The Risen Gods Read online

  The

  Risen

  Gods

  Book 2: The Impossible Future

  Frank Kennedy

  Dedicated to all those who don’t like being told the rules.

  c. 2019 by Frank Kennedy

  All rights reserved

  Cover art by Fiona Jayde

  www.fionajaydemedia.com

  To my amazing readers:

  This story picks up right where The Last Everything ends. If you haven’t read TLE yet, I would recommend starting there!

  Every reader is valuable, and I’d love for you to become part of my literary family. Go to www.frankkennedy.org and sign up for my newsletter, which will provide an opportunity to receive free additional material, updates on the next release in The Impossible Future series, as well as other offers connected to my work. Additionally, follow me on Amazon for product updates.

  And now, the story continues …

  PART ONE

  STRANGERS

  I used to play in the river when I was little. I swam naked because nobody was around. I liked peanut butter and jelly. Skippy was my favorite brand.

  I wanted to draw comic books for a living.

  When I was twelve, I started smoking. My best friend and I walked the long way home from school and shared a cigarette at our hideout.

  We decided to become world-class burglars. We weren’t very good at it, but we stole our first car when we were fourteen.

  It was fun, and nobody got hurt.

  We knew our hometown could never contain us. But we weren’t stupid, so we planned to wait until graduation, then we’d be off. Where? Who knew? We just wanted to have fun and ignore as many rules as we could.

  Maybe it was all a dream.

  Maybe I was never that boy.

  Maybe I will stop killing people someday.

  Maybe they will figure out how to kill me before the dark drowns them all.

  1

  The Interdimensional Fold

  J AMIE SHERIDAN FELT HIS HUMANITY peeling away like thin sheets of sun-ravaged skin. He transformed just as the Jewel of Eternity promised, but with the unexpected burdens of memory, love, and compassion. His DNA was realigning. He sensed the coming stages of his next evolution.

  How much time do I have?

  He turned from the Earth he knew and disappeared into an impenetrable fog between universes. Inside the fold, he looked around for Sammie and Michael, who entered before him, but he saw nothing through the gray soup.

  “Seriously. Dude.” Michael Cooper’s voice rose a few feet ahead. “This is not cool.”

  The air was stale and thin.

  “It’s OK,” Samantha Huggins said. “Just keep walking. We’ll be there any second, Coop.”

  “Dude, I’m right behind you,” Jamie said.

  “Sweet,” Michael said. “No. 1 has my back. Seriously, guys, I got doubts about these pistols. I mean, if one of them giant machine-monsters is waiting for us, we gotta bring out the big guns. Reckon that would be you, J. No pressure.”

  “Shock units,” Jamie whispered.

  He destroyed those walking mechanical nightmares ten hours ago, but he replayed the moment on a loop. He could not shake the nagging fear of having made a horrible mistake. Yes, the machines would have reduced Michael and Sammie to ash in seconds. Yes, his friends deserved better, a chance to salvage new lives. But was the cost too high? If Jamie remained dead, he would not have unleashed the Jewel’s power on the Shock Units – and everything else for miles.

  Three lives saved. Countless more annihilated.

  Though he did not remember everything that happened inside the maelstrom after his death, Jamie did hold onto Lydia’s warning. You do not understand what you will become. The dark will drown them.

  He took a deep breath. Patience, he told himself. You can do this. Lydia is gone. You can protect them.

  Jamie recalled the advice of his track coach: Steady, even breaths. Pace yourself. Listen to the rhythm of the feet. They’ll sing to the beat of your heart.

  Ten hours earlier, Jamie shot that man in the face five times.

  He wanted the echoes of Coach Arthur Tynes and the rest of Albion, Alabama to disappear. Anyone there who ever tried to uplift him in the slightest was dead — save for the two he brought on this foolish quest. The pistol he carried in his right hand was as light and natural now as when the Jewel consumed him and defended itself against its enemies.

  At first, he accused the Jewel of being the killer, but Jamie knew the truth: All those bodies belonged to him, and they were not the last.

  Patience. You can do this.

  As the fog lessened, thunder rumbled like fireworks many miles away. Jamie tightened the grip on his weapon, but instinct told him the real threat lie closer, that the other side of the fold would defy his expectations. He saw the silhouettes of his friends and stepped closer.

  “Don’t pull the trigger,” he whispered, “unless you got no choice.”

  “What do you sense?” Sammie asked.

  “Not who ought to be waiting for us.”

  “Shit,” Michael said. “Then who?”

  Before he replied, flashes of red and green broke through the haze, and rigid, metallic outlines took form.

  “We’re here. Just stay close. Stay calm.”

  They stepped into another universe.

  A tight chill enveloped them; stark summer heat became a brisk fall evening. Jamie understood why as he scanned the new world.

  They stood in a cavern, its ceiling twenty feet high and as wide, its walls reinforced by a complex metal lattice gleaming silver as if alive, creating enough artificial light for easy passage. The tunnel extended in this way perhaps fifty feet before reaching a sharp, rightward bend. Far above, the short volleys of thunder continued, and the rubberish floor beneath them vibrated. The sources of the red-green flashes revealed themselves as two fist-sized orbs that met them eye-to-eye. The orbs blanketed them in laser scans, never dipping beneath their necks.

  “Guess they’re checking us out,” Michael said, turning to his friends. “So, I gotta say it, right?” He smiled for the orbs.

  “We come in peace.”

  Jamie wanted to chuckle, but he understood what the thunder far above meant. Peace was not in the equation today.

  “They’re coming,” he said, just before the echoes of rapid footsteps swooped around the bend. “Let me do the talking.”

  Sammie leaned in. “But Jamie, I’m a Chancellor. They’ll identify me from the records. I should be…”

  “I was born on this side, and I’m the one they want.” He offered a brotherly hand on her shoulder. “You once told me Chancellors plan ten steps ahead. So have I. Follow my lead. Aim your guns, both of you. Right between their eyes.”

  “Swell,” Michael said after a deep breath. “So much for peace talks, dude.”

  Jamie moved ahead by three paces and stood firm, his gun resting at his side. Three people rushed up the tunnel, each seven feet tall. Two goateed men in white bodysuits bore silver weapons that seemed to be extensions of their arms. They flanked a woman whose scarlet hair fell beneath her shoulders and whose three-piece suit jacket blended neon tones of olive and magenta.

  The men, with piercing jade eyes, extended their weapons as they entered the cavern’s chamber and planted an aggressive posture. The woman’s jaw dropped as she analyzed the teens.

  “What am I to make of you?” Her voice carried an arrogance Jamie expected, but laced in fear. “And what are you wearing?”

  These weren’t the first questions he expected, but Jamie understood how confused they must be. He assumed jeans with t-shirts wasn’t the fashion on this side of the fold. He opened his mouth, but Michael beat him to it.

  “Summer casual
,” he quipped before turning to Jamie. “Sorry, dude. It felt right.”

  Jamie and Sammie shared a smile. He gestured to their greeters.

  “You know who we are. Your drones scanned us.”

  The woman hesitated. “Perhaps. But what of the African?”

  Michael whistled. “Afri – what in the hell?”

  “My friend,” Jamie said. “Someone you will never touch.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because if you do, I’ll kill every one of you where you stand. I’ll be so quick, you won’t even notice it hurt.”

  The greeters brought condescending smiles. The woman raised both hands, palms open.

  “This is no moment for violence. We are making history today. My name is Dr. Ophelia Tomelin. I am mission leader. My colleagues are occupied elsewhere at the moment. If you will indulge me, I wish to bring them instream to witness this moment.”

  She tapped a node implanted above her right eye, releasing a holographic cube. She ran a finger through the convoluted images and opened a panoply of faces.

  Michael whispered. “Sweet. I have got to have one of those.”

  Maybe you will, Jamie thought. But please, keep your mouth shut, Coop. One wrong word…

  Ophelia Tomelin continued. “We are connected. Everyone, I stand here at the IDF, where our mission appears to have borne fruit.” She turned to Sammie. “You are the daughter of Walter and Grace Pynn of the Americus Presidium?”

  Sammie hesitated. “I … Pynn? Yes. My pseudonym was Huggins.” She angled to Jamie. “They didn’t tell me my true surname until yesterday at the lake house.”

  The woman eyed Jamie.

  “You are James Bouchet, son of Emil and Frances Bouchet?”

  “That’s what I been told,” he replied. “Until about 12 hours ago, I was James Sheridan. But none of that much matters, does it, Ophelia?” He added a touch of snark as he dug in. “Let me tell you what you’re dying to learn. Yes, ma’am, I am the Jewel of Eternity. The next great evolution. Everything you people been working for. Except for one little hiccup. I know everything I’m not supposed to, and I remember everything I ever did before all this came down on me. You will not be the one giving the orders here.”

  Jamie saw the shock creeping in between the cool air of Ophelia’s disdain. She responded in halting words.

  “You have a poor sense of your place … James. Now, where are the others? Your parents? Her parents? All the others?”

  Sammie trying to lock her fingers with his, but Jamie pulled away. Not here. They can’t see our weakness.

  “Dead,” Sammie said with grave finality. “All of them.”

  “No one else is coming through,” Jamie added. “Your observers are gone. And guess what else isn’t coming back?”

  When Ophelia’s features turned pale, Jamie saw he had her.

  “That’s right. I took them both out myself. Not even Shock Units can stop me.”

  Jamie realized he edged into a dangerous bravado, but as he studied Ophelia’s guards, he sensed a turn in their demeanor. To his left, he detected a twitch, as if the man were prepping a new maneuver. Jamie caught a bead of sweat on the man’s brow. Yet Jamie never took his focus off Ophelia, who stepped closer.

  “That cannot be, James,” she said. “We programmed the Jewel for absolute obedience to our commands and those of our agents. Is it possible you never evolved? Did the program fail?”

  “You’re not listening, Ophelia. I am the Jewel, but not the one you expected. You can’t control me. They can’t either,” he said, pointing above, where thunder continued in bursts. “But they want me dead. Ain’t that right?”

  She grimaced. “Ain’t? Strange dialect, James. I believe we …”

  “Your enemies are everywhere. You can’t trust anybody.”

  Jamie sensed the cold, resolute ambition of the guard to his left, and saw the weapon tilt upward ten degrees. The eyes unveiled the man’s treachery. Jamie looked Ophelia square in the eyes:

  “He’s not yours. He can’t believe he got this lucky.”

  The guard moved with swift precision, shifting on an axis in a fraction of a second. He fired multiple bursts, and the cold cavern air thumped as the translucent concussions hit the other, unprepared guard in the head, contorting his skull amid a meager yelp of agony. As the unsuspecting man crumpled, and Ophelia stood statuesque, horrified, Sammie opened her pistol on the assassin. The first two bullets skidded off his mesh body armor, while the third drew blood under the chin.

  The assassin fired into the teens. Before the oval burst of thump energy lay upon Sammie, Michael crashed into her with a hip-tackle. She grunted as the weapon glanced off her shoulder and dropped her pistol. As Michael wrapped himself around her and prepared to take the second blow, a new vibration consumed the chamber.

  The assassin shook, dropping his weapon, his eyes glowing sunset orange as they retreated into his head. He gasped for air as puffs of steam exited every pore. His bodysuit became flimsy and oversized as he shriveled, his skin bursting into flame beneath the surface. The suit caught fire and exploded in a cyclone of fury. Perhaps three seconds after it began, the man and his suit flickered out of existence, a smoldering ash pile the only remains.

  Jamie, on bended knee, turned to his friends. He saw the agony in Samantha’s eyes and the burn on her right shoulder. In Michael, he witnessed the same disbelief as when Jamie brought him back from the near-dead on Lake Vernon. While he expected his friends to understand his action was necessary, that it came from love, he wasn’t sure about the others.

  He thought of Dr. Tomelin and those watching from a safe distance. Now they know. They see me for what I am.

  He rose from bended knee and faced the ash pile. A streak of black lightning scarred the floor from where he laid his hand to where the assassin once stood. He felt neither regret nor remorse.

  No. More. Running.

  Jamie turned to the last greeter. She telegraphed fear and awe.

  “You’re welcome, Ophelia. My name is James Bouchet. Take me to my parents. Now.”

  2

  Mongolian Desolation

  Standard Year (SY) 5355

  Far side of Earth

  V ALENTIN WAS LOSING HIS EDGE. One flicker of hesitation, an extra second’s twitch before tapping another volley of flash pegs – just enough time for the insurgents to cut down one of his best men.

  It was every peacekeeper’s nightmare: To lose a fellow soldier of the Guard because of his own incompetence. To allow even a split-second distraction to interfere with the job at hand.

  Emotions on the battlefield were unacceptable, regardless of the context. The commanders had a word for this weakness, the one no soldier wanted to hear: Regression.

  “Not you, Bouchet,” Valentin told himself for weeks. “Not you.”

  He repeated the mantra after the firefight on Zwahili Kingdom, through to the inquest, and back to Earth. He came too far, overcome too many skeptics, to let them revel in his failure.

  “Show them you are not a cudfrucking washout.”

  His conviction brought him here, to this Mongolian wasteland where he determined to recapture his manhood. He found success here before. Once again, he needed to smell the blood of a successful hunt, to solidify his mettle as a peacekeeper.

  Victory is morality.

  Those words guided him: Even in the face of rising insurgencies, of scandal and civil war among his own kind, of comrades surrendering to nativist ideologies and defecting to the colonies.

  Victory is morality.

  “It is all a peacekeeper ever needs to appreciate,” Valentin told his father upon his fourteenth birthday, announcing his intent to join Forward Operations Special Division. “I will cut them down where they stand. The Collectorate belongs to the Chancellors.”

  “Are you sure?” His father said. “Will stacking their bodies guarantee our future?”

  When Valentin spat on his father, he cut short the celebration of his adulthood. He
turned to the six hundred Chancellor guests that day, asked who among them also believed in his father’s treacherous swill, and stormed out with his comrades. They drank deep into the night, filtered poltash weed into their blood, and watched children tear each other apart at the regional kwin-sho matches. The soldiers were ready for their orders, bound to each other no matter how many light-years might separate them in the coming months.

  Victory is morality.

  They streamed each other from their remote postings, cheered outcomes of successful operations, and worked to manipulate their leave-calendars to reunite for a few days of debauchery on Xavier’s Garden. Most of them made it. Not Valentin.

  After the riot suppression on Zwahili Kingdom, his commanders did not attribute his carelessness to peacekeeper losses and determined him fit to resume combat. Yet Valentin detected a slip in performance – not in tactical efficiency, but where it mattered most – in his heart’s resolve. Regression led to compassion, even empathy, for the indigos. He refused to travel that road.

  He begged his superiors for leave to engage in Dacha. Officially, they denied him since the Dacha program existed off-book. However, they granted enough shore leave for travel to Earth.

  Valentin needed this, as he did his Dacha training runs two years ago. He wanted to enjoy the pride of a successful kill, a confirmation of his inherent battlefield cruelty. He needed to bury a knife in the gut of his quarry, twisting it until his victim stared forever into nothing.

  Now, two weeks after the riots on Zwahili Kingdom, Valentin ran barefoot across a jagged, rocky plateau near an escarpment in the Mongolian Desolation, with a twelve-inch, serrated Manville knife in his left hand, prepared to strike. The partial moon cast a pale mist over the copper-tinged landscape, enough light to help Valentin track – and sometimes spot – the quarry who had thirty minutes head-start.

  “I will have you,” Valentin whispered when he found the footprints of his target, a man set loose into the night with no weapon, no clothes, no discernible hope beyond his own wits.