by Schow, Ryan
She had a husband whose heart she decimated, a daughter who loathed her, and no real role in society or anything. She was basically a useless consumer. No one would miss her, except perhaps the paparazzi, and not even them because in the scope of all things, she had nothing significant to contribute to her family or the press, so she really didn’t matter.
If I drown and die, she thought as the liquid expanded within her, the world will be a better place because of it.
Little Invisible Feet
1
The new Gerhard took Alice home and showed her how to feed and change the babies, then—unable to sleep—he returned to the lab. His brain wouldn’t shut off. At one point he started crying for no reason at all. The awkward misfiring in his psyche had him reaching for whiskey. Johnnie Walker Blue Label. After drinking from the two hundred and fifty dollar bottle with reckless abandon, after passing out and waking up to a head split in two from too much alcohol, grief and genuine exhaustion, he sucked down five more fingers of the whiskey, then sat down hard in front of the canister holding Abby’s corpse.
His eyes refused to blink, or even look away.
There was a certain beauty he saw in her, in the perfection of his serum. It had taken the better part of a decade to perfect the serum, to get the nutrient content right, to infuse the proper sedatives into the solution, and then to make the mixture breathable. Even in death, Abby refused to expire. Her body, anyway. That was his miracle, yet he couldn’t swallow the disappointment.
“Stubborn little nuisance,” he said, his words a whiskey laced slur.
So strange were the feelings washing over him as he looked at her. She was the lull within the storm. This still, gentle thing he had come to both appreciate and detest over the months. And now? Now he was firmly rooted in this delectable moment. For this one second, there was no screaming, no sobbing, no senseless unraveling of his sanity. For this one second, there was perfect clarity.
He wanted to kill everything in sight.
Everything but her.
More than his desire to lay ruin to the world before him was the compulsion to bring Abby back to life. To save her.
God, he thought, save her? I want to kill her! But he didn’t. Not really.
Well, not all the time.
He pulled his knees to his chest the way he did when he was a boy, then he circled his arms around his shins and prayed to the devil-God of inspiration.
The mystery of this shot-to-death little girl refused to unfold itself through osmosis, therefore he begged the dark universe for direction, for some sort of divine intervention. After swallowing the last of his Blue Label, he wavered, then passed out drunk, his shoulder squashed hard against Abby’s canister, his head lolled at a brisk angle to the side.
2
Hours later Gerhard kicked and thrashed his way out of a nightmare. He jerked awake, found himself on the cold, concrete floor in between Abby and the melted boy’s remains. He hated the petrified-shit boy. Refused to clean it up because the only thing to give him peace was seeing what Georgia had done.
He smelled himself, made a face and pulled away. His body bore the sour stench of sweat and alcohol. He sat up, his clothes damp from the nightmares and pulling tight against him. Gerhard rubbed his jaw, figured he had been grinding his teeth in his sleep. His vision blurred in and out, and he didn’t know why his brain was vibrating. If you wiggled a tub of Jell-O, then hit it with a stun gun, that would be his brain. He turned and threw up.
The hot, acidic juices of the night before splashed with force against the dead boy’s blackened corpse. It was like hosing down dinosaur crap with a bile cannon. The tuning fork vibrations behind his skull became the sledgehammer-like pounding he often got after a hard night of drinking. The cystic fog coating his brain eventually settled, leaving behind a smattering of memories.
If I eat a bullet, he thought, will I live, too? Is that what I’ve done to myself?
Lingering in his psyche were memories of the obscenities pouring from his cursing mouth as he slept; he remembered the itch in the hollows of his mind, a rabid itch he couldn’t scratch, as if it were rooted so deep inside him, he could never hope to satiate it; he remembered murmuring voices saying things he could hardly comprehend. One voice called out his name. Another said the word “kill” and the word “save.”
He ran a hand through his blonde hair, then saw his dirty fingernails. He picked dark crust from beneath the nails. Blood? he thought. Yes. He scraped the dried crust of it loose; crumbs peppered the floor. Landed amidst speckles of even more dried blood.
My blood?
Maybe.
The Fountain of Youth Serum made cuts heal, especially trenched flesh caused by the scratching of fingernails. His eyes went to the roasted boy. The assassin who killed Abby, who killed Arabelle. A proficient purveyor of death, that one. A true Monarch assassin. But why kill Abby?
She was no longer a threat.
The Director dispatched the boy to exact Savannah Van Duyn’s murder, but who was the client and why did Abby have to die? Was it the Virginia Corporation? He took out her RFID chip, changed her identity without telling them; had they been looking for her this entire time? It felt plausible. His sick, indignant brain began to hurt again. Abby’s death was a bought-and-paid-for hit. In the end, he could live with that.
But Arabelle?
She was collateral damage. The very idea of her being gone puddled his stomach with worms, burdened his throat with an unquenchable thirst for more, more, more whiskey.
So he drank.
A lot.
And he got plastered again. And then it was the memories and the waterworks all over again. At some point, while sobbing and hiccupping stupidly, so hard he almost couldn’t breathe, he discovered he was scratching. His fingernails raked across his head, up and down the sides of his stubbled throat; they ripped trenches in the fresh skin of his forearms. Before he knew it he was storming the lab, kicking and punching things already broken before, screaming obscenities to everyone and no one, clawing violently at his own face. He didn’t know why this was happening, only that it was. Only that it felt perfect, just and necessary.
At some point Alice appeared in the doorway and just stared at him, unafraid, curious. He didn’t even think to question how she got there, or why she had come when he clearly left her at home. He just threw a tray at her and it clanged with force against the doorway, barely missing her.
She didn’t even startle.
She merely turned and walked into the other room. Finally he exhausted himself, and fell asleep. Then he woke with grainy, blistered eyes. Slowly, ever so slowly, he became aware of his surroundings. He was in the lab in the dark next to Abby’s canister with the feeling that his head had been trampled by herds of steer. The lab’s automatic timer must have killed the lights.
Could it be past midnight already?
He stood, fumbled through the dark and the mess he created, tripped twice, the second time falling right into the crash cart where he hit his head and was knocked out. When he came to, and God only knows how much time had passed, he stood and found the lights, and then he switched them on. The boy assassin was still a smoked pile, and Abby’s condition remained the same: alive-looking, yet not alive at all.
Then it happened: that sliver of peace, that shine of clarity. The tick-tick-ticking of millions of little invisible feet dancing on his brain suddenly stopped.
The light switch.
Quickly, before the madness took hold once more and inspiration faded, he drained Abby’s tank of the pinkish stabilizing fluids. He needed her out of there. He needed her dry. By the time the watery pink gel had drained away, he was ready with the crash cart. Wrestling her runway-ready corpse out of the canister, he got her gracelessly on the gurney, dried her naked body, then used the charged paddles and a standby shot of adrenaline to jumpstart her. After several tries, the impossible happened: a slight beep on the EKG monitor.
A heart rate.
A s
teady one at that.
She was just a light switch turned off. With her, all he needed to do was turn her back on! He laughed out loud, but wavered with buckled knees at the riotous pounding that the laughter had caused in his head.
Then the question formed with a prickling intensity: Is she still in there? Her soul? Or is she a zombie? He peeled her eyelids back, looked at the milky white lifelessness of her pupils and fought to see beyond the surface.
“Abby,” he said.
Nothing.
He slapped her face, hard. “Abby,” he said, more insistent.
Nothing.
He put his hand to her nose and felt the warmth of her breath. “Abby, please wake up.” For the first time in decades, he heard something in his voice he had never heard before: compassion, pleading.
This worried him.
More so than anything else.
He was many things: a scientist, a genetic genius, a sadist, a mass murderer, a Nazi, a monster, but there was one thing he was most assuredly not, and that was compassionate.
Compassion was a weakness, an affliction. It was kryptonite to acute scientific breakthroughs. The moment you started caring, he once told a colleague, you had best put a gun in your mouth and eat the goddamn bullet.
Perhaps that was changing, too. Perhaps he should find a gun, and eat that bullet. It might be time, he told himself.
If it is, he thought, I’m ready.
The Alien-Faced Blonde
1
Entire days passed in a blur. Brayden didn’t know the day of the week, nor did he care. All his crayons felt broken. Inside he was so sad it actually weakened him to be awake. Even worse, he was stuck in Netty’s apartment because he couldn’t muster the will to get off the couch except to pee and sometimes eat.
His father called twice. He didn’t answer. Didn’t even bother listening to the messages left for him. Netty talked to him; he tuned her out. Georgia looked at him but didn’t talk to him. It was weird how she just stared, but whatever.
Irenka, however, when she talked to him, he actually tried to make eye contact with her, but only because she was hot AF and an adult. If he could talk, if he had the courage to say what he was really feeling, he’d say he was in love with a girl who died. It was the truth. It was also something he would never say. His situation was entirely too tragic for words. When it came to his love life, he felt he had the brown touch. As in, everything he touched turned to crap.
He wasn’t the only one suffering, though. Netty’s dick was in the dirt as much as Brayden’s. She turned to drugs when all else failed. Not heroine or cocaine or even pot. We’re talking serotonin reuptake inhibitors. She was eating Xanax like that shit was candy. Irenka offered Brayden the same relief, but he refused them.
Abby wouldn’t want that for him.
He’d fallen asleep on the couch again, and when he woke, by the look of things, it was morning outside. He rubbed his eyes, then grabbed the remote off the coffee table and flipped on the television to the local news. He laid back down, yawned deeply. Waited for it to hit. The grief.
And then it was there. The malignant onset of gloom. The constant, all-draining force of misery that wrenched, tugged and gnawed at his soul, like it was somehow determined to drag him screaming to the furthest depths of depression. The way he’d been so exhausted lately, like he’d been pumped full of contagion, he wanted to sleep all the time. Like all the time. He reminded himself this was grief, that it needed to run its course. This, however, felt worse than grief. Worse than depression.
He didn’t think anything could hurt this much.
If his mind wandered far enough, it would have him thinking about all the things he didn’t want to think about since meeting Savannah/Abby. Like the Giardino murder/suicide, Dr. Heim, the hairless assassin. They just sat there rotting, these memories, festering, like moldy cheese, all noxious and vile. Abby’s neck being trenched open in Laurel Court at The Fairmont, her brains being shot out the back of her head, Georgia’s newfound power to incinerate people using only her mind. Good God, was any of that even real? Had he really been involved in all those things? Survived them all?
The waking nightmare of an answer was: yes.
This burden he carried, it weighed so much more than grief. Did he think he could survive these events and not be changed? He shoved all these thoughts out of his head until now. He was changing. Becoming numb. And now he was wondering how much more his delicate mind could handle before it completely unraveled. Would he ever be the same again?
He didn’t think so.
That’s when he saw it on TV: the news piece that had him double clenching his butt cheeks so as not to soil himself. He sat up on the couch, cranked the TV’s volume, then promptly began sweating in the most unusual places.
What he was staring at was a still photo of him hustling the blood soaked version of Abby out of The Fairmont Hotel’s Laurel Court restaurant. In the newscaster’s photo, the looks etched on his and Abby’s faces—the unadulterated terror they felt—it took him back to that moment. He was so scared! On TV, the picture had the almost-grainy quality of a surveillance photo, but it wasn’t so bad that you couldn’t almost see them both.
You knew this was a possibility, he reminded himself. Breathe. But he wasn’t breathing. He was officially freaking the hell out! “I’m done,” he said, matter-of-fact. He raked his hands over his scalp, forcefully, angrily. “Stick a goddamn fork in me because I’m done.”
If law enforcement connected Abby’s blood from the Giardino murder/suicide to blood from this crime scene—with their photos attached—both he and Abby were headed for jail.
So far, news about the Giardino’s hadn’t come out. But it was simply a matter of time before the announcements were made. The big loose end will be Abby’s blood at the scene. They wouldn’t dream of letting that go because they’d assume the third person at the Giardino crime scene had to be the killer. And that blood would connect to Abby’s blood from Laurel Court. Abby in the picture. With Brayden. Who was not in the good graces of the FBI.
He felt the room hazing in and out as he contemplated the possibilities.
The news anchor, an alien-faced blonde pretty enough to have been popular in high school, was saying, “Local authorities are asking for your help in identifying these two people, who are now wanted for questioning. It’s undetermined, at this time, whether they are victims of this prank, or if they are its administrators. If you have information leading to their identities, or their whereabouts, please contact the San Francisco Police Department.” The number to SFPD’s tip hotline appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Behind him, Netty said, “That was you and Abby, wasn’t it?”
He turned around, his face a ghostly apparition, and said, “I think I need to leave town. Probably sooner than later. Maybe tonight.” He had too much nervous energy to stay seated, so he popped up off the couch, wrestled up all the windows, and waited for the living room to fill with fresh air before sitting back down.
“Because of that?” she said, pointing at the TV.
His stomach was becoming more upset by the minute. Even his eyes didn’t seem to fit in their sockets quite right. “That and the thing about Demetrius and Bryn Giardino.”
“The guy who…did what he did to your friend Maggie?”
Brayden nodded.
“What exactly happened there?” Netty dared to ask.
“They’re dead, Netty. Abby, me and her…we were sort of…at that scumbag’s house when his wife shot and killed him.”
“What?!” she said. Now she was freaking out, too.
“Yeah, Abby went there to kill him, but the wife ended up doing it for us. Then she shot herself in the head right in front of me.”
Netty was now pacing the room saying “ohmigod,” over and over again. Making that wild eyed, I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing face.
“She almost died that day, Netty. Demetrius almost beat her to death because she shot him in the stomac
h. The shot didn’t kill him, and so he almost killed her.”
She stopped pacing, leveled him with a look. “That’s how you found out she could heal the way she can, right?”
“Yeah.”
She drew a deep breath, blew it out recklessly. Her face had gone a whiter shade of pale. “So her blood was at the scene?”
“Both scenes. There”—he said, pointing to the TV—“and in Santa Monica.”
“Do you think, I mean, is it possible that they won’t—”
“I don’t know, Netty. If her blood goes in the national database…I just…holy shit”—he said, feeling so weak and helpless—“if I don’t leave, if we don’t tell Abby’s dad…dammit, we have to tell him Abby’s dead! We need to be way more responsible about this than we’re being!”
“She’s not dead,” Netty hissed. “Not yet. I mean, she could—”
“C’mon,” he snapped, “we both know she’s gone! It’s been days!”
“That doesn’t mean she’s dead dead,” Netty countered, her voice breaking.
“Yeah, well, we don’t know anything because there’s nothing yet to know. I mean, seriously, what are we supposed to do?!”
“Dr. Gerhard’s doing everything he can,” Netty reasoned.
“You have no idea what he’s doing,” Georgia said. Brayden didn’t see her come into the room, and by the look on Netty’s face, neither did she. Georgia, however, had major bed head and she was standing in the living room wearing pink cotton short-shorts and a white wife-beater that did nothing to hide the brown circles of her nipples.
2
Man, Brayden thought, there’s something deeply unsettling about her. Even beyond her ability to start fires with her mind and kill people. And that was really saying something.
To Georgia’s response about them not knowing what Gerhard was even doing with Abby at the lab, Netty said, “What is Gerhard to you, besides a freaking creepy, Nazi…whatever?”