Til Death Do Us Part Read online

  Til Death Do Us Part

  By Leonard Petracci

  A special thanks to my editor, my cover designer, and my supporters. To everyone who believed I would make it here, even when I doubted myself.

  Be sure to join my mailing list at http://eepurl.com/-j2Oz to be notified when I release new books or have free promotions!

  Introduction

  Frederick Galvanni is the thief of the century, but it’s not his first time claiming the title. For Frederick and the inhabitants of his world, reincarnation is real, but people are always reborn in the country in which they died. Now Frederick seeks to pull off his greatest heist yet—enter a maximum security prison, where souls are trapped through reincarnation, and assemble the greatest criminal team that has ever lived.

  But for Frederick, the heist is just the beginning of a plan centuries in the making: a plan of revenge for unforgivable crimes committed a millennium before. And in this world, even death cannot keep Frederick from success.

  Chapter 1

  In most countries, murdering a child is one of the worst crimes that can be committed. But in Carcer it's routine. For good reason, too.

  It's the only way to keep them in.

  Carcer is the world's highest security prison: an island country, reserved for murderers, rapists, and thieves of the highest caliber. But none of the inmates on Carcer are over thirteen years of age, because on entry to the prison country, each and every one of them is murdered when they step off the boat. Within the next day, they're reborn and cataloged into the system. Then they're allowed to grow until their minds begin to sharpen and their muscles begin to develop. At thirteen, they're slaughtered again, resetting the cycle, repeating for the amount of lifetimes sentenced by the judge for their crime.

  They say after ten cycles a prisoner can't even remember who they are anymore, that the memories of their past lives have been eradicated, that they no longer bear the character traits that landed them in Carcer in the first place. At that point they've been "reconditioned," and are ready to be assimilated into society once again.

  Due to this system, not a single prisoner has escaped from Carcer since its creation.

  I intend to be the first.

  Four and a half billion dollars worth of stolen rare metals led to my arrest. Heaps of platinum, gold, silver, and a slew of other elements so precious the judge deemed ten cycles of imprisonment insufficient. The esteemed justice most high generously granted me twenty cycles; the additional ten for pure punishment.

  The government's detectives found me through a hole in my planning, a detail they suspected I'd forgotten to cover up. A twisting trail of clues that led them to me, Frederick Galvanni, the greatest thief of the century. They locked me in a padded cell, strapped to a table, with no chance of accidental death and escape until I was on Carcer.

  Except I had planned to arrive on Carcer.

  Frederick Galvanni doesn't make mistakes. I'd left the hole in my plans for them to find.

  Now I was on a boat to Carcer, the greatest networking location in the world for top notch thieves. A vault filled with talent yet to be cracked by anyone in existence.

  The perfect place to recruit a team.

  Chapter 2

  I was in my study when they caught me. Or at least when they thought they had caught me.

  "We'll call in with the tip at 1900 hours," said Marco, my technology specialist, over our private line. "Expect a one-hour delay. Once you're captured, we'll continue monitoring until you switch bodies. If the plan goes sour, you know the signal—we can get you out of there in ten minutes."

  "My plans don't go sour."

  "Well, in case it does—"

  "It won't, Marco," I said. "I'll see you on the other side. Any additions to our list of potential recruits?"

  "Nope. Just the twelve. We'll reach out to you with updates as they come. Once you're on the island, you're outside our reach except for basic communications. At that point, everything is in your hands."

  "Just how I like it. They're best suited for the job."

  I hung up before he replied, and looked over the list of twelve resumes one last time. There was Antonio Perez, the man who had invented his own coding language for banking, then used a backdoor to siphon millions into his own Swedish account. Tom Noles, captured half a century ago, but not before the FBI founded an entire division with the sole purpose of shutting down the most extensive black market the world had ever known. And Lisa Watkins, whose skill in bed was only exceeded by her proficiency at murder. I would know, on both accounts. Each of them showed criminal histories trailing back at least three lifetimes, and none of them had wavered to a moment's thought of repentance.

  "My rock stars," I whispered. "My Murderers' Row. My hall of fame."

  At 1900 hours, I positioned myself in my study, my back to the wall-length window that faced the forest behind. A forest perfect for a sneak assault, and a thin, glass window pane that would break even under the smallest amount of pressure.

  And I waited with arms crossed, pretending to watch the seventy-inch display in front of me.

  Fifty-seven minutes later, I heard the glass shatter and felt the prick in the back of my neck. I feigned surprise as four elite task force units charged through the window, and I pulled the tranquilizer dart out, my vision already blurring.

  "Bastards," I shouted, fumbling for the gun at my belt and raising it to my temple. "Good luck tracing this dead body!"

  But before I could pull the trigger, darkness closed around me, and four sets of hands caught my falling body.

  ***

  Shortly after I awoke, I was escorted to the courtroom.

  "Class three death clearance!" shouted the guard as they took me from my holding cell. Pens, scissors and neckties disappeared as I walked down the hall in accordance with his command, as a class three clearance removed any potential methods of suicide. Even the electrical outlets had stoppers over them.

  The judge was immovable and the jury heartless.

  "Please," I drawled, my voice heavy with sarcasm, "you have the wrong guy. Not guilty. "

  The judge snorted, finally getting the chance to read the sentence he had been waiting all day to lay down.

  "20 life cycles," he ruled, rapping his gavel, "category four deaths. Dismissed."

  I laughed as they led me from the courtroom and boarded me onto the boat that would take me to Carcer. No helicopters or planes were used for transportation—it was too easy to shoot them down, or seize the controls, and die in international waters where the soul fled to its most recent country of residence.

  I was sedated the entire trip, and couldn't possibly know how long it had been when the boat finally docked at the prison island. The guards ushered me from the boat and led me up the beach, to a roped-off section of sand permanently stained red.

  "Alright boys," I said from inside my straitjacket, "you heard the judge. Category four death. Let's get this over with."

  "Shut it, prisoner," said the head guard, kicking my knees out from under me, one of them breaking with an audible snap, "You are worthless now. You are no longer Frederick. You are no longer an economic nightmare. You are no one."

  Behind him, the other three guards removed steel batons from their belts. I watched as they advanced, knowing full well what a category four death meant—that there was only one category more painful, category five, reserved for the rapists.

  It took twenty minutes for me to black out. They started with the legs, working their way upwards, ensuring no bone remained intact. And just before I lost consciousness I saw the head guard remove a glass jar from his belt, and catch my last breath inside it, which they would use to trace the soul to its new body.

  And I, Fre
derick Galvanni, died my sixty-fourth death.

  Chapter 3

  Every parent wants their child to be Original.

  I don’t mean original like a piano player, a baseball star, or a poet. I mean Original. A brand new soul, one untarnished by past lives. Fresh.

  But it doesn’t always happen. In fact, as birth rates and death rates have leveled off, Original children have become quite rare. It had been known for centuries that Originals were much more likely to be born to couples of passion, whose love ran hot with desire, and a stale baby born into a family could sow doubt in even the most devoted of couples. It’s not unheard of for babies who remember their past lives to fake Originality, trying to please their new parents, hiding their past lives behind faux innocence and ignorance.

  Even in countries where the death rate far outstripped the birth rate, however, Originals have been known to randomly pop into the population. And this posed a problem for Carcer.

  Should an Original child slip into the prison, only to be raised and murdered in a horrific accident, the public outcry would be deafening. The prison would be shut down, its officials relocated to the inmate side of prisons to pay their own sentences. So babies on Carcer were not made the natural way that babies had been made for millennia. But rather, they were made by machines, in test tubes and incubators controlled by the cold hand of science. With no passion, and no chance for Originality.

  So when I opened my eyes for the first time to the harsh lab lighting, and breathed my first breath of latex and disinfectant, I knew that I had arrived on Carcer. Not intellectually, no—I had yet to build the mental capabilities to form thought, let alone words—but instinctively I had a feeling. A satisfaction comparable at that time to only the basest of human desires, like sipping from a bottle of warm milk. The machines above me knew that I had arrived too—had I been able to read, I would have seen my name displayed across the incubator monitor as the machine read my first breath, the one most potent with soul, followed only by the last breath.

  And despite the bravado in the courtroom, and the confidence over the phone with Marco, baby me knew the feeling that I had tightly wrapped confidence around to cover up. And baby me screamed.

  ***

  For most people, memory recovery is slow. It starts off young through feelings and instincts, and gradually blossoms into full memories. Some people are better at it than others, and can recall the entirety of their past life by age five. They still have to relearn things like speech, writing and math by developing the necessary neural pathways for these skills, but there’s an underlying intuition underneath that will spur them along, molding their body to fit their soul.

  But the secret that I had carefully kept throughout my sixty five lives, the secret that propelled me to the height of criminal organizations throughout the centuries, was my ability to recall. By two months, I could remember my entire past life. By four months, I could remember the three lives before that. And by four years my memory stretched back to my very first life, to a set of memories that would have been washed away by the waves of reincarnation in the average man by ten cycles.

  And because of this skill, I could manipulate reincarnation like no one else I had ever met.

  If I was dealt a bad hand and born into a family too impoverished, or found my body type deformed, or my mind’s processor too slow, I could always restart within nine months. That plump new baby would find a way to turn the stove on so that natural gas filled the house, or roll down the flight of stairs that should have been gated, or sneak into the household bleach. And that new baby would be no more, a vessel discarded in light of a newer model. Like trading in an Impala for a Corvette.

  But now, as I stared upwards in the incubator, my neck muscles not yet strong enough to turn my head and my eyes not developed enough to discern the shapes above, I knew I had one chance. There would be no discarding the hand—there was no time, and the entire Carcer facility was certified for class three death clearance.

  There was no choice but to play fair. I’d have to make it out of this one alive.

  Chapter 4

  “I want the citizens of Alani irate. Livid. I want them insatiable, demanding that their voices be heard, starting riots in the street and threatening war. I want them petitioning to the world council for them to have what is rightfully theirs, until the world council has no choice but to right this most grievous wrong.”

  Marco listened to my rant as he sipped his coffee. We were in my study, the same one that I would be arrested in one year later. And there were plans to be made.

  “We have six agents in public office, two at the head of unions, three deep in the Alanian mafia, and four awaiting placement,” he answered, consulting a stack of notes. “Already streets have begun to whisper—subtleties, seeds of thought being planted into the collective subconscious. According to our data models, within three years it will become a political issue, and at the next five-year election, politicians will be scrambling to add it to their platforms. Should any of this begin too early or too late, our agents should be able to correct the course.”

  “Good,” I said, looking at the map on my desk. I saw Carcer, a pinprick of an island just off the coast of Alani and Hemorran, two small nations with GDPs smaller than their square mileage, and a surplus of hungry mouths to feed. The perfect pot in which to brew domestic unrest. “And I take it you conducted background checks into their past dozen lives?”

  “Of course, Frederick,” he said. “They’re solid and, as you know, bribable.”

  “Perfect. Then it’s time we became activists, Marco. It’s time to bring Alani some long overdue justice.”

  ***

  By the time the guards took me from the incubator, I’d developed the ability to recognize basic shapes. Near the end of my stay, my head lulled to the left, and I saw the oblong pink shape next to me, staring for hours until I recognized the object.

  It was another baby, wrapped in a tight, white blanket and resting on its back, its eyes trained on the ceiling. I waved my hand in front of its face, my poor motor skills causing my fist to connect accidentally with its head. But the baby never reacted; it continued to stare into the harsh light, a single tear trailing down its cheek. I never heard it cry or saw it move, except for the falling tears wicked into the bedding below.

  After leaving the incubators, babies at Carcer were transported to the nursery, where they remained until they were two years of age and could walk and defecate without assistance. At this point, they would be designated a holding cell.

  “Look what we have here,” said a voice from above my nursery crib on the first day of my arrival. It originated from one of the children assigned to work in the nursery. “A new baby. A fat, chubby one. Won’t we have so much fun with you? I know I will.”

  The owner of the voice, a young boy with curly red hair and pasty skin, cracked a smile, displaying yellow teeth and swollen gums accompanied by rancid breath. With life being so short on Carcer, the prison supplied none of the basic amenities for personal hygiene, having long cut out any form of health care from their budget. Those too sick to work would be slaughtered. And those who could persist on could continue living, though enfeebled, at least until they neared thirteen years of age.

  “Don’t you know what I do to all the new ones?” he said, flashing the putrid smile again. “I think you can guess—it’s what got me in here. Or wait, no, you can’t guess. You’re just a baby. You haven't had the talk yet. I like to give the new ones a few weeks first though, that way I don’t have to be as gentle. The guards say that. They say, 'Omar, Omar, you have to be more gentle with the new ones.' ”

  He laughed as I gurgled, frozen beneath him, barely able to move. Then he was gone, disappearing over the edge of my crib, and I heard his voice speaking to the baby one crib over.

  The weeks passed with Omar visiting my crib each day.

  “Won’t be long now. Just a bit older,” he would say, filling a bottle with warm milk. “You’re growin
g so quick.”

  And in Carcer, there was nothing I could do. Even if I could wield a weapon, there was nothing in the nursery suitable to fend him off. I couldn’t yet scale the walls of the crib. And even if I found the means, I couldn’t afford to kill myself and restart life on the island. There was no time.

  Omar forgot one crucial detail, however. That as I grew, so did he.

  Aging was something the guards on Carcer never forgot. And age he did, until Carcer decided he would age no more.

  “No!” I heard him scream as the guards pulled him by the arms from the nursery and out of sight, his legs dragging on the floor. “No! Not yet, please! Ow, my arm, be gentle!”

  And after his category five death, Omar never bothered me in the nursery again.

  The next few weeks in the nursery passed without incident, and I began gaining more control over my body and mind. I focused on speech, knowing that communication was of top priority to forward my plans. And I tried crawling, though I was still too young, and my muscles couldn’t bear the load.

  I practiced moving: stretching out my fingers, curling my elbow. I flexed my toes and kicked my legs. But as the weeks turned to months, and my gurgling turned to consonant sounds, I noticed something was wrong.

  It was my right leg. A stiffness, or lack of response. Something off about the way it moved.

  I hadn’t noticed it before—trying to make sense of all the nervous wiring is always a slow part of the just-been-reborn learning curve. But now it was obvious. Once, as an attendant held and burped me, I managed to catch a glimpse of my leg—and now that I knew that something was amiss, I saw the truth.

  Where there should have been muscle, there was nothing—only skin stretched tight over bone. A defect, likely resulting from improper procedure in the birthing lab by attendants who knew they were serving criminals. A disability I knew would prevent me from walking, from mobility, from the plan.