The Rain In The Sky Read online

  The Rain In The Sky

  By

  Antony J Woodward

  Copyright Notice:

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

  There is use of Pop Culture references, with no intention of copyright infringement and are merely used as references and do not claim any ownership of copyrighted material.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  Notice:

  Whilst every care has been taken and every effort applied, there may still be the odd

  grammatical or spelling error in this book.

  Be sure to remember to leave a review on Amazon!

  Other Works by Antony J Woodward:

  The Black Winter

  P A R A D I S E

  The Mendacity Games

  I Am Pug

  P R O G E N Y

  Puss In Boots and the Werewolf Cult

  Puss In Boots and Frankenstein’s Monster

  Rewind

  P R O G E N I T O R

  Ten Missing Children

  Bound Villain

  Other Works:

  Bitchcraft / The Count / Queer Intentions / Heaven Drowning

  Available now

  About the Author:

  Antony J Woodward lives in his hometown of Scunthorpe, with his Pug. A lifelong enthusiast

  for cathartic entertainment, he studied multimedia at college level before finding himself

  in the ever challenging world of healthcare. When he isn’t struggling with doubts and the finer points of his novels, he’s drinking herbal tea and petting his pug.

  Oh so very not-so-normal…

  Get in touch! Find him on Facebook by searching for: Antony J Woodward.

  And please be sure to leave a review on Amazon!

  WARNING:

  This book contains themes and scenes that some readers may find disturbing, offensive or upsetting.

  There is a mysterious phenomenon in the medical field. Patients who’ve received organ transplants have sometimes gone on to adopt behaviours and personality traits of the donor. In some instances it has lead adamantly anti-smokers to becoming smokers, or even more drastic shifts in personalities.

  There is currently no conclusive reason to this medical phenomenon…

  PROLOGUE:

  “You sure you wanna do this?” Lambert asked gruffly around the cigarette perched on his lips. Smoke was trailing up into his eyes and he was beginning to squint as they stung and watered. Despite the thick glasses dominating his facial features, the smoke still managed to curl around them and sting. He scratched the five o’clock shadow on his chin subconsciously as he deliberated the dilemma. Did he really want to do this? Was it the right thing to do?

  Lambert was attired in a white laboratory coat that strained against his considerable bulk, his hair was unkempt and he didn’t smell that great either. A mixture of stale cigarettes and body odour. He rolled his lips together, losing a little cap of ash as the cigarette bounced on his lips as he did so. It fell and scattered over his keyboard. He then slowly turned to the man stood next to him. “Are you sure this is the right thing?”

  The two men were hovering over a computer, Lambert perched on a delicate little office chair and the other man stood over him. There was nobody else present in the laboratory, they were the only two. The room was gloomy and sparsely lit, as it was very much after working hours and everybody else had long gone home. The hustle and bustle of the working day had fell away to a cavernous silence.

  “No, but what choice do we have? There’s nothing we…” was the response Lambert received after a painful deliberation. It didn’t even finish, the sentence gave up life and died before it left the standing man’s throat. The answer, and perhaps its lack of an actual conclusion, made the standing man turn away and step aside in discomfort. His coarse hands ran up through his short blonde hair and he sighed. He should’ve known this day would come, perhaps even he should‘ve planned for it…?

  “Is she even ready?” Lambert chewed on the cigarette in his mouth. It was rhetorical and both of them knew it. Their hands were tied. Lambert guessed that his boss had finally ran out of usable excuses and reasons to delay… There was no more delaying, the artist had to reveal his creation, there was no more time left to tinker.

  The standing man slowly turned around. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything further. Instead he idly fiddled with his jacket cuff as he struggled with the weight of his discomfort. He appeared as one of those trendy looking CEO’s, an image he strongly begrudged but had been forced to adopt. It was PR that had encouraged, nay forced him, to adopt the more casual jumper and jacket look. So he was stood wearing a velvet jumper, white shirt and no tie. The man had drawn the line at wearing sneakers, it had been the only thing PR had relented on. It just didn’t feel right, he was old school and believed he should be dressing like the boss he was. Sometimes, on the approach towards fifty, he kind of felt like mutton dressed in lamb’s clothing. Sometimes he yearned so hard for a suit and tie he felt he may snap. This was not him, these were not his clothes. He was wearing a disguise…

  He would often sit in on board meetings and unfairly view everyone around him as assholes trying to appear current and contemporary. This wasn’t some social media giant, this wasn’t some hip new product to appeal to the younger masses. This corporation, his business, it was an entity built on the foundations of medicine and hard work. Cold irrefutable hard science. Nobody was gonna be swayed because he looked like he might hang out with the young ones, or that was how he viewed it. Yet here he was, the owner of the business and yet still subservient to the beast. Dressed in an expensive jumper and a nice shirt but no tie, like all the other assholes he loathed. The man stopped himself, his dark mood was spilling out and he needed to reign it in.

  “Just do it Lambert,” the man ordered conclusively, rousing fully from his internal musings. It wasn’t open for discussion anymore, the time had come.

  Lambert rolled the cigarette to the other corner of his mouth, his face raising in surprise. Surprised, yet he knew deep down there was no other alternative. He hesitated, then swivelled back to the computer. He typed a new command into the program, then hesitated over the return key.

  “I really don’t think she’s ready… We have no failsafe remember…” Lambert shook his head. A fresh pillar of ash fell free and scattered across the keyboard.

  “Do it Lambert, we’ve got no choice. We have eighteen hours before the government is crawling all over Encarta Island, we don’t have enough time to run the final tests…”

  “But she’s a prototype,”

  “I know that!” the older man hissed suddenly. Of course he knew that, he’d designed her! He stymied the flare of anger before it spiked and promptly erupted. That age old feeling of jealousy and protectiveness of his life’s work burnt hotly for a brief moment. As it always had. It was so easy for his employees to forget that their work, their legacy, was all built upon his. He took a hold of himself, wrenching any animosity down deep inside. He was the foundations of so much, the root of so many other’s accomplishments, and sometimes it could feel like he’d started becoming overwritten by the achievements of all those others. He imagined it would be how the Earth felt when mankind built skyscrapers upon her face.

  “I know we don’t have a choice, but we’re sen
ding her into god-knows-what! We‘ve never had anything like this before…” Lambert stressed. For a peculiar second he sounded just like a father lamenting his progeny going to war. In a peculiar sort of way, perhaps he was… Lambert wasn’t facing him but the standing man knew a look of anguish was washed over his employee‘s face. It made the older man smile for a split-second, it was moments like these that told him that he’d made the right choice hiring Lambert. He was an astoundingly bright geneticist and programmer, but most importantly he also had a heart. That very heart was what was obstructing him from following the command. He genuinely cared for the creation they had all worked towards, and that emotional drive outweighed the flaws of his excessive smoking and poor image control.

  “Do it Lambert,” the man repeated himself in a soft assuring tone. He watched the man finally click down on the return key. It was officially happening as a yellow progress bar slowly filled onscreen.

  As if on cue the man’s mobile phone began vibrating. He removed it from his jacket pocket and glanced at the number. He recognised the end three digits and sighed wearily.

  “Bring Eve onboard, brief her, then get everything else organised. We need her on site within three hours…” he ordered Lambert as he placed a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezed gently. A fluttering sensation was starting to unfold in his gut as his hand lifted off, but when Lambert glanced up at him he appeared relaxed and assured.

  He then departed, stepping out into the dark corridors lined either side with frosted glass. It was finally happening, and his gut didn’t feel any better for it. It was a curious mix of excitement that was heavily contaminated with one of dread and a sickening sinking sense of doom. He didn’t know what had happened upon Encarta Island but his gut sensed something was amiss.

  “Hello,” he answered the call.

  “Is it done?” The gruff male voice cut immediately to it. It was always the nature of their exchanges, matter-of-fact and cutting directly to the point. Majority of the time that was just the way he liked it too. The interactions with the government officials always irked him a little. They reminded of him the moment he had to sell his soul to the devil to achieve his ambitions. Wasn’t that the legend of Faust? It felt like a lifetime ago, that forsaken moment. Way back before the company became this sprawling biological behemoth that he felt he only had the barest control of.

  Rain Corporation had started life as a think tank for biological research, deeply investing in specifically genetic research; DNA defects and diseases and stem cells. He had patched together a wealth of talent and intelligence in the early days, many of whom were still in his employ. Success had followed and his company had been thrust into the spotlight very prominently. Savvy business talents had led him to being the market leader within the pharmaceutical sector in a very short, and surprising, amount of time. Rain Corporation produced, manufactured and researched almost all leading medications almost worldwide. It was a very robust and healthy corporation that had grown larger than he’d ever dreamed of. So large it now employed twenty thousand employees worldwide and had even managed to single-handedly destroy a competitor in the process.

  But the road hadn’t been always so golden. It had been a solid brick wall in his research that had led him to hopping into bed with the English Government. A legality that he couldn’t circumvent. So a fragile alliance had been drawn, one that was tested frequently as both parties sought something from the other over the years. It was like a fiery marriage and the two sides didn’t always see eye to eye.

  But it was a necessary evil, for what he had needed more than anything was the ability to perfect the science of cloning.

  Clones, they were his secret legacy. It was illegal research but the government was quite happy to offer discreet permission as long it benefited them eventually. So while they allowed Rain Corporation to conduct research into clones, they only did so with the distant promise of being delivered super-soldiers sometime in the future. For the General he frequently liaised with, it was the stuff of wet dreams; a disposable army of elite soldiers. Soldiers who could be grown and programmed into a certain way of thinking. The perfect, and infinite, army. There was even the faint potential of superseding the world powers and placing the U.K. on top of the world no doubt.

  “It’s done,” the CEO answered firmly as he slipped into a door further down the corridor. It opened to a staircase.

  “Good. How long before she’s on site?”

  “We’re aiming for three hours,” again he fought the compulsion to call him Sir, he didn’t feel that referring to him as that would do him any favours. It might even deprecate his standing with him. At present they were two equal forces and that was exactly how it was going to remain. Hell would freeze over before he submitted to him, he wasn’t going to let the miserable bastard gain control over him, the company or his research.

  “Still no response from Encarta Island?”

  “No, completely dark…” he answered.

  Encarta Island had gone dark 36 hours ago. There had been a garbled snippet of a cry for help but nothing since. Access to the island’s network had been compromised and there was no way of finding out what had transpired. It had simply gone dark, all they really knew was something had gone wrong. It was like the entire Island has just disappeared.

  Thankfully the island was set off the Isle Of Wight and privately owned by the corporation, so there was no means of travel to and from the island that wasn’t controlled by Rain Corp. So whatever had happened was very much contained.

  He just didn’t know what exactly was being contained…

  The first twelve hours had been justified as a satellite failure or a system malfunction, but as the silence continued they began to suspect otherwise.

  The next twelve hours were spent nervously awaiting to hear something back from the small security group had been deployed to the island. They lost communication with the team as soon as the crew came into range of the Island, like the island had swallowed them up like a black-hole. Twelve hours later, with still no contact, Rain Corporation was forced to send in their primary super-soldier and her team. They too disappeared and fell radio silent. They now had very little time left before it would be classified as a biological exposure emergency and the government would have to intervene. A biological terror attack is what the papers would undoubtedly call it and it would probably be the death of the Rain Corporation. Death, and utter annihilation, of everything he stood for as no doubt the government would swoop and swiftly absorb the company and reallocate all its assets.

  The government would then raze the island and everything he had strived for would be gone in a plume of napalm. His entire life and legacy would be razed in fiery wrath.

  So this was the last chance saloon to salvage the island and all the research there. Not to mention keeping his livelihood out of the governments pockets.

  “You think there’s been a biohazard leak?” The high ranking general probed for the umpteenth time. He had been doggedly chasing that bone since the incident first developed.

  The question made the CEO think of the realms of science fiction. He briefly thought of that video game series about a pharmaceutical corporation that created biological monstrosities as B.O.W’s. In hindsight he’d have chosen a different name for his company because Rain had inadvertently led to many comparisons to the fictional Umbrella Corporation, but he did predate the advent of the Umbrella Corporation by almost a decade so how was he to know.

  Thankfully this wasn’t science fiction, this was real life. There wouldn’t be any mutant creatures stalking Encarta Island. They hadn’t been working on a zombie making virus either. The truth was far more pedestrian and tame. The Island’s research teams had been making excellent progress in the field of programmable biology, or specifically; automated cells that could be programmed. It was a phenomenal break through and was only a scant few years from becoming a medical revelation. The concept of programmable cells would be the biological, and natural
, answer to nano-machines.

  So it was alarming that something had occurred on the Island at all.

  Alarming because there wasn’t anything to leak and cause a complete blackout.

  That unknown element to the entire situation teased him again, he was hungry to know what it was.

  “There’s nothing to leak,” he told the general yet again. He obviously misunderstood just what the Island was working on, despite the numerous attempts to educate him. Why couldn’t the old bastard understand he wasn’t keeping top secret B.O.W.’s within his company. Perhaps the General had partaken in too much science-fiction himself? But what the CEO of Rain Corporation never truly understood was that line between science fiction and reality had long irreversibly been blurred. He had cooked up human clones and augmented them with skills and abilities of elite athletes, it wasn’t unfair to suspect he had cooked up a fair share of monsters too.

  “Then what happened?” the general’s voice was rife with disbelief. There was that erroneous assumption that the Island was working on a biological weapon of war again! It was like bashing your head against a brick wall.

  “I don’t know…” It didn’t make sense. Why had the Island gone dark? And why had super-soldier Rain and her private squad disappeared too?

  Had the Island been attacked? It was his only plausible theory and it didn’t bode well. Rain Corporation naturally had enemies, mostly industrial ones with the occasional do-gooder who wanted to protest something, but were any of them capable of rendering an entire Island dark? Majority of the do-gooders did nothing more than protest outside his HQ and throw defamatory accusations at him. His competitors would all be too busy planting spies in his business to be able to render an Island completely dark.