Awakened Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  AWAKENED: PARAGONS BOOK ONE

  C. Steven Manley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 C. Steven Manley

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  ISBN-13:

  Cover by Juan Padron (@sirjotajota) via 99Designs

  Copy Edit by Lynsey Morandin

  DEDICATION

  To the Friday Night Knights:

  Chris C.

  Wayne L.

  Kelli B.

  John C.

  Nick J.

  Nick G.

  Thanks for all the adventures, guys.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Israel Trent woke to shadows.

  His eyes felt thick, as though swollen in their sockets, and he blinked slowly as the rest of his senses struggled to catch up to his sight. There were sounds all around: dull pops in the distance - insistent beeping closer - a soft, drowsy groaning under the beeps. He tried to raise his head and realized it seemed to weigh far more than he remembered. Not that he could remember much. His thoughts came in slow trickles instead of the quick steady stream he was accustomed to.

  There had been a bar. That was right, he’d met Conroy after they‘d wrapped the post trial piece on the Albany Park story. They had been drinking…what had it been? It was all so damn vague.

  A man’s scream echoed from somewhere and Israel’s eyes finally surged open in their too small sockets. The space he was in looked like a storeroom. Solid brick surrounded him on three sides with heavy chain-link fence making up the fourth wall. The lights were low and yellow, glowing from what looked like emergency fixtures set high on the walls outside the fence. The air was dense and carried a miasma of scents that Israel couldn’t separate.

  He struggled to sit up and realized he was on a padded table of some kind. No, not a table, but a stretcher. It was the kind paramedics used, but simpler. It was the older metal kind he’d seen in black and white movies. He raised his hand to his face to rub at his tortured eyes and felt a sharp sting in his arm. An IV was securely taped to the inside of his elbow with thin tubing leading up to a bag that was torn across the bottom and dripping its contents onto the floor. Around the IV insertion site there was some kind of discoloration that had turned his normally dark mocha skin a kind of sickly orange.

  Realization hit him like a bucket of water to the face and he yanked hard at the tubing. Pain stabbed through his arm and he gasped. He slapped his other hand over the tiny wound to stop any bleeding. There was another strangled cry from somewhere he couldn’t see and Israel swung his feet off the stretcher with clumsy efficiency. Hard, frigid stone met his bare feet. He looked down at himself, wondering what had happened to his shoes, and noticed that he was dressed in nothing but black hospital scrubs. He gritted his teeth and struggled to clear his mind of panic and disorientation. “Focus,” he whispered to himself. “Just focus on the question.” It was a mantra he had picked up from one of his journalism professors back in college. Every story had a question at its core. Any time he’d felt himself getting bogged down on an assignment he would recite that to refocus his thinking. This seemed more nightmare than assignment, though.

  Despite that, he knew it was no dream. He studied the heavy fence separating him from the bricked hallway and noticed for the first time that there was a gate at one end of it. Israel was moving toward it when he heard someone groan and then softly whimper. He whirled toward the sound and found himself looking at a woman’s still form lying on another of the old fashioned stretchers. She was pushed against the back of the room and only partially revealed by the hall lights.

  The glow coming through the fence cast slanted diamond patches of light over the woman’s face. She was dressed in the same black scrubs as Israel and had an identical IV running to her arm. She was young - early twenties at a guess - and had hair a shade of red that Israel was pretty sure didn’t occur in nature. Her face was distressed and pinched by whatever she was dreaming about and her full lips twitched in time with the tiny movements of her arms and legs. Israel looked at the gate for just a second and then cursed softly.

  He moved to her side and, carefully this time, removed the IV from her arm. He pressed on it as he had his own and used his other hand to shake her gently. “Hey,” he said, leaning close to her ear so he could keep his voice lower. “Come on, wake up. You really need to wake up now, girl.”

  Her head lolled back and forth for a moment before he grabbed her chin and softly shook it. “Let’s go,” he said, “time to wake up.”

  Her eyes popped open. Suddenly, Israel was the target of weak slaps and kicks as she screamed at him with words that were slurred and incomprehensible. He staggered back, throwing his hands up in defense and saying “Calm down, calm down” as quietly as he could. After a few seconds, the woman slid off the stretcher onto shaky legs and leaned against the wall - swaying like a drunk. She kept shaking her head to clear it while Israel stayed out of arm’s reach with his hands held out.

  “Whossh...” She shook her head again. “Who are you?” she asked. “What the hell did you do to me, you sick fuck?”

  “Easy now,” Israel said. “I didn’t do anything but wake you up.”

  “Bullshit,” she snapped. Her eyes darted around the room and her expression grew confused. “Where are we? What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” Israel said. “I just woke up myself. Look.” He gestured to the other stretcher in the room and the pole with the ruptured IV bag. “Same as you,” he said. “We’ve even got the same outfits.”

  The woman looked down at herself and back at him. “What… What’s happening?”

  Israel shook his head. “I don’t know. I think the question we should be asking, though, is ‘Where’s the exit?’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, let’s get the hell up outta here and figure the rest out when we’re surrounded by guys with guns and badges.”

  She stared at him. Israel could see her clenching her teeth as she thought. “If you were drugged, what woke you up?”

  Israel pointed to the torn IV bag. “I think something happened to whatever they were giving us. I can’t be sure.”

  She pushed away from the wall and said, “Stay there.” She half-staggered over and examined the fluid bag. After a moment she said, “This goes all the way through. I think it’s a bullet hole.”

  Israel shrugged. Th
e woman waved him over, but took a step away as he drew close.

  He reached up and lifted the bag slightly so it was lit better. The plastic bag was ruptured near the bottom with a hole on one side that was pushed in and a second that seemed to have exploded outward. “Entry and exit,” he said, pointing at each hole respectively. “I think you’re right. Good job. I missed that.” He moved to the wall directly past the IV and found the bullet’s obvious impact point in the brick.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Somebody was shooting. What the hell are we into here?” He looked back at the woman.

  She was still staring at him, but her features had softened somewhat. “You aren’t lying to me? You really don’t know what’s going on?”

  “Girl, last thing I remember is throwing back shots with a friend of mine at a bar on Rush Street. Then this crap.”

  “My name isn’t ‘Girl.’ It’s Erin.”

  Israel nodded. “Sorry. Erin it is. I’m Israel.”

  “Like the country with all the Jews?”

  “Yeah, like the country. And, in case you were going to ask, no, I’m not Jewish myself. My mom named me after my grandfather.”

  Erin shrugged. She seemed to be steadier on her feet, but still swayed slightly. “I wasn’t going to. You’re a black guy. Black guys aren’t Jewish.”

  Now it was Israel’s turn to stare. “You know what, Erin? What say we find our way out of here and then we can discuss religious diversity?”

  Erin nodded. “Yeah. Out sounds good.”

  The gate in the chain-link wall was unlocked and opened easily. Israel figured that whoever had put them there hadn’t locked it because people under sedation didn’t tend to wander off. The corridor outside the chain-link had been a dead end in one direction, so they had turned right. It was after rounding the corner at the end of that hall that they found the first body.

  Covering the crime beat for the Chicago Tribune had given Israel more than his fair share of exposure to corpses, but he’d never seen anything like this before. The woman was slumped against the wall with multiple bullet holes in her chest. She was middle-aged and showed the softening around the face and torso that comes with that. Her clothes were that of a typical soccer mom: jeans, soft ivory turtleneck sweater, sensible shoes. What was odd was the black, oily residue that covered her face and head. It was almost as though someone had poured crude oil over the woman’s head, but this was thicker, more like jelly than liquid. Israel reached out a finger and touched it for just an instant. It was as cold as ice.

  “What is that shit?” Erin asked.

  Israel shook his head. “No idea. We’ll figure it out later. Let’s find an exit.”

  “What’s that on her arm?” Erin asked, pointing.

  Israel turned the body so he could better see the arm she was referring to. There was a thick black armband there with an emblem of some kind embroidered on it in heavy silver thread. Rather than take the time to examine it, Israel slid it down the dead woman’s arm and stuck it into the small pocket on the front of his scrub shirt.

  “What are you doing?” Erin said.

  “For when we find all those guns and badges,” he said. “You know, clues.”

  Erin nodded. For the first time, Israel realized that she hadn’t screamed or made a scene at the sight of the body. He filed that away for future reference and said, “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Same as you. I was in a bar.”

  Israel nodded. “All right. When we get outta here, the first round’s on me.”

  The corridor they were in stretched out before them. It was hard to judge how far as the emergency lights were only illuminating portions of the space separated by patches of deep shadow. There was an unidentifiable sound coming from the far end, but it seemed muffled, like listening to a television through a hotel wall. Farther down, Israel saw at least two more bodies.

  He looked at Erin. She could see the same thing as him but rather than being disgusted by the corpses, she only seemed confused. “You ever play Resident Evil?” she asked without looking at him.

  Israel blinked at the question. “No,” he said. “I’m more of a Madden guy.”

  She nodded. “I feel like I’m trapped in a Resident Evil game.”

  Israel looked at the corridor and said, “Well, let’s get to the next level, then.”

  He was moving forward when he felt her hand slip into his. There was nothing romantic in the action. It was more she was grabbing onto the ledge that was keeping her from falling to her death. Israel looked back at her and she met his gaze with her own dark eyes. “Doesn’t mean anything. I just don’t want to get separated.”

  Israel looked back at the corridor and said, “Yeah. I’m good with that.”

  They moved down the corridor, Israel in the lead and Erin a handhold behind. He’d been right about the bodies; they came across two more, one much like the first, but male. The other was another male and dressed in some kind of tactical gear. This one didn’t have the black ooze covering his features, but his head was distorted and cracked. Gray bits of flesh hung from the ruptures in his skull and one eye bulged almost completely out of the socket , the muscles that held it in place clearly visible.

  Israel looked away as he swallowed back something bitter that had risen in his throat. Behind him he heard Erin gasp and say “Oh, fuck. What the hell?”

  Israel took a deep breath and looked back at the ruined body. “I don’t know. It looks like his head got crushed by something. Can’t say I know what, though.”

  “He’s carrying.”

  Israel looked back at her. “What?”

  Erin pointed. “He’s got a gun.”

  Israel looked to where she was pointing. Sure enough, there was a pistol lying on the floor next to the corpse’s bloody hand. It was short and solid-looking with a square barrel. Israel was pretty sure it was a Glock. He picked it up and examined it. He knew a lot of cops but he’d never really gotten caught up in gun culture.

  After a minute, Erin said, “Check the clip.”

  Israel nodded. He tilted the gun in his hand, looking for a release button.

  “It’s that one,” she said, pointing. “Near the top of the handle where your thumb would be.”

  Israel checked and found the small button. He pressed it with his index finger and the magazine clattered to the floor. He snatched it up quickly and looked at Erin. “Slipped,” he said. He examined the magazine and counted five remaining rounds.

  “Look for more clips,” Erin said.

  Israel turned his attention to the bloodied body, trying not to look at the ruined head. The man was wearing some kind of tactical vest that was coated in gore. Israel could see where the extra magazines would rest in the harness. All of the pouches were empty. “This is all we get,” he said.

  Erin shook her head. “What the hell did that to him? Where are we?”

  Israel touched the rough wall. “This is really old brick,” he said, “so not a new structure. The air kind of feels like we’re underground, so some kind of warehouse basement maybe? Beyond that we could be on the moon for all I know.”

  “Why? Fuck, why would...” Her voice was shaky and thick with tension.

  Israel put his free hand on her shoulder, keeping the pistol hand down at his side. “Easy, Erin. Easy. Look at me.” He leaned his head down a little so he could make eye contact. “We woke up together, we get out of here together. I promise. We’ve got to keep our heads, though, okay? I promise you, I’m just as freaked out as you are but that will not help us right now. Let’s keep our cool and do this safe, slow, and easy. We stay focused on getting out. That’s our best bet. You and me. We can do this.”

  Erin’s hand found his wrist and squeezed it as though she were deciding whether or not to push it away. After a moment she did so- gently- and then nodded. “I’m okay,” she said. “Let’s just keep going.”

  They had gone another few feet when Israel said, “How’d you k
now about the button on the gun?”

  “I’ve got an ex-boyfriend who was into guns. He showed me a little.”

  “Can you shoot?”

  “Not really. He wouldn’t let me put any bullets in the gun. Guess he thought I might take him out.”

  Israel half-smiled. “Yeah, I’ve had an ex or two like that.”

  The corridor came to an intersection with a short hallway leading forward and two more corridors turning both left and right. The short hallway ended in a set of double doors with no visible latches or handles. It looked as though they could be pushed open easily and were wide enough to admit two men side by side. Or, he thought, one person on an old, metal stretcher. There were at least three more bodies to the left and right.

  “Let’s go forward,” he said looking back at Erin.

  She stared to the right at the two bodies on the floor. They were face-down, but the halo of black gel was easy to see. She nodded and gently pushed him forward.

  They moved to the double doors. Israel was still feeling sluggish but better than he had back in the stretcher room. He held the pistol up awkwardly as he pushed open the door and moved through it. There was a small room lit by a single overhead fluorescent that flickered and hummed. The room was empty save for a bank of full-sized gym lockers on either wall. One of them stood open, and Israel could see a dark suit jacket hanging on a hook with the rest of the suit neatly folded on a shelf at the top. What looked to be a pair of leather wingtips were neatly placed at the bottom of the locker.

  He looked at Erin and she shrugged.

  The wall opposite the door was covered in a heavy, black curtain of some kind and they moved toward it together. Israel found the seam in the curtained wall and pulled it open slightly, just enough to peek into the dimly lit room beyond. A strong odor wafted through. It was like some strange mixture of old fish and excrement. Israel wrinkled his nose against it and tried to make out some of the room’s details, but the light was too thin and the shadows too deep. It seemed darker than it should be, but Israel put that off as his mind playing tricks on him.