Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (43 page)

R
igley stood
in front of the last door built on this level of her mind. She had been through the other two, seeing her daughter, seeing the man that she gunned down while he pleaded with silent hands.

The name of the last room rested above the door, hanging with the same red glow that every other thing in this place did. The godlike statue of the man she killed remained behind her, but she wouldn’t turn around to see it again. Not out of fear of the statue, but fear of the other figure behind her. It was a black thing, the same as the room around her, formless, yet she knew it was there. It stood behind her like death, wanting her to turn around so that it could lay its cold black hand on her shoulder.

It wouldn’t let her turn back.

And she knew the thing’s name, even if it looked so much different in this place. Kenneth Marks. Even here, in her mind, he forced her forward, ready to kill her if she didn’t do his bidding. Ready to torture her if she did.

She looked up at the name of the room in front of her.

GRAYSON.

The difference between this room and the other two was that this hadn’t happened yet. That whatever she would see next wouldn’t be in the past, but in the future, and that meant she would look at what her mind thought the world could be. Everything else in here, so far, had been her mind replaying a life drastically spinning out of control, worse than any fighter pilot that swirled down into a burning spectacle of twisted metal.

Now, though, she was going to see something that was pure imagination. Pure creation. Because it hadn’t happened. She was going to be forced to see it, because there was nowhere else to turn—the creature behind her made sure of that.

Her hand moved forward on its own, as if having waited for her to think these thoughts, and now that they passed through her consciousness, it was time to press on. Ever onward in this place of complete emptiness yet brimming with more than Rigley could handle.

She felt the cold doorknob as it twisted in her hand, but the door opened of its own accord, and she was left holding nothing but the frigid air.

Darkness spread in front of her like a feast before the blind.

Her feet moved, slowly, stepping from the past into the future.

In the other rooms she saw things immediately, pictures, and then a statue, but here, she listened as the door shut behind her and yet nothing revealed itself. Just darkness that seemed to stretch for eternity.

This is where insanity is created
, she thought.
In places like this, where one only has the mind to confront.

Her feet didn’t move her for the first time since she began this journey, a time so long ago that it may have happened to a different person. She flexed her hand and it moved as she commanded it, then she turned her head, her body finally listening to her as it had before she found this place.

This is the future,
she thought.

It’s black,
she thought.

She stood for a long while, not moving though she could now, hoping that something would reveal itself, that perhaps words would be spoken as they had been in the past. Nothing. Nothing illuminated in red or spoke from the air around her. She was alone. Completely.

In her mind.

Eventually Rigley sat down.

And in the blackness, she began thinking. She hadn’t, perhaps in fifteen years, had a single true introspective thought. The second part of her life had been all external, all onward and upward, until this moment when she sat on a floor that might not even exist.

Rigley thought in this black expanse, even as her body remained seated in a relatively lit hotel room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She thought dark things, and wondered when all of this would simply end.

M
arks looked
to be more creature than human. At least, that’s what Will was coming to think. He sat in the back of a large SUV and Marks sat on the opposite side. The man/creature looked out the window, his arms resting at his sides.

The stillness around him slightly scared Will.

Will had been in places, a lot of them, in which his ability to remain quiet and not move meant life or death. In fact, he thought his capability to do so was probably unmatched in the world, or at most, surpassed by very, very few. And even so, he had never seen someone, nor contemplated his own ability, to sit like Marks did.

The bumps in the road seemed not to affect him, as if the shock absorbers on the car absorbed everything, though the rocking of the car still made its way through Will’s body.

It was as if the man/creature was separate from this world, as if even the laws of physics didn’t apply to him somehow. Will didn’t hide his stare, didn’t try to keep his wonder from the man’s view, though it didn’t appear Marks cared at all. Really, it didn’t appear that Marks even noticed the outside world, except when he decided to—the rest of the time he was somewhere else, though Will didn’t know where that place might be.

“What’s wrong with you?” Will asked.

Marks didn’t move, didn’t even act as if he heard the question. Will glanced to the driver in the front of the car, but the man only looked at the road. Will switched to the woman, Jenna, but she didn’t seem to hear him either. It was as if everyone in this goddamn vehicle lived on another plane of existence, one that was visible to Will, but not reversed.

“Hey,” Will said, turning back to Marks. “I’m talking to you. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Marks turned his head, moving it with the same care that he kept his body still. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not like me. You’re not like Rigley. You’re not even like the two people up there in the front, though they’re doing their best to mimic you.”

Marks eyes squinted. “Does it bother you that someone is different? I’m fairly certain a countrywide memo went out about this, that diversity is not just something that should be accepted, but encouraged. Did you not receive it?”

“No, I got it. Hiring Blacks and Asians and women is what that memo referred to. It didn’t have anything to do with someone like you, though.”

“And what is someone like me? Would you enlighten me, Will?”

That’s what he didn’t know, what exactly he was looking at. Marks looked human, sounded human, and yet something in Will kept screaming he wasn’t. That what was sitting on the other side of the vehicle was as much human as the high school girl that opened the door back in Grayson. Was as human as the alien Will tried to kill a day ago.

“You’re not human,” he said finally.

Marks smiled. “No? Did I arrive from outer space as well?”

“I don’t know if you came from space or a woman’s womb, but you’re not like the rest of us.”

“I wonder what homo erectus thought of the first homo sapiens, sometimes, Will.”

Will tried not to move at the man’s words, tried not to show any reaction—that the implication stunned him for a second.

“You’re the next evolution in humanity? That’s what you think?”

Marks was still smiling as he turned his head to look out the window. “There is a difference between us, there can be no doubt about that. There are others that have been similar to me, but holding onto much more of what makes up you than what I am. I may indeed be the first of my kind, though I don’t know for sure.”

The man was insane. Maybe he was the first of his kind, but that only meant he was the first human being to reach a level of insanity that breached all known previous thresholds.

“Do you even realize how crazy you are? Or does what you’re saying actually make sense in your head?”

Marks didn’t look back over at him as he spoke. “Let’s have some quiet time now, okay, Will?”

G
eneral Joseph Knox
had his orders, though they made no sense. An entire division of his military was wiped out today, and in less than three minutes. The dead were still being removed and the cost of the machinery destroyed would total into the millions. What they needed to do was eradicate the entire town, and since they were evacuating the state, perhaps just go ahead and expand the reach of eradication.

Knox hadn’t ever seen anything like the satellite image transferred to his computer. He never comprehended something flying through the sky, surrounded by a kind of green smoke, and choking men like Darth Vader. The Force Choke. That’s what they called it as kids back in Ohio. He never imagined that something might actually be able to use a Force Choke, and yet there it was, right on the screen for anyone with eyes to see.

Which was why these orders made no sense.

They said to send in one man, and only one man, and then wait.

Knox hadn’t sent anyone else into the Grayson city limits, though he set up bases around the town in one-mile increments, as well as sentries in between each base. Nothing else had ventured out and he wasn’t sending a single soldier inside, not until he was told and had no other options. Nothing in his command, outside of weapons based at a molecular level, would make a dent in what appeared out of the sky. Yet Kenneth Marks sent him the order to wait, that he would show up with the man to send inside the city.

Goddamn Kenneth Marks.

Protocol told General Knox he couldn’t skip a level up to Marks’ boss; Knox had never attempted something like that before, and he didn’t know anyone else who had either. The military followed a strict chain of command and that’s what kept men alive. But, this…this new order, this whole setup, made no goddamn sense. Whatever was inside that town, whether alien or machine, wasn’t like anything the world had ever seen. But Knox would stand down and wait, would not send a single person in while he waited.

Someone needed to know what this fucking psychopath was doing, because a lot more people were going to die, more than the one man they sent in over the next few hours.

General Knox had known Kenneth Marks for a couple of decades. Or rather, he had known of him. It was the past year that Knox actually became acquainted with him, as he earned his General’s rank. He'd been assigned to this section of the military, an almost shadow unit, and he first thought it a great honor. It showed the military’s trust in his judgment, his silence, and his capabilities, because he was a part of a section that didn’t exist in the American mind. This wasn’t like black sites in foreign countries, where torture occurred—things like that would eventually be known.
This
only existed in rumors and on websites dedicated to men in black type discussions.

And then he met Kenneth Marks. A civilian who reported directly to the President.

Knox did his research on the man the moment he began realizing that something was off about him. Degrees in theoretical physics and artificial intelligence. General Joseph Knox was a smart man by anyone’s standards, but he recognized immediately that more than one level separated him from Kenneth Marks.

He looked deeper though, wanting to understand Marks’ rise through this organization, the one without a name, the one that newspapers wouldn’t be able to identify even if shit did eventually leak out. Only, he couldn’t find anything. Kenneth Marks was as black as the rest of the organization. Like a black hole in space, one could point to it and say,
Look, there he is.
But when someone looked, they would see nothing because even time stopped when it moved around Kenneth Marks. There was simply nothing on the man, anywhere.

It didn’t change the fact that he was criminally insane. Knox went that route next, studying as much as he could about Marks, using textbooks and psychiatrists he contacted. The man was a sociopath. He might even see the rest of humanity as existing only in his mind, like pawns to be moved on a chessboard, having no life outside of what he gave them. Knox didn’t know the intricacies, but he didn’t need to. He knew enough to keep himself safe, and that was what he had intended to do during this assignment.

Until now.

Because Marks was doing something that would make a lot of people less safe, not just General Joseph Knox.

How far would the man push this, and to what end?

Knox had never done what he was considering now, but he thought if he didn’t, he might be sentencing his soul to something much worse than a court martial.

T
he SUV rolled
to a gentle stop in the middle lane of the highway. No other cars passed on either side; no other cars had passed on either side of it during the entire ride. The state was empty, or near empty at least, as far as Will could tell. If people were here, Will didn’t know where, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone to stop in the middle of the road.

Will saw a gas station to his right, completely empty, the lights inside dark. That was the only thing on this road besides trees and a stoplight in the distance, that had also gone out.

“This is your stop,” Marks said.

Will knew that as soon as he felt the car begin to slow; he didn’t need Marks to tell him. Will opened the door and set his foot out onto the pavement.

“Someone will be along soon to pick you up.”

“How far out from Grayson are we?”

“About twenty minutes.”

Will turned back into the car and looked at Marks, who was already staring at him. “You don’t want to get any closer to it, do you?”

“Of course not. That’s why I have you. What good would you be if I went in?”

“What do you want me to find out when I get in there?”

“I’m not completely sure yet,” Marks said. “I’ve been giving it some thought, but I think the best thing to do is to hook up a microphone to you and put a speaker in your ear, that way I can coach you through it as things unfold.”

“How very wise of you,” Will said. “Have you thought about what your species should be called? You know, like I’m a homo sapien, what do you think us homo sapiens should call you?”

Marks smiled. It was the first smile Will had seen on him which looked predatory, like Will imagined the smartest wolf in the woods might look just before he plunged his snout into the gut of some wounded antelope. “You can call me homo get-the-fuck-out-of-my-car, Will.” He didn’t look away and Will held on for a few seconds. He wanted to think that he would get back at this man, that at some point, he would deliver whatever justice he could—but those were only thoughts. He would never have a chance at touching this man/creature, this psychopath.

Will stepped out and turned to push the door shut behind him. Just before he closed it, the smiling man spoke again from inside.

“Best of luck, Will.”