Stormbreak (The Serenity Strain Book 1) Read online

  Do not venture outside. At this time, residents are required to shelter in place in their homes or the nearest tenable structure until further notice. Citizens are encouraged to cooperate and help one another in this time of unprecedented natural catastrophe. Stay tuned to this station for further updates as they are available.

  Following a repeat of the three lifeless tones, music resumed. Lena Horne’s “Stormy Weather.” Strange on a rock station, was Mark’s ridiculous thought following the NOAA’s pronouncement.

  “I’m supposed to work the night watch Saturday night,” Lauryn said. Her voice sounded like a feminine reflection of the computerized announcer’s. Flat and dead.

  Mark turned off the radio. In the stunned silence, only the background noise of Helen remained. The forces of nature punishing the structures of man.

  “Daddy? What did that mean?”

  They both looked over to Megan lying on the couch. Earlier, when Lauryn waxed nostalgic, the teen was snuggled into the fabric of the couch like a cat. Now she was wrapped in a fetal position, hiding under her shawl. A frightened animal protecting vital organs inside a cocoon. Only her head was visible. Jasper seemed more alert lying beside her, if no less comfortable.

  “It meant we’re in for a rough time ahead,” said Mark.

  Lauryn gave him a hard look. He stared right back, unflinching. His eyes said, This isn’t a minor inconvenience. We might not survive this.

  “But what does that mean?” asked Megan. She needed answers. She wanted her father to tell her everything was going to be all right. She pulled the shawl tighter around her.

  “I don’t know, doll.”

  Mark hadn’t called her that in years. She’d asked him to stop around the time she was ten years old. She’d said it embarrassed her in front of her friends. Now her eyes never left his face. They locked there, with no word of complaint behind them.

  “It’s dying down a little,” Lauryn noted.

  They all turned their ears to the ceiling, the universal gesture for listening more closely that really made no difference at all. What they heard was a momentary lull in the violence beyond the apartment’s walls.

  “Let me have a look,” said Mark. He got up and made his way to the window, cracked the blinds.

  “Well?” wondered Lauryn after a moment. But Mark was silent. He didn’t even look back at her. Instead, he made his way to the door.

  “Wait. Mark, what are you doing?”

  Jasper raised his head at her tone, his alert status elevated.

  Her almost-ex ignored her. He took the chain off, turned the locks.

  “Mark!”

  He opened the door. The wind blew the rain, sprinkling, through the doorway. The deadly storm was now a breezy shower, for the moment at least. Lauryn got up and went over to him, prepared to use her skills for subduing unruly inmates if she needed to. But when she stood next to him, Mark moved back a little so she could see.

  “My God,” she whispered. Her eyes attempted to take in the devastation around them, despite the pre-dawn darkness. Half the complex was obliterated. Bodies floated, half submerged in brackish water. All she wanted to do was close the door and never open it again.

  “Jasper!”

  Megan’s voice startled Lauryn and as she looked back at her daughter, she felt the bulky fur of Jasper’s body as he dashed out the front door.

  “Jasper!” Mark called after him. But the dog was a bullet shooting across the complex in pursuit of something invisible to them in the dim moonlight.

  “I’ll go get him,” Lauryn said, but before she could move, she heard her daughter shriek.

  “Mom! I’m blind!”

  “What the—”

  “Lauryn, I can’t see either,” Mark said quietly.

  As she turned her head toward him, a filmy, orange curtain descended over her vision. They were all suddenly, completely without sight. Megan’s screams pierced the deepening darkness as it descended over them.

  Chapter 9. Saturday, early morning.

  She came into the world in the still sleep of unlife; as yet unmade.

  Large, black clouds circled over the Gulf of Mexico, a common enough sight in the last few days. But these clouds that had once been merely a tropical storm named Ilene, now grew obese with their own darkness. Unable to hold their burden, they released yet another torrent onto the heaving ocean below. They began moving in a circle, their squalls turning round and round, cutting swaths in the warm air above the Gulf. Ilene’s winds whipped round and round, soon exceeding even hurricane Category Five strength.

  And then the uncommon occurred. The gales churned faster still until rain flew sideways, then fell upward. Direction became meaningless inside the storm. The winds increased in velocity, like the anxious heart of a lover beating faster and faster in the throes of passion. Lightning arced, tearing great rips in the fabric of time and space. The thunder it made rolled eerily like the baritone shriek of a mother of giants giving birth to her entire brood, all at once.

  Sound and sight and feeling blended, elements swirled into the winds of chaos. And within that disorder, a sudden calmness appeared. In the eye of this most unnatural of storms, she evolved from nowhere and nothingness. Wrapped in a web of storm clouds, protected from the winds turning ever faster, her body emerged from nonexistence. The hurricane cradled her lovingly in its windy arms as air whipped around her in a shell of silence. It held the space around her unmolested high above the ocean, sustaining her aloft as she became herself.

  Her face crystallized substance from shadow—the sharp nose of a regal line, the high cheekbones of marble perfection, the piercing green irises surrounding pupils of bruised violet. Her lips grew pink and trembling from a canvas of blank skin. Then came bone and sinew and muscle to shape her neck and shoulders, her torso and hips and limbs. She cast her eyes downward, painting herself into existence. Her arms and legs grew into their length. Her hands formed, stretching into fingers and thumbs. Then the painter became a sculptor, reaching down to stroke the unfinished skin of her long calves, then up to shape the supple contours behind her knees, and up further still to knead the alabaster muscles of her thighs and buttocks. Her palms cupped and squeezed the yielding clay of her flesh to form soft breasts. Hair the color of red lightning sprouted all at once from her head like Athena born from Zeus. It stretched the length of her, protectively embracing the curves of her body.

  As she rode the winds, she felt the rain bead upon her skin. Her eyes drank in the silver streaks of power blazing against the black underbelly of the clouds. She heard the thunder answer, rolling like an army of war drums heralding her entry into the world. Her senses conducted the hurricane around her like metal would electricity. The storm’s power shone in her eyes. The rain slicked her skin, making her smile. Born of Mother Nature’s wrath, she had become the hurricane itself: a living appetite constantly stalking its next prey. Her auburn hair wove around her hands, around her body, as if it were a breathing creature caressing its mistress.

  She was unafraid. She was unashamed. She was unfettered in her appetites.

  And she was hungry.

  She turned her eyes northwest toward a shore too far away to see. Through the howling wind and driving rain, through the opacity of clouds, she sensed fear. Smelled its sweet sourness on the salt spray of the savage sea below her. It wafted to her and she inhaled it deeply. The flowering scent of human depravity. The terror of victim below attacker. The wanton carnality of unrestrained desire.

  Wrath.

  Avarice.

  Lust.

  Spiced with fear, these emotions came to her as twirling lines of scent, sound, and light. A beacon leading her landward.

  She spread her arms wide, inviting the winds around her to drive their rains against her skin. They lacerated her with a wet sting. Her first utterance upon the earth was a moan of intense pleasure. She laid back her head, staring up at a boiling sky of darkness arcing and booming with the power of her passage into the world.
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  It was her time now. The perfect moment for casting an anchor upon this world for He Who Was To Come. She closed her eyes and gathered the power of the storm inside her, undulating as it rocked through her in waves. She resonated with the magnetic lines of psychic power fingering her entire body.

  Before she spoke, the winds calmed. The lightning paused. She opened her eyes to the distant shore.

  “I am coming.”

  * * *

  Stavros was shaking. Still.

  The noises, those terrible sounds, were subsiding like Helen herself as she moved northeast. But they were still in his brain. Three hours ago, the sounds of the second storm were overrun by the clamor of the prison klaxons followed quickly by sharp screams. And not the jungle calls of the inmates as they staved off boredom by tossing catcalls at Helen, either. These were the guttural cries of men and women suffering agony in death.

  He hadn’t moved an inch from beneath the Steelcase desk. During the commotion, he’d heard feet running, streaking on the floor, up the corridor. Someone even cracked open the door to his temporary office. They must’ve decided it was empty, because they’d moved on quickly.

  All had been relatively quiet for, what, the last half an hour? His watch had broken when his chair fell over backward and his cell phone was dead, so he was guessing at the time. But Stavros thought Saturday’s sunrise would be happening soon. He hadn’t slept all night. And he needed to piss like a racehorse. But he couldn’t make himself move.

  In the heart of a horror show, that’s where he was.

  Step right up, folks! said a little demon in his brain. Don’t mind the rain! This show must go on!

  Jesus, why’d he ever leave the university? Why couldn’t they have come up with a different testing protocol, a different study group?

  Thinking of the Serenity Six made Stavros shudder. His cramped legs trembled beneath him. The first screams had been answered by men and women shouting orders, trying to regain control. He’d even thought he’d heard the big guard, Bradford, the one who’d subdued Marsten on the gurney, trying to organize his men. But it’d been hard to hear anything above the blaring alarm. The whole prison had sounded like the Titanic going down after striking the iceberg.

  Running footsteps. Surprised screams. The sound of a man choking on his own blood. The sound of another man, exultant in the anarchy.

  He’d recognized that particular man’s voice. Peter Marsten. Marsten was out. He was roaming the prison, killing guards. In rather gruesome ways, it seemed.

  How was that possible? He’d been strapped down beyond all hope of escape. And even if he’d gotten free, how could he possibly overpower every guard in the place, even assuming their force was greatly reduced during the storm watch?

  But he knew the answer. Marsten hadn’t been alone. Stavros had heard others, too. Some of the hooters and howlers from earlier. He’d recognized the timbre of their voices. And worse still—after the initial pandemonium ceased, all seemed to defer to Marsten.

  Jesus, he’s their leader, Stavros realized. God, what an utter failure Serenity is.

  Maybe he would lose tenure after all.

  He just couldn’t understand it. What had gone so wrong? Not only did the gene replacement introduced by the Serenity Virus not effect permanent, positive change in its host … the host seemed even more impulsive than before. He’d heard others of his six test subjects participating in the massacre. Especially Maggie Spinks. She’d sounded nearly orgasmic as she held one of the female guards down and …

  Stavros tried to shake the images from his head. Images painted with the brush of terror in his ears. The woman’s pleading. The primal shrieks for mercy, unanswered. Maggie’s ravenous laughter.

  He couldn’t stand thinking about it. About the suffering Serenity had caused. About the monsters this particular Doctor Frankenstein had created. I’m a friggin’ literary cliché, he thought. How academically appropriate.

  And Marsten. Marsten’s voice above all of them. Marsten was indeed his creature, Stavros realized. Genes stitched together to create something greater than the whole: a better man. A more evolved psychopath.

  And here he was, hiding under his desk, a group of madmen on the prowl. His madmen … and women. But all had remained quiet for a while. That fact worried him even more than the sounds of the insane asylum had before.

  God, he needed to piss. He had two choices. Stay here and lose control of his bladder or try and find a bathroom. Eventually, he knew, he’d have to get out from under this desk. The quiet reassured him in that regard, at least. Might as well be now, to find a bathroom.

  Tentatively, wincing at the slightest scrape, Stavros pushed the chair away from his hidey-hole. He tried to move, found his legs locked in the position they’d held for hours. He swung around slowly under the desk, careful not to bump his head.

  He inched himself slowly out, moving the chair quietly in front of him as he went. Finally, he was clear and able to get onto his knees. His circulation quickened and he barely kept himself from crying out from the pain. The scientist slowly rose to his feet and hobbled to the door, legs protesting. He darted a glance through its tiny Plexiglas window.

  The red light from the silent alarm winked slowly, reflecting off the sweating white walls. The corridor looked deserted. Brief lightning flashes showed him more glimpses of the hallway. Shadows leapt out of the darkness only to fall away again. He closed his eyes and exhaled. That’s all they’d been. Bloody shadows sketched by the lightning and alarm lights.

  Stavros placed his hand on the knob and turned it. Swallowing his fear, he opened the door and made his way slowly into the corridor. He pressed himself hard against the wall, as if that would somehow hide him should an inmate round the corner ahead. But he didn’t stop. His bladder drove him forward, faster than he felt it was safe to move. He found the door to the next wing wedged open. He sneaked a peek through the crack.

  Again, nothing moved. Red light blinking. Empty hallway.

  His eyes found the staff men’s room thirty feet down the corridor on the left. He moved into the next wing. His bladder carried enough courage for the rest of him. The closer Stavros got to the men’s room, the faster he moved. When he reached its door, he walked right in, all caution lost to the need to relieve himself. The emergency light wasn’t pulsing in here, so the restroom was pitch black. But the thousands of other times he’d moved through a men’s room guided his steps. He’d already unbuckled his belt and unzipped his fly by the time his hands found the stainless steel urinal. Barely in time, he even managed to aim.

  Relief coursed through him. He closed his eyes and reveled in the moment of physical ecstasy. He even ignored the danger from the steady sound his urine made as it splashed the steel. Stavros allowed the fear to flow out of him with it.

  It felt like forever, but he finally finished. Shake, tap-tap, zip.

  Out of habit he reached for the urinal’s handle, then stopped cold. With the immediate necessity taken care of, his sense of being prey returned. That’s when he noticed the dripping sound. Not a surprise in a men’s room, he told himself. Water was dripping somewhere. Maybe he’d noticed it before and dismissed it during his urgency to find relief. He looked around uselessly in the dark for the source.

  Who gives a damn? he thought. But his scientific curiosity kicked in. Now, on top of the slow drip, he heard a slight squeaking noise. What the hell is that, now?

  Both sounds were coming from one of the stalls.

  As a man of science, Stavros was not superstitious. Empirical detail, properly organized and analyzed, precluded the need for unconfirmed belief born of fear. And that was all he believed superstition to be. But recent events had overwhelmed his ability to assimilate and evaluate his environment, to remain in control. He felt at sea, absolutely clueless about what was going on around him. So while his rational self told him that water dripping in a men’s room was nothing to be afraid of, a demon in the back of his brain teased him otherwise.
/>   Let’s get the hell out of here, he urged them both.

  But his need to know drove him through the darkness toward the stall. He diverted, grabbing a handful of paper towels and made his way back to the men’s room door. He cracked it first, confirmed that no one was nearby, and opened the door wide. The red light, pulsing and faint, was better than no light at all. He stuffed the paper towels under the door to keep it open.

  Stavros returned to the stall. The on-again, off-again emergency light showed him snapshots. It almost synced perfectly with the

  dink … dink … dink

  coming from inside the stall. Water dripping into a stainless steel toilet?

  A quick look toward the ceiling above the stall showed him a glimpse of something else. But Stavros couldn’t tell what it was as the emergency light came and went, came and went. When the light returned enough times, he saw it was something hanging from the ceiling brace over the stall.

  Something hanging from a strap.

  The light winked out, then returned.

  A gurney strap.

  dink … dink … dink

  Redness. Blackness. Redness again.

  Can we please get the hell out of here?

  But he needed to know. However bad it was, he needed to know.

  Stavros slowly pushed the stall door inward.

  dink … dink … dink

  A body hung by its feet, swaying. Everything was red. Of course it was.

  Black. Red. Black again.

  Marsten’s handiwork. Stavros knew that instantly because the mutilated man hanging upside down was Bradford. He recognized him despite the red smile—or frown, from this angle—marking his neck from ear to ear. Despite the gout of flesh removed from the left side of his neck.

  He’d been tied like a hog and allowed to drain.

  dink … dink … dink

  The blood tolling flatly on the steel of the toilet bowl, one drop at a time.

  The scientist put a hand to his mouth but couldn’t force his eyes to close. He stared at Bradford’s face masked in blood, painted by gravity. Behind him, beyond the men’s room door, the sun was rising, adding a hazy orange pallor to the pulsing redness of the alarm light. At the precise moment Stavros wished to see so much less, the dawn insisted he see it all.