Free Spawn of Man by Terry Farricker Page A

field of bright, swaying, tall flowers.
    He was asleep too and she heard herself whisper, ‘Everyone’s asleep now.’
    But there was no sound . She felt like she and Jake were floating in a small wooden boat on a perfect lake, everything was serene and the sun beat down on her exposed skin. Then the warmth was no longer external and she was aware of a rapid, white-hot rush of pain travelling through her body. Then nothing. But she never let go of Jake’s hand.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter Seven
     
    ‘Hello?’ Alex called. She was terribly cold.
    Although her body was dead, Alex was faintly aware of noise and colors around her, above her. She thought she might still have been floating. She had the sensation of movement without trying to move. Now the colors seemed to be behind her eyelids, shot from a projector deep inside her brain. Then the noises were far away, as if someone was calling to her repeatedly from the far shore of a great lake. She was mercifully unaware of the car crash.
    Her memories were confused and entwined and they overlapped each other in murky, muddled layers. She had been drifting on a lake and she was being called from the distant shore? Warned. Her child Jake had been there. Then something had happened but she just couldn’t remember and now she was floating through this place of flickering, bouncing lights. She wanted to sleep but she felt she should fight against it, at least till the light display subsided and then she would find out what happened next. She felt that was important.
    Alex had lost her left leg and right arm and even if she had lived her other two limbs would have been amputated. Her soul was tearing itself free from her body to begin its flight away from the corporeal state. The intangible essence of Alex was almost discorporate now and the play of lights on her eyelids had stopped. She thought her child was embracing her and she fell asleep with him safe and warm in her arms.
     
     
     

Chapter Eight
    2036. October, Saturday. Midnight
     
    Hope Hospital was a fifteen-minute drive from the town of Babel but Robert had to make the thirty-minute journey to Babel from the Douglas Institute first. Detective Inspector Andrews had phoned Robert to inform him of a car crash and now Robert sat in a small corridor within the hospital. The room was bare and felt cold. He had spoken to the doctor and had been told Alex and Jake were dead.
    Robert assimilated the horror of the death of his wife and only child in the present, whilst simultaneously stepping into a bleak, colorless future where he had lost the two most important people in his life. A future that could not exist because it could have nothing to sustain its state of being; it was unimaginable by definition.
    Robert’s head was bowed and he felt as if someone had erased his emotions. As if he was now just a caricature of a man with no real vitality. He looked down at the clean, tiled floor. A hollow and empty feeling reached up through the polished surface and began to creep slowly up through his legs, clawing his flesh with aching, numbing talons. A sterile smelling, disinfected phantom, emerging from the floor, howling its intent to choke Robert’s soul and leave him as cold and vacant as the little corridor he now occupied.
    He was lost now within his awful mourning, being devoured by a spectral energy of sorrow that threatened to drag him down into a pool of dark hurting. He struggled not to succumb to the feeling of desolation but it weighed heavily on him. It was pulling deeper into senselessness, where something was waiting for him. Something that would feed on his torment. Something that was curious to taste his sadness. A base thing that was ultimately ruinous and malignant. It lived just below the fabric of his consciousness and it was lonely and hungry.
    Robert found he wasn’t breathing. The air had stopped filling his lungs and he was choking on nothingness.
    It was as if the