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

sound. Sh-tump, sh-tump, sh-tump, sh-tump. When he stared upon the valley, he saw a path of destruction approaching the far side of the creek. Invisible monsters threw aside everything in their path.

He had no words for this. He bent to his knees and stared at the impossible sight. Jamie knew his whole life came down to an exercise in complete futility, as if swimming upstream from Day One.

Then he heard shouts through the forest. Were they real or merely echoes from across time? Had not these voices teased him moments earlier? His mind was an amalgam of images and sensations as the Jewel opened him up to the countless possibilities of all creation. His mind’s eye fell upon feet crushing a carpet of rotted leaves. He heard the desperate, forced breaths of someone who could not run much farther. He felt himself inside the wearied, defeated skin of an obsessed woman who had but one mission left on this Earth. Not even Jamie’s tears blinded him to the image of the rifle poised in Agatha Bidwell’s hands.

In that instant, he saw another way out.

Jamie did not move at first, tilting his head ever so slightly in Lydia’s direction. The hologram smiled with giddiness as she stared out across the stream at the approaching invisible monsters. He saw the glimmer of a tear, and the very notion of the Jewel’s satisfaction repulsed him. Jamie refused to betray his thoughts to her.

However, Jamie felt his blood rise with a familiar, disturbing hunger when he heard footsteps scaling the last slope, seconds away from exiting the forest and spying her prey at last. In a realization almost simultaneous to his impending sense of victory, Jamie also realized what a fool he’d been; he saw the cunning in her eyes.

“Run for your pistol and kill her,” Lydia said.

Yet when Agatha emerged from the forest, Jamie resisted the desire to kill again even though he was awash in the beauty of becoming a destroyer. He felt Lydia’s ever-present glare and heard her insisting that he kill while he still had the chance.

Agatha’s ragged appearance stunned him. Her heavily-bandaged face was badly burned, her hair singed, and her dark clothes ripped. She walked with a powerful limp and was a defeated version of the woman he used to fear each morning. Yet the Jewel made her the scapegoat for everything taken from him. This execution would avenge Sammie’s losses and provide justice for the innocents who died at Agatha’s hands. This would be for Michael and the pain he never deserved. The Jewel goaded him on, insisting that yes, the kill was justified, that nothing Jamie ever did would be as satisfying.

Then he heard another voice. A shout. Familiar, yet out of place. It shouldn’t have been this close. It shouldn’t have been … Coop. He was close, getting closer.

Jamie saw the Shock Units slice across the creek, scale a bluff, smash the low brush and shake the earth as they moved toward the rock face, seconds away. He saw the earth twist around the invisible monsters as if he were viewing through a honeycomb.

As Jamie took a step back, the blinders of rage dissolved; once again, the universe opened. Jamie fell inside the skin of the wounded old teacher. He fell deeper into the pit of emotions and memories. She was a mother; she had a husband on the other side. She used to love her life, and she was betrayed. They all were. For a moment, he understood her pain.

He stared into Agatha’s weary eyes, the obsessed assassin tilting her head in confusion.

“My birth parents,” Jamie said. “Did they love me, Ms. Bidwell?”

He started to walk backward toward the edge of the rock face. The earth shook as the Shock Units climbed. Jamie smelled their stench.

“In their own way,” she said as she raised her rifle and aimed. “They had a courageous son.”

Jamie saw Lydia’s smug smile disappear, and he knew why. He was glad. There would be a release, and the Jewel couldn’t stop it.

The Shock Units reached the top of the rock, and Jamie felt death. From the depths of his soul, he heard Ben’s voice. If you believe …

He closed his eyes and bowed his head.

The first bullet tore through Jamie just beneath his kidney. He felt no pain. Seven more bullets shredded Jamie, throwing him back in a tragic dance until at last, he tumbled over the edge. He bounded along the side of the giant rock, at one point cracking his skull, until at last his body rested comfortably in the waiting cushion of a knotted myrtle bush. Jamie’s long, blond hair, speckled in red, covered his face where he lay.

He was dead four minutes before his time.

 

66

A S SOON AS Agatha killed Jamie and saw the boy disappear over the edge, she dropped her weapon. She served no further purpose. As the air warmed with a pervading aroma of stench, Agatha turned to the invisible monsters, lifted her shoulders and stood tall.

One of the Shock Units turned, the distinctive sh-tump, sh-tump the only evidence it was a machine. She saw the world change before her, a myriad of shapes twisting, morphing into new realities as the monster powered its weapons.

She was prepared, yet Agatha did not escape the irony. She was about to be destroyed by one of her own people’s most dangerous weapons, a machine designed to hunt down and kill inferior castes, those undesirables who might shake the balance of power established by Chancellors. She saw now, for the first time, the depth of fear and loathing those ethnic peoples surely held for her caste. She wondered how long before those insurgencies and The United Green would shred what was left of the Chancellory.

She raised her tired arms to the sky and smiled. She thought of her husband, the