Savior

By Don Thomas

In the Near Future, a Red Death will cover the world. As civilization struggles to survive, one government emerges with a sliver of hope- The Strategic Agency against Viral Infections by Organized Resistance. SAVIOR.
SAVIOR delivered on the promise of a miracle cure, elevating themselves into legends...but behind every legend lies truths and secrets...truths and secrets former SAVIOR agent Steve Ryker has sworn to bring into the light...even if it kills him.
SAVIOR is the debut novel of author Don Thomas, a mainstay writer of Pro Se Presents, a two year award winning New Pulp magazine. Complete with fully realized characters, lightning fast pacing, and more meteoric action, SAVIOR proves to be a solid, taut science fiction thriller!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pro Se Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476131542

Book preview

SAVIOR

by Don Thomas

Published by Pro Se Press at Smashwords

Cover Art by Marc Guerrero

Book Design, Layout, and Additional Graphics by Sean E. Ali

E-book Production Design by Russ Anderson

Edited by Nancy A. Hansen

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters in this publication are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. No part or whole of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.

Pro Se Productions, LLC

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SAVIOR

Copyright © 2012 Don Thomas

All rights reserved.

PRELUDE

THE VILLAIN

There was an old diner in New Jersey that’s been around since the late 1950’s. The seats were uncomfortable and sometimes the air conditioner didn’t work, but the customers still filled most of them throughout the rushes of the day. Josef was an overweight man with short black hair that he kept trimmed short. He had owned the diner for nearly twenty years. For most of those years he had worked an average of seventy hours a week.

Now in the latter part of his life, the hours seemed to bother him more than they used to. He started getting headaches that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much aspirin he took. The throbbing in his head had made him a little more irritable than usual, but he seldom interacted with the customers. His job was to prepare the meals and keep an eye on the waitresses who worked the various shifts.

Since it was late at night and it was storming, he had already been thinking of letting Charlene off early. She had moved to Trenton right after her divorce, and had counted herself lucky that Josef had not only hired her, but also kept employing her for all those years. She was originally from Arkansas, and still retained a healthy portion of the accent.

Maria was the younger waitress, a student at a nearby community college. She wasn’t as loud as Charlene, but she had picked up the routine fairly quickly, and seldom made many mistakes. And for various reasons lately, like Josef, she wasn’t getting enough sleep.

My name is unimportant, just another customer that came in wanting a quick bite to eat, and perhaps to sit and enjoy a couple of cups of coffee. And you may ask yourself how it is that I know so much about Josef and his relatively unremarkable little dinner. I know so much because all of it is publicly available information in the year 2223, the era that I have recently escaped from. There, information itself had been so plentiful that a man could drink up all the knowledge that he could stomach. It was a society where man had overcome so many things; diseases, war, hatred, and envy, otherwise known as the four horses of Entropy Lord.

There was talk amongst even the oldest religions of the universe that there was a distinct possibility that this upstart planet of mortals had the potential to defeat and possibly undo the Entropy Lord himself. And when word got out about their discussions, aliens from across the Milky Way galaxy swarmed to ally themselves with this little blue planet which somehow had managed to rebuff a direct attack by the hand of Entropy itself.

I imagine that’s how good finally triumphs over evil, happily ever after, just like in a fairy tale. But this is even better than a fairy tale, because it has the possibility of becoming one hundred percent true. They were great and mighty people in so many ways. It was amazing just how much humans during that period of time had accomplished, and the advancement and progress that I saw in just three years was nothing short of miraculous.

They had dragged me from the time stream. Their scientists were working on a device that could pull objects and people from the past. They had found that although they could not travel one second into the future, any bygone era was just a precise expenditure of mathematically calculated energy. But the further you went back, or the further you traveled, the more energy it took.

The time stream, it seems, was a raging river, and to fight against the current took massive amounts of energy. They discovered that some human beings, those who had managed to leave a certain level of impact on history and progression of mankind, tended to resist the retrieval process. There would be no George Washington brought to the future immediately after the events of his first presidential inauguration to glimpse at what the United States would one day become. To put it bluntly, Washington was just too important to the time stream.

Therefore time restricted the possibility of him being extracted.

But like I said before, this was time when knowledge was plentiful, and it was a time when they who lived there sought to understand their past like no other. And eventually it was discovered that those who had an insubstantial impact, the weaker ripples, had barely affected their world, much less later generations. They were much easier for these devices to tug towards their era.

So it was decided to start retrieving witnesses to the majority of the greatest historical events that had occurred on planet earth up until the year 2220. And that was when one of their technicians stumbled upon me. There I was, at least what remained of my ego and my spirit, drifting in some sort of spatial limbo, neither living nor dead. I had come from the desert, and my people were primitive in comparison. Primitive even to the dark empire that stretched its grand shadow of oppression against our insignificant lives.

I was a man of means, a well respected authority in my community. Not only was I a holy man, but I was also one of the natives that sat upon the council that issued judgments regarding the local population. Those judgments and decisions did not need to involve the great empire that had conquered our desert dwelling people.

As a man of means that was well respected, the world was my oyster, or at least as much as a desert nation can be any local resident’s ‘oyster’ in such a primitive time. And one of the perks was that I was granted the ability to chose a mate from any family within my area. So I picked a stunning dark haired beauty, and for six years she tried to conceive an heir for me, but to no avail.

I know not why she could not give me the heir that we both so desired. I was starting think that our desert god had forsaken us. Would he ever answer both of our most fervent pleas? For the first time in my life, my spirit was filled with doubt. Unbeknown to the other judges, my heart started to fill with despair. I started drinking more, and eventually started researching other religions in the hope of finding something that might help.

Then like a bolt of lightning the belly of my wife became swollen, and it became obvious that she had finally conceived the child that we had both desperately wanted. And truthfully I was somewhat dumbstruck, as a witch of some foreign fertility god had told me that the fault had always been mine and mine alone. She had thrown bones across the ground and inspected my nakedness and determined that I was incapable of having children. She said it was probably the result of an injury that I had received as a youth.

So with the revelation of my wife’s pregnancy I was dumbfounded and immediately stricken mute. Many times I would sit there and struggle to find the words, any words, but they would not come. I would just sit and look at her and wonder just how she had gotten with child.

I had my answer later, after the child was born.

The pigmentation of his skin and his hair were several shades lighter than either parent, and in fact much more resembled the men that served the great empire that oppressed our people. With the realization of this simple explanation, I discovered that I was capable of talking once again. Coincidentally, I regained my ability just in time to give my wife’s son the name that he would have until his dying days.

Make no mistake, although I doubted that the boy was the son of my loins, I treated him as if he was mine the entire time that he was growing up. After all, it wasn’t his fault; whether it was his mother’s infidelity or some cruel jest of our desert god; the boy was completely blameless in the matter. So like my father had done with me, I began to instruct him on the religion of our people. And to my surprise he took to it far better than I, or anyone else from our community ever had before. It was like he had a particular knack for that sort of thing. As a teenager his mind deliberated over complicated theological matters that I could barely comprehend at the time. Soon my heart and spirit was filled with great pride for the possibility of the man and religious leader that he might one day become.

But to my dismay, soon after he was indoctrinated into the priesthood of our desert god, he lost himself and became a madman wandering the desert and raging at the world. I am ashamed to say that even as followers began to flock to him and his madness, I was filled with intense embarrassment0.. Is was as if he had been gifted with a great mind and capacity for wisdom, and those very gifts given to him by our desert god had betrayed him. And that was when I started to deny the man that had always called me father.

When he was imprisoned by a local king, I didn’t lift a finger to help him, although I very easily could have. Soon after my wife and I received word that our son had been executed, and once again despair began to fill my heart. I delved deeper not only into the religion of my people, but also into other religions, discovering there were a series of prophecies regarding a boy that would be conceived by no man. A very important child that would become so pivotal to our people that just by his existence all would be filled with hope.

At first after reading all of these prophecies I had thought that maybe the man that my wife had borne had been the same that was mentioned in the prophecies, and I was saddened at the prospect that he might have been sacrificed to bring hope to the world. To tell you the truth; the idea that he had been the one the prophecies were talking about, was empowering enough that I was able to cast out the doubt that had continually afflicted me since he was first conceived.

Somewhat restored, I went about my business, trying to be wiser about the decisions that I made in regards to our desert community. So imagine my surprise when after my son’s demise it was revealed to me that another had arrived within our community. One that was not only making a point to fulfill certain prophecies, but also publicly stating that it was our desert god himself that led him to say and do such things.

Such blasphemy! Such arrogance! For the first time I found myself filled with rage. Rage for the hubris of a man that would claim such thing—something my own insane son would have proclaimed himself as being. Here was also a rival to the lofty position that I had cast my own heir to, in an effort to justify my former inaction. The intense guilt that I had felt relieved of was now upon me tenfold, especially when I discovered that this other man was akin to my fallen heir. Their mothers had been distantly related, and in fact both initial beginnings were strangely similar in many ways.

Although I hated him, I was judge of my people, and certainly not a murderer, and so I could not get the vengeance that I so desperately wanted. All I could do was serve my people, and sit upon the council of priests that ruled over our desert community. But then to my surprise, one of the man’s followers betrayed him, for whatever reasons; and before I knew it that very man was shackled and brought before me and the other wise men of our desert village. He had been charged with most heinous of crimes, not only blasphemy but also insurrection against the great empire that ruled over us.

That was when I saw opportunity, and quickly convinced the other priests of our community to not only issue a judgment against him, but also to let the empire itself decide his final fate. Before long, he also was executed for crimes against his people and the empire that ruled over them.

Tragically several years later I began to believe that my inaction with my own heir, and my manipulation of events with this other man, had somehow thwarted the prophecies of our desert god. The despair within my own heart intensified, and once again I sought some hidden bit of knowledge that would somehow relieve me of my guilt.

So I like my heir before me, left the safety of civilization and began living as hermit in the great desert. I was desperate for some means of absolution; some way to relieve the guilt that I felt for both men’s life. Over time I began to realize that I had been manipulated. Manipulated by the desert god, whose primary ability had always been to know the nature of things that are and the things that will be. With that realization I abandoned my desert god and sought others to end the pain and remorse that overwhelmed me.

Eventually in a tomb in the shadow of a fallen empire, I had dark rituals cast over my dying aged body by a consortium of priests that all followed several different religions. The rituals, while ending my own mortal life, managed to cast my soul and ego into the great spiritual sea where I languished for many lifetimes.

Or so it seemed, at least until I felt the peculiar tug of the device of the people from the far future. And soon to my surprise, complicated machines fashioned an organic body to house that which remained of me. These were people from the world where knowledge was so plentiful, and more importantly, the pursuit of knowledge was king. It didn’t take long for them to realize that the insignificant events that had made up so much of my own life had become incredibly important in their era. Before I knew it, they had designated me as a primary witness, and soon I was taught to speak numerous strange languages so that I might enlighten as many as I could about the events that I had experienced throughout the living of my own life.

It was also during this time that I began to drink heavily from the well of knowledge that they freely offered. In truth I think that my appetite for such things was far more than any of them ever suspected. Although they had elevated me far past the power and prestige of my original position with my primitive desert tribe, secretly I hated giving lectures and answering questions about the one that my actions helped to execute, inadvertently setting off a chain of events that would have serious implications in the future.

It was a world that I had started to despise. I hated them for becoming everything that my desert community would never have been capable of being. I hated them for so solidly knowing that the man that I had judged, had been the one mentioned in prophecies. For them it was almost documented fact that he was the one, and the proof of my heir’s and my own insignificance was the fact that they were so easily capable of retrieving me.

Slowly, even as earth made contact with a thousand different alien races of the Milky Way Galaxy, I began putting together my grand scheme. A scheme to not only escape their perfect society into the past, but also making sure to pick the exact moment in history where the planning and foresight of the very same desert god that I had originally worshiped so fervently and passionately had carefully sowed the seeds of the Entropy Lord’s destruction.

With Maria.

It isn’t fair that he made my life into something of such meaninglessness. I was a great and wise man for many years, but tragically the one thing that I desired more than anything else was taken from me, becoming naught more than collateral damage in war between the desert god of a conquered nation in the distant past and the Entropy Lord who came into being at the very end of time.

Therefore I have come to this era. To early 2001, and more importantly I have to this come to this very average looking diner, and to the woman named Maria. Bringing with me a few items from the future and a mind that has fully drunken from the well of knowledge. I have come to take from her the seed that has been sown, and to undo the planning and the foresight of the desert god.

I do this not to serve the Entropy Lord, but to cast off the manipulation of both, and to forge a new world that is beyond their manipulation. Beyond all manipulation, other than what is directed by my own hand.

***

Would you like one last refill before we close? Maria interrupted the older man who had seemed so deep in thought for the last hour, carefully sipping his coffee.

Closing time already? he asked, letting her refresh his cup.

Yes. Sometimes we stay open a little later if there’s crowd, she answered.

The man looked around cafe. No crowd tonight huh?

Nope, Maria said smiling. But don’t feel like you have hurry up and finish that last cup on our account.

Of course not. No reason to rush is there? the man said as he started sipping this coffee again.

Nope, Maria said as she pulled his ticket off of her pad and placed it on his table.

She walked away as the man took a deeper drink of his coffee, fumbling in his coat pocket for something. He withdrew something Metallic with a several studs on one side. He gently pressed his thumb against the one in the center and two things happened so quickly that even the fastest camera of that period of time might not been able to have caught both of them.

First the gas heated grill exploded, the blue flames erupting suddenly, spreading outward a yellow and red tinged conflagration. It consumed everyone nearly instantaneously, except for the last customer of the night, who quickly dematerialized, only to reappear completely unharmed in a nearby darkened alley.

CHAPTER 1

THE PANDEMIC AND THE COMING OF S.A.V.I.O.R.

The whole thing started during the fa11 of 2011. The popu1ation concerns were centered on a variety of manmade and natural disasters, including several epidemics that ravaged parts of the world. Luckily the United States had managed to endure these difficult times relatively unscathed, which sadly, led to speculation that some foreign power had a hand in the pandemic that