The Undergods (Episodes 1 & 2)

By Eva Kane

There are no good guys in the near-future war of the underworld. There are only gods, slaves, and undergods. The gods seek to rule; the slaves accept the rules; the undergods walk among the gods as undetected traitors.

There are only ever six undergods. When one dies, another elite candidate will rise to fill their place until the gods are destroyed. At the moment, the undergods are made up a scientist, medic, sniper, hacker, bodyguard, and smuggler with one common goal: unmask the gods before their power is solidified and it is too late for everyone.

Episode 1: In the near future, six vigilantes turn Reno upside-down when they assassinate the son of a god in broad daylight.

Episode 2: Bounty hunters search for the assassins en masse as the undergods worked to use the chaos to move their agenda forward.

PLEASE NOTE: This book is part of a series that is released in episodes and seasons. The seventh episode will be released once the series is "picked up" by readers.

RATING: MATURE AUDIENCES (18+). This series has graphic scenes some may find offensive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eva Kane
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310880698

Eva Kane

Writer. Wanderer. Jack of all trades looking to maybe master one. Thank you for your downloads and reviews. Your demand and your thoughts matter. Check out my website to learn more, and to sign up to get the news when episodes pick back up!

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

SWISS

I’d like to state for the record that Day 7 of holding my shit together is still intact, Swiss said into her comm as she waited outside of the men’s locker room. This despite the fact that I let Gunnar land six jabs as we sparred.

Congratulations, Bach said over the comm. "The glory and the honor be thine forever and ever. What’s your ETA?"

Swiss tuned in to the sounds in the locker room, zooming in on Gunnar’s breathing. He was out of the shower, dressed, and had just slung his duffel bag over his shoulder—his right shoulder. Yes, she could tell that through a brick wall with three dead bodies stashed inside of it.

Gunnar usually slung his bag over his left shoulder, which meant Swiss had tweaked his arm while sparring a little bit harder than he’d claimed.

Whoops.

But nothing in Gunnar was broken after squaring off with her, so that was a win.

ETA twelve minutes, she said.

Copy that, Bach said then went silent.

As Swiss listened to Gunnar’s unique cadence of footsteps moving toward the locker room exit, she tried to focus solely on her foster brother while filtering out the chaos between them. Closing her eyes, she fought to separate out the scurrying footfalls of ants and the gnawing of mice. She tried to shut off the heavy breathing of the man jacking off in the shower, tune out the high buzz of the surveillance equipment overseeing the lobby, and filter out the millions of other unidentifiable sounds clawing for her attention. She did everything she could think of to put the rest of the world on mute and hear only Gunnar’s footsteps…and she failed.

Her upgraded ears heard it all, and she had no idea how to turn down the volume.

Swiss liked to play things casual with her team, but navigating the world with her new upgrades was a bit like juggling chainsaws with flames roaring out of their back ends. Finding a safe zone to grip, if one existed at all, was uncertain. All she could say was that the comic books of her childhood hadn’t really given a balanced picture of what super powers entailed.

Like super sight, for example. Yes, Swiss could see things far away, zoom, access macrovision, and see literally millions of colors now, but she also saw everything else that came with it. Like the gym.

Swiss gave herself high marks for the simple fact that she wasn’t outright staring at the morbid modern art she saw all around her. Blood, piss, puke, sweat, cum…the deposits of times past coated the gym. It was like a canvas that had been painted over hundreds of times. To her new upgraded senses, the mopped-up blood on the gym’s floor looked like something out of a slaughterhouse. True, the blood had been scrubbed at and bleached many times, yet the residue was as clear to Swiss’s eyes as if someone had dumped a gallon of black paint and swirled it around with a broom.

The comic books of her childhood had never mentioned how with sight enhancement the whole manmade world looked like a well-used hotel room. And Swiss wasn’t even going to talk about her other senses. She’d leave that mess on the editing room floor, too. But seriously…she wished someone would have warned her.

When Gunnar finally stepped out of the locker room, Swiss fell in stride next to him and jabbed the arm he was trying to pretend was A-OK. Hey, champ. How’s the arm?

Gunnar grunted in annoyance, rolling his shoulder as he gave the tender joint a squeeze. I’m still feeling that crank you managed to get on me back there. You’re almost getting good enough for me to pull out the big guns.

The playful dis gave Swiss something to focus on as the two of them stepped out into the afternoon sun and Swiss’s eyes were assaulted by prisms of multicolored fairies zipping around in the air. Okay, they weren’t fairies. They were water particles and pollen and dust and a shit-ton of other things, but they looked like miniscule fairies to Swiss’s hypersensitive eyes.

Accept, adapt, and focus, she chanted to herself. Oh, and talk. She must remember to talk. What had Gunnar just said? Something about her being almost good enough to beat him?

Almost? Bitch, please. She popped up her solar-cycle seat and swapped out her gym bag for a black hoodie, careful to keep her movements slow and even.

Gunnar’s eyes narrowed. Careful, young grasshopper. You have yet to snatch the pebble from my hand.

She grinned as she shrugged into the thin hoodie. You want me to snatch your pebble? I’ll snatch ‘em both. Time and place, man. Name it.

Gunnar shook his head in feigned longsuffering. See that? You can’t even tell the difference between pebbles and massive stones.

Swiss straddled her cycle and checked her watch. The day I can strike your nuts together and use the sparks to build a fire is the day I’ll call them stones.

Gunnar’s hands drifted south protectively. Dude. Unnecessary imagery.

Swiss grinned, hoping the expression looked natural. Hate to insult your manhood and leave, but duty calls.

Sure, Gunnar agreed, stepping toward his own cycle. We wouldn’t want the iconic Demi St. Vincent wearing anything that was oh-so-yesterday. Get gone. Save the world one accessory at a time and all that, but first…

Seeing the change in his body language and hearing the brief double-time of his heart, Swiss knew what—or rather, whom—Gunnar was thinking about without asking. Abruptly all of Swiss’s hyperactive senses focused on Gunnar—the change in his breathing, the small gush of adrenaline and cortisol, the unconscious tightening of his muscles.

Yeah, Swiss knew exactly who he was thinking about. Which meant she shouldn’t ask. But she did.

Yeah? she prompted.

He gave a shrug. It’s Ash…she’s throwing me a birthday party at the bar and, well…you know the rest of that sentence.

Swiss kicked up the solar-cycle stand and studied her almost-brother. How many times do you want to rehash this same conversation, Gun? I’m respecting your parents’ final wishes here. It’s the last thing they asked of me, and they were right to ask it.

He’d been expecting her to say that. She could tell by his physiological response, just like she could tell by the tone in his voice, that he had practiced his reply. It’s just…she keeps angling and pushing, you know? Can’t you just stop by the bar or something? It’s been two fucking years. There’s not a single excuse that doesn’t sound empty at this point. She knows you’re avoiding her.

I never told you to make up excuses, Swiss said, checking her watch again. Time was moving normal speed. Good. Time had a tendency to get funky whenever she got stressed.

Well, you’re not the one who has to look her in the eye and see her disappointment. Give her closure at least. All she knows is that she lost her parents and her best friend in the same week—her parents to a freak accident and her best friend to…vapidness.

Best friends? Swiss fought the urge to laugh right in Gunnar’s face. Ash had resented Swiss for the two years Swiss had been a foster child in the Travers home back when she was a teen. Once Swiss enlisted in the Navy and was out of their hair, Ash had softened a bit and moved to passive acceptance of Swiss’s presence whenever she came back on leave, but best friends?

Swiss wasn’t any expert on friendship, but she was pretty sure that didn’t qualify as besties. Ash has the closest thing to an answer that she’s ever going to get from me.

But if you just went to the bar and—

She’d dig and she’d poke, Swiss said over him. Gun, you and I still work because neither of us looks too deeply into the other or asks questions. You do what you do, and I don’t ask. I do what I do, and you don’t ask…Ash asks. She’s observant as hell and she pokes at what she finds.

Gunner blinked and looked away.

Worse than that, Swiss added. She doesn’t let go until she has an answer, and neither of us can protect her once she has our answers. "

The slow sigh Gunnar let out was on par with a silent agreement. He wasn’t going to say it, but he knew Swiss was right.

The best thing I can do is keep her asking the wrong questions, Swiss said. And the best thing you can do is tell her that there is exactly zero chance I’ll be swinging by the bar. I can live with her hating me more than I can live with the alternatives.

Gunnar shook his head. Damn. How did we both turn out fucked up? Ash deserves better.

Yes. She does. And if the two of us can keep our distance, she might just have a shot at better, Swiss said, starting up the engine. We still on to meet up next week?

He nodded. Yeah. I’ll let you know when I get back in town.

Swiss nodded, put her bike in gear, and sped away. She waited until she was through the first intersection to turn on her comm and update the undergods.

En route. ETA to rendezvous with target, seven minutes.

CHAPTER TWO

OMEN

Keeping Dom in his line of sight, Omen blended into the shadows of the old parking structure. Even from a distance Dom maintained his signature Italian sheen that made him a bit too polished to blend in with the pissed-on walls and decomposing trash around him.

Abandoned cement structures with no bartender in sight weren’t really Dom’s scene, but Travis McGee had called for the meeting and chosen the place. So here they all were, thanks to a rumor Travis had heard that Dom had been dealing in Travis’s territory. Travis had reached out and set up the meet, allegedly to bring Dom in as a player in Travis’s network—because clandestine drug dealers were so keen on sharing turf and all.

But Omen could not care less about the premise of the meet at this point. All that mattered was that Travis and six of his gang members were strutting into a trap of their own making.

The meet-up site Travis had chosen was roped off, abandoned, and slated for demolition by the city of Reno. In twenty-four hours the parking terrace that had served the city for so many years would be a heap of rubble. With the next phase of Project: Pristine approved and funded, the Prohibited Vehicle Zone would be extended to graft in 33 more blocks into Reno’s ever-growing carbon-negative infrastructure. As of tomorrow, all of the hybrid vehicles Reno residents used to interact with the rest of the world would be banned within the expanded Pristine Zone, as the current infrastructure was torn down and replaced with a solar transportation and carbon-negative structures.

Very few cities had made the switch to being fully solar powered, but of those pushing in that direction, Reno was the prototype. Fifteen years earlier, running on sunshine had just been a Reno politician’s controversial pet project. Currently, 17% of the city operated solely on clean energy, with the remaining 83% in queue to be integrated as quickly as old-school permits and status quo protesters would allow. After all, not everyone considered clean energy progress, and a small army had moved to Reno for the sole purpose of protecting a person’s right to belch carbon into the atmosphere and other such inalienable rights. If these liberties were outlawed in Reno, the Mecca of the Green movement, the protesters knew it was only time before trickle-down activism took hold in other cities.

And to think that without The Great Southern California Quake, Reno might have remained a lackluster city—its vision unfunded as it died on its own vine. But as fate would have it, approximately twelve seconds of Mother Earth shifting her tectonic plates fifteen years prior had transformed all of Southern California into a third-world charity case. The devastation had killed millions the first day, with thousands following in subsequent days from injury, exposure, drowning, or outright violence.

In all the movies Hollywood had ever made, it had never dreamed up its own fate following a 9.4 magnitude earthquake. All of Southern California had been gutted. Omen knew firsthand, since that had been his stomping ground. He’d been seventeen and homeless, and the latter fact would ultimately save his life. While the gazillionaires were being flattened by their mansions during The Great Quake, Omen’s roof that night had been the sky and his bed had been a layer of leaves in the vacation destination formerly known as Rustic Canyon. The quake definitely tossed Omen around, but when all was said and done he walked away from the apocalypse without a scratch. It was just one of countless times Omen had been in a situation where he should have died, but didn’t. And while Omen had been herded to Las Vegas with other survivors, Hollywood had embraced the big saga about how they would rebuild and how Hollywood would always be Hollywood.

Other industries, however, had been less invested in keeping the same address.

Namely: music.

Underground shot callers in Reno had been luring music executives for years before The Great Quake. Reno was America’s Amsterdam—with legalized prostitution and drugs. What was more rock ‘n roll than that?

As it turned