Finding His Child. Tracy Montoya

her,” Aaron said simply, and because she knew what frightened him, his words made her ache for him.

      Without thinking, she reached for him, her hand closing around his bare wrist. “Aaron,” she said, because that’s all she could say.

      Gently, firmly, he pulled his arm away, the cool, collected cop once more. “I’ll make sure someone casts that tire track,” he said. “Thanks for your help, Ms. Adelante.” Aaron turned and disappeared through the mist, heading toward his car.

      As she watched him leave, the migraine hit her full force, slamming 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.