Soul Survivor: excerpt from chapter one

Screams shattered Emrys’s dreams, and thundering footsteps trampled the remains into dust. His eyelids flickered open into the darkness of his living quarters while in the corridor beyond his door, the bellowing continued, a multitude of voices stampeding into his blood and kicking his heart into a frenzy. He bolted upright, threw back the sheet, and swung out of bed. His bare feet hit the floor and the vibrations rose up his legs. The lights activated, and the closer he got to the door, the more the screams and shouts swelled. He hesitated, not wanting to see what madness had struck Endurance.

“You’re only waking now? You’d sleep through Judgement Day.”

He spun at the sound of Nimue’s voice as she crawled out of the hole in the back wall of his room. The diminutive and child-in-looks only Darisami had her almost-black hair fashioned into a high bun. Her hazel eyes were wide and alert on her white as alabaster face.

“What’s going on?” And why had none of the others woken him?

“It’s Absolon. He’s lost it.”

That could mean anything. Absolon was nothing more than a barbarian, and from the sounds coming from outside, it wasn’t unrealistic to assume he was sacking the place. “Lost it? Lost it how?”

“He fed on some souls. Went mad. Fed some more.” She chewed her bottom lip. “Out in the open. The humans saw him and freaked. Some tried to kill him. Others ran and that started a panic.”

Emrys swallowed a curse and looked at the closed door. What would he find on the other side? Five thousand humans lived in Endurance, a city their government had built into and below a mountain when the end of the world came sixty-five years earlier. He and a group of Darisami had snuck into Endurance with the humans before it sealed shut. One of the last cities left on Earth, Endurance was an ark to ensure the survival of the human race and, unwittingly, that of the Darisami.

And now Absolon had broken the covenant.

“Where are the others?”

“Ragnar, Yusef, and Denari are trying to subdue Absolon. Clara and Wyatt are at the exit, trying to keep the humans inside. It’s a bloodbath out there, Emrys. They’re killing humans to quell the uprising, but it’s making it worse.”

How many would be left when they were finished? This had to be stopped. The humans wouldn’t survive if they got outside, and that meant he and all the other Darisami would starve.

“Where did it start?” He pulled on a pair of trousers and his boots.

She held out a shirt to him. “Lower levels but many of the humans are rushing to the top.”

He went to the door.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“We need to keep the humans in, so I’m going up top too.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“What does it matter if they see me now?”

She’d lived fifty-three years pretending to be a ghost flitting through the hidden parts of Endurance, and now it was time to come back to life. And if she was going to be seen as she truly was, he may as well too.

He paused and breathed deep, letting the wrinkles and age spots fade. His gray hair returned to its natural brown. He stole his body back from the ravages of time, so he no longer appeared as a sprightly ninety-year-old but as a fit and healthy thirty. The reclamation returned some of the energy he expended in maintaining a semblance of ageing. Considering the chaos he was about to walk into, he’d need every ounce.

He swiped the touchpad, and the door slid open. A man dashed past, a human following a herd of humans. The hallway outside his quarters on level four was nearly empty, but a cacophony filled the facility. He peered over the balcony to find the floor far below strewn with bodies, some bloodied, others simply lifeless, twisted, trampled. A battlefield in the pits of Hell.

A mob surrounded an armed Yusef. Wasn’t he meant to be capturing Absolon? Yusef released a round of machine gun fire, and the humans fell like wheat beneath a scythe.

Nimue joined Emrys. “They’ll all be slaughtered if we don’t do something.”

He looked above him at the throng on the upper levels. “We need to get to the control room.”

But the control room was also on the top level with the exit. The elevators would be jammed so they had to muscle their way through the stairs. Even then, they’d be clogged with the living and the dead.

“Come on. We have to hurry.”

They joined the exodus of humans belting for the top levels, keeping their heads down and running as far as they could in the hope that no one recognized them in the confusion. Rattles of gunfire followed them. Who else had guns: more of his kind or the humans? It didn’t matter. They needed to get to the control room before too many more humans died.

The ascended the stairs, pushing and shoving the crowd aside, easier to do with their supernatural strength. But when they reached the level beneath the top, they slammed against a bottleneck. The crowd jostled as it continued to grow, and he and Nimue had little room to fit. They got separated but he kept going, and Nimue rejoined him at the head of the stairs, sandwiched between one crowd and another, the gathering no less dense, no less jittery.

The humans pushed and shoved at him as they surged towards the exit, but he needed to go in the other direction. He grabbed the woman next to him, picked her up, and used her to push his way through, letting her go when she hit him in the face. He lifted body after body, and each time he touched a human, the symbol that would separate them from their souls buzzed inside his skull like a firefly trapped in a bottle.

One soul and this would be easier. He’d be stronger. He’d be sated. And they’d fall away from him in terror.

He ground his teeth together. He wouldn’t kill. Not yet. Not until it was necessary.

He held onto the symbol as hard as he held onto the man in front of him. More shouted at him, demanding that he go the other way. The cleared space behind him soon filled as more people swarmed out of the stairwell, and he and Nimue were forgotten. Gunfire in the distance turned heads and bodies to greater danger.

He navigated a path through the crowd, some parting out of fear, others unsure of what had happened. Most people had fixated on the airlock to the outside, but others, perhaps smarter, perhaps more desperate, had targeted the control room. A wall seven people deep surrounded the room. He and Nimue joined them. Its thick glass windows held, despite the banging and the bullets and the begging.

“We need to clear a path to the door.” His insides tugged, demanding a soul, tempting him with an easier solution, the urge that was always there, even after sixty-five years of restricted diet.

“There’s another way.” Nimue grabbed his hand and pulled him to the left, running down the empty hall while everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere. She pulled him into a dark room. The lights winked on and the door slid shut, muffling the sounds like he was back in bed. That seemed like hours ago.

They were in a supply room with bare shelves. Nimue ran towards the back. Halfway along, she dropped to the floor, crawled to the right through the bottom shelves, and lifted aside a plate from the wall to reveal an opening. She slid in, and he followed.

They continued for a few feet, turned left, then right, then right again. Voices permeated the walls. Nimue stopped and spun, putting her legs in front of her. He grabbed her arm before she kicked in the grill.

“Do it gently,” he whispered. “We don’t know who’s in there.”

She tutted, spun back around, and lifted the grill aside with her hands. Light filtered into the tunnel. He held his breath.

The tunnel exited beneath one of the control desks, and Nimue slipped out and hid while Emrys inched forward. Anybody could be in the control room—and they could be armed. And while he wasn’t worried about himself, if bullets were fired, they could damage the consoles.

From his crouched position, he saw one set of legs. Darisami or human? He summoned the harvest symbol and climbed out from under the control desk.

Dark brown skin, broad shoulders, close shaved head. He banished the symbol in a puff of breath. “Hey, Wyatt.”

The Darisami spun, leveling his gun at Emrys. “For fuck’s sake, Emrys. Where the hell have you been?”

“He was sleeping.” Nimue climbed out and dusted off the front of her trousers.

Emrys let the comment slide, his eye drawn to what was happening outside the booth. The realization that Emrys, Nimue, and Wyatt were all on the same side crashed on the faces of some. Others figured there must be a secret entrance. Wild hope entered their eyes, and it spread as one mouthed to another that they should look for a different way in.

“We don’t have much time. Wyatt, guard the tunnel. They’ll come through any minute.”

Wyatt swore. “What are we going to do? We can’t kill them all.”

“The tunnel should slow them down. Shoot a few and they’ll be wary. What’s more important is finding…”

Emrys looked down on the control desk. All the buttons and screens were still intact, but it’d been so long since he’d looked at it that he struggled to remember how it worked.

“What are you looking for?” Nimue asked.

“I’m going to gas everyone.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Not to kill them, just knock them out.”

Nimue paused. “Why didn’t I know this was possible?”

“Take it up with Clara. Or Ragnar. Whoever. We just need to find it.”

Rumblings echoed in the tunnel as too many people tried to come through on their suicide mission. He blocked out their noise and pressed his palm to the screen. It asked for his password.

He entered it.

Wrong.

His heart thudded.

Second attempt…

His hand slipped.

Error message.

Thud again.

Third time…

Access granted.

Wyatt fired a round into the tunnel.

Emrys breathed hard and fast. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. What he needed wasn’t immediately visible. He had to search. One menu, then another. In case of emergency… No, that wasn’t it. More menus, more delving, more disappointment.

Gunshots. A wet palm slapped the floor, followed by gasping breaths and a gargled plea before a bullet cut it short.

There! He found it buried down a select pathway that his fingers remembered and his brain had tried to piece together.

GOD.

He slammed his palm on the button, and gas released out of the air vents, including those in the control room. He turned and watched the humans panic as white mist filled the corridor. They sought refuge, held their breath, but there was no escape. Gas suffocated every part of Endurance within seconds. A perfect solution to quell the maddest of uprisings.

It was a miracle it hadn’t been required before.

The humans collapsed, unconscious, but he and Nimue couldn’t stop. Subduing the humans was only part of the problem. The next mission wouldn’t be so easy.

He swallowed hard to smother the disquiet over what he would soon be required to do, regardless of its necessity. He grabbed a couple of two-way radios from their cradles and gave one to Nimue. He left one on the console tuned to channel four and called Wyatt over to the screen.

“The gas will cut off in another three minutes, and everyone should be out for at least four hours. If we find anyone awake or it looks like they’re starting to stir, we’ll call you and tell you to press the button again.”

He showed Wyatt how to get to the GOD button and gave him his access code.

“Where are you going?” Wyatt asked.

“To catch Absolon.”