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  Atlas

  The Book of Death: Volume III

  Nicholas Gagnier

  Copyright © 2020 Nicholas Gagnier

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the

  case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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

  Cover Design by Temys Designs

  ISBN 978-1-7328610-5-3

  @gagniernicholasauthor

  Also by Nicholas Gagnier

  Mercy Road

  Founding Fathers

  Dead’s Haven

  Olivia & Hale

  The Book of Death

  Leviathan

  Underworld Earth

  Embers of Aloessia

  Recap

  The Book of Death

  PROLOGUE

  Nephalim

  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

  Behemoth

  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

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Acknowledgements

  Recap

  Atlas comprises the third volume in The Book of Death series, which is a spin-off of the Olivia & Hale series, making this book the seventh story set in the universe that inspired it.

  This recap will introduce characters, concepts and events in a limited context, who are relevant to the story you are about to read.

  The Olivia & Hale series, as the precursor to BoD (as The Book of Death will henceforth be referred to as), introduced the central protagonists and concepts through four loosely interconnected, standalone novels; Mercy Road, Founding Fathers, Dead’s Haven and Olivia & Hale. During these disparate stories, we met Harper Whitaker and Tim Hawkins, who later became connected through Tim’s sister Grace Hawkins.

  It also introduces the Shroud, a purgatorial realm between life and Death, presided over by a being named Reaper. Out of boredom or for other reasons unknown, Reaper took two souls captive following their worldly deaths in the poem Genesis. Using a basin-like reincarnation device called the Timestream, he offered Olivia and Hale (surnames unknown) their lives back if they would participate in a game.

  This game consisted of twenty-eight incarnations from birth to death, a target only Hale would later reach. Due to Reaper’s manipulations of time and space, Olivia was imprisoned in the past and Hale was told she was dead. After completing the twenty-eighth death, Hale was challenged to stab a dormant Reaper, posing on a stone slab adjacent to the Timestream. When he removed the mask following the deed, the corpse was, in fact, Olivia’s.

  With nothing left to lose, Hale challenged Reaper, but ultimately took his place as Death. Drowning a woman named Ariel whose powers facilitated Reaper’s game against her own will, Hale sought to destroy the world out of bitterness, while Ariel respawned in the real world.

  During Olivia’s time-space imprisonment, she was reincarnated as Nancy Whitaker, and had two children, Harper and Charlie. Following Hale stabbing Olivia, Nancy’s real-world form instinctively killed herself. The novel Mercy Road follows young Harper as she recovers from Nancy’s suicide, unaware of the larger cosmic events at play. It is during this emotional fallout, she and her peers rescue Grace, a sex slave from her neighbor’s cellar.

  In Olivia & Hale, Harper returns as an adult when she awakens with five others in a purgatorial realm called the Shroud. One of these others is Tim Hawkins, Grace’s brother. After surviving an outlaw town Hale ultimately destroyed (Dead’s Haven), Tim was forced to enter a portal to the Shroud. As Harper and Tim realized their underlying connection to Grace, the reincarnated Olivia’s final conflict against her old friend manifested, revealing Grace to be Ariel, the woman Hale drowned after becoming Death.

  When the dust settled, Tim Hawkins took Hale’s place; and inheriting the locket that sustained Olivia’s ghost, Harper went home to her love Michaela. But upon returning to the real world, she quickly died of a neurological disease and was claimed by Tim.

  The Book of Death

  In Leviathan (Volume I), Tim travelled back in time to discover what happened to those who abducted his sister Grace when she was nine years old. Upon learning of the FBI agent working Grace’s case in its final days, Tim began surveying her life from its beginning, making himself known in her younger years until becoming a regular presence in adulthood.

  Arriving at her inevitable death, Tim and Ramona Knox learned the child abductions were a hoax concocted by a senior FBI agent, employing a group of former altar boys to do his bidding. Tim reversed Ramona’s death, physically merging with her to grant otherworldly powers, while warning it could produce unintended butterfly effects. Following her revenge, and the case’s resolution, Tim and Ramona attempted to separate, resulting in the latter’s indefinite incapacitation.

  Twenty years after that fateful decision, the world is a remarkably different place. Underworld Earth opens following a series of butterfly effects that undid most of modern history, including the September 11th attacks, the Obama presidency and the Iraq War— replacing it with new conflicts, balances of power and outcomes. In the midst of this, a deadly plague escaped the Center for Disease Control on Mother’s Day 2018, wiping out 99.9% of the human population on Earth, and charging the newly immortalized Harper with undoing Death’s mistake. Guided by an angel of Atlas named Gabriel, the Phoenix set out to eliminate seven reincarnated individuals, including the comatose Ramona— some good, some bad, some outright rotten.

  After being betrayed by Gabriel, Harper had completed five of the seven deaths entrusted to her. As the man who calls himself Death surrendered to the Grand Council of Atlas in exchange for Ramona’s freedom, Harper learned of the final name— her reincarnated older brother Charlie Whitaker— and refused to be the one to kill him…sentencing Earth to permanent inhabitability.

  “But has there ever been

  something so great as love, quite

  so comfortable with sin?”

  Atlas proverb

  ***

  Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one

  that is proud, and abase him.

  Look on everyone who is proud, and bring him low;

  Tread down the wicked in their place.

&
nbsp; Job 40:10 (New King James Version)

  PROLOGUE

  I always imagined the afterlife as a soulless place.

  Death gets a bad rap — human beings are easily afraid of things we don’t understand. It is why people created religion and stories and rationales, backing up irrational confirmation we know nothing about what lies on the white light’s other end.

  Ever since I was a little girl, a strange man has visited me. I rarely had control over when he appeared— usually, it happened as I was hurt or traumatized in a way only children can find themselves; quite often, by their own doing.

  My parents died when I was two. My father was a certifiable addict who ingested a bunch of terrible substances, and brought my mother and I to a gravel pit in western Virginia. When all was said and done, my mother— also a natural trainwreck— was on the ground with a bullet in her head. Daniel’s body was found beside her, similarly disfigured from a gunshot to the temple.

  I was the only survivor.

  After a year in the foster system, I was adopted by my mother’s sister Maya. That woman would raise me into a rookie FBI agent — she was the mother my own never was, tutoring and disciplining and nurturing me through the formative years. She had violent boyfriends, a cigarette constantly between her lips and the sass I inherited from her, but things were okay.

  When I was five, the suited man began visiting me, and nothing about my life would ever be normal again.

  ***

  In the summer of ninety-five, I graduated at the top of my class from Quantico, the FBI’s elite training facility in Virginia. At this point in my life, the man who introduced himself as Death under a kitchen table when I was five-years-old became a constant presence. For years before that, he had only shown up in times of crisis, sometimes going years without making contact. Just as I began to believe his appearances were symptomatic of deeper-seated issues, he would appear again.

  By the time I began at the Bureau in late summer — shortly before being assigned the case that would change my career— Tim was at my side for all of it.

  I gave everything to bring down the Jordan West crew— a grown group of former altar boys who partnered with a senior FBI agent named Stephen Hardwick to abduct young children across the nation. In the end, it cost my life. Hardwick burned me alive and left my charred remains in a dilapidated Georgetown warehouse.

  Until that point, the man who calls himself Death had only spoken of his realm. Beyond his casual appearances from nowhere, I assumed his claims were exaggerations designed to keep me in a state of awe and wonder.

  After my death at Hardwick’s hand, I would be forced to believe him. In a room with shimmering illusions for walls, a thousand holes poked into its black veneer like stars, I couldn’t deny what my eyes saw. The floors were slick, without color or hue, shiny as the waxed tiles of any department store. The room’s exact size was hard to distinguish, because those multi-plane walls seemed to immediately end and go on forever simultaneously.

  I developed a place, he once told me. A safe middle ground before people come to my world, where we can meet for the first time. On average, a person dies every 1.2 seconds, somewhere in the world. I personally greet each and every one of them.

  “Hello, Ramona,” said the man who calls himself Death — whose power over human souls leaving their earthly vessels held the key to my success or failure in rescuing the young girl taken by the West crew.

  “Tim? Where are we?”

  “We are in the Arcway,” the suited man replied. In all the years I have known him, his dress has never changed; the part in his hair and the length of his beard remain identical to our first meeting. “My creation. It is the step before entering my realm, where you will await salvation or damnation.”

  “Does that... mean I’m dead?”

  As Tim explained the chain of events that had brought us to this point, I couldn’t help wondering why these cosmic forces had any interest in Ramona Carol Knox— the little girl with dead parents who had no business growing up to be an FBI agent, but did anyway.

  Mostly, I wondered what bliss ignorance would have brought me instead.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

  “Because,” Tim replied, “I am no longer willing to stand by, Ramona.”

  And that is the last thing I remember.

  Nephalim

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  White lights.

  The initial wave of suppressed glare behind my eyes poisons the comfort of endless sleep. The lids over my slumber flutter, provoking mouth corners to twitch, fingers to bend. Breaths begin short, tiny assaults on capillaries in the lungs. Tolerance grows, like a rose blossoming, easing its pistils into glare it has been indefinitely sheltered from. It turns my cognition left, then right. The chasm splits over my darting eyes, allowing in more shadows of light than existed before.

  And then, like a computer booting up out of deep hibernation, streams of consciousness unravel. Memories return as a flood— sound inhibits my senses, but can’t conjure visuals to accompany it.

  When I started with the Bureau, back in the seventies, it was simple. Black and fucking white. Bad guy popped up, we put ‘em away. You get yourself on a Most Wanted list, we took you the fuck down.

  Light is intrusive in its mannerisms, simply feeling entitled to impose itself on the status quo. Soon, pain blooms where those images should manifest. It begins in my head, travelling to knees which feel like they haven’t moved in ages. Distant curiosity implores me to wiggle the connected toes. Nothing changes, and mobility remains uncertain. My legs feel like meat in a grocery store bunker, cold slabs on a sheeted surface.

  Then, something changed. The Wall fell in Berlin, the Cold War ended. I don’t fucking know. Point is, bad guys just weren’t so easy to find anymore. People were more educated than ever, and the politicians kept squeezing our budgets. More and more, my brothers in blue were handed pink slips, told to clean out their desks. There just weren’t enough heads to bust anymore.

  Kaleidoscopic films between my eyelids shade the solidifying outlines with confusion. Light is the color scheme of a growing berth at the base of nascent consciousness — I continue experimenting in darkness I have long felt most comfortable with. Fingers twitch as shifting shoulders turn my neck. All are mildly unsuccessful, and none prove worth the expended energy.

  That’s the problem, Knox— you still think this is about children. It’s about sustaining a failing black market which pays dividends to the real one...upholding the standard of living we have become accustomed to— life, liberty, and security.

  How did I end up here?

  Considering movement worth another try, fingers attempt curling into a fist. The interlaced colors comprising vision run together, forming blotches that interfere with cohesive sight. I don’t know how long I’ve laid in this bed, nor do I have the slightest inkling where I am. Making out pearl-tinted blinds, my irises distinguish blues from less dominant whites, a bed rail from broken medical equipment whose monitors and displays are unserviceable and blank.

  A hospital room. Vaguely aware of the air mask over my face, there is no respirator down my throat. An IV feed is the only flesh-intruding measure they implemented, but it has not delivered drips or fluids through the cords in some time.

  And then, it dawns on me.

  Why is it so quiet?

  Struggling to recall why I’m in the hospital— and why it feels I’ve been asleep for a long time— frustration yields a tepid fist. It is short-lived, but progress. My eyes feel heavy, and I could go back to sleep, but I need to know more.

  Come on, Ramona.

  Ramona.

  As my own name registers, context begins to creep back in. Like waking from a bad dream, reality floods back quicker, all the answers to how I ended up here at my disposal.

  I’ve already lost two of my best agents to this individual, Knox, one voice says. I have a city in panic over whether kids will come home after
school. They disappear from parks, grocery stores and museums. All it takes is their parents’ heads turning, they’re gone.

  Emily.

  The girl whose disappearance led me to the exposure of my partner was found safe. I remember that. But what happened after?

  Outlines of the room gain more clarity. Color consolidates strength, red and blues rightfully dominating those they play superior to. The regular sounds of intensive care never replenish— beeping monitors, the shuffling shoes of passing nurses and droning orderlies coming by to change the sheets — leaving my room deafened by silence. Like the slow drip of a morphine feed, it pulses over the expected cues of tired doctors and hurried specialists beyond the room’s door rushing to stem the tides of the dying.

  My eyes are exhausted by the rush of stimuli passing through them, and close to regain strength. I can’t remember how I got here, or the amount of time passed since the voices running together spoke those words.

  I have to get out of here.

  That might be easier said than done. Ligaments ache trying to make a continuous, consistent fist. My toes don’t wiggle on command; even a turn of my head yields nothing but more soreness and centimeters of progress.

  Giving up for now, my eyes grow too heavy, and I fade to black.

  ***

  Consciousness arrives slower the second time. My surroundings have reverted to blur. Wisps of insanity build— shadows that aren’t there, silhouettes even less likely, and the sound of chewing. The audio cues are short; saliva squished between cheeks tells the helpless woman to intuitively recognize the room is no longer empty. The moist movements occur from behind me, and instinct kicks in. Panic transcends earlier difficulty turning my head— I immediately regret moving so quickly as sharp pain reverberates through the muscles surrounding my carotid artery.