Origin (35 page)
Authors: Jack Kilborn
The wind died suddenly, bringing absolute stillness.
Andy opened his eyes. A breeze hit them from the opposite direction, lasting a few seconds, but not nearly the strength of the blast wave.
“Negative phase,” Belgium yelled. “The blast happened so fast it created a partial vacuum, this wind is the result of suction.”
Andy wasn’t listening. He was staring at the fireball. It was bright, almost too bright to look at, mostly red and violet with portions of pure white.
The giant fire column plumed at the top, becoming the recognizable mushroom cloud, gray and purple smoke billowing out in an expanding ball.
“Spectacular,” Belgium said.
Sun was also taken in by its destructive beauty. The apex of mankind’s scientific endeavors. The secret of the atom, on display in all of its kiloton glory.
“We weren’t burned,” Sun said. “How do we know about our radiation exposure?”
“It doesn’t look like too big of a nuke, so it probably isn’t a fusion bomb,” Belgium said. “We won’t know until later, but I think we’re far enough away. Our radiation exposure should be minimal.”
The mushroom cloud continued to expand, spreading open like a flower.
“Nothing could live through that, right?” Andy said. “Bub couldn’t…”
“Nothing can survive a nuclear blast at ground zero.”
Andy frowned. “But what if all of that outer space crap was just that—crap? Isn’t the devil supposed to be a liar? What was it that Father Thrist said? Satan’s greatest feat is to convince us he doesn’t exist. Lucifer is the Master of Lies.”
“Trust me, Andy,” Belgium patted his shoulder. “Even if Bub really was Lucifer, he doesn’t exist any longer.”
Andy thought about it. “So we did it,” he said. “We actually beat the devil.”
The voice came from behind them, low and hoarse.
“I’m not beaten yet.”
They spun around and watched in horror as Bub crawled out of the crevice. He looked even worse than before. One wing was missing, and the other dragged behind him, broken and bloody. Several holes in his flesh were so big that the bones showed through. Both eye sockets were empty, but he’d grown a tiny third eye in the middle of his forehead.
The demon glanced away from the trio and looked at the fireball, the plume still rising. He dropped to his haunches and vomited blood onto the desert sand.
“I am immortal… I was heeeeere before your species began… and I’ll be heeeeeeere to lead you to extinctioooooooon!”
Bub stretched out his claws and raised them to the heavens.
“YOU CAN’T KILL ME!”
he screamed, his voice spreading out over the expanse of the desert.
He pointed a misshapen claw at them, accusing.
“All you diiiiiiiiiid,”
Bub snarled,
“is make meeeee angry.”
Sun looked around for any kind of weapon—a rock, a branch, anything at all. She saw Belgium pick up a handful of sand, and Andy ball up his fists.
Then Bub did something that none of them could have possibly expected.
He exploded.
The demon burst into dozens of pieces with a splatting sound, like a giant water balloon had popped. Andy, Sun, and Frank dove to the ground and hid their faces from the blast.
But nothing touched them.
The trio looked, and saw that each of Bub’s parts had sprouted wings and remained airborn. He had become a swarm of demons, each no larger than a tennis ball.
Perfect replicas of Bub.
They circled, briefly flapping around the trio in quick figure eights. Then they all flew off in different directions, scattering into the distance, as if each had a specific destination in mind.
Eventually they faded out of sight.
Andy reached for Sun’s hand and held it. She squeezed it tight. They looked at each other, and then at Dr. Belgium.
The biologist made a long face and verbalized what each of them was thinking.
“Uh-oh.”
T
he ebook you’re now reading has never been conventionally published.
Let me backtrack a little.
In 1999, after writing six unpublished novels in the mystery-thriller genre, I wrote a technothriller called
Origin.
It was based on the idea of the US government holding Satan in an underground research facility, where he was being studied by the top scientific, religious, and military minds in the world.
I was thinking
Jurassic Park
meets
The Exorcist,
and could already picture the action figures when the movie came out. I believed it was the best thing I’d written up to that point, and it was good enough to help me land a literary agent, which then quickly led to a Hollywood agent.
For a few weeks, I felt on top of the world.
Naturally, the book didn’t sell.
I’m not sure why. Maybe it stinks. Maybe it mixed too many genres, containing elements of horror, thriller, romance, sci-fi, and humor. Maybe it was just an unlucky project.
When the final rejection came in, I put the book away and went to work on another cross-genre technothriller, called
The List.
That one didn’t sell either. This led me to write a medical thriller without any genre-mixing at all, called
Disturb
, which my agent hated and wouldn’t represent.
I eventually did wind up selling
Whiskey Sour,
the first in the Jack Daniels series, and have been writing those since 2003.
But
Origin
and
The List
have always been in the back of my mind. Every so often I’d take them out and tinker with them, and eventually I put them on my website as free ebook downloads.
The reader response took me by surprise. The books have been downloaded more than two thousand times each. I’m humbled and flattered by the attention these two failures have gotten, and have answered quite a bit of email about them. The question people most often ask is, “When will these be published?”
I still don’t have an answer to that. But with the birth of the Amazon Kindle, I realized my older thrillers might have a life beyond those people who surf my website.
The secret to success in publishing is distribution. In the world of ebooks, Amazon is currently the biggest distributor, with the hottest ereader.
Origin, The List, Disturb,
and my short story collection
55 Proof
aren’t available in bookstores, or libraries. They don’t have ISBN numbers or bar codes. They haven’t been catalogued by the Library of Congress. They haven’t been professionally typeset, or edited.
But fans, collectors, and completests have asked for them, so here they are.
In 2006 I rewrote
Origin
, taking out some of the humor, making it darker and scarier, and submitting it to editors under a pen name. It didn’t sell, and
Origin
garnered even more rejections.
That’s the version I’ve presented here, because I believe it’s the version that works best. I’ve rewritten
Origin
more than any of my other novels. I have no desire to work on it further.
Unless, of course, a real publisher shows some interest.
I hope you enjoyed it, and would love to hear what you thought.
Origin
is the book that made me realize I might be able to make it in this business. Dr. Belgium is one of my favorite supporting characters, and I still think Bub is my best villain.
If you know anyone who makes action figures, have them get in touch…
Joe Konrath
April, 2009
J
.A. Konrath is the author of seven novels in the Jack Daniels series, along with dozens of short stories. The eighth, STIRRED, will be available in 2011.
Under the name Jack Kilborn, he wrote the horror novels AFRAID, ENDURANCE, TRAPPED, SERIAL UNCUT (written with Blake Crouch) and DRACULAS (written with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson.)
Under the name Joe Kimball, he wrote two novels in the TIMECASTER sci-fi series, coming in 2011.
Visit Joe at
www.JAKonrath.com
.
JA Konrath’s Works Available on Nook
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“I
’m going to kill somebody. Soon.”
David leaned back on the mattress, fingers laced behind his blond head. His overdeveloped biceps strained the fabric of his T-shirt sleeves. He flexed his pecs, and his chest trembled like a bull shaking off horseflies.
Manny muted the television, sighing loudly enough for David to hear him. This was a familiar dialog.
“No, you won’t. You don’t want to get in trouble again.”
David grunted. He stared at the ceiling, imagining that this was a real apartment with people living above and below. But it wasn’t real; it was a cage, pure and simple. The fake scenery outside the window and the phone that only dialed out to one number made it even more ludicrous.
“I’d rather go back to prison than stay here.”
“You know that isn’t true. This is better for us, David. We can get through this. Look at all we’ve been through together.”
Manny was right. They’d been through hell. But the future only promised extra helpings, with no end in sight.
