The Recarn Chronicles- Omnibus Edition

by Greg Krojac

  “I wish we could, but you saw what Liam and Connor did back there. You don’t want to end up like the others, do you?”

  “Of course not, but I’m not as fit as you.”

  “You’d be surprised what you can do when you try, Steve. Especially when you’re being chased. Our lives’ depend on us getting as far away from that place as possible. You want to live, don’t you?”

  Martin waited a few seconds for Stephen to catch up with him.

  “Look. If they catch us, they’ll kill us. We’re witnesses. We saw what they did. They’ll want to tie up loose ends.”

  “What does ‘tie up loose ends’ mean?”

  “Sorry, I keep forgetting that you’re only seven.”

  “So are you. But you know a lot of long words. You know a lot more than I do. Why?”

  “Yes. I’m only seven. But I remember things easily. That’s all. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got plenty of time to remember loads of things.”

  “What if I haven’t?”

  “You have.”

  “But, what if I haven’t?”

  “Look, don’t worry about it. We’ve got to get out of these woods. We’re way too close to the house. They can’t be far behind.”

  Stephen stretched his arms out wide and then let them drop to his side, shaking them to loosen them up.

  “Okay. I’m ready.”

  Martin started to run again but was stopped in his tracks by a shout of surprise. He turned round to see Stephen falling to the ground. He wasn’t unconscious but he did have blood trickling from a wound at the back of his head.

  Behind him stood Jazz with a small rock in his right hand. Stephen, who had always been an introverted child – he hadn’t even wanted to go to the twins’ party, but his mother had insisted, thinking it would do him good – suddenly found reserves of courage that he didn’t know that he possessed. He drew himself to his feet and punched Jazz hard on the jaw, but all it did was irritate Jazz even more and make Stephen’s hand hurt.

  “Run Martin, run! The others can’t be far behind.”

  “But, but, I can’t leave you here.”

  “I’ll come back. I will get born again, won’t I?”

  “Yes…but.”

  “Then run!”

  Martin didn’t like leaving the little lad, but he could see Liam, Connor and Rebecca running up the path to catch up with their accomplice. There was no point in both of them dying. Stephen would be reincarnated but he wouldn’t remember any of his past lives; he wasn’t a Recarn. He also knew that Stephen was right – if he stayed he’d be killed too. What a brave young boy Stephen had turned out to be.

  Martin started sprinting through the woods, dodging low branches and leaping over fallen logs. He felt guilty about leaving his friend behind, but what else could he have done? It’s not as if Stephen hadn’t told him to save himself. It was odd because usually, it was he who sacrificed his life to save others. The boot was now on the other foot and it felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  He had to get out of this stupid Wolverine costume. His mum had packed a change of clothes into a backpack but that was back at the house with all the dead bodies. He had two alternatives really. He could find something to wear on the streets, in a bin or something maybe, but that wasn’t exactly fool-proof and he could spend all night rifling through rubbish bins but finding nothing. There were a couple of clothes recycling bins at a nearby mall but even if he could get some clothing out of them – the bins had a kind of one way clothes deposit system to discourage thieves – he couldn’t guarantee that anything he found would fit. The other option was to go back to the scene of the massacre and retrieve his own clothes. He weighed up the two options and decided on the latter. At first look it may seem the foolish choice, returning to a place that would soon be teeming with police, but it was certainly the one thing that Liam, Connor, and their cronies wouldn’t be expecting. Also, he didn’t want his parents to get more involved in this mess than they had to. If he stayed away from his own house there would be no need for them to have to deny that they had seen him. They could honestly state that they hadn’t seen their son since they had dropped him off at the party. Of course, they would be worried sick about him - not knowing if he were dead or alive - but that was a small price to pay.

  Martin was a very fast runner and the school champion for his age group. His four pursuers wouldn’t be able to keep up with him and he knew it. Being an adventurous child, he often played in the woods and knew every rut and dip in the earth, the location of every fallen branch and log, and the height and positioning of every hanging branch. His parents called it playing but it was, in reality, training. He may have been only seven years old (nearly eight actually) but he liked to hone his survival skills and keep himself at the peak of physical fitness. Whilst most of his friends would be indoors, glued to their games consoles and computers, or wandering around their neighbourhoods trying to capture characters from the latest version of Pokémon Go, he would be mapping the woods in his mind. He had seen it principally as a mentally stimulating exercise and had never imagined that it would end up playing such an important part in keeping him alive. Having died and been reincarnated more times than most Recarns, he had no fear of death but he didn’t go looking for it either.

  He was running on instinct. It was dark now, but he could have been blindfolded and it wouldn’t have made any difference. He was like a fusion between the speed of a cheetah and the agility of a Thomson gazelle. His legs were a blur as he weaved around trees and ducked beneath overhanging branches. He could hear the voices of the killers fading into the distance. That was a rookie mistake, trying to talk whilst running. They were wasting much needed oxygen, oxygen that would have been put to better use feeding their muscles (not that he was complaining). A heavy, moss-covered log loomed into view but he hurdled it without even glancing down at the obstacle. He knew it was there, he didn’t need to see it. His brain was rapidly processing any unexpected changes in the terrain and surroundings, whilst silently making minute adjustments to his body position to counter the possible threats. He allowed himself a lack of concentration for but a few seconds when he considered that perhaps he should be wearing a Flash costume instead of being dressed as Wolverine, but he didn’t let it break his stride or miscalculate a duck or a leap.

  The woods were now silent and all he could hear were dead leaves dealing a glancing but harmless blow against the soles of his sneakers as the two surfaces made momentary contact. He was now certain that he was clear of the chasing pack and started to make a wide turn to the left so that he could head back to the house without, quite literally, running into his would-be killers.

  Ten minutes later he was approaching the murder scene. There was no sign of his pursuers and he had to rely upon stealth rather than speed from now on. He could afford to spare a few seconds to take stock of his situation and formulate some kind of plan. Tucking himself behind a bush he scanned the scene that lay before him.

  There weren’t that many people in the garden. Not live people anyway. Circulating around the dead bodies were a couple of people in white SOC overalls and four other people who were seated on plastic garden chairs a little away from the other two. They didn’t look like the police, maybe they were from the ONP Special Investigations Group. The challenge would be to get past these investigators, whoever they were, sneak into the house, grab his rucksack – if it was still there and hadn’t been hauled off as evidence – and to get out again without being seen. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  He spent a minute or two inventing plans, dismissing them as impractical, and creating new ones. Finally, he settled upon a plan that he felt had a reasonable chance of success. He stood up, stretched his arms out wide and then stretched them behind himself, linking and pulling on his fingers, to make sure his muscles would be well charged for what he was about to do.

  What he wasn’t expecting was to find his wrists suddenly bound together by a pair of Dyna-Cuffs. The handcuffs shrank
to fit his wrists and offered no chance of escape. A voice behind him whispered in his ear.

  “I think you’d better come with me.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  20:01 SUNDAY 14 MARCH 2077

  “What do you mean, there was no warning that this might happen?”

  Michelle was furious. She knew – and One Life, the resistance organisation, also knew –that seven years old was the point at which Recarns began to regain the memory of their past lives. The twins’ parents, Janice and Paul, had been comprehensively trained in observation and behavioural analysis techniques and had been providing daily reports on their young sons. Nothing had raised any red flags; those daily reports had been studied and analysed by experts and any problems had been put down to sibling rivalry or simply normal child behaviour that could be seen in any family unit. There had been no recorded instance of a Recarn regaining past life memory until after his or her seventh birthday, but special attention had been paid to the twins’ development since their sixth birthday. They appeared for all intents and purposes to be normal healthy children.

  Yet there they were. Michelle, her second-in-command Danielle, and Zafar, along with other high-ranking One Life officials looking stunned as they surveyed the scene of utter carnage before them.

  Strewn around the garden were the limp lifeless corpses of several children. A couple of hours earlier they had been enjoying themselves at the twins’ birthday party, stuffing their faces with ice cream, jelly, and cake. Now it looked like they had fallen into a threshing machine and been spewed out in pieces.

  The scene was surreal; half a dozen miniature superheroes were scattered about the garden in varying positions of death, most killed by stab wounds, although Wonder Woman was suspended from an apple tree, hanged by her own Lasso of Truth. Sprawled across the table were the bodies of the twins’ parents, Janice and Paul, crushed food and a pool of blood congealing beneath their bodies. It was quite macabre how the birthday cake had soaked up the blood and was now a mixture of yellow and red sponge. Michelle turned to her colleagues.

  “I’ll ask again. Why was there no warning? How could we not have seen this coming?”

  A bespectacled man with a shock of grey hair was the first to attempt to offer an answer.

  “We know that Recarn memories only kick in after the seventh birthday. There’s been absolutely no recorded instance of a Recarn regaining past memories before this age. And we have been paying special attention since the twins turned six years old.”

  “Well something has obviously gone wrong, hasn’t it? I mean, we’ve been watching them, haven’t we? Was there no hint that something was wrong?”

  “None. None whatsoever. We’ve been studying them meticulously and comparing them to a very large cross-section of normal – well, non-Recarn – children, and they’ve been completely typical. We included twins in that number too, just to be sure that being a twin wouldn’t affect the results. Nothing, absolutely nothing, gave us cause for concern.”

  “I want the records of these two boys to be dissected, analysed, and gone through with a fine tooth comb. We need to know what we missed.”

  “I don’t see how we could have missed anything, Michelle. We had not only our best behavioural analysts on the case but the latest profile analysis software too.”

  “Well, the mess that we’re standing in now would rather suggest the opposite, don’t you think?”

  Michelle made her way over to where the lifeless body of six year old Alice Sedgeley was still hanging from the outstretched branch of the young but healthy apple-tree.

  “What does this tell you?”

  The investigators looked at the body of the girl, her body limp as if she were a marionette whose strings had been cut. The confident voice of a new arrival broke the murmuring.

  “That branch is about ten feet off the ground. The girl is about three foot ten inches tall. The average height of children between the ages of six and eight - which is the age range of the children at the party - is between three foot ten inches and four foot two. Even if Liam and Connor worked in unison, they couldn’t have done this by themselves. They couldn’t have hauled the girl up there and left her hanging without help.”

  Michelle was impressed with how her younger sister, Caitlin, had turned her life around after her ordeal at the hands of Marcus. She had been left emotionally crushed by his abuse but had come out of the experience a stronger and more determined woman, mainly thanks to the intensive training to be a field agent like her older sister. The training could have broken her even further but she had managed to come out the other side a remarkably strong and well-balanced individual. Maybe there was something in the genes that she and her sister shared that had given them this strength.

  “Not only that, but there are only six bodies, six children’s bodies anyway. Has anybody checked the house?”

  A scene of crimes analyst in a too white plastic jump-suit raised his hand gingerly. He was very good at his job but there was something very intimidating in the air when the Boone sisters were together.

  “Yes. The house is empty. No blood anywhere and no other bodies. We did find two cake slices hidden inside the piano though. Do you think that may be relevant?”

  “I don’t know, but highlight it in the report anyway. So, there were twelve guests and only six of them are accounted for?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it’s safe to say that Liam instigated this.”

  “Why Liam?”

  “Because Liam came from the embryo into which we placed Marcus’s soul. We’ve always known which twin had the soul implanted, even though Janice and Paul didn’t.”

  “Do you think that Liam forced Connor to help him?”

  “Maybe, but I doubt that he needed much persuading. They’re twins, remember. They’ve been together since the womb.”

  Caitlin joined her sister in front of Alice’s body.

  “Can we get the poor girl down now, please? Let’s give her a little dignity in death.”

  The scene of crimes officer beckoned a colleague to help him and they cut the cord that was keeping poor Alice attached to the tree. Whilst the child’s body was zipped into an oversized body-bag and placed alongside the body bags of her fellow party guests, Michelle took four plastic garden chairs from a stack of unused chairs after coming to the conclusion that she wouldn’t be contaminating the crime scene. She placed them on the patio and beckoned over her sister, Zafar, and Danielle. The rest of the investigation team carried on with their work.

  When all four were seated, Zafar leaned forward on his seat, being careful not to move his weight too quickly in case the flimsy chair legs gave way.

  “These are the facts as we know them. This evening, six children and two adults were brutally murdered at a seventh birthday party for twins Liam and Connor, a party organised by their parents Janine and Paul Hillary. The parents are the two deceased adults.”

  Danielle had a question.

  “How many children were at the party?”

  “Twelve in all, including the twins. Six were found dead. They were all dressed in superhero costumes – it was a fancy dress party. The deceased children were Grant Roberts and his sister Marcia aka Superman and Supergirl. David Hawkes aka Thor. Philip Clarke aka the Flash. Ronan Peters, the boys’ cousin. He was dressed as Captain America. And the poor girl who was dressed as Wonderwoman, who was hanged, was Alice Sedgeley. That leaves Jeremy ‘Jazz’ Fairley aka Iron Man, Rebecca Walker aka Catwoman, Martin Dier aka Wolverine, and Stephen Tufnell aka Robin, the Boy Wonder, all unaccounted for.

  “Now we know that Liam and Connor are the instigators of this massacre, particularly Liam. Michelle and Caitlin already know, but – for Danielle’s benefit -– I’ll reiterate that Liam Hillary is the reincarnation of Marcus Gallagher.”

  Danielle pretended not to know, although Michelle had already told her this a couple of years earlier. She didn’t want to get Michelle into trouble. Zafar expanded on the details as
she hadn’t been present at Marcus’s final demise.

  “Long story short, when we had him detained we couldn’t terminate him – much as we would have liked to – so, thanks to information that we received from our scientists, we were able to neutralise him, take away his Recarn properties, and transfer his soul into a fresh embryo, thus cutting him off from his past life memories and giving him – and us – a fresh start. Unfortunately, tragically, it looks like we screwed up. But I must emphasise that it was the only solution that we could see at the time. We have no reason to believe that his twin brother Conner is a Recarn, but he may be helping him out of a misguided sibling bond.”

  “These other kids. What do we know about them?”

  “We believe that at least one of them is an accomplice, maybe more. Jeremy Fairley is quite a big lad for his age so he probably helped in the hanging of young Alice Sedgeley. Rebecca is a bit of a wild child and suffers from Tourette’s, so if she starts swearing at you don’t take it personally – she can’t help herself. I can’t see her being an accomplice though. Martin Dier, well, he’s a bit of a lad. Doesn’t seem to be scared of anything, a risk-taker, says he lives for adventure. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and I don’t know what side of the fence he’s fallen. His mother says that she has wondered sometimes if he might be a Recarn, but she’s never had him tested.”

  A memory drifted into Michelle’s mind; she’d once known a young boy who thrived on adventure.

  “That just leaves Stephen Tufnell, who was dressed as Robin. A quiet boy, by all accounts. Definitely not a scrapper. I’d be surprised if he put up much of a fight. Probably ran off.”

  Philippa, Caitlin’s clone came into the garden, her right hand gripping tightly the arm of an undersized Wolverine.

  “Look who I found spying on us in the woods.”

  Martin protested.

  “I wasn’t spying. I just wanted to know when it would be safe to get my backpack.”

  The group looked at Philippa’s prisoner. Michelle looked at him even more closely. Something about him seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite place where she might have seen him before.