God of Destruction Read Online Free

way she’d fallen asleep. She squinted against the blinding
light coming in through the window and realized that she was late
for school. Again.
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter Three
    London, England; December
20 th , 2011
    The timing had been perfect.
    Closing had come about an hour before and
only two guards remained in the silent building, awaiting the
replacements that would be relieving them in another half hour.
    Harris and Reyes had worked this shift
together every night, excluding weekends, for five years, and the
two had become good friends. Both men had been sitting in the
security room, eyes flickering between the wall of surveillance
feeds and the portable small screen television Harris had brought
from home, when the lights and video monitors concurrently died.
Cursing softly under his breath, Harris stood in the dark and
pulled the small flashlight from his belt, suddenly hyper aware of
the limited space around him.
    "The back-up generator'll take care of it,"
Reyes assured him, lazily stretching back in his chair and rifling
through his pockets for batteries. "Just give it a minute."
    Henry Harris was the older and much larger
guard, just shy of fifty and well over six feet tall. Despite his
age, he was a burly man with a permanently angry expression on his
face, unless you, by a miracle, got him to laugh. His hair was salt
and pepper, but only where he allowed it to show. In order to beat
impending baldness, he’d shaved his head back in college and had
never gone back. Short stubble covered his head and grew longer
toward his chin, around which he had organized a neat beard. Small,
dark eyes were sunken into his withering face.
    Fred Reyes, on the other hand, was
comparatively meek. The younger man had only just celebrated his
twenty ninth birthday the previous week and was still cleaning up
his apartment from the surprise party his brother had thrown him,
one Coors Light bottle at a time. Reyes stood above average height
but resembled more of a toy soldier than a security guard while
standing beside Harris. His long, wiry muscles swam in the extra
material of his black uniform. He wore his hat over his head,
masking his shaggy, dark hair, and allowing only his dull brown
eyes to show. Reyes was clean-shaven, retaining a boyish quality
that Harris lacked.
    “Do you have any Double A's?” Reyes
inquired, finally giving up on his pockets with a deep, dramatic
sigh.
    “Just take 'em out of the remote,” Harris
grunted back. “The generator should have come on by now.”
    “The rain might've blown out the box,” Reyes
shrugged, suddenly pointedly interested in his uniform's broken
belt loop.
    Harris grit his teeth, pulling back his
sleeve to study his watch. Realizing he couldn’t leave the
generator for his replacement, he resolved to go, and by the look
on Reyes’s face, he’d be going alone. Fixing his hat upon his bald
head, he turned on his heel to leave, despite Reyes’s protests.
“Harris!” Reyes called as his friend vanished through the door.
“The night guy’ll get it! Harris!”
    “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” the officer
vowed with a roll of his eyes. “Find the batteries,” he added.
    Navigating through the blackened halls of
the museum was difficult with only a flashlight, but Harris had
memorized every door and crevice so attentively that he could’ve
done it with his eyes closed. The back-up generator existed in the
basement and was only accessible through the ward devoted entirely
to Greek artifacts and literature on its mythology. The basement
was off limits to the public for its dangerous setup, concrete
walls, and the boiler, making it a hell of its own making beneath
the feet of the many patrons each day. It wasn’t a place
necessarily enjoyed by the staff of the museum, but whatever minor
incidence had brought them down to begin with was usually enough to
make them overlook this general distaste for the hot and unkempt
room. Harris was no exception to those who