Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6) Read online

  Heavy, insistent banging erupted suddenly at the door, followed by some very high-pitched girlish screams broke the moment, instantly reminding Indra of something. “How did you even get past Gargand?”

  “The soldier?” Fenris couldn’t believe his ears.

  “Ex-soldier.” Indra narrowed her eyes into dagger points. Gargand’s insistence he held no interest in returning to the fold was the only reason she’d allowed him to stay on staff.

  That, and the relative difficulty she would've had in finding someone to replace him.

  “Forgetting for the moment that I am who I am, Indra,” Fenris brushed imaginary dust from an epaulet, “and can go wherever I want whenever I want, there is no such thing as an ex-God soldier. If you are a soldier, if you have the implants, you have Harmony within you.”

  Indra looked around quizzically, as if she were trying to find an answer amongst all the things she’d collected down through the years. “Then why leave him here, dealing with screaming teenagers and obsessively weird adult men? Why leave him exposed to …”

  “To something like you?” Fenris felt his brothers’ mental hiss of dismay at the insult, but he merely grinned at them through Harmony: the unkind words scored no hits on the thing pretending to be Indra. Like the BCU monstrosities after them, these true shapeshifters had had all sense of shame and propriety bred out of them. “Believe it or not, there are instances where discretion pays better dividends. Consider men like Gargand to be … undercover operatives.”

  Spoken aloud, it made sense.

  Not everyone was appreciative of the God soldier Army's transformation and had -those who could it afford it, at any rate- stepped up security to the point where yes, even Goddies would have difficulty making headway.

  And honestly, it wasn't like criminal organizations across the system had suddenly closed up shop or whatever because of the war, making the demand for 'ex-Goddies' at an all-time high. Bad guys needed far better protection than they ever had; Trinity soldiers made no discrimination between military targets and ‘criminal dens’.

  Indra knew through Gargand that many of his brothers and sisters had hurried back home within hours of the Harmony Soldiers descending to the earth, no doubt spilling all the seedy secrets they’d learned from their alleged masters, making those who'd stayed behind all the more trustworthy.

  All the more hidden.

  “Is he how you found me?” It was difficult to keep the rage from her voice.

  “No. Well.” Fenris dipped his head in recognition of a half-lie. “Not at first. One of my brothers noticed the extreme shift in personalities some fifty years ago and followed your career with the kind of obsession that would have me concerned for his sanity were he not a Harmony soldier. Either you were a serial murderer hiding in plain sight or you were something quite special. It wasn’t until Gargand was pressured that he revealed everything.”

  “I thought you could read the minds of every single God soldier under your command, without their permission.”

  “If that were the case, my dear creature, the face of this system would be shaped much differently.” It was one of the distinct flaws of how their Harmony had come to be; the original Harmony, the one belonging to Kith Antal, did allow for that kind of neural intrusion, but theirs, with all those cybernetic implants … made it … difficult without permission.

  Fenris cleared his throat. “But we are not here to discuss me and mine, but rather, you, and what you can do for me. For us. For the Latelian war effort.”

  “I was never cleared for field combat.” Indra answered instantly and without prevarication. Some of the others, the bulls, they’d been built for that kind of in-your-face action, but not her. She was tough, resilient, difficult to kill, but in an actual combat setting she’d be torn apart within seconds. Especially these days. “I couldn’t help you with the Trinity forces.”

  “I would never risk something as precious and unique as you on a mission of such an unsubtle nature, my dear." Fenris showed his teeth in the closest approximation of a smile as he could muster. He knew it made him look as though he were thinking of ripping out throats, but there was nothing to do about it now. “No. Never.”

  Indra’s mind raced with the skills that’d been burned into her mind, into her flesh. She was best at infiltration, dissemination, assassination. Thanks to Chairwoman Doans deciding that their lack of implant-enhanced loyalty to the Chair wasn’t strong enough and that they were ‘going to go another way’, none of them had ever made it out into the ‘real world’, but the programming was strong, the programming was sound.

  She’d been Indra Sahari for fifty years, and no one had blinked an eye, opened a mouth to wonder at the significant changes in personality or attitude. Anyone who might’ve had been encouraged to find themselves a new life at the very beginning of her assumption of the role.

  And since then, adopting a strict regime of unstoppable aloofness combined with a kind of beautiful bitchiness had all but shattered Sahari's old life like a mirror thrown to the ground.

  All anyone from the past saw were the broken shards, and a woman transformed by wealth and fame.

  It was a suitable arrangement.

  “Then what?” She asked into the silence. Refusing to work with -most probably for- Fenris wasn't an option, that much Indra knew without asking.

  Men like Fenris didn't ask.

  “Tell me, Indra. How does it work, with memory? How did you hide for so long as Indra with nobody being the wiser? Documents and information are –justifiably so- sparse and disconnected. It would be many decades before Doans would see the wisdom in creating horrors like yourself, but in the beginning, she was … disturbed. We know only what you can do, not how.” In the back of his mind, Lokken and Nalanata were paying close, strict attention. Solgun and Stride had wandered off to take care of military matters.

  “Brain matter, for the most part.” Indra squinted when Fenris didn’t even budge at the grim admission. He merely looked like a pleased carrion eater. “Specially engineered organs decrypt the … electrical and organic structures of short term memory. Some long-term, deeply held memories, like musical talent or other abilities learned over long periods of time, are also acquirable through … long-chain protein absorption. These are then laid into my brain and become … useable. After that? People live their lives through their prote, sa. It just takes time to fill in all those little gaps that get missed. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to ignore lapses in memory. All you need to is claim you're tired, or confused, or forgetful.”

  “Fascinating.” Fenris applauded the mad genius of Hollyoak’s predecessor. While not as truly deranged as the freak, he’d possessed his own dark, labyrinthine dreams. “I think you’ll do just fine, Indra Sahari.”

  “I have a life here, I’ve done something no one else has ever done! I am the most recognizable face in the solar system!” Indra didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to be anything other than the person she was right now, and she knew deep in her bones that whatever it was Fenris wanted, it’d either end with her death or her wishing with every fiber of her chameleonic being that she had died.

  She moved to run, to flee, but it was already too late. Fenris had his implacable grip around her throat. She hadn't even seen him move. Hadn’t even sensed the thought in him. Fenris' grip was cruelly intimate, impressively masculine.

  “If you like, we can dance for a time. You and I, in a lover's embrace, and when I least expect it, you can try to kill me.” Fenris’ eyes seemed to spin in their sockets, black whirlpools filled with blacker stars. “But you are coming with me, and you will do as you’re told. If you perform well, you might be permitted to return to this hollow mockery of a thing you call ‘your life’. Understand? You believe this," the Horseman pointed at the garish lifestyle dripping from the walls in poster form with disdain, "was the role you were built for? I tell you now, what comes next will test your every skill, demand the highest levels of performance. It will
be wonderful.”

  Indra Sahari did her best to nod, but the Horseman kept choking and choking, squeezing her fluid neck tighter and tighter until she choked and gasped into unconsciousness.

  Final Destination? How About We Go More Than Half a Mile Before Dying

  Being prepared for a future event is a lot like watching a horror movie and you're expecting a jump scare. You sit there, telling yourself that yes, the mirror shot is going to have a zombie or vampire or what-the-fuck-ever and that you aren't going to be scared.

  And then the jump scare comes, and you scream like a little bitch.

  Sitting in the back seat, ready to have his head bounced against the 'shatterproof' glass was like that. He knew it was coming because he'd lived through it once before, and if the Emperor was going to follow the rules, that was what happened in the first few minutes on his first day in Groundhog Day Planet.

  That being said …

  The future rolled out just as before, only … well. The cabbie swore musically in his native tongue, complete with a raft of gestures no one outside his village would ever understand and he undertook measures to prevent high-speed shenanigans from slowing his journey.

  The ‘enemy’ car darted ahead in an attempt to outpace the ravening cab driver, blasting both rider and passenger with a sharp and furious toot from their horn as they whipped by.

  The cabbie -surely believing by this point he was trying out for Mad Max V: Max's Big Day Out- stamped so angrily on the gas pedal that even as his cab roared like a jungle cat, the pedal itself cracked.

  The driver of the other car, either pathologically incapable of realizing how dangerous things had become or just plain ignorant, resumed his or her attempt to sail into their lane as if nothing was going to happen, a blind captain piloting a five thousand pound solid steel American-made Titanic on wheels.

  The cabbie, magically becoming aware that everyone was going to die, and very soon, -just as Garth himself was about to open his mouth to start screaming- yanked hard on the wheel, finally bringing into existence the moment of the future that Garth had been waiting for: that ever-so-gentle love tap on the window that put him into unconsciousness.

  There he'd stay until he arrived on campus, whereupon he'd meet one of his best friends, the great Drake Bishop …

  Garth bounced his head off the shatterproof glass hard enough to make him reminisce for that time he'd been punched right in the face by Sa Gurant, and from the slow-motion chaos all around him -a perk of high-level combat training- it looked as though the one bounce wasn't gonna be all that happened in the cab.

  Unawares of what was going on, the cabbie still fought for road supremacy with the other driver; a quick spin of the wheel in an attempt to nudge the combatant’s car out of the way was met with a savage stamp on the brakes, which in turn caused …

  Another brutal swing of the wheel, driving Garth -who's bell was thoroughly rung- through the shatterproof glass.

  Slivers and shards of razor sharp glass turned the entire left side of his head into bloody hamburger.

  Groggy, only dimly aware of what was happening, there was only enough time and consciousness to watch droplets of blood get suctioned towards the hole his head had carved in the resilient glass, each carmine bead forming a small river to freedom on the other side of the hole. Focus descended for a moment, just long enough to show Garth something … worrisome.

  The events of the moment had them in the opposite lane, hurtling towards oncoming traffic.

  "Fuck my life." Garth whispered through pain-deadened lips. "This is some bullshit future stuff right here. How am I suddenly doing worse than last time?"

  Bellowing incoherently now, the cabbie yanked on the wheel a third and final time, this time to avoid being turned into a steel pancake by a marauding 18-wheeler hauling a full load of pre-poured concrete dividers.

  The driver's reflexes weren't fast enough to get them off onto a shoulder, or out of the way; the front end of the towering rig clipped the back end of the cab and sent it spinning around in a blur of uncontrolled 360 degree circles, flinging glass, metal and rubber through the air.

  “Come the fuck on!” The divinely unimpressed Kin'kithal thundered groggily as he tried to keep all his limbs and extremities safe while the cab was turned into scrap metal around him.

  The cab driver -who had failed his audition for Mad Max 5- was probably quite fantastically dead, or would want to be, what with the steering wheel and driving column slammed into his chest deep enough to qualify as a cybernetic implant.

  Centrifugal force wanted Garth's arms and legs bouncing around the backseat of the cab, forcing him to hurriedly -not worrisomely- work himself into a position that didn't equal 'stupid fucking bullshit where a stupid fucking arm or leg doesn't wind up outside the goddamn fucking window where it'll then be fucking well pulled off by a passing motorist'.

  Success came when he finally managed to get himself into a ball-like position on the floor of the cab, but at the expense of cracking his arm against the front side passenger seat’s headrest so painfully that as he struck the other door hard enough to bang it open –revealing a scene right out Final Destination- he knew it was broken in four places.

  Garth flopped back onto the seat, breathing raggedly, nursing his broken arm carefully, trying to probe around the gash in his forehead, feeling tiny slivers of glass embedded pretty decently into his skull and hissing at the fine, razor sharp pain as he accidentally cut a finger open.

  Somewhere a million miles away, the cabbie was somehow still alive, still hollering in a combination of fear and almighty vexation, alternately doing so into his radio and at basically everyone around him but at no point did he actually, physically, try to correct that broken gas pedal.

  Garth opened his mouth to suggest that perhaps since they’d survived round one of Murder Road, The Crushening, slowing the car down by, oh, say, yanking on the motherfucking E-brake might possibly be the best idea since inventing Internet porn, but before he could even form the first word, the door –banging and slamming noisily a few inches from where he lay- was torn off the hinges a scant second later.

  The driver, still functioning in the world of miracles, reacted. At last, at long last, he did as Garth had been trying to suggest since the whole nightmare had begun.

  The driver's dying act was to pull on the E-brake with the last, failing tendrils of strength burning through his muscles.

  The Engineer of Reality 2.0 had zero time to react. One minute he was in the back seat of a completely mangled San Franciscan cab on his way to meet with destiny, the next, he was tumbling through the air, a Garth 'Nickels' N'Chalez-shaped lump of profusely bleeding debris.

  There were a few, terrible seconds where Garth was introduced to the fine roadwork of The City by the Bay; each bounce and skip across the black tarmac left behind bits and pieces of our hero, but not without leaving pebbles, grit, random chunks of glass and who-knew-what-the-fuck-else in Garth's arms, legs, head, and face.

  Eventually, he came to a bloody mess, fifteen feet away, hilariously propped against the side of a car driven by an owner who actually understood what to do in the case of a pretty fucking serious accident.

  Garth, resting against the driver’s side door of a dinged-up Ford Focus, watched the fireball blossom towards the heavens. He was pretty banged up, but he was still alive, and that was saying something.

  Around a mouthful of broken teeth, he croaked, “What in the fuck is happening here? This isn’t… isn’t … like I remember at all…”

  Just then, an ambulance, lurking around the corner at the local Slappy Burger not more than fifty feet away, came barreling onto the scene, slamming into the Ford Focus at the local equivalent of 'hey, are you a dumbshit or what, this is the scene of an horrific accident, maybe ten klicks under the speed limit might be good'.

  Garth didn't stand a chance. Had never stood a chance. The Focus and the ambulance fused into an unholy merger of metal and glass intent on turning a lowly h
ero into pâté.

  A great and terrible sensation of falling assailed Garth …

  ***

  Desultory clapping echoed hollowly through a large, mostly empty room, filling his senses with the kind of mockery that generally made the recipient feel like the biggest tool in the known Universe.

  Wait a minute!

  He was alive?

  He was alive!

  Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez, recent memories still swarming with images and sensations of perhaps the most violent agony he’d ever felt –mostly because he’d actually felt every single bit of it, which implied … implied things he didn’t want to think about right then- tried to get up and walk around, to do anything to see if he was actually all right or if this was some kind of grim, post-death interlude before shuffling off his mortal coil forever.

  Except he couldn’t. As his senses were brought back into full swing, he saw that he'd been expertly bound to a heavy chair that was itself firmly welded to the floor.

  “What the …” Garth closed his eyes, rolled them tightly around in their sockets. Weird colors popped and flashed for a second.

  The clapping continued, raw and unkind.

  Okay. He’d put his hand against the Emperor’s Purple Dome. He snickered at the obscene image that popped up, but said nothing, focusing on the chain of events after that; hand on the resilient yet somehow weirdly thin energy bubble, whereupon he’d awoken in a cab, the cab that was supposed to’ve taken him to Drake and Sparks.

  “Obviously,” Garth said woozily, calmly testing the strength of his bindings and finding them … resistant, “that isn’t what happened.”

  A strong, bold voice filled the empty hall. “How long was that? Five minutes, would you say? Let’s make it six for good measure. The mighty Garth N’Chalez, Kin’kithal warrior and would-be destroyer of the Unreal Universe and would-be Father of a new one lasted six whole minutes in the world he left behind.”

  Garth said nothing, choosing instead to push up from the soles of his feet, intent on ripping the chair loose.