Legacy Of Ashes Read online

  Legacy Of Ashes

  Earth’s Ashes Series

  Ric Beard

  T. K. King

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Book One

  Part 1

  1. A Whole Lotta Talk

  2. Just a Shoulder Wound

  3. Armed

  4. Of Course

  5. You're Welcome, Rats

  Part 2

  6. Probably the Usual

  7. Do Not Engage

  8. Rat-Shit Timing

  9. The Time for Serious People

  10. Time to Escalate

  11. A Dastardly Secret, No Doubt

  12. Are You Angry?

  Part 3

  13. Slim and None

  14. The Wounded Act

  15. Flapjacks

  16. Incessant Ear Pollution

  Part 4

  17. Sanctimonious

  18. Unplanned Company

  19. A Towering Steeple

  Book Two

  Part 5

  20. I Always Come Prepared

  21. A Nerd in Hero's Clothing

  22. Badlanders

  23. Yo

  24. Always with the Questions

  Part 6

  25. Old World Pretension

  26. Martha

  Part 7

  27. Ninety-Teeth

  28. So Much Shit

  Part 8

  29. Lifeforms Detected

  30. A Sparkling Glaze

  31. Definitely a Rib

  Book Three

  Part 9

  32. Ain't Gonna Be No Cleanup

  33. I'll See Him Bleed

  34. Red Carpet All the Way

  35. You and Me Both

  36. They Don't Keep Calendars

  37. Grand Entrances

  Part 10

  38. A Tyrant in Saint's Clothing

  39. Paid with Their Blood

  40. Talk to the Loser

  41. My Best Red Dress

  42. A Real Handful

  43. Pull the Trigger Already

  Part 11

  44. A Bit on the Thin Side

  45. Is He Still Talking?

  46. Lucy

  47. Stow It

  48. Asshole with the Loudspeaker

  49. Ally or Not

  50. A High-Pitched Whistle

  51. A Genius in Bear's Clothing

  Part 12

  52. Evasion Recommended

  53. Pick Them Off

  54. Flickering

  55. Open the Door, Sara

  56. Family Fights

  57. A Fucking Box

  58. A Blimp

  59. Make Our Work Together Easier

  Book Four

  Part 13

  60. Both Middle Fingers

  61. A Tool of Lesser Minds

  62. Never Stopped Him Before

  Part 14

  63. Looking at the Suit

  64. A Click

  65. I'm Just Steering

  Part 15

  66. Pay Your Wager

  67. Do You Want to Play, Too?

  68. Who Is Miles?

  Part 16

  69. We Aren't Alone

  70. Who?

  71. A World of Hurt

  72. The Rest Was History

  73. You're How Old?

  Part 17

  74. Tiny Man

  75. Finished with Your Insolence

  Book Five

  Part 18

  76. Unknown Origins

  77. A Room?

  78. Got a Smoke?

  79. Curtains

  Part 19

  80. A Little Revenge

  81. I Should Know Better

  82. Rife With Self-Interest

  83. Keep It Quiet

  84. Unforgivable

  85. A Pity

  86. You Dropped It

  Part 20

  87. Nuh-uh!

  88. Boy

  89. Magic

  90. If You Want to Shoot Him

  91. I'm a Little Busy

  Part 21

  92. A Hell of a Surprise

  93. Paint the Ground

  94. Over My Own Breathing

  95. You'll Kill Us All

  96. A Man Possessed

  97. Do It Slow

  98. Light 'Em Up

  99. Oh, You Want A Fair Fight?

  100. Why Are You Surprised?

  101. Enjoying the View

  Epilogue

  Get A Free E-Book

  LEGACY OF ASHES

  Ric Beard and T.K. King

  For Emily and Kellie

  Prologue

  “Mitchell!” Judy Tyson-Graves barked as she reached for the handle above the passenger door. “Slow down!”

  “I’ve got it,” Mitchell said. “Trust me.”

  Using subtle movements born of repetition and muscle memory, Mitchell navigated the Audi along familiar roads leading toward the campus of his research company nestled on a 25-acre swath in Research Triangle Park. Shadows danced on the asphalt ahead as the midday sunlight penetrated a canopy of tree branches reaching across the narrow road.

  “This isn’t NASCAR. You’re not going to fix anything by slamming us into the trees!” She placed a hand on the console between them. “Miranda is in the car!”

  A groaning male voice interrupted from the backseat. “Mom, I can hear you.”

  Judy threw a glare over her shoulder at the lanky teen. His light brown hair was unkempt and his knees stood higher than his waist. A set of Beats headphones covered his ears.

  “I don’t mean anything bad by it, hon. One day you’ll understand.”

  “Yeah, she’s the baby. I get it.”

  Declining to repeat the equal-love-for-her-children debate with her eldest, Judy turned her attention back to Mitchell as he whipped the car around another curve, causing her to slide in the seat. She poked his shoulder hard and her voice adopted an eerie-calm.

  “Mitchell. Slow down or I’ll make sure you don’t survive the crash.” She poked with each word. “I-am-not-kidding.” Leaning closer, she growled under her breath, “You’re pissing me off!”

  Mitchell spied their daughter in the rear-view mirror. The fair-skinned girl’s fingertips danced a ballet on her iPad’s surface, her eyes darting rapidly around its display.

  “Yeah, Miranda looks just terrified,” he said. But he let off the gas and the SUV decelerated.

  “Thank you, smart ass.” She relinquished her grip on the ‘oh-shit’ handle and relaxed in the seat as they rounded a curve and rolled into view of the compound’s access road. “I’m gonna miss this place.”

  Mitchell nodded.

  “We raised our kids here.”

  “Let’s not start that again,” Judy replied. “At least give me a couple of minutes’ worth of nostalgia before you go shitting on it.”

  “I can still hear you, Mom.”

  “Stow it, William,” she snapped over her shoulder. “I swear, a woman can’t get a moment’s peace with you two.” She looked over her shoulder and wagged a finger at the boy. “And don’t act like you don’t say the word ‘shit’…”

  Miranda giggled; Judy ignored her.

  “…when you think I’m out of earshot. You have no concept of a mother’s superpowers.”

  William grinned, but Judy suppressed her own smile until she was facing front again. She glanced over at Mitchell, expecting to see a smile on her husband’s face, but he was brooding.

  Mitchell responded as if he’d read her thoughts. “Yes, I’m doing it again.”

  Judy again turned to face her son.

  “Turn up the music.”

  William shrugged and thumbed the side of the cell phone to which the hea
dphones were connected. Pumping bass and an indifferent gander out the window signaled his withdrawal from the conversation. Judy turned her gaze on Mitchell. “Go ahead, Mister OCD. Get it out of your system or you’ll be brooding all day.”

  Mitchell started prattling, tapping one hand on the wheel with his cadence, for emphasis.

  “Sure, sometimes I’m conflicted, and I wonder if we’ve done the right thing. But I try to remind myself that the ROI,” he thrusted a thumb toward the back seat, “outweighs the price they’ve paid.”

  Judy glanced at Miranda in the visor mirror. Still disinterested. Eyes darted. Fingers danced. But she knew her daughter heard every word.

  Screw it.

  “I agree,” Judy said. But Mitchell continued his prattling.

  “We’re talking about research that could change the direction of human evolution. Research this important can’t be thrust aside. It wasn’t us who forced the situation. If it weren’t for those ignorant government windbags’ fear-mongering about the things they can’t comprehend…”

  “I know.”

  “The closed-minded hacks in the scientific community…”

  “I know.”

  Placating Mitchell when he had demons to exorcise was a futile endeavor with which Judy Tyson-Graves was all-too-familiar. Today, it would really be pointless. After all, they were about to flee the country. Mitchell was consistent, if anything.

  “…we wouldn’t have dreamed of using our children as guinea pigs.”

  “They’re not guinea pigs,” Judy said. “They never were.”

  “Of course, they’re not!” Mitchell barked. Judy glanced at her mirror again and saw Miranda’s crystal eyes burning into the rearview from the back seat. She poked Mitchell and jerked her chin toward the mirror.

  “What?” Mitchell looked up. “Oh. Sorry, babe.”

  Judy watched from the mirror mirror in her visor as Miranda glared for a moment longer to ensure her discomfort was adequately communicated, before shrugging and lowering her head.

  Tap tap tap. Eyes darted, fingers danced, and Miranda Graves plotted her takeover of the world.

  Precocious child.

  Judy smirked and returned to the conversation. “We spent two years sitting up nights, running experiments over and over at the lab. The results were consistent. We validated our hypotheses. We ruled out any chance of harm coming to our children. I don’t know how many times I have to say these things. Stop beating yourself up for giving your children an amazing gift.” She paused and took a cleansing breath. Mitchell ground his teeth like he was working out an equation. She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. Into his ear, she whispered, “Shit, Mitchell, it’s the best gift a parent has given a child in the history of the human race. Nothing short of it.”

  Mitchell smiled and squeezed her leg.

  “Okay. You’re right.”

  “So, we don’t get the Nobel Prize or the recognition…well, maybe posthumously. But when we’re gone? When the children reveal the work, and stand as living proof of its validity? They’ll never want for anything again. And if things go sideways? If the government oversteps? Gray’s son is a technical prodigy. If Miranda and William need to hide from the windbags, he’s given them the tools to do it.”

  Mitchell glanced at Miranda in the rearview again.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “They could vanish. Miranda has outpaced both of us.”

  “Right? I mean how lucky are we that Miranda and Gray’s kid crossed paths?”

  “And to think that I chewed out the staff like a pretentious twat for breaking isolation protocols.”

  “Again, with the beating yourself up.” Judy patted his forearm. “Either way, we got lucky. Those two are thick as thieves. Sharing their secret with each other made them less likely to share it with others.”

  “They haven’t so far.”

  “People would call us freaks,” Miranda said. “Why would we tell anyone?”

  Mitchell looked in the mirror, Judy glanced at hers, but Miranda was still tapping away and hadn’t even looked up as she spoke.

  What does it say about us that we ask William to turn up his headphones, but don’t care if his younger sister hears us? Judy thought. She’s made of tougher stuff. But William knows the plan today and she doesn’t. ‘Guess it balances out.

  “You’re not freaks.”

  “I don’t care, Mom. So, what? I won’t ever get sick. I don’t have to advertise it.”

  Judy and Mitchell gazed at each other.

  “If she only knew the half of it,” Judy whispered.

  Mitchell nodded.

  “Things work themselves out, eventually,” Judy said aloud.

  “Except that now we’re grabbing our shit, cutting our losses, and fleeing like cowards.”

  “My point was that maybe you should take a positive perspective regardless of the situation, Mitch.”

  “Yeah, well you forget the proverbial glass is half full of air,” Mitchell replied. Silence fell between them, accentuating the tap-tap-tapping of Miranda’s fingers. Just when the rhythm started to grate on Judy’s nerves, Mitchell spoke again drowning it out. “I wish I knew how our mystery man found us in the first place.”

  “If nothing else, he showed us that not everyone is worthy of our gift,” Judy said. “Besides, worrying and wondering over that isn’t going to help us now. We need to focus on the task at hand, put the past behind us.”

  “Time to break camp.”

  “Yes.” Judy checked the mirror and saw Miranda’s eyes dart to the rearview and then back to her tablet.

  Tapping, dancing, darting. Plotting.

  “I still want to know how he found us out,” Mitchell muttered.

  The first encrypted, untraceable contact arrived simultaneously in each partner’s inbox. The sender not only knew about the research but had a broad range of details. There was no mention of the subjects, causing Mitchell to wonder if the partners should count themselves lucky. There still hadn’t been a mention of the kids, to this day. Judy knew that was shrewd calculation on the part of the sender. He just didn’t want to spook them into fleeing by threatening their kids. If he knew about the research, then Miranda, William, and the other kids were well known to the blackmailer.

  But the blackmailer didn’t have to threaten the kids. He had the partners dead to rights. The children were too young to give legal consent. Forget the fact that Mitchell and company would lose the respect of the scientific community and gain the ire of anyone in the world who found out what they’d done. Facebook would take their story viral. Prison was a real possibility. The prospect of losing their kids and rotting in a 6x9 cell was a storm cloud hanging over their heads throughout many sleepless nights.

  Although the sender of the email offered investment funds in return for full partnership, it all boiled down to extortion, plain and simple. The partial documents he provided were proof that he’d leached all the materials he needed to ruin them from their servers.

  So much for our Top-Secret protocols.

  They’d all agreed it was better to entertain the offer while they made every effort to learn Mister X’s identity. They weren’t sure what they would do if they found out who he was, but that was the kind of problem they’d rather have than the set of problems their blindness presented.

  When the managing research partners of GeneWorks RTP asked for the full terms, X said he wanted to remain anonymous while taking part in the experiment. Investments would follow proven success. But weeks after the treatments ended and blood tests verified his system’s acceptance of the procedure, X contacted the partners and stated that the terms had changed. Now that he had reaped the physiological benefits he’d desired, it had been time to turn his attention to money.

  Of course, he had. What had they expected from an extortionist?

  X demanded sixty percent of the proceeds, including private grant monies. There would be no investment funds.

  Three nights ago, the partners decided it was time
to cut their losses and get the kids out of Dodge. They would meet at their campus today and discuss the allocating of their resources from the company. GeneWorks RTP would continue to do business on its legal product lines, and the reins would be handed to the head of their plant research team, who was already destroying any remaining assets related to the research involving the children. The partners would sell their shares to the company and divide the proceeds before skipping off to different parts of the world. All that remained was to sign the legal paperwork.

  Mitchell eased the Audi up to the security gate and fished out his identification for a guard wearing a black and gray uniform. The guard greeted him and scanned the badge. The gate lifted and he fired off a two-fingered salute as he pulled onto the campus.

  The Audi rolled into the loop in front of the smallest building located in the back corner of the site. Sunlight poured into the vehicle as the parents opened their doors. Judy popped Miranda’s open and leaned in as Mitchell opened the hatch and started rummaging through their suitcases and bags.

  “You want to wait here? We’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “Sure, mom,” Miranda said without looking up from the tablet. “See you in a couple hours.”

  “Okay, smarty pants.” She kissed her daughter on her forehead. Miranda smirked in response. “We’ll be back in half an hour, tops.”

  Miranda looked up.

  “Can you keep the AC on? It’s hot out.”

  Judy ran her fingers gently over Miranda’s fiery red hair. “Sure, hon.”

  William pulled the headphones onto his lap.

  “Bring me a Coke from the machine?”

  Judy pursed her lips and threw her son a playful squint.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  William watched as his mother and father entered the building and sauntered by the security desk. He was fine with staying outside the glass-encased dungeon where needles poked him and he sweated inside those narrow MRI tubes. In truth, he was thrilled he wouldn’t be going back.

  He looked across the parking lot and then at his sister. Miranda was still bending her tablet to her will. That thing was practically attached to her. He mused that Apple should create a port to charge it from her bunghole as much as she used it.