?

  A growing physical discomfort put a halt to her questions. Each breath had become an ordeal and she found herself gasping for air. Inside the chamber, oxygen levels must have dropped below an acceptable level.

  Her arms twisted in the confined space and she pushed her hands against the cylinder's glass surface, pressing. A fierce struggle ensued but yielded l
ittle result. The tube didn’t budge. How was she going to get out of this contraption? Panic took hold as mounting claustrophobia frayed at her nerves, control threatening to slip away once more. She started pounding the glass. Though her mouth was too parched to utter a sound, the words her body was too weak to generate echoed through her mind with terrifying clarity...

  LET ME OUT OF HERE!

  Her moment of sheer terror was mercifully cut short. There was a sudden explosion of escaping gas and the lid of the coffin slid open with a hiss. The cables popped off her body and retracted into the coffin’s wall.

  Faith stumbled out of the open glass cylinder and collapsed on her knees. She sucked in greedy lungfuls of air as her hands planted themselves on the steel floor. Precious oxygen passed through her nasal cavities and filled her starved lungs. As the oxygen revitalized her, she hazarded a look back at the now-empty coffin and realized it was just one out of many such tubes. The room was filled with hundreds of identical glass cylinders, each containing the silhouettes of men and women.

  The sight brought further clarity to the jumbled mess of her thoughts, snapping her memory into sharp focus. Ten years had passed since she gave birth to her daughter. The coffin was a cryo tube. She wasn’t on Earth any more but aboard the Orion, a colony barge headed for the main belt asteroids, a 134-million-mile, one-year journey. She had chosen to leave everything she knew behind to start a new life in the outer colonies. Paul, the young man she’d dated for what seemed like a minute before she decided to sign up with the mining corp, had frowned at her when she first brought up the idea of moving to the asteroid belt. “Why would anyone take a chance on a rock millions of miles away from home?” The answer was clear to her even if Paul might not appreciate it: Maybe home had nothing to offer them.

  Faith stood in the dark for another moment, eyes adjusting to the subdued lighting, reassured by her growing understanding of her situation. Taking in the maze of sleeping colonists around her, she couldn’t help but wonder why she was awake. The most likely explanation was a timer issue with her capsule. The grim alternative was an onboard emergency of some kind but if that were the case, wouldn’t every one of the four-thousand passengers on the Orion be awake by now? Her premature return to consciousness had to be a glitch. And glitches could be fixed.

  As far as Faith was aware, the ship was run by a skeleton crew — the captain and about 15 other essential personnel — while most of the colonists remained in deep hibernation. All she had to do was locate an intercom system, put in a call to the bridge and let them know what was going on. With any luck they’d be nice enough to tuck her back in and let her catch up on her beauty sleep for the remainder of their journey. To her surprise, the gray, sterile environment of the Orion seemed more appealing than another cryo-sleep cycle, where she’d be forced to face the nightmares of her past.

  Faith staggered erect, her legs straining under the weight of her own body. The cryo-tube was supposed to electrically stimulate her muscles and assure they wouldn’t atrophy, but nevertheless she could tell she hadn’t used her legs in quite some time. With each step, it seemed like someone was driving sharp nails into her calves and thighs.

  As she navigated the hyper-stasis chamber, she caught her reflection in one of the cryo-tubes and for a moment, her features seemed superimposed over the dormant person inside the cylinder. She didn’t like what she was seeing. She must’ve lost about 10 pounds since she slipped into the tube, the bones of her face outlined sharply under the skin. She looked gaunt, haunted, the mileage catching up with her beauty. She was only 29, but the last decade hadn’t been a cakewalk.

  Her attention shifted from her face to the tattoos that shimmered over her body, a mixture of strange glyphs and numbers. They flickered and kept changing shape as she flexed her muscles. Each tattoo contained a series of three digital images that were randomly projected under her skin. Souvenirs of her own rough past. For a moment, she marveled at the images — a fierce dragon becoming a Chinese symbol of peace, only to make way for a police badge with a death’s head at its center. Images that once meant so much to her but now didn’t seem to belong on her body. Time had made them lose their meaning.

  Faith kept walking. Her feet slapped steel and echoed through the vast, cavernous chamber. The sole other sound was the incessant thrumming of hyperdrive engines beneath her bare feet, the spaceship’s faint yet steady heartbeat.

  She tried not to stare at the walls of dormant people as she passed them. Even though these space travelers were asleep, not dead, she couldn't shake the feeling of being inside a giant mausoleum. Surrounded by hundreds of people yet utterly alone, she felt a crushing, almost paralyzing sense of loneliness descend over her. The colonists looked like ghosts trapped in icy limbo. Faith realized she had been one of them only minutes earlier and a shiver ran up her spine. Cryo-stasis might the cheapest way to space travel but it sure as hell wasn’t her favorite way.

  Faith approached a bulkhead. The steel door whooshed open, sensors responding to her presence. She stepped into the adjoining chamber dominated by an observation window and snatched a glance outside. For a moment, she could only stare, wowed by the sight that awaited her. To behold the infinity of glittering stars was to experience both awe and fear. The darkness of deep space loomed, a perfect void. In her mind’s eye, she could picture the Orion, a million tons of titanium, gliding through the vast nothingness beyond the observation window, nuclear thrusters the size of football fields roaring like incandescent, plasma-powered miniature suns.

  They were a long way from their final destination and once again, Faith wondered why she was awake. Gripped by a growing sense of foreboding, she suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  OTHER NOVELS BY WILLIAM MASSA

  FEAR THE LIGHT: WHO MURDERED DRACULA?

  Over the centuries, many had tried to kill the Count. All had failed. Until now...

  Eight vampires gather at Dracula's castle to solve his murder. But as the sun rises outside the chateau, a voice cries out and another creature of the night is slain. Trapped, the sun burning bright outside, the vampires realize they have met their match — a killer who plans on picking them off one by one!

  As the daylight reigns and their numbers dwindle, a dark suspicion grows — could Dracula's murderer be hiding in plain sight?

  A THRILLER WHERE THE MONSTERS ARE THE VICTIMS!

  "All in all this was an easy read that flew by. The pacing was tight and kept the story interesting up until the last page. A satisfying ending made this a worthy read." - Nikki Howard, Ravenous Reads

  "...it is fun to see vampires switch from being predator to prey. The story is essentially ten little Indians" - Taliesin meets the Vampires

  "...If you loved and read Agatha Christie's - And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians then you will love this novel..." - Gadget Girl Reviews

  "It is nothing like the other vampire books I have read..." - Jenny, Fabulous and Fun Blog

  A black Mercedes barreled down a two-lane country road that carved its way through endless rolling hills, Vincent behind the wheel. Towering trees and vast vineyards stood silhouetted in the milky moonlight. There was an air of remoteness and isolation about the place even though the nearest town was only half an hour away. This was Bordeaux wine country, where monks had first embraced viticulture during the reign of Charlemagne.

  Vincent eased his foot off the gas as the road began to turn. The flight had been uneventful and for the most part painless. He left Los Angeles around two in the morning and arrived in Paris after 8 o’clock in the evening, a nine-hour time difference allowing him to avoid daylight all together. He traveled first class and made sure to book a whole row. He opted for the aisle seat and kept a safe distance from his window, the shade drawn of course. Most of the legends surrounding his kind were Hollywood bullshit. Vampires couldn’t turn into bats, wolves or mist. Crosses held no power over them. But sunlight was one of the few things that could destroy them.


  A different vampire might have opted to sit out the flight in the cargo hold, secure inside a steel sarcophagus with two human servants along for the ride to assure that the coffin arrived at the right address, the promise of immortality assuring their loyal assistance. But that was way too dramatic for Vincent and not his style.

  That was Dracula’s style.

  Vincent drove in silence as the bucolic forest landscape unfolded before him. Strange to think that the master had chosen this area as his home for the better half of the last century. But then again, Vincent never did understand how Dracula’s mind worked. He was a legend and an enigma. Vincent wondered often what had driven the Count to choose a Texas Ranger to be one of his children of the night.

  Vincent had promised himself not to dredge up the old days, but he had also known it was a promise he’d break. Much of the past seemed like a blur, but that fateful moment when everything changed was etched into Vincent’s memory and still held its dark sway over him.

  The year was 1876 and he’d been tracking a vicious murderer across the state of Texas. The fiend had left ten bodies in his deadly wake, all of them female, their blood completely drained, albino corpses lined with twin puncture marks. Later such killings would be ascribed to serial killers but the Texas of the Nineteenth Century knew better. A monster was afoot and needed to be stopped.

  Vincent didn’t try to profile this creature or understand what made it tick. He didn’t consider its psychology or try to decipher the forces that could give birth to such a savage pathology. All Vincent cared about was finding this monster and putting an end to its murderous reign. It seemed to him as though he was up against the Devil himself; little did he know that he wasn’t far off the mark. Every time he thought he’d found a lead that could break the case and it’d be only minutes before he’d have the killer in his sights, the beast would manage to somehow elude him and the trail would grow cold again. The fiend was always just one step ahead of him. Toying with him. Pushing him to the edge. The pursuit had become a game of cat and mouse, and it was consuming Vincent’s every waking moment.