Deadfall: A Post-Humans Story Read online

  A Post-Humans story:

  Thurston Bassett

  Kalamity Press

  Published by Kalamity Press, Portland, Australia

  kalamitypress.com

  thurstonbassett.com

  Copyright © 2016 Thurston Bassett

  All rights reserved.

  No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding of cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: 978-0-9944093-2-4 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-0-9944093-3-1 (print)

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover by Pulp Studio

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  Also by Kalamity Press

  Thurston Bassett

  The League Book one of the Post-Humans

  Jack Lorde A Post-Humans Story

  Ben Langdon

  The Miranda Contract

  The Adventures of Charlie Conti: Book One

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Sample: The League

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  The front door slammed and echoed down the corridor.

  Cynthia was suddenly wide-awake.

  Dan was home.

  Dan was her stepfather. He had been with Cynthia’s mother for about two years. During those years they had broken up twice, and both times Cynthia had wished like hell that they would stay broken up.

  It was Cynthia’s last year of high school and she was turning eighteen in three weeks. All she wanted for her birthday was to move out of that house and be free of the drama.

  Alone.

  This night was the same as most Friday nights; Dan would be out to all hours and he would come home shitfaced. Not that Cynthia had a problem with drinking, she enjoyed drinking with her friends, but Dan was a different kind of drunk. Every time it was the same, like clockwork.

  After the door slammed he would stomp into the kitchen and check the fridge. As per usual there was no alcohol in the fridge so he would wake Cynthia’s mother and ask why.

  This is how the fighting starts.

  Cynthia rolled onto her back and took a deep breath. She was having enough trouble sleeping tonight before the racket started. She was sweating and had the shakes. She felt like she had a fever.

  She squeezed her eyes closed against the nausea and the noise.

  Her mother was yelling now and Dan was yelling back.

  The regular Friday night orchestra.

  Her skin burned and felt tight. She was horribly uncomfortable. She needed to cool herself off.

  Cynthia sat up and looked around the room. In the glow of the streetlight outside she could see her high school books strewn about the room, in untidy piles where she had left them before bed.

  She scanned for the bottle of water she usually had with her.

  It wasn’t there.

  She would have to leave her room.

  She swung her legs out of the bed and tried to stand, but her brain throbbed behind her eyes.

  She stumbled over to the bedroom door and undid the latch.

  Outside the voices were amplified once the door was open and the sound was crippling. Cynthia held her head between her hands and strained her eyes to see clearly.

  The bathroom door was wide open and the light was on, so Cynthia went to the sink and turned on the cold tap. She lapped up handfuls of cold water and rubbed it on her face and the back of her neck.

  She looked at her reflection. She looked ill. Her eyes were red and there were bags under her eyes. Her blonde hair was a wavy mess.

  She felt the tears burning her eyes and her stomach rising up in her throat. She needed the fighting to stop.

  A loud crash told her that Dan had smashed a glass that she had left on the sink earlier that night.

  The crunches that followed told her that he was stepping on the broken glass with his shoes.

  Another throb in Cynthia’s head nearly made her collapse. She was so ill and Dan was so selfish.

  She left the bathroom and stumbled up the corridor to the kitchen and lounge room where all the noise was coming from.

  Cynthia stood in the doorway with her pajamas on. It was a storm opening up in front of her. Dan threw things and her mother did the same and they both tried to yell over each other’s words.

  “You need to stop.” Cynthia said as she stood there.

  Neither heard or cared.

  “Stop fighting!” she called louder. The strain, making her head ache more.

  Dan turned to her with dazed unfocused eyes and pink cheeks. “Piss off kid. This is nothing to do with you!”

  Cynthia’s mother glanced at her with red eyes and a bruised face. “Go to bed Cynthy. Stay out of this!”

  Dan and her mother turned to each other and renewed their battle.

  Cynthia merely stood for a few moments trying to focus her eyes and ignore the pain.

  A heat rose in her skin. It was a heat she had never felt before. Her hands tingled and goose bumps covered her skin.

  She felt separated from her body, like she was stronger than her real self.

  She focused her eyes again on the fighting happening in front of her. For the first time in her life she felt like she had the strength to stop it.

  Her mother stumbled back after receiving another blow to the face. The woman barely propped herself up against the kitchen bench.

  Cynthia paced across the kitchen with her eyes fixed on Dan. She could hear the glass crunching under her bare feet, but she couldn’t feel the pain. As she drew closer, her body began to vibrate.

  She wasn’t shivering, she felt like she was a character in a piece of old film vibrating in and out of focus before the film snaps.

  Dan looked at her and narrowed his eyes.

  “Did I, or did I not tell you to piss off?”

  Cynthia’s blood was boiling as she drew closer.

  “What the hell do you think you are dong? Do you wanna get your arse kicked? Is that it?”

  Cynthia lunged forward, screaming and Dan was thrown back against the kitchen bench, hard. Dan groaned, but grappled with Cynthia’s swinging fists and sharp fingernails.

  Dan reached behind him and grabbed a dinner plate from the edge of the sink and swung it hard into the side of Cynthia’s head.

  There was a crack as the plate broke and fell apart, but the crack wasn’t just the plate. Somewhere in Cynthia’s face bones broke and blood floo
ded out of her nose. Her eyes were wide with shock, and Dan even paused a moment when he realized what he had done.

  “You stupid bitch! Look at what you have done?” Dan glared at the girl as she collapsed.

  Her mother sobbed and tried to venture closer. “Cynthia! Oh, my baby.”

  “She… She should have stayed the fuck out of it!” Dan was excusing himself from injuring Cynthia, but as she stared up from the floor, she could see the guilt in his eyes.

  “She should have gone to bed!” Dan said, gritting his teeth.

  Dan was holding Cynthia up by her wrist and then he let her fall back onto the floor amongst the broken glass, where she stared up at him with wide blue eyes.

  Rather than call an ambulance or take her to hospital, Dan knelt down and yelled at her face.

  Cynthia couldn’t make out half of the words, but she could tell that he was abusing her for getting in his way.

  It was her fault that she was hurt.

  Then he started hitting her in the head with his fists. He was blinded behind his own tears, but he still lashed out at the object of his own guilt.

  Over and over again, he hit her.

  She could feel her head being knocked around and the blood spattered into her eyes and made everything hazy, but she couldn’t feel the pain.

  Dan sat up to look at what he had done.

  The girl splayed out on the floor in her pajamas in a sea blood and broken glass.

  “How could you let me do it?” Dan muttered to himself.

  Then he turned to Cynthia’s mother, who stood gaping with tear sodden eyes at the scene on the kitchen floor.

  “You killed my girl…”

  Dan glared at her. “What did you say?”

  “You killed my baby…” She muttered through gritted teeth.

  “You are blaming me? She attacked me, and you let her. Now you are blaming me?” He stepped over Cynthia’s still body and out of the kitchen toward her mother.

  “What are you doing, Danny?” She pleaded.

  Dan shoved her backward, so she fell over the coffee table and he knelt over her.

  In a blurred world of echoes and vibrations Cynthia could hear Dan’s voice and her mother’s screaming.

  She couldn’t move her body, but she knew that she had to. She needed to help her mother.

  She concentrated as hard as she possibly could to move her broken body. She needed to.

  She could feel the clicking and grinding of bone and the ache of her muscles. The more she concentrated the more she could feel, her body was getting it’s feeling back.

  She could hear Dan’s sobbing voice and her mother’s crying in the background, and it became clearer with each moment that passed.

  She gasped.

  She was suddenly strong again.

  She flexed her fingers and blinked her eyes into focus.

  She forced herself up off the floor, the broken glass crunching under her palms and cut the skin. As she stood on wobbly legs she could see Dan holding her mother down trying to reason with her between punches.

  Cynthia needed it to stop.

  As she padded over the kitchen floor towards the scene of the violence, pieces of glass broke and cracked under her feet.

  Dan turned when he heard the sound.

  Her mother lay back gasping and sobbing.

  Dan’s eyes were wide with horror.

  He was seeing the dead return to life.

  Cynthia stood in front of him covered in blood and bruises.

  Her pajamas were stained and spattered.

  Cynthia’s eyes were cold. She was filed with a boiling rage, but on the outside there was nothing but deep blue eyes staring out from between rust stained curtains of golden hair.

  Dan stammered, making up his mind about how to react.

  Cynthia reached out with both her blood stained hands and held his face between them.

  Dan’s expression changed from horrified confusion to open mouthed terror.

  Cynthia looked into his eyes, watching his life slip away into her fingers.

  She could feel his life force like a fuzzy glow that filled his body, but little by little she drank it into her fingertips.

  “What…what?” Dan stammered.

  Cynthia’s mother propped herself up on her elbows and saw her blood covered daughter standing fearlessly in front of Dan.

  “Cynthy?”

  Cynthia ignored her mother and focused on the man in front of her.

  His face began to turn pale and gaunt and his eyes turned red.

  He was in incredible pain, but he couldn’t move a muscle.

  Then Cynthia finished it.

  She drew in the last spark of life from his body and he went limp.

  Dan’s head hit the floor with a dull crack.

  “What happened, Cynthy?” Her mother asked wiping the blood from her split lips.

  “He can’t hurt anyone again,” was all Cynthia could manage to say. She looked at her hands and felt the throbbing energy she had just taken.

  It then dawned on her what she had done.

  She had killed a man.

  Her mother got up off the floor crying and tried to hold her daughter, but Cynthia stepped back. “You can’t touch my skin anymore.”

  “What?” Her mother said, still trying to hold her.

  “You can’t touch my skin, Mum!” She cried, trying to get her to listen.

  Her mother looked down at the bluish skinned corpse on the lounge room floor and then she looked at Cynthia’s hands, the ones that had been so tenderly holding Dan’s face. She couldn’t comprehend what had happened.

  “I did it with my skin, Mum.”

  Her mother stared at her blinking. “Stay the way you are, Cynthy.” She looked down at the body again. “We need to call the police.”

  Cynthia’s eyes opened wide, as she was about to protest.

  “Don’t worry, honey.” Her mother nodded at the body. “That prick has made a enough of a mess of both of us that we can say it was because of the drinking…or a heart attack.”

  Cynthia nodded.

  “Sit down, honey. They won’t blame us.”

  Cynthia sat on the chair and closed her eyes. As soon as she did the tears came and they burned. She could feel them streaming down her face in warm trickles cutting paths through the sticky patches of drying blood.

  Chapter 1

  Courtney Kennedy stepped out of the elevator.

  She smiled at the young man in the powder blue shirt. He blushed and pushed his glasses further up his nose.

  The woman he saw had wide sparkling green eyes that lingered on him longingly.

  She strolled confidently between the glass box offices of the solicitors and barristers. She had her mission and she would not deviate from it.

  “Excuse me ma’am?” a handsome blonde man stood in the doorway of an office cubicle. “Can I help you at all?”

  He saw a friendly old woman carrying a basket. “Oh, no, I’m fine. I’m just bringing my son some lunch. He works here. He’s very successful. We always knew he would be…”

  The blonde man shook his head and broke the conversation short. “I’m sure he’s looking forward to it.” He smiled and closed the office door.

  Courtney kept going, up another set of stairs.

  The law firm was quite prestigious in Melbourne. They handled a lot of high profile cases even some Post-Human ones had been discretely resolved by this group. Fischer & Beckett was its name and they were well respected in the legal community.

  As Courtney reached the top of the stairs she collided a with man in a dark grey suit. He was in his forties but was prematurely bald. Anger flashed in his eyes as they ran into one another. The folders he was carrying fell and spilled onto the carpet near the photocopier.

  “What the hell did you think you were…” he began to raise his voice, then calmed when he saw the young intern in the short skirt on all fours, on the floor trying to collect his papers.

  At leas
t that was what he saw…

  Courtney didn’t care about his stupid paperwork; she was busy.

  She kept marching along the corridor, checking the names on doors.

  The man at the photocopier was confused as he found himself collecting the fallen documents.

  Wasn’t there a young woman?

  Courtney found that people didn’t ask questions if they saw what they wanted to see.

  She was only eighteen, but she already had a reputation. Among the people with the right bank accounts, she was known simply as Mirage. Her Post-Human ability was being able to manipulate the minds of people close to her and show them whatever she wanted them to see. The only downside was that this mirage only lasted for several seconds at a time.

  Courtney had always been an outsider, who was never noticed by the boys at high school and she never felt like she fitted into any social group. When her ability developed she manipulated everyone who had made her feel rejected. She was still that ordinary-looking girl and she still played mind games with those around her. The young man at the elevator saw a sexy girl that was well out of his league, the blonde man downstairs saw an old woman that was going to talk his ears off.

  She never got tired of messing with people.

  She was plain and nondescript when she walked past the women in the corridor. Looking unattractive ensured that she wouldn’t be noticed.

  She saw a slight smile of self-assurance on the face of one young solicitor. She was glad she was prettier than the girl that walked past. The men saw an old woman or an attractive and aggressive looking businesswoman. Both of which men didn’t want to talk to in passing.

  Finally, head office.

  Courtney looked around for the office she wanted.

  Jamie Fischer’s office was the largest.

  She saw the plaque on an office on the mezzanine. That was it.