by Mary Ramsey
“You’ve been here way too long, Miss Barbie.” It was one of the many janitors. He took off his glove and gave me a hug.
I returned the hug even though I did not recognize the man. “Do you know my husband?”
“He got moved to the ICU last night. There was an incident, but he’s alive.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“So, wipe those tears and put on your warrior face. You know how to get to the ICU?”
“Yeah, I do.” I turned away to start walking towards the elevator. When I reached the ICU, I was afraid of what I would find. Of course, there was an intercom system. I picked up the phone, fully expecting to have to explain who I was and who I was looking for.
“Hello, you must be Barbie Mercer,” said the female voice on the other end.
The door opened with a buzz. I looked around for cameras. There were a few round black cameras, like something out of a department store. There was a nursing station with a dry-erase board listing the patient rooms. Kent was in room 102.
I knocked on the door, but it opened as soon as I touched the faux wood. He appeared to be asleep, attached to several different IV drips. A young female nurse was by his side. “Hi, I’m Becca.”
“Barbara-Ann.”
“His wife, he told me so much about you! The poor dear, he hit his head on the nightstand while attempting to get out of bed on his own.”
That reeked of bullshit. “Really?”
“He’d gone into convulsions, prompting the move to the ICU and subsequent scans.”
“How do you know all that?”
Becca froze. “I’ll get the on-call doctor to fill you in.”
When she left, I rushed to my husband’s side. I needed to see what was under the bandages.
The door opened as if on cue. “Hello, Mrs. Mercer.” An older female doctor who I’d never met stood before me with a sense of superiority. “I’m Dr. Rylan. Last night, your husband attempted to get out of bed, resulting in an unfortunate accident.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been told.”
The doctor continued without missing a beat. “He fell off the side, striking his head on the nightstand. When he was discovered moments later by the ward nurse, he was in the throes of a seizure. Upon stabilizing him, we sent your husband for a CT scan, where they first documented the abnormalities, prompting a full MRI. The current results are inconclusive, but we have reason to believe there are malignant growths throughout his body.”
“How was this not noticed when he first arrived?”
“At the time of your husband’s initial injury, his mind was in a state of delirium, so the main goal was to keep him stabilized.”
“What about the months he stayed in the inpatient ward?”
The doctor looked at her notes. “We have reason to believe the source of the infection is an overlooked medical abnormality. If that is the case, he would not be eligible for further treatment beyond hospice palliative care.”
This felt like a scam, a ploy to destroy what little confidence he had left. “My husband has been in service for sixteen years.”
“He would be transferred to a veteran’s hospice clinic where he would receive end-of-life care at no cost to you or your family. Or are you concerned about whether or not you would be eligible for monetary compensation upon his passing, given that you’ve been married for less than ten years?”
And because my baby will be born after he’s dead? “Money is not a concern,” I said with all the professionalism I could muster. “I’d like to speak to my husband.” Alone.
The doctor nodded. “Well, he should awaken shortly, as he was only given a mild sedative.”
“Please leave. If I need anything, I’ll notify the nurse.”
“The nurse?” the doctor seemed genuinely confused.
“Yes, the one who let me in.”
She started to back out the door. “I’ll just step out for a moment, give you some time alone.”
Once she shut the door, I took a seat at my husband’s side. “Hey, Kent, baby, are you ok?”
He had a cut on his forehead that was so deep it’d required stitches. And there was already bruising beginning to form. This was consistent with falling out of bed. The surgical scars near his hairline were not.
Suddenly his eyes opened. They seemed to sparkle win an inhuman glow, like cataracts made of blue nail polish. “Barbie?” He blinked a few times, causing his left eye to bleed. There were surgical stitches above and below his eyeball, as well as a dark shape inserted into his cornea.
“Yeah, it’s me.” I waved a finger in front of his face, to see if I could garner any reaction. “So, how’d you hit your head?”
“I-I had a real bad seizure.”
“You had a seizure before you hit your head?” I could feel his heart beating slowly as I placed my hand upon his chest. Something was breathing for him, forcing air into his chest.
“It was my fault.” His voice sounded suddenly clearer, like a recording. “I felt good, strong. I wanted to see what it’d be like to piss in a place other than my bed.” He blinked his eyes slower, and each motion seemed to catch the light.
“You thought you could make it out of your bed?”
“You have to admit I succeeded. Now I get the honor of pissing in an ICU bed.”
This was the old Kent Mercer. The boy who made me laugh and smile before going in for our first kiss. This was the boy who felt like my truest friend. I bit my lip as my mouth formed an involuntary smile.
He folded his thumb over my fingers, rubbing my skin. “Do you remember what you said in the last letter you wrote?”
“I wrote you a letter?”
“Fine,” he said with a smirk. “Do you remember the last topless pic you sent to my work email?”
“How could I forget. You allegedly passed it up your chain of command.”
“No, I believe what I said was that I passed it around to raise the morale of my men.”
We were, of course, both joking. “You’re too much, baby.” As my finger pressed on his wrist, a spark started to form. The neon blue light was like a surge of power, looking for a proper outlet. I followed the light, tracing its path with my finger as he spoke.
“You said if and when I came home to you,” he paused, struggling for air as the energy settled on his throat, “y-you’d…”
I pressed my lips to his ear, speaking with a breathy whisper. “I said I would let you lie on the recliner while I brought you a beer. I’d sit between your legs and worship you like the sexy, heroic, kind, amazing man that you are.”
“Please kiss me.”
I wanted so badly to feel something, anything. But nothing about this felt real. It was like someone had replaced my husband with a pre-programmed doll. “You want me to remove the oxygen?”
“It’s just a mask,” he said with another forced laugh. “There’s no machine breathing for me.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” I moved the oxygen mask from his mouth to his neck trach so he could still breathe.
“Take the—” he was struggling to move his arm “–mask off!”
“Ok,” I said calmly, moving the mask to his chest.
It was only then he took a deep breath. “This was all a mistake.”
“What was?”
He started to laugh as tears flowed down his cheeks. “I signed over my life.”
“You’re not sick, are you?”
“That’s a long, fucked up story.”
Every brain cell and muscle in my body was telling me to run. But where would I even go? “Were you even actually deployed?”
My husband flinched in pain. “I would never leave you of my own free will.”
Tears filled my eyes. I knew he was telling the truth. “Then what the fuck happened?”
“They wanted physically fit men and women close to retirement. All I asked was for the chance to make love to my wife one last time. I was supposed to be erased. I was supposed to just disappear, le
aving behind a carbon copy. They’d use my consciousness for research while keeping my body around for experimental augmentation. But your love, having you close, it changed something.”
The sex saved your brain. Well, that’s just great. “But why? Why would you consent to being killed? Why would you abandon me?”
My husband blinked tears from his eyes as he shook his head with disbelief. “About a year ago, I,” he struggled to speak over the blubbering of his sobs, “I was pissing blood.”
Seeing him in such pain, I couldn’t help but hold him. “You didn’t want me to worry, right?”
“I have late-stage bladder cancer. It spread to my liver, my kidneys, my blood, my brain. Ironically the only place it hadn’t spread to was my eyes.”
That explained... something. Did all the test subjects have metallic eyes?
“If I accepted a medical discharge, I’d forfeit my retirement pension.”
“For cancer?”
“The best I could hope for would be medical retirement.”
“I don’t care about money! I would live in a car with you.”
“For as long as I lasted? Even with chemo I would be lucky to have even a few years.”
I slowly lifted his gown, kissing his stomach. His abs were hard, firm, like someone who could still work out seven days a week.
He was reaching for my hair, all on his own. His finger stroked a blonde curl over my ear.
Air choked in my throat. I wanted to feel angry, scared. They did something to him. Was he ever injured? Was he even human? A deep wave of pleasure washed over me. I don’t care. He’s mine.
I could feel the electric surge, crackling like a sparkler on the fourth of July. I looked at my hands. The blue energy was on my fingertips. Neither liquid nor solid, it was a connection. I rested my head on his chest. “Why did they send for me? It would have been so much easier to say you died overseas.”
“What can I say, I was insistent; I wanted the chance to say goodbye.”
“Do all the volunteers get a ‘one last wish’?”
“Most of the test subjects are NCOs in their forties who fucked their way through life. I met one guy who had six kids with five women. Given the choice, he was more than ready to die for his country and let his exes fight over his death benefits.”
“What was supposed to happen to you? I mean, if everything went according to plan?”
“I was supposed to let go. They were giving me drugs to start the process. If everything went according to plan, I would slip into a coma a week after you arrived, and within a few days, I would be legally dead—ready to live out the rest of my existence as a glorified mannequin. But because of you, I can’t let go, and somehow, I fathered a child.” His voice went soft. I could tell that was the part he was truly terrified about. “You need to escape, or they will cut the baby from your corpse.”
I nodded silently. He wasn’t wrong.
“I met her in a dream,” he said in a whisper. “She’s as beautiful as her mother.” He started to close his eyes, drifting off to deep, peaceful sleep. “She told me her name was Becca.”
I’d somehow managed to fall asleep, cuddled next to him in his ICU bed. After a few hours of much-needed rest, I awoke to the sound of rattling, knocking, only it wasn’t coming from the door.
Screech. The large, frosted window appeared to be welded shut. But someone or something was trying to get in. From where my body rested, I could see a figure. The light of the new morning was too bright to allow me to make out features.
“Hey!” shouted a male voice as he banged on the thick glass pane. The voice sounded young, possibly a teenager. “Can you hear me, Barbie girl? I’m coming in.” He sounded happy, friendly almost.
How the hell did he know my name? I regressed from a grown woman to a little girl and did the only thing I could think to do; I pulled the blankets over my head.
I could hear the window open with an audible crack, followed by the crash of glass and possibly chunks of drywall falling to the ground. The stranger was in the room. The man’s footsteps sounded like combat boots; firm, strong, and more than a little terrifying.
“Barbie?” He cleared his throat like a nervous teen addressing a teacher. “Mrs. Mercer? I know you must be hungry. You have a life growing inside you.” With the last sentence, a hint of an American Southern accent started to slip through.
I turned my head just enough to catch a view of his face. What stood before me was a young man with my husband’s blue eyes, blond hair, distinctive nose, and jawline. If I had to guess, I’d say he was in his twenties. He looked like he could be my husband’s kid brother. Except Kent didn’t have a brother. “Who are you?”
“Just to be respectful, how about you call me K?”
K still sounded too much like Kent for my liking. “How about if I call you Kai?” It was the only other male ‘K’ name I could think of.
“I like it.” Kai reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a king-sized Snickers bar, the kind with two in the package.
“Wow.” I’d only ever seen them back home in America. And I was in fact very hungry.
“Here, Barbie, you need to eat,” he said, offering me the whole package. “If not for you, then do it for the baby. You’re, what, two months along?”
I kept my hands where they were. Thoughts of food poisoning, drugging, or worse raced through my mind. This was a setup; this was how I was going to die. But I needed to stay calm. Kai was acting friendly because I was acting friendly. “I’m three months pregnant, but how do you know that?”
“I only know what I’ve been given access to. But it’s more than enough.” He opened the package, pulling out a bar. He broke off a piece, squishing the chocolate and caramel between his fingers. “Here, see, it’s just a regular Snickers bar.”
I closed my mouth, forcing myself to swallow the bite if only to appease him. “Are you a clone?”
Kai laughed and shook his head. “I’m more of a compilation.”
“Like, the best of...?” My eyes motioned to my husband.
“More like I’m what’s left of him,” Kai muttered. “Look, Miss Mercer, can I call you Barbie?” he asked as he tried to finger-feed me another piece of candy, like a lamb at a petting zoo.
You’ve been calling me Barbie for the last ten minutes. “Missus Mercer will be fine,” I replied.
Kai ate the remainder of the piece of chocolate, sucking his own fingers as he spoke. “The fact is, ma’am, Master Sergeant Mercer is not waking up. They’ve been harvesting him for months; he’s been lucky to last as long as he did.”
And now everything he owns (everything he was) belongs to you? “Did they send you?”
Kai shook his head. He was glancing at his hands with a cocky grin. “Do I look like a product of the military to you?”
“No, you look like some kind of genetic experiment,” I said, unintentionally out loud.
“If you’re willing to leave with me, I can get you someplace safe.”
I wasn’t leaving, not without my husband. But if I couldn’t wake him up, I was in a bit of a bind. I fluttered my eyes, trying to look every bit like a damsel in distress. “Will you stay with me?”
“Sure,” Kai said as he ran his fingers through his hair like a slacker surfer. “I mean, I already went through the trouble of breaking in.”
“Yeah, you did,” I replied with a fake smile, to hopefully look more innocent and trustworthy.
I locked eyes with him, taking a moment to fully take in his demeanor. “Will you take your clothes off?” I asked in a surgery-sweet whisper. Sure, Kai was handsome, but in truth, I needed to know what exactly I was dealing with. Was he a robot, a human, or something else entirely?
“Will you get out of bed and eat candy with me?”
“Of course.” I took a breath, gathering the courage to sit up on my own. I could see Kai’s arms; they were bruised and scarred. But his skin tone was rather strange. Large sections of his skin were discolored. Some places lo
oked like tan lines while others look like surgical scars. I moved my hands under his shirt, expecting to feel six-pack abs and a toned chest.
But instead, my hands were met with something leathery, dry, and held together with sutures of various sizes. It was what I imagined Frankenstein’s monster must have felt like.
Kai held my hand, guiding me to remove his t-shirt. His body was a mess of scars, tissue that had been grafted, rejected and replaced. “Don’t worry, Barbie-girl, it’s just a touch of cancer.”
I jerked my hand back. “You are a clone.”
Kai growled in frustration. “I really don’t care for that word.” He somehow managed to hold on to his Southern accent, even as his eyes filled with rage. “I’m superior to Kent Mercer in every possible way. When they gave me his cancer-laced DNA, I beat it.”
Because they cut the rotting flesh from your body and replaced it with new parts. He wasn’t a clone, at least not just of my husband. I needed a closer look.
“I want to hold you.” I placed his hands upon my hips, allowing him to embrace me the way my husband would. His eyes were clear, human, perfect copies of my husband’s eyes. That’s what made the next part easier. I kissed him on the lips, soft and slow. His mouth tasted like a bag of quarters; cold, metallic. But he had a normal tongue that seemed to function the way one should. Part of him was metal, perhaps robotic? And yet I could feel his heart beating.
Kai leaned his head back, undoing his jeans. He was able to shimmy out of his pants just enough to reveal the defined muscles of his hips.
“How fucked up would it be if your scrap-heap of a husband woke up right now?” Kai let the chair fall back into place, freeing his hands to cup my face to kiss me. I expected him to stick his tongue in my mouth. But instead, he took this moment to kiss me the way Kent would. “He can’t even kiss you. How can you expect him to be able to love you?”
His words caused me to shed a single tear.
Suddenly I fell from Kai’s lap, landing on the floor. “Fuck!” Dazed, it took me a moment to realize Kai was screaming.