Utopia: A Dark Thriller: Book 1 Read online

  The rights of Adam Steel and Tina M. White to be identified as the authors of the work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

  Copyright©2013 by Adam Steel and Tina M. White

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without express written permission of the authors.

  Front cover design by Arron McArthur.

  We dedicate this book to our long suffering partners, Simon and Abi.

  Thank you.

  This book is not intended for children.

  INDEX

  Synopsis

  PROLOGUE

  The End

  BOOK 1

  Chapter 1: The Masons

  Chapter 2: The Request

  Chapter 3: Trouble in Paradise

  Chapter 4: Max

  Chapter 5: Three Friends

  Chapter 6: Restless

  Chapter 7: Back in the Red

  Chapter 8: Mr Li

  Chapter 9: Blue Monday

  Chapter 10: Jack

  Chapter 11: The Way of Chi

  Chapter 12: Warden Mary Clarke

  Chapter 13: The Masquerade Ball

  Chapter 14: New Orders

  UTOPIA: A DARK THRILLER SERIES

  Key Organisations

  Fin-Sen, Utopia’s financial and administrative centre. Fin-Sen headquarters is the seat of power for the masons and is based at the centre of Coney City. It injects Utopian society with abundant wealth.

  CURE, Centre for Utopian Reform and Education. The CURE system acts as law enforcement and the prison system.

  TALOS, the elite military force of Utopia. Operated under the direct supervision of Mason Deckler.

  ISIAH, Integrated Systems for Independent and Advanced Health. A revolutionary healthcare system which has eclipsed even the most opulent health care systems of the past.

  TAU, Technological Advancement for Utopia. TAU works alongside the CUB and manufactures the various enhancements and new developments for Utopian Society.

  CUB, Centre for Utopian Biotechnology. The research and development centre that researches new developments for Utopian Society.

  Project F2 Genie, A cutting edge power station containing the Genie Reactor. A revolutionary device that fuels Utopia and provides it with a near limitless source of power. Genie, as it is known, has made Utopia entirely self-sufficient.

  The Circle of Eight

  Mason Albert Coney, (Deceased)

  Mason Hester Royale

  Mason Bruce Katcher

  Mason Marlene Henson

  Mason Damon Deckler

  Mason Alexis Coney

  Mason Jonus Coney

  Mason Paul De-Barr

  Mason Henri Batide

  Citizens of Utopia.

  ISIAH Staff

  ‘Ellie’, Elinor Rushford, Consultant

  ‘Reenie’, Irene Sharpe, Consultant

  Bridget, Psychiatric Nurse

  Mr Mackenzie, Coroner

  Victor Archer, Professor

  CURE Staff

  Max Benson, Security Guard

  Alvin Betts, Station Commander

  Aya Kaleem, Personal Assistant

  Arthur Taskin, Prison Governor

  Mary Clarke, Prison Warden

  Hendrickson, Prison Guard

  FIN-SEN Staff

  Jon-Li, Financial Executive

  TALOS Operatives

  Samson ‘Sonofabitch’ Jones, Drill Instructor

  Richards, Corporal

  Kristoff Ranger, Corporal

  Sector 7 Citizens

  ‘Red-Man’, Jomo Marseilles, Gang Leader

  Marko Marseilles, Gang Leader

  Louis, Biochemist

  Jack Greaves, Private Detective

  Others of Note

  Aarif Pashazade, Visiting Dignitary

  Ajit, Bodyguard

  Abigail Winters, Reporter

  Nathan Bridges, Tour Guide

  Mr Baginski, Porter

  Rexton, Chauffeur

  Richie Red, Rock Star

  Mada, Citizen

  Kaleem and Sara, (Deceased)

  Sophie and Sandy, (Deceased)

  Society has collapsed: destroyed by an unknown weapon of terrible power. The survivors turn on each other in desperation.

  Twenty years later a new society has formed from the ruins. Utopia is the envy of the outside world: powerful, highly advanced and led by the mysterious Circle of Eight. Fuelled by the limitless power of the ‘Genie Reactor’ its people want for nothing.

  Freedom and Equality exists in Utopia.

  Ellie, a survivor of the disaster has carved out a new life in Utopia. She is wealthy and successful, but lonely and haunted by dreams of the past.

  A brutal murder will plunge her, and others, into a world of horrifying revelations, death and madness, as she explores the dark side of Utopia: where a terrifying secret awaits and nothing is as it seems…

  The story of Utopia is told across three books.

  This is book one of three.

  It is also available as a Complete Edition containing all three books.

  Utopia: A Dark Thriller Book 1.

  Utopia: A Dark Thriller Book 2.

  Utopia: A Dark Thriller Book 3.

  Utopia: A Dark Thriller Complete Edition.

  “I never think about the future - it comes soon enough.”

  --Albert Einstein

  The End

  Brighton Beach

  11:58 a.m.

  It was a blistering hot August Bank Holiday the day it happened.

  The beach was crammed with tourists along the sandy strip that spanned out towards the noisy fairground which was perched on the end of Brighton Pier. Kids screamed and laughed as the rides flipped them around to the thumping music. Dogs yapped as they danced in and out of the waves. Toddlers got their first taste of what it felt like to put tiny toes into the freezing cold water of the English Channel.

  It would be the last day for many years that they would get the chance again.

  Amongst the crowd that fateful day a young medical student had taken a day off from her second year studies to sunbathe on the beach. Her name was Elinor Rushford, but she preferred the name Ellie. She was propped up on a striped beach towel, reading from a book called: “Augmentation Mammaplasty. Redefining the Patient and Surgeon Experience.”

  Ellie imagined herself as a plastic surgeon (famous of course) teaching in an expensive private hospital and earning obscene amounts of money. She would, of course, have a rich and talented husband.

  Mr Right.

  Like her future career, he had not yet materialised, despite her best efforts to find him. Her room-mate and life-long friend, Irene Sharpe, was lying flat out under the scorching sun next to her.

  Irene reached blindly for the radio she had nestled into the sand next to her and turned it up when one of her favourite songs came on. A small child ran across them heading for the sea. He vaulted over the radio spraying a small cloud of sand across the pages of Ellie’s book. Ellie put her book down in annoyance. Between the noise of the radio – and holiday makers – she found it impossible to concentrate.

  ‘I don’t know why you brought that book anyway,’ Irene chipped in beside her, without opening her eyes. ‘Don’t you ever take a day off?’

  Ellie sighed. ‘Guess it runs in the family,’ she said with some resignation.

  Ellie’s parents were both working o
vertime in London. They never seemed to take a day off. It was one of the reasons Ellie had elected not to have children until her career was organised. Her childhood had left her wanting as her parents were always too consumed with work to spend time with her. Irene had filled the gap that they had left. They had been childhood friends before becoming room-mates.

  At twenty one years of age Irene was a beauty. She had long red hair that curled over her slender shoulders. Ellie considered that if Irene had not been a medical student she could easily have been a model. Irene seemed to sail through life unaware of her own traits and exhibited the kind of vulnerability about her that made Ellie want to protect her as an older sister would have done.

  The sea breeze carried the voices of excited children and barking dogs towards them. Leaning back on her elbows – and looking up at the sky – Ellie watched the wheeling gulls that called above her. She traced the jet-stream of a passenger plane, thousands of miles above and thought to herself. I wish we were on that, going to some deserted beach. Somewhere far away from the crowds and the yapping dogs: a place where the sea’s warm and I could swim without getting hypothermia. Irene wouldn’t get in the sea, she can’t swim. What was it her mother told me? I remember, she said that some idiot pushed her off a paddle boat into a lake when she was six and she nearly drowned. Ever since then she’s been scared to death of water. I can’t imagine how scary that must have been for a six year old. Maybe, when we’ve finished med school, we’ll take a gap year and go travelling.

  Earlier they had discussed doing that very same thing on the island of Grenada in the West Indies. It had sounded fantastic – although it was (in Ellie’s opinion) a bit far-fetched. Ellie returned to musing about medical school and how many more years of study and training she would have to do before she was qualified. Study did not come easy to her. She always had to work very hard at it while Irene seemed to sail through her tests and exams without much effort. She would have been jealous of Irene if she had not been so fond of her.

  Ellie and Irene were sitting a few hundred yards from the shore where the gentle waves lapped back and forth kicking up a white froth. At the far end of the beach was Brighton Pier with the fairground. The Big Dipper twirled and twisted, carrying its load of children and reluctant parents.

  Ellie noticed a man flipping a bright yellow disk in and out of the waves for two tiny dogs to chase. The water had soaked his knee length trousers and they were hanging down revealing the crack of his arse. It was an ugly sight to which he seemed stupidly oblivious. The term ‘knuckle-dragger’ came to Ellie’s mind, and she longed even more to be on the plane that soared high above them.

  No one noticed that the gulls had stopped crying. The noise from the beach had drowned out their whining cries. Ellie looked up at the gulls and noticed them behaving oddly; plunging from the sky like a flock of feathered, spent fireworks. A few of the birds landed on the beach nearby and crouched low to the ground, wings touching the sand, heads bowed low, beaks gaping. They seemed stunned. Odd, she thought. A group of kids were poking one of the squatted gulls with a stick. It did not move.

  Ellie held her hand above her sunglasses to shield her eyes from the flare of unnaturally bright light that suddenly reflected off the sea. Beneath her body she felt the earth shiver – very slightly – and at that moment the radio emitted an ear-splitting, feed-back noise. She covered her ears with both hands and shut her eyes tightly against the squealing burst of static. The radio went dead. She felt a weird pressure drop in her ears that made all the noise on the beach sound as if it was inside her head and moving down a hollow tube. She did not hear the distant screech of tires and breaking glass far behind her on the road.

  12.00 a.m.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Irene complained, sitting bolt upright and jiggling one slender finger in her ear. Irene tapped the dials on the radio and cursed.

  A few of the holiday makers nearby were also shaking and fiddling with their music players. They looked confused. Others were cursing their portable phones (which had inexplicably shut off) bringing an abrupt halt to their conversations. A baby screamed and the dogs that had been yapping so energetically minutes before were whining and shaking their heads. The music from the fairground rides had also stopped.

  ‘I don’t know. Did you feel something?’ Ellie said warily.

  ‘Feel what?’ Irene replied, adjusting the radio and shaking it.

  The readout on the front was blank.

  Ellie did not respond.

  ‘What?’ Irene asked again.

  Ellie was looking at the sky over the sea, with her mouth agape. A cold breeze passed over them like a wave. It rippled the hairs on the back of Ellie’s neck and sent a shiver through her body.

  The man with the yellow disk was standing waist deep in the surf, reaching for one of the tiny dogs that looked like it might drown. The rides on the fairground had ground to a halt and people were stuck in their seats midway. Confused children were leaning over the sides of the rides, some were crying, others were screaming for help. The people who had been standing on the end of the Pier earlier were shouting and running in all directions. Frantic parents were jumping up and down below the stranded rides; desperate to rescue their children from what was coming.

  Ellie was frozen to the spot in total disbelief at what she was witnessing. Her eyes saw it, but her mind refused to believe it was real. The huge passenger plane – that seconds earlier had been streaking across the sky with its payload of happy holiday makers – was plummeting towards the sea in their direction. From ten thousand feet it had accelerated to terminal velocity and was dropping so fast that the sound of its failed engines had not caught up with its descent. It was spinning down nose first and out of control at a terrifying speed like a stricken bird. The sound that followed seconds later tore a raw strip out of the sky as the plane smashed into the water just off the shore nearest to the Pier. The noise from the plane continued after it had carved a hole in the sea and disintegrated into a mass of silver shards and flames. Chunks of wreckage were catapulted up into the air.

  The whole of Brighton Pier rocked from the impact and the legs of the Pier buckled under the stress. The Big Dipper lunged towards the sea so that part of it hung over the edge; dangling its petrified passengers with it.

  The plane exploded into flames when it hit the sea and a shock wave of black water (alight with aviation fuel) sprayed towards the shore at incredible speed. The wave (which Ellie estimated must have been at least one-hundred feet high) was carrying debris and charred bodies from the wreckage when it ploughed first into the Pier and then the beach.

  A woman was shouting at the man with the dog from further up the beach. She did not see the exploding wreckage from the plane that was heading in her direction. It landed with a sickening thump on top of her and rolled over into a smoking heap. Parts of her blackened body were welded to the underside of a pair of airplane seats.

  Terrified tourists ran in all directions as the black smoking ‘tidal-wave’ of water hurtled rapidly outwards.

  The Pier went first.

  The wave of fire sprayed the fun rides; drenching the rollercoaster in flames. The people that were hanging from the Big Dipper were falling into the water on fire; squealing and thrashing around in agony. The wind carried the smell of aviation fuel and burning flesh up the beach to where Ellie and Irene were now running flat out in a stampede with the other holiday makers. They turned to watch only when they had reached the safety of the upper promenade. The whole pier was alight and collapsing into the sea, taking with it hundreds of people. The wave accelerated up the beach from the direction of the pier taking with it hundreds of bodies and drenching everything in its path in burning fuel. The sea was a hellish boiling cauldron of charred bodies and wreckage that swirled around before disappearing below the burning waves.

  Irene sank to her knees in a state of shock as she stared at the hundreds of panic stricken people left on the beach. The black wave of fire made a se
aring noise as it burned its way through the scattering crowds like a speeding lava flow. Ellie watched with an expression of naked horror as the man with the two little dogs was swept over by the wave. He was holding one of the dogs and squealing a terrible, high pitched scream. The yellow disk popped and melted and the other dog whimpered as its fur was caught alight by the fuel. It paddled hopelessly for a second or two before disappearing into the deathly wave.

  The wave had swept up deckchairs, towels, tents, picnic sets and the people who were on the lower shore before they had chance to escape. Children that had been swimming in the water earlier, disappeared beneath the black depths of the deadly, fuel-soaked water. Yellow armbands hissed and popped where once they had carried the little swimmers. Hysterical parents jumped into the sea to rescue their toddlers and they were also set alight by the film of burning fuel that topped the wave.