Free Cobra Z by Sean Deville Page A

all the time; it was all he had. There wasn’t even any room for grief. The psychiatrists sympathised with him, said they understood the way he felt. He spat their words back in their faces. How could they know? How could they understand such loss? Not just the loss of his family, but the loss of his hope, the loss of his belief about the world, the loss of such perfection. The rage became all consuming, and it wasn’t helped with the knowledge that the man who had killed his family had served less than three years at her Majesty’s Pleasure. Three years? Where was the justice there? Jones railed against society, hurled venom and verbal abuse at those whose job it was to try and help him. He would not be consoled, and he would not forgive a world that allowed such pain and suffering to dwell at its very core. Even worse, he would not forgive the people who created it, who helped oil the wheels of its systems and governments. He quickly learnt to loathe humanity, because they had such potential, and yet they let themselves be corrupted by weakness and selfishness. In his weakened state, muscles atrophied, he was no real physical threat, not to those trained in how to deal with such cases. But his obvious hatred for the world and subsequent attempts at suicide saw him sectioned to a secure psychiatric facility.
    That was time passed. Now he sat, passing the half-filled glass to his lips, listening to the inane chatter in the pub around him, his burns mostly healed, but having sight still in only one eye. Those around him would claim they were good people, that they deserved the life they held so dear. But how often did he see them consume four, maybe five pints before venturing outside to drive their chariots of death home? How often did their bigotry and their racism escape the confines of their hearts through the words they expressed, through their actions? He truly despised them all. Including the children that often ran laughing through the pub. As innocent as they were, they were slowly being filled with hatred and poison by the corrupted adults who surrounded them.
    Even now, many years on, utter hatred filled his heart for the human race. But long ago he had learnt to contain his rage, to bottle it and channel it to where it needed to be, to show the psychiatrists what they wanted to see. It was the only way to escape their clutches. So he wore the mask of meek compliance and pretended to enjoy the simple pleasures that life offered whilst rejecting the blanket of comfort that society claimed to provide.
    He was able to perform this masquerade because he believed he had been shown a truth about the world, and had learnt that he had an important place in it. In the psychiatric facility, he quickly learnt to tell the head shrinkers what they wanted to hear. He showed pain at his loss, and slowly “learnt” the lessons they tried to teach him, taking his medication as ordered, but discarding the pills whenever he could. When he was released, he gave the illusion of working with the medical professionals and the social workers, but deep in his heart, his hostility to the human race grew, dark thoughts beginning to fester in his mind in those dark moments before sleep. The thoughts became plans, and the plans searched for a way to manifest themselves.
    Money was of little concern to him. His parents had been rich when they had died, and a large trust fund was there for his every whim. He did not, therefore, seek employment, but embraced a new technology that was revolutionising the world … the internet. And through this he found the writings of a controversial American professor whose latest book The Plague of Man was causing quite a stir in the scientific community. Jones realised that the author was a glorified Eugenicist, but the basic premise that man was a cancer that needed eradicating to save the Earth took root in his already diseased mind.
    When the author came to speak in London, Jones attended. Sat in the