The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2

by Michael Evans

  Now, there’s only one left.

  “Charles!” I snarl. He is five feet away from the ledge, scurrying back and forth between jumping off and hiding away in the cockpit. “Jump!”

  He doesn’t seem to be compelled to action by my words.

  “You are going to die if you don’t move. You need to live! You need to go!” The head of the figure that is Charles turns towards me. He grumbles something that is inaudible due to the cloth coating his face.

  He moves a bit closer to the edge but still hesitates.

  I don’t let him wait to decide any longer.

  Something dark inside me snaps.

  My goal isn’t to save his life anymore. I want to end it.

  In two long, powerful strides, I find myself within arm’s length of him. I take the perfect opportunity with him being defenseless and no one else here to stop me to wrap my hand around his neck.

  “You fucking coward.” I let the rage inside me explode on him. For a brief second I even forget about saving my own life. My only goal is to end his. “I’m going to make sure you feel the pain of everyone you killed and ten times more.”

  In an eruption of force, I shove his body up against the window of the helicopter. The sounds of the aircrafts outside are now louder than ever. I can hear multiple bombs and bullets being shot into the night sky, likely trying to kill the people who have already jumped out of this aircraft.

  Every moment my hands are around his neck, strangling the life out of him, I know I am one second closer to dying myself.

  But I don’t care.

  Now all I can think about is Riva. The blood. The stab wounds. His smile.

  Only the Chimera Cube is between us, the dense object digging into both our stomachs. I know exactly what I need to use it for. I remove one hand from his neck and say a simple command to the cube.

  “Machete.”

  I laugh as the dark leather handle and long, sharp blade appears right in front of me. I snatch the object from the air, my right arm still grasped around his neck that is slowly losing strength.

  Then he pushes back.

  His words are inaudible, but the anger that is released with the force of his abdominals and legs pushing upward is enough to send shockwaves through my body. He grabs my wrist that holds the knife and uses his height advantage to overpower me and knock me down onto the ground.

  Now he’s the one with the upper hand.

  All he has to do is reach into my backpack and take the Chimera Cube and he can do whatever he wants to me. All he has to do is take the knife right from my hands and slice me apart just like he did to Riva.

  But I am holding on tight. Every muscle fiber in my hand and body is strained to their absolute max. The same desperation for survival that I had a few minutes ago is now finally roaring alive in him.

  This is nothing short of two animals fighting.

  But I don’t care about my own survival. All I want is to see him dead.

  “I hate you.” I spit into his face as I finally tug my wrist away from his grip. “You deserve to die.”

  He claws at me, his scratch not doing much to affect me due to my bullet-proof armor, but the blade of this knife won’t do anything to him if I don’t manage to tear the armor right off him.

  Good thing I know just how to do it.

  I position my body weight so that with one violent thrust of my hips I can take advantage back in this fight. We roll over again, our bodies inches from falling down the hole and into the night sky, but now I am on top of him.

  I shove the knife as far as I can into my mouth. Due to the lack of friction between the mesh-like fabric and knife, I have to clamp down on the blade with astounding force to keep it steady in my mouth. Then with my body working to pin down his arms and one hand on his neck, I use my other hand to unzip the bullet-proof armor coating his face.

  Now he is exposed.

  “You fucked up when you decided you wanted to become friends with me.” I laugh, trying to mimic his cold, short chuckle.

  I want him to die with my laugh playing over and over again in his brain for eternity.

  Then I do the only logical thing left: I stab him directly in his forehead. The blade of the machete cuts through his skull surprisingly easy. The sound of his skull being pierced by the blade and his flesh being torn into dozens of pieces is one that will haunt me forever.

  After that one stab in his forehead, he still has one last surge of life in him where I have to press my body against his harder than I ever have before to keep him from pushing me off.

  But the anger keeps me going.

  The vision in my mind and the taste of Riva’s lips as I tried to breathe life back into her are the only things keeping me going.

  I stab him again. This time in the same part of his skull, but I make sure to twist the blade once it digs into his brain, likely severing hundreds of millions of connections between neurons inside his brain.

  The life seems to flee from him now.

  But something about this all doesn’t seem enough.

  After all the times he tortured me, after all the lives he has taken away from the Earth, he still needs more pain.

  The darkest parts of my being have now taken over. I don’t care about doing the right thing anymore. All I want is to cause him pain beyond anyone’s imagination.

  I undo the zipper all the way down to his waist and rip off both the wingsuit and bullet-proof armor.

  I realize now that the council and dozens of other members of the Syndicate are likely watching this. They know that I have killed their guy.

  And they will make me pay.

  But first I want to carve enough marks with my machete into his body to tally for each life he has taken from this Earth. Something tells me if I did that, there would be no flesh left in his body to tear apart, so instead I pretend as if I’m in a messed-up video game.

  I dig my blade once into his neck, then a second time and then a third time. Then I move down to his chest and his stomach, where I dig abrasions into his ribs, his heart, his lungs, and every other organ I can find. I rip open his insides. Blood covers my bullet-proof suit as chunks of flesh stick to the blade of the machete. A thick stream of blood drips out of his body and down the helicopter to fall to the ground in a stream of red rain.

  From behind my bullet-proof suit, I am a bit desensitized to it all. I can’t fully see the pure white color to his bones or the deep colors in his flesh. I’m not able to feel his body as the life flees from him and the blood pours out of him.

  All I know is that every time I dig my blade into him, I feel a tiny bit better. Every time I see another piece of his body torn apart, his shirt ripped to shreds by my blade, I feel a little bit more powerful.

  But then it all comes to an end.

  A massive projectile connects with the exterior of the helicopter. On impact, the aircraft is thrown so much that I am unable to fight the force.

  I am knocked into the gaping hole at the center of the aircraft along with Charles’s dead body. Bits of metal collide with the exterior of my suit as the pull of gravity overtakes me. I instinctively work to zip up the Chimera Cube safely in the backpack as I outstretch my legs, hoping to catch as much of a ride as possible through the night sky.

  I close my eyes, not knowing whether in the brief second that I fall through the helicopter and down the first few feet below it I will live or explode in a fireball along with the massive hunk of metal above me.

  Luckily, the singular projectile wasn’t enough to destroy the helicopter. But it will explode soon enough.

  All that will be left is the flesh from Charles’s body and his dry, stale blood. I killed that man.

  And now that I am flying down to the earth below, I don’t feel good about it. My arms and legs are outstretched, the surface area of my body easily the greatest it has ever been, while the high that is traveling to my mind is one that is only rivaled by the terror flowing through me.

  It feels amazing being
free and knowing that with every second I survive in this war zone, I am one second farther from the Chinese military aircraft above me. But below I can see the dark sea of smoke enveloping the ground. Military drones have released tons of gas that make it nearly impossible to see where I am gliding to.

  I only see one thing.

  Charles’s limp body falling into the thickest parts of the smoke as gravity completely overtakes him. Unlike me, his wingsuit isn’t doing any help at easing the pressure that gravity has on his fall. Unlike me, he doesn’t have a life to live anymore.

  I killed him.

  And although revenge felt really good when I first dug my blade into him, now as I hold the machete in my outstretched arm, all I feel is regret. I first thought it was the only rational thing to do, but at the back of my mind I wonder if he really meant it when he said he wanted to be friends.

  I wonder if I should have let him live.

  A round of explosions reverberate through the air around me. I can feel shards from the aircraft pelting against me as the helicopter explodes into a massive ball of fire that will only add more smoke to the city.

  I can barely even see a few feet below me as I glide through the air, the force of gravity slowly pulling me downward as the wings carry me further and further away from the hellish scene above. I have no idea where I am about to land. I have no idea how I am going to make it out of this alive. But there’s nothing I can do but enjoy the flight for now and try and suppress the mountains of terror overwhelming my nerves by rejoicing in the high of the endorphins.

  It doesn’t work.

  The feeling of life escaping from Charles’s body won’t leave me. I can’t ever reverse that. I can’t reverse any of the horrible things that I thought I’d be getting retribution for. No matter what I do, I can’t bring back the dead. No matter what I do, that pain won’t go away.

  All I did was kill a man.

  And I have nothing but a bloody machete to show for it.

  Chapter 29

  President Li is standing right in front of me.

  Or more accurately, one of what may be thousands of humanoid versions of him is standing only feet away from me. His body is surrounded in a pit of smoke, but even through my bullet-proof suit I can make out the distinctive features of his short, yet muscular body.

  He smiles as I stand only a few feet away from him, his body so close that I feel like I could reach out and touch it, yet there is a certain glow to his figure that makes everything feel like it is an odd hallucination.

  I landed on a rooftop roughly half a mile from the explosion site of the helicopter. When the aircraft landed on the capitol building, a massive explosion ensued that likely woke everyone up in downtown Beijing. Along with the heavy smoke, a dark black cloud now fills the sky from the fire of the engine exploding.

  For almost a minute I rocketed through the sky, getting to live out a fantasy that everyone has had of being a bird. I will tell you when flying through a storm of smoke with multiple bullets shot at you, and all the meanwhile hoping that a laser beam doesn’t slice through my protective coating and kill me, being a bird is no fun.

  That’s why when I noticed the roof of a mid-rise apartment building right within the trajectory of my flight path, I prepared myself for as smooth of a landing as possible. Despite the bones in my feet likely being severely bruised, I made it.

  Now that I have landed, I feel dead again.

  “I was waiting for you.” President Li smiles. His familiar yet chilling voice makes my insides churn. He is still speaking into a translator, his words transmitting from the machine in a monotone voice. “I knew where you were all along. I knew you would come back to find me, and now you can’t escape.”

  “I’ll make you regret this.” I stand in front of him with my bloody machete held up in front of my face. I will slash his suit and obnoxious red bow tie to shreds and make his head into a trophy.

  This man deserves it.

  “Go ahead.” He laughs. He even takes the time to brush his hair perfectly to the side of his head. This man must want to die in style.

  I don’t hesitate.

  I lunge forward and drive my knife into his neck. Li doesn’t even fight back. His body simply tears apart. The knife easily cuts through his humanoid skin, and once it gets to the interior of his neck, the machete cuts through the dozens of wires that run to his head.

  The machine falls to the ground, blood that I can’t tell if it’s human or fake squirting out of his neck as he lifelessly collapses to the ground. One last laugh escapes from his throat before Li dies.

  But I know there are more of him.

  Li is not a human anymore. He is an artificial intelligence network. Who knows how many thousands of them they created. He may even be able to control tens of thousands of himself at the same time, each one of his humanoid beings acting as a node to power one massive all-knowing hive mind.

  Another identical version of Li claws its way onto the roof from a ladder that leads to a lower level on the roof. Smoke surrounds the figure as it stands up on the roof, the dark black color to its eyes matching that of the pavement.

  I scan my surroundings, looking around in a panic to make sure that these humanoid versions of Li aren’t just a distraction to allow the Chinese military to creep up on me and kill me.

  The night sky around me is full of smoke, but eerily absent of the presence of any military aircraft or drones.

  “There are dozens of me on every roof in this city.” Li sneers and steps closer to me.

  “No matter what you do, you will never be able to destroy me.” He holds up a finger at me, as if tempting me to slice him into pieces. “You won’t be able to stop me from finally delivering the destruction to China that these people deserve.”

  “You have no idea what I’m capable of.” I shift the backpack to hang off my back instead of being strapped to the front of my body. I step forward, preparing to drive the edge of the machete right into his heart. “I’ll kill every last one of you until there are more of you dead than people in this country.”

  I stab the machete into him. The adrenaline that shoots through me when the knife digs into him is one of the most satisfying feelings I have ever experienced. To watch the life fade from his eyes and see the blood pour out of his chest is amazing. His flesh has a feel that is distinctly not human, but also doesn’t feel like a machine either.

  But when he hits the ground, his body appears dead all the same as anyone. Except there are thousands more of him.

  I exhale, breathing in the crisp summer air that reminds me in a way of the pleasant temperatures that are always abundant in San Diego. If only I could be there on a sunny beach with Riva in my arms.

  “You need to give up this fight.” The voice of Li echoes through the night. Right as the second body of Li falls on top of the first, the blood from both forming a river that trickles off the edge of the roof, another humanoid of Li appears. It takes one last step off the ladder and onto the roof. It has a terrible glow to its skin, one that looks as if it is somehow absorbing the light from the surrounding skyscrapers and using it as a source of power.

  With the smoke still causing my lungs to feel heavy and vision to be extremely limited, the towering skyscrapers are barely visible around us. All I can see is the battlefield in front of me.

  All I can think about is ending Li for good.

  “I’ll never give up.” I clench my fist around the grip of the machete, stepping on top of the small pile of humanoid bodies.

  “You should. Your friends are already safe down on the ground.” He smiles as his eyes wander to the streets down below. “You can go and join them. All you have to do is give me the bag on your back. All you have to do is hand me the one technology you vowed to keep secret. I’ll make sure to keep it safe for you. I’ll make sure no one in the world ever finds out that I have it. And then you will be saved.”

  “If you think I’d ever do that, then you are delusional.” I hold the mach
ete in front of me, doing my best to ignore the disgusting sight of blood and flesh dripping off it. “You will have to pry that thing from my dead body.”

  “You will have to watch this country fall, then.” Li smiles. He is still speaking Mandarin into a translator, his voice coming out in English just as monotone as usual. “You will have to watch hundreds of millions of people die, knowing that if you surrendered your technology, there could have been another way.”

  “What are you talking about?” I step closer to him. I am within striking distance of him but I am keeping my knife at my side. I want to listen.

  “In the East China Sea, I have a little research station. One that is designed to cause a series of massive earthquakes along the Eastern Seaboard of China. It would cause all the energy in every fault line in this country to be released, create massive tidal waves, and displace hundreds of millions of people.” When he says that sentence, his eyes light up like a child talking about their excitement for a new toy. “In the aftermath of the disaster, there won’t be any help coming. I will let them all die. I will let them all fend for themselves, like they deserved to do from the beginning. But if I had your technology, there could be a different way. A better away to go about it. Something that is more efficient. Something that wouldn’t have lasting effects on the global economy and likely disrupt the global political order for good.”

  “That’s impossible.” I step closer to him, my knife grazing against his cheek. He doesn’t move, his stare unbroken on me, and his body still loose as if he is talking to his best friend.

  “Anything in this world is possible if someone is willing to sacrifice.” He reaches out and places a cold hand on my shoulder. I can feel the iciness to his skin even from beneath my bullet-proof suit.

  “Well, I’ll sacrifice everything before I give a single thing to you.” I grit my teeth together, and as I jerk my body away from his hand, I slice my machete into his stomach. He moves his hands to his waist. He laughs instead of groaning in pain, but still steps back as if in agony from me stabbing him.