by Schow, Ryan
“Yes.”
“So what’s the problem?” I say. But deep down, I don’t really care about his problem. I used to loathe him, to fear him, to misunderstand him. Not anymore. He has simply become a means to an end.
“The problem is it’s no longer Nazi Germany,” he says. “You can’t slaughter people wholesale anymore without attracting attention. And pitching babies into fire? This world isn’t damaged enough yet to understand the importance of such an act.”
For some reason, and perhaps it’s simply because I can, I connect up with him, take a look inside him. One glimpse into his heart and my soul feels dirty. As in polluted. I try to wash my psyche of the filth-ridden feel of him, but this new emotional insight of mine, the way I feel emotions tucked inside of emotions, it’s overwhelming already. Whatever switch the inhuman doctor from Dulce flipped inside of me, I want it switched back off. Like now. I can’t be me anymore.
“While I’m under—” he starts to say.
“You’re going under again?” I interrupt.
“While I’m under,” he says, slower, like my interruption was oh so terribly rude, “I’ll need you to watch Alice for me.”
“I’m going under, too. Whatever DNA you put in me that allowed this…this mutation in me…I want it undone. Burned right out of me. If that’s possible.”
I feel the blistering heat of him rising. His aura is vile and crackling with fire, and his thoughts are fouled with annoyance. His restlessness, the hindrance of simply being alive, it rides every hateful fiber of his being.
“Don’t kick a gift horse in the nuts, Abby.”
“Let’s not talk about your nuts,” I say. This motherf*cker knows me well enough to know I will not be owned. “Let’s talk about me being your latest guinea pig, Josef. Or maybe we can talk about you now being mine.”
That said, I hold a mental image of his right index finger, then I zero in on the short, manicured nail. Using my mind, my newfound power, I slowly peel the nail up and away from the bed. Instantly he grabs his hand, starts pressing on the nail, as if his new human strength could match my supernatural abilities.
“Physical strength is nothing to me anymore,” I warn, sitting peacefully. “I don’t need it.”
Forget the nail. I see a line of lily white skin splitting open the length of his forearm. He doesn’t move because I don’t let him. In my mind, I have him tethered to his seat with restraints. Only his eyes can move to study his arm. The full line forms, blood seeping up from the incision. New red lines form at both ends. Now it looks like a long, bloody I. Concentrating hard, I draw the skin open the same way you would open a book to the middle. The fresh skin peels back to reveal muscles and tendons beneath. Deep inside, I feel a scream building. His mouth gets imaginary steel clamps that end the scream before it starts. All the pain, I want it stuck inside him. Trapped.
“Let me ask you something, you monstrous prick,” I say, snapping a picture of the scene before me, transferring it to an imaginary photo and sending the three by five photo of it hovering in the space between me and him, “has this demonstration of my control over you proven my point?” The three by five picture between us remains whole, a floating image of him held in place without me having to even use an ounce of mental effort. As long as the picture is in existence in my mind, he will remain hostage to my will. The moment I destroy it, I know he will be free once more. I don’t know how I know this, I only know that I almost don’t want him free.
In his head, mentally, he nods his acknowledgment, his face wrought with a ferocious agony.
“Good. Now, about your transformation.”
“Our transformation,” he whispers from a pained place in his mind.
A smile creeps up on my face. “Yes, our transformation,” I repeat, this time aloud.
2
With his cooperation now secured, I snap the picture between us out of existence. His body slumps with relief. His arm is already healing. The scream I kept trapped inside him comes out as a shaky, moaning, coughing fit.
“Whatever you did to me,” I say, calmly, diplomatically, “you will undo before going under.”
“And if you die in the process?” he challenges, holding his injured arm, his face still twisting and wincing from the torture I brought upon him.
“So be it.”
“I’m not promising you won’t die.”
“You’ve had plenty of opportunities to kill me before,” I say, and that’s when his mind fills with more truth than I’m ready for. It’s the truth of why he hasn’t killed me, and it all boils down to a single element: I am the experiment who will not die, who cannot die.
“Say I put you under,” he says, “and undo this spectacular creature that you’ve become. Then what?”
“I’m done being me. Whatever this is inside me, the voices, this…this other thing—”
He straightens up. “What other thing? What are you saying?”
“There’s—” I say in response to his thoughts, hesitating, “there’s an alter. His name is Delta.”
“What?” he stammers. “How?”
“Delgado, I think.”
“But there wasn’t time,” he says, letting go of his rapidly healing arm. There are still thick red lines where the skin was peeled back, but already the skin is stitching itself back together. He starts to sweat. The heat of brisk healing.
“There wasn’t time for what?” I ask.
“Creating a sustainable alter is nearly impossible in an adult. You start the trauma almost from birth, no later than age six. Mostly in the womb now. But with you? At your age?”
My ears stop hearing him because what he’s saying doesn’t matter. Instead, I close my eyes and reach out to Delgado. In seconds, I feel him. Instantly I am in his head, connected to everything. How I’m rifling through the twisted geneticist’s memories, it’s the same as skipping through all the files on a computer’s hard drive. When I find what I’m looking for, I sever the connection.
My eyes snap open; Holland is still talking.
“Shut up,” I say. He does. “Microchip.” And then I tap my head. “Right here.”
The limo double parks in front of the lab. Cars are driving around us; people are walking in both directions on sidewalks on either side of the street even though it’s dark outside. Holland reaches out to touch the spot on my head.
He doesn’t utter a word. Just stares at me. I connect with him, step inside his mind. The stab of fear I feel him feeling is instantaneous. He knows this computer generated version of the Delta alter can activate the moment it’s threatened, which might be now. He knows this, so I know this, and that’s why I sense the beast stirring inside me.
Hands curl around the legs of my soul, clamping, pulling, trying desperately to drag, drag, drag me down into the abyss of my mind so he can kill this son of a bitch right now.
“No,” I snarl. Holland looks at me and I say, “Whatever you’re planning, you’d better do it now because he’s coming.”
The limo driver is getting out of the car, walking around to my side to let me out. Neither he nor Holland will last that long, not if Delta gets his way. Slurs and obscenities fill my mind, like a storm of insanity, a fever-pitch of want and furious need.
“NOW!” I scream in Holland’s face. My mind is still my own, but my only focus is on keeping Delta from taking the body. He’s stronger than me. More determined.
Just as Holland is pulling out his keys, the driver is reaching for my door. I use my mind to lock the doors. Holland grabs me by the hair, yanks my head down and finds the location of the microchip.
Delta is climbing up the spine inside my mind, seething.
“I can’t hold him!” I scream.
The driver is unlocking the door with his remote, wondering what’s going on and I’m locking it again, jamming his signal. I’m in his mind and he’s perplexed. Delta, on the other hand, has his claws wrapped around the knobby vertebrae of my being. He’s crazed, raring, and more ferocious than even I can handle
, as powerful as I have become.
“Get it out Holland!”
Holland stabs into the flesh of my scalp with his car keys, and that one moment of pain allows both the driver to unlock the doors by remote and Delta to get up over my shoulders. He’s pulling me under, yanking and wrestling and jerking me down inside myself, but not just yet.
I’m screaming, trying not to thrash around, cursing at Holland to hurry, to fucking hurry, that he’s coming, coming, coming, that he’s here and I can’t stop him!
Holland is slicing, scraping, digging; he’s doing everything possible to get under my scalp, and he does. Digging the length of his fingers into the space between flesh and bone, he roots around, finds the chip, then really goes at it. He’s tearing at my scalp like it is old carpet being ripped up, but I don’t care because Delta scares me more than the idea of whatever pain Holland’s causing me.
“You shit sucking Nazi cock stain!” my mouth screams. This isn’t me anymore. It’s Delta. I’m visualizing steel tethers on my body, fighting for every last ounce of control over my body and therefore holding onto Delta for dear life.
We go stiff.
The side door opens and the limo driver startles. “What the hell?”
In my mind, I snap the picture of me being bound by invisible ties, put it up for my eyes to see. As long as I can see it, I’m held hostage and Delta can’t have the body. He destroys the picture; I make another. Chills race up my spine all the way to my shoulders and scalp.
Holland jerks a large swatch of hair back, starts stabbing the microchip with his keys. Delta has my body now. Destroys the picture. Shoves me under so I can’t make pictures of our containment. Our hand becomes a fist that lashes out and strikes Holland right on the Adam’s apple.
The hyoid bone cracks. He chokes, eyes wide.
“I’m calling the police!” the driver yells, startled. Where he was once soft spoken and courteous, the driver is now shrill and one hundred percent flamboyant.
In a last ditch effort to give Holland the second he needs, I make a picture of me paralyzed, stick it between me and Holland, use the rest of my might to protect it from Delta. If we can’t move, we can’t fight. That’s all I can think of.
“Go under!” Delta screams in our head. His voice is thunderous, lethal, a sound so repellant and homicidal it’s mortifying. I’m not going easy though. Hell no.
Outside, the driver, he’s fishing his cell phone out of his pocket.
Delta turns his attention to Holland, who is recovering in spite of the fatal blow. Holland is like me: loaded up on the Fountain of Youth serum. In other words, it’s pretty damn hard to kill the guy.
The word dismemberment flashes into my thoughts.
“Thank you,” Delta says in our head. Now I’ve given him the key to killing Holland.
Damn!
The second Delta takes his attention off Holland, Holland stabs us in the head with his key. The sound of metal-destroying-plastic winks out Delta instantly. I’m me again. Like the raging storm broke. Shoved to the surface of my body, Delta is gone. There’s no one left in here to stop me.
It’s just me.
“911, what is your emergency?” my ears hear the 911 operator of the driver’s cell phone saying. Holland is still stabbing at me. I stop him with my mind. Make him a statue. Tapping into the energy of the driver’s cell phone, I crush it, kill the connection. The phone practically explodes in the driver’s hand, eliciting a very hyper, very gayish squeal.
“I’m fine,” I tell the driver in his head. “No emergency to report.”
I let Holland go, tell him Delta’s gone.
“We need to be sure,” he says. He starts digging out the ruined plastic particles from my head, hurrying where he can because my head is trying to heal, but way too fast for him.
The driver looks in, sees Holland holding back a flap of my scalp and scraping away on my bare, bloody skull. Red trails are running down my face.
He turns and starts to gag.
“Seriously,” I say in his head while he’s bent over and freaking out, “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” the driver says, strings of snot running from his nose. Does he not realize I’ve been communicating with him telepathically?
“I’m a doctor,” Holland tells him.
“He is,” I reply aloud this time. To Holland I say, “Make sure you pull out the stem.”
“I see it.”
I close my eyes, sync my conscious mind to his and see my scalp through his eyes. It’s a mess. Bits and pieces of smashed microchip litter the surface of my skull. Tiny shards are stuck in the meaty lining of my scalp. He’s scraping them away with his dirty fingernails. Great.
That’s sanitary as hell.
When the chip and all its pieces are cleared away, he goes to work on the stem. There is a metal grommet implanted into the surface of my skull. The stem occupies its center.
“It’s so the bone doesn’t grow on the stem and ruin it,” Holland’s mouth says, even though these are my words coming out of his mouth. He startles me out of his head, and back into mine.
“What the hell did you just do?” he says. He’s frozen stiff with fear. And me? I didn’t know I could do that. Make him my puppet.
Holy cow, Batman!
“Stop stalling and pull the freaking stem out already,” I say.
Still shaken, he does exactly as I ask and I feel it come out, kind of like taking a small dump, but in reverse. He then lays the patch of scalp back in place, smoothing it out evenly. When that’s done, he sits back, adjusts his Adam’s apple, heaves out the biggest sigh.
The driver, by this time, he’s gone, trying to borrow someone’s phone. A woman gives him her phone and I destroy it as he’s dialing 911. Several dozen pieces of the ruined phone just crumble to the ground.
“What did you do to my phone?” I hear the lady yelling at him.
He’s trying to explain that he can’t explain what just happened about the same time I’m wiping the blood off my face. Cleaned up sufficiently, I step out of the limo, gorgeous, my borrowed hillbilly shirt destroyed and caked with dried blood under one of the plane’s yellow emergency jackets, which Holland put on me to hide the gigantic bloodstain beneath. I look like a hot parking lot attendant in a horror movie.
Holland gets out of the limo after me. From his pocket, he takes out a wad of money, peels off ten one-hundred dollar bills, shows the driver the loot in an obvious, almost annoyed manner, then flips the bills into the back seat and shuts the door.
“For your discretion,” he says, frazzled and annoyed, not with him, but with me and the never-ending stream of grief I have caused him. By now, bystanders have seen the driver’s exploding phones and they’re all eyes on us. Like we’re aliens, or superstars.
We sail right into Holland’s office, shut the door and take a long moment to breathe. He says, “Whatever you are, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Not even with Alice?”
“No,” he says, “Not even with Alice.”
3
My brain is a garbage can half-filled with the perturbing snippets of Frederick Delgado’s and Mengele’s subconscious minds. One minute inside either man’s head, and even Charley Manson would shit in his pants. And me? OMG, my psyche is soooo unclean. How a baby’s butt crack must feel so filthy when packed for hours with the blown out, smeary results of their expelled colons, that’s how badly my brain needs a shower and a scrub right now.
Being in Holland’s mind is like crawling through a double-occupancy insane asylum while every one of the patients is loose and violent with frenzy.
“I’ve heard the rumors about the technology Dr. Delgado used on you,” Holland said. “But I’ve never personally seen it.”
“The implant?”
“No, the fact that it’s remote controlled.” He shows me part of the chip, but nothing significant registers in me. I don’t know microchips.
“Well now you know.”
/>
“Why would anyone want to control you? I mean, is there something you’re supposed to do? Is there someone you’re supposed to blackmail or seduce or kill?”
Trolling through the memories of being in Delgado’s head, I can’t think of why he would want to control me. Then I find the answer I’m looking for. The reason.
“He wants me to kill someone and not remember it. He has a half million dollar contract.”
“Jesus,” he says, scratching his head and pacing the lab. “Who are you supposed to kill?”
My mind is suddenly a blank slate.
“I don’t know, not that it matters anymore.”
“Do you remember any of what happened to you down there?”
“Some of it,” I say.
“And?”
Glaring at him, I say, “It’s none of your business. What I can tell you, however, is there was a doctor, a man who was not a man and not an alien. He activated something in me, a hormone or some of my DNA. I don’t know. Basically he said the new hormone working in conjunction with new DNA is non-existent in humans. That’s what is making me what I am. What you did with me—the DNA you gave me from the cow-killing kid—this…thing…he said it was a very rare, very extraordinary mutation. That it wasn’t supposed to exist in humans.”
“Ah,” Holland says.
“The boy,” I say, a knowing, judgmental look in my eye. “You have the same DNA in you, too, I’m assuming? And Alice’s, too?”
“It’s a terrible combination,” he admits.
“Well then, let’s fix us both.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says. I can tell he’s waiting for me to crawl into his mind and take the thought, but I refuse to let him off so easy. Whatever he has to tell me, it’s not good.
“I cloned you.”
“What?!”
He holds his hands up, palms facing me, like he’s under arrest or something. If I think about it, about what I want to do to him, it just might happen.
“When Damien’s step-sister Kaitlyn nearly died in my care, I didn’t have that option. With you I did. You were killed, so I resuscitated you back into your life. A separate you, a stand-in.”