The Seventh Count: Gifted, #1

By Ted Johnson

Brilliant and gifted, Ben Taylor was the reason his teachers went to school. Brilliant without human equal and gifted beyond comprehension. Even Ben’s. The day the lawn turned to ash, he barely glimpsed the ultimate expression of his gift. When his neighbor drowned, he began to understand. But by the time his mother’s body was discovered, it was already too late to stop the brutal carnage Ben Taylor had already unleashed upon the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ted Johnson
• Release date: Nov 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516350063

Book preview

Chapter 1 - Sarah

At precisely 6.45 pm on a Wednesday, Sarah Louise Taylor slumped face down into her shopping trolley ... dead. From a distance it looked as though she was reaching for something at the bottom, a tub of cream maybe, there was one in her right hand.

Just one glance at her face would confirm that she was most definitely a corpse.

Sudden cardiac arrest, they said. The paramedics suspected what the doctors confirmed. The hospital staff lifted her body into a small, slide-out, coffin-sized compartment in the freezer room from where the undertaker would collect it later and take it to the morgue. A nurse at the front desk tried calling Sarah’s husband but he wouldn’t answer, he was dead too.

If only the nurse knew that she too would be dead soon. All of them would be ... the paramedics, the doctors, the hospital staff, even the undertaker. They would all be dead before the sun set on tomorrow’s horizon.

––––––––

I wonder what they would have done if they had known that this day would be their last.

Ben Taylor knew what to do on his last day,

Which

ironically,

was also today.

...

Chapter 2 - Ben

I had been watching Ben for a while now,

longer than most.

Minutes or months,

are they different enough to matter?

It was certainly long enough to study a most interesting boy

and know that it was time for Ben

to receive his Gift.

...

Benjamin Charles Taylor was fifteen years old and lived with his parents in a small red brick house with a rose garden in the front yard and a small fish pond at the rear. His house was next door to an old Anglican Church in a quiet, tree-lined street, an easy ten-minute walk to school.

He didn’t have a brother to go fishing with or any sisters to bake for him on his birthday but Ben never cared much for fishing or cake.

Ben liked being an only child.

Most evenings his mother would drink too much wine and put herself to bed early. His father would follow later after too many beers. Ben would be left to himself and the darkness; he liked that too. His nights began quietly locking his bedroom door and sitting motionless at the end of his bed, with the light off, soaking in the pitch black. He liked to watch the girl who lived in the house beyond the back fence. He would quietly watch her change into her nightshirt, put herself to bed and switch off her bedside lamp. From that distance he could just make out that she was around his age and height. She wasn’t particularly pretty to anyone else at school but to Ben she was beautiful. And in that moment that she shared with him, just as her form began to fade, her beauty became magical.

Ben spent a few moments more imagining her lying there in her darkness. This was the most intimate experience that Ben would ever have – with her or any girl.

Only when the outline of the girl and her room and the small details of the house she lived in were swallowed by the dark and lost to the night, Ben’s attention slowly turned from her to The Zone. That’s what he liked to call it. He would take himself there, sometimes far beyond midnight, immersed and productive. The Zone wasn’t just a time slot, it was a sanctum that he had created where his mind and body escaped meagre mortal confines such as time and space and parents and routine and dull anonymity. It was his sacred place where he was there, truly there, in the moment. As Ben entered The Zone, he disconnected from the rest of the world rendering it departed, gone and forgotten, and tuned into a fantasy world of fame, power and perfection.

It was the most magnificent place for late night pursuits. He would tell his parents that he was studying and sometimes he was, but most often he was enjoying bedroom-based escapades. Once he crammed The Zone with a nine-hour Chinese