Read Black Sun: A Thriller for Free Online Page A

eyes.
    “What are you looking for?” the voice demanded again.
    It felt like a nightmare, like a disjointed dream of terror. Her head was swimming, as if she had vertigo and was falling. She reached for something to hold on to, feeling behind her, but there was no back to the chair, nothing to lean against, only edges like on a countertop or table.
    The blinding light vanished and a more subdued light came on. A face moved close. It was Asian in complexion and features, slight and fine-boned. He came so close that all she could see was his eyes. His hands grabbed her. They were cold and shaking. He gazed into her eyes, as if he were searching her soul.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “We know what you’re looking for. More artifacts, like the one youfound in Brazil.” He pulled away, laughing a sickly laugh.
    He began to laugh harder and it terrified her. She forced herself to move, scurrying backward and then falling. The jarring impact with the floor sharpened her senses for a minute. She looked back toward her oppressor. He sat in a motorized wheelchair, his body twisted and withered, shaking slightly from some internal tremor.
    As strange as it seemed, a feeling of pity came over Danielle. And when the man seemed to recognize it, his face contorted in fury.
    “Take her,” he shouted.
    Two large men grabbed her, picked her up, and slammed her back onto the examination table. A third man approached with a dripping hypodermic needle.
    “No!” she screamed, struggling to break free.
    The men held her down. The blinding light flashed again and then the needle pierced her flesh and everything vanished.
    She woke, curled up in the fetal position, her heart pounding in her chest. It was more than a dream, but how much more she couldn’t know. As the images faded, she struggled to parse them into coherence, to separate reality from what must only be nightmarish imagination. Try as she did, she could not be sure where the boundary lay.
    She sat up slowly. White walls and beige furniture surrounded her, including an art-deco-like desk and several chairs that occupied the far side of the room. There were no windows in the room. No clocks, radios, ortelevisions; no computer sat on the desk. It was as if she’d fallen asleep in some downtown office building and woken up in the
Twilight Zone
version of it.
    If only that were the case.
    She was a prisoner. One who had been treated roughly for some period of time, a few days or even weeks perhaps. She had no concept of how long it had been, of where she was, or what she might have told them.
    Her last clear thought was of Professor McCarter lying dead on the side of the hill, wrapped around a tree, like a car that had gone off a cliff.
    A wave of depression swept over her.
    She felt great responsibility for McCarter. To begin with, he’d only been exposed to the NRI after she’d talked him into joining the Brazilian expedition two years before. He was a civilian and at the time not even cleared to know the truth behind the mission. Yet together they discovered a precursor of the Mayan religion, one that predated the rest of the culture by at least a thousand years.
    And then they’d been attacked, first by a group of mercenaries, later by a tribe of xenophobic natives, and finally by a relentless pack of mutated animals that seemed to spring from the Mayan underworld itself.
    They’d never found what they were looking for—elements that NRI scientists believed could lead to a working cold-fusion device—but just prior to departing, they’d recovered something else: a large, glasslike stone, which seemed to radiate energy in a manner that no one could yet explain.
    The NRI hid the stone in a vault beneath its Virginiaheadquarters and began to study it. McCarter went back to New York to begin teaching again and Danielle watched the machinery of government move on, unconcerned with those who had suffered for what they’d found.
    It was enough to change her