World Killer
Barry J. Hutchison
Zertex Media Ltd
Contents
Prologue
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
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Have a Free Book on Me
Further Reading
Dedicated to Chris Treise, who nagged and nagged until I gave in and finished writing this book.
Happy now, Chris?!
Prologue
They knelt on the sand, hands bound at their backs, the twin suns scorching their naked skin. Thirty or more adults, their grey flesh bruised, their dark hair matted with blood.
Just a few feet away their children cried and cowered and clung together in the dirt. The dust of the dead swirled around them, stinging their wide eyes and snagging at the back of their throats.
And between them, in the gulf that separated parents and children, stood the demon.
He had come from the stars, bringing his whole world with him. It had grown in the sky like a tumor, its land masses blackened, its seas a crimson red. For three days it hung there, unmoving, as the people of Khershoun gazed up in fear and wonder.
The attacks began on the third day. Small groups of metal-clad warriors materialized in offices, in shops, in schools, in homes. They killed relentlessly and indiscriminately, hacking and stabbing and ripping, as fire rained from the sky, and the screams of the dying echoed around the world.
On the fourth day, silence descended. The once great cities of Khershoun had fallen. Its governments lay crushed, its communications networks forever silenced. Thousands of years of civilization and eleven billion souls wiped out in a few bloody hours.
The demon surveyed the naked figures kneeling before him. He had appeared on the Network an hour before the first attacks, his face hidden behind skull-like black armor. His voice was gruff and alien, and even though they didn't know the words, the people of Khershoun had understood their meaning. This man brought darkness and death and the end of all things.
And now here he stood, towering above them, contempt clouding the lenses of his mask. He stood alone. No guards. No army. He no longer needed them. Perhaps he never had.
“Pay attention,” he commanded. “You understand me because I have assimilated your archives and your language. I have plundered your databases and absorbed your knowledge. I have harvested your history, your traditions, your culture and I have stripped them bare. I have taken everything that you were.”
Behind him, one of the youngest children began to howl, scared not by his words but the boom of his voice. An older girl—a sister, maybe—clutched the baby to her chest and rocked it back and forth.
“Shh, now,” she whispered. “Shh.”
“You may think me a monster,” the invader continued. He began to pace back and forth before the kneeling adults, his armor clanking with every step. “But none of this was personal.”
He turned and gazed up at the planet that had swollen to fill the sky. “All I do, I do for Skalgorth. For my people.”
“And what of our people?” sobbed one of the prisoners.
“You have no people,” the invader replied, almost absent-mindedly. “You are the last of your kind.”
Wails of despair burst from bloodied lips. The armored figure took a moment to savor the sound.
“I have spared your lives for a reason,” he said, finally tearing his eyes from his home planet. “You are to be my ambassadors. You will venture to other worlds and you will tell them what I have done.”
He cast his gaze across the prisoners. “And you will tell them that I am coming. You will tell them to hold their loved ones close and to make peace with their gods. You will tell them to be afraid.”
He paused, just for a moment, to let this sink in. “What I have done here I will do again. And again. And again. Other worlds shall fall. And others still. And yet,” he said, lowering his voice, “I am not without mercy.”
He turned to the children. They drew back, recoiling from the leer of his skull mask. “Little ones,” he said, the words trailing off into a hiss. He stepped aside and gestured toward the adults. “Go to your parents,” he instructed. “Go. Be with them.”
The children didn't go anywhere. They cowered on the sand, too terrified to move, even as their mothers and fathers beckoned to them, sobbed, wept and cried out their names.
And then, at last, the girl with the crying infant rose shakily to her feet. She pressed the baby tighter to her chest. Avoiding the invader’s gaze, she took a few tentative steps toward the adults. This was the cue the others needed.
They moved like a single organism, suddenly scrabbling and scurrying through the dirt. Some ran upright, others scampered on all fours, their tears cutting track marks down their dust-covered faces.
Behind his mask, the invader watched the children’s bare feet churning up the hot sand. He studied the expressions of the adults as their terrified offspring ran and ran and ran toward them, lips babbling, arms flung wide.
And then he saw what he had been watching for. It flickered there in the eyes of the parents: hope. The hope that the worst was over. That everything was going to be OK.
“You think me a monster, but I am not,” the alien said. His voice was low, but seemed to roll across the sand like thunder. He raised one gloved hand. “I am something worse.”
The girl with the baby went first, her flesh sizzling and blistering as they both became bone, then ash, then nothing at all. The wave of heat washed backward, scorching the sand, peeling the skin from the children mid-run. Those at the back tried to stop, but they were already burning, crumbling, turning to dust.
A few seconds later, the invader lowered his hand. The children were gone. The sand before him had melted to blackened glass. It cracked into jagged splinters as it began to cool.
There were no screams from the adults at first. They could only stare in mute shock at the flurry of blackened flakes floating off on the breeze.
And then, with a piercing squeal, a mother found her voice. “No!” she wailed, leaping to her feet and hurling herself at the child-killer. “No, no, no, no!”
The invader clamped a hand on the woman's head, stopping her dead. She tried to pull back, but his fingers splayed across her skull, his thumb pressing in against her eye socket.
“I am High Ruler of Skalgorth,” he said. “I am the World Killer. And I have spared your miserable lives.”
The woman yelped as he forced her head back. The narrow slits of his eyes stared at her through the lenses of his mask with something close to amusement.
“And you,” he told her, caressing her cheek with the back of his hand, “shall be the first to show your gratitude.”
One
He lay on his back watching the universe spin in slow, sluggish circles. The whole of infinity stretched out above him, although he
was too young yet to fully appreciate the scale of it all. He was dimly aware, though, that each pinprick of twinkling light offered whole new worlds of possibilities. He'd seen Star Trek. He knew the score.
The merry-go-round beneath him was old and tired. It sagged lower at one side, meaning it never stayed spinning for long. Unless you positioned three fat kids in just the right spots. Then it'd spin forever. Or at least until someone puked.
There were no other kids to help balance things out now. There was just him and the rest of the universe, and after four more lazy revolutions the merry-go-round shuddered and squeaked to a stop.
He didn't know the time, but he knew he was probably in trouble. His dad had told him to be back home before the clouds turned purple, but there had been no clouds that day, just a faint summer haze that had eventually cooled into night.
One by one his friends had been called home. One by one they had gone, until there was only him left. Him, Daryl Elliot. Alone with the rest of the universe.
He should go home. Face the wrath. Take the punishment. Maybe he could still get away with it. Maybe his dad would be too asleep to notice the time, or too drunk to care.
Or maybe he was standing by the window, staring out, anxiously chewing his nails. Or pacing the streets, torch in hand, desperately calling Daryl's name into the darkness. Or even just sitting in his usual armchair, idly wondering where his son could be at such a late hour.
Nah.
The rotten wood was cold against the back of Daryl's head. He cupped his hands at the base of his skull, the fingers threaded together. He stared at the stars and the stars stared back. It was Sunday. Bath night. School tomorrow.
But out there—on that merry-go-round, looking up at that universe—school didn't exist. Bath night didn't exist. Sunday didn't exist. There were a million twinkling lights and there was darkness in between, and just for that moment, nothing else mattered.
A breeze blew around the playground, sending sweet wrappers scampering across the wood chippings, and wafting the smell of days-old dog mess across his face. He held his breath and waited for it to settle back to stillness. That was when he noticed it.
Above—way above—one of those pinpricks of light peeled from the darkness like a glittery scab. It shifted to the left as if buffeted on the breeze, then drifted right until it was level with its original position, but closer to the horizon.
Daryl kept holding his breath.
The star moved straight down the sky. It crawled at little more than a snail's pace, but the fact it was moving at all made it faster than any star Daryl had seen before. It covered only a few inches of the darkness, but even with his limited grasp of the scale of the universe, Daryl knew it must've traveled a good bit farther. A hundred miles. Or a thousand. Probably even more.
Still, it kept moving, picking up speed on its downward trajectory. The star grew steadily brighter, as if a dimmer switch were being cranked up to full. The glare made an ache form at the back of Daryl's eyes. He turned his head and saw his shadow scurry off across the wood.
And then the star was all around him, a brilliant blinding glow that lit up the world in all directions. Daryl screwed his eyes shut tight, but it made no difference. That light was still there, still everywhere.
And then it wasn't. Without warning, it was gone, leaving not so much as an imprint on his eyeballs. He blinked cautiously then sat up and gazed at the sky. A thick layer of cloud now blocked out the stars.
Daryl jumped to his feet and ran for the entrance to the park where he'd abandoned his bike a few hours earlier. He discovered that the gate had been secured with a chain and padlock. He rattled it like he couldn't quite believe it was real. He'd come to the park at least three times a week since his third birthday, and in those three years, he’d never once seen the gate locked.
Fortunately, the adults didn't know about the hole in the fence. He squatted down, dodging the dog mess, and pushed outward on the wire mesh. A moment later he emerged onto the path and realized with a sinking feeling that his bike was missing.
Great. Now he really was in trouble.
A damp fleck skiffed across his cheek. He looked up just as a mist of fine rain began to fall. Daryl shivered in his thin t-shirt. Ducking his head, he ran for home.
He was two streets away—past the five-a-side pitch, but not yet at the bus stop—when he realized the streets were empty. The kids his age had all gone home, but the bigger kids got to stay out later, and the teenagers later still.
But not tonight. It could've been the rain, but the rain never stopped them before. He'd often hear them as he lay in bed, laughing and swearing and fighting until the early hours of the morning.
But not tonight. No one tonight.
He passed the bus stop. He ducked through Old Tony's garden—an eight-foot by ten-foot rectangle of tangled grass and weeds—and then turned onto his street.
He stopped in the shadows of Old Tony's house. His street was a hive of activity. Vans were pulled up all along it, two wheels on the pavement, two wheels on the road. Three police cars were parked farther along, their blue lights sweeping across the front of a house.
No, not a house. His house. The police cars were right outside his house.
Daryl's feet began to move. Slowly. Plodding. Forward. The door of the closest van opened and he saw the letters “BBC” on the side. A man clambered out and stretched. Daryl was close enough to hear the little groans of satisfaction the man made as he arched his back and limbs.
Daryl stopped in the shadows and waited to see what the man would do next. When he had finished stretching, the man reached into the van, took out a large plastic cup, and swigged from it as he strolled off in the direction of the police cars.
The rain began to rattle against the van, like a drumbeat urging Daryl onward. Moving on their own, his feet carried him out of the shadows and past the van marked “BBC”. Another man dozed behind the steering wheel. Daryl watched him through the glass as if some clue as to what was going on would be written there across his face.
“Here, wait, is that... is that him?”
The voice was female. Daryl turned and saw a woman he recognized hurrying toward him. She was off the telly. He didn't remember which program, exactly, but she was definitely off the telly. She clutched a microphone and pounced at him like a hungry tiger.
“Daryl? Daryl? Is that you, Daryl?”
Daryl backed up to the van. He heard the driver's door open and slam closed on the other side, then the woman from the TV was right up at him, almost ramming her microphone down his throat.
“It's him!”
The second voice was male. It came from further away and was followed by a clatter of eager footsteps. Daryl tried to look, but the woman angled herself to block his view.
“Daryl, where have you been?” she demanded. Excited. Urgent. “What happened to you? Where have you been?”
The question came at him again, same words, different accent, as a man in a dark grey suit pushed another microphone toward him. A camera flashed, dazzling him. More flashes went off. Pop, pop, pop. More microphones were shoved in his face.
“Where were you, Daryl?”
“Where have you been?”
Daryl blinked. “The... the park. I was... I was at the park.”
A riot of questions were fired at him, all at once so he couldn't hear any of them. The reporters tightened like a knot around him, braying and shouting as they fought to get to the front. Daryl tried to pull back, but the beady eye of a TV camera blocked his escape. A red light blinked above the lens, and Daryl suddenly got the sensation that a million people were staring directly at him.
“Move! Out of the bloody road, the lot of you.”
Two men in dark blue uniforms shoved their way through the throng. A strong arm wrapped around Daryl's shoulders. “It's OK, son,” said the policeman. “You're OK now. You're safe.”
Daryl let himself be led past the crowd. Another flash went off and the other policeman
stopped to hold the journalists back. More people in uniform ran up. A blanket was draped across his shoulders. An umbrella was held above his head. The rain thudded against it like fingers drumming on a desk.
And then they were at his front gate. Daryl looked at his house. The lights were on in every window. He felt a knot form between his stomach and his chest.
“Is... is my dad OK?”
“He's fine, son. He's inside.”
Daryl looked up at the policeman. He'd never been this close to one before. He'd always thought they would be taller. “Is this about my bike?”
Before the policeman could answer, the front door opened and there was Daryl's dad. He hesitated just for a moment, then bounded down the step and raced along the path. The stale smell of sweat and smoke and too-much-beer wrapped around Daryl as his dad dragged him into a bear hug.
“Daryl, son, Daryl, son. You're all right. You're all right!” he babbled, and Daryl was shocked to see his old man crying. Properly crying, like he had when Daryl's mum had died. The sight of his dad in tears made Daryl cry, too. He didn't really know why.
“See, what did I tell you, pig?” his dad said, pointing a finger right in the policeman's face. “I didn't do nothing to him. It wasn't me.”
“I'm just glad he's back safe. But I think we should take this inside, Mr Elliot, don't you?”
“Dad? What's happened? Why are the police here?”
“We've been looking for you, son,” the policeman said, before Daryl's dad could reply. “We were all very worried about you.”
World Killer: A Sci-Fi Action Adventure Novel Page 1
