by SD Tanner
Hidden Evil
(EDEN LOST BOOK ONE)
SD TANNER
Hidden Evil
Copyright © SD Tanner 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by law.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to Mousey and his new girlfriend Daisy
And our good friend, Airman Tim
Table of Contents
Authors Note
Foreword
Prologue
Chapter One: Cain
Chapter Two: Gears
Chapter Three: Axe
Chapter Four: TL
Chapter Five: Gears
Chapter Six: Gears
Chapter Seven: Gears
Chapter Eight: Pax
Chapter Nine: Faith
Chapter Ten: TL
Chapter Eleven: Gears
Chapter Twelve: Faith
Chapter Thirteen: Pax
Chapter Fourteen: Jack
Chapter Fifteen: Ted
Chapter Sixteen: Troops
Chapter Seventeen: Gears
Chapter Eighteen: Pax
Chapter Nineteen: Cain
Chapter Twenty: TL
Chapter Twenty-One: Faith
Chapter Twenty-Two: Gears
Chapter Twenty-Three: Pax
Chapter Twenty-Four: Phillip
Chapter Twenty-Five: Gears
Chapter Twenty-Six: Troops
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Troy
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Hatch
Chapter Twenty-Nine: TL
Chapter Thirty: Pax
Chapter Thirty-One: Faith
Chapter Thirty-Two: Greg
Chapter Thirty-Three: Troops
Chapter Thirty-Four: Ted
Chapter Thirty-Five: Faith
Chapter Thirty-Six: Gears
Epilogue: Cain
From the Author
Authors Note
To keep the action exciting, this story is told through multiple points of view. Please see the character name in the Chapter heading to know which person is narrating.
Although this series is preceded by the Hunter Wars series, it isn’t necessary to read the first series to enjoy this one. If you’re interested in viewing the first series, please click here to link to Hunter Wars Series.
I really hope you enjoy the Eden Lost series.
Foreword
Seven years ago, mankind was infected with a virus that turned most people into the walking dead. Nicknamed hunters, they were fast, almost impossible to kill and ate their victims alive. The Devil took advantage of the disaster, and his demons used the newly created hunters as an army to bring hell to earth. As the world slowly collapsed, the gates to hell opened, the demons ruled and the dead began to haunt the living.
Before the outbreak, Gears, Pax and TL were foster brothers and soldiers in the United States Army. During the disaster they rescued a strange woman they called Ip, who could kill hunters with a touch. They later learned that Ip was infected with a counter virus the government developed in the hope it would rid the world of hunters. Believing they could replicate her abilities, they set themselves the mission to kill all hunters and restore order.
Setting up bases for the survivors and building an army, they gradually realized they were more than mere men, and they hadn’t met Ip by chance. As the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they lived as mortals, unaware of their true purpose until they were called upon to decide the fate of mankind. On learning their role, they waged a war against the Devil to decide whether heaven or hell would rule mankind.
It took two years for the Horsemen to understand what was really happening on earth, and it ended in a battle between seventy thousand brave soldiers, and the demons and hunters under the control of the Devil. During the battle, God sent his son, Jacob, to take the lost souls trapped in the virus-damaged bodies of the hunters to heaven. As the Horseman of War, Gears summoned ten thousand of his Immortal Army from the earth, and over half of the human soldiers died to prove man was worthy of another chance. After the battle against the Devil was won, our Horsemen were buried, and God granted man the gift of Eden.
For the next five years, mankind rebuilt their world, but not to be the same as before, and small civilizations grew in the paradise of Eden. In a plentiful world, filled with new species, plant life and temperate weather, people carved out a new way of living. For the longest while, man was content to feel safe on earth once again and peace reigned, but lately there have been rumblings of ambition. It seems the peace of heaven on earth is easily undone, and it’s not clear if it’s man or the Devil bringing Eden to its knees.
After five years of paradise, our Horsemen have clawed themselves from their graves to enforce their right to rule.
Prologue
His eyes glittered coldly like crystal under bright light. With a flourish of his long, dark robe, he strode up to the four children crouched in the small animal cages. The three boys were no more than five or six years old, and they glared aggressively through the wire mesh, but the equally young girl simply sighed.
Curious about her reaction, he put his face against the wire and asked silkily, “Bored, are we?”
The tiny girl crawled across the floor of the small cage until her face was no more than four inches from his own. Still separated by the wire mesh, her sharp, blue eyes narrowed, and her expression stiffened until it grew savage in a way he’d never seen on a child before. Surprised by her response, he waited to see what she would do next. Without warning, the girl spat directly at his eyes. With her warm spittle slowly dripping down his cheek, he thought, you’ll pay for that, bitch.
Standing as he wiped his cheek with the sleeve of his robe, he barked, “Get her out of the cage. I’ll kill her first.”
On hearing his words, the three boys howled in rage and fiercely kicked against the wires of their cages. While the girl was being taken from her prison, he watched the boys coldly. What strange children they are, he thought dismissively.
Chapter One: Cain
She was a small hunter, maybe five feet tall, skinny, bald and with stunningly natural blue eyes. Walking up to the bars of her cage, she eyed him warily and snarled. Although hunters were so lean they were virtually sexless, this one was unusually feminine.
Curling his upper lip at the hunter’s womanly form, he said abruptly, “Dress her. She looks obscene. This is a family event.”
Sounding worried, the Crusader standing next to him asked, “How, Cain? How are we supposed to dress it when we can’t get near it? We haven’t fed it for two months, it’s starving.”
That didn’t sound like his problem. Hunters could infect a person with a single bite, but he couldn’t take this so obviously female creature outside to the waiting crowd. There were thirty thousand men, women and children waiting to witness the ritual of the Reckoning. Usually he relied on one of the more manageable blue on blue-eyed hunters to perform the sacrifice. One bite from a hunter with blue on blue eyes could infect a victim, but they didn’t carry the same virus as the original hunters, and the results were unpredictable.
At the last ritual, the person instantly became a super hunter and ran amok until the Crusaders brought her down.
This ritual they got lucky. One of his Crusader teams found this hunter alone in an RV in the hills of Mississippi. According to his men, they caught it by surprise and were able to get a hood over its head, and tied it up before it had a chance to attack. Staring coldly at the hunter, he thought, my little beauty, you’re my prize possession.
His name wasn’t really Cain, but he liked the irony of the name. Stolen from the Bible, Cain was the first to kill his own kin for power over man, and he fully intended to be the last man standing. When the outbreak of the hunter virus happened, he’d just been arrested for murdering a twelve-year-old girl, and was in a police holding facility in Phoenix, Arizona. They didn’t know the half of what he’d done, and they never got a chance to ask. Everyone at the station left to deal with the crisis that wouldn’t end until the world was transformed into Eden. After five days trapped in his cell, a group of men arrived looking for guns, and he persuaded them he’d been arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
For the next two years, he travelled across the country indulging his every whim. Had anyone been following him, they would have found a litter of corpses with his signature. His trademark vivisection of humans left his victims hollowed of all organs. Over the years, he’d become quite adept at keeping them alive until he removed their heart. He might have failed his final medical exam, but he learned a thing or two before he did. His family had been wealthy for three generations, and with a generous trust fund, he didn’t really need to work for a living. Before the outbreak, he occasionally worked as a torturer for a drug cartel in Mexico, but he preferred his victims blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It was during one of his jaunts across the border to his homeland to indulge in his preferences, that he was arrested.
He could hear the sound of the excited crowd. When the abundance of Eden exploded five years ago, his ambitions grew. Without police or the structure of society, he’d grown bored with how easy it was to kill, and decided he wanted power over more than one person. He’d met a woman who told him about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and an idea formed. Reinventing himself as Cain, the Crusader for God, he told his Followers that God had punished the Sinners by turning them into hunters, and cast the living into hell. He knew there was a rumor God sent his son to earth to take the hunters home, and he played on this naïveté. His Followers believed he was God’s messenger on earth, and with this elevated credibility, when he said God would punish them again, people took him at his word.
People do love rituals, he though idly, as long as they’re not the one being sacrificed. Walking upstairs to a room above the jail, he saw a strikingly beautiful young woman. Sitting quietly, she was being painted with tattoos up her arms that ended at her right cheekbone. According to the woman who told him the story, the Horsemen had a tattoo covering their arms and shoulders, ending at the right side of their face. Using the symbolism as leverage, he had himself tattooed with what he assumed was a similar pattern.
“Are you ready, my child?”
Keeping her eyes cast downward, the young woman replied softly, “Yes, Cain, I am ready to satisfy the anger of God.”
Her Handmaidens had dressed her in a sheer white robe, leaving only her arms exposed. In the sunlight shining through the window, he could see the outline of her curved and pointed breasts. Last night, knowing she would be dead in less than a day, he’d enjoyed her body. Even now, he physically stirred at the memory, but put aside his desire. There were over thirty thousand people gathered for the ceremony, and he didn’t want her crying at the ritual.
“Make sure she has her elixir.”
He didn’t like drugging the victims, it made them too calm and he enjoyed the fear, but he didn’t want a repeat of his first ritual. That child had howled throughout the entire event, and the audience empathized with her fear. Nowadays, he made sure victims were at least sixteen, and sufficiently subdued so they wouldn’t detract from the purpose of the ceremony. People are so sensitive, he thought irritably, they look forward to the kill providing it’s not too gory, and the victim looks happy enough. Harrumphing to himself, he believed they’d do better to admit to their own dark desires, and enjoy the full experience.
This stadium was near a prison in Los Angeles, which was now home to a battalion of Crusaders. Accommodation wasn’t luxurious, but he was never a decadent man, and the irony of the situation amused him. There he’d been caught, and about to spend the rest of his life in prison, and now he did, but not in quite the way the police intended. Always convinced he was smarter than everyone else, he had to admit his current situation was quite a stroke of luck. Luck or genius, he wondered? More genius than luck, he thought smugly. Once people began to believe the hunters were gone and they were safe again, fear set in. People are strange, he thought, even when there’s nothing to worry about, they make something up. For as much as he enjoyed fear in a person, he preferred to watch them suffer. He’d spent decades honing his vivisection skills on humans, and his personal record for keeping a victim alive was nine delicious days.
For today’s event, he was at Dodger Stadium, dressed in black jeans, black shirt and a long, black cloak made of a heavy hessian style wool. Tugging the wide, soft hood over his head, he prepared to walk out to greet his Followers. He loved the adoration and awe he could inspire, and waved his hand at his soundman. The speakers boomed, filling the stadium with an eerie rhythm. With a wave of his other hand, his lighting man threw the stadium into darkness. One of the Crusaders opened the door to the field and silently led him to the pitcher’s mound. He stood, holding his hands in front of him with his head bowed, and waited for the spotlight he knew would come.
While the music drifted around him, he was lit with an orb of white, and he continued to stand perfectly still. On cue, the music died and he slowly looked up into the darkness, well aware thousands of eyes were watching him. With slow deliberate movements, he raised his hands, pushing the hood back over his head until his eyes were showing. Super hunters always had blue on blue eyes, and were able to control the hunters telepathically. As a sign of his power, he wore blue on blue contacts, and to emulate the Horsemen, his arms and half his face were vividly tattooed with an intricate pattern.
Giving the crowd he couldn’t see a long stare, he boomed sternly, “God was vengeful and punished the Sinners with disease. God will punish man until only the Holy remain. With God’s blessing, I send the Crusaders to find and punish the Sinners. If man does not repent, God will be vengeful again. Today you worship God. You will show him you have heard His message, that you will do His work, and destroy the Sinners until only the Holy stand in Eden.”
His voice was building to a crescendo, and he could sense the crowd stirring with excitement. After his night with her, the woman wasn’t a virgin, but ignoring this fact, he boomed, “Today I will guide you to do God’s work! I will take that which is pure, stain it with disease, and then purge it from Eden. You must show God you are his Crusaders and Followers on Earth, so that you will be immune to the disease while all Sinners will perish.”
Flanked by two Crusaders, the woman was brought into the spotlight. To his annoyance, he noted she was heavily supported by both men, and appeared completely unaware of her surroundings. They’d over-drugged her and now her mind was empty. Eager not to damage her the night before the ritual, he’d restrained himself when he hurt her, and now she was too doped to understand why.
Hiding his irritation, he roared, “The Sacrificial Lamb lays down her life to appease a vengeful God, so you may live safe in God’s grace.”
On cue, the spotlight widened until more of the stadium floor was lit. Two more Crusaders were controlling the female hunter, now dressed in what looked to him like a hospital gown. The hunter had two animal nooses attached to long metal rods around her neck. Hunters were strong, and the sturdy men were struggling to control the tiny creature. They dragged it forward until it
was only six feet from the woman. At the sight of the barely restrained hunter, he smiled inwardly at the fear that was finally registering in the woman’s eyes. Not really wanting to leave, he turned and climbed onto a table covered in a white sheet.
“No, no, no,” the woman began to wail.
Without needing to be told, the two Crusaders by her side, pulled her hands behind her back and clicked solid metal cuffs in place. The audience began to chant.
“Eden, Eden, Eden.”
Before the woman could resist, a Crusader kicked her in the back of her legs, and she dropped to her knees. The other Crusader quickly snapped heavy metal cuffs on her ankles to stop her from running once she was infected. He could see the woman was still screaming, but he couldn’t hear her over the growing noise of the chanting audience. Sensing its prey, the starving hunter was thrashing in the metal rods that held it at a safe distance from the Crusaders. It was reaching its arms out to the woman, clawing at the air, eager to feed.
While the hunter snarled and the woman screamed, he raised his arms in the air and roared, “This is God’s command.”
When he nodded to the Crusaders, they allowed the hunter to leap forward and it fell on the woman, tearing into her face and throat. Blood sprayed onto the pure white of the cotton cloth beneath his feet, and he stepped back, not wanting to be touched by the tainted blood. In less than ten seconds, the woman lifted her head and snarled, already infected and newly born as a hunter. The Crusaders used the metal rods to pull the hunter away from the infected woman. The spotlight narrowed again, until it focused only on him and the woman who was his Sacrificial Lamb. He knew the original hunter would be taken back to its cell.
Moving his robe slightly, he pulled out the sword it was hiding. The sword was specially made for this ceremony. Etched down its lethal blade, was an intricate pattern that matched the tattoos on his body. The woman who told him about the Horsemen took nine days to die while he removed her organs, carefully cauterizing the wounds as he did. While she slowly died, she talked to herself and according to her, the soldiers who defeated the hunters were led by the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. She said they all had matching tattoos, and the Horseman of Death was a woman who carried a sword with the same pattern. He wasn’t sure he believed her story, but it inspired him to form his own religious army. Her long rambling tale seemed to keep her alive for longer than anyone, and he doubted he’d ever find another quite like her.