by Paul Tassi
Praise for Paul Tassi and The Earthborn Trilogy
The Last Exodus
“In The Last Exodus, Tassi succeeds in weaving together the space and post-apocalypse sub-genres into an enthralling adventure story of survival, trust, and hope…. Bottom line: a quick read, very enjoyable, highly recommended.” —Geeks of Doom
“What would happen if you threw Independence Day, The Walking Dead, and Guardians of the Galaxy into a blender? I can’t say for sure, but it’d probably look something like The Last Exodus. Tassi’s book is a clear, clever and action-packed romp that will undoubtedly appeal to sci-fi veterans and novices alike.” —Blake Harris, author of Console Wars
“Readers of Paul Tassi’s The Last Exodus should get strapped in for a thrilling ride—this guy can really tell a tale!” —Michael Cobley, author of the Humanity’s Fire trilogy
“A well-grounded, grim tale of first contact … Debut novelist Tassi gifts his characters with solid motivations and understandable responses to the postapocalyptic setting.” —Publishers Weekly
The Exiled Earthborn
“Again, Tassi delivers a fast-paced action novel that hums along … a solid read that is perfect for a quiet weekend.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“The space war between the human Sorans and their former slaves, the alien Xalan, continues in this fast-paced second Earthborn tale of raids and rescues…. A cliff-hanger ending almost demands that readers return for the concluding volume.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Sons of Sora
“Tassi melds a coming-of-age narrative with a philosophical nod toward dealing with pain and sorrow in the midst of the horrors of war…. The epic vibe doesn’t detract from the quieter truths, and small victories of the heart carry as much weight as clashes of space dreadnoughts.”
—Publishers Weekly
Also by Paul Tassi
The Earthborn Trilogy
The Last Exodus
The Exiled Earthborn
The Sons of Sora
Copyright © 2018 Paul Tassi
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Talos Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tassi, Paul, author.
Title: Herokiller : a novel / Paul Tassi.
Description: New York : Talos Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046298 (print) | LCCN 2017051275 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945863240 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781945863233 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Undercover operations--Fiction. | Contests--Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3620.A86 (ebook) | LCC PS3620.A86 H47 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046298
Cover design by Paul Tassi
Cover art by Protski
Printed in the United States of America
For Michelle
PART I
“Boredom is rage spread thin.”
—Paul Tillich
1
MARK JOLTED AWAKE TO something pawing at his shoulder. Drool spiderwebbed between his mouth and the wood. His unfocused eyes blinked and he saw a forearm being strangled by an angry purple octopus. A tattoo. Rayne.
“Mark,” she said. His head tilted up toward her face. Rayne was mostly piercings and ink, with intense green eyes accented by a mask of makeup. She screamed at most customers, but she was nice to him, and he loved her for that. Except right now.
“Mark,” she said, louder this time, which caused him to wince. He rubbed his eyes and she finally came into focus. Well, two of her did. And both looked annoyed.
“You know me, I’ll serve you all day ’cause you’re quiet, but you can’t sleep. Laird will toss you in an autocab and you’ll wake up in your driveway instead of my lovely bar.”
Mark turned to look at Laird, who looked like an albino silverback gorilla crammed into a boys’ large black T-shirt. His build suggested an ex-college football player, but his vocabulary said nothing higher than Division 4. Mark absently thought of six different bones he could break in the man’s body before he even hit the ground. Laird glowered at him, unaware of the imaginary ass-kicking he was receiving in Mark’s head.
“Alright, alright,” Mark said, his voice husky. “But keeping me conscious is probably gonna take a Spark and vodka.”
“Coming right up,” Rayne said with a smile full of rings.
Rayne mixed his caffeine/alcohol cocktail with machinelike efficiency, and Mark’s eyes wandered up to the screen over the bar. He was greeted by moist lumps of indeterminate flesh, the sight enough to make him wrinkle up his nose on instinct. The camera panned out to reveal the full scope of the televised orgy, which was mostly sweat and uncomfortable grunts.
“God, Rayne, can we switch this shit? I’m going to puke all over your bar.”
Mark gestured toward the TV, trying to change the channel with a swipe of his hand, but to no avail.
Rayne laughed.
“It’s tuned to my bio; it won’t work for you. Can’t let just anyone mess with my set.”
She made a quick flipping gesture with her finger toward the TV, and the stream rolled over to another similar, nudity-filled program. And another. And another.
“Hey, I was watchin’ that!” came a cry from the back of the bar. Rayne and Mark ignored it.
“What, you don’t like Sexcapade?” Rayne asked Mark, masking a smile. “You’re the only one. It’s the number one show on air right now by a mile.”
Mark shook his head.
“I’m not some family-values nutjob, but come on. In my day you watched this stuff in the privacy of your own home with the blinds shut and deep sense of self-loathing. Not in a bar when you’re trying to enjoy a drink.”
“Such an old man,” Rayne said, sliding the crystal blue drink his way. “At what, thirty-eight?”
He took a sip, and immediately his pulse quickened a half beat per second. By the time he finished it, he’d be out three extra hours sleep, no doubt.
“Thirty-five, asshole,” Mark said, checking his reflection in the bar mirror. He couldn’t blame her for the mistake. He might have said forty if he was looking at himself as a total stranger. Hell, he almost felt like he was seeing a stranger as is. He was half Chinese, but looked full-blooded with his father’s face right down to the arch of his eyebrows. He was a few inches taller than his Amazonian, corn-fed mother, who if asked was a twentieth-generation Nebraskan. And there was just a hint of her blue ringing his brown eyes. But right now the dominant color infecting them was red. His cheekbones and jawline were normally cut from stone, but his entire face was puffy at the moment and he had a temporary tattoo of the woodgrain of the bar stamped on his forehead.
“Just turn on the football stream, will you?” Mark asked. “The Bears game should still be on.”
Rayne obliged, and the TV flipped over to the game. But the screen showed a mostly empty field populated by medics, referees, and a half-dozen downed players. The fans in the stands were thin
ning out quickly.
“What the hell? It’s over?” Mark said. “It’s the second damn quarter!”
“Oh, I heard about this,” Rayne said. “There was a big brawl and they had to cart off half the offensive line. I heard Grayson actually took a cleat to the eye.”
“Seriously?” Mark said. “Like three-quarters of the roster is out already. I’ve seen little league teams with more talent than these called-up washouts.”
Rayne shrugged.
“The crowds wanted fights. They got fights. Now they got a hell of a lot of hurt players. At least it’s better than the NBA. They’re talking about canceling the whole season after what happened out in LA.”
“Ratings are still down,” Mark said. “It’s not doing them any good easing up on the fouls and ejections and fines.”
“Well lord knows they’re still trying.”
Rayne flipped the stream to a NASCAR race that was under a red flag. The screen just showed an inferno of electric cars that were now little more than scrap metal after a 400 mph collision.
“I give up,” Mark said, throwing up his hands. “Just put on a damn movie stream, I don’t give a shit.”
Rayne jumped to a new channel, and the familiar sight of writhing naked bodies returned.
“I said a movie!”
“This is a movie. That chick won an Oscar last year!” Rayne said, pointing at the gyrating woman onscreen. She flipped to a news stream this time, where, mercifully, everyone was fully clothed.
“Turn Sexcapade back on!” came the voice again from behind him. Mark turned around. He couldn’t pin the annoyance to a specific person in the booths, but he suspected an irritating-looking group of college guys wearing Northwestern lacrosse zip-ups that badly clashed with every other article of clothing they wore. Though admittedly it was hard to match purple.
Rayne continued paying them no mind. She quickly flicked her finger, and the video now had sound, with the picture so clear it might as well have been a window. Mark took a swig from his electric drink, and found that he finally felt halfway awake. On the screen, an attractive blonde in a low-cut top filed a report from outside a large stone building in DC. She spoke in typical reporter sing-song.
“In a landmark decision destined to be the biggest of 2035, the Supreme Court has just ruled that effective immediately, Cameron Crayton’s hit television event, Prison Wars, must cease and desist filming and broadcasting, having been found in violation of the ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment statute of US criminal law. Crayton’s lawyers spent weeks arguing that because the program required the consent of the death row inmates, no laws were being violated, and the health and safety waivers signed by participants made the risks clear to all, but the Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that since the express purpose of the event was the death of a combatant, that it was in effect overruling their current sentence, and was in itself a form of capital punishment. Prison Wars draws the seventh most subscribers of any show in the nation, with twenty-five million weekly viewers tuning into its stream. A shutdown will dramatically impact the bottom line of Crayton Media Incorporated, and CMI stock is already plummeting in after-hours trading. CEO Cameron Crayton had this to say in the wake of the decision.”
A man in a trim, pitch-black suit with an open-collar, garish red shirt appeared in front of a podium. The hands that gripped the metal were sixty, but his tight, smooth face looked no older than forty. His skin was tanned like evenly baked bread, and his teeth looked like they’d been carved out of marble.
“It was a tough decision, but I am satisfied with the split that we nearly convinced the court of the athletic merit of our program,” he said with the poise of a trial lawyer spliced with the off-putting charisma of a politician. “Unfortunately, I understand the complications with the criminal justice system, and though I thank our partner prisons for their tireless support, I admit it is a tricky area of the law. Hopefully new legislation will ensure that entertainment isn’t censored in violation of the First Amendment.”
He smiled at the camera in a way that made Mark’s teeth hurt. His sapphire eyes glittered with malice even as his face was robotically configured into something approximating cheerfulness.
“And while Prison Wars is no more,” he continued, “we at Crayton Media have been hard at work on a new venture, something I think our audiences will love. Expect an announcement shortly, but for now, I’d say I’ve earned a good long nap.”
Mark knew men like Crayton. They didn’t sleep. His eyes told him that. He was simultaneously enigmatic and creepy, charming and unsettling. His face had been plastered all over the feeds after Prison Wars turned the media upstart into a mogul in the last year alone. But Mark wondered how fast CMI would collapse with its flagship show dismantled.
“They’re shutting down Prison Wars?” asked Rayne, her stenciled eyebrows arched in surprise. “Shit …”
“Good riddance,” Mark said. “That was a horror show.”
“A really goddamn popular horror show,” Rayne said. “My brother is going to be pissed. He loved that shit. I swear he must spend $100 a month on Prison Wars swag, not to mention the subscription fee.”
The news was now showing highlights of Prison Wars’ year-long run: enormous men exploding with muscle beating each other to pulp with pipes and chains. One man covered in blood and Russian mob ink of crowns and keys stared at the camera like he was going to eat it. “Drago the Undying” was a household name, more famous for killing eleven combatants in the ring than for the two dozen civilians he’d killed before that, including informants and their entire families. Hopefully now he would fade into obscurity like all the rest and meet his fate by lethal injection like he was supposed to before the Prison Wars circus began.
“This is what I fought for?” Mark said, gesturing at the snarling madman on the screen.
“Fought?” Rayne said. “No offense, Marky, but sitting in an Okinawa base playing video games for a few years during Cold War II isn’t exactly sacrificing life and limb. You tell me how bored you were there all the time.”
Mark boiled with sudden rage, but quickly quelled the fire in his chest. He was way too drunk if he was even hinting at what had gone on in China. It was time to go. He inhaled the rest of his drink and slammed it down on the table too loudly. That caught Laird’s eye, and he lumbered around on underdeveloped calves to face him as he stood up.
“Hey, bitch,” came the voice again from the back. “Turn the show back on now that the cranker’s leaving.”
Mark’s theories were confirmed as he could now see the voice came from the college kid with the most punchable face of the group. Rayne just glared at him and turned up the volume of the news. Mark didn’t know what “cranker” meant, but the way the guy said it was unpleasant enough to make his fists clench.
“What the hell, bitch?” the kid said impatiently, his word choice surprisingly limited given the supposed caliber of his university. He was now attracting Laird’s attention too. The oaf had always had a blindingly obvious crush on Rayne, and he darkened as he approached the table.
“Time to leave,” Laird growled, and grabbed the loud idiot by the collar.
“Alright,” the kid said, smiling to reveal dimples, holding up his hands like the bouncer had the power to arrest him.
But Mark slowed his walk to the door, seeing what was about to happen. The sandy-haired goon across from dimples had slid his shin behind Laird’s boots. Dimples dropped his right hand and wrapped it around the neck of a bottle. Laird’s beady eyes barely had time to register the threat.
A split-second later, the kid’s nose exploded in a shower of blood and goo, causing him to drop the beer mid-swing and fling his hands to his face. The ketchup bottle Mark hurled at him like a lawn dart had not shattered, and it landed on the table with a thud. The five other Wildcats scrambled back in shock, the one about to trip Laird pulling his foot back immediately. The bouncer kept his grip on the kid’s collar, hauling him out of the booth as he wailed. His f
riends trailed behind him, suddenly meek and harmless ducklings, and Mark held the door open as Laird tossed the kid to curb. As Mark passed on his way out, Laird granted him a nod of appreciation, which was the nicest gesture he’d ever made toward Mark since he’d started looming in the doorway six months ago. Mark stumbled past the dazed college kids trying to look up how to fix a broken nose on their phones, 911 clearly not an option due to the trouble it would bring with it. Their eyes darted toward him, but none made any moves his way, and if anything, they shrunk back as he passed.
Mark lurched over to his car. It took six attempts to unlock it with a fumbling thumb. He couldn’t even open his door, but he’d made that ketchup bottle shot from a dozen yards while seeing double.
The training never leaves you, he thought, though he couldn’t remember the exact drill where he was taught how to kill enemy combatants with condiments.
The door slammed shut behind him and he curled into a ball in the driver’s seat of his car. The engine automatically started when it sensed his bio-signature. He looked at the dashboard where, ten years ago, a steering wheel might have been.
“Where to, Mr. Wei?” a pleasant female voice said, chipper with a faint chaser of sultry.
“Just home,” he mumbled, turning himself so he didn’t accidentally drool on the leather. The autocar kicked itself into gear, its Italian engine roaring before settling into a low purr as it crawled down the street. What the hell was the point of having an electric car with the equivalent of a six-hundred-horsepower engine when it always drove the speed limit? Another one of his unwise purchases.
The radio was squawking about the end of Prison Wars, the commentators wondering out loud how Crayton would recover.
“I wouldn’t count him out,” said the shockjock. “Do you know anything about that guy? Crayton’s not someone you want to fuck with.”
“What, he’ll smile you to death?” said a woman, laughing.
“Just trust me,” the other host said. “Whatever he’s got cooking next, I have a feeling we’ve never seen anything like it.”