Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps Read Online Free PDF Page A

worst-“
    “They’ll have to cut through our loving followers, first,” Monkey said, grinning his narrow grin, tossing his long copper hair nonchalantly over his shoulder. Blood returned a crooked smile.
    “How could this happen?” Teal murmured. “Why do they want to kill us?”
    Monkey hooted at that, sounding not unlike his chosen namesake .
    “They’ve wanted to kill us ever since we got here. You don’t plop a bunch of mindless zombies and a Mayan temple out in the middle of bumpkinland without creatin’ a few hard feelings.”
    “We shouldn’t have used our powers so freely,” Teal complained . “We shouldn’t-“
    “Come on. How could we have known science was going to all of a sudden discover us? Hell, we thought we were the only ones. We ran across one another in the space of two years, and then nothing, no matter how we looked. Up until now, the believers thought we got our powers from the ancestors and everybody else assumed we were frauds. Fair enough, and it got us some good times. Now the rules have changed, and our kind are takin’ it in the butt. The sooner we learn to live with that, the better.”
    Smoke, who had been customarily silent, unknotted his massive jaw long enough to say,
    “We go.”
    “Yeah, big fellah, we go. Do you think the followers need to be pumped up a little bit more, Blood?”
    She nodded.
    “Sound the drums. It’s show time.”
    Her pain spattered out into the congregation like her blood onto the paper, as the others picked it up and threw it out as far as they could. She pulled the string of thorns through her tongue, grateful that it was the last time. It was fine being the dark goddess, waited on hand and foot, sucking the last dime out of the fools in their congregation, watching their herd of normals grow, but maybe it wasn’t worth this. Of course, it was moot now. She felt a little dizzy as Monkey lit the paper and started his speech. She looked out over the glazed eyes of two hundred people and wanted to laugh at them.
    Pitiful sheep.
    “The time has come, the Katun-ending draws nigh, the cycle begins again,” he intoned. ‘The maggots of the world are coming to eat its meat. As they came to the prairies to slay the buffalo, as they came to the Amazon to strip our mother bare, now they come here. But though the wheel of time turns, it is yet never the same. It can be changed. The buffalo can come back. The redwoods can return. The Amazon can be green as once it was. The ancestors are watching, who fought and died for you. You can see their eyes, in the night sky. Will you shame them, when the enemy comes? Will you do less for them?”
    The sound of the crowd was inarticulate, but all of their minds screamed No.
    “We go inside to gird ourselves. We will emerge at the last, when you have proven yourselves.”
    You okay, Blood? Dizzy. I’m okay.
    It was Monkey, naturally, who had insisted on the escape tunnel . Once again he was proved right.
    Well, you got your wish, Monkey told her, as they moved down the tunnel. For a while, anyway. The Man Who Would Be King was always your favorite book. Uh-huh. Fm just remembering how that ended. Not this time, Monkey promised.
    After ten or fifteen minutes they came up in the deep Alaskan woods, cautiously. In the distance, Blood heard the familiar tearing sound of automatic gunfire, something she hadn’t heard since they had been mercenaries in Kamchatka. She found she almost welcomed it. It was a somehow honest sound. Mercy was pale, though. She had not been one of them, back then, and probably had never heard gunfire. She took Mercy’s hand.
    Don’t worry, she told her. We’ll be okay. But we have to run silent now. Mercy nodded, and took hold of Smoke’s hand. Blood raised her pistol, checked to make certain it was loaded. She knew the men were ahead, waiting for them, and when she could see them through the trees, she tasted them. The bloodletting sometimes made her like this, as if she were evaporating,