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

by Doug McGovern

  Reilly stepped out of the octagon shaped white canvas tent.

  “I don’t get it. If they’re going to come up from the sea, then why did we put our most vulnerable thing on the front line?” She leaned over a box and let her oversized rifle clatter against it. She began to clean the rifle’s body with an orange cloth.

  Harrison smiled.

  “I’ve been watching the news and…” He bowed his head, closed his eyes.

  “I thought Andromeda would be able to see it better from the sky if I put it here.” Harrison stood up and studied his companions.

  “I know it seems like an insane risk. Except I know what un-death is like. It wasn’t so long ago that I was in Jane’s shoes. I know that she will come for this. For us. See, when you are trapped in that limbo you hear the thoughts and anticipate the duress of the one person you couldn’t live without when you were balanced alive.” He shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “How do you know that?” Reilly’s lips twisted into an “oh” shape.

  “Because when I was dead, I could feel her in my head. Her life…She saved me so many times. I think maybe she will save us again. I know her. I felt her soul when I was sleepwalking. She loves this man more than I ever thought was possible for a human being to do.” Harrison pointed a shaking finger at Dexter. He swallowed, tears brewing behind his eyes.

  “The maniacs that murdered her…This serum that’s tearing her apart on live TV. None of that is any match for her spirit. She’s coming for you, Dexter Owens. Make no mistake.”

  There was a surge of rabid foam on the water’s face. The Geryon Sub was spinning into port, bursting within from the fire and war that had erupted in the belly of the ocean. They held their breaths, knowing who this had to be. She always announced her presence with fire and flare. Infrared lights shot through the surf and reflected off the shore. Sabotage was near.

  “Eureka! I think I’ve got something! It’s not a lot, but it’s something.” Joseph popped out of the tent, a syringe in hand. His jaw gaped. As the Geryon Sub rose from the sea, the air began to darken with the U.S. Airforce, and Andromeda was hovering above them, spinning them around her in carousel arcs.

  “Say what, Grampy? You’ve got the best timing of anybody I’ve ever met!” Reilly swung the rifle to her shoulder and tossed her hair out of her face.

  “Jane.” Dexter tilted his face to heaven as magnetism began to draw water from the sea and bring it down in great torrents of unnatural rain.

  *****

  Chapter 9

  “My darlings! Escaped from the nest to cause so much trouble!” Leona strode in on the smoke in the blazing center of the submarine.

  The Geryon Sub was out of control. The crew had drawn back, clinging to the walls, opening fire on the creature with a volley of semi-automatic rifles. They’d had no effect on the organic compilation mascot of Leona’s wretched family.

  Leaf had pounced on the massive creature’s shoulders and sunk his hands into his ribs, roasting him where he stood. Derek stood and held the cage doors using the force of his bio-seismic muscular convulsions to hold the giant off. The mascot gnashed his teeth and spit acidic vapor that had begun to chemically erode the cage. Metals were sizzling, giving way under Derek’s wrenching hands. They were spilling over into the cockpit. Derek’s rattling shattered dashboard tech. The pilot shrieked and swung a .50 caliber pistol up from a small metallic drawer at the dash, shooting Derek point blank in the face. His tremors sent the bullet to spiraling around him at orbital speed. It had killed half the crew by the time Leona descended. The velocity that it traveled at set the cockpit on fire. Magnetic pressure from the whirring mechanism began to bow the submarine’s walls. Soon the interior would be erupting as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico broke through its framework.

  “I see that you’ve met my husband. My rightful husband. I married the flesh and frame of the future. The future is where we’re going, my young friends.” Leona strode through the midst of the cockpit, dodging the bullet, walking with perfect balance over the seismic tremors. Derek gaped. The crew scrambled away from her feet. She plucked a barber’s razor from her bra and began slashing them. Frenetically, heavy handed. The bullet whizzed by her several times and failed to hit her. Derek twisted, turned himself. Why could the world not move to the tempo of ideals? How poetically just it would be if something as mundane as crossfire took the glorious She-Hitler down. It was not to be.

  “I find myself ratifying, manically shredding this world I aspired to build! Madness! There is a creativity in it! I will embrace what I have staved off so long! I will drink deeply of the dew of it!” Her flailing hands swatted out, taking a fistful of the Commodore’s hair.

  “Ma’am, please! Please! You know me! The work I’ve done for you! I did away with that salty old cur Alistair!” Her hands flew to her face.

  “You murdered the father of my only child? Mmm, damn good of you. Ambition would have been an advantage if I had meant to cling to an empire. There’s so much to reconstruct! So much to demolish! I will need your energy. To employ the sentiments of my sister, I could say that I must absorb the power that emanates from your biology and bathe in your soul.” She slit the Commodore’s throat and let the blood flow into her hands, splashing it on her face like aftershave, running it through her hair.

  “Mm, yes! What bliss, what creative triumph arises from sweet, undisputed madness! Cherish the sanctity of life, my reluctant disciples! Cherish the fragrance of blood as it flows without hindrance, free to write the pages of the history that emerges from me! I will rewrite the course of human thought! I will give humanity madness for a medicine!” She turned to Enzo, the Geryon Sub’s pilot. He shrieked, trying to load the .50 caliber again. Leona laughed and swung up, cutting the barrel in half. It collapsed to the floor and rolled over Enzo’s toes. He howled and whimpered.

  “Cutting edge. I keep a titanium blade on it. It’s ultra-sharp. Like a samurai’s weapon. I was a person of disciplines once.” She swung the razor haphazardly across his brachiocephalic vein. He groaned, crying and cursing, as his clothes began to soak with blood. She caught him by the hair on his way to his knees and began to stroke the razor back and forth like a paintbrush until she had a deep enough slot, so that she could thrust her hand inside him. She smiled at Leaf, who was momentarily distracted long enough to let the Geryon go. The creature screamed and hurled Leaf at the cage bars. They came clean the rest of the way. He and Derek rolled to Leona’s feet.

  “Your Andromeda has proselytized me. I am convicted. I have so much more to do! I must be baptized! Renewed in my thought. Responsible for my actions!” She reached and began to pull the bones of Enzo’s throat free of the slit in this chest. She snapped them in her hands, yanking on his spine until she had dislocated his head and exposed his spinal cord. She pressed it to her lips like a funnel and guzzled his blood and spinal fluid.

  “She had made me acknowledge my sin. My sin is this: That I abandoned those things which I first held precious. I became obsessed. Greed. Gratuitous living. Corporate ambition. You know this, I’m sure. Oh…Did you think you could spy me out and I wouldn’t catch wind of you? I know who you boys are. I knew when I took you from Shreveport’s streets, rose you up to glory with me in the highest. You are the chief members of the glorified dogwatch that reported to Congress my every function. You were the ones that followed my design teams and tried to pirate my ideas.” She wagged her finger and drew closer, dragging Enzo along with her by his exposed spine.

  “That Corvette chassis that you modified to be wider, aeronautic even, with the same dimensions and make of Air Force prototype master drones? A passenger super-sonic car? That was beautiful, Sergeant Manson. You truly are your father’s son.” Leona gritted her teeth, snickering. The blood began to pool in her frenzy-exposed cleavage. Leaf shook his head, disgusted.

  “How could you even profess to know my father? He died 10 years ago!” Leaf spat on the floor. Leona giggled and swung the spine around,
whipping him across the face. He skidded into Derek’s shoulders as the Captain tried to rise to his knees.

  “Ah, yes. That’s what they told you. I remember now. Libby and Annie were always very good at fabricating alternate histories for citizens of my cities. That’s how my little daughter was led to believe she was an orphan of Hurricane Katrina.” Leona laid a hand over her mouth. As Leaf blanched, his face took on a candle-light halo. She had wreathed him in that fire-touched beauty. What good she had done for the world! She sighed. It had cost her so much.

  “You had the potential to be a northern light in my galaxy of otherwise mundane creations. I mean, with a beautiful mind like yours? You were worth bringing back from the dead, Manson. Please be aware that this is a personal obligation I have to discipline myself in. It has nothing to do with your place in the architecture of my world.” She looked down her nose at Derek, who had rolled over on his back.

  “You on the other hand. You were always an anchor for my engineering protégé. He could have been wholly mine if not for you! You turned him against me and I will never forgive you for that. I will send incantational bribes to Hell in hopes that it will influence the infernal hosts to make a higher performance sport of you for every day that you rot in chains.” She hissed and looked at the Geryon. The creature had gotten to its shaky feet.

  “Oh, this is too painful for words! Losing you, my organic android! It can’t be helped! To Hell with my perfect union! I will rise from the ashes of myself and all of my dreams! If you are the gods, then I am a phoenix. I am hollow and will live eternally!” She swung around to the control board and began to pull fuses from it and rewire it in insane patterns. The soldiers shot a nervous glance at each other and dove forward. It was too late. The dashboard surged with a sudden white-hot light and a mechanical sonar sound that was being redirected into the cockpit walls. The orbital bullet clattered to the floor and rolled like a bottle top. Thus was the power of the thrust.

  Leona leaped on the dashboard, covering her face with her hands as the thrust shot her upward through the cockpit shield’s glass. She was thrust into the sand of the New Orleans conflict then. A single purpose flittered through her mind: She must murder her darlings.

  Captain Matheson and Sergeant Manson were certainly finished. They got knocked instantly comatose by the high-wired sonar malfunction. It would have been the end of their part in the story, except that the Andromeda was near, directly above them in fact. Jane’s consciousness still stirred in the Geryon’s mechanic brain function. The creature rustled in the swell of the imploding cockpit. Only he had the brute force necessary to dredge the soldiers back from the troubled waters.

  *****

  Chapter 10

  The first thing that bled into his consciousness was the smell of heated asphalt. He could be walking into Hell, but he wouldn’t have been any wiser to it. His shoes hit the solid pavement. A hawk’s cry awakened his ears to the presence of forests surrounding the township of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

  Kiara hopped out and landed with a heavy thud of shoe’s rubber hitting the blacktop. The truck shot off into the distance, its driver never once alerted to their spectral presence among the cargo. They stood now in the smoky air looking on in speculation. Kingsley felt the syringe of Andromeda’s extract hanging on a dog tag chain about his neck, with the curative metal tucked safely into a film canister beside it. He’d bought both chain and syringe at a pharmacy they’d snuck into when the truck stopped for gas. He’d stolen the canister from the pharmacy’s film development center.

  The story of Kiara’s family and the dark inception of Leona Kelley weighed mightily on his mind. He drew a sharp breath. Kiara waited in silence for him to speak. She knew eventually she’d need to answer the questions she knew that he needed to voice. Questions that might never have a tangible answer. There had never been a good reason for the things her wretched family had done.

  “This city holds the history of her darkest crimes?” Kingsley cleared his throat. Kiara had told him the reason that Leona Kelley would never return to his city was because this was the site of those few murders she could actually be haunted by.

  “Your descent into Caroline’s history will be soft like snowfall, then will roar like lions. I won’t tell you what she did here. I don’t want to awaken the souls she spilled. Murder is of the flesh and bone. Her actions took the act so much deeper, navigating the course that leads to the psychopathic core of criminal insanity.” She took a ginger step forward and he followed her.

  “I suppose I’ll discover it anyway, though, won’t I? When I open those dark chambers of her past, when I slowly start putting on her madness so I can match her play for play…I will become something entirely else, won’t I? Something unforgivable.” Kingsley fingered the syringe hanging on his chest. His eyes floated toward the horizon as he felt the heat from the collapsing street wafting to his cheeks. Hell was calling his name. This time, he would not run.

  “So, that’s what you mean to do then? To know your enemy well enough that you would wear her darkness… I taught you too well, Lucien.” Kiara looked at her feet, hands twitching at her sides.

  “That you did.” Kingsley swallowed. He was every bit as enraptured by her beauty as he was appalled by the darkness he now verged on.

  “I have to ask one more thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “What caused you to become so superstitious?”

  Kiara laughed. Kingsley held up a shaking hand.

  “Sorry! I know that’s a bit blunt. It’s just…I don’t understand. You swallow hearts to save their owners. You won’t speak about certain things, afraid that the dead can hear you. Why?”

  Kiara looked at Kingsley, jaw squared.

  “I told you the story of my family, Doctor. I didn’t tell you about my private hell. It’s difficult to shape those things with syllables of my tongue alone. I can’t think properly when we come to this part, you understand?” She drew a shaky breath, nodding fiercely. He felt a spasm pass through his stomach that clenched in his pelvis and made it throb from its east to west dimension. Empathy for her, compassion for what he couldn’t profess to understand, went beyond his bones. He believed in human spirituality now. She had awakened that eternal fire within him.

  “My sister created me. It began when Kiara Rievaulx attempted to stop her from murdering her one lover, the boy I called Dante. She gave me over to her girls, which she eventually killed herself when they began to question the end of Dante. There were rules and methods to my murder and resuscitation. I was not killed by physical murder. I was murdered by Satanic ritual. Here actually.” Kiara looked away. Kingsley shook his head.

  “I don’t understand?”

  “Oh, you will. There are simple minded people, innocents I envy, who believe the paranormal to be the illusion of outdated superstition. We live in a gratuitous age that promotes science-minded thinking but closes its mind to the aspect of broader horizons than the sphere of Human dimension. In the pursuit of scientific understanding, Humanity has failed to recognize the paranormal conundrum as being a science beyond their Modern comprehension. Out of the darkness of Dante’s own feverish flirting with the Dark, Leona began to learn things-things beyond time and her years. She opened a door no Earth-bound mind could have opened. You opened the door to her, Pandora Man.” Kiara smiled as Kingsley’s head ducked in shame.

  “You must embrace the supernatural, the depths and dregs and colors of madness, of her profound and paradoxically obscure madness if you have any chance of learning whatever knowledge her DNA could have passed to you.” She turned back to the road.

  “I’m open to anything. I have to be. This is penance, not pleasure. Teach me.”

  “I could do better.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I can’t tell you all the terrible things that were done in this place, but I can show you the scene of the crime. You will understand. Believe me, when I say that, you will understand.” Kiara let a heavy breath, becko
ning him with her hand. She went off the main road, dodging around signs that warned of street collapsing into the explosive mine shaft fire that had rendered Centralia a seat for fire and urban legend.

  *****

  Chapter 11

  It had to be a divine alignment in Heaven. The seals of Apocalypse breaking, the universe shifting on its axis. Andromeda released the fighter jets and floated placidly into the sun. Spreading her hands like a swimmer, she pushed the planes to hovering in a vulture circling safe gliding. The engines cut off midair. The pilots were forced just to wait this out. Hot News Channel 16 could only watch without narrative commentary, because Andromeda’s magnetic force had killed their all of their sound systems.

  The superhuman vigilante touched lightly on the shore, face to face now with Harrison Kelley and Dexter Owens. Reilly stood between them, covering her eyes from the sand the magnetism cast into her face. Joseph took a stumbling step forward and then gave a cry as the power of her G-Forces hurled him back, almost as though deliberately. Somehow they had the sense that she was trying to protect him, judging by the placid smile that spread over her altered face.

  “Jane…” Dexter took a step forward. The Andromeda’s eyes flickered, confused by the name. Dexter was hyperventilating, shaking his head. Her eyes ghosted over him, trying to place him. This was somehow so much worse than what she had become. He stumbled forward hand outstretched.

  “Jane…It’s me. It’s okay.” Never mind that the World was coming to its end. He was here. He would stand with her.

  Even when that meant that suddenly he was two feet away from Leona Kelley. She came rising from the sea, a bloody smile on her lips, running like lipstick down her chin and throat, somehow indelible yet even rising from the fountains of the Deep.