The Immortal Harvest (20 page)

She swallowed hard and tried to summon her anger to confront the demon.

“Ok buster, who the fuck are ya? And what have ya done with me friend and….ouch! Stop twisting me arm ya son of a bitch, you’re hurting me,” she almost shouted through the pain.

Her breathing became rapid as she struggled to pull away from the monster.

“For fucks sake, just tell me what ya want!”

She almost fell to her knees when her captor raised himself from the bed and started steering her across the room to one of her dining chairs.

She collapsed onto the chair and she gasped suddenly as he released her arm and stood behind her.

She felt the coldness of a blade pressed hard into her throat. She froze as she realised that he could kill her instantly if she tried to struggle.

She decided to try a different approach.

“Ok now, why don’t we just be friends? I could make ya feel really good. Why don’t ya just relax and let Crystal do what she does best ok sweetie?

“Ya don’t want to hurt me do ya? I’ll do whatever ya want. I’ll even give it to ya on the house, ok?” She said in her most seductive voice.

She felt his hot breath on her ear as he bent down close and her blood ran cold as he whispered.

“I don’t want to fuck you; I just want to know where the girl and her kid are. Tell me now or I will slice you from ear to ear.”

Crystal started to panic. She understood that this could be her last moments.

Oh my God how I need a hit
, she thought as she scratched at her arms. They felt like there were millions of tiny worms crawling under her skin.

Her breathing became erratic as she struggled to come up with anything that she could tell this maniac.

She wanted to scream, I DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE IS!!

She began to sob hysterically.

“Please don’t hurt me mista!” She managed to blubber meekly through her sobs.

“Now listen, just answer the fucking question bitch,” her attacker said malevolently as he pressed the blade harder into her neck causing small blood droplets to form around the edges of the blade.

Crystal could feel the warmth of urine running down her leg.

She closed her eyes tightly and tried to think of anything that she could tell this maniac. Suddenly she remembered the mysterious disappearances of her friends.

“Mm. mista,.. maybe they’ve been taken.” she managed to blurt out. She felt the blade ease off a little and then pressed harder again.

“Taken where?” The attacker said, emphasising the question with a quick jolt of the blade.

Crystal felt the jolt and clenched her teeth.

“I..I don’t know where. Nobody knows. They just disappear,” Crystal said the last part quietly.

She felt crestfallen; she knew that she did not have the right answer and that her life was now over.

She prepared herself for the inevitable pain of the blade slicing open her throat. She thought of her Mother and a feeling of calm descended over her as she realised that she would soon be seeing her. She closed her eyes and held her breath.

The extreme violence of the blow to the back of her head was unexpected. The inevitable descent into blackness was also unexpected.

*     *     *

Stringer sat back down on the stained sheets of the bed that he had hidden in when the crack whore had shown up.

He was disappointed. He was hoping that either the kid or the girl Sylvan would have shown up.

He sat quietly as he stared at the glint of light that played along the blade of his knife and stared at the slumped form of the pathetic creature on the floor.

He pondered about her responses. She had unwittingly uncovered an unexpected scenario.

Stringer did not expect that the two separate aspects of Mundus Nova would suddenly overlap.

If the kid and his Mother had been taken by one of the Immortal Harvesters, then his hunt was over.

He could be assured that the operatives at the organ harvest would take care of silencing anyone who entered that facility.

His mind went over his journey from the girl’s parent’s house. He accessed his neural net and replayed the journey. He froze the replay when he noticed in his extreme periphery the image of the black van.

He zoomed in on the number plate of the van. He instantly recognised it as the Mundus Nova retrieval van.

He focussed on the image of the unconscious body at the bus shelter. He had a partial of the face and quickly ran a face recognition scan. The scan revealed a seventy five percent match. Not good enough. He needed certainty.

He also realised of course, that he still needed to find the boy. He wondered whether the kid may have also been taken by the harvesters.

He decided that the only way to know for sure would be to go the facility and check it out.

He could get lucky and find both of them.

Unfortunately he was forbidden to contact the Harvesters in case he was captured and questioned.

He was reluctant to contact the Boss, he didn’t need the aggravation. He knew however, that eventually he would have to if he was going to find the new location of the Traverser and have his freqlock reversed. But that could only occur after he had finished tying up all of the loose ends.

This of course would include removing any traces of his existence here in this world.

He had to ensure that there was nothing to link his actions to those of Mundus Nova.

He would either have to eliminate the nosy Feds or get inside the FBI.

He smiled at that idea. He loved a challenge.

He rose from the bed and surveyed the room.

He took a quick look at the contents of the hooker’s handbag. He saw the drug paraphernalia and chuckled at the primitive methods that the drug users of this world were forced to use to get a fix. He cringed at the thought of having to puncture his body with those crude delivery methods.

They did not have the luxury of direct neural stimulation.

All of the high without damaging the body
, he thought as he threw the handbag onto the couch.

He decided against rummaging through drawers and cupboards. There was nothing more of use here.

He looked at the hooker’s body again. He wondered why he had only knocked her out. A swift slash would have silenced her forever.

He was however, cognizant of the fact, that there were rampant bodily fluid-borne diseases on this world and he knew that this hooker would definitely be a candidate for something really nasty. He did not want to risk an infection.

He tossed around the idea of letting her live. He doubted that she would present any danger and
besides
, he thought,
her miserable existence was punishment enough.

However, he decided that he would keep with his credo of ‘no loose ends’.

She served no further purpose.

He retrieved the handbag and pulled out four hypodermics and plunged them one after another into the hooker’s neck.

He watched as the deadly overdose took effect and the hooker’s body convulsed violently, spittle and foam seeped from between her nicotine stained teeth.

After the convulsions subsided, he checked her carotid pulse and smiled.

Thanks for the info bitch – sleep tight.

He pulled a small metallic object from his pocket, flipped off the lid and then dropped it on the dead hooker’s body. He then quickly made his way out of the apartment.

As he strode through the darkened corridor he accessed his neural net and scanned for the address of the organ harvesting facility. Once it had been downloaded, he exited the building and jumped into the Camaro.

Wisps of blue smoke streamed from the car’s tyres as he sped off towards his target as yet another building vanished in an instant.

Every night Michael Jacobs tossed and turned in his bed as a blizzard of thoughts raced unrelentingly through his mind.

He would lie awake for hours as he processed every waking moment of his day, his week and even processed thoughts that he had had when he was a child.

His life was a perpetual torment.

Of course for the most part, the reason for his torment was that he was consumed with guilt and the knowledge that he had unleashed a terrible curse on mankind.

For most of his life, Michael Jacobs was considered to be a freak of nature. He possessed an IQ so far beyond the normal, that for the first twenty years of his life he had been a “guest” of the United Government.

He had been earmarked as a gifted child from the age of two, having developed rudimentary telekinetic ability and displayed an advanced knowledge of physics.

Of course it helped that he was created by the most powerful scientific minds using both human and alien DNA only to be kept locked in a Laboratory like some intelligent rat in a cage.

It took fifteen years of pushing and prodding before Michael finally snapped.

The secure laboratory run by Mundus Nova which contained his bedroom, his world, was totally destroyed in the carnage that he created to hide his spectacular escape.

All he wanted to do was to live a normal life.

He had given them what they wanted. He had provided them with the blueprints to a device that was capable of spanning the gap between alternate Universes. He had even volunteered to be the first to test the device.

To everyone’s utter amazement the device worked.

The astounding thing about Michael’s amazing device was the fact that he intuitively knew that without a stabiliser, organic matter could not withstand the forces within the Laurentian wormhole that the device created.

He helped the Scientists of Mundus Nova create the Trans-dimensional Interface device that provided the molecular cohesion for organic matter to travel through the wormhole. He was also the first to volunteer to be implanted with the prototype TDI.

However, he soon realised that the TDI was not necessary for him. He could use his mind to control his own molecular cohesion.

He kept this ability to himself and suppressed it so that the TDI could be properly tested and then used by other ordinary humans.

The Scientists were astounded that anyone would volunteer to test such a device. They would have to be either incredibly brave or incredibly foolish.

To Michael it was neither, he just wanted to get the hell out of there. At least if he travelled through the worm hole he would have a normal life – at least for a brief period.

His journey to the other Universe had changed his life. It was in the other Universe, on the
other Earth
where he had found the love of his life, Sylvan Peters.

His mind retraced every moment that he had spent with Sylvan. He could still smell her fragrance; he could still feel her soft lips as she kissed him. He could still recall her radiance.

He squeezed his eyes closed and felt the heartache of loss.

After he had betrayed Mundus Nova, he had lost the access to the Traverser so that he could no longer go back and see her, to touch her, to make love to her.

Only the thought that Sylvan had fallen pregnant kept pushing him on.

Sylvan and their son Justen were the driving force behind his desire to help the ‘Right-to-Die’ movement.

As he sat up and turned his pillow over for the fourth time he started to relive the events which that led up to the development of wormhole technology and the supposed humanitarian imperative that justified its use.

The Great War had been the result of a huge disparity in the sharing of knowledge and technological advancements between those who possessed power and those who did not.

Those who possessed power were able to reap the rewards of technological breakthroughs.

They could live longer, healthier lives than those who could not take advantage of the technology, a technology that had been stolen.

Assisted by two alien beings that had crashed their spaceship in a place called Roseville New Texas in the early part of the Twentieth century, some of the humans of his Earth took a leap forward in evolution.

Using their minds, the aliens were able to communicate at length with the Scientists.

It was determined that the aliens were Scientists themselves and had come to grief when testing their theories on the existence of the Multi-verse.

They had created a stable wormhole and travelled through it in an attempt to discover other intelligent life in other Universes.

Purely by chance, the aliens had found themselves in an alternate solar system, within an alternate galaxy, of which was part of an alternate Universe.

Even more miraculous, was the chance discovery by the aliens, of a probe that had been launched from the Earth decades ago. The probe contained a gold plated disc that was embedded with vast quantities of data about humankind.

One particular part of data actually provided the galactic co-ordinates of Earth.

After decoding this information the aliens found Earth, but unfortunately lost control of their spaceship upon entering The Earth’s oxygen rich atmosphere.

The aliens were very close to death when they were found within the wreckage. They were taken immediately to a secure location for study.

From the onset, it was apparent that the aliens could not tolerate the high level of atmospheric oxygen and hence were kept within a special enclosure.

Fortunately, the badly injured aliens were saved from being subjected to experimentation and dissection by a last minute reprieve from the President of the United Government.

He convinced the Scientists that the aliens would be more valuable if they were cared for and kept alive. As a gesture of gratitude for their care, the aliens passed on vast quantities of information.

They provided information on everything from the mundane, such as micro electronics, to the exotic such as space travel, inter-universal travel and genetic manipulation.

It was long suspected however that the aliens held back a lot of information which was the main reason that Michael was created.

With DNA extracted from the aliens, the Scientists created Michael and therefore could access all the information they needed without the necessity of working with the aliens.