Sinners- The Dawn Of Kalki Read online

  appreciations

  "Sinners is ambitious in its scope and brilliant in its execution. With his new book, Naveen manages to bring to life, a tale of intrigue and adventure. A must read."

  - Bala V Balachandran,

  Founder and Dean, Great Lakes Institute of Management,

  J. L. Kellogg Distinguished Professor.

  "Sinners manages to brilliantly fuse fast paced action with rich world building. A must read!"

  - JV Ramamurthy,

  Senior Advisor at HCL Infosystems Ltd,

  Ex-President and Chief Operating Officer,

  HCL Infosystems Ltd

  "Sinners is brilliant and ambitious in its storytelling and narrative."

  - Srinu Pandranki,

  Film maker, Author

  "Naveen breathes a fresh air into Indian fiction with the first book of his Sinners trilogy which is one of a kind."

  - Rahul Reddy,

  Founder, Inani Media

  sin/

  noun/

  an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law.

  “a sin in the eyes of God”

  To you, if you have sinned enough.

  Yada Yada Hi Dharmasya

  Glanirva Bhavathi Bharatha,

  Abhyuthanam Adharmaysya

  Tadatmanam Srijami Aham

  Bhagavad Gita (Chapter IV–7)

  “Whenever there is decay

  of righteousness O! Bharatha

  And a rise of unrighteousness

  then I manifest Myself!”

  To you, if you have sinned enough.

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost, I am extremely thankful to my entire family for their constant support without which this endeavor would not have been possible

  This book originally began as a Quora answer which then grew into a full–blown trilogy because of the encouragement from many Quorans. I would like to thank all of them for providing me with the much-needed motivation.

  I am thankful to my agent Suhail Mathur and the team of 'The Book Bakers' for bringing this book to life. I would like to thank Raghu Teja for working along with me in coming up with some really cool ideas for the cover and the wonderfully creative design team at Onomatopo for the brilliant final cover design. I am thankful to Ishwarya Varshitha for the tremendous support and precise editing that made this edition possible.

  I would like to thank Sanchit and his entire team at PepperScript for showing confidence in my work, understanding my vision for this book and making it real.

  I am grateful to Raghunandan, Apra, Srikanth, Sai Bharath, Divya, Avinash, Vamsi, Srikar, Ravi, Pushpinder, Venkat, Keerthi and all my other friends for their wholehearted support and encouragement. They all kept me going and this book would not have been possible without them.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  i–iii

  1

  THE END

  1

  2

  FORGIVEN

  13

  3

  FRIENDS AND FIRE

  25

  4

  A COMMANDER’S NIGHTMARE

  37

  5

  BOOKS AND BLOOD

  49

  6

  SINNERS AND KILLERS

  61

  7

  KALKI COMMANDS

  71

  8

  SINS OF PASSION

  83

  9

  A STRANGER IN THE DARK

  95

  10

  BATTLE OF BELUM

  107

  11

  INTO THE WOODS

  119

  12

  CRAWLING DEATH

  127

  13

  THE PRIESTESS

  135

  14

  CHAINS OF THE SINLESS

  143

  15

  JUDGEMENT DAY

  159

  16

  ESCAPE FROM HELL

  167

  17

  DARKNESS CALLING

  175

  18

  UNCAGED

  183

  19

  NIGHT OF MANY DEATHS

  189

  20

  TEETH AND CLAWS

  197

  21

  A FACE IN THE SAND

  207

  22

  THE TOWERS

  217

  23

  SINNERS AND THE SINLESS

  225

  24

  THE CORRUPTION

  237

  25

  CONQUEST

  251

  26

  THE BEGINNING

  257

  EPILOGUE

  iv–vii

  PROLOGUE

  Saahil's quick feet thundered hard on the warm earth as he ran. The dust from the ground danced in the air around his feet as he sprinted, painting his dark trousers with a thin, light brownish tinge. He could feel his heart pound now. The organic machine thumped away like a mindless beast, hard against his chest. His breath was now betraying him. His lungs were crying out for him to stop.

  But he could not stop. Not now. He kept running – panting and out of breath. He felt as if his backpack was growing heavier with each passing moment. His frame was bent under its weight, making his run even more tedious. That morning, he had packed it with a gas mask, some bread slices in case he was trapped somewhere and, of course, his constant companion – the two–piece. A word like two–piece meant something else in the old world to young boys like him. But not anymore. Now, it’s the yellow device that all hunters are given –a two–piece Geiger counter that detected radiation in the atmosphere. “You had to be a fool to find radiation this south of the fission.” Suresh had once said to him. “But even fools need to survive,” he had said, handing him over his Geiger counter.

  Little did Saahil know that it was not the radiation that would threaten his life. This was not how he thought the night would end. He had been close to the purge a few times but never this close.

  Never this deadly close.

  The alarm on his detector was supposed to go off a good solid twenty minutes earlier. He must have wrongly calibrated it or maybe the heat sensor was shot. He remembered the last time he was in a purge zone. He ran the moment the alarm rang as if he had seen a ghost. He got far enough and then waited for the purge to hit. He had to wait for more than half an hour. But today something had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.

  This was the worst nightmare of a scavenger. Getting caught –dead centre in the purge during a hunt. In the early days that followed the 'First settlement' at the caves, he had heard the tales of scavengers caught in the purge. They had many names for it.

  The Scavenger’s Pyre.

  The Last Hunt.

  The Funeral.

  He had heard enough stories to know that the names were painfully apt. Stories of scavengers reduced to nothing but charred bones. Stories of men who had turned to ashes and dust.

  For a moment, he pictured what his burnt skeleton would look like when his fellow ‘Forgiven’ came looking for him the next morning. There was no family to weep for him but then again no one had families in the End Age. Maybe, the Commander and Roy would miss him as he would have missed them if they ever got killed in a purge. Would they even know it was him? Or would he be lost among the skeletal remains of early sinners?

  He was jerked out of his thoughts when the ground shook violently, throwing him off balance. The weight of his backpack helped his staggering fall. He fell hard on his face and his body skidded to a halt. He looked up disoriented, knowing fully well that his elbows and knees would start bleeding anytime now. But no
– the injuries were not something to be thought of now. He tried getting up in vain and fell hard as the ground lurched again.

  He knew the earthquakes were only the beginning. He quickly got up and started running again, ignoring the searing pain in his right knee. If only he had 5 more minutes. That’s all he needed to get to his bike. To get out. To survive. His bike, his ever-loyal companion, was waiting for him. The heat was on a steep rise. The warm earth was now turning hot.

  Sweat trickled down from his forehead into his eyes as he ran, burning them. He could feel the heat drown him. The ground shook violently.

  And then it began.

  Slowly, the soil and dust around him started to rise into the air. Then, the tiny rocks rose slowly upwards as if an invisible giant magnet hovered above them. They stuttered and snaked upwards like little spiders crawling in air. For a moment, he just stood and watched as all tiny objects around him hovered above the ground, travelling upwards into the black skies.

  Then, everything started to burn.

  The rocks were now cinders…bright and crimson like the setting sun. The heat was unbearable. He ran towards the bike, faster. He could see it. The bike on which he had shared countless roads and adventures with his fellow hunters. He remembered how it had given up on him the day he had been chased by the damn Thuggees and how it had then again started, miraculously saving his ass just in time. That’s all he wanted from it now. To save his ass just one more time.

  Now the rocks were on fire. So was everything else. The trees, the abandoned buildings and the dead bodies.

  He was ten meters from his gleaming bike when he first screamed. The fire didn’t spare him. His hands were on fire. He ran mindlessly ahead as the tongues of flame licked him all over.

  THE END

  Day Zero

  It was the day on which God had answered our prayers.

  It was also the day on which our collective nightmare began. And like many nightmares it began in a dark and damp place.

  A prison.

  What the fuck? Kumar, the young guard at Tihar Jail thought to himself as he ran along the dark corridor. The dimly lit cells on both sides of the corridor were now ringing with terrible, chilling screams of the inmates. Kumar's new boots were wet with blood and they marked the floor with bright red footprints as he ran. That day, when he came in for his night shift, he expected another sleepy day. All he had to do was sit the whole day, reading ‘Dainik Bhaskar’ and if he was lucky, the earlier guard would sometimes forget his dirty magazine. Kumar couldn’t read a word of it. But he didn’t need to. All he wanted was to look at the pictures. He wasn’t lucky that day. There was no magazine with a half–naked girl on the cover, waiting for him. All he had to look forward to tonight was the dull newspaper and his cigarette break. His plans for the day didn’t include him running along corridors with people dying gruesome deaths in cells beside him.

  “Let us out! LET US OUT!” one of the prisoners screamed as the guard ran past his cell. The prisoner’s screams turned into gurgling noises as he vomited a jet of blood and crashed lifeless onto the prison floor. Kumar knew he had to inform someone through the radio. He crashed into the door of the radio room, breaking it. The wood splinters stuck in his elbow drawing tiny amounts of precious blood as he moved.

  He hurried to the communication panel and picked up the transmitter and started shouting into it. “Anybody there?”

  Buzzing static.

  “Anybody there?” He shouted again, clutching his hair with his blood-soaked hands.

  Far away in the police control room, a constable woke up from his guilty nap to the sound of an incoming signal.

  He picked up the receiver and started listening.

  “Anybody there?” A shaky voice was yelling at the other end of the line.

  “This is Mathunga,” the constable replied, rubbing his hairy belly. He was in no mood to be disturbed.

  “Thank God!” The constable could hear a deep sigh in the voice on the other end, to be immediately resumed by panic.

  “Something…something's gone horribly wrong.” The voice quivered on the line.

  “They are all...they are all...” The constable almost knew what was coming next from the way the voice shook on the other end.

  “They are all dead.”

  Day One

  “Local police have confirmed that they have registered a case and are looking into this matter,” the news anchor’s voice informed from the dirty television set, up on the wall as Pradyumn Rathod watched with interest from down below. His fat and round frame sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair, which seemed to be on the verge of buckling any moment under his weight as its thin legs wobbled dangerously. Rathod hated his job as the night guard at Yerwada Central Jail. The dingy central hall and the muddy light above him didn’t help much.

  “Kumar, the guard at Tihar claims that the prisoners died suddenly without any reason. The doctors have made no comment on the cause of these mysterious deaths so far. The victims include high–profile criminals and few most wanted terrorists. The police are yet to release a report detailing the names of those who are dead, but unofficial accounts claim that this event, which has shocked the entire nation, has claimed 71 lives in Tihar Jail so far,” the reporter continued, the mike held tightly in her hand as if it was a beacon of truth, which could slip away any time.

  “Good riddance,” Rathod muttered under his breath as he chewed some gum.

  His duty as the night guard had left him with a particular distaste for prisoners. If it wasn’t to put a plate of food in front of his wife and kids, he would have gladly left this god–forsaken place a long time ago. The thought of his wife and kids left even more of a bad taste in his mouth. If there’s one thing he hated more than the prisoners, it was that ‘nagging bitch’ and those ‘little monsters’. The bitch was again asking him for money today. She knew that annoyed him. She knew he needed his money and his drink. What other joys did he have left in his life? The child’s school fees could wait. Education hadn’t done anybody any good. He had seen illiterate thugs end up in jail and highly educated businessmen too. And the more educated you were, he observed, the harder you broke. But that stupid bitch wouldn’t understand and she wouldn’t shut up about the money. Not until he had planted a firm one on her face. He hadn’t hit her too hard. He didn’t want to break anything or kill her. That would only cost more. The doctors these days simply loot the patients. No, not that hard, but just hard enough to shut her up for a couple of days.

  “The police strongly suspect a case of food poisoning in the premises of Tihar,” the anchor said. Rathod always felt Yerwada was clearly better than Tihar. This place was special. According to him, it had a sense of doom inherently built into it. Even the Father of the Nation, the ‘Mahatma’ was a prisoner here once. Somehow, that made him happy. This little fact made him feel superior and more powerful than Gandhi. Little did he know that something which would make him a lot happier was about to happen.

  “But it is not yet confirmed if this was an accident or a deliberate attempt by someone to kill these prisoners. The government...” The reporter continued. Suddenly, Rathod thought he heard a muffled little sound from one of the cells.

  The sound of choking.

  He sighed, disappointed at this interruption, bent down with great difficulty and picked up the remote control from the floor. He muted the television set and listened hard. There indeed were sounds.

  He walked carefully towards the cells, studying each of them with half panic and half excitement. All prisoners seemed to be asleep. No one moved.

  Rathod moved silently as his eyes surveyed his surroundings and his ears tried to pick up traces of the faint choking sound. The cell from which the sound emanated slowly came into his view. He approached it with caution. Inside the dark cell, a prisoner fell from his bed onto the floor and was now violently rolling around, choking all the time–his hands clawed at his neck, as if trying to free himself from an invisible assailant
. His nails dug deep into his neck, drawing ribbons of blood. He started screaming now.

  The prisoner bled from his nose and ears. But none of this matched the eeriness that his eyes radiated. His eyes were completely devoid of pupils. They were pure shocking white with streaks of red veins crawling along the edges. Suddenly, the other prisoners too started bleeding, choking and screaming.

  Rathod stood there, watching them suffer and their suffering gave him a strange sense of happiness. He knew he had to alert the authorities. Whatever had transpired over in Tihar was now happening here in this goddamned hell hole. But he had other plans. He decided to enjoy the show while it lasted.

  He sat down, cross–legged on the corridor floor such that he had a clear view of all the prisoners and all their deaths. A cold smile crept on his lips as he watched them die. A sense of dull satisfaction ebbed inside him.

  Whatever was happening, he knew it was something big but he was glad that it was happening. Finally, some real justice, he thought. He wondered how different his life would be once all of these vermin were dead. He would have to find a new job. Maybe of a security guard at some other stupid prison. It was the only job he knew how to do and he hated it. If only I didn’t have that pathetic family to feed, he thought and before his thoughts could return from that dark place, they stopped dead in their tracks. His pupils rolled back into his head turning his eyes a clear white. The breath left him quickly as he grasped his throat in a desperate effort to draw in air. The world was choking him with its invisible yet strong hands of fate.