Superstars

By Zack Cahill

Fame equals power. Yeah-yeah, you knew that already. But we’re not talking private jets and champagne at The Ritz. We’re talking honest-to-goodness superpowers.

They call it The Divergence. Celebrities all over the world, transforming overnight. Flight. Super strength. Telekinesis. And the more famous they are, the more power

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zack Cahill
• Release date: Sep 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781684191628

Zack Cahill

Zack Cahill was born in Dublin. As an award winning journalist he has contributed to a range of men's magazines including GQ, FHM and OutThere. He is also a screenwriter with a number of major film projects optioned and in development. He lives in London. This is his first novel.

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About the author

Zack Cahill was born in Dublin. As an award winning journalist he has contributed to a range of men’s magazines including GQ, FHM and OutThere. He is also a screenwriter with a number of major film projects optioned and in development. He lives in London. This is his first novel.

This book is dedicated to Lindsay Lohan

Credits

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a ficticious manner. Any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual

events is purely coincidental.

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Copyright Kearney Publishing 2016

Superstars By Zack Cahill

Cover design by Martin Perry

Prologue

The truth about how it all began? No one ever found out. Even after the story went public and sent the world into paroxysms of fear and confusion and philosophical angst, after the governments tried to take control and ran into difficulties, after the world adjusted and became what it is now. After all that, the beginning of the story remained a mystery.

That’s because Jack Langella died before he could tell it.

They know that long before things went really crazy there were outliers, one-off cases of people developing months, maybe years, before it became wide spread.

At ninety-eight years old, bed bound and hooked up to all kinds of tubes, Jack became the first of them.

He spent the last six months of his life under home care at his mansion in Malibu. His money bought him the best medical help in existence, but his cancer was like the tide; he could shift up the sand a little higher but sooner or later the water was coming in. By the end he was mute as well as paralysed.

His daughter still visited every day. She’d sit on his bed and read the papers to him or gossip about work for hours. She’d gone into the music business too, though as an executive, not a performer like her old man.

It was on his last day of living that it happened. His daughter was there, sitting sideways on his bed. As she spoke to him she gazed out of the floor to ceiling windows at that spectacular Pacific view.

Jack, still able to move his eyes, was staring at the shelves of gleaming awards and framed platinum records lining the walls of his vast bedroom. How many years of her childhood, Jack thought, had he given up to accumulate those stupid hunks of metal? How many months of touring while she was taking her first drunken steps?

He recalled her mother phoning him on the road to tell him she’d said her first word. He’d just come off stage. Dead drunk, coming up on coke, a girl and a party waiting for him, he’d rushed off the line like he had more important things to do.

If he could give all that bullshit back now to reach out and touch his daughter’s hand, he would.

He looked at her arm then, inches from his. He was totally paralysed, no possible way he could do it, but he had this odd compulsion to try.

He looked at his own withered arm, and suddenly it did move. It was slow, it didn’t feel like his muscles were making any effort, they still hung slack and lifeless. It was just as if an invisible helper had taken Jack by the wrist, lifted his hand and gently placed it on top of his daughter’s.

She gasped and turned to look Jack in the eye. Clasping his hand in hers and holding it to her chest and smiling she said Dad, how’d you do that?

Jack had tears in his eyes. He wasn’t able to make his arm move again. They stayed like that for ten minutes. Then Jack died.

A man who shouldn’t be able to move a finger lifted his whole arm. A little miracle;, nothing compared to what came later. But just like it only takes one white crow to disprove the theory that all crows are black, it only takes one genuine miracle to prove they can happen.

What they forget about miracles though, is they don’t always have to be positive. You get bad miracles too.

Part One

Chapter 1

He slid his backpack off his shoulder and dropped it on the marble floor, easing himself into a low wicker chair. A caramel skinned Thai girl placed a glass of water and a cool towel on the table in front of him and backed away with little, reverential steps.

The manager approached, bowing and smiling

Sawat deh krab Mr Mash. You’re friend is here, we’re collecting him from the beach now

Brian nodded and mispronounced a Thai thank you at the manager.

He gulped down the water and towelled his neck, enjoying the air-con, the smell of jasmine, the feeling of being properly fussed over after two days of living like a fucking twenty-year-old backpacker.

Two days. Sixteen hours from London to Bangkok, a night out with the editor of some Thai fashion mag he’d done some freelance work for in the past. Martinis in a rooftop bar. Thailand was cheap allegedly, but no one had informed these rip-off cunts. Twenty thousand baht for a martini. Though he’d expense the lot.

Then on to a blues bar of all places, some homeless-looking locals murdering Hendrix covers, Chang beer, shots, puking in the street. Some gungy stuff he was pretty sure wasn’t coke in a toilet, with someone he was pretty sure wasn’t a woman.

Then, oblivion.

The wake up call from reception. The baseball-bat hangover. Car to the airport. Internal flight to Krabi. Private boat to Rialay Beach and now, here.

The Ryavadee. Cost you more for a week’s stay than most British families earn in a year. A resort of almost pornographic luxury.

Brian Mash.

Thirty-four years old.

Journalist - sort of.

Businessman - after a fashion.

Bullshitter - nonpareil.

Jammy cunt - extraordinaire.

He eased back in his chair. The reception was a circular building on stilts with wrap-around floor to ceiling windows. Outside, a manicured tropical forest baked in the late afternoon sun. Monkeys clattered about on the roof yelling at each other. Koi carp burbled stupidly in the man made river.

Can I get a beer please? he asked the room. Another girl pressed her hands together and peeled off to fetch him a Chang.

It was a pretty sweet deal, to be fair. The magazine covered his travel and accommodation of course, plus a small daily allowance on top of the article fee. Three days rock-climbing in one of the world’s top destinations. He’d managed to stretch the assignment to a two week trip, taking in some of the islands and another two nights in Bangkok on the way back, all in the name of background colour for the article, of course.

An electric cart pulled up outside. The photographer. Mid-twenties, lanky. So pale he was almost translucent, which combined with his huge black sunglasses and Errol Flynn moustache made him look like a black and white photograph from the twenties.

The moustache narrowed his post-code down to within spitting distance of Dalston, East London’s epicentre of self-conscious cool.

He slid languidly out of the cart and loped up the steps into reception. A novel under his arm, something heavy and Russian, the kind of thing Brian had suffered through once or twice purely to say he’d read but wouldn’t dream of bringing on a fucking beach holiday.

Hey mate, I’m Dave

Brian stood up and shook his hand.

What a shithole eh? Brian said, grinning

Dave laughed.

Fucking appalling.

An hour later they sat in the resort’s beach restaurant, The Grotto, set in a recess in the cliffs, lit by candles and the setting sun. A wine bottle stood between them, a single red inch at the bottom. Empty plates had been cleared away, the cheese board en route.

So why travel writing all of a sudden? asked David, I’d have thought The Record would be keeping you busy with the meaty stuff?

Brian groaned inwardly. David didn’t know. Not uncommon, lots of people still thought he worked for The Record. Really, why should they be up to date on disgraced journalists when – and this was the constant gripe when he still worked at the left leaning national newspaper - no-one actually bought the bastard things any more.

Yeah I finished up there a while back, I’m just freelancing now. He tried to make that now sound final; end of story, let’s move along. But inevitably-

No way really? I was sure I’d read something by you on the website last week?

Nope, not for over a year. Fourteen months actually.

What a bummer, your stuff always made me chuckle.

By stuff, David was almost certainly referencing a specific, tiny section of Brian’s body of work. A short-lived pop culture column in The Record’s weekend supplement. Vitriolic and angry, it had momentarily captured a niche audience. Until he’d targeted the wrong person: James Maddox, a media tycoon at that time embroiled in an embarrassing prostitution scandal. James Maddox also happened to own a hefty percentage of The Record, albeit through a series of convoluted corporate links. Within the week, following a sudden bout of reshuffling, Brian found his column quietly dropped and himself reshuffled directly out the door.

Thankfully in the Wild West internet age he’d found new uses for his writing chops, basic programming skills and newly festering apathy toward the rest of humanity: he found marketing.

He ran through the heavily edited highlights, before steering it carefully back to more general philosophical ground.

But I still do the odd freelance job for friends, like this, Brian said, gesturing at their opulent surroundings with his glass. Thing is, anyone who’s even scraping a living in something creative is in an incredibly lucky minority. It’s just a fact of life, the people who do the most important things, creating art, teaching, putting out fires, get paid the least. It’s their punishment for doing meaningful work and making the rest of us look bad. Meanwhile the people who do the useless shit, maybe even stuff that actively damages society; hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, internet marketers like me, get paid the most.

David snorted.

Obviously I agree but you say that like you’re describing gravity, like it’s some kind of immutable law of physics.

It might as well be, said Brian, tearing a warm loaf of bread in half and slathering it with butter.

But aren’t you angry about that?

Why should I be? I make good money, I get to do nice things like this, I’m pretty happy actually.

But it’s that attitude that maintains the status quo said David. It’s the Edmund Burke thing; All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Right, well that’s great David but the trouble is in the course of quitting my superficial but well-paid job and dedicating myself to the downfall of the patriarchal capitalist machine, I’ll miss my mortgage payment and most likely starve to death. You can’t eat art mate. I mean, I love writing but I’m not gonna sleep in a dumpster for it.

You don’t have to quit, but you don’t have to completely sell your soul either. You don’t have to buy into the system.

Brian flattened his hand on the table and made a noise like a game-show buzzer for an incorrect answer.

Sorry mate but you immediately lose points for using the expression ‘the system.’

Why’s that?

Because there is no system, that’s the fucking terrifying thing. There’s no shadowy conspiracy, no hand at the wheel. Of course there are social forces; a kid born in Darfur doesn’t have the same opportunities as a kid born in Islington. But nobody’s sitting at a bank of computers with a cigar saying this white kid gets a promotion and this black kid goes to jail. It just happens because we’re too short-sighted and stupid and greedy to set the world up any better.

David had started shaking his head as soon as Brian began talking.

So we should just accept the world for the way it is and get on with making as much money as possible until we die? Screw everyone else?

Well, we’re all gonna die anyway. Whether you raped kids or taught Braille to underprivileged midgets, you still end up in a box in the ground. So we might as well play the game as best we can and have as much fun as possible.

With that he popped the buttered bread in his mouth and topped up their wine glasses.

Five hundred metres away in what the Ryavadee brochure called a deluxe pavilion, Anna settled into a vast armchair by a bubbling hot tub, her cell phone nestled between her shoulder and ear as she cracked open a bottle of mini bar white wine.

The line to LA was clear but there was a half second of lag time.

Just look after yourself over there sweetheart, won’t you? Take a break from it all and just relax.

Totally mom, I will, Anna said

She filled the wine glass, evincing that most happy of noises, the escalating glug-glug-glug of an upended bottle.

Honestly Anna, in a few days you’ll even enjoy being there on your own. I wish I could go somewhere so beautiful all by myself. Sit by the ocean, read books... she trailed off.

Anna winced at the equivocatory even, the stressed enjoy. Clearly her mother found the prospect of her having a good time as unlikely as she did.

Anna’s friends had been split on her taking the trip alone, but a work shift that an asshole manager refused to move, a cousin’s wedding and an actual honest-to-God acting role had, one by one, put paid to any of her three best girlfriends becoming a last minute stand-in travel buddy.

And it really was last minute. Jake had gotten all the way to her apartment with his wheeled suitcase and passport (he was due to stay over so they could share a taxi to LAX in the morning) before he decided it was all too much.

What the fuck are you talking about? she’d asked, justifiably, The flight is tomorrow!

Jake had stared at the floor

I don’t know how to explain he said.

Things haven’t been right with us, and I just can’t face going into this trip if my heart’s not in it. The place is gonna be so romantic and, y’know...

No I don’t fucking know, Jake. This doesn’t make any sense. You suggested we go to Thailand, you chose the resort, we’ve been talking about it for months.

She stopped short of saying she’d half expected him to propose there. Immediately the delicate carapace of self delusion she’d been carefully constructing over the last six weeks was gone like it had never been there: the coldness she’d written off as artistic temperament, the widening gaps between text message replies she’d ignored, not wanting to appear needy.

The pain was immediate and all the more excruciating for the foolishness she felt at having ignored the signs of imminent collapse.

Jake dithered for another hour on her doorstep, none of his explanations really explaining anything. Just lots of talk about things not being the same, about it being more a friendship than a relationship. By the end, though he was still making all the apologetic noises, still saying he was the asshole, his face had become set in a familiar long-suffering expression. The expression said I will put up with this because I’m an adult, but still subtly conveyed that Anna was making a scene. She slammed the door in his face.

It took their mutual friend Mike six words to make sense of it all the next morning. They were drinking coffee in her kitchen. Her bags were packed and the taxi ordered, but she still hadn’t fully made her mind up about going.

I think he was seeing Heather, said Mike.

She’d met Heather on the set of Jake’s last movie. A low-budget knock-off of a current hit franchise, artistically bereft but calibrated to make a predictable profit on DVD. The kind of shit she’d have given a kidney to play a dead-in-the-first-act bimbo in when she’d first met Jake but was now, without sounding like a pretentious bitch, above.

But Heather was not, and perhaps that was what made her an easy choice for Jake. She was just a little younger, not necessarily prettier, but maybe Jake had preferred the dynamics when he was the Hollywood big shot, a role he could no longer legitimately play when Anna was beginning to show up in small yet well-received roles in movies that didn’t feature CGI dinosaurs.

It was so depressingly predictable that she surprised herself by being so shocked and disgusted.

A few hours later she was sitting in first class with a gin and tonic in her hand and a new unread script on the empty seat beside her.

Now, a day’s travel later and fresh from the shower, she reassured her mother back home.

Reading a book by the ocean sounds perfect mom. Don’t worry. The place is beautiful, I’m just gonna switch off for two weeks. I’ll come back a different person.

She was right.

Chapter 2

Tonsai Bay was calm and sparkling as Brian and David made their way along the beach for the first climb of the day. The horizon, a perfect blue flatline, was punctuated nearer land by monolithic cliffs hundreds of metres high, dripping stalactites, dotted already with climbers like head lice on a sleeping giant.

Brian saw none of it. His eyes were fixed on his iPhone, his Paypal app open, the rotating icon at the top of the screen indicating the slothful network was still fetching his data.

He’d scheduled a sequence of emails prior to leaving London. One email per day to each of the 3,000 odd addresses on his marketing list. The content, a mixture of psychological techniques, humour, basic marketing principles and storytelling, escalated from a very soft sales pitch on day one and culminated on day three with a time-sensitive offer, a killer call to action and the subtle, barely concealed suggestion that if the recipient failed to act now then perhaps it was their fault, not the economy or anyone else’s, that financial freedom and ultimate success had thus far eluded them.

Any entry-level ironist would make great sport of the Internet marketing racket, and Brian had no illusions. The industry was a snake eating its own tail. A small group of men, getting rich on the Internet by teaching people how to get rich on the Internet. Of course, the vast majority of customers ended up no more successful than when they began. In fact, they were poorer to the tune of several costly marketing courses. Naturally, this was the fault of the buyer. They hadn’t taken action on the information they’d received or had simply sabotaged themselves with a negative mindset.

Of course there was always the odd success story, emotive testimonials from happy customers who had joined the new elite, earning money every time they sent an email. These were a statistically insignificant minority, but that didn’t matter. Emotive stories with a human face beat dry statistics every time.

And, to be fair, Brian was in that minority. His screen had finally updated, displaying what he’d earned in the last forty-eight hours while settling into his opulent accommodation.

3,267 sterling. Nothing spectacular. He’d heard mind boggling figures quoted by the big names in the industry and he was not a big name (though you never knew how much of that was bullshit), but not at all bad either.

Up ahead, David chatted to their climbing instructor Ghop, a short, lithely muscular local. Ghop was pointing out the different climbing routes, from simple beginner trails up to gnarly level eights, all flat expanses and overhangs. He’d spent five years living on the beach in the early nineties when the tourist trade was kicking off here. His marriage had fallen apart, climbing became everything. He slept in the caves, spent his time on the rocks, talked and thought endlessly about climbing, puzzling over routes with the other dropouts and obsessives.

As they walked together, Ghop animatedly supplying his back-story, Brian glanced back toward the Ryavadee. He saw a girl drinking coffee at the beach bar, long dark hair tumbling over a face otherwise obscured by giant sunglasses but still unmistakably beautiful and somehow familiar.

Anna ate breakfast by the beach, eggs and good strong coffee. She was already slipping into the pleasurable habits of the solo traveller. An early swim in the ocean then back to the beach bar for breakfast, reading a book as the temperature gradually rose and the other guests began to filter in. She’d spoken to only a few of them so far, but had established lavish, fictional backgrounds for most of them. There was the German arms dealer and his Ugandan trophy bride, he eating in silence while she spoke into her phone. Here comes the Japanese business mogul and his teenage mistress.

As the waiter removed her plates with the stealth of a Navy Seal on a midnight incursion, she glanced from her book to her phone and once again checked her email, refreshing the inbox in case it hadn’t updated yet.

Nothing from Jake.

Of course not. She knew he wouldn’t contact her now, but checking her email had become like poking at a sore tooth; painful each time but addictive and compelling.

It was ridiculous. She threw the phone down, then immediately picked it back up to check her email one last time.

A new email popped into existence. It was from Lara, one of her closest LA friends. The subject line read You look HOT! and contained a link to an article on DailyMail.com.

Heartbroken Anna Pours Her Curves Into Revealing Red Bikini While Holidaying Alone In Thailand

Starlet Anna Pierce may be having better luck on the big screen, but she’s still unlucky in love.

The 30-year-old actress, seen here in a bikini that leaves nothing to the imagination, is spending time at a luxury Thai beach resort after a painful breakup with long term beau Jake Beneke.

A close friend of Pierce said Anna is grieving right now, she’s getting away from the craziness in LA and just having fun.

She certainly looks to be having fun in our exclusive pics, as she parades around in a racy red bikini, showing off her pert derrière.

Sources close to the Spring Break Slaughter star suspect jealousy is to blame for the split.

Jake’s ego can’t handle Anna’s success said a friend.

With upcoming roles in comedy superhero romp Nut Kicker alongside funny man Mike Black, as well as a role in Oscar tipped AIDS drama For One More Chance, Anna has been gaining traction in Hollywood.

Anna is the next big thing while Jake is directing B-Movies, I don’t think his precious ego could take it, said a source close to the well-endowed screen siren.

We get the feeling when Beneke sees these eye-popping pics he’ll be willing to put his ego aside.

The pictures had been taken yesterday, presumably by a long lens from a boat out on Tonsai bay.

It was unsettling. Of course, this was the kind of thing friends had been warning her about since she first expressed an interest in the movie business. She was the first one to roll her eyes at the hypocritical multi-millionaire actor whining about their privacy as they fell out of some