Quietus Read online

“Not so long ago, you didn’t think there was anything to shoot at.”

  Silence.

  Jimmy peers over the edge of the jetty, just in time to catch one last glimpse of the creature sinking beneath the surface. “What in the world was that thing?”

  Nobody has an answer to that. At least, not a confident one.

  “Parts of it looked so human,” Silver ponders.

  “And parts of it looked like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” Luka holsters his gun. “It was no more Chimera than it was one of us.”

  “It must’ve been some kind of hybrid.” Alex shoulders his bow. “Parahuman. A freak of nature.”

  Keeping his eyes fixed on the depths in case it comes back, Jimmy hovers near the end of the jetty with his bow in hand. “Do you think there are more of them?”

  Silver shakes her head. “There’s no way. This guy wasn’t shy about making his presence known. If there were more, they’d be letting us know about it.”

  “A freak, then.” Jimmy seems satisfied with that. “Let’s just pretend this never happened.”

  Luka jumps into Agent mode at the mere suggestion of bypassing any Police Division protocols. “No way! We have to report this.”

  “They’d shut down the Rec Zone,” Silver warns him. “Jimmy’s Rec Zone permit would be terminated, and he depends upon this income.”

  Silence.

  “Do you remember what happened the last time we hid something from Omega?” Alex asks her. “We got blown up.”

  “You have a selective memory. The way I remember it, we exposed an illegal prostitution ring and put a stop to Phaeden’s flesh trade. I’d call that a pretty productive day at the office. Besides, like you said, it’s probably just an anomaly; a perversion of nature that should never have happened. I agree with Jimmy. I think we should just give it the mooncalf treatment.”

  “Mooncalf?” Luka quirks an eyebrow. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  Judging by the look on Silver’s face, he should be.

  “You know how the Fringers have a nasty habit of tossing their dead babies in the woods as Lurker food? Especially the ones that come out looking … wrong. Well, disposing of something ugly and unwanted in the most convenient manner possible and then pretending like it never happened, that’s the mooncalf treatment.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Jimmy spits in the water. “Let’s get back to camp.”

  He starts to leave, but no-one rushes to join him.

  “We’re really letting this happen?” Luka addresses Alex. “As the Chief of Police, you’re okay with brushing this whole weird event under the carpet?”

  “No.” Alex plants his hands on his hips. “I’m not. I—”

  “What good could possibly come of taking the truth about this fugly looking thing to Omega?” Silver butts in on their conversation. “Curfews? Lockdown? Jimmy would lose his livelihood.”

  Alex shakes his head in frustration. “If we don’t call this in, what are we supposed to tell the coroner’s office when they ask what took a nibble on our dead camper? And what if you’re wrong? What if there are more of them? Silver …”

  “Alex …” She tries to reason with him. “I’ll send the Hunter Division on a full sweep of the Cut Off first thing in the morning. Whatever this creature is, we’ll make sure there aren’t any more of them.”

  “Good. And the camper?”

  Silver shrugs. “A wild animal attack? We’ll think of something.”

  Luka pushes in front of her and steps in between them. “Don’t listen to her.”

  Alex pushes him out of the way. “The creature’s gone. Even if we did make a report out of this, we’ve got nothing to show for it. All we have is a dead camper with a suspicious bite mark. If you ask me, it was some lunatic Fringer on a PCP high. He must’ve made a raft out of tree trunks and hemp twine and tried to float his way out of incarceration. Unfortunately for all of us, he didn’t make it to the Unknown Territories, he ended up in the Rec Zone.”

  Silver smiles, enjoying Alex’s quick mind. “He killed the camper in a rage of madness. We chased him down, shot him, killed him, and his body fell into the ocean,” she completes the tale. “I like it.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Luka turns his back on them both.

  Silver gets in front of him and forces him to listen to her. “If we call this in armed with nothing but the truth, Jimmy will lose everything. If we call in the edited version of events, nobody has to suffer.”

  “And the bite mark? What lie are you gonna use to explain the dentition?”

  “Have you ever been to fetish night at Kink Central?”

  His face screams ‘no’.

  “Well, this might shock you, but it’s not uncommon for Fringers to get dental implants for petplay.”

  “Petplay?”

  “You’re really that vanilla? It’s a fetish where people pretend to be tame Chimera. They paint their skin gray, put in some violet contact lenses, screw in some dental implants, get down on all fours, and do whatever their master tells them to.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I guess you haven’t been inside a BDSM store lately. There’s an entire section for collars, leashes, and gray skin paint.”

  “I never want to know why you know that.”

  Silver’s eyes do a quick tumble. “The point is, our Fringer was wearing dental implants. That’s how I’m gonna explain the bite mark.”

  “And what about the future safety of everyone in the Rec Zone? Or are you not thinking that far ahead?”

  “Weren’t you listening? I’ll send the Hunter Division to clear the Cut Off.”

  “And I’ll have the Police Division erect guard units along the Rec Zone’s boundaries,” Alex adds. “They’ll keep everything out. Fringer, Lurker, or otherwise. The Rec Zone will be perfectly safe.”

  Luka stares him down, hoping for a change of heart.

  None comes.

  The plan is set in motion.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Future Echoes

  Stealing a moment back at their tent, Silver and Alex begin to pack up their things. Given recent circumstances, both of them are happy to consider this vacation over.

  Piling together a bunch of her dirty clothes, Silver feels something lumpy inside the bundle and pulls it out.

  Her hairbrush.

  “Huh.” She stares at it in disbelief. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  Alex finishes packing and drops down onto their rolled up blankets. “Did that poor squirrel take anything he was accused of? Besides our compass.”

  “I think he was a victim of our prejudice.”

  “You took Luka’s gun—”

  “For the benefit of the group,” Silver interjects.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “His clip was practically empty. I couldn’t risk the chance that he’d waste the shot on anything other than the skull of that thing I knew was stalking the camp.”

  Alex mulls on that for a moment. “So it wasn’t just a plot to keep Luka here?”

  Her eye already beginning to heal, Silver is finally able to cock her eyebrow. “Insecurity? Really? Now?” She continues packing. “I took his gun because I thought I might need it. The only thing the squirrel’s guilty of is being a panty snatcher, and there are people in the Sentinel District with a worse rap sheet than that.”

  Silence.

  More packing.

  Eventually, Silver stops and looks over at Alex. “I really wasn’t hallucinating, was I?”

  Alex shakes his head. “No, you weren’t.”

  More silence.

  “None of it?” she asks.

  “None of it. Why?”

  Silver half shrugs. “Just checking.”

  She doesn’t want to talk about it.

  She doesn’t want to talk about what the Governor said to her at her hospital bedside.

  Moreover, she doesn’t want to talk about the disturbing reflection that briefly stared back at her in the blade
of her knife.

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER Ø

  The Dawn of A New Age

  The Sentinel District

  Amaranthe, 2348 CE

  – One Week Ago

  Rachel ‘Red’ Jenkins flips the page of a Braille book, enjoying a quiet afternoon in the sun.

  Sitting on a park bench that overlooks the ocean and the Fringe District in the distance, the view would be spectacular … if only she could see it. Blind since she was a baby, Red—a nickname given to her because of her long red hair—has trained her other senses to compensate.

  “Who are you?” She addresses her question to the stranger who took so much effort to sit down beside her without making a sound.

  “Lovely scenery, isn’t it?” the stranger replies.

  From those few short words, Red makes a few swift deductions: female, foreign, thirties, confident.

  She keeps reading, refusing to take the bait. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You will. Soon enough.”

  Silence.

  Red closes the book. “I don’t think I caught your name.”

  The foreigner breaks into a smile. She’s dressed in civilian clothes with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her short brown hair is pulled into two tiny pigtails, and there’s nothing in the least bit conspicuous about her … except for a small ace of spades tattoo on her inner left wrist.

  “My name is Major Rebecca J. Jones, and I think the two of us are going to work very well together.”

  OUT NOW

  About The Author

  Keira Michelle Telford is an award-winning author with a love for the gruesome, the macabre, and the downright filthy. She writes dystopian science fiction, erotic lesbian romance, and other lesbian fiction.

  Website: www.keiramichelle.com

  Twitter: @mylostanddamned

  Facebook Page for KM Telford

  Goodreads Author Page

  Amazon Author Page

  Works by this author:

  The SILVER Series

  The Amaranthe Chronicles

  The Outlier Trilogy

  www.ellacross.com

  www.facebook.com/thesilverseries

  The Prisonworld Trilogy

  www.carmenwild.com

  Standalone titles:

  Cadence of My Heart – an erotic lesbian romance

  The Housemistress – an erotic lesbian romance

  Hoar & Rime (A Short Story) – lesbian fiction

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ZERO

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER Ø