Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) by Brent J. Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page A

down
and saw two wires running from her belly to the index and middle finger of his
left hand. The tips of those fingers had levered open to allow the wires to
shoot out and lodge in her stomach.
    She laughed, not even bothering to pull the
wires out. “A Taser? Are you fuckin’ kidding me? You have no idea what you are
dealing with, little man.”
    “This is no ordinary Taser,” he said, his
voice low.
    She felt every muscle in her body lock as
the current flowed through her. Blackness descended and wiped away her consciousness
before she was able to feel surprise at being taken by one of the Herd.
     

St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
     
    The Bute building was mainly dedicated to
the Biology department, but a few rooms were set aside for the fledgling
Parapsychology department. The Psychology department was housed in a completely
separate building next to the Bute. When the Parapsychology Department had been
founded, the Psychology Department had lobbied hard and successfully to have
the Parapsychology Department housed in any building other than the Psychology
building, not wanting to risk confusion and have its own fairly recent
credibility linked to the disreputable new science of Parapsychology.
    The computer lab in the Bute building was a
rectangular room with a two-foot wide counter protruding from the wall. Putty-colored
PCs were crammed onto the encircling counter, with just enough space between
them to avoid overheating. There were no classes, as it was Saturday morning,
so the lab was packed with longhairs — as Jonni Brown called them — playing
Doom against each other. Finn did not recognize any of them from the Psych,
Parapsych or Biology departments; they were most likely overflow from the IT
and Maths computer labs.
    Finn had snagged one of the last available
computers.
    He accessed the drive Proctor had made
available to him and was pleased to see that there was a massive amount of data
he could play with. After an hour of analysis he started to feel a little
depressed as he started to realize the scope of the undertaking he had signed
up for. His mild to moderate hangover from the prior night’s revelries was not
helping much either.
    He could not remember how many pubs he and
Rebecca had hit on the pub crawl. He vaguely remembered being chased out of the
Cross Keys by some townies after Rebecca dared him to order a cocktail at the
bar. A snowball? Yes, he thought it was a snowball. Somewhere along the way
they had mitotically split into two separate drunken people rather than the
original three-legged drunken hybrid, through the loss of the scarf that bound
their legs. He remembered losing track of all the other pub crawl participants
and ending up, unsurprisingly, in the Student Union.
    Every pub crawl he had ever been on — well,
both of them — ended up at the Student Union. It — as well as the Late Night Bakery
and the All Night Garage — was one of the post-midnight lodestones for the
student population in the town, as well as any townies that could sneak in. As
it was Friday night, the Union provided the one club fix — other than the
occasional beach party — that the dance-deprived students of the old University
town craved, the Megabop Disco. The name was rather embarrassing, but the
drinks were cheap and it was full of young people lost in abandon. It could
have been called the Shithole and it would still be packed thanks to it being a
late night hedonistic monopoly. The other pubs in town shut down at eleven
thirty.
    He remembered not dancing, thankfully, and
he remembered talking and talking. But most of all he remembered the laughter
that he and Bex shared.
    Bex. He subvocalized the word and savored
it.
    The longhair sitting next to him glanced
over. He needed to work on subvocalization.
    She had told him to call her Bex, not
Rebecca, but Bex.
    That small bit of intimacy had been enough
to make his evening, once he got past the awkwardness of saying Bex out loud.
The first few times