Utopia: A Dark Thriller: Complete Edition

by Adam Steel

  Lucian took his chance. He knew what Max wanted him to do. It was his cover. Lucian ditched the shotgun and raced towards the entrance corridor. He looked back to see Max’s body riddled with bullets: jerking spasmodically. Max continued to scream in rage while his body was torn apart by the torrents of fire. His assault rifle was still firing when it was ripped away from his body.

  ‘Excellent,’ the satisfied voice announced over the loudspeaker.

  The shredded remains of Max’s body crashed to the ground.

  ‘Target the other one. Then we can…’

  The twin’s voice stopped mid-sentence and the TALOS guards looked up at him for confirmation. The twin paused: confused. His hands flew to the side of his head, and he suddenly screamed. It was an inhuman, agonising, howl. The anguished wail, echoed out over the speakers.

  Across the Genie complex, Ellie’s final blow landed home: caving in the other twin’s head. It made a disgusting squelching noise when the pink and white brain matter splattered over the floor.

  The paralysed Twin on the gantry was holding his head and staggering back and forth. Lucian and the guards watched him lose his footing and fall towards the generator. The twin bounced like a rag doll when he fell: smacking off the pipes and metal sides of his own bulky creation. Lucian savoured every breaking bone, and splash of blood which was smashed from the plummeting body. The twin crashed into the broken conduit. The power surged out eagerly to consume him and his body went up in flames. It was wreathed in the circling lightning.

  Lucian saw the Twin’s eyes explode.

  Good enough, he thought, as he fled the generator room.

  Somewhere in the generator room (unheard behind the tremendous noise) a clock was striking midnight.

  Laboratory: Sub Level Four

  12:00 p.m.

  Ellie didn’t bother to look at the guards who were surrounding her.

  The twin lay dead in front of her: his fair hair stained with blood. His skull had been broken open. It revealed a pink mass of brain tissue, and bits of white bone.

  She didn’t see the baton coming, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. She fell to the ground beside her unconscious lover, and as she fell, Abigail’s small Chinese symbol hit the ground, and broke into pieces.

  Chapter 46: The Beginning

  The Hive: Genie Complex

  Jon Li was sitting in the lotus position in the middle of the cold windowless container. He was alone in the silence. His eyes were closed, but even if they had been open, he would only have perceived the blackness that surrounded him.

  The tiled floor was freezing cold under his weak and dying body.

  He placed one hand on his chest. The pain under his skin, where Ellie had made the incision, had grown more intense. It was sore and infected as a result of the crudely sterilised equipment which she had used on him. He felt around the flat and movable implant which she had so skill-fully inserted under his skin. It hid just below his nipple.

  She had performed breast augmentation a thousand times back in Plastic Paradise, but never on a man, and never with an implant that contained a lethal chemical cocktail. She had carefully injected the solution ‘Lucky’ into the implant. The highly volatile chemical had begun to leak from the beating which he had taken. Soon it would poison his heart.

  She had disguised the scar as an injury to avoid suspicion should they be captured and examined. The ugly red line of stitches throbbed under his sweating palm. He returned his hand to his knee and began the process of meditation for the last time.

  Give me strength to block out the pain when the time comes, and it’s coming very soon. I must block out the pain and the fear…totally. Forgive me Ellie for not being able to save you.

  Tears rolled freely down his bruised cheeks and he reminded himself painfully of his last image of her: terrified, shaking and waiting for her fate. He knew that it was a fate so horrific, that he couldn’t overcome his torment at the idea they would feed Ellie into Genie and use her lovely body to meet their desire for energy.

  It was a fate that was now awaited him.

  Jon Li shivered and tried to get into his mind deeper, but he was having difficulty dispelling his dire thoughts.

  They’re dead now: Irish, Lucian and Max. I’ve failed Drago and the others, because the Coney Twins are still alive – and Ellie’s alone with them. The horror of what they’ve been doing. Such evil…not human…It can’t be real. Red betrayed us all. For what? The mission’s a failure and Genie is still operating. Still feeding bodies into its ugly mouth. The twin said that they would be getting ready to launch a raid on Union City and I led them there. Right to the heart of it. We’ve failed utterly…unless…they take me soon.

  He bowed his head down low and cried silently for a few seconds. He cleared his mind of the sadness that crushed his heart like a cold vice. His whole body and soul ached from the overwhelming loss that he felt.

  He thought he could hear something starting up in the background: something mechanical and faint.

  Time to get ready Jon. Time to go home.

  He knew what the sound was. He’d heard it before in the generator room.

  He breathed in and out very deeply.

  At first the pain in his chest rose and fell with each deep breath. The chemical cocktail leaked insidiously and coldly into his system.

  Very slowly his mind was full of energy and his pain began to subside.

  The noise was getting louder and he struggled to obliterate the sounds, choosing instead to concentrate hard on his inner soul. He pushed the sounds of winding machinery out of his brain and stepped deep into his sub-consciousness and his mind began to fill with brilliant images. They came out of the pitch blackness.

  He found himself drifting into space and time and as he went deeper and deeper into his mind’s eye, the light changed to brilliant white. He saw a golden phoenix soaring in front of him. It was showing him the way home. Its golden wings beat as it flew away, far into the distance. He felt the rush of air on his face and then he heard his mother’s voice and he could see her face clearly. She was the same as he remembered her when he was a little boy: unchanged, young and beautiful.

  “There you are my little Emperor…Where have you been?” the soft voice called.

  “I’ve waited an eternity for you my son. It's time to come with me now, your work is done here now little Emperor. Ellie would have been proud of you. They all would have been, but no one, my little Emperor, could ever be as proud of you as I am. To give your life as a sacrifice, and to protect the weak and innocent, is the greatest honour a warrior could give. You will go down in history my son, and last for the whole of eternity in the universe. Feel the ripple that you have started…Do you feel it?”

  Jon Li thought he could feel something cold and soft falling on his face. His body succumbed to the fatal cocktail that was leaking from the breast implant. It flowed into his heart and numbed his body. In his last breath, he saw Ellie’s face. It appeared the same as it was when they had first made love on a bed of cool silk. He let go of his living world and reached out to his mother’s outstretched hand. He could feel her soft touch, as clear as the day she had held out her hand in their Japanese garden: back in his childhood days.

  The wind blew through the Black Walnut trees and whispered to him. He could feel the cool breeze in his hair. They stood, hand in hand, mother and son, at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

  He was home.

  The chains clanked and groaned as they got closer to the storage cubicle that contained the body of Jon Li.

  A panel slid open in the top and a robotic arm entered the cubicle. It groped around with its cold, steel fingers and then picked up the lifeless body by one leg, and dangled it momentarily, before disappearing back out of the hole, and into the storage facility. The body of Jon Li was zipped neatly into a black pod and attached onto a long chain on which several other pods were already waiting in line to be loaded into Genie.

  A sma
ll group of technicians, who were working the night-shift, were assembled by the input valves. One of them pressed a large red button on a flexible cable and the chain of pods creaked towards the hungry generator. When the pods reached the input valve, each one opened like a large black egg, ‘hatching’ a grotesque dead chick.

  The corpse of Red was sucked forcefully into the blue liquid, and pumped towards the intestines of Genie. Others followed. The technicians watched with interest, as Max’s tattered corpse disintegrated, before it got even a fraction of the way down the tube. Finally, Jon Li’s lifeless body plunged into the waiting tube of blue liquid.

  It shot forwards at high velocity towards the belly of Genie.

  The technicians waited, and monitored the damaged generator. Something started bleeping. One of them turned to see red lights flashing on the control panels on the side of the generator. A muffled blast shook the generator from somewhere deep inside when the chemical in Jon Li’s implant ignited. The generator started to make enormous quaking movements. It heaved and grumbled like some huge monster that had swallowed a stone and was choking. The lights and sirens on all of the systems were going haywire. Computer control panels burst into flames and crackled: sending sparks out like fireworks. The building began to shake as Genie screamed and writhed in agony. The ice encasing the bottom of the generator melted instantly into steam. The fine covering of frost on the floor receded away from the dying generator, as if it were fleeing from the coming explosion. Steam was pouring out of the valves along its sides: scolding the technicians who were nearest to it.

  The technicians scattered in all directions to get away from the impending disaster. They never made it to the exit before the generator exploded catastrophically: blowing the top off. Genie erupted like a bizarre volcano which spewed boiling blue magma up into the atmosphere. Lightening bounced around the silver spires and domes and spun around the inside of the vast chamber like a million, furious, iridescent blue bees: stinging everything they touched. The ground shook like an earthquake of epic proportions, and one by one, the buildings around the generator collapsed and imploded back down on themselves.

  The Domes filled with an alien blue gas, resembling giant blue mushrooms, which glowed against the black night sky. The pressure built up and they exploded one by one, into a trillion shards of blue glass, which filled the sky with a lethal, cutting rain. It was as if a great deity had designed a firework display to show the whole planet.

  The power grid went down and Sector by Sector the lights went out in Coney City.

  Eden City went out next, and finally, the whole of Utopia was out of energy.

  An immense blue glow filled the whole of the sky on the south coast that night. The enormous column of blue gas, which went up into the sky: reached out to the stars.

  Lucian staggered out of the complex into the cold night air and watched looked up at the sky above the reactor. He took his silver Zippo out of his pocket and lit up a cigar. He took a deep draw, and as he watched the beautiful firework display, he wondered:

  Is this the end or the beginning?

  “Now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien.”

  --Lyndon B. Johnson

  Redux

  Nine Months Later

  The operating room was alive with nurses who were robed in green. Their plastic aprons were smeared with blood.

  A woman lay sedated on the operating table. She was covered in a green cloth.

  The anaesthetist was adjusting gases and checking monitors. He pulled the woman’s eyelids back and shone a tiny light into each eye; searching for pupil dilation and then he sat back on his stool by her head and adjusted another dial.

  Another monitor measured the woman’s heartbeat.

  It was rising.

  The heat from the operating lights was giving the surgeon some discomfort. A nurse mopped his brow: dropping the swab into a bin full of blood-soaked swabs. The surgeon held out his bloody hand and signalled for the immediate need of an instrument.

  The ordered line of attendants worked on the woman, sucking blood from the gaping wound in her abdomen, and passing instruments along. They watched as the surgeon worked against the bleeping monitor. The surgeon touched something unexpected and blood squirted out of the gaping wound. The surgeon stepped back for moment: splattered with the spray. A nurse tried to wipe the blood splatter from his glasses.

  ‘More suction. Quickly! We have to get this bleeding under control,’ the surgeon ordered.

  The surgeon worked faster.

  The monitor bleeped faster.

  Alarm bells were ringing.

  ‘Her pressure’s dropping Sir,’ the Anaesthetist advised.

  The nurses looked at each other over their face masks. Worried eyes looked at the woman on the table as the blood was pumping down through the suction tube. It was filling up the large glass bottle on the floor, faster than decanting wine.

  ‘I am nearly there. I can feel it now. We just need to ease it out. A few more seconds more,’ the surgeon said anxiously.

  His hand was fully immersed into the woman’s abdomen.

  The heart monitor went wild and other monitors started bleeping.

  ‘She’s crashing,’ the nurse said, swinging a trolley over towards the table.

  ‘Not now. Wait!’ the surgeon shouted at the nurse.

  The nurse halted the crash trolley, and stood rigidly waiting for orders.

  ‘Here it comes. Be ready – just a few more seconds,’ the surgeon said, and looked at the woman lying on the table.

  The surgeon lifted the lifeless baby out. Its covering of amniotic fluid gushed from the table, and washed the floor. He placed the lifeless baby into the outstretched arms of a nurse and cut the pulsing umbilical cord. He looked at the masked person opposite him and shook his head lowly from side to side.

  The nurse took the lifeless baby to a waiting incubator.

  ‘We’re running out of time. Her vitals are failing too fast. We will be too late,’ the Anaesthetist said.

  He was panicking: scooting from one monitor to another on his wheeled chair.

  ‘Increase the dosage! We must do whatever it takes. Just keep the subject alive,’ the surgeon demanded.

  The surgeon plunged both of his hands into the warm body cavity of the woman and a second later he pulled the slippery baby from its bloody pool. The twin screamed when he held it above the woman’s lifeless body. From the other end of the operating room, another twin screamed in synchrony.

  The heart monitor flat-lined.

  The surgeon smiled as he congratulated his team.

  ‘The clones are viable. They are perfect.’

  The surgeon put his hand on the dead woman’s forehead and stroked her long blonde hair. He pulled a lock of her white hair through his bloody fingers.

  ‘Thank you Dr Rushford. We shall name them for you. Jonus and Alexis. It suits them. Don’t you agree?’ Mason De-Barr said to Ellie’s lifeless body.