Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams

Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1
:

Copyright 2016 Damian
Huntley

Published by Damian
Huntley at Smashwords

ISBN:
9781311676450

Smashwords Edition
License Notes

This ebook is licensed
for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or
given away to other people. If you would like to share this book
with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each
recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or
it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to
Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own
copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

Quote

One - Capitalist Reform

Two -
Charlene

Three -
Questions

Four -
Shadowcab

Five -
DC

Six
- Calvert Cliffs

Seven - Pizza and History

Eight - Saving Mr. Beach

Nine - The Void Garden

Ten -
The Hopper

Eleven -
Spiff

Twelve - Fighting Shadows

Thirteen - On the Road

Fourteen - Compound Fracture

Fifteen - The Kings Mosaic

Sixteen - In the Beginning

A Preview of Book 2 in the Series

About the Author

Connect with the
Author

For Ryen, because
without you I wouldn’t know how to write a grounded happy
human.

For Jean
Huntley, for life, the universe and everything.

For Katie
Blackwell, for having the sense to tell me to try harder.

“There is nothing like a dream to
create the future.”

- Victor Hugo,
Les Misérables

David Beach was
starting to flag a little. The heat would have been enough to wear
him down, but with the added frustration of his seven-year-old
daughter sitting on his shoulders, pounding incessantly on his
chest with her feet, he was beginning to think that even this
historic event didn’t merit enduring such torture. He gritted his
teeth and gazed towards the podium, hoping that the leaders of the
free world would hurry up and get their shit together.

“Stephanie,
hun, do you mind standing for a while?” he asked his daughter,
tapping her shins gently with his hands. He managed to contain a
groan of exasperation when she responded, “Daaad, I might miss it.’
That whine … he only had himself to blame; he recognized his own
corrosive determination in the sing song trail off of her plea.

“Spiff, you
don’t even know what you’re going to see.”

“The
PRESIDENT!” She still occasionally struggled with ‘r’ in president,
but she had been practicing, and this time she managed to deliver
the word perfectly, emphasizing her enthusiasm by gently patting
her father’s hair.

David’s eyes
rolled and he inhaled slowly, trying to be as happy as he knew he
should be that Stephanie had understood something of the importance
of the day. Still, she was underselling the gravitas somewhat.
Today the President of America, along with the fifteen other world
leaders who made up the Economic Unification Council, were meeting
in order to sign an accord that promised to change the world
economy at its most fundamental level.

It was an
agreement that had been thirteen years in the making and David had
played a part in its conception. It was only right that he should
be within spitting distance of the podium. If you stood on the
fifth floor of an apartment building and tried to spit on a passing
pedestrian you could probably make the shot, and following that
logic, David figured that he’d done alright; fifty feet or so from
the podium might as well be spitting distance.

David worked as
an assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence in
President Tiernan’s administration. If he was honest with himself,
he was only attending the signing ceremony because of his
involvement with the Undersecretary. He’d had a sense of impending
doom about the whole thing for several weeks now, and when that
feeling had refused to abate, he’d tried to wriggle out of
attending, but Carlton wouldn’t hear of it.

David’s friends
often referred to him as a conspiracy nut, which was pretty much
all you had to do these days to write off a person’s opinions. The
Undersecretary valued much of what David had to say, even when his
thoughts bled black. When David had voiced his concerns,
Undersecretary Carlton hadn’t made him feel marginalized; however,
he had reiterated that the signing of the Capitalism Reform Act had
to happen. Everyone knew it. A great many people were concerned
about today’s events, but those concerns could never be allowed to
impact on the momentous occasion. The meeting of the Economic
Unification Council and the signing of the act was to signal the
end of the old regime; the President might as well have painted a
bullseye on his chest.

There was a wave of
motion in the crowd in front of David, an eruption of applause and
cheering, but all David could see were the bobbing heads and waving
hands of a few thousand people. He couldn’t even see the
billboard-sized display playing live coverage of the stage. Unseen
by David Beach, but watched by the avid eyes of hundreds of
millions of people around the world, President Allan Tiernan walked
up the short staircase to the stage, followed closely by Russia’s
President Abakumov, France’s President Loubé and the leaders of
thirteen of the most influential countries in the world. The men
and women lined up on the stage, with President Tiernan making for
the central podium, ready to address the nation. Each of the
figures on the podium would have an opportunity to speak directly
to the concerns and needs of their people, but this was President
Tiernan’s moment, and he steadied himself, licking his lips and
looking down with an air of solemnity.

By some
miracle, a gap opened up in the crowd just large enough for David
to push forwards a little and catch a glimpse of the giant monitor.
David was already grinding his teeth, and as he arched his head to
the side to see past Stephanie’s hand, his tension grew. There,
writ large, crystal clear colors, strong contrasts, clean lines,
the President stepped toward the microphone, smiling and waving
confidently at the world.

One mile away, in a
North facing room on the eighteenth floor of the Arctum Industries
office complex, a lone figure packed ammo into four empty
magazines. After all of the anxieties and tribulations, he was
calm. Nothing could distract him from his goal. He wasn’t about to
commit murder. He had told himself this so many times that he was
almost convinced the rest of the world would see it that way. Five
.338 Lapua Magnum bullets per cartridge. He loaded the first
cartridge into the AWM rifle and checked the sights. There, through
the glass of the U.S. Optics Scope, almost as clear as the image
displayed on the high definition monitor next to him, the man
watched President Tiernan commence his address to the nation.

The shots
themselves would not be a test of skill, he could make this shot
one hundred times out of one hundred and still feel no sense of
achievement. Timing, that might be an issue though. There were
sixteen squibs, small explosive charges, mounted at strategic
points around the precinct and these squibs were set to go off at
very precise times. He knew the squibs had not been discovered by
the Secret Service, or this historic event would not be running on
schedule. Speed was absolutely of the essence; sixteen shots fired
within the space of nine seconds, four AWM rifles mounted on the
window ledge, and the shots all had to be timed perfectly to
coincide with the sound of squibs firing in close proximity to the
stage.

The gunman felt
no fear, felt no remorse for what he was about to do, no pride
either. It wasn’t murder. It was just a message.

David had been
watching the monitor for what felt like an eternity now and he was
starting to wonder how bored Stephanie must be feeling. Stephanie
Beach was in her element actually, ecstatic that she was so much
taller than the people around her, and at the same time, pleased
that she hadn’t been made to stand. At some point, David would
explain to her that she didn’t have to understand the word
manipulate
to be manipulative, but that conversation
wouldn’t happen today. Today she would pat her father’s hair with
mild elation and grin at the little people around her, all much
shorter than her.

President
Tiernan placed his hands either side of the podium and focused his
gaze on a distant point in the crowds. Behind him and to either
side, the other heads of state prepared to deliver the address in
their own languages.

“We speak today
as one voice.” Tiernan lowered his head briefly as the crowd
cheered. “We are a voice, not unified by a tragedy, but by our
desire to forestall tragedy.”

David watched
as the camera panned across the faces on stage, each of them pacing
themselves to match the speed of Tiernan’s speech.

“We are a
voice, not of lamentation for the ills of the world, but of hope
for what we have set out today to achieve.” He paused, his eyes
moving slowly about the faces in the crowd, “Economic Unification
has been a shared dream … An all encompassing passion for those of
us who stand before you today, and we know we share that dream with
many of you, but to those who would seek to silence our voice, as
one we ask, where is your shame?”

Cheers erupted
from a crowd united, and David stepped to the side as one
enthusiastic onlooker threw his arms in the air in celebration.

“No longer can
we ignore the clamor of the masses, the chant of the ninety-nine
percent when they ask, what gall? Where’s their shame? How dare
they? Today, with one voice, we will answer loud and clear, enough
is enough.”

Behind him,
President Loubé finished, “ça suffit, comme ça.” Tiernan nodded,
“Enough is enough. Today, with the introduction of a unified
currency,” he raised the index finger of his right hand, counting
off, “salary caps, minimum wages and globalized health care …
today, we level the playing field, and we say as one, if you don’t
like it, get off the field.”

As the madness
of the crowd set in about him, David didn’t understand what had
happened at first. He heard a loud crack, somewhere off to his left
and he didn’t react to it, didn’t flinch. He was so intent on
watching the huge LCD display, the close-up image of the president
smiling and waving casually. There was something odd there,
something about the president’s face. The moment stretched out in
front of David, a smear on the camera lens, a long dirty line
appearing on the image, and a flash of dark red there, along the
crooked line. An eternity between David’s brain processing the
image he was seeing, and connecting it to the loud cracking sounds
that he could hear. Then the red was gone almost as quickly as it
had appeared and now the president’s hand was clutching at his
forehead as he stumbled backward. The camera had cut to a wider
shot now and there were more explosive cracking noises and the
other figures on the stage started to stumble and fall over each
other in the commotion.

People around
David pushed and shoved, some of them screaming and pointing at the
monitor, other’s pointing to various buildings around the precinct.
Stephanie was holding tightly around David’s shoulders and she was
screaming too. David knew in the back of his mind that he should be
doing something, anything to calm Stephanie or protect her from the
pandemonium that was starting to unfold around them, but he was
completely incapable of action. Something was profoundly wrong with
what he had just witnessed. He was paralyzed by the thought, no,
not even a thought. Just a feeling, an instinct. The hairs on his
arms standing on end, Stephanie’s legs digging into his chest, the
thought clattering around his numbed head, a clumsy but untouchable
interloper.