SUPERNOVA
Jessica Marting
Digital Edition
Copyright © 2012 by J.L. Turner
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc.
http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for brief quotations in reviews, without the prior written consent of the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN 978-0-9733146-2-5
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
About the Author
For Dad—I may be writing romance, but at least it’s balanced with aliens and violence!
I still miss you.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go out to the following people for their support during this project: David, Angela, and Bishop for beta reading (Bishop also let me borrow his name), and Katrina Robinson for proofreading.
Chapter 1
Lily Stewart stared at the last zombie, shambling towards her little fortress. It mindlessly chewed on an arm pilfered from an innocent victim, red and black gore dribbling down its face. She looked over her weapons cache, willing a measly hand grenade to materialize. It didn’t.
The zombie lost its grip on the arm and tossed it aside jerkily. It sped up. Damn it—they were now capable of running? She hadn’t banked on that happening.
She let out a low curse. The zombie lurched forward with a guttural moan and stepped into her fortress. GAME OVER flashed across Lily’s computer screen. THE ZOMBIES ATE YOUR BRAAAINS!!!
Lily sighed and closed the game, then brought up a spreadsheet detailing Lazarus Cryonics’ appointments. There weren’t a lot, at least as far as this receptionist could tell. Lazarus didn’t seem to do too much business; there wasn’t a big market for it in southern Ontario.
But then, what did she know? Part of the reason Lily had taken the job in the first place was its welcome respite from the thick August heat, air-conditioning being a luxury her stingy landlord refused to install. The total lack of monitoring on her computer activities was an added bonus, although Undead Uprising was kicking her ass. After this latest defeat she almost wished one of her employers would intervene and cut her off.
Her employers. Ugh. She shuddered faintly in revulsion and was grateful they rarely ventured into reception.
The locked door off the foyer opened, as though one of them on the other side had heard her thoughts and felt like creeping her out. Dr. Zadbac was one of the two doctors who owned Lazarus Cryonics. He padded into reception, his footsteps muffled by the plush carpeting beneath him. “Minsa Stewart,” he said by way of greeting. Never a hello from this one. His accent was unrecognizable to Lily, as were the foreign words that peppered his speech. Lily had stopped trying to get him and the lab’s other doctor, Pitro, to call her by her first name or at least Miss Stewart by her second day.
“Hi, Doctor,” Lily returned. She glanced at the time display on her computer—one-fifteen. “Going out to lunch?”
“No, I do not require nutrition at this time, nor do I care for the offerings around here,” he replied. “I believe we have an appointment at fourteen hundred hours. Who is it today?”
Lily checked the spreadsheet. “Andrew Claybourne,” she read. “He’s here for a consultation. He’s only interested in having his head in the deep freeze.”
Dr. Zadbac’s mouth thinned slightly. “Such a crude term,” he said. Then, “I’m hoping to change his mind. Who wants to be reanimated without a body?” He smiled wanly.
Who wanted to be reanimated at all? She glanced at the framed photo sitting on her desk next to her pencil cup. Lily and her father beamed at the camera, a shot taken at his Christmas tree farm a few weeks before his fatal heart attack. It had been a year this past July. Cryonics and privately-run labs had begun gaining momentum six months before he passed, but he had been unsure about the whole thing. Lily had had him cremated and his ashes spread in Lake Ontario.
She realized Zadbac was waiting for a reply. “Well, it’s part of my benefits package,” she managed.
His smile grew wider and almost feral. Dr. Pitro had the same one. The pair had a brotherly resemblance, each unusually tall and rail-thin, their bald heads almost too large for their bodies and bulgy eyes too large for their heads. Zadbac’s were nearly black, the irises almost indistinguishable, and Pitro’s an unnatural shade of green. Lily suspected he wore contacts.
“Maybe the clients are expecting better synthetic bodies in the future,” Lily added. “Technology will probably be advanced enough so their heads can be attached to a supermodel’s body. That’s something I’d think about.”
“Or not,” Zadbac replied. “Why take the chance? Preserve the entire body.” He raised a thick eyebrow at her, as if he was implying something.
If Lily were stupid, she might ponder the notion that her employers were vampires. Of course, vampires would burst into flames at this time of day if they existed, and Lily would have a bigger mess on her hands than an apartment that smelled like feet in the humidity.
But vampires didn’t exist.
“Minsa Stewart, you have not given us a reply about the preservation offer in your benefits. Are you interested?”
Lily’s scientific education had stopped after her second try at Chemistry 203 in high school, but even she didn’t think that a body that had been dunked in the deep freeze seconds after passing could be woken up. “To be honest, Doctor, I was looking at the dental plan,” she lied. “I think I have a cavity.”
Zadbac laughed, the first time Lily had heard him do so. She also finally noticed how pointy and sharp his teeth were, as though they had been shoved haphazardly into his gums. He was the one who should be worried about visiting a dentist.
You’re sure you don’t believe in vampires? a small voice whispered in her head.
“You have no idea what the future holds,” he announced.
And you do? “Well, no one does,” Lily pointed out.
“Our clients are willing to take a chance,” Zadbac continued.
No, Lily thought. Your clients have too much money and too much guilt on their conscience to take a chance with an afterlife. Aloud, she replied, “I guess so.”
Zadbac stared at her for a moment, his black eyes boring into her green ones. Lily broke the contact first and pretended to look back her computer screen.
“Two o’clock,” she confirmed. She deliberately avoided his gaze. “Andrew Claybourne. I’ve heard of him. I think he owns all the Tiger Media stores.” She didn’t mention the very public personal troubles the man had been in.
“Take a meal break, Minsa Stewart,” Zadbac suggested. “Maybe you’ll find something to your liking out there.”
Lily was never so glad to get out of Lazarus Cryonics.
The facility was one of three tenants in a mostly deserted office park. There was a single bus route servicing the road that led to the area’s underused Wilson West subway station, making Lily glad she had a car. Civilization started again about a block away from the office park, and a hot food cart and Starbucks waited
for her there. She plugged in her phone’s ear buds and tuned it to the satellite radio station she still had a free subscription to for another two months, the same channel she had been listening to her in her car on the way to work. Traffic was still bad on the Spadina Expressway, there had been a robbery in the east end of the city, and the Canadian Space Agency and NASA were still puzzled over the appearance of a silver dome in space a few months back. Was it a top-secret weapon from one of their current enemy nations? Her father would have had a field day with that little tidbit of news, but she tuned it out. A pair of unidentified human remains, both male and middle-aged, had been pulled from the Humber River, both found with syringes sticking out of their necks, the substance in the chambers as mysterious as the victims’ names. Lily’s stomach recoiled at that tidbit of news; it had been mentioned on TV that morning. There was a protest on the highway she used to get to and from work, and it was still going on. She was going to be stuck taking the scenic route tonight. Again. Not for the first time she thought about packing up and moving somewhere quieter, and thought wistfully of her childhood home in Courtice.
She bought some fries and an iced coffee, and snagged her favorite bench near the cart, shaded by a lone maple tree. She turned off the radio and let herself enjoy the outdoors. This evening definitely called for a few hours spent on the beach, maybe with the classifieds section of the newspaper.
Two weeks into her lab gig, and Lily was ready to throw in the towel; it was getting creepier every day. She had signed on with an employment agency shortly after her move to the city, and had been sent to the cryonics lab as soon as the agency found out she could create formulas in spreadsheet programs. At first she had been pleased to land a job that used a few of her skills, but now she didn’t care. There was a tanning salon near her apartment in Dufferin Grove that had a “Help Wanted” sign in its front window that could be worth looking into. A mandatory spray tan would be easier to handle than Zadbac and Pitro.
She finished her fries and checked her e-mail on her phone, an outrageously overpriced gadget she had picked up a few weeks before, and opened the e-books folder. She wistfully pulled up one of her father’s books to browse through before heading back to the office. Daniel Stewart had been a moderately-successful science fiction and horror author in addition to running the tree farm, with six titles to his name. She had downloaded his books to her phone when she bought it and would flip through the pages on the screen, reading random pieces of her father’s words. They were infinite, and she always had them with her. Getting in a few pages of The Meadow Killers or The Curse on a daily basis was turning into her own drug.
Lily had nursed hurts in the past that she thought broke her heart—when her father and stepmother divorced when she was a teenager, for one, and when she discovered the affair between her fiancé and best friend. She found out about their affair nearly a year into it, when she had been expecting a proposal from Cameron. Lily and Cameron had built a quiet life for themselves in the basement apartment in her father’s house, and she had expected that they would take over the family business when her father retired. Of course, that hadn’t happened. He had taken one look at Katy shortly after moving in with Lily after university and started sniffing around her instead.
But those wounds had healed. Her former stepmother was still alive, now living in Vancouver, and while she hadn’t spoken much to Cameron and Katy, especially now that they were married, they were still living, too. Her father’s death felt like an insurmountable ache that she couldn’t get past. He was the one person in her life who had never let her down.
She deliberately took her time walking back to the office, wanting to avoid the doctors. It was a beautiful day—the mercury hadn’t climbed as high as the morning news predicted—and Lily wished she could blow off the rest of the afternoon and sit under an umbrella at Sugar Beach with a trashy paperback in one hand and a bottle of lemonade in the other.
Back at the lab, the reception area was empty and quiet save for the whoosh of the air conditioner. She took her seat behind the desk and wasn’t surprised at the lack of messages. She opened Undead Uprising and picked out her weapons for another go-round with the zombies. No machetes this time; they ran out too quickly and were cumbersome besides. Hand grenades only required her to right-click and hit the space bar.
At five minutes to two, a tall, well-dressed man let himself into reception. “Hey,” he said by way of introduction, then added, “Why does this place have to be middle of nowhere?”
“Good afternoon,” Lily greeted him professionally. “You must be Mr. Claybourne.”
The man took off his sunglasses, a pair that probably would have set Lily back a week’s pay. Watery, red-rimmed hazel eyes sized her up from the other side of the desk. “I am. Who are you?” he asked.
She shifted uncomfortably in her ergonomically correct chair. “Lily. May I get you a bottle of water, Mr. Claybourne?”
“No thanks,” he said. She felt him sizing her up, and looked away. She knew what he saw: She looked like she had grown up in the country in her simple blue linen dress and short-sleeved black cardigan. A mistake during the heat wave, but the air conditioning here was cranked up to Arctic temperatures.
The door off reception opened and Pitro and Zadbac stepped out. “Min Claybourne,” Pitro said, bowing slightly. “We have been anticipating your consultation. Please come in.” He held open the door.
“I don’t want to get suckered into everything,” Claybourne warned them. “I just want to be alive to see alien ass in a few hundred years.” He followed the doctors through the door.
* * *
When three o’clock rolled around, Andrew Claybourne hadn’t yet emerged from the rooms off reception, and Lily had been eaten by zombies four times and bombed them to kingdom come twice.
She was giving notice at the end of the week. After today, she would be happy to book tanning appointments or sling beer at a dive. She was sticking to her new life plan—stay in Toronto and force it into becoming her home while working a job that paid the bills until she had enough saved up to go to teacher’s college—but she couldn’t deal with the doctors who cheerfully talked about death anymore.
Cryonics had been forced into following federal regulations a bare three years prior, in 2014. Since then, a handful of small private clinics had sprung up across the country, charging enough money to feed a small country for a decade for a service that wasn’t guaranteed. Lazarus Cryonics was one of three labs in southern Ontario, and the newest. After the initial uproar from the segment of the population that looked down on anything not okayed in their religious book of choice, the issue of cryonics had faded into the background. It would probably stay there until an accident occurred.
She fired a couple of cannonballs at a horde of ravenous zombies and watched with satisfaction as they exploded into a mass of red and black gore. The screen blinked NEXT LEVEL.
A scream made her hand twitch, knocking the mouse off the desk. The computer’s sound was turned off, so she knew it wasn’t the game.
Another scream reverberated through reception, louder this time. It sounded like it was coming from the lab.
The doctors and Claybourne were in there. Heart pounding, Lily crept to the door and knocked. “Is everything okay?” she asked, but received no reply.
She gingerly twisted the knob and found it unlocked. The open doorway revealed a short, narrow hallway tiled in white that led to another door. This one led to the offices and the lab itself, which Lily had never seen. None of their clients had actually died yet as far as she knew, and she doubted she could be of any help when it happened.
Another scream rent the air, closer this time. Maybe someone was on their way out to the big freezer.
The door to the lab was locked, and from behind it she heard a man wailing in terror. She tapped on the door. “Dr. Zadbac? Dr. Pitro? Is everything—”
“Thank God!” a voice yelped. It sounded like Claybourne. The doorknob started to turn
but she heard Zadbac bark out a command in whatever his mother tongue was, and then a hollow thump of something or someone slamming against the door.
“Mr. Claybourne? Dr. Zadbac, do you need me to call 911?”
“Yes!” came a gurgled scream from the other side. There was some more slamming, hard enough to shake the door in the jamb, and more foreign cursing.
The doorknob clicked and unlocked. Lily tried to push open the door, but it was blocked by a body in a suit. She looked at the floor and screamed.
Claybourne’s hand reached towards her, the skin bloody and ragged. His nose had been broken, smashed into his face so rivulets of blood pooled on the floor. He looked like a zombie had attacked him.
No, not a zombie. Pitro. The doctor was wiping blood off his mouth with the sleeve of his white lab coat, making a face like he had just tasted something awful.
“Humans,” he muttered, and made a noise of disgust.
Claybourne looked up at her, making animal noises in his throat. She saw the huge syringe sticking out of the back of his neck, and she shrieked.
He let out a howl at her reaction. Lily tore her eyes away from him to look at the doctors. Zadbac was holding another gigantic syringe, irritation registering on his bulbous features. Pitro licked his lips, made another face, and coolly regarded the trembling Claybourne on the floor.
“Help me,” he garbled.
“Minsa Stewart,” said Zadbac, her name coming out in a low growl. He held out the syringe, his finger over the depressor.
Lily stared at the scene before her in horror for what felt like hours. She looked at the syringe sticking out of Claybourne, saw the one in Zadbac’s gnarled hand, and felt her stomach lurch.
“What the hell?” she choked out.
“Minsa Stewart, you should not have entered here,” he said quietly. “We have told you many times never to enter the lab.” He stepped over Claybourne, now moaning and clutching his face. “Come here,” he said.
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