As he sped around a sharp curve, the book slid off the passenger’s seat and fell into the floorboard, flipping open to the final page. The happy ending where Patty gets to be herself and everyone accepts her as she is.
The doppelgänger will never show up again.
Of course not. Why would he? The trade had left him ensconced in a life where he had a loving wife and daughter, two living parents, a thriving career. Earlier Joe had thought that life hadn’t been perfect, but it certainly seemed so compared to this one.
So he would sit in that basement and stare at the wall and wait for the opportunity to steal his life back. Weeks, months, years—however long it took.
However long.
BIOGRAPHY: Mark Allan Gunnells loves to tell stories, has been doing so since the age of ten. Over the past ten years he has published several novels with a variety of small press publishers and has enjoyed every minute of it. He lives in Greer, SC, with his fiancé Craig Metcalf.
CHEMICAL OASIS
Tommy B. Smith
The glowing speck on Michael’s tongue made everything right in the delicious beauty of paradise. He swallowed it down.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome, Michael.” Lucille’s dazzling smile was as white as her uniform.
Michael smiled back. He was so happy.
It was strange then that the ultimate pinnacle of bliss hovered out of reach. Even while a tiny point of brilliance outshone everything else, a quiet shadow held its breath in the back of his mind as if waiting for a punchline.
Michael was happy. Wasn’t that enough?
The face. That was it. It was an ugly face that emerged from amid the trees of the dead forest. It still bothered him.
Lucille had placed cool fingers against his cheek, had gently turned his head from the high window to face her milky features framed by dark brown hair. Her round brown eyes probed him.
“Come on now, Michael. Don’t look out the window.”
Michael nodded. She smiled. He returned the smile as he always did, but for the first time since he could remember, it was forced.
From the third-floor window his gaze had drifted to the shimmering river and beyond to the forest, where he had seen the face. The vision clung to his thoughts like a leech. The joy was seeping away, leaving a troubling chill in its stead.
His imagination wouldn’t rest. Despite Lucille’s warning, he had to look one more time. He hoped he wouldn’t see the face again.
He stood at the window and stared down to the forest, gray and dead. He could envision the face against it.
A hand touched his shoulder. He jolted around with a startled cry. His hand struck Lucille’s and the pill flew.
“Michael!” she exclaimed. “What did I tell you?”
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I—thought I saw something.”
“I told you not to look out the window,” Lucille said under her breath. She was on the floor now, searching for the pill.
“There’s something out there,” Michael said.
Lucille raised her head. Her hair was mussed, and her lips were flat, unsmiling. She stared through Michael.
“I told you not to look out the window,” she said. “Why did you disobey me?”
She stood and held out her hand, opening it to reveal the pill in her palm. “Here. Take this.”
The hallway had dimmed. Michael considered Lucille’s tone, which had changed as well. He studied her face. His eyes trailed downward, where he noticed a faint yellow smudge on her uniform’s collar.
“Take the pill, Michael,” Lucille spoke.
Michael stared at her. Strange thoughts converged in his mind.
“No,” he said.
“No?” Lucille turned her head. “I need some help with this one!”
Footsteps answered her.
Michael tensed, seeing several white-uniformed figures running up the corridor toward them.
“I’m sorry, Michael, but we’re going to have to do this by force,” Lucille said.
The others rustled past her toward Michael.
Michael was confronted by a tall, powerfully-built man with a shaven head, and a dark-haired man who was shorter, but equally fit.
The bald man seized Michael’s arm. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” he said. The thick, powerful fingers squeezed Michael’s arm just above the elbow.
Michael jerked his arm back, and the other man ran forward to assist in detaining him.
He fought, yanking his arm away and throwing a misguided punch. The bald man flung powerful arms around him, pinning his arms to his sides. The other man slipped from his sight. Lucille came forward with the pill between two fingers.
“Relax, Michael,” she said. “It will be over soon.”
Michael cracked his head into the bald man’s forehead. The man reeled, and Michael was free until arms locked onto him from behind. It was the other man, the one he could no longer see. Michael twisted to free himself and punched the man in the face. The man shouted, enraged, and hurled a hard fist into Michael’s ribs. The bald man joined in, striking him across the face. Michael tumbled backward. His tailbone crunched against the bottom edge of a window.
The men advanced. With an impulsive spring of his legs, Michael propelled himself back. Glass shattered. He was plummeting downward. He fought to gain a grip on himself for all it would even matter, because he was already striking a liquid surface, and an oily murk consumed him.
It burned. His head was spinning. He thrashed and fought for the surface. The world, in mere minutes, had become a blur.
Through his confusion he managed to crawl from the awful slurry and collapsed on the bank. His skin was burning. A tingling sensation flittered through his brain. His senses scattered.
Water splashed across his reddening skin. He didn’t move. He didn’t react when the second bucketful of water struck him either, or when the ropes encircled him and rough hands cinched them into an expert knot.
When Michael came to, he was more than aware of the ropes’ painful tightness against his blistered skin. He struggled for a moment, still confused, while his eyes locked on the first visible image of a dirty building and its surrounding moat of rancid brown liquid.
His heart thudded an accelerating machine-gun rhythm. He continued to strain, but it only made the affair more agonizing. The ropes allowed no movement. When he glimpsed his captor, he recoiled, surprised and a bit disgusted.
Seeing his reaction, the man with the horrible face chuckled. He strode into Michael’s full line of vision, and scarred features came into view. The ugly face was attached to a tall, wiry body wrapped in a tan trench coat.
“Are you finished now, Mike?” he said.
Michael felt a spark of his frustration return. He swirled his tongue around in his mouth. Grit coated the inside of it.
“What did you call me?” Michael said after a couple of minutes. He had to speak slowly so the words wouldn’t be slurred outside of comprehension.
“I called you by your name.”
Michael shook his head at the words, which didn’t seem to make much sense, and focused instead on his surroundings. It was dark around, but he could make out the withered, dead trees.
The dead forest.
He gasped.
“What’s going on?” was all Michael could think to ask.
“You tell me,” the ugly man said. James. Thatwas his name, Michael realized. Agent James Mitchell.
Michael’s skin crawled. The coarse ground was unpleasant against his skin, but far worse was that river, that dirty chemical moat. He had fallen out of the window, directly into it.
“The river,” Michael said. “It burns so much.”
“You’re telling me?” James replied. “I know better than anybody. Look at my face.That isn’t enough of a reminder?”
“That’s what happened to you?”
“You know that’s what happened to me. That stuff kills. It’s poison. It’
s the byproduct of the Synthesizer. It’s killed the trees and land for some distance around. You’re lucky I was able to pull you out quick enough and throw some water on you.”
James rattled out a sigh. He stared across the moat to the tall, dark-brown building it encircled.
“The others are still in there,” James said. “They probably don’t have any idea. You don’t, and you’ve only been in there a few days.”
“It was so beautiful,” Michael said. “But so—”
“Wrong?” James finished. “Look at it, Mike.”
“It just looks like an old building,” Mike said.
“It’s a factory of lies.” James gestured to the dead forest around them, the thin, decayed tree trunks with lifeless limbs and the dry gray dirt that buried the dead trees’ feeble roots. “But this is real. You and me, here and now. That’s real. Look at me.” He came closer, and leaned down close.
Mike flinched.
“Look at my face,” James said. “Yeah. I know. But you know what? It’s part of who I am now and I can deal with it.” He straightened. “This has gone too far, Mike. This isn’t just an investigation anymore. It’s war. We have to do something. The Synthesizer is destroying everything, and everybody inside that place serves it either because they’re on the payroll or on the stuff, as you were.”
The sense of familiarity was returning to Michael—Mike, as James had called him—and the others, before they had lost themselves to the Synthesizer and its wonderful magic.
“So you aren’t going to try anything crazy, right?” James said.
Mike didn’t reply.
James came close with a curved knife in his hand.
“All right,” James said. “Hold still.”
James slashed the ropes with quick efficiency, and Mike climbed to his feet. His limbs were stiff and sore. His arms, he saw, were covered in red blisters. He imagined his face was in a similar shape, but he could at least be thankful he didn’t look like James.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“Funny, you asking me such a thing,” James said.
“Why?” Mike asked.
“We have a plan,” James answered. “Your plan, only you don’t seem to remember it now. I’m thrilled you should ask me to remind you. Come on.”
James led him through the forest. Mike stumbled over a large rock, but James kept walking. Mike hurried to keep up.
James stopped and gestured down to a bare patch of ashy dirt.
Mike blinked. “There isn’t anything there,” he said.
Without answering, James crouched and began pushing dirt with his hands. He paused after a half-minute’s effort. “Are you going to help me with this, or what?”
Mike came over to assist. Even between the two of them, the process of pushing and digging became exhausting.
“What are we doing?” Mike asked.
James answered with some vague muttering Mike couldn’t really even understand. He shook his head, and went back to digging.
When they uncovered the wooden crates, James drew a sharp breath. He pried open the top of one crate and hefted a lengthy, black item from it.
It was an automatic rifle. The crates were filled with firearms.
“We buried them.” Mike recalled at last.
“You always were paranoid and suspicious, Mike,” James said. “But for once it paid off. The manufacturing of AX-633 could only benefit everyone, they said. Cure us all of pain, fear, and misery.” He shoved a clip into the gun. “And you were right, whether you remember it or not, when you said it was too good to be true. There’s only one miracle cure for life, and that’s death. The death of freedom? Or the death of everything, in the end?” He motioned to the trees and the dead, nutrient-sapped soil. “But the end isn’t here yet. There’s still time. Here, catch.” He threw the rifle to Mike, who caught it in both hands, but almost lost his balance in the process. James picked up another rifle, loaded it, and began stocking his jacket with ammunition clips.
Mike looked over the rifle uneasily. It was too familiar.
“You told me you’d be back in a week,” James said. “I was starting to wonder.”
“I was only inside for a week?”
“That’s it.”
“It seems like forever. I can hardly remember anything from before that.”
“Of course. What’s worse, you’re probably better off than a lot of the others in there. Some of them have been in there for a long time. They don’t know who they are or what they’re doing.”
James paused, studying his rifle. He raised it and fired. Flames erupted from the barrel and the shot tore through a narrow tree-trunk.
“Just testing,” James said. He glanced back at Mike. “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“Think. Look deep into that brain of yours, Mike. I think you know, on some level, don’t you?”
Mike stood in silence. The longer he stood there, looking at James’s ugly face, the deeper he sank into realization.
“We have to go back in,” he whispered.
“We have to do it, Mike,” James said. “If we walk away and file some stupid report, it’ll be stonewalled like all of the others before, and we’ll never get another chance. There is no other way.”
Mike swallowed. His eyes fell back to the rifle in his hands.
“Ready?” James asked him. Mike kept looking at the rifle. His stomach felt like it was full of lead, but he nodded.
“Then let’s go,” James said, and turned to walk.
They made their way for the entrance.
Mike searched his mind and found the way, a hidden bridge across the moat which he activated. They waited for the metal bridge to extend, and when it locked into place, they crossed it to the large door.
Mike knew the entry code also, he discovered. He punched the correct combination of numbers into the keypad, and the door popped open.
They slipped in.
A gray-haired, white-uniformed denizen froze. The older man turned to run, and called out for security. James opened fire and riddled the man’s back with bullets. He flopped forward to the ground, blood soaking the back of his uniform.
Mike shouted, surprised, before the security officers in brown uniforms rushed in.
James squeezed the trigger of his raised weapon and released a flurry of bullets.
Mike, torn between the past and present, flinched at the gunfire, but a steel clamp squeezed his brain. There was no place for indecision here. Impulse guided his hands. He gripped the weapon and gripped its trigger. Bodies fell. Mike killed because there was no alternative, and he found it almost second-nature.
One was backed into a corner, pressed against a wall with eyes stretched wide open. He wore a torn and dirty navy blue shirt, and jeans.
“He’s one of us,” James said, pointing. “Leave him. When the drug wears off he’ll see the truth. So will others.” He glanced at Mike. “With our help they’ll remember, I hope. Let’s go. We can’t stop now.”
As if in response, a man in a brown uniform charged into the room, rifle readied and swinging toward James and Mike. James fired, and Mike was quick to join in. The man’s body shook in an involuntary bullet-dance and his rifle struck the floor at his feet. He soon followed it, slumping across the white, shiny floor, his blood running free.
“Where is it?” James asked him.
He was talking about the Synthesizer. Mike strained to scour his clogged memory.
“The sixth floor,” he said. “There’s an elevator that way.”
“Good,” James said with a nod. They moved on, weapons ready.
Mike still struggled with his memories, but hesitation was unaffordable. As he and James pushed through the building, both fired at anything that moved in a white or brown uniform.
“The elevator,” Mike said. “It’s that way.” He pointed ahead.
Mike kept watch, his rifle primed, while James hit the elevator’s single button. When the ding sounded, Mike turned
and took aim along with James, as the door opened.
The elevator was empty. James stepped in, and Mike after him. The doors slid shut.
“It only goes up to five,” James said, studying the buttons.
“The sixth floor is only available by stairway,” Mike said, thinking carefully. “We take the elevator to five, and take the stairs at the opposite end up to six.”
James punched the button for 5.
The elevator rose.
Mike’s heart pounded. His hands were sweating, which made the rifle uncomfortably slick in his grip. During the elevator’s ascent, he took a moment to wipe his palms on his pants and returned a tight grip to the weapon.
The elevator’s ding halted them at the fourth floor. The door opened, and they fired. A man in a white uniform sprawled to the floor, dead. The doors closed again.
The two exchanged glances. At the fifth floor the carriage stopped its ascent.
Ding.
The doors opened, and they came out with guns blazing. Screams and gunfire filled the room. A crowd parted, some falling beneath the gunfire and some fleeing.
White and brown uniforms went red, and the blood of liberation struck the walls and floor. James went for the browns first. Michael made quick sense and followed suit; security was apt to be the best-equipped for combat.
Their combined efforts eliminated the immediate security threat in less than a minute. The white uniforms, while not as dangerous, still posed a threat. They were the next targets, although a few had been downed already.
To Mike there came a familiar glimpse and a face that seemed from a faraway dream.
“Michael, why?” Lucille cried right before his bullets quieted her voice forever.
Mike stared down at Lucille’s blood-washed body as if paralyzed. He tried to sort through the emotions that buffeted him, to make some sense of them, but there was no time. Another gunshot rang out. Mike turned with his weapon to fire, but saw James standing there and the last white-uniformed body falling.
His gun smoking, James looked to Mike and asked, “What else is on the sixth floor? How well-guarded is it?”
“Just the Synthesizer,” he said after a moment of pause. “The last wave of security is stationed on this floor.”
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