Chosen (The Chosen Few Trilogy #1)

For Erica, my
amazing
wife, and Keira and Megan,
my
beautiful daughters.

1

NEW YORK CITY - U.S.A.

The lights went out.

Johnny Trevochet’s breath froze in his throat

A hush fell over Madison Square Garden; a hush laced with so much tension and suppressed excitement he had never experienced the like of it before. The rock group Supernatural were about to kick off a kick-ass concert, and the anticipation was palpable.

Amidst the whispers, the whistles, and the rising wave of noise he turne
d to smile at his wife, Natalie.
T
his simple act
was
harder than he could ever have imagined before the accident that took away the use of his legs and destroyed his acting career. The wheelchair didn’t give like normal seating. He had to turn his entire body like a damn robot.

“Hey, Johnny,” she winked and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Remember Harvard?”

His discomfort slipped aw
ay as a rare smile came
to his lips and he remembered a day more
than ten years ago. A day when smiles came natura
lly, before Fate took its
greedy bite out of him. It had been one of those unforgettable Boston,
Massachusetts,
mid-
A
utumn days:
a bracing wind, a crisp golden light that splintered through the trees, and the promise of winter snapping at the air.

“Remember what?” he teased her and delighted in the way she threw
back her head
to laugh. It was his
greatest pleasure, watching his wife laugh.
It was the reason he hadn’t tak
en
the easy way out after a drunken
attorney put an end to his
acting career one
snowbound New York night.

Natalie leaned in clos
er, her words falling like
drops of honey. When her lips brushed against his ear, tingles spread from his brain to his toes, never mind the goddamned paralysis. Then, Supernatural made a high-level appearance, and the rest of her sentence was lost
in
uproar
.

Powerful chords of rock music drowned out everything except the spectacle of light and dancing that erupted
before
them.
P
eople rushed to the front of the stage. Due to his recent disability and his luminary reputation, Johnny had been able to secure front row
‘disabled-area’ tickets to the
gig, the hottest of the year. He had heard that Supernatural were the new wave; an all-girl rock group who knew how to play, how to write, and sure as hell knew how to dress.

He stared for a moment, then blinked, swallowed, and pretended he hadn’t been staring. “Good. . .erm. . .start,” he shouted.

Natalie raised her eyebrows, still laughing, and again he was catapulted back to Boston. One evening, in the gardens of one of the quieter halls, they had enjoyed a picn
ic of
cheese and wine whilst hiding themselves away among the shedding trees. They had taken blankets too, and had spent the night there, keeping the cold at bay with each other’s bodies, toasting Chardonnay to the frosted stars, and making the conversation of two people who knew they were destined to be with each other beyond youth and into old age. It had been the best night of both their lives.

Johnny was dragged back to the present as the first song came to a rowdy end and the lead singer of Supernatural,
Emily Crowe-
a
dy
namic girl with
r
aven-
coloured locks, shouted: “CAN YOU
HEAR ME?” in a
booming
voice that belied her size.

The crowd responded immediately, Johnny and Natalie included, roaring their approval. Without delay, Supernatural launched into their second song, electric guitars screamed, and the drummer went into a frenzy. Johnny let the atmosphere take him. After all, he thought, if you couldn’t forget your worries at a rock concert, along with twenty thousand like-minded people, you might as well be dead. You might as well have breat
hed your last on that
snow-ridden street.

The crescendo of noise swelled around him. People were dancing in the aisles. He turned to Natalie.

“I wish. . .I just wish. . .” he shouted, and t
hen a crushing sadness fell over
him, causing a break in his voice.

“I wish I could take you to Central Park after this,” he said. “I wish I could take you ice skating.”

He saw his own hurt reflected in Natalie’s eyes. And then the sudden strength. And the belief. “One day,” she said, then added “Spanky.”

And just like that she made him s
mile. ‘Spanky’ was her
pet name for him. A few years ago, the
producers of his soap-opera
ha
d green-l
ighted
a humor
ous spanking scene with his
pretty femal
e co-star. He had come home
sheepish;
terrified his wife would be angry at him for agreeing to do it. Instead she had fallen about laughing and had never let him forget it.

Now, he leaned forward, trying to ignore the wheelchair’s restrictions. “If I said you could go anywhere this summer, see anything in any part of the world, where would you choose?”

They were silent for a moment, as the music
rolled and swelled around them. Supernatural’s lead singer strutted back and forth not ten feet away, slightly elevated on stage, chomping so hard at her microphone Johnny wondered if it was made of cookie dough.

“You’d think I might say Boston,” Natalie said at last when the music stilled. “But I’m thinking something different. England, I think. And not London. There are supposed
to be castle walls in York
you can follow right around the city.”

At
that moment, Johnny experienced a peculiar sensation.
He had the nauseating sense
everything around him suddenly receded and then returned instantly, like some special
-
effects trick. Time seemed to shift, as if one moment hadn’t quite melded with the next. His head started spinning. It happened so fast he couldn’t be sure anything
had
happened at first, but then the sick expression on Natalie’s face and the confused commotion all around him confirmed it.

What the-?

The music faded. A guitar barked discordantly. On stage, Emily Crowe and her leather-clad lead guitarist stared at each other and then into the crowd.

“Johnny. . .” Natalie sounded puzzled.

“Shhh. . .” Johnny held up a hand as a new sound arose. A terrible knowledge hit him. He struggled to turn around in his chair.

“Oh my God!”

Behind them, twenty thousand people had begun to stampede.

***

This can’t be happening. My God, not now.

Johnny Trevochet turned back to his wife.

Natalie sat frozen, her face white with fear.

A terrible undulating wave of noise swept through the Garden. Johnny knew that sound. It was the primordial sound of terror. The sound of a speeding car breaking your legs.

He snapped his head to the left when the swell of people smashed some unfortunates against the stage. Screaming and the sound of crushing bodies rent the air. Up on stage, the members of Supernatural watched in horror. Johnny saw their bodyguards rush on and begin to drag them away. The lead guitarist ran back to her microphone, shouting something that was lost in the mad cacophony of human terror that rose like a killer wave
.

“The stage!” he screamed at Natalie. She didn’t respond, so he got right up in her face.
“The stage! Get us up on the fucking stage!”

Natalie snapped out of it and began to drag him forward. Around them other people were clambering and struggling in the same direction. The stage was eerily deserted now, lit by a single spot
light and strewn with
wires and instruments. Johnny shook his head in disgust. If the members of Supernatural or their bodyguards had elected to hang around they might have saved dozens of lives.

Something dark was rising, he could s
ense it. It filled his
lungs like a malignant cancer. It filled the Garde
n up
to its rafters
with m
alice, curdling the very
air
they
breathed. A high-pitched
wail sliced through everything. Not human, Johnny thought before his wheelchair toppled over and he landed face first on the sticky floor, amidst a plastic carnage of broken chairs, paper cups and bottles.

It was a desperate moment. He thought:
this is it;
this is where I get trampled to death,
then Natalie was down beside him.

“Come on, Johnny,” she breathed. She hauled him up.

He blinked in disbelief at the chaos that was the Garden. To his right, uniformed guards tried to stem the stampede. Johnny saw one of them swept away in a panicked rush of bodies; he sa
w another elbowed in the face
and trampled underfoot. He saw blood spraying from the crowd in errant patterns as if a coked-up painter had decided to decorate the Garden in crimson.

This couldn’t be happening. Denial still dulled Johnny’s wits even as a man fell snarling at his feet. Johnny reached for him, but the man kicked out, at the seats, at anything that might lever him back to his feet. Johnny stared, unable to help the man even if he’d wanted to, sitting with his back against the
stage and facing the
surging tide of humanity gone insane.

It was Natalie and him against them all. Natalie crouched beside him, looked him dead in the eyes. The look said it all.

“Be safe.”

She moved back, then ran and jumped, and caught the edge of the stage. In a few seconds she had hauled herself up, then rolled on to her front, wriggled to the edge of the stage and reached back down.

“
Come on, Johnny!”

She caught his hands and heaved, struggling with his dead weight. Shame and humiliation rushed through him as he tried to shuffle
the top part of his body
over the edge of the stage
. His dead legs dangled uselessly, giving him no leverage. Other people were clambering up now, some reaching back to help loved ones, some reaching back to help just anyone. Others stumbled straight for the stage ex
it without even a
back
wards glance
.