The Reborn

By Daniel Martin Black

Matt Pierce, high school senior, lives in a small town he dreams of leaving. He belongs nowhere save with Satya, the girl he loves, who left months ago. Just as he makes a brave choice that may give them another chance, a brutal event throws his world into a tailspin.

Then three strangers enter his life: Kara, David, and their leader, Pell. They have strange abilities, and tell him he does, as well. They call themselves Reborn, for the one thing they have in common -- each has died, and was inexplicably resurrected. They warn of an enemy that hunts their kind, which will stop at nothing to kill Matt or anyone close to him.

Matt must decide whether to leave Satya behind, or stay, and risk her safety ... to trust Pell, who gives him some answers, but clearly hides many more ... and if he can embrace what Pell claims is his destiny: to fight a war for the fate of everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Martin Black
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311285935

Daniel Martin Black

Dan's had a varied career, but his deepest ambition has always been to share the stories and characters he can't stop dreaming about, even when he tries. The Reborn is his his first novel.

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THE REBORN

by Daniel Martin Black

Copyright 2016 Daniel Martin Black

Smashwords Edition

http://whoarethereborn.com

SMASHWORDS EDITION LICENSE NOTES

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PROLOGUE

The five-year-old boy darts past trees in the pouring rain – away from the open, lit door to a house some two dozen feet behind. A white house, which grows more distant as he runs.

The house is surrounded by woods which form a thick, seemingly impenetrable wall the boy now tries to escape. He once thought of these trees as shelter, protection, something to keep the monsters out. But now, cut by a sharp tree branch as he flits past, he wonders if their true purpose was always to cage him ...

Lightning flashes – followed by a thunderous boom so loud, he nearly slips. It illuminates the house against the night as he dares to glance back ... a house he’d similarly thought of as shelter against the thousand things every boy fears, a guardian of sorts. But he knows now, it’s just a house, just an unliving thing, incapable of caring whether he lives or dies. Tonight, it had offered no protection at all ...

Huffing, crying, he continues to run, splashing through water and mud –

– until a terrible scream brings him to a halt.

It’s his father – he’s sure of it, although he’s never heard a person make such a sound –

– a sound then cut brutally short. But for the rain, the night is now silent.

"Daddy?" he begs the yawning nothingness.

He looks back toward that door, eyes it with terror. Hugs himself, soaked and shivering, tortured by a choice ...

Run? Or go back, to offer what help a small boy possibly could? His father had told him to keep running, not to stop, never to stop. But without his Daddy, what hope does the boy have anyway?

"Daddy ..." he cries.

Sobbing, he decides. Begins walking back toward the door ... toward the thing that made his father scream. Resigned to fate, knowing the monster will get him.

Almost there now, he slows. The doorway remains empty.

"Daddy?" he says again.

Finally, a shape appears in that doorway. A man’s shape, but not his father’s. And not a man. The thing in the brown overcoat turns slowly toward him ... its throat and chest slicked with blood, yet it grins ...

... and its eyes glow a bright, hellish red.

The boy yelps in horror – turns to run –

"Daddy! Help m–"

– when a bolt of lightning – huge, and strangely, blue – radiates through the house, and the monster in the brown overcoat. A screaming sound accompanies the snaking electricity –

– which continues to churn – splintering wood – blackening Brown Overcoat’s flesh – bursting windows –

– and blasting the boy away from the house, to land hard in the mud.

Matt Pierce awakened in a sweat-damp bed, eyes wide, trying to catch the breath that had fled his body completely.

It took long seconds for him to exert conscious will over starving lungs, slow them down enough to focus on a single, luxuriant, deep breath. He finally succeeded – heaved in once deeply, then out again – and everything seemed better. He was no longer going to die of asphyxiation ... in addition to having endured the nightmare yet again ... in addition to having just escaped pursuit.

Because that’s how it felt. He knew it wasn’t rational, but even now, even awake, he couldn’t shake the feeling that in those dreams he was being chased. Hunted. And now that he was awake, he’d eluded the monsters, if only for now.

Until he dreamed again.

When the fear wore off, he actually spent a second or two chiding himself for it. He was twelve now, and still having nightmares like some ten-year-old. You’re almost a teenager, he scolded himself, which is almost an adult. Grow up, bonehead.

This had been happening for years, and every time it was the same – like he was the child in the dream, with no memory of ever having experienced it before. Every time, just like the first.

Which was when, exactly? He couldn’t remember.

Thing was, he didn’t recognize anything about the dream’s house or surroundings. He certainly didn’t remember any actual events like the dream’s.

But the lightning ...

Dad had told him long ago his Mom had, in fact, died in a lightning fire when he was little. And according to Dad, they'd both been in the house at the time too, but managed to escape. But it was so long ago, he had no memory of it. Neither did he have any real memories of his mother ... just emotions, impressions. Old, beer-stained photographs. The abstract sense of an angel he’d once known, and who, he hoped, still watched over him from time to time.

It always happened the same way. Near the same house, which he didn’t even recognize. So why do I dream it, again and again?

He turned to his bedside clock. It read 6:42 AM.

Whipping right past his Dad, Matt bolted out the door and made a beeline for the school bus to Midway Elementary, whose doors were already closing.

Clad in an old bathrobe as he stepped onto the porch to see Matt off, Martin Pierce smoked a cigarette and gripped a half-liter of Jameson’s – slung way down low where he thought no one could see it. Matt saw it just as clearly this morning as most others.

He was also fairly confident, judging by the taunting glances he got on the bus each morning, just about everyone else did too.

The bus lurched to a halt, and the doors opened once again to admit young Mr. Pierce. The usual annoyed glance from the driver – the kids called him Mr. Sam – and Matt was aboard.

Sorry, Matt told him. It was, after all, the third time this week he’d made it on the bus by a hair.

He waded into the bus, ignoring a hundred unfriendly eyes. They reminded him of something ... that monster in Greek mythology, the one that literally had a hundred eyes. Argus, he remembered. Walking onto this school bus was like having Argus stare back at you every morning.

If Argus was, you know, a miserable and judgmental prick.

Your Dad’s an alkie, their glances all said. Few ever found the courage to come right out and say it, but the eyes spoke volumes. Other kids generally knew better than to confront Matt, since he had a bit of an explosive disposition. You could think whatever the hell you wanted, but saying it out loud made it a thing, and Matt had been known to lose control with anyone who did that. He didn’t always win, but even then, an effort was made to ensure a pyrrhic victory for the offender. Bullies were a fact of life in this town ... Matt’s philosophy was to make sure that, when they decided you were today’s victim, they never went home happy about that decision.

As he walked past, he ignored a particularly intense glare from Cole Panzer and his little buddy, Jerry Fallon. They were his two biggest antagonists at school, dicks and bullies both. Difficult enough taken individually, but each emboldened by the other, much worse together.

He tried to have as little to do with them as possible, and usually they were cautious enough of Matt’s reputation not to issue any direct challenges, even as their every glance seemed to imply one.

Matt now in their rear view, their attention turned to the young girl behind them.

Satya Naik’s dark skin stood out on an otherwise fully white bus. Her family had moved to Midway just a year or so after Matt’s – and much like Matt, and for only slightly different reasons, she’d never felt quite at home here either.

Different. Weird.

She’d told her parents about how mean the kids could be, how most teachers didn’t intervene despite the public crusade against bullying in just about every school in the country ... and how, even when she wasn’t being directly abused, she frequently got uncomfortable, sometimes even hostile stares walking the halls of her school, and the streets of her town.

Hadji.

Which made no fucking sense. Her family was Hindu, and had no Middle-Eastern ancestry that she was aware of. The insult wouldn’t have been any more forgivable if she had, but at least it would’ve been properly targeted. Yet she’d heard the word whispered behind her back many times. In a way, the obvious ignorance of her oppressors was comforting ... you never had to second-guess your side of the conflict when the enemy was this dumb.

Her Dad was a systems consultant for HCH, a large offshore staffing firm. They had signed a large automation contract with the local mill, of which her Dad’s presence here was a part. And at the end of the day, you went where they told you. This was their home right now, warts and all, and they would have to make the best of it. Her Dad told her life here in Midway was much better than it had been in Mumbai. But even though her memories of home were growing more dim each day, she had a tough time believing that.

Or perhaps it was true, for him. Not for her.

Hey, Princess, Panzer said to her. You people think cows are sacred, right? We just wanna, you know, understand your culture.

Satya met his taunting gaze, but said nothing.

We actually got some sacred cow juice, he said, as though that was something with her unique background, she might be interested in. Want some? he asked.

Again she just stared back at him.

What am I thinking? Panzer broke the silence, with the air of an embarrassed host who realized he was neglecting a guest. "Of course you want some! Share, Fallon."

So Fallon did – squirting an entire snack carton of vitamin D milk directly onto her face.

She didn’t cry as it dripped down her nose. Just looked at her cackling oppressors in ice-cold, impotent rage.

See, now you’re white enough! Fallon taunted. Now you fit right in!

Still laughing, Fallon looked back, expecting to see his buddy Panzer –

– but it was Matt.

His face was close, beet-red with fury, arms spread wide. Fallon’s eyes traced along the length of Matt’s arm – right to the hand, which held a metal lunch box.

Wham! as that lunchbox cracked Fallon across the mouth.

Panzer tried to grab Matt from behind, but the lunch box whipped around, found Panzer’s nose. Blood spurted.

Satya ran forward to the driver. Stop the bus! she screamed. "They're gonna hurt him! They're gonna hurt him bad!"

Mr. Sam, otherwise known as Sam Trammel, looked at her suspiciously ... and did nothing. Mr. Sam had quite a high tolerance for the chaos these kids created daily. As long as they didn’t interfere with his ability to drive – which was, after all, his damn job – he didn’t much give a shit if the little animals tore each other apart.

Matt couldn’t see or hear what was going on between Satya and the driver – he was busy fending off two opponents – but by the continued motion of the bus, deduced her plea hadn’t been received with much sympathy.

So, based on these meager prospects for help, he tried to do as Satya had – lurch forward and try to reach Mr. Sam himself – just get in the man’s face until he did something. Whether from sympathy, or just to remove an obstacle to his driving, Matt didn’t care either way.

But Matt’s new plan never reached fruition, because that’s when the metal lunchbox Panzer had managed to wrest away came down onto his skull. He literally saw stars, and went limp.

Panzer and Fallon dragged him all the way to the very rear of the bus, out of the driver’s sight ... and began pounding, pounding ...

SIX YEARS LATER

CHAPTER ONE

In a large bedroom on the East-facing side of the Pierce house in Midway, Matt Pierce sat behind a years-old wooden table, with several PC displays on it. Tech lined the room end to end: multiple PCs, two rack-mount servers, several network switches, even two external disk arrays – all strung together by USB and fiber-optic cable spaghetti.

One look at the shabbiness of the room, the cracks in the wall, the peeling paint, and you knew its occupant was unlikely to command the kind of budget this amount of technology must require. But Matt Pierce had his ways.

Just recently turned eighteen, he’d grown into what appeared to most an average young man. His hair was dark brown, eyes light blue, height average. He might reach six feet, if he wasn’t quite done growing. But his eyes were those of an old soul ... he’d seen too much and more in his short span of years, and grown up far too fast.

Matt removed a bill from its envelope. It was from one of his least favorite creditors, United Battery Bank (UBB), the current holders of his Dad’s mortgage. He sighed as he began reading it.

DEAR MR. PIERCE,

Our records indicate your bill is now more than 90 days past due. Unless we receive payment within the next 7 days, we will have no recourse but to begin foreclosure proceedings ...

He stopped reading right there ... it was the usual shit. Since their finances had taken a turn several years before, Matt had gotten used to these letters. He mentally translated:

DEAR CORPORATE SERF #1138,

You've failed to pay your life tax, yet again. Unless you do so immediately, we will promptly begin removing the essentials of life, beginning with your shitty little house.

We'll parade you out of it, preferably into inclement weather, as your family and neighbors look upon you with resentment, and you look back with shame.

But we won’t give a shit about your tears. This is what happens to deadbeats, and it serves you right for becoming useless to us.

Pay the fuck up.

Sincerely,

Your Masters

The first such letter had been a shock, of course. It was an outlier, statistically improbable, perhaps a misunderstanding.

The second had been an embarrassment ... as though to tell him, Yes, we mean you. You’re in our sights now, and don’t you dare fuck up again. After the third and fourth, Matt had just accepted it as part of life with an unemployed, alcoholic father.

But even after he’d learned to deal with the shame, the fundamental problem remained. How would he avoid becoming homeless?

At first he’d done his best to corral his Dad’s disability checks before they were spent on beer, or weed, or cigarettes. That was still always the preferred option, but his Dad was surprisingly skillful at preventing interception of those checks. He’d even gone to the length of changing the address on the account to a PO Box Matt would have no access to, conveniently located just several store fronts from Mickey’s, his favorite watering hole.

Then Matt had added electronic statements to his Dad’s account, sent to an e-mail address Matt owned. He could have hacked into his Dad’s account and changed the address back easily, but preferred the electronic statements to an ongoing, address-changing tug of war with his Dad. At least now he’d know when the account was past due, even if he couldn’t stop his father from squandering their only income.

Well – his Dad’s only income, at least. Matt had developed quite a skill for hacking over the course of the past several years, which allowed for some supplemental cash flow, and a kind of ace in the hole when things got truly bad.

Truly bad ... like when the bank’s about to take your house.

Now for Matt, hacking was the computer equivalent of super powers. The world said you were only capable of doing this, yet you found ways to do much more, show them what you were really capable of – by subverting design, doing things its architects never intended. Things good little corporate serfs and drones dared only dream of.

As Matt loaded the bank’s web site on his PC, an app called Belch proxy displayed the underlying HTTP data stream for him. Browsers hid that data stream from users, but most had lately added developer features to allow HTTP tracing for those who really wanted to see it. For most modern desktop browsers, this could be turned on just by hitting the F12 key.

That was instructive, but Belch took it a step further. A simple configuration change in his browser relayed, or proxied, all its HTTP requests through Belch – which made them not only plainly visible, but also malleable, and replayable. That meant he could tinker with those requests, again and again, until he found a technique with the desired effect.

Today, development teams for major financial institutions usually knew better than to accept dynamic, arbitrary SQL statements from the application layer. This meant your app was determining what kind of query to run on the database programmatically based user selections, rather than funneling them through a hardened stored procedure that only allowed certain very specific operations. Once you knew the app sent dynamic SQL to its database, that meant someone had left the front door of the mansion wide open. It was bad practice; the app layer was exposed to hackers, and if there was some way to abuse it by sending unexpected SQL instructions back to the database, hackers would find it.

Years before, during the Wild West of the Internet, many financials still made these rookie mistakes, and were slow to address them. How many people actually know how to do this? they would ask after learning the hefty price tag for the fix – which in most cases was significant redesign of the application. Because hacking was such esoteric knowledge to them, they had a hard time believing there were many folks in the world not only with the knowledge, but also the will, the balls to exploit it.

UBB was no exception. They'd eventually come around and spent the money on complete app redesigns to address these problems. From what Matt could tell, their current web site was bulletproof against this kind of manipulation. But then, Matt wasn’t trying this against the current site.

After many days of automated probing of the bank’s domains through his proxies, he’d found an older version of the site just sitting out there on what must be an old, forgotten development server, which still had a live connection to the Internet. After some testing, Matt realized further – this dev server had, very foolishly, been configured with a connection to the prod database. Once Matt had learned a bit about the database schema, he learned how to find his own banking transactions within it, confirming it did indeed contain production data.

This was also a product of the Wild West days, when dev teams were in such a rush to get things done, they'd take shortcuts to get their latest release out the door. So if they'd only had one database server at the time, they'd use it for prod and non-prod both – with every intention of fixing it later. But then the next project came along, with its own urgent deadlines, and later never came.

Inadvisable. They’d put a dev server on the Internet, and then they’d forgotten about it. It wasn’t unheard of, with all the chaos surrounding the movement of servers from one data center to another, staff turnover in both the hosting facilities and the banks themselves, not to mention shoddy inventory practices frequently in place at the time.

Of course Matt was just supposing, based on stories he’d heard several dozen times. But whatever the reasons for the lapse, Matt had his target.

Target in sight, Matt was doing the hacking equivalent of reconnaissance: reading HTTP data streams back and forth from the web site. It was utter gibberish to the uninitiated, but Matt read it with fluency, and interest.

UBB, Matt said to himself as he scanned through it, line by line. United Battery Bank ... or maybe it should be You Big Bully. You own billions in foreclosed homes ... but you still want mine.

The Belch proxy app reported with a ding: Site is vulnerable to SQL injection!

Nice, Matt observed. He read the app’s output, studying its interactions to find the chink in the site’s armor. Guess you don’t use that foreclosure money on security.

Just then, his focus was interrupted by a chat window from a user called StuckMidway. Matt’s chat app of choice was called HereChat, because it had versions for just about every kind of device, allowed chat within any geographical area you specified, and was extremely secure. All chats took place over an encrypted connection proxied by the HereChat servers – there was never a direct connection between chat participants.

Sup hacker, it read. Whatcha up to?

Matt smiled. StuckMidway was a guy he’d met online some weeks ago on an IRC chat site. They shared many interests – foremost among them hacking, and getting the hell out of this town. Not necessarily in order.

He typed his reply using his chat alias, GalileoWuzRight: Just payin bills.

User StuckMidway is typing a reply ... HereChat informed him.

Payin, right, StuckMidway’s reply came through. Got better use for those hacking skills – meet me.

In person? Matt said to himself. Creepy. But on the screen, he typed: Um kinda busy. What’s it about?

Not all hackers were shut-ins, but most were possessed of a healthy paranoia. On Matt’s list of possible reasons someone would ask him to go somewhere in person, number one was the person asking was FBI. Two was an axe murderer, three through ten were various ethnic mobs, and friendly social gathering was twenty or so options down from there.

A chance to do something cool with ur life, StuckMidway assured him, and to get outta this town. Sending GPS.

There was a brief pause during which the chat site told him, User StuckMidway is typing a reply ...

But when the reply finally came through, his eyes went wide. Because on this hacker-frequented, anonymous chat site, the message said:

Cmon, trust the world ...

Matt

How do you know my – Matt started to say, but an abrupt StuckMidway has signed off message had already ended the chat.

Matt’s phone chimed. Perhaps it was the GPS data arriving via the mobile version of the HereChat app.

You type my real name on an anonymous chat, but sure, trust that world, right? Because people are basically good, and all that.

He sighed. "First, back to those basically good folks trying to take my house. He typed a long, arcane string of text into the Belch window, made sure it was correct, then tapped Belch proxy’s send" button.

His web browser displayed an HTTP 500 error from the web server. That was expected, and just meant the