The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series

by Doug McGovern

  “What’s it talking about, Derek?” Leaf crawled away from the creature, stumbling into Derek who scooped him up off the floor. No sooner had the Captain sat up than did the seismology of his own scientific altering begin again.

  “Do you remember the night that all this crazy began? When those kids came to us and wanted us to help them save their friend, right? Jane was in the Lab that night and-ah, it’s all difficult for me to remember now, but…Leona Kelley had captured Jane the same night she stole the Andromeda extract. You remember, that’s where we met the girl that saved us only it was pure chaos and the girl was suffering from Spontaneous Human Combustion. Whatever that crap was that she got hopped up on that night…This guy is saying it was some kind of social networking neurotransmitter collaborating drug that linked her conscious with the rest of this clown and pony show.”

  Derek huffed. He was shocked by all the things he’d forgotten or nearly forgotten in his captivity. All those valuable details he’d come to know about Leona Kelley as a National Guard captain who doubled as a micro-intelligence operative for the Shreveport guard would certainly be useful to him now.

  “Oh my God, Leaf! This guy is worse than that electric blue Corvette chassis you sawed and morphed with those bullet car parts into that super-speed sedan thing! Custom human beings!” Derek felt his hand clamp down over his gasping mouth. Memories of the life they’d left behind were bleeding back in rapid, underdeveloped spurts.

  “Hey, that was a beautiful prototype for the custom jet police cruisers you and Congress ordered me to make for the Shreveport Secret Police to masquerade around in, remember? Don’t compare this debauchery to my automotive genius!” Leaf’s hair was standing on end now.

  “Humanity! Pieces! You won’t have the power in all your engineering or sleuthing prowess to stop this! The power of innovation over the Human genome!” The Geryon stood up.

  “Oh God!” Derek didn’t have the time or breath left to exchange a plan with Leaf for their survival. The Geryon screamed suddenly tapping into the hundreds of collectively conscious voices coursing through him. He pounced on the soldiers. As their lives flashed before their eyes, they remembered everything.

  *****

  Chapter 5

  She tasted gunpowder just on the tip of her tongue and felt it swab the inner walls of her nostrils. Sanity and tactical prowess were slipping away from her, melting into an awry gray. This becoming was something more animal and savage. To hell with her ideals! Pure nihilism replaced her will for an orderly government in her name. If she couldn’t dominate the world with the monsters she’d placed in it, then she’d just burn it down. Maybe then she could build it again.

  Leona Kelley was debating many like things as she ran alongside the pier against the Hudson River.

  She pulled her iPhone from out of her boot and began to dial coordinates to the Geryon Sub’s crew. It was time to get this set in motion.

  Her mind was bleeding away. She felt her heart beating in her palms echoing through the carpal tunnels. She could still feel the power of the Andromeda even from this distance. Her eyes were watching her away over the city’s sepia skyline and the whirr of choppers.

  This had been a terrible defect of hers ever since her girlhood days in her first love’s tutelage. She was a great dreamer, a swift thinker, and a skilled, acrobatic, even skin-changing performer when it came to her dramatizations of a concept. Where she failed in all things was with her barbaric temper. Fury seized her, tore at her now. Her skin was vibrating with it. Her ribs were pulsating. She could feel a dull throbbing in the marrow of her knees.

  “I should have all along and now I’m just realizing. My dearest, you were a wiser man than I am. You knew to kill your darlings. The Andromeda showed me up by reason of spectacle! This was my hour! Now I will reclaim my spotlight. The World is my stage and this is my opera. They will drown in the blood I set to spilling. I’ll strike my pretty bird from the sky. I’ll destroy it. For that, I’ll need my militia and an advantageous stronghold. For which I’ll need New Orleans. I must kill Harrison. Get him entirely out of my way. Oh, yes, Harrison first. Then Kiara…Foolish girl has outlived her use. Of course, how silly to let them live, in pursuit of great dreams! No more frivolities. My pet, you were right. I’m distracted, overly passionate! It’s time for nihilism. Destruction of assets that really have no meaning. Destruction of the world I cannot save or keep. That there’s no point in ruling anyway expect for my bold passions.”

  The Geryon Sub rose bubbling from the water hissing like a serpent. Its hatch opened. She admired the shining leather of her smart black boots as she leapt through the air and sailed through the hole. Even the smallest details could be used to feed her ego. She wasn’t just some throwaway hellcat whore like many of her peers before her. She was the first female global terrorist! A lady Saddam Hussein! With her feminine attention to detail and her intuition, couldn’t she aspire to much higher things than the men who blazed the trail before her?

  “You know where to! Step on it! We’re heading for New Orleans! There’s a bigger picture to be painted from the blood of my wretched family and my birth city yet!”

  The Geryon Sub shot into the darkness and whirred with the precise revolutions of a bullet as it cut through the sea. Leona allowed herself to bask in the darkness of her prized designer submarine. She was enthroned in enterprise. Andromeda was only the prototype of her master race. Another Geryon, just like the mascot of this vessel. She could make many more, could she not?

  She heard the sudden chaos in the center of the ship and knew that something was deeply amiss. What now? Didn’t these pitiful fools realize there was a grand design to still uphold?

  *****

  Chapter 6

  “We’re packing out of here like rats. Don’t worry we’re the biggest thing that this truck is shipping.” Kiara slipped the wall out of the crate. She and Kingsley tumbled across the wooden floorboards of the old cattle feed shipping truck.

  Kingsley let out a heavy gasp and watched her. Watched her long dark hair tumbling free of the knot she’d had it tied in. It was funny how the man he was before would have been putting hands all over her, cramped in that close of proximity for as long as they’d had to wait to be hauled onto the truck. This new incarnation of himself had been a breathless passenger in her company. He knew her scent. Her shape in the dark. This woman, this greatest mystery of his life, had saved him again and was leading him forward to his greater purpose. For all of the terror she struck in the souls of those who knew her, she had become his guardian angel. He was falling in love with her at the same desperate velocity and consuming fire of a supernova. Had already fallen. This was spiraling out of orbit. This was a depth of feeling he’d never thought he was capable of. It had convicted him, humbled him, and transformed him into a new person.

  “Where are we going?” Kingsley knelt on the ground.

  Kiara smiled.

  “I can’t tell you that. She could have eyes and ears even here.”

  “Who are you people?” Kingsley shook his head.

  Kiara looked at her feet.

  “We were a drama club.”

  The walls of the truck echoed in the silence. Kiara’s eyes had gone wide as she realized she said those words aloud. She swallowed.

  “There’s nothing left for me to lose.” She shrugged and turned to face him, teeth clenched.

  “You should know the truth, if only in fragments, Lucien.” The gravity was ingrained on her face. She’d even used his first name.

  “A drama club. How does a drama club become whatever this war machine is that she pilots?” Lucien’s hand clutched at his throat.

  Kiara smiled.

  “With innovative young minds. Never underestimate the power of the teenage volition, my dear Doctor. This is how we began. At a run-down private school for troubled youths in the Lower Ninth Ward of a late 20th century New Orleans. He was the valedictorian of our school. Sharp as new money, suit and tie, with the pocket watch
on a long golden chain. He had visions of the world that made Karl Marx look like an idiot. Everyone thought so, but my sister was the one most captivated by him.” She held her breath and closed her eyes, as tears began to creep down her face.

  “My sister was born Caroline Rievaulx. We pronounce it like ‘Vevo’ and add the ‘r’ so it sounds like Reevo. We had extremely impoverished parents, a father who was a fisherman and a restaurant cook and a mother who cleaned houses and took care of children. Caroline was always a rebellious child. She had the criminal reputation of arson and painting anarchist symbols on neighbors’ front doors at the ripe old age of 12. My older brother and I were often assumed to be her accomplices guilty by the power of association.

  “We really had simply been trying oh so many times throughout our childhood to reason with her. At his wits end, our father sent us to the private alternative school with the booming theater department thinking it would keep us out of trouble. There we met the boy who called himself Dante, a kid who’d fabricated a glamorous identity to mask his psychopathic history. This proved to be the undoing of all of Louisiana. Soon it will unwind the world I fear. This is our story. Brace yourself, Doctor. It’s far from pretty.”

  *****

  Chapter 7

  “Does anybody know I’m still alive in here?”

  The sounds of the thousands of voices in what remained of her mind were riveting. Her distraction pushed this battle to the limits of her strength. She could hear the living, the dead, and the people lingering between the dimensions all alike.

  “Would it matter if they did?

  You’ve got to get the message across. Many people will die.

  Then let them die! The world is coming to an end. So, let it end!

  No…No, you can’t. You’ve got the power to stop her.

  Do I?”

  Jane screamed within herself and fought against the electric currents coursing through her. On the one hand, she was still the scapegoat of a nation that was turning on her for the crime of doing their dirty work. On the other hand, she had become a monster, the envy of Frankenstein. The lines of her responsibility were blurring. The skies above Manhattan were filling with fighter jets. The current Air Force One joined the lineup. Jane tore at the Andromeda’s flesh. If she could just take control for 30 seconds…

  “What good will it do? You’ll only make it worse.

  I need to try. I’m not finished yet.

  Yes, you are!

  Why am I still here, then? Answer the question!

  You know I can’t…”

  Here came the seizures again. She felt her hands tearing out her flaming hair. Blood came spilling down her neck, sending sputters through her haywire transposons’ electrical fields. She screamed without sound. Felt tears of pain welling. Her lips began to foam. Rabid dog, feral bird, she was trapped in this body. Public enemy number one, humanity’s scapegoat and savior all at once. The way of this world was to turn on its heroes. She crawled in herself as her spine shattered and rebound itself with magnetic configurations.

  The pain was beyond the threshold of human comprehension. Something she’d gotten used to a few hours ago before the scale was shaken and expanded again. Her understanding of pain was only deepening. As her body rapidly produced greater neurogenesis, transposon activity, nervous-receptivity and balance of all of these hyper-neurological activities in a sort of electromagnetic equilibrium, she was actually enabled to feel greater levels of pain than the human brain could process.

  And this agony didn’t come without its advantages. Her mind could process much brighter spectrums of color and pick up much greater definitions of detail and sound. What was more, as she’d been in the physical vicinity of Leona she’d been able to transpose her thoughts into her own mind. It was a sort of calibration of her brain stimulus and Leona’s stimulus that allowed her mind to literally translate her thoughts into her own brainwaves. She knew the full scale of her plan. All of her subconscious secrets. Her forecasted success. She had more dirt on Leona Kelley in a few moments of playing catch than the CIA could unearth on her in decades. Now it was just vocalizing these thoughts. Curbing this lighting storm, bottling it! Bringing it to the President’s attention.

  Her head turned toward the sound of debate coming from Air Force One’s cockpit.

  “Sir, we need your authorization—”

  “I don’t want to do this!”

  “You need to make a decision.”

  “This is a liability! We can’t be seen shooting our own decoy out of the sky! What kind of message does that send the public? We’re on live camera!” President Matthews jabbed a hand at Kendra to indicate the reporter who was recently recovered from Leona’s Island Fortress.

  “She served her purpose. To distract the She-Hitler until we had fabricated a strategy. We have a strategy now. We don’t need the Andromeda anymore.”

  “In case you haven’t read the fine print of the Andromeda Act, there was a lot more to it than that!” The President’s voice was strained with terrified fury.

  Sheer rage caused an explosion within Andromeda’s marrow that shattered her bones into hundreds of thousands of little fragments. Magnetism generating from her blood, from metals it began to produce as the Andromeda extract began to react with proteins in her DNA table, bound those bone fragments back together in a limbo of intense friction. The friction in these shards super-charged them. The Andromeda began to burn like dragon’s fire there in the skyline. Seven times brighter than the sun.

  “You have it in you! Annihilate them! That plane would be sand in an hourglass through your fingers!

  If I can do that, I can survive a puny airstrike!

  Why?! Why not put an end to them? It’s their fault you became me! You were the only one that had the guts to do what they should have done!

  Exactly! I’m the only one that can still save my friends from out of this.

  What are you talking about, you fool?

  I hear Dexter’s mind…”

  “Do it! The heat coming from her is sending a wave over New York. The whole city will be on fire if we don’t do something. God, I’m sorry, Jane!” President Matthew’s voice echoed through the chaos of Jane’s grasping mind.

  They had brought the deluxe model of their drawing-board technology. Scientists who had been onboard ever since the She-Hitler was identified a little over a month ago, after the Shreveport Assaults, had been making modifications around the clock to Air Force EMP concept weapons. Combining this technology with lethal homing missiles, they held the firm belief that the electronic knock-out power of the super-tech could disengage Andromeda and her high-powered frequencies. The lethal anti-armor striker would then dispense with her life, marking her as the only casualty.

  They were hilariously wrong.

  Andromeda shrieked. The magnetic fields shooting from her DNA engulfed and collapsed the EMP-rockets as they opened. The standby jet fighters watched in slack-jawed horror as these electronic fields shooting from Andromeda’s muscle tissue were able to tightly wind the EMP pulses shooting from the smart bombs. They were diffused midair. Andromeda began to shriek, thrash, and convulse in frenetic bouts of an epileptic surge as the lethal surge from the precision striker missiles was drawn into her own energy fields. It was apparent quickly that her body was influencing some kind of educated equipoise with the bomb, as her brain activity was learning a way around what her body confused with an autoimmune attack on her own haywire electromagnetic system.

  They had fired 40 EMP-Lethal Strikes directly at the Andromeda. She had absorbed them all, converted them into some kind of radio-stimulant. Neurological activity increasing by powers of a million, she was drawing the fire she had spread over Manhattan back into her own body.

  “Mr. President.” The voice unmistakably belonged to Jane. It was coming from his cell phone.

  “Hello?” President Matthew’s hand quivered as he answered the call.

  Andromeda began to twitch as she absorbed this energy in
a halo of lightning and red and golden amethyst fire. She touched down on the nose of the Air Force One, endothermic now, able to touch the plane without obliterating it.

  “Mr. President, please. I understand why they want to— I have the answers. The intel on Leona Kelley. I can help you stop her, sir. I can still—”

  Andromeda shot into the air above the Air Force One. Moving in tight revolutions, she bound the entire squad of fighter jets together by electronic chains that affixed in the shape of DNA double helixes. They were now a merry-go-round in the sky, a pinwheel moving wherever she’d command.

  “I’m not entirely in control of myself, sir.” Jane’s voice was exhausted. Just this message was a supernatural strain of will.

  “I can see that, Jane.”

  “I can’t stop her. She’s taking you to New Orleans. I’m sorry. I only had the strength for this message. She’s not me, sir. If they ask you later, she’s not me.” At that, the call cut out.

  *****

  Chapter 8

  “I can hear them coming for you.” Dexter stood atop a pyramid of ammo crates, looking out over the sea. He couldn’t see the fighter jets through the acidic cloud that was rising from the water. Yet he could hear the trouble brewing in the sky.

  Harrison looked up from where he bowed over many packages of dried ice.

  “Let them come. As long as I can secure this mobile lab for Dr. Kingsley, I will have absolved myself of guilt for all of this. Then I can die a peaceful man.” He loaded a Walther and popped his neck.