Rebirth (The Praegressus Project Book 1) Read online

  REBIRTH

  Book I

  of

  The Praegressus Project

  Aaron Hodges

  Written by Aaron Hodges

  Edited by M. M. Chabot

  Proofread by Sara Pinnell

  Cover Art by Christian Bentulan

  The Praegressus Project

  Book 1: Rebirth

  Book 2: Renegades

  Book 3: Retaliation

  Other Series:

  The Sword of Light Trilogy

  Book 1: Stormwielder

  Book 2: Firestorm

  Book 3: Soul Blade

  Copyright © March 2017 Aaron Hodges.

  First Edition

  All rights reserved.

  The National Library of New Zealand

  ISBN-13: 978-0994147516

  Aaron Hodges was born in 1989 in the small town of Whakatane, New Zealand. He studied for five years at the University of Auckland, completing a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology and Geography, and a Masters of Environmental Engineering. After working as an environmental consultant for two years, he grew tired of office work and decided to quit his job and explore the world. During his travels he picked up an old draft of a novel he once wrote in High School – titled The Sword of Light – and began to rewrite the story. Six months later he published his first novel – Stormwielder. And the rest, as they say, is history.

  Fans of Aaron can subscribe to his VIP list for a free short story and the chance to receive advanced copies of his coming novels:

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  Boy, is it hard to write a new story. I never realised quite how easy I had it, piggybacking off the imagination of my childhood self. I would say 60-70% of the plot for The Sword of Light was already written when I picked it back up in 2015, at the very least. This new series was an altogether different matter. So, let’s see what you think!

  For the child inside us all.

  Let them soar.

  PROLOGUE

  Angela Fallow squinted through the rain-streaked windshield, struggling to make out details in the lengthening gloom. A few minutes ago the streetlights had flickered into life, but despite their yellowed light, shadows still hung around the house across the street. Tall hedges marked the boundary with the neighbouring properties, while a white picket fence stood between her car and the old cottage.

  Leaning closer to the window, Angela held her breath to keep the glass from fogging, and willed her eyes to pierce the twilight. But beyond the brightly-lit sidewalk, there was no sign of movement. Letting out a long sigh, she sat back in her seat and smiled with quiet satisfaction. There was no sign of anyone outside the house, no silent shadows slipping closer to the warm light streaming from the windows.

  At least, none that could be seen.

  Berating herself for her nerves, Angela turned her attention to the touchscreen on her dashboard. Its soft glow brightened as she tapped its screen, making her glad for the tinted windows. No one in the house would be able to see the car was occupied.

  Angela pursed her lips, studying the charts on the screen one last time. It displayed the driver’s license of a young woman in her early forties. Auburn hair hung around her shoulders and she wore the faintest hint of a smile on her red lips. The smile spread to her cheeks, crinkling the skin around her olive-green eyes.

  Margaret Sanders

  Beneath the picture was a description of the woman: her height, weight, license number, last known address, school and work history, her current occupation as a college teacher, and marital status. The last was listed as widowed with a single child. Her husband had succumbed to cancer almost a decade previously.

  Shaking her head, Angela looked again at the woman’s eyes, wondering what could have driven her to this end. She had a house, a son, solid employment as a teacher. Why would she throw it all away, when she had so much to lose?

  Idly, she wondered whether Mrs Sanders would have done things differently if given another chance. The smile lines around her eyes were those of a kind soul, and her alleged support for the resistance fighters seemed out of character. It was a shame the government did not give second chances – especially not with traitors of the state.

  Now both mother and son would suffer for her actions.

  Tapping the screen, Angela pulled up the son’s file. Christopher Sanders, at eighteen, was the reason she had come tonight. The assault team would handle the mother and any of her associates who might be on the property, but the son had been selected for the Praegressus project. That meant he had to be taken alive and unharmed.

  His profile described him as five-foot-eleven, with a weight of 150 pounds – not large by any measure. Her only concern was the black belt listed beneath his credentials, though Angela knew such accomplishments usually meant little in reality. Particularly when the target was unarmed, unsuspecting and outnumbered.

  A picture of her target popped onto the screen with another tap, and a flicker of discomfort spread through her stomach. His brunet hair showed traces of his mother’s auburn locks, while the hazel eyes must have descended from a dominant bey2 allele in his father’s chromosome. A hint of light-brown facial hair traced the edges of his jaw, mingling with the last traces of teenage acne. Despite his small size, he had the broad, muscular shoulders of an athlete, and there was little sign of fat on his youthful face.

  Sucking in a breath, Angela flicked off the screen. This was not her first assignment, though she hoped it might be her last. For months now she had overseen the collection of subjects for the Praegressus project, and the task had never gotten easier. The faces of the children she had taken haunted her, staring at her when she closed her eyes. Her only consolation was that without her, those children would have suffered the same fate as their parents. At least the research facility gave them a fighting chance.

  And looking into the boy’s eyes, she knew he was a fighter.

  Angela closed her eyes, shoving aside her doubt, and reached out and pressed a button on the car’s console.

  “Are you in position?” she spoke to the empty car.

  “Ready when you are, Fallow,” a man replied.

  Nodding her head, Fallow reached beneath her seat and retrieved a steel briefcase. Unclipping its restraints, she lifted out a jet injector and held it up to the light. The stainless-steel instrument appeared more like a gun than a piece of medical equipment, but it served its purpose well enough. Once her team had Chris restrained, it would be a simple matter to use the jet injector to anesthetise the young man for transport.

  Removing a vial of etorphine from the case, she screwed it into place and pressed a button on the side. A short hiss confirmed it was pressurised. She eyed the clear liquid, hoping the details in the boy’s file were correct. She had prepared the dosage of etorphine earlier for Chris’s age and weight, but a miscalculation could prove fatal.

  “Fallow, still waiting on your signal?” the voice came again.

  Fallow bit her lip and closed her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she shivered in the cold of the car.

  If not you, then someone else.

  She opened her eyes. “Go.”

  1

  Chris let out a long sigh as he settled into the worn-out sofa and then cursed as a broken spring stabbed at his backside. Wriggling sideways to avoid it, he leaned back and reached for the remote, only to realise it had been left beside the television. Muttering under his breath, he climbed back to his feet, retrieved the remote and flicked on the television, then collapsed back into the chair. This time he was careful to avoid t
he broken springs.

  He closed his eyes as the blue glow of the television lit the room. The shriek of the adverts quickly followed, but he barely had the energy to be annoyed. He was still studying full-time, but now his afternoons were taken up by long hours at the construction site. Even then, they were struggling. His only hope was winning a place at the California State University. Otherwise, he would have little choice but to accept the apprenticeship his supervisor was offering.

  “Another attack was reported today from the rural town of Julian,” a reporter’s voice broke through the stream of adverts, announcing the start of the six o’clock news.

  Chris’s ears perked up and he opened his eyes to look at the television. Images flashed across the screen of an old mining town, its dusty dirt roads and rundown buildings looking like they had not been touched since the 1900s. A row of horse-drawn carriages lined the street, their owners standing beside them.

  The sight was a common one in the rural counties of the Western Allied States. In the thirty years since the states of California, Oregon and Washington had declared their independence, the divide between urban and rural communities had grown exponentially. Today there were few citizens in the countryside who could afford luxuries such as cars and televisions.

  “We’re just receiving word the police have arrived on the scene,” the reporter continued.

  On the television, a black van with the letters SWAT painted on the side had just pulled up. The rear doors swung open, and a squad of black-garbed riot-police leapt out. They gathered around the van and then moved on past the carriages. Dust swirled around them, but they moved without hesitation, the camera following them at a distance.

  The image changed as the police moved around a corner into an empty street. The new camera angle looked down at the police from the rooftop of a nearby building. It followed the SWAT unit as they split into two groups and spread out along the street, moving quickly, their rifles at the ready.

  Then the camera panned down the street and refocused on the broken window of a grocery store. The image grew as the camera zoomed, revealing the nightmare inside the store.

  Chris swallowed as images straight from a horror movie flashed across the screen. The remnants of the store lay scattered across the linoleum floor, the contents of broken cans and bottles staining the ground red. Amongst the wreckage, a dozen people lay motionless, face down in the dark red liquid.

  The camera tilted and zoomed again, bringing the figures into sharper focus. Chris’s stomach twisted and he forced himself to look away. But even the brief glimpse had been enough to see the people in the store were dead. Their pale faces stared blankly into space, the blood drained away, their skin marked by jagged streaks of red and patches of purple. Few, if any of the victims were whole. Pieces of humanity lay scattered across the floor, the broken limbs still dripping blood.

  Finally turning back to the television, Chris swallowed as the camera panned in on the sole survivor of the carnage. The man stood amidst the wreckage of the store, blood streaking his face and arms, stained his shirt red. His head was bowed, and the only sign of life was the rhythmic rise and fall of his shoulders. As the camera zoomed on his face, his cold grey eyes were revealed. They stared at the ground, blank and lifeless.

  Standing, Chris looked away, struggling to contain the meagre contents of his stomach.

  “The Chead is thought to have awakened around sixteen hundred hours,” the reporter started to speak again, drawing Chris back to the screen. “Special forces have cleared the immediate area and are now preparing to engage with the creature.”

  “Two hours.” Chris jumped as a woman’s voice came from behind him.

  Spinning on his heel, he let out a long breath as his mother walked in from the kitchen. “I thought you had a night class!” he gasped, his heart racing.

  His mother shook her head, a slight smile touching her face. “We finished early.” She shrugged, then waved at the television. “They’ve been standing around for two hours. Watching that thing. Some of those people were still alive when it all started. They could have been saved. Would have, if they’d been somebody important.”

  Chris pulled himself off the couch and moved across to embrace his mother. Wrapping his arms around her, he kissed her cheek. She returned the gesture, and then they both turned to watch the SWAT team approach the grocery store. The men in black moved with military precision, jogging down the dirt road, sticking close to the buildings. If the Chead came out of its trance, no one wanted to be caught in the open. While the creatures looked human, they possessed a terrifying speed, and had the strength to tear full-grown men limb from limb.

  As the scene inside the grocery store demonstrated.

  Absently, Chris clutched his mother’s arm tighter. The Chead were almost legend throughout the Western Allied States, a dark shadow left over from the days of the American War. The first whispers of the creatures were believed to have started in 2030, not long after the United States had fallen.

  At first they had been dismissed as rumour by a country eager to move on from the decade-long conflict of the American War. The attacks had been blamed on resistance fighters in rural communities, who had never fully supported their severance from the United States. So the government had imposed curfews over rural communities and sent in the military to quell the problem.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the young nation had moved forward, and prospered. The pacific coast had boomed as migrants arrived from the allied nations of Mexico and Canada, replacing the thousands of lives lost in the American War.

  But through the years, reports of attacks continued, and accounts by survivors eventually filtered through to the media. Each claimed the slaughter had been carried out by one or two individuals – often someone well known in the community. One day, they would be an ordinary neighbour, mother, father, child. The next, they would become the monster now standing in the grocery store.

  It was not until one of the creatures was captured, that the government had admitted its mistake. By then, rural communities had suffered almost a decade of terror at the hands of the monstrosities. Newsrooms and government agencies had been beside themselves with the discovery, with blame pointed in every direction from poor rural police-reporting, to secret operations by the Texans to destabilise the Western Allied States.

  The government had extended curfews across the entire country and increased military patrols, but the measures had done little to slow the spread of attacks. Last year, in 2050, the first Chead sighting had been reported in Los Angeles, and was quickly followed by attacks in Portland and Seattle. Fortunately, they had yet to reach the streets of San Francisco. Even so, a perpetual State of Emergency had been put into effect.

  On the television, the SWAT team had reached the grocery store and were now gathering outside, their rifles trained on the entrance. One lowered his rifle and stepped towards it, the others covering him from behind. Reaching the door, he stretched out an arm and began to pull it open.

  The Chead did not make a sound as it tore through the store windows and barrelled into the man. A screech came through the old television speakers as the men scattered before the Chead’s ferocity. With one hand, it grabbed its victim by the throat and hurled him across the street. The thud as he struck the ground was audible over the reporter’s microphone.

  The crunch of their companion’s untimely demise seemed to snap the other members of the squadron into action. The first bangs of gunfire echoed over the television speakers, but the Chead was already moving. It tore across the dirt road as bullets raised dust-clouds around it, and smashed into another squad member. A scream echoed up from the street as man and Chead went down, disappearing into a cloud of dust.

  Despite the risk of hitting their comrade, the rest of the SWAT team did not stop firing. The chance of survival once a Chead had its hands on you was zero to none, and no one wanted to take the chance it might escape.

  With a roar, the Chead reared up from the dust, th
en spun as a bullet struck it in the shoulder. Blood blossomed from the wound as it staggered backwards, its grey eyes wide, flickering with surprise. It reached up and touched a finger to the hole left by the bullet, its brow creasing with confusion.

  Then the rest of the men opened fire, and the battle was over.

  2

  The screen of the old CRT television flickered to black as Chris’s mother moved across and switched it off. Her face was pale when she turned towards him, and a shiver ran through her as she closed her eyes.

  “Your Grandfather would be ashamed, Chris,” she said, shaking her head. “He went to war against the United States because he believed in our freedom. He fought to keep us free, not to spend decades haunted by the ghosts of the past.”

  Chris shivered. He’d never met his grandfather, but his mother and grandmother talked of him enough that Chris felt he knew him. When the United States had refused to accept the independence of the Western Allied States, his grandfather had accepted the call to defend their young nation. He had enlisted in the WAS Marines and had shipped off to war. The conflict had quickly expanded to engulf the whole of North America. Only the aid of Canada and Mexico had given the WAS the strength to survive, and eventually prevail against the aggression of the United States.

  Unfortunately, his grandfather had not survived to see the world change. He had learned of Chris’s birth while stationed in New Mexico, but had never gotten the chance to return to see his grandson grow. So Chris knew him only from photos, and the stories of his mother and grandmother.

  “Things will change soon.” Chris shook his head. “Surely?”

  His mother crinkled her nose. “I’ve been saying that for ten years,” she said as she moved towards the kitchen, ruffling Chris’s hair as she passed him, “but things only ever seem to get worse.”