Free Cobra Z by Sean Deville

the man, had always been politely rebuffed. Nobody even knew his name or why he had suddenly appeared and chosen to live here for nearly a year.
    Word had also gotten around about the sale of the old farmhouse years prior, and of the building work that had gone on, mostly unseen due to the farmhouse only being reached by a long and winding private road that was now secured by security cameras and a formidable electronic gate. The twenty acres of land that the farm covered quickly became encircled by sturdy eight-foot Barbican fencing, topped with fresh and gleaming razor wire. Earlier attempts by the few neighbours to welcome the new owners to the locality had been unsuccessful, nobody answering the electronic gate intercom, and after the construction was complete, nobody was ever seen using the gate to enter or exit. Soon enough, people had given up trying. It was thought that the quiet man lived in what the locals now called “The Fortress”, although nobody really knew for sure. And due to the man’s thin frame, scarred face and meek demeanour, they labelled him as a harmless eccentric and left him to his own devices. Eventually, like everything else familiar, his presence amongst them faded into indifference.
    In reality, he was a devout man with a genius IQ. Devout to science, not religion. If the drinkers in the Rock Inn Pub had been avid readers of the more obscure scientific journals, they might have recognised his face, but only if they had read those journals twenty years ago. A brilliant virologist, he had, at one time, had it all. A beautiful wife and three children who he had adored more than life. On the very cusp of becoming the head of Virology at Cambridge University, his life had been stripped from him one vicious evening. Driving carefully home from a day out – the wife in the passenger seat, the children playing kids’ games in the back – he had seen the Ford Escort two seconds before it ploughed through a red light, sending his car and his life into a burning hell.
    The victim of a drunk driver who ironically had escaped virtually unscathed, Professor James Jones, one of the most brilliant minds the country had to offer, awoke to find his legs broken, a tube sticking out of his chest to deal with the collapsed lung, and the sight in his right eye gone due to the flames that had licked at his features. He also found his wife and two of his children dead. The third was in a coma and held on for another two days before nature took her to where all living things go eventually. The nurses and doctors had struggled to know how to break this further news to him, a man who no longer had any living relatives of note, and whose friends seemed noticeably absent, despite this being the time he needed them the most. The doctor who finally told him felt a little piece of her die when her words visibly destroyed what was left of the man who had already been on the brink.
    That brilliant mind, a mind that was destined to cure disease and to help the lives of millions, simply snapped. Something inside it just broke, and after his initial uncontrolled despair, Jones descended into a catatonic state that medical science was unable to rouse him from. As his physical injuries healed, his mind closed down, and now unable to be released into the world he had retreated from, he was hospitalised and diagnosed with Schizophrenic Catatonia. His burns healed with little in the way of visible scarring, but the sight in the dead eye never returned, and he dwelled in an internal world of peace, oblivious to everything that made him human.
    When the catatonia broke four years later, he returned to the world with a different perspective than the one he had held before the accident. When he turned his head and asked for water, frightening the life out of the care assistant who had been giving him a sponge bath, he felt something dwelling in the forefront of his mind that he had rarely experienced before:
     
    Rage
     
    It was there