The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

arrangement. Yes.” Ignatius cocked the hammer. “Until I spent time with him this evening. He agreed with my assessment. Anyone willing to murder a son who poses no immediate threat to the mission is, by extension, a clear and present danger to the larger group. He asked only that I plan carefully, make this clean, and ensure a speedy arrest based on damning evidence. The man who will be charged is a felon, recently released from prison, with a long history of break-ins, always using a weapon just like this.”

Ignatius raised the volume to maximum. Tom held out his hands. Ignatius thought he might fall to the floor and supplicate himself. It would have been the one unpredictable moment. Instead, Tom begged:

“I made the decision. Not Marlena. She didn’t know about the …”

Ignatius rolled his eyes. “Of course, she did.”

He pulled the trigger. Tom’s chest exploded as he crashed into the night table and toppled a lamp. Marlena screamed, more emotion than Ignatius expected. He didn’t give her time to beg. When it was over, half her face was gone, the pillows coated in blood and brain matter.

He wasn’t sorry to see them go.

The next steps were critical. He brought along physical evidence and needed to work quickly. The miserable sod who’d be arrested made the misstep of settling down in Albion months ago. He reported to Ignatius between visits to his parole officer. Hair samples, fingerprints, shoeprints. A job mowing lawns in this neighborhood.

Ignatius emptied the Sheridans’ safe.

He hurried. Ignatius needed this to become a crime scene before dawn, long before Jamie might return home. The murders would crush the boy’s spirit, but if he saw the bodies …

No, Ignatius told himself. I won’t do that to you. Trust me, Jamie. This will work out in the end. This was the hard choice but the right one – for all of us. Hard choices change history. You will move past this, Jamie. If your brother is right, you will become something greater than any Chancellor ever thought possible.

 

PART THREE BEYOND THE EDGE

Son,

These must be our final words to you. If you are listening, then you are minutes away from the end of your life. We know how confusing these recent events must be for your young and undeveloped mind.

We believe each human being is born into this universe with a unique purpose built into his genes. The struggle of each man and woman is to uncover this biological purpose and strive with all his might to fulfill it before he dies. In this sense, you have lived a brief but successful life. Through your death, the fates of millions to come will be ensured for centuries. Few humans have been granted such a remarkable gift.

However, we believe you have been denied one essential opportunity: The chance to know the very world into which you were born, and the one your actions will help to create. We have embedded a visual tour of Earth and her colonies inside the Mentor’s program. She will play it for you as you go to your rest. The last images you see before you die will be of the three of us on the day you were born.

With Fondest Regards,

Mother

Father

45

J AMIE HELD THE AK-47 ahead of his body the way Sammie showed him, his finger poised against the trigger. He felt naked and alone, but he refused to die without meaning. He was going to give his friends enough time to escape. He realized a bullet could shatter his skull in less than the blink of an eye, but the thought didn’t terrify him. If death came, he wanted it to be swift and merciless.

He did as Sammie advised and raced to the fattest tree he saw, steadying himself with deep, measured breaths. If the enemy was close by, they come from the north, so Jamie knew focused on a path west. Morning light struggled to cut through the canopy, and the spaces between the trees seemed dark and foreboding. All he could imagine to do was run.

And then, the Earth tilted.

The sunlight disappeared altogether, but the forest floor of thickly-packed leaves and fallen, rotting branches glowed. He viewed the forest as through a fisheye, seeing only the carpet on which he must run, with all else dissolved into darkness. Some fallen leaves fluttered in a breeze that did not exist. Jamie sensed himself losing touch with reality, fading into a realm where he was no longer in charge.

He tightened his grip on the weapon, which no longer felt awkward in his hands, and sprinted. He did not hear the leaves crunching beneath him, and he barely felt the low twigs that snapped against his bare chest as he plowed deep into the forest all but blind. When he reached a slope that would carry him south toward the hunting road and further into the grip of hopelessness, he heard footsteps close behind.

The first machine-gun blasts zinged over his head, one bullet ricocheting off a pine tree dead ahead. The terrain became rugged, with deep gashes in the earth caused by runoff and a pair of fallen trees slowing his escape. He leaped across the second, moss-blanketed tree, ducked down just as additional shots were fired, and rolled up behind the giant log. Only then did he sense blood and realized a bullet grazed him.

The crunching of leaves underfoot exposed his pursuers’ positions. Jamie heard them splitting up, coming around to attack him from either side. Jamie looked over his shoulder to what should have been his path of escape. The darkness brought the forest in upon him, as if confining him in a closet. Yet Jamie saw a possibility, perhaps no more than thirty feet away. The land stopped there, falling. His ears honed in on a