Beginnings Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cover Credit

  About This Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  From The Author

  About The Author

  Sandra R Neeley

  P. O. Box 127

  Franklin ton, LA 70438

  [email protected]

  Independently published

  by Sandra R Neeley

  158,047 words.

  Beginnings

  Variant - Book 1

  by Sandra R Neeley

  Copyright © 2020 SANDRA R NEELEY

  All rights reserved.

  Thank you for purchasing and/or downloading this book. It is the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and/or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes without express written permission from the author.

  Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales, is purely coincidental. The characters are creations of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademarked ownership of all trademarks and word marks mentioned in this book.

  For the Variant

  Cover Credit

  Christopher Coyle

  darkandstormyknight.com

  Thank you for adorning my words so beautifully.

  Your talent knows no bounds!

  About This Book

  Warning: This book is not suitable for sensitive readers. Please do not buy this book if you have triggers to sensitive situations.

  Black Ops Lieutenant Maddox Larsen is missing. Not only is he missing, his entire team is missing. Their reality has been yanked from beneath them, replaced with a sadistic, twisted doctor eager to find just what the limitations of a soldier’s body and mind are. Unfortunately, Maddox and his men are not alone, there are others like them locked in this nightmarish facility. They barely survive torture, abuse, and drug induced changes of their DNA. Their needs have become simple: Food, Fight, Fornicate. Maddox exceeds all expectations and becomes the model by which all other males in the facility are measured. These males are no longer men, or even human for that matter. They are Variant. But now they’re free, and they're angry. Their target? Those who made them what they are today.

  Nina struggled most of her adult life just to survive. She made the fateful decision to marry her high school sweetheart right after graduation — now she’s his favorite punching bag. He interrupts her when she finally seizes a chance to run from him, and almost kills her. She loses consciousness, awakening to a nightmare worse than she ever imagined. She’s at the mercy of five predatory, aggressive males, all locked in a prison cell with her. Sold to a medical facility as a reward for their test subjects for good behavior, her hell has only just begun. Eventually the most volatile of them claims her, giving her a slight reprieve. But then he disappears, leaving her in the hands of all the others. He better hope he’s dead, because now she’s free and if she discovers he intentionally left her behind, her wrath will make the monster that created them seem like their best friend.

  Warning: If you have any triggers at all, please do not buy this book. This book shows the violence and abuse required to turn highly trained soldiers into killing machines with no thought of right and wrong. This book shows the plight of the women who are given to them as ‘rewards’ for good behavior. While the first few chapters are dark, this story ultimately becomes a tale of survival, revenge, and ultimately love, that will always eventually overcome all.

  Chapter 1

  Nina placed her clip-on name badge in her locker and took a moment to glance around the employee locker room. She’d worked here since she was sixteen years old. For ten years she’d wasted her life here, working the production line for a company who saw her and all who worked beside her as no more than numbers.

  Her co-workers — that was another thing altogether. It didn’t matter how long they’d known her, or how well she did her job. They always treated her as second class. This was a very small town in the South, and if you weren’t exactly like them, then you didn’t belong. And no matter how hard she tried to fit in, she’d never be like them. She sure as hell wouldn’t miss this place or the people in it.

  Nina glanced at her reflection in the small mirror mounted on the inside of her locker. Her pale skin, her board-straight black hair, and her almond-shaped dark eyes looked back at her. The darkened bruise around her right eye drew her attention. The person she would be happiest to get away from was the same one who’d bruised her eye — again. The same one who’d broken bones and bloodied lips. The same one who’d vowed to love and protect her when she’d foolishly let her heart lead her into a marriage at seventeen years old.

  She should have listened to her mother. Her mother was from South Korea. She was a small, slight, overbearing, powerhouse of a woman who had immigrated to the United States after meeting and marrying her father who’d been stationed in South Korea while in the military. After his death at the end of endless bottles of whiskey, Mom moved them to Freedom, Louisiana, because she liked the name of the little town. She said, ‘Any town with the name of Freedom was a good place to be’. It wasn’t. It was a town filled with small minded, judgmental, bigoted people who claimed to be good bible thumping Christians, while scorning all who so much as even looked a little different.

  Mom had also said marrying Bryant Johnston was a bad idea, but back then Nina desperately wanted out from under her mother’s overbearing rule. So she’d ignored her and married him anyway. He was one of the worst of the bigots. He came from a long line of them, and came into this world hating all that were not blonde, blue-eyed, red-necked, country boys.

  Two of the women who worked beside her on the insecticide canning line walked into the locker room, laughing and carrying on about the minority workers on the line and how they just needed to be relegated to the maintenance crew. On seeing her standing there, they stopped in their tracks, eyes wide with surprise. Then they looked at each other and burst out laughing, continuing on their way.

  Nina sighed, shook her head and closed her locker. She didn’t bother to lock it — she wouldn’t be bac
k. For the last time she went through the exit door of the locker room, leading her into the parking lot. She got in her piece of shit 1974 Monte Carlo, with the faded to metal silver paint and its ripped and hanging roof liner. She turned the ignition and prayed it would start as it slowly chugged to life, threatening to stall out and die with each crank of the starter.

  Finally, the engine caught and fired to life. She smiled as she put the old car into gear and backed out of her spot. Fellow plant workers looked at her curiously as she drove out of the parking lot just about the same time she was supposed to be clocking back in to return to her position on the production line.

  Let ‘em look. She didn’t care. She was on her way home to gather her few belongings and head out. Screw this place — she’d had enough. Bryant was at work down at the gravel pits, and all she needed was about fifteen minutes to grab some clothes and the money she’d been hiding under the sink with all her cleaning supplies, then she’d be gone — in the wind, never to be seen again.

  <<<<<<<>>>>>>>

  The radio attached to the shoulder strap of Bryant’s work vest crackled to life. Bryant paused, swiping a sweaty arm across his brow as he waited to see what his boss wanted. “Bryant?” the voice crackled over the line.

  Bryant spit a stream of tobacco tinged spit in the dirt at his feet. “Yep,” he answered, pressing the button down to answer.

  “Got a call from the plant. Your woman done walked off the job.”

  “The hell you talking about, Harold?” Bryant asked, walking a few feet away from the machinery to better hear his uncle — who was also his boss.

  “Jerry called. Said they saw her driving out of the parking lot just after lunch. Thought you might want to know.”

  “Fuck!” Bryant shouted. He stomped around in the red dirt, kicking the wet, spit stained spot he’d created moments earlier. “Alright, I’ll be back. Gotta go see what that stupid bitch is up to now.”

  “Hurry up. I got to come do your job while you gone.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bryant answered.

  <<<<<<<>>>>>>>

  Nina rushed into the house she shared with Bryant, leaving the screen door slamming behind her and the front door wide open. She went to the kitchen and rummaged around beneath the trash bags she kept in the cabinet below the sink, and withdrew a small group of bills. They were twenties, and there were only about fifteen of them, but she’d been saving a little at a time, and it would just have to be enough for now.

  She hurried into her bedroom and grabbed her pillow, shaking it out of the green pillow case, and started shoving clothes into it. Then she went to her chest of drawers to gather her panties and bras. The only shoes she had were the ones on her feet, so she didn’t have to worry about those. She headed out of the bedroom and on her way past the flimsy dollar store shelves that sat against the sagging wall in the living room, she noticed the picture of her father in full military dress, and the medals he’d won in combat displayed next to the photo. Maybe he’d died a drunk, but he’d done some wonderful things in his life. And when he’d been alive, he’d loved her.

  Nina grabbed the picture frame and the medals and shoved them into her pillow case, too. She didn’t have any photos of her mother. Bryant had destroyed them in a drunken frenzy one night when he was railing about her being nothing because she came from people who weren’t ‘Merican, as he called it. He’d burned all her mother’s photos so no one would know she was a half-breed. Like anyone could look at her and not see her heritage…

  Nina glanced around the dilapidated living room and saw nothing there but misery. This was it. This was the beginning of her new life. She rushed out the front door, tossed her filled pillow case into the back seat and turned the key in her ignition. Nothing happened. The car was dead.

  Nina panicked, her heart beating ninety-to-nothing as she prayed for it to turn over, just one more time. “I swear, I won’t stop until I get to where I’m going! Just start one more time!” she whispered, patting the faded, cracked dashboard. Nina tried the ignition once again, to no avail. Nothing happened.

  Then she saw him. She glanced up through the broken windshield and saw Bryant. He was leaning on the outside corner of the house, tossing what appeared to be her spark plug wiring harness up in the air and catching it over and over as he calmly watched her try to start her car. Her eyes widened. Her heart nearly exploded with the adrenalin rush she experienced. Her head began pounding. And Bryant started toward her.

  “Where you heading, Nina?” he called to her.

  That frightened her more than if he’d been screaming at her. The deceptive calm before the storm was always worse than the out and out anger.

  “I’m, I’m going to wash some clothes down at the laundromat,” she answered, praying he didn’t look in the pillow case behind her.

  “Really? And you left work at noon to come home and do laundry?”

  “Yes. I didn’t feel well, and I needed a break from all the pesticides. You know how they make the air heavy and the scent just messes with you. And then I thought about it on the way home and knew that you wouldn’t like it if I wasted the day away so I decided to take care of some laundry. At least I wouldn’t be around all the chemicals at the plant, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do know. I know you a lying bitch,” he said calmly, smiling at her. “I know you ain’t doing laundry.”

  “What else would I be doing?” she asked, trying to turn it around.

  “Why don’t we just have a look?” he said, jerking her car door open and pulling her out of the car.

  Nina put her hands over his where he held her shirt and tried to keep her balance as he pulled her out, but she didn’t fight him. She knew better than that. All fighting him would get her was another trip to the emergency room, if he let her go get treated at all.

  “Please, Bryant. I swear, I was just going to do laundry! There’s no reason for you to get all upset.”

  Bryant smirked and shoved her away from him. “Stand right there, liar.” He reached in through the open back window and pulled the pillow case out of the back seat, upending it and spilling its contents onto the dusty, hard packed red dirt of the front yard.

  Nina watched as the picture of her dad and his medals, her clothes and finally a small stack of twenties fell out and onto the dirt at his feet.

  Bryant shook his head, tsking his disapproval at her attempt to leave him. “What you doing, Nina?” he asked, turning and walking slowly toward her.

  Nina didn’t answer. She just started backing up.

  “You gonna answer me, or I’m gonna make you answer me,” Bryant said.

  “Nothing like you're thinking, Bryant. It’s not. I was just…”

  Bryant screamed at her, his face becoming a bright red mask of rage. “Just what, bitch? Just thinking that you’d run your ass off in the middle of the day and I wouldn’t find out about it? Just thinking you gonna run away and make me the laughing stock of MY hometown ‘cause I can’t control my woman?”

  “No! No, I would never think that,” Nina responded, tears trickling down her face.

  “Thinking you all better than me, thinking your daddy’s a war hero, so you deserve better. Guess what, baby doll — they ain't no better than me! Women’d pay to have my attentions. And I ain't got no shortage of ‘em lining up to get my attentions, neither. You wanna leave me, you can leave me, but it won’t be the way you think.”

  Nina had been steadily backing away from him as he advanced on her, and now she felt herself backed against the railing of the porch — she could go no further.

  “Bye bye, baby doll,” Bryant said, pulling back his fist and punching her as hard as he could.

  Nina barely had time to shriek before everything went dark. She heard nothing, she felt nothing, she was completely oblivious to the world. Completely unconscious and unaware, at the mercy of the monster who’d made her life a living hell since she’d said, ‘I do.’

  <<<<<<<>>>>>>>

  “Caul, I need ya. G
etcha ass over here, now!” Bryant yelled into his phone.

  “Fuck you, I’m working,” Caul answered, wondering what the hell his best friend could possibly want in the middle of the afternoon.

  “I need you here now. We moving another one,” Bryant demanded in his best do-what-the-fuck-I-tell-you voice.

  “Now? In the middle of the damn day? I can’t call the boys and get ‘em all to leave work,” Caul said.

  “Yes, now! Gotta be right now! And I don’t want the boys here, just you. This one’s just between us. And I already called the doc and his crew. They expecting us,” Bryant said.

  “Damn, boy, when you find time to drive into the city for another one?” Caul asked.

  “I ain’t. This one’s mine. Fucking bitch crossed me.”

  “Nina? You got to be fucking kidding! People gonna notice she’s gone!” Caul exclaimed, not sure he wanted to risk this one.

  “Naw. She planned it all already. Easy enough for anybody to see. All we got to do is dump her car and everybody’ll believe she walked out on me just like the bitch planned.”

  “Man, I don’t know…” Caul said, not convinced.

  “You want a piece of this before we turn her over, come get it. I do not fucking care. Just get your ass over here now,” Bryant said, before ending the call.

  Caul looked at his phone as the call disconnected. He, Bryant, and a few of their buddies had been supplying women to some military guys a couple of hours out of town. He wasn’t quite sure what they did with ‘em, but one day when he pressed the issue just out of curiosity, one of the guys laughed and said they were given as treats to military men on lock down — rewards for good behavior for the ones that had crossed the line into psychotic episodes, so to speak.