Tenebra Zeta #7: Venom in the Breeze

By Justin Bedard

Within the heart of an African utopia, a dreaded poison from a hundred years past oozes its way to the surface. Whether it is a curse or a living thing bent on its survival, it is known only as "the Infection", and as it spreads slowly across the beauty of nature, it shows no qualms of consuming the life of all it seizes in its putrid grasp and leaving them as nothing more than soulless husks.

It doesn't take long for Tenebra Zeta to hit the scene, hot off the heels of their European Invasion and still seeking answers for the disappearance of cult leader Cain. With the aid of local master of the winds Zahra Angani, the team sets out to purge the waste and return order to the sunlit savannahs before it claims one of the great beacons imbueing the planet with life.

But it is the waste itself that intrigues them the most, its dark and somehow familiar essence begging for its secrets to show themselves...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justin Bedard
• Release date: May 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463745816

Justin Bedard

Justin Bedard (born September 11th, 1995) is a Canadian author that has lived in southern Ontario most of his life. To talk broad strokes, he's your average geek and has a very strange and slightly immature sense of humor that may be the result of insanity. He currently resides in Kemptville with his parents and two siblings.

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The following contains strong language, sexual content, and scenes of violence. Reader discretion is advised.

The characters and scenarios depicted in this work are either fictional or derived from mythology. Any resemblances to any person living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Some dialogue appears enclosed in angle brackets (< and >). These indicate that the character is speaking a non-English language.

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Select cover assets provided by Dark Shadow Artworks. Support him at patreon.com/DarkShadowArtworks.

©Justin Bedard, 2020. All rights reserved.

TENEBRA ZETA

ISSUE #7

VENOM IN THE BREEZE

CHAPTER ONE

December 9th, 2198

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

*******

Shit just kept happening. More freaky creatures popping up all over, more manpower required to deal with it. We’d been paired up with Tenebra Beta twice already, and while the jobs got done, it wasn’t worth hearing their captain and Monica butt heads eight million times before breakfast. Combine that with our glut of missions that had us on the move just about every minute of every day, and you’ve got a sour recipe for total burnout, my friends. Even our fearless and slightly crazy leader had thanked every last god twenty times over when we finally caught a break. Granted, that meant she had a lot more time to dote on me, and lately she’d been getting pushier than ever, so that’s just no fun for anyone but her.

For me, though, the worst thing about it all was knowing every day that passed was another one with Cain still on the loose. Nearly a month and a half had gone by, and not only had he not been caught or even spotted, there was still no effort being made to find him. Not by Alpha, certainly not by us, and I just kept getting more and more pissed off every day nothing changed.

And I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t Danu tell you not to worry about it? Doesn’t it make more sense to be patient? Yes and yes. But guess what. Anxiety doesn’t play by the rules. I couldn’t kick back with a beer and forget about it like I’m sure other guys my age would be willing to do. I worry, and when I worry, I come to really scary and poorly thought out conclusions. It was the kind of shit that no amount of pills and therapy were ever going to fix. Really. How many problems was this now? Tamamo, the Brotherhood of Blood, the leech, and now this black stuff. It was a wonder my brain didn’t explode as I tried to figure them out not just all at once but also by myself.

They demanded quick solutions that simply didn’t exist, not helped by Exhibits A through Z systematically going up in smoke. Yep. The whole deletion kerfuffle was happening again...well, sort of. The reports from our European tour were still there in the archives, but a quick skim showed that any references to the leech or Cain were nowhere to be seen. I looked at my own drafts for comparison’s sake, a little worried I might have left those detail out by accident. Nope. Right there, clear as crystal. So I resubmitted them under the guise of revisions, and within the hour, it happened again. No notices given as to why. Just a swift change that I couldn’t even verify since I checked through the editing history and didn’t see a single timestamp other than my own.

They’d at least failed at thinking I wouldn’t notice or go without speculating. Why those tidbits in particular? Why would someone go to the effort of hiding them? Were they trying to hide them at all or was it just a minor edit to keep the info relevant to the mission in the forefront? Maybe it was HQ censoring the info for the sake of keeping the squadrons out of the case they explicitly didn’t want them working on.

No. It couldn’t be any of those things. If intel in reports was irrelevant to the current mission but could come in handy later, it was usually taken aside and placed in a separate file. Even then, there’d be a stamp in the editing history and HQ would send a note to the original writer telling them about the revision. As for the other option...well, it seemed too crazy for anyone to actually think of as a possibility, but if there was one thing the human race had been made painfully aware of since the dawn of the twenty-second century, it was that impossible was an increasingly useless term.

The whole thing made my head spin as you could correctly assume, and I decided not to go any further for the time being. What I did do, however, was shoot e-mails off to the other Scholars. One to Alpha, one to Beta, one to Sigma, one to Gamma. Telling them about the situation, asking if they’d filed any similar reports and had similar unauthorized edits. I left it at that and shifted my priorities. The higher-ups didn’t want the field squadrons bothering with searching for Cain or Tamamo, let alone pondering over this leech thing that conveniently showed up whenever a particularly dangerous monster appeared. So you know what? Fine. I’ll make like Thanos and do it myself.

Just, y’know...with less snapping half the universe out of existence.

I started by re-engaging the tracking signature on all of Tenebra’s outposts, then used the blood Cain left on my clothes to develop a second signature to run in tandem with the first. How did I manage that without anyone noticing? Each outpost had a set time window where it would cease sending info directly to HQ, usually about a half hour or so a day, and they were so used to pouring out hundreds of terabytes of data at once that a single unauthorized extra gig wouldn’t even blip on the radar.

Still, the results would take a lot of time, and so I worked with the resources that were more readily available. My own reports for a start, then one that had been lurking around in our library for as long as I’d lived at the manor. It looked no better now than it had the first time I read it, but everything in it had only increased in value now that I saw how much information it contained on the Brotherhood of Blood. The origins (to the best of the writer’s knowledge), the names and profiles of some of its more prolific members, interviews with their victims. I honestly wondered why a digital copy hadn’t been made and sent into the archives. It alone could convince even the biggest doubters that these freaks needed to be scrubbed from existence. Then again, digital copies could always be corrupted or lost in the bowels of a defunct server or, just for the sake of argument, tampered with to keep the vital information out of reach.

And so paperbacks and hardcovers it would be to begin with. Every text, every tome, every scroll I could get my hands on. I grabbed anything I thought would satisfy my hunger for information, only turning to the Internet and its unverifiable vastness once all physical resources were exhausted. When the load got too heavy for a few journal pages, I started making note after note and sticking them up on my bedroom wall with pins, stringing the fitting pieces together with elastic.

So it would be for hours a day. I’d lock my door, blast heavy metal music at max volume, and either pin a new piece of evidence into the ever-expanding web or take the time to go over every little thing I could think of. Specific people, places, events. Anything that could lead to a definitive conclusion. It was kind of like those crazies that tried to link the Kennedy assassination to Apollo 11 being fake which made Osama bin Laden do 9/11 which in turn made this moment awkward for all of us. You know. Proper conspiracy theory bullshit. The kind of thing I had to hide behind a tarp lest someone stroll on in and think I’d taken a flying leap off the deep end.

And honestly, I was starting to believe that I had. But that was just how it would be until this thing was solved and all the questions were answered. Why had the Brotherhood resurfaced now? How had they avoided capture for so long? What was their game working with Tamamo? Speaking of Tamamo, what was her game? How was she so elusive that she’d been on the loose for five hundred years? What was this leech thing? Why had it fed on Apophis and Fenris? Why hadn’t it attacked Monica?

And most importantly and nerve-wracking of all, where were they all headed next?

Mister Parker?

It was hard not