Raid

RAID

My Right to Life: Book 2

Grayson James

PROVOCA PRESS

Real Life Fiction

Raid

Book Two of the My Right to Life Series

By Grayson James

Published by Provoca Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 by Grayson James

www.grayson-james.com

Discover other titles by Grayson James at Smashwords.com.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the new atheists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

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

An Excerpt From Life Unworthy

An Excerpt From Safari - Book Three of the My Right to Life Series

About the Author

Acknowledgments

As always, I would like to thank my family for bearing with this writing obsession of mine. I want to thank my editor and the staff of Provoca Press for all their hard work in bringing my imagination to the world. I would also like to thank all those who call themselves the new atheists. You were the inspiration for this book and the two others in this series. Finally, I would like to thank those writers in the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology for making yourselves such damn easy targets.

"We all know that human beings are capable of incredible brutality,

but we would do well to ask,

What sort of ideology will make us most capable of it?"

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

"The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage

to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Chapter 1

We're almost home, Average Joe, I said, laughing.

Average Joe didn't answer. What used to be Joe Cavanaugh was still a bloody heap in the trunk of his car.

I was in a neighborhood called Forest Springs and Joe's house was a big gray brick castle-looking structure. I drove around the block twice and put on Harrison before pressing the button on the garage door opener.

Of course, I didn't need Harrison to function anymore since I'd copulated with Tessa Zombie without it. My nerves and confidence were getting stronger with each new challenge. Still, I liked the mask. The chimp mask reminded me that there's only a two percent difference between chimpanzee DNA and human DNA. That's an important little fact that too many humans overlook.

I was right. Average Joe had money, and from the looks of his massive house, lot's of it. Life has such a funny way of working out. What good did it all do him? Now the chimp was going to raid the house that he had built and copulate with the mate that he had groomed to be his wife.

Nice house, Average Joe.

The garage was tidy, garden tools hung on hooks next to a wheelbarrow hung on a hook next to three bikes hung on hooks on the wall in front of me. I didn't know they made that many kinds of hooks.

To the right was a red SUV, always an SUV, and in the space beyond a zero-turn lawnmower, a chopper sort of motorcycle, and a go cart with a little orange flag. No boat.

I pictured Average Joe in a leather jacket riding the chopper. I laughed out loud. Maybe I'd prop what used to be Joe up on it when I was finished and let his guts drape the sides of the gas tank.

I brought the garage door down, unsure what was awaiting me on the other side of the smaller door on my left. There were no other cars in the drive or on the street, so I could only assume they would be here alone. There was a light visible through the front of the house, shining down from the second story, a hallway light perhaps.

Hopefully I could just go upstairs unnoticed, and then a thought rushed over me, demanded entry to the front of my mind. You know what you have to do. I collected my op-bag and slid out of the car. No. I'm not a gorilla.

I opened the door, nine millimeter in hand, and crept into a little mudroom that opened up into a big laundry room. The washer and dryer were big enough that I could sleep inside. Spotless.

The kitchen came next, a big stainless steel fridge, and a six burner stove, and a rack of pots and pans and ladles and tongs hanging above a large marble-topped island like you'd see on the cooking channel. Not even a drinking glass was out of place.

A sturdy oak table sat at the end of the room beside french doors that opened onto a deck with a hot tub. A hot tub. I was on cloud nine. Already spent on Tessa Zombie anyway, I considered stripping down and jumping into the hot tub in the cold night air. Maybe later.

Beyond the table was an open doorway into a dining room with an even larger table and ten chairs. An entire wall of built-in wood hutch housed crystal glasses and china plates. Average Joe had excellent taste in useless trinkets. I turned left out of the kitchen into a tunnel-like hallway and saw a grand double-door entrance twenty feet in front of me. I passed a bathroom on the right and a closed door on the left before entering an open two-story foyer.

I looked straight up at the giant light dimly glowing overhead. If this was a horror movie, it would have fallen on me, driving my head into my chest cavity. Instead it lit the large staircase that stood to my left and open doorway into a great room on my right.

There was no noise in the house and I began to wonder if I was there alone. Just do it quick and don't look at her eyes. No! She is a potential mate someday. Stop justifying. She'll just use up resources that could be spent on your own.

I started slowly up the first few steps, bag slung over my shoulder, worried at what, or rather who, I might find at the top of the stairs. On the first landing was a big painting of the family staring at me – Joe alpha in a black tux, trophy wife in a low cut black dress, and little offspring in a pink frilly dress – all smiling. Any fears about the size of Susan's breasts from the car photo were laid to rest by the painting, if it was accurate.

I started up the second flight, gun raised, never taking my eyes off the open area at the top of the steps. It was too quiet. If I didn't know that what used to be Joe was stuffed in the trunk in the garage, I'd think I was walking into an ambush. Every raid is a dangerous event, even when you think you know what to expect.

At the top of the steps was an entire wall of photographs. Offspring in tights dancing, offspring downhill skiing, offspring water skiing, offspring in sandbox, offspring holding little kitten, offspring riding roller coaster, offspring playing violin, offspring playing piano, offspring being kissed by some greasy rock singer with a guitar, offspring riding a horse with tight little white pants and a cap and a whip in her hand. So cute! Detach Milo. She's had a full life already. Just shut up. I know what I have to do.

A hallway broke off in two directions from the open area and the offspring shrine. There were two doors down the hall to the left, one in front of me, and two down the hall to the right.

I slowly opened the door in front of me since it was closest anyway. It was a heavy door with an oversize oblong knob. No creaking. There was a big flat television mounted on the wall to the left. Shelves surrounded it, propping up books, toys, electronics. A little leather love seat sat on the floor facing the screen and several bins of toys lined the wall on the right side of the room. A playroom.

I closed the door and moved right. The next door was a large bathroom with deep blue walls and an oversize tub. A little box of toys sat on the floor beside the tub. She's across the hall. Just use a pillow.

I opened the door across the hall from the bathroom. A big pinkish post bed sat in the middle of the room, probably queen size, with the big curtain thing hanging over it like in old pictures. The bed was made. No offspring.

The room was very tidy for a kid's room and if not for a net of stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling and some little shoes under the bed, I'd think it was a spare room. She wasn't in there, which meant she was probably in bed with her mother, waiting on her father to come home to wish her happy birthday.

I carefully walked back down the hall, past the playroom and shrine wall and toward the two doors on either side of me. Both doors appeared open, so I approached very deliberately, not making any noise. I think the room on the left was a spare room, a large wood bed and dresser and rocking chair its only furnishings.

That left the room on the right a little farther down. I peeked in through the door and from what I could tell, it was a little sitting room with a loveseat and coffee table and a big something on the far wall. It looked like a large horizontal cocoon.

I crept into the room, letting my eyes adjust to even less light. I told myself to get a little flashlight for my op-bag, one with a red lens like soldiers used. For crying out loud, the cocoon was a tanning bed. In their bedroom!

There was no one in this first room, but a door to the right was partly closed, bluish shadows were shifting in there, and I had a feeling what I'd find when I went in.

I stepped very lightly, on my tip-toes, to the door and stared through the crack in the door, trying to make out something, anything. The shadows were coming from the changing scenes of a television screen, no sound, mounted in a corner behind the door.

I saw a long nightstand on the right wall of the room. Still no sign of life. My eyes were pretty adjusted to the darkness, so I raised the gun and walked on in.

You can be careful, crafty, patient. Up to a point. And then it's just risk, life and death on the line, go or you'll go crazy. Or you'll never go at all and your genes will end up on the trash heap of history.

I stepped around the door, gun pointing forward, expecting to see a blond head watching the silent screen. I was ready to take control of the situation, ready to use the little one for leverage, whatever was demanded. There was no little one. And the blond wasn't watching the screen.

She was sprawled out, completely naked, and face-down on the king size bed. Her legs were spread slightly, and her arms jutted out at ninety degree angles from either side of her body, bent up at the elbows.

I got really scared, thinking maybe someone beat me to her and killed her, but upon closer inspection I saw her beautiful body rising and falling. Her head was facing right so I walked around the bed to the left into a large closet that opened into a master bathroom. Extravagant and unoccupied.

I came back out, pretty sure that this was a bigger risk than taking down the mall alpha without Harrison. I had so many questions and no control. And without the offspring, no leverage.

I walked around the other side of the bed so I was facing Susan. I got down on my knees so I was eye level with her. I was staring at half her face, the other half buried in a fluffy down comforter. No wonder Joe went down so easily. They've been living way too soft.

I moved in so my head was even with the edge of the bed, watching the effect different scenes on the television had on her smooth shiny cheek. I was so focused on her body at first that I didn't see the empty bottle of vodka next to a bottle of pills on the nightstand. She was smashed, passed out!

I moved right in next to her face, taking a huge chance, lip to lip nearly, and could have gotten a contact buzz from the fumes. I chuckled to myself at the thought of her waking up and being face to face with a chimp. I pressed the scene a little further and stroked her hair back from her flushed cheek, imagining what it would be like to be Average Joe coming home to this creature, to this house, to this life. She didn't flinch.

For a moment, the danger of being in a strange house, the gold van sitting in a parking lot across town, the missing little offspring, what used to be Joe stuffed in a trunk and Tessa Zombie in another, and the lingering question of Susan's strange nudity, all slipped away as I ran fingers through her hair and she didn't move and I was Average Joe.

Her breath caught momentarily, and I was shaken back to reality, jerking my hand away and jumping back with my gun raised. Aside from the small glitch in her breathing, she didn't even tense up. She really was out of it.

Get it together, I whispered to myself.

I set my op-bag down and pulled out a set of cuffs. No sense in prolonging the inevitable. I moved in slowly, gently grabbing her right wrist and raising it slightly. I clamped the cuff down against her wrist and pulled it softly behind her back.

I reached over her tanned body, accentuated by the bright white comforter, trying to shift my weight as little as possible, and grabbed her left wrist. I brought it around her back, waiting for her to wake up at the discomfort, but by then it would be too late. She didn't stir as I clamped the other cuff on.

I backed off the bed, terrified at the power, my own power to do whatever I wanted to do with this magnificent female. Who does this? Who is this free?

I was dying to copulate with her right then and there, had been physically ready since I first laid eyes on her, but I knew I should wait. It had only been hours since Tessa Zombie, and I wanted to build potency.

I pulled out two zip ties from the op-bag and brought her legs together, binding them at the ankles and