Souls of the Never

by CJ Rutherford

  And besides, this was Derren and Katheryne’s moment, and they watched the joyous reunion in silence.

  Even Toshi was lifted out of his melancholy by the exuberant energy flowing through him. Who couldn’t resist this, he thought. With this amount of love and hope on our side we’re invincible.

  Derren released Katheryne to stand, but they still clung to each other, as if they feared to let go ever again.

  Katheryne managed to break reluctantly free, and stood looking at her impossible man. Impossible because she never imagined this much love could exist in the universe, the depth of emotion they felt for each other was inconceivable.

  Derren looked down and returned the same glowing expression. She was glowing, brighter than a sun, but he didn’t, couldn’t look away. The pain and uncertainty of the last few days was washed away as his wish came true. She had returned to him. He sensed the damage, but it was nothing compared to the strength and will at the forefront of her mind.

  “Hello you,” he breathed, smiling the lopsided smile which never failed to catch her heart.

  “Hello you, too.” Katheryne smiled, causing an equally effective reaction.

  “I thought I’d lost you again,” said Derren, huskily, “you know you need to stop doing that. I might start to take it personally.”

  “I think you’ll be able to hang onto me for a little while this time,” she chuckled, “at least for a day or two.”

  “Only for a day or two? Is that all I get?” He feigned rejection, “And here I was thinking you loved me.”

  Katheryne looked up, as she realized something hadn’t been said.

  “I love you Derren,” she breathed, “even though this is the first time I’ve said it, I’ve loved you for years, and saying it now feels so amazing I just might cry.”

  “I love you too Katheryne,” he whispered in reply as he drew her close to him again.

  Nothing more needed to be said. They had a little time before the next battle.

  Just a little.

  The End

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  Available now

  Worlds of the Never, book two of the Tales of the Neverwar series.

  Chapter One

  Cern Facility, Switzerland

  “You're not thinking straight, Jason. Jesus! I don't think I've ever heard a crazier idea in my life!” shouted Julia as she watched her boss prepare to commit professional suicide.

  “I don’t have any choice, Jules. They’ve suspended me. This is the only way, don’t you see?” His face was crazed with grief.

  Jules took a deep breath, forcing what she hoped was a calm and understanding expression onto her face. “Jason, you’ve just driven through a security barrier, nearly killing the guard on duty. Then you go and pull a gun on Ted at reception. Jesus H Christ, the poor guy’s probably having a coronary up there.” She jerked her thumb upwards.

  “I need to try, Jules. I need to try to bring Alice back.” Jason’s expression was pleading as they descended in the elevator.

  “She's dead, Jason. For God's sake, we all saw it...whatever it was.” Julia grew morose as she remembered the fateful day over two years before.

  That day was the beginning of the end for Jason, as far as she was concerned. The death of his wife Alice rocked him to the foundations of his soul.

  Even now Jules suspected he awoke at night screaming and crying, wracked with guilt even though there was no way the accident could have been foreseen, never mind prevented.

  But no amount of logical persuasion could divert Jason from his irrational desire to explain what the object was which appeared for an instant before vaporizing his wife and unborn child.

  He glowered at her.

  “Where's the proof, Jules?” he hissed. “Never mind that there was no body, but there was nothing...absolutely nothing left. No DNA, not even a single trace of an errant molecule. Nothing!”

  There was a feral look in his eyes as he pleaded for her to understand, but Jules shook her head.

  “Jason, the level of energy released that night was enough to make a crater ten miles wide and two miles deep. It was concentrated in an area barely two meters across. How could anything exist in that type of bombardment...I'm just amazed she was the only...”

  Julia broke off as she saw the ghost of grief cross her friend's face. It was a look he had done his best to hide and deny for months, ever since he'd come up with the crazy notion his wife was still alive.

  But he just shrugged, and a grimly determined expression replaced the sorrow as he spoke.

  “Jules, that energy level is one of the reasons I’m doing this. Think about it. There's no way we dialed the beams up enough to cause the sort of readings we recorded...There was something else there, something causing the energy spike.”

  Further conversation was halted by the doors opening at the main laboratory level, and Jason rushed out of the doors towards his old lab. The floor was deserted at this time of night but he looked furtively back and forth.

  Julia ran to keep up. He swiped the card and opened the door into the room, crossing over to the familiar consoles which controlled the central emitter assembly.

  “Jason, you can't do this!” Jules shouted, glancing at the fire alarm panel on the wall to her left. If she could reach it, the emergency cut outs would shut the whole lab level down. “I won't let you end your career like this.” She began walk towards it.

  Jason drew the gun and pulled the trigger. For a second Jules thought he’d shot her, but when she opened her eyes there was a sparking hole in the wall where the panel had been. He turned the muzzle in her direction.

  “I won't let you stop me!” he screamed. “I know she's alive, Jules. She has to be! They have to be.”

  Her terror subsided as she watched anguish replace the madness and tears form in his eyes. Not many people knew Alice was two months pregnant when the accident happened. Jason told her on the flight back from the service, but she already knew. Alice confided in her only a few minutes before her disappearance inside the ball of energy which appeared. This didn't matter now, however, as she knew she was the only one who could stop this insanity.

  It was pure luck she was been driving out through the security gates as Jason ploughed through them. She'd turned straight around and ran after him, catching him just before the elevator doors closed.

  “How could they be, Jason?” she asked, softly. “It's been two years. Two years of nothing.”

  She saw the sentence cut into his hope. It was true, however. All his attempts to gather evidence to corroborate his belief that his wife hadn't been vaporised resulted in nothing.

  Unfortunately, the guilt driving Jason outstripped the logic everyone else knew to be true.

  “I needed more power, Jules!” he shouted. “They never let me have a full power test since that day.”

  “Jesus, Jason, do you blame them?” she asked. “What happened scared the shit out of them. Fuck, it scared the shit out of me!”

  She knew it was useless as she watched Jason's calm expression turn angry.

  “I thought you at least might have understood, Julia.”

  She flinched as he used her full name for the first time in years. He knew, ever since they'd met she vastly preferred Jules to the name her parents called her.

  “You knew her,” he continued. “Alice was your friend. You should be doing anything you can to bring her back.”

  Julia's face reddened. “Damn you, Jason!” she hissed. “I miss her just as much as you do. But there's nothing to bring back! Can't you see that? She's gone. Accept it before you screw any more lives up.”

  It was a low blow, Julia knew, but she saw it hit home and was glad of the pause it produced. If only she could delay him a few more minutes. Maybe security might be able to reach them.

  She regrette
d the words as she saw the pain on his face. Jason knew exactly what Julia meant when she accused him of screwing up lives. He’d abandoned his daughter Katheryne to this crazy idea. They hadn’t spoken more than twice since her mother disappeared.

  She saw the moment of indecision pass, however, as Jason sat down at the console and began typing. He typed-one handed, keeping the gun pointed at Jules.

  “Come on, come on. Load up, you piece of shit!” He banged the console in frustration. He couldn’t keep an eye on her, and operate the complex controls at the same time.

  He waved the gun to a chair opposite him. “Sit down, Jules. And keep your hands to yourself. I don’t want to have to hurt you too.”

  This sentence and his possession of the keycard in his hand caused a cold pit to form in Jules’s stomach as she watched Jason’s hands fly across the keyboard. It was a master bypass key, issued to only ten or so people on the entire staff. Sure, most of them were Jason’s friends, but she didn’t think any of them would be stupid enough to willingly hand it over.

  He finished the first sequence, and the control board lit up with alarms as he bypassed the lockouts with the key card.

  And if they hadn’t handed it over, then just how desperate was he? She wondered, Desperate enough to harm a friend?

  “Where did you get the card, Jason?”

  If I can just stall him, give the guards enough time to get here, she thought.

  He didn’t reply. He simply rushed recklessly through the startup process, totally oblivious to her and the alarms.

  “Who did you hurt to get it? Lars? Piotre? Brigitte?” she persisted. The last name caused Jason to pause and turn.

  “She’s not hurt,” he said as his face reddened. “She’s...I drugged her. She’ll be fine in an hour or so.”

  Julia gaped at her friend. A desperate plan flashed into her head.

  You son of a bitch!” she screamed, “She’s pregnant, you asshole! What if what you gave her hurts the baby?”

  It was a stretch, and Julia felt sickened at her lie, but it was all she could think of to delay him. It succeeded. She relied on his grief at losing his own unborn child breaking through, and for a few brief moments, it did.

  He looked at her with tears in his eyes, and for a second, Julia knew she reached him. The pain on his face was heartbreaking to behold, as if the grief of the last two years was at last being set free.

  Jules started to walk over to her friend, about to take him by the hand and let him cry the tears he so badly needed to, but as she got closer, he was taken over by something which was hidden inside him.

  The eyes looking back at her didn’t belong to Jason McNair anymore. There was no way her friend and mentor could provoke the feeling of terror she felt right at this moment. His face was cold and emotionless, but his eyes burnt like embers of hatred as he gazed contemptuously at her. She didn’t care about the experiment anymore. She just wanted to live long enough to get to the door, and run.

  She didn’t worry about her immediate safety, however, as Jason, if that’s who he truly was, turned to the console, his hands flashing impossibly fast across the keyboard. She watched as he locked out all external access. Elevators, stairwell access doors, all of them were locked as he overrode the protocols.

  Dimly, she realized he shouldn’t be able to do this. Jason was a geek, like her. There was no way he should be able to access the mainframe security systems with the level of expertise he displayed.

  With this task complete, he continued on with his original plan. Jules watched as the power levels on the capacitors feeding the particle beams pegged out at maximum. The control display was a sea of blinking-red alarms, as Jason prepared to carry out what looked to her to be a simultaneous collision of every operational beam.

  All the safeties were locked out, and Julia knew a catastrophic reaction was imminent. Indeed, it appeared this was exactly what Jason wanted to happen, as she watched him fine tune the emitters.

  There was only one way to prevent it, she realized, as her stomach turned to lead. She paused for half a second before a grim determination boiled up inside her, spurring her into action. She ran out of the door to the lab, half-expecting to be shot in the back. The elevators were locked out, she knew but if only…

  “Please open, please, please, please…yes!” She let out a small cry of triumph as her card unlocked the heavy doors of the collider aperture assembly chamber. They slid apart slowly, and she squeezed through.

  The light forming in the centre of the aperture was approaching blinding levels, and she hadn’t thought to grab a pair of protective goggles on the way in. She’d been too busy grabbing the fire extinguisher. She paused to utter a prayer to whatever gods might exist.

  Oh God, Katheryne…I’m so sorry, she thought, as she threw the metal canister with all her strength into the beams.

  She imagined she heard a scream of fury and frustration as the fireball engulfed her and the rest of the entire level, destroying everything in an inferno as hot as the surface of the sun.

  Souls of the Never

  Copyright © 2014 by C J Rutherford. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher or author, except in cases of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and/or reviews.