The line of energy sliced right through his neck, cutting his head clean off and cauterizing the wound at the same time. Her blast slammed into the back wall, fizzing and sparking, his head bouncing away somewhere to the left.
I was going to be sick.
I had seen dead bodies before … hell, I’d help to move a few, but seeing a head bounce, roll, and then stop so it was looking right at me, mouth agape, was too much to handle.
I gagged and was just barely able to stop from vomiting. The smell of singed flesh was terrible, nauseating.
“Holy shit …” With a deep breath in, I steeled myself, fully aware that I was next.
Dorian approached me, and as she did, she placed her finger in her mouth again.
I turned away from her so that the chain holding me to the wall was now visible. I wasn’t whimpering or begging for my life; I knew this was it, and there was nothing I could do.
Dorian Gray was going to kill me.
A small explosion beside me produced a wave of heat against my exposed hands. I felt my chain fall away and glanced around to see that she’d saved me instead.
“Stand up,” Dorian said, her voice hoarse.
I did as I was told. My legs and wrists were still bound, but I could at least move.
Fight back? The thought, my own, was one of the dumbest I’d had in a while. I didn’t need to look at the severed head across the room to be reminded of that.
“I want answers,” she said.
“Answers?” I tilted my head as I took her in. I was still shaky, and whatever noxious gas Butler had used against us had my head doing somersaults.
Grace, I thought, please, if you can hear me …
Just a little longer. Stall her.
“What answers do you want?”
Dorian took a step closer, sizing me up. The heels of her boots brought her to about the same height as me.
“Why did you take them?”
“Them?” I asked, looking at Grace and Veronique. “I didn’t take them, they … well, they took me. Kind of strange to say it like that, but it’s the truth. Grace showed up on my doorstep. Veronique tried to capture us and later joined us once she found out what we were doing.”
“What are you doing?”
“We’re putting an end to the experiments that created people like you and people like them,” I told her, my confidence wavering.
It was odd to tell someone that you were trying to stop their species from flourishing. I decided on a different approach.
“Let me rephrase. Creating superpowered individuals in a lab to serve the Federal Corporate Government is an abomination.”
Her brow furrowed. “How do you know we serve them?”
But I was so impassioned by what I was saying that I missed her question. “It’s against the agreed-upon social norms of humanity. Just think about it: Grace was kept in solitary confinement most of her life; Veronique and you were both trained to be killers, but they’ll retire you once they develop a better version. Can’t you see what is going on here and how it’s wrong?”
“My original question was: How do you know we serve the FCG?”
“I don’t, but they funded your creation and …” I looked at her unsteadily. “Who do you serve?”
“We serve Mother.”
There’s that name again, I thought, taking in her blank expression.
“And Mother must serve someone. I’m not saying you’re delusional, but there’s no way Mother is getting funding from the FCG and protection by one of America’s elite security companies without catering to a higher force.”
She didn’t say anything, and for a moment, we just stared at each other.
“You seem like a nice enough person,” I finally said, clearly talking out of my ass. “And I think you get what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to expose these experiments and put an end to them. I’m a writer, and I’ve already written two books about these experiments – well, they’re novellas, but still.”
“How can you care about something you know nothing of?” she asked.
“I know plenty about it. Grace … you know what her ability is, right? She put everything into my mind. She gave me the ability to see and feel what she went through.”
“Grace?”
“You call her Sabine. Her new name is Grace.”
“Okay,” Dorian said. “I did not know new names were possible. How can you trust her?”
“I trust her because she trusts me. Same with Veronique. Not a week ago, she was trying to kill me. Now … now, I fucking love having her around. Bygones be bygones. What I’m saying here is …”
“Yes?”
I raised my chin slightly, trying to look as leaderlike as possible. “Join us. Let’s bring an end to this together. Or go off on your own, leave Mother.”
“Join you?” Dorian paced back and forth for a moment. She glanced from Veronique to Grace and back to me.
“What happened to your face?” she finally asked me.
“My face?” I touched the scar on my cheek. “That would be Angel. Know him?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You survived an encounter with Angel?”
“I survived two,” I said.
“How do I know they won’t kill me when they wake up?”
“Because they listen to me. I listen to them too. We listen to each other.”
She stared at me skeptically.
“Look, this isn’t some situation where I’m the alpha male and these two obey me. Fanboy fantasies aside, I’m kind of the driver of the group. I write the books and do the driving. If anyone is the alpha, it’s Veronique. Lateral leadership. That’s what I’m trying to say. We work together. We live together. We do everything together.”
“You’re like a family.”
“I … yeah … we are. Hell, I basically abandoned my real family when I took off with them.” My throat tightened. That was something I wasn’t proud of, something I’d never be able to rectify. I didn’t want the FCG going after them; the less they knew the better.
Still, I needed to call my mom at some point. But the longer I put it off, the easier it became.
“And why are we here at this house?” Dorian asked.
“The guy you decapitated claimed to have information for us. He may still have information, somewhere on his computers, but what he was really trying to do was sell us back to the FCG.”
“To Mother? Why would she spare this guy’s life?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t know about him. He didn’t seem to know about her. Anyway, he said something about being out of money and needing more. He read my book. Yep. I fucked up by not coming into this situation the right way. I should have been much more careful.”
She smirked. “You talk a lot.”
“Sorry, you could seriously kill me in a matter of seconds, so I’m a little nervous. Also, I’m sorry I punched you back in Louisiana. My mistake.”
“I’m not going to kill you, and that’s fine. It was a natural reaction.”
“If you aren’t going to kill us, what are you going to do? Are you going to … turn us in?”
Dorian looked down at her hands, nodding slightly to herself as she considered her options. Finally, she locked eyes with me and offered a thin smile. “No, I’m going to join you.”
Chapter Eighteen: Pizza and Gruesome Jokes
I shit you not, that was exactly how our conversation went down. Dorian Gray promised she wouldn’t kill me and said she was going to join us.
Then she came over to me, licked her finger, and placed it on my handcuffs. The first one fizzled and snapped, followed by the second. She then went for the cuffs on my ankles.
“Damn, your ability really is activated by your saliva,” I said, still not believing she’d flipped so easily. I was naive, sure, but I wasn’t naive enough to think that someone who had tried to kill us just a few days ago could switch sides so easily.
Then again, that’s exactly what happened with Vero
nique. So I relaxed my guard some. Not that I could have done anything.
“If it’s tied to your saliva, how do you kiss someone?”
Dorian shook her head. “Are you serious?”
“It’s an honest question,” I said as she removed the final cuff. Damn, it felt good to be using my arms and legs again.
“I don’t normally kiss people, but I can tell you that I don’t explode the fork or melt the glass if I eat or drink, so it has to be intentional. Does that answer your question?”
“I … yeah, that does. Sorry. I’m an idiot.”
She cocked her head. “I thought you said you were a writer.”
“Same difference?”
Dorian didn’t laugh at my joke, but she should have.
Writers are a weird breed of human. If you give them any amount of power, it goes straight to their head, something I’ve seen in the indie writer community since I became part of it. Suddenly, they’re giving out writing advice, or lecturing people on what constitutes good writing, or writing books on writing, or trying to keep up with the famous drinkers of the past.
Shit, even I had let the little bit of fame I got from releasing How Heavy This Axe? go to my head, and that was just after fifty sales over a three-week period.
One of the drunker authors I know celebrated after just ten sells in a five-week stretch. The dude got so schwasted he ended up on some country road outside Kansas City riding an ATV with his shirt off screaming about how he was the new William Gibson, until local law enforcement caught up to him.
And don’t get me started on writing and drinking. That never ends well. While it has resulted in some of the best books ever written, the lives of those who write them usually pale in comparison to their books.
Me? I’ll stick to banging superheroes.
That’s one way to put it, Writer Gideon.
Grace? Are you ready to stop pretending to be dead?
I’m still passed out. This is the part of myself I’ve imprinted on you.
You’re kidding me.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Dorian asked.
“Sorry, voices in my head.”
Grace, we need to talk about that. How much longer until you wake up?
I can’t predict these types of things.
You did in Stamford …
Sooner than later. Also, regarding Dorian, I will take a solid look at her and see if her intentions are true. If not, Veronique will kill her.
Hey!
“Should we take a look around the place?” Dorian asked. “That is why you came here, right?”
“Right, but I don’t know how we’re going to get into Butler’s computer if it has a password. I literally know nothing about him.”
I took another gander at the headless body. Shouldn’t have done that. I started to dry heave and had to go outside to throw up what was left of breakfast.
Just as I had predicted, we’d been in Butler’s guest house. Most of it had been gutted and the bottom converted into a workshop, which was where he would have kept us if Dorian hadn’t saved our asses.
Dorian led me along the winding path that took us to the back door. We slid the door open, and after making sure there was no toxic gas in the living room and kitchen area – and by no means was this a scientific study; I simply sniffed the air and opened some windows – we headed to the fridge.
“I figured you were thirsty,” I told her as I pulled out two ginger ales.
She took a sip and her eyes went wide. “This is really good.”
“Definitely some good stuff.” I started searching the kitchen for food. I was hungry, and I eventually found some snack bars in a walk-in pantry. I wolfed down two of them, figuring it was good to eat something, especially after what I’d just been through.
We continued upstairs and found that Butler had an entire room dedicated to virtual gaming. He also had a pair of guestrooms, and his master bedroom had been recently cleaned, evident by how perfectly the sheets and blankets were pressed.
Did he have the place cleaned before we came?
Butler really was a weird guy, but he had crossed the wrong people.
I wished I could have learned more from him about this experiment, and how he came to figure it out. It would have been great for Mutants in the Making 3, but his sudden death put a damper on that idea. Dorian had killed him the way someone swats a fly; it was almost sad how quickly he died.
I guess it would be better to go that way, having your head cut off – better than getting tortured, shot a couple times, burned to death, or boiled in acid. Personally, if someone gave me a choice of how to die, I would choose to freeze to death.
“What are you thinking about?” Dorian asked.
“Weird ways to die and which I’d pick if given a choice. Sorry, my mind is still, um, spinning a little from what happened back there. Hope you understand. I’m not always this crazy. Scratch that. Yes, I’m usually this crazy, but it comes with the territory.”
“And what territory is that?”
“The territory of being a writer? I don’t know.”
She shrugged. “You sure blame a lot on being a writer.”
“It’s a sickness for which there is no cure but death.”
We checked out the bathroom, which was super nice, and another little study he had adjacent to one of the upstairs bedrooms.
Jackpot.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Like my cross-dressing uncle, David Butler liked to print everything out – from email correspondence to GoogleFace maps to just about anything he could find online.
And I meant anything. Dude had even printed out porn, as well as some tasteful hentai prints, most notably some Ladies vs. Butlers! and R-15 pics.
“All the info we need is in this room,” I told her with a grin.
“You think so?”
“We should just stay here tonight. I’ll go through all this and see what I can uncover. We can get on the road tomorrow. I don’t know how long we should stay here, but considering that there’s a dead body in the guesthouse, I’d like for it to not be very long. In fact, once Grace is well again, I’ll probably send her to the neighbors to mindwipe everybody.”
“Mindwipe?”
“I don’t know how much experience you have on the outside, but I’m guessing you’re kind of like Veronique. You live in the facility and if they need you, they send you out. Is that assumption accurate?”
She nodded.
“Well, as you’ll probably come to realize, you can’t just go around showing off your superpowers out in the real world. People take notice, and as much as I want to expose what’s happening, I’d like to not have it done in a twenty-first-century media frenzy kind of way.”
Dorian looked at me funny. She really was cute, her black hair framing her face and her ‘I’ll put a boot in your ass’ style. I didn’t have much experience with women who looked like her. There weren’t many punk rockers in Connecticut.
“What?” I asked after she didn’t say anything.
“You’re publishing books about this, but you don’t want there to be any media attention? How are you going to get more people to know about it? How are you going to get the right people to know about it?”
“Those are all valid points, and I’m probably going about this the wrong way,” I said.
We took the stairs to the bottom floor where we found Grace and Veronique in the living room, watching us suspiciously. The metal on the floor started to twitch as it lifted into the air.
“She’s with us,” I told Veronique.
“Grace already explained that to me.”
The tension in the room was palpable; I held up my palms. “Let’s just keep it cool here. I know you two have fought each other before –”
“Writer Gideon, I think we should order some pizza for Dorian. That would probably make her happy.”
All of us looked at Grace in time to see her morphing into David Butler and speaking in his voice. “I sure would lik
e some pizza, but I can’t eat any because I can’t digest food any longer.”
I looked in horror from Grace to the other two superpowereds. Veronique and Dorian both started laughing as Grace did her spot-on impression again.
If all it took was pizza and gruesome jokes to make them happy, then we weren’t as bad off as I thought.
Chapter Nineteen: Broken Bird’s Nest
“Are there cherry blossoms in Texas?” Grace asked me as we set the pizza on the table. We’d ordered two pies actually, this time from a local place that specialized in Chicago style pizza. I wasn’t a big deep-dish man, but I wanted to give them a taste of Chicago.
“I think it’s too hot for cherry blossoms,” I told her, handing Dorian a plate.
Veronique had already eaten, which was creepy to say considering that her meal consisted of draining Butler’s decapitated body. But I suppose a meal is a meal. She’d also had a slice of the deep-dish pizza, which she didn’t seem to enjoy.
Grace and Dorian, on the other hand, pretty much finished one whole pie themselves.
There wasn’t a lot of banter between them yet, but I figured this would change after Grace and Veronique introduced Dorian to their favorite TV shows. Or vice versa. There was really no telling how Dorian’s personality would affect the other two.
One thing we did finally get around to talking about was her teleportation ability. When asked how far she could teleport, her only response had been, “Far.”
It was true, she could sketch something and teleport there, but it was difficult, and it had to be an exact replica. This was why she had a smartphone. She would look at pictures on GoogleFace and use them to make her sketches.
Speaking of sketches, Grace had given Dorian’s paintbrush back, much to her delight. She explained that using the paintbrush just felt better to her, even though she could technically perform her ability just by licking her finger.
Or licking anything for that matter.
While we’d been waiting for the pizza, she showed us how her saliva could ignite a piece of paper. It was one of the weirdest abilities I’d ever heard of.
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