into her skull like a freight train. Her vision blurred, and she stumbled, feeling rather pathetic as she caught herself by wrapping her arms around the rough bark of a sequoia. The clouds suddenly opened, and it started raining in sheets. The cold enveloped her, seeping into her very bones and causing her teeth to chatter.
“I’m all right,” she murmured as she heard Jessie and Alex approach, willing herself to push away from the tree, to stand without support and keep looking. Her will wasn’t enough.
She felt Jessie wrap something warm around her—probably her own all-weather jacket—and felt the woman’s arms come around her. Sabrina couldn’t see a damn thing. “Shh,” Jessie said.
She heard them radio for help, and she closed her eyes, unable to deal with the piercing brightness of the sky.
“What did that man do to her?” Jessie asked Alex as she pulled the jacket’s large hood over Sabrina’s dripping hair.
“She gets migraines sometimes,” Alex said. “Bad ones.”
“Yeah, hello,” Jessie retorted. “Alex, I saw her face when that detective was talking to her. What’s his deal?”
Don’t tell her. Don’t say it. Sabrina didn’t think she could stand to hear the words. The pain in her head sharpened, and she let herself lean against Jessie’s sturdy frame.
Alex paused, probably weighing his words. “That was Detective Aaron Donovan.”
Sabrina heard Jessie gasp.
“Yeah,” Alex continued. “Rosie? That girl who went missing six months ago, around when you joined the staff? She was his daughter.”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE had introduced the concept of the Übermensch, which many lesser minds had erroneously translated to mean superman.” However, some scholars, himself included, knew that the German philosopher had meant overman. In other words, every human aspired—or should aspire—to become over-and-above Man, someone who transcends the crude limitations of humanity.
“I teach you the Overman,” he pronounced to the shivering mortals in his audience, knowing that they, too, should aspire to become like him, an Übermensch. But they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. It took a rare, special individual to overcome limitations and evolve into a superior being. But still, he couldn’t give up. Still he had to try. “Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”
They scream, and they cry, and they refuse to see what lies before them.
“What have you done to overcome him?” he shouted back.
But they kept praying. And God was dead.
And in a universe where God was dead, he’d explained patiently, repeatedly, Man had to reconstruct himself, overcome the idea of himself as a fallen creature, slave to a moral code from on high. He has a responsibility to become something higher on the evolutionary scale. Ape created Man, and Man created Overman. And to get there, there could be no moral code. The Overman created his own moral code.
God was dead.
He took the whip from where it lay on a shelf, wrapped it around the waist of a member of his audience. He pulled it to him, and it whimpered, a small, pathetic thing. He laughed, knowing that he could show it and the rest of his audience what it meant to be an Overman. His mouth pressed against its open, wailing one, and he gave it the breath, the very essence of himself, feeling the first stirrings of creation in his very core.
He pulled away. First, he had to continue the lesson. “Man is not becoming better simply by virtue of the passage of time,” he told them. “We have to do something about it. Man can make himself better if he so chooses.”
He traced the whip between a pair of exquisite breasts, quivering in anticipation. Beauty was the first requirement. Beauty begat physical strength begat super-intelligence begat…
The Overman. A race of Overmen.
Only he could have spirited his audience away. Only he had the intelligence, the ability to elude the mere mortals who lived below his mountain, trapped in mediocrity by their laws and their self-imposed limits. They lived a certain way, thought a certain way, ate their dinners a certain way, never knowing what they had the potential to be, if only they would open their eyes. He would teach them, one by one. Like the Overmen before him—Magellan, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Caesar…even Hitler, in his twisted way—he would remake the world anew, into a brilliant, shining thing.
He walked behind his audience, the tremors of a new evolution taking control of him. It was his responsibility. He was the Overman. He’d won his own moral code. He would cleanse them and make them whole.
“We should be dissatisfied with ourselves,” he said, his entire body shaking with the effort. “Without this dissatisfaction, there’s no self-overcoming. No higher evolution of Man.”
He brought the whip down, again and again, cleansing the blood of the new generation.
They scream, and they cry. Because God is dead.
Chapter Three
It’s been two weeks….
No new sign…no new sign….
Her head felt as if someone had filled it with cement, thick and ponderous and nearly impossible to lift. She struggled to open her eyes.
Rosie’s gone.
“Nooo.” Pushing down with one arm, Sabrina propelled herself onto her back. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she saw a cup of steaming tea on her pale teak nightstand, smelled the cinnamon and herbs. Then, because keeping them open took too much effort, she let her eyes close once more.
The likelihood of her surviving up there isn’t…I’m sorry….
Wake up. She had to wake up. Everything just felt so…weighted, as though she had anchors tied to her limbs that were pulling her down, down under an ocean of still, quiet, dark water. She could hear the blood rushing in her ears, the thum-thump beat of her heart.
Two weeks.
Reaching up, she slowly dragged the back of her hand across her face, concentrating intensely on the movement so she wouldn’t stop halfway and fall asleep again. So tired. With all of the effort it was taking to wake up fully, Sabrina considered just letting herself fall into unconsciousness again. Just for a little while.
Rosie’s gone.
“Tara.” The sharp memory of the missing girl suddenly gave Sabrina the strength to propel herself into a sitting position, the movement causing her head to spin ever so slightly.
“Whoa.” The familiar deep voice came from her right, where a small, overstuffed chair sat tucked in the corner of the room. “Holy Bride of Frankenstein, that was sudden.” She turned toward the voice and saw her brother Patricio sprawled in said chair.
“Rico, what the heck are you doing in my room?” The last vestiges of sleep abruptly disappeared from the surprise, and once her pulse went back to normal, Sabrina grinned, glad to see him despite her words. “How did you get in my house?”
His light brown eyes, the mirror image of her own—though he would have said his were the more masculine version—sparkled a bit as he relaxed back into the chair, looking rather smug and satisfied with himself. “I have my ways.”
She rolled her eyes, and thank goodness, the movement didn’t make her head throb anymore. “Okay, whatever.” She quickly finger-combed her long hair. It was stick straight, so that small amount of effort was enough to get it to fall into place. Then, scrambling her way out of a pile of sheets, quilts and one puffy flowered comforter, she catapulted off the mattress and wrapped her arms around her brother. “I’m glad you’re here.”
He stood, lifting her off her feet in the process with an exaggerated grunt. She pretended to smack him on the head, after which he put her down, his broad hands still