Immortal Twilight Read Free

awry.”
    The queen gazed over the major’s shoulder at Professor Howard, who stood fidgeting with the brim of his hat. “Will anything go awry, Professor?”
    â€œNo, Your Majesty,” Howard said with the swagger of an American on foreign soil. “This time next year you’ll have the first platoon of superintelligent, superstrong supermen.”
    â€œAnd they’ll be standing shoulder to shoulder to defend the borders of the empire,” Fortesque-Penwright added proudly.

Chapter 1
    “You know what the difference is between grave robbers and tomb raiders, Milo?”
    “I dunno—to get to the other side or something...?” Milo replied uncertainly in his deep, rumbling voice. A big man, Milo leaned down with a shovel in his hand, working at the hard soil of a hillock some twenty miles outside what used to be the ville of Beausoleil.
    Standing beside Milo, Jake was thinner with a girl’s shoulders and a pencil mustache. His dark hair, thinner now at forty than it had been at twenty, though the style remained unchanged, was slicked back.
    It had been over three hundred years since Queen Victoria met with Professor Howard in the underground bunker at Windsor, three hundred years during which the whole world had been devastated by two World Wars before an apocalyptic third, in 2001, had turned the United States of America into the radioactive Deathlands. The population was culled to one tenth of its size, and the survivors struggled to eke out their lives in an irradiated wasteland where muties roamed the dust-swept streets of abandoned cities. For some, that era had seemed to go on forever, but eventually humankind had clambered out of that self-made hell pit. Under the Program of Unification, civil North America was governed by nine ruthless barons who split the land into great chunks, which they oversaw. Each baron commanded a ville named after him- or herself—and all demanded absolute loyalty from their subjects. But in the past few years, the balance of power had been upset when the barons had revealed themselves as reborn Annunaki, a race of lizardlike aliens who had walked the Earth once before at the dawn of man, when they had been revered as gods. The Annunaki had planned to take control of the decimated populace, the thinned herd that the nuclear exchange had created two hundred years before, but their plan had crumbled thanks to a combination of infighting and the intervention of a brave band of rebels working under the banner of the Cerberus organization. With the barons-turned-Annunaki now departed, the world itself seemed up for grabs, a future just waiting for guidance. And perhaps that guidance would come from a most unlikely source.
    “‘To get to the...’ What?” Jake spit, glaring at his broad-shouldered companion in disbelief. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    “I dunno,” Milo admitted. “It’s a joke, right?”
    Jake’s withering look was lost in the faint illumination of the overhead stars. “I swear to Cobalt, you are one dumb son of a mutant. I’ve had dumps that showed more intelligence than you.”
    Milo looked up, offended.
    “Just keep digging, huh,” Jake told him. “I’m trying to make a point here.”
    Milo got back to digging, working at the spot that Jake had indicated. It was located amid a thick group of trees. It was the kind of place you’d go to bury a body, and the thin crescent of moonlight did nothing to assuage that feeling in Jake’s mind. He wondered when was the last time anyone had actually walked up here, between this particular cluster of trees, way out beyond the farmland.
    “So, what is it?” Milo asked as he shunted another shovelful of earth aside. He was a strong man and, even though they hadn’t been here ten minutes, already he was down four feet into the heavy soil and showing no signs of tiring. Jake had to credit the guy with that—whatever he lacked in brainpower, Milo worked like one of them old-time