The Immortal Harvest (5 page)

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Sylvan stood in the shower allowing the water to wash away the torrent of tears that streamed down her face. She ignored the metallic smell of the water and the black streaks of mould that oozed from the cracks in the tile grout. She did not care.

She needed to cleanse herself of the utter humiliation she had been subjected to at the hands of her step Father and Mother. She knew that soap could only do so much. It wouldn’t cleanse her soul.

The warmth of the water diminished and left her shivering as she turned the rusty faucet off and stepped out of the shower.

She stood as she let the water run in rivulets from her body. She looked at the cracked bathroom mirror and looked away in disgust at the image she saw. The face was gaunt, even though she still possessed eyes that were an ocean blue; her once youthful blemish free complexion was now forever marred by the ordeal thrust upon her. Her once youthful, womanly body was now violated and disgusting.

The tears streamed down her cheeks as she turned away from the mirror and picked up the greying, tattered, bath towel.

She had finally managed to regain control of her emotions when she felt a sudden sense of panic.

How long have I been in here?

She stopped drying her hair and listened. There were no sounds coming from the other room. She hurried to finish drying, wrapped the towel around herself and rushed out into the other room.

She felt a tight clenching in her chest. The room was empty. Crystal was gone.

“Oh my god!” she whispered and felt the blood drain from her face as she looked towards the couch.

Justen was not there. The blanket lay discarded on the piles of clothes on the floor. He was gone.

Clad only in a towel, she ran from the apartment. She squinted in the darkness within the corridor. There was no trace of Justen.

Frantically she began banging her fists on each door in the corridor. There was an angry response from the room across from Crystal’s apartment.

“Fuck off I’m trying to sleep!”

“Please help me. I’ve lost my son. He is only six he has blonde hair and blue eyes,” Sylvan screamed at the voice behind the door.

“I don’t give a crap lady. Fuck off and tell someone who gives a shit.”

She ignored the voice and continued beating on the other doors in the corridor.

She ceased beating the doors when the door with the voice, burst open and she was confronted with a massive, hairy behemoth of a man. Sweat formed in small bubbles on his bloated reddened face. The veins in his neck pulsed as he thrust his fist towards Sylvan’s face.

“I said fuck off!”

Sylvan reeled backwards in terror as the man raised his fist ready to strike. She closed her eyes and awaited the inevitable pain.

None came.

She opened her eyes to see Crystal standing in front of the brute, her face very close to his. Her eyes fixed and ablaze with fury, her bony fist clenched and ready to strike.

“Leave her alone Carl. Fuck off and go back to your room or I’ll get Julian over here to sort you out.”

The behemoth unclenched his fist and skulked back to his room.

Sylvan breathed a sigh of relief and then shrieked when she realised that Crystal had Justen by the hand. He had been standing behind her.

She grabbed his hand and pulled her to him and hugged him. She felt joy, relief and anger at the same time. After a quick hug, she pushed him away and held his hands.

“Justen, where the hell have you been? I have been worried sick about you. I thought I’d lost you.”

She turned to Crystal, “I thought I asked you to watch him. What happened?”

Crystal lowered her face and spoke at the floor.

“I had an errand to run. I had to get sumfin’ for us ta eat,” she said as she held up a grease stained paper bag and continued. “I thought he would be ok for a few minutes.”

“Where was he? Where did you find him?” Sylvan asked as she scooped Justen up into her arms and took him back into Crystal’s apartment.

She gently put him back onto Crystal’s bed.

“Now stay here Justen. I’m going to get some clothes on and then Aunt Crystal and I are just going to sit on the couch and have a chat.

As Sylvan leant in closer to Justen to kiss him, her blood ran cold when she softly heard the whisper in her ear.

“Mummy,. . Please don’t be angry. I was hiding from a bad man.”

The rust coloured 1968 Chevrolet Camaro was a crap car, but it got Edward Stringer where he wanted to go. It provided a certain kind of anonymity that was very important to his line of work.

He was on a mission. The finer details were to be given to him piecemeal so that if he were to be caught he would only know snippets. He would not be able to betray the cause.

Pick up the phone on the corner of Fifth and Main at exactly ten PM.

“I’m so sick of this kind of bullshit,” he growled as he pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator.

His Mother had named him Edward and he proceeded through his school years as Eddy. In his current profession he dropped the name and preferred the anonymity of just being called Stringer. He liked the ring of the name. It suited him.

He spied the phone booth and wrestled the Camaro to the kerb.

After silencing the growling V8 he pulled the handle of the door up and pushed hard to open it. The stiff hinges gave way with a squeal of rusty metal on metal. His teeth clenched at the sound and hunched his back against the cold. He swore as he lumbered through the steady trickle of rain to the booth. He checked his watch. It was nine fifty nine.

He leant on the outside of the phone booth and waited. A passerby tried to enter the booth and was instantly dissuaded by a menacing look. The stranger quickly moved on. The phone rang at precisely ten.

Stringer swung the door open and lifted the receiver. The voice on the other end had been electronically altered.

“Stringer?”

“No it’s Elvis fucking Presley! Who else would it be? Ya fucken moron!” Stringer fought to hold back his growing rage.

“Careful Stringer, you’re not indispensable. Now listen carefully – this will not be repeated.”

Stringer allowed the caller to complete the instructions and without a word slammed the receiver back on the phone and stormed out of the booth, jumped into his car and sped off in the direction of his mark. As he drove he had time to go over his plan for eliminating his next target.

This was his ritual.

In his mind he could picture how the whole scenario would play out. He never rushed his jobs. Each one had to be meticulously rehearsed. There were to be no loose ends. His life depended upon his ability to carry out the task with ruthless efficiency. He had received excellent training as a sharp shooter for the Marines.

“That was another time, another place, my other life
,” he thought as he drove the Camaro through the slick blackened streets.

Even though it was a rainy night, from his vantage point he had a clear view of the neighbourhood. He liked using abandoned buildings to set up his operation.

The city was full of the filthy lumbering edifices. Neglected and abused, the buildings had ceased to become safe habitats, even though the building he had decided to use still had some indigent residents. He was unconcerned; he planned to be silent and efficient. He would carry out the task and be a long way away from the building before anyone knew what had happened.

Stringer methodically set up the XM2210 ESR Enhanced Sniper Rifle on its tripod. It was an advanced weapon designed to kill efficiently.

He turned from the weapon and opened a small chrome box, and took out the long sleek projectile that was embedded in the form-fit foam.

He rolled the bullet around in his fingers enjoying the feeling of power that it possessed. He looked at it closely in the dim light and admired the craftsmanship that went into producing such an efficient killing device. Then, with practised precision, he loaded the special DNA specific high velocity round into the rifle.

It was special purpose ammunition that not only tracked specific targets; it also injected an untraceable DNA specific toxin into the victim providing instant death at contact.

Accuracy was usually not important. However, to Stringer accuracy was extremely important. He was a professional.

The subject will be dead long before the toxin would be needed
; he thought as he prostrated himself behind the rifle and carefully adjusted the telescopic sight.

He knew that he would only have one chance to eliminate his target.

Once he was satisfied that he had successfully completed setting up his position, he sat back against the death grey wall of the room and took in his surroundings. He looked with disinterest at the copious quantities of discarded syringes and the tell tale remnants of drug use.

He ignored the piles of old newspapers and the myriad of insect life that infested the stained and mildew riddled carpet. He had no interest in the disgusting environment in which he was forced to work.

He absently brushed a piece of lint from his pants and reached into his pocket for his nicotine neural infuser. The fact that he had a weakness disturbed him. He would lose the habit if it wasn’t for the fact that it kept him sharp.

He had once tried to quit cold turkey. Unfortunately, the uncontrollable shaking had nearly caused him to screw up a hit. Nothing could interfere with his work. Besides he was nearly a hundred, it was time to grow up.

He twisted his wrist and checked his watch. He smiled as he realised that within the next forty five minutes he would have accomplished his mission. He had time to kill. He hated that.

When he had time to kill, his mind would wander, and it would often wander down dark neural pathways to memories he would rather forget. Hiding insidiously within his neural net, lurked the ugly truths, the putrid realities of an abused childhood and a fucked up adulthood.

Like congealed vomit, vile and acrid, the memories would fester within him, seeping into his nightmares.

Images of his Father would be distorted and twisted, the visions evoking a visceral, gut wrenching fear.

There were of course, far worse memories than those of his Father.

He still vividly recalled the horrific images of his friends being blown to pink mist by improvised micro anti-matter explosive devices in Sadamistan.

He sneered as he remembered his time crawling through the dusty streets of that filthy hell hole. Constantly looking behind him as each moment brought him closer to eating his own DNA bullet.

He shook his head and tried to empty the thoughts as though they were sand pouring from a bucket. He exhaled deeply and shoved another piece of the nicotine neural infuser into his mouth. As he chewed, the jarring narcotic effect made him think about his childhood.

As a young boy growing up in Nixonville, he would often lie awake at night and listen to his parents argue.

The constant fear of being hauled out of bed and punished for trivial things caused him to hide under his sheets. He would also block out the yelling and screaming with his pillow. Many nights he went without sleep for fear of the punishment for wetting his bed.

He was eleven before he had grown out of the humiliating weakness. Many times he had to wake himself up in the middle of the night and sneak into the laundry with his wet sheets and pyjamas and attempt to iron them dry. Afterwards he would sneak back to his room, wracked with self loathing and guilt.

Don’t fall asleep, you’ll do it again!

The punishment for wetting the bed was even more degrading and humiliating. His Father would thrash him with the buckle of his pants belt, digging his fingernails into the flesh of his arm as the buckle dug into the flesh of his buttocks. He would then drag him out the front of their dilapidated hovel and hang his urine stained sheets in full view of his peers as they made their way to school each morning.

He hated his Father. He hated his Mother more for allowing the abuse to continue. He hated himself for taking the abuse. So much hate,
nothing but hate
.

The day after he turned fourteen he ran away from home and drifted. He managed to find odd jobs washing dishes and mowing lawns until he had turned eighteen, at which point he decided to really run away.

He enlisted in the Space Marines as a marksman and was promptly shipped off to Sadamistan to help defend his country from terrorism. He finally had a legitimate outlet for his hate.

It was several years later that he had heard that his younger brother, Billy had taken his own life. It was
suicide by impact
. He had taken a swan dive from his apartment.

Even though Stringer loved him, he never really knew his brother. He was a weedy kid who would wake him up at night struggling to breathe. Caught up in his own inner turmoil, Stringer would dismiss the weakling.

He suspected that his brother’s death had been the direct result of the mind fucking he would have received from his Father.

One more nail in his Father’s coffin
.

Stringer knew that he could never find closure in his own world, that pleasure had been torn from him when his parents were killed in the Great War. Their organs had given him another ten years, at least that was something.

Nevertheless, he vowed that if he ever ran into his parents on this world, he would not hesitate to kill them. He made a mental note to track them down as soon as he had finished this mission.

He shook himself out of his day dreaming and calmly scanned the room. He cocked his head to listen for anything or anyone that would distract him from his mission.

Apart from the usual sounds of life from the filthy streets and alleyways below him, there was nothing of concern.

He subconsciously felt for the lump on the back of his neck. It was his lifeline back to his world. The TDI or Trans-dimensional Interface was the only thing that allowed the flesh and blood of his body to pass through the Traverser.

Without the TDI, every molecule in his body would be displaced inside of the event horizon. He would simply cease to exist. He did not pretend to understand the physics of it; he trusted that the pencil necks back in Traversal Central knew what they were doing. Besides, in his line of work, death was almost a certainty. He just wanted his death to be on his terms.