by Jason Taylor
“We will have an opportunity when they enter our cells to remove the barriers. I have figured out how to modify their sedation program so that the gas released into our cells will be inert.”
“Won’t they notice that we are still awake?”
“Do you know how to suppress your heart, breathing, and brain activity?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes, I’ve known how to do that for ages,” June said, proudly.
“Their monitors are primitive, that’s all you need to do. When they enter each of our cells and remove the bars, we will be awake and ready.”
“What should I do?” June asked.
“I’ll tell you when it’s time,” Elizabeth responded.
Joseph was leaning against the wall next to Suki’s cell door. “How much longer do you think we need to wait?”
“A few more minutes. Jules will let us know as soon as the sedation has taken effect. We can’t go into the cell until we have confirmation that Suki is unconscious,” Liezel answered.
“We have to do all four cells?”
“New guys always get the shit jobs, right? Don’t worry, it’ll go quickly. You’ve got me here to entertain you, right?” she said with a wink.
Joseph wasn’t mollified. “How long do you think they will stay asleep?”
“The sedative takes hours to wear off. Don’t worry, you'll be fine. Are you scared of the little seven-year-old monsters?” she asked, laughing.
While Joseph was trying to think of a witty reply, the light above Suki’s door changed from red to green, and he received a notification in his interface from Jules – they were clear to enter.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, pushing the door open.
Joseph hadn’t been inside the cells yet, and so he was surprised at how spartan they were. The walls and floor were a dull, smooth white, light emanating evenly from the ceiling tiles above. When he moved to take a closer look at the bars, he noticed the floor had a slight spring to it. Soft, he thought, to reduce the chance of self-injury.
Liezel followed him in with the toolkit and started setting up next to the first bar. She pulled out the retracting-wrench and placed it into a matching socket in the floor. While she turned the wrench, drawing the bar down into the floor below, Joseph took a closer look at the clone. She was lying in bed, knees tucked up to her chin, one small hand cradled under her cheek. She looked angelic, asleep like that, and Joseph felt some of his fear and worry lift away. In its place, a small seed of anger germinated. They hadn’t even given her a pillow for God’s sake, he thought indignantly. What has the world come to?
“A little help over here?” Liezel asked. “You can gawk later.”
“Sorry! Of course,” Joseph said, joining her to lend a hand.
Fifteen minutes later, all the bars had been retracted. They stood in the center of the cell brushing off their palms and wiping away stray beads of sweat.
“So…” Liezel said, looking at Joseph appraisingly. “You know there aren’t any video feeds in here, right?”
“Yeah, you told me. On account of the clone kids being so dangerous,” he responded.
“Don’t worry about the little monster, she’s out for the count,” Liezel said, walking closer, well into his personal space.
“I’m not worried, I’m uh, just, uh… what are you doing?” he stammered, stepping backward, as Liezel continued forward.
“Something I’ve been thinking about since we met,” she said, her eyes holding his, a hint of a smile on her face.
Joseph continued to back up, until he found himself trapped in the corner of the cell, the walls soft against his back.
Liezel put her hands on his shoulders, her smile growing bigger. “Nowhere left to run now is there, big guy?”
Joseph felt desperate, but he didn’t want to cause a scene. He hadn’t been on the job long, and he couldn’t afford to lose it. He looked down at his feet, pointedly trying to avoid Liezel’s gaze.
Liezel put a finger under his chin and lifted his head up until their eyes were level again. Then she leaned in toward him, her eyes closed, lips brushing gently against his. “You like that, don’t you?” she murmured.
“I don’t think…” he started to say, but she cut him off, pressing her body hard up against him, her lips working at his mouth.
In his panic, he thought he heard a small noise, the slither of ballistic plastic against leather. It sounded just like someone pulling a needle gun from its holster. He started to push Liezel away, but she’d noticed it too and had already started to turn.
“Hey, what are you…” she gasped and then stiffened in shock.
Suki was standing in the center of the cell, four paces away, in a perfect shooting stance, the needle gun leveled at Liezel’s chest.
“Oh shit!” Liezel said.
Suki pulled the trigger three times. The gun made a vibrating, popping noise and the needles, set for maximum lethality, entered Liezel’s chest in a tight cluster around her breastbone. Once inside her body, each needle fired off a small shaped charge that expanded the surface area of the needle by fifty times. As the rapidly expanding needles exited her back, they blew out three holes, each the size of a fist, dropping Liezel to the ground like someone had pulled a plug. She fell in a loose-limbed, bloody heap at Suki’s feet.
As Liezel fell, fragments of bone, mixed with meaty chunks of muscle and organ, peppered Joseph’s upper body and face like birdshot. Joseph dropped to his knees screaming, his face streaming blood from the hundreds of tiny slivers of bone that had penetrated his skin. His left eye was leaking vitreous fluid and half his world had gone dark. He cupped a hand over his injured eye, staring wildly at the sweet-looking little girl who was incongruously pointing Liezel’s gun at his head.
“Why did you people kidnap me?” she asked.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he choked out, his words stumbling through the pain.
“It was a simple question, Joseph. Why did you lock me in here?” she asked, her voice calm, the gun unwavering.
“Because you are a monster,” he gasped.
“Thank you, Joseph. That wasn’t so hard was it?” She grinned maliciously at him. “Are there any more of your people out there?”
“What?” he asked, his thoughts going fuzzy.
“Any more people? Outside the door?” she asked again, pointing her chin toward the door.
“No, just me. Please, let me go. I didn’t do anything to you. Let me …” he was crying and blubbering, hands outstretched, pleading for mercy, when she pulled the trigger, cutting him off mid-sentence.
“Thank you, Joseph, you’ve been very helpful,” Suki said as he slumped sideways to the floor, coming to a rest next to Liezel. His remaining eye stared sightlessly at Suki, a look of confusion on his face as if he was trying to make out this new and unexpected future, a future that he couldn’t hope to understand and that he would never see come to fruition.
Jules knew something was wrong as soon as the medical alarm system triggered for Liezel. She knew something was very wrong when it triggered for Joseph too. She sent out a general distress signal, calling all security personnel to respond to a priority one threat. She could hear the chatter as the four squads on duty scaled up to full military readiness. They deployed to their action stations: Falcon squad took a position just outside the door leading into the secured facility, Raven squad covered the entrance of the lab, Osprey squad rushed to Suki’s cell where the alarm had been triggered, and Shrike squad spread themselves through the secured facility to guard the rest of the cells.
“June?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes?” June replied.
“It has started. It’s time to wake up.”
June’s eyes popped open and she sat up in bed, a big smile on her face. She stared through the bars toward the door at the front of her cell, waiting for something to happen.
Osprey squad’s Alpha advanced cautiously down the hallway, one hand up, arm bent at the elbow, indicating to h
is team that all was clear and they should continue to follow. The entrance to Suki’s cell was around the next corner. His helmet projected a view of the building’s layout from multiple angles. He could see a forward-facing video-feed from his body-cam as well as an overhead map tracking their progress toward the target. A thermal overlay would show him any living, heat-emitting organism within a scan radius of 600 meters.
He could see the rapidly cooling bodies of Joseph and Liezel in his feed, but there was no sign of the clone Suki. Had she already escaped the building? Something wasn’t adding up. He was a twenty-year veteran in service, and he’d learned to trust his instincts. He closed his hand into a fist and his team stopped behind him, solidifying into firing stances to cover potential threats both front and rear. He strained his senses, trying to figure out what was triggering the red-flag warning in his gut.
Then he felt it. The tiniest vibration through the thin sole of his boot. He turned up the magnification on his video feed, both visual and thermal, and concentrated forward. Was something coming? His feed showed an empty corridor, but the hairs raising on the back of his neck said otherwise. He felt as if he were being stalked, like he was being watched.
He took one, smooth step forward, making no sound, light on the balls of his feet, ears straining, eyes forward. He stopped and waited for the vibration to return. After a moment he felt it again, a little stronger this time. Whatever it was was moving closer. Close enough to touch. He could feel it as an uncomfortable invasion into the bubble of personal space he maintained around himself at all times.
His feed showed nothing, but his sense of unease was growing stronger. He couldn’t shake the feeling that a ghost stood invisible before him.
His body tingling with anticipation, he raised the armor-mask on the front of his helmet to see the hallway with his own eyes. A little girl stood in front of him, not more than three feet away, a tac-knife huge in her small hand.
“Hello,” she said, and then she lunged forward ramming the knife into Osprey-Alpha’s chest just below the sternum. She gave it a brutal twist and then pulled free, spinning to the right, light on her feet, black hair trailing behind her.
Osprey-Alpha cupped his hands over the wound, blood flowing freely through his fingers. He gurgled a warning to his squad and fell, twisting sideways into the wall on his way to the floor.
Osprey-Bravo saw Alpha fall but couldn’t see the reason. Her feed showed no active threats. Reflexively, she dropped to one knee and brought up her needle-rifle, but it was already too late for her. Suki slipped past, drawing the tac-knife across her neck, flaying it open to the vertebrae. Osprey-Bravo fell heavily and lay twitching in a growing pool of her own blood.
As Suki twisted to her left, Osprey-Charlie took two steps backward and fired her needle rifle on full automatic, filling the hallway with deadly projectiles. Suki ducked her head, all the needles flying higher than she was tall, and stuck the knife into Osprey-Charlie’s thigh as she ran past. Osprey-Charlie went down screaming, a gout of blood spouting from a severed artery, her rifle clattering to the ground.
Osprey-Delta raised his helmet’s armor-mask in time to see Osprey-Charlie drop to the ground, writhing in pain. He raised his rifle and swung it around, but couldn’t follow Suki as she moved swiftly and erratically in the constrained space. Suki dove between his legs, pulled the needle-gun from her waistband, and fired three shots into Osprey-Delta’s back, blowing the front of his chest up into the ceiling.
Suki came to a sliding stop, four feet past the downed squad, as Osprey-Delta fell face forward and lay still in the now quiet corridor. The fight had lasted all of thirty seconds.
Jules watched as Osprey squad was killed, jumping out of her chair and screaming each time she saw another vital-signal flatline. She had no idea what was killing them.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
She knew she had to pull herself together.
“All squads, converge on the cells. We have soldiers down. I repeat we have soldiers down.” She sent the message and then sat perched at the edge of her chair, hands gripping her console, wishing there was more she could do.
“June, I need you to do something for me now,” Elizabeth said.
“Anything,” June responded, excited. “Anything you want.”
Shrike squad had been guarding the other cells and was the closest to the situation with Osprey. They deployed in a delta-v formation, advancing down the corridor from Elizabeth’s cell toward Suki’s, past the cells occupied by Ava and June.
“Officer on duty, report” Shrike-Alpha transmitted. “What are we walking into?”
“An unknown assailant, presumed Suki, has attacked and killed all members of Osprey,” Jules sent back.
“Unknown assailant? Please repeat. What do the feeds from Osprey show?” Shrike-Alpha responded.
“Osprey’s feeds do not show the assailant.”
Shrike-Alpha did not like the sound of that. “Slow and steady,” he transmitted to his team. “We don’t want to rush into an ambush.”
As they passed June’s door, they could hear her screaming inside. “Help! Help! Somebody, please help me! Suki’s going to kill me! Help!”
Shrike-Alpha saw that the door was unlocked and assumed Suki had entered June’s cell. He pushed the door open and stepped in, his team following, rifles ready as they spread to cover the angles.
“Hello,” said June. “My name is June. It’s nice to meet you.” She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, beaming up at them. “It looks like we’ll get to spend some time together.”
The door closed behind them and the light above it changed from green to red, locking them in.
“What the fuck is going on Jules? I need you to get this goddamned door open,” Shrike-Alpha growled at her as she tried to get the system to respond to her commands.
“Falcon squad, Shrike needs your assistance. Proceed immediately to June’s cell and provide a forced entry,” Jules transmitted. “Shrike, standby. Help is on the way.”
Jules glanced at the various video feeds trained on the outside of the clones’ cell doors. All the hallways were empty. All the doors indicated green except for one. They were all unlocked except for the door holding Shrike inside the cell with June.
Suki stepped gingerly over the bodies of Osprey-squad and returned to her cell to retrieve the retracting-wrench from where Liezel had dropped it. She had watched how the wrench worked. She thought she could repeat the procedure to get the bars to retract in the other cells. She would just need to lower one bar in each cell, and then the other girls could squeeze through and escape.
“What do you think is the difference between someone who is a relative and someone who is family?” June asked. The strange adults in black armor were wearing faceless masks and they seemed agitated. She thought that Jill’s questions might help calm them down.
“What?” one of them asked, turning toward her.
“Relatives are different than family, you see. What do you think the difference is?”
“Shut up freak,” the strange adult spat back at her, her voice distorted and metallic through the helmet speaker. The rest of them were pushing on the door and pulling at the exposed edges of wall around it. She’d tried that too. It wouldn’t work.
“If you don’t like that question, I have a few more that you might like better,” June said.
The adult walked toward her and pointed the needle gun at June’s head. “If you don’t shut up right now, I’m going to shut you up myself,” she growled.
The light above the door turned from red to green. “Thank God,” one of the others said. “Falcon must have gotten the door open.”
The squad members stepped back to make room for the door to open. But where they expected to see the familiar armor of their friends, there was empty space.
“What the fuck?” one of them said, looking down at the top of two heads.
“Are you Elizabeth?” June asked. Two little girls were standin
g in the doorway. She thought they were both very beautiful.
“Hi June, I’ll be with you in a moment,” the girl with brown hair said, and then she nodded to the black-haired girl next to her.
The black-haired girl grinned and sprang into action. A minute later all of the adults were dead and the walls had acquired an interestingly abstract pattern of red spots. That must be Suki, June thought.
“Hi Suki,” she said.
“Hi June,” Suki grinned back at her.
“Falcon squad, stand back. Stand back, for Christ’s sake,” Jules yelled. The members of Shrike squad were all dead and she had to assume that all the clones were free from their cells at this point.
“We can’t afford additional casualties,” she added. “Stay outside the secure-facility door. There are no friendlies left inside. Shoot anything that tries to get out.”
Jules thought about the lack of information in the video feeds. She thought about how Elizabeth had hacked into one of the feeds earlier, and she put it together.
“Armor-masks up team. Eyes on target, don’t trust your feeds.”
After the three girls left June’s cell, they went to Ava’s and used the retracting-wrench to free her as well. June liked Ava. She was quiet and she seemed smart. June thought that she would like to talk to her about Jill’s questions when things quieted down a little.
“Hi Ava, welcome to our party,” Elizabeth said, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
“Stop wasting time. I need you to call an air-car to the roof,” Ava said. She spoke in a quiet murmur. June leaned in to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything.
“Isn’t that a bit premature?” Elizabeth responded. “There are ten stories between us and the roof and we’re still stuck inside the secure-facility.”
June was watching Suki. She looked fierce with all that blood on her face and clothing. June thought that Suki was someone she could look up to. A role-model maybe? A mentor? It was worth thinking about.
“Just do it,” Ava responded, a hint of menace in her voice.
“Ok,” Elizabeth responded quickly. She closed her eyes for a moment. “Air-car on the way. It should be here in ten minutes.”