by Schow, Ryan
Seeing this perfect man stretched out before her, carnal things inside her ached and swam. A sweep of dizziness twisted its way through her, leaving her short of breath.
Arabelle wondered, is this lust?
Perhaps…
Never before had she been so attracted to another human being as she was right now. Would she find that bottomless love at last? Or would her tale have a tragic ending? The way her life had been—a life wrought with grave misfortune—she always feared she would be the old maid in her own, sad story.
Even before she was swallowed up in the world of human trafficking, even before she was sold for sex by her uncle in Tamozhennaya Square all those years ago, even before her father was murdered and her mother went insane, Arabelle was a girl of unfortunate circumstances. So this line of thinking was not new to her.
Being in love, even if it was with this new man, it couldn’t have a happy ending, could it? In that dark moment when her innocence was torn from her, that’s when she realized she would not have a fair or just life. That she would never love a man. Much less like one. Looking at the man in the glass canister, though, she wondered if all that might change.
Her body suddenly felt heavier, more lethargic. Looking down at Alice, remembering herself as a child, she thought of all of those desperate, young girls strutting haughtily through the Square at night only to end up packed into vans, freighters and cargo planes and taken away forever. She was one of them. She was older now, but once she too was a vessel to satisfy strangers’ perversions.
Nothing but a vessel.
Just like Alice. And Rebecca. Just like all the girls Heim was using and killing for his ridiculous experiments. Who was she fooling thinking she could fall prey to the carelessness of love? Who was she to dream of happily-ever-after?
She shook off the feeling, dragged her weary mind out of that mire. Standing over Wolfgang, right beside Alice, the little girl took Arabelle’s hand into hers. It was a sweet gesture. A kind gesture. And though she kept the girl’s tiny hand wrapped in hers, she thought bad thoughts about her.
“Where are his clothes?” Alice asked.
“Silence is best for this,” she told Alice. The girl was not allowed into the lab except for when she wandered in on her own, which wasn’t often. Heim never stopped her. He did not worry for the things her eyes might see. For the feelings she might have in seeing all these naked people suspended in stasis in glass canisters.
Arabelle, on the other hand, always ushered her out, telling her that her eyes were too young for such difficult sights. She did not usher Alice out today. Her mind felt too weak. Too entangled.
“Who is he?” Alice asked. She did not know this new creature was Wolfgang Gerhard. The most recent version of him anyway.
“Just a man,” she said. New all the way around, except for one thing which remained the same: the small gap between his two front teeth.
Alice looked up, didn’t say anything. Was she unsatisfied by Arabelle’s answer? Her eyes said she knew more than Arabelle was letting on.
Arabelle blew out a sigh. “It is new Wolfgang,” she relented. “Dr. Gerhard to you.”
“It doesn’t look like him,” Alice said, still tilting her head backwards to look up at Arabelle. She had so many unasked questions in her eyes. Too many!
Ignoring Alice’s observation, she tore her eyes from the doctor, and from Heim. Where her eyes went was straight to Rebecca. To the rounding of her belly. Then to the clones, and finally to the other subjects sent to Heim by Monarch Enterprises, by Michael Porquino, by CPS. Her inquisitive amethyst eyes then returned to Rebecca.
Poor girl, she thought. Like herself and Alice, Rebecca was a vessel for the wicked perversions of science, genetics and really awful men.
At some point, she thought, all of this has to end!
Taken
1
Thirteen year old Mangus Svendson was a creative, dangerous boy, but he could never have imagined the kind of trouble he created for himself by levitating and ripping that cow in two.
Outside, the Låsby sky was black, the air bitter cold. Nothing stirred. Mangus was asleep, all but dead to the world when the agents slipped into his room to take him. They moved whisper quiet, nearly soundless against the boy’s soft breathing.
Magus was not a deep sleeper, though. In addition to his newly discovered talent for telekinesis, he was gifted with a heightened sense of awareness. When one sense shut down, the others came alive.
Even before he opened his eyes—which he did not do right away—he felt the presence of men surrounding him. The press of their anxiety on his skin, almost like sound waves breaking on the shore of his body, brought him into full awareness.
He showed no signs, however.
He was no fool.
In the span of less than a second, he used his ears and his spatial senses to pinpoint the men’s locations in his room. Using the placement of the bed, the book cases full of books, his desk with its supplies (including a cup of sharpened pencils), the trashcan and the half-full glass of water, he “saw” the room.
And his enemies.
There were four men, all of them near six feet tall, all converging in on him. He drew his focus inward. A vision of death and destruction bloomed.
Then…
Sharpened pencils flew like daggers from their tray, thwump, thwump, thwumpthwumthwumping their way into the exposed neck of the nearest agent. The minute the pencils dug in, Mangus tore them out, letting the agent’s neck geyser out red. He envisioned invisible claws tearing out the man’s throat. The agent’s fleshy neck exploded right then, the flesh and bone of it blowing outward into the darkness.
The half-full water glass on the desk careened through the air and shattered against the temple of the next nearest agent. Shards of glass rained downward, but Mangus caught them midair with his mind then drove them up into the man’s throat. Again, the minute they severed arteries and blood vessels, he tore them out sideways making a mess that rained and squirted red everywhere.
All this in mere seconds.
Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, the words two down echoed.
The boy physically spun in bed, felt the two remaining agents at his back as he flung the blankets into the air between them. He rolled sideways off the bed, putting it between him and the remaining two agents. Using his mind, he tore the blankets out of the air, exposing the last of his enemies.
Mangus raised his hand, lifting the third agent up just as he did the cow. The agent’s hands clawed at his neck, at the invisible hand choking him. Mangus’s other hand flew up, and just as he pulled the agent in two the same way he did the cow—
—something needle-thin drove into the soft flesh of his neck, just left of his Adam’s apple.
The hovering, jerking, torn apart man dropped to the floor.
From his own neck, Mangus yanked out a dart.
He envisioned flinging the offending projectile back at the shooter; in real life, his senses swam and he was suddenly having a hard time concentrating. The dart rolled loosely between his fingers. He struggled to focus. His bones felt wobbly, all his joints really, really rubbery and tired.
Mangus tried imagining the dart zinging straight into the agent’s eyeball, but his ability to hold a single thought was fast degrading.
He blinked several times, felt woozy.
Is this my life? Mangus wondered. Is this my life bleeding at the edges? The thought made no sense. The dart started to slide from his grip, its tip now aiming at the floor rather than the fourth agent. Another dart hit him hard in the neck and the dart in his hand fell.
The last thing he heard was the clink of the fallen dart landing on the hardwood floor.
Blackness was swallowing him, a great, yawning chasm.
His body leaned sideways, tipped over. He never actually landed on anything. Rather when he hit the ground, he didn’t feel it.
It would be hours before he woke back up and realized he was no longer in Låsby.
No longer in Denmark. Instead, his ears would hear the drone of engines, and his body would feel the vibration. He wouldn’t know it then, but he’d be thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, heading toward the United States.
Bound, gagged and blindfolded with his hands in cuffs and his ankles in shackles, he would feel restricted. And then he would feel true fear. Then he would be shot again. He would descend into the darkness, the silence, the nothingness. Then he would wake again, and be shot again. And wake. And be shot.
And wake…
2
Where he was, Mangus could not say. He remembered being kidnapped. He remembered the airplane, getting shot, passing out. But he did not remember getting off the plane.
Now he sat strapped to a metal chair which felt solid. As in bolted to concrete. His eyes were blindfolded; he was gagged. No change there.
Somewhere deep in his belly, he registered hunger. In his neck he felt pain where the darts had buried into him.
Mangus reached out into the room with his mind, let his senses act as feelers on the surfaces of his surroundings. He clicked his tongue loud, and then he listened.
No carpet. Bare floors? Two men; no windows. He felt one of the men approaching. A great storm brewed within him. His thoughts ran their course in real life.
The man was pitched away from him and the sound of him crashing into the wall had the solid thump of a body line-driving itself into solid mass. The man umphffed out his breath, then hit the floor unconscious. The echo of the impact sounded like tile. Cold tile. He envisioned the man’s ribcage being crushed; there were the dying, breaking sounds in the room—his thoughts becoming reality.
A door opened (metal), more men approached. Three. He flung them all outward. In his mind, he snapped off the metal handcuffs (they snapped off), ripped apart his leather bindings with the force of his thoughts (they tore in half like old paper), and made the blindfold go away (it flew off his head). A concussion wave, almost like an invisible explosion, cracked the tile at his feet, the walls and the ceiling.
He was pure rage, a caged beast. He felt ten feet tall and ready to murder everything in sight.
The room was huge black and white checkerboard tiles—floor to ceiling (not concrete as he first thought), the single metal chair bolted to the floor in the room’s center, no windows, ventilation system overhead and bright, bright lights. It was like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
Six darts simultaneously penetrated the skin in his neck, face and upper body. Rather than throw the men, he realized he should’ve squashed their guns. He thought the darts out of him; they ejected out of him, smacked flat against the walls. He thought the guns crushed, but the tranquilizing darts made his head weak.
Darkness took him quick.
When he woke, it was to heavy metal music blaring in the headphones in his ears. Rapid fire images being pumped into his eyes through virtual reality glasses. His brain was peeling apart. He tried to shut his eyes, but his eyelids were forced open with metal clamps. He felt the stomping of his heart. His blood pressure was pumped full of jet fuel. Random bursts of electricity flared in his arms and legs, the pain sizzling its way down through every single nerve in an indescribable torrent.
Chaos tore at the very fabric of his soul. He felt his mind dividing, almost as if greedy talons were scraping back his scalp, reaching through his skull and separating the gray folds of his brain.
He screamed his throat ragged.
More electricity. It shot through his entire body, making him jerk into a bone breaking stiffness. When the charge was cut short, his body sagged back into the chair, his nerve endings so lit he was sure they’d burnt themselves to cinder ends.
The music in his ears grew louder; the images in his eyes moved faster, then slower, then faster still. There were shorter and shorter bursts of time between the jolts of electricity.
Then a needle pierced his skin. Took his blood.
Another dart…more darkness.
Then awake, but barely.
The chaos stopped and Mangus was weary. Drugged. Thankfully there was no music. No rapid fire imagery. No electricity.
The barrel of a gun pressed into the back of his head. He tried to open his eyes; he saw nothing, felt only concentrated pain. He tried to gather his thoughts, but they were billions of bubbles floating in the sky.
“Your eyes have been pulled from your head,” the voice said. “You will not need them.” He tried to move his hands, but there were no fingers. Tried to move his feet, but they were nailed to the floor. He went to scream, found he had no tongue.
“Thank you for your contribution,” the male voice said. As the horror spread through him, his brain felt manic and numb, too obliterated to orchestrate this man’s demise.
It barely registered that in addition to his eyes and his fingers, they were taking his blood. A needle pierced his back, felt like it went all the way into his spine.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” the voice said. It was a merciless ache that hurt like hell.
Then the gunshot.
Then his brains everywhere.
3
“I want the rest of his blood and I want it in long term storage,” the Director said. “Salvage as much as you can, and do it fast. Oh, and get the spinal fluid and brain tissue samples to Dr. Heim as well. Tell him whatever monster he creates, we’re sharing rights to the final product. That’s the deal.”
“Yes, sir,” Shelton Gotlieb said to the Director of Richmond, California’s branch of Monarch Enterprises. The Director was wiping blood spatter off his cheek. He was looking with interest at the red smears on his fingers. Checking his suit to see if it would need dry cleaning.
He tasted his fingers. Looked at Shelton.
“That’s good blood,” the Director replied, almost surprised. Wiping the rest of the boy’s back spray off his face, he said, “Oh, and Shelton?”
“Yes?”
“I appreciate your contribution as well.”
“So long as it doesn’t get me shot, sir, I’ll continue to serve this company and its interests loyally and dutifully to the best of my abilities.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Shelton, you sound like a commercial,” the Director said with a creeping smile.
“Will there be anything else?” Shelton asked. Inside, he was squirming. There was something diabolical about the man. Something…menacing.
“What is the current status on Savannah Van Duyn?”
Shelton drew an inward sigh. What a pain in the ass that girl was, he thought. He didn’t know her personally, but already he wished her dead, if only to rid his mind of her once and for all. She could be the nicest person in the world, but to Shelton Gotlieb, she would be a whole lot nicer with her head sawn off.
“I’m on it,” Shelton replied.
The Director took another taste of the boy’s blood. He looked content. Not embarrassed at all, despite his unabashed behavior.
“What exactly does that mean, you’re on it?” the Director asked. “Either it’s done or it’s not and you haven’t said it’s done.”
Shelton watched him watching the amount of blood leaking out of the hole in the boy’s head. The crimson pool gathering on the white tile was nowhere near the four quarts of blood the average thirteen year old carried. There would be plenty to salvage.
Entire quarts of it.
“It means I’ve located her vehicle and I’m preparing to have it tracked and followed.”
“I thought you were already doing that,” the Director replied. He leaned over and shamelessly squished his finger inside the hole in the back of the dead boy’s head. He then put the red tipped finger in his mouth.
Shelton’s blood rose to a boil. He felt a deeper throbbing and it wobbled his vision. A sheen of sweat broke out on the surface of his neck and brow.
“It’s not as easy as you think, Director. I have contacts in the NSA, but they must be massaged properly so as not to endanger our company, or our mission.”
�
�I appreciate your caution, Shelton, but in matters as sensitive as these, expedience trumps prudence.”
“Yes, sir.”
4
After leaving the blood-sucking director, Shelton returned to his office, picked up his secure phone line, and dialed the number for his NSA contact. It had been two years since they spoke. The “favor” he had done for the NSA man so many years ago, it was time Shelton cash it in for a favor of his own.
One of the many specialties offered by the Monarch Enterprises was their CIA-like ability to make people disappear. If you didn’t know better, a woman hanging in the bathtub dead, that’s a suicide, cut and dry. As for robberies, sometimes they go bad. Sometimes people die. Then there are cars. Cars, just like private airplanes, aren’t always safe. The fatal car accident involving Mary Ann Straus, in the case of NSA Agent William Straus, was a solution far better than divorce.
No expensive lawyers, no custody battles.
And most important, especially in said case, no alimony or child support payments either. The name of the game was wealth retention.
Shelton put to end the life of Agent Straus’s neurotic, overly narcissistic wife. This, of course, put Agent Straus squarely in Shelton’s debt. He was not only able to keep the small fortune he was amassing for his retirement, Straus cashed in on his wife’s life-insurance policy and had since taken a new bride: a lovely young Persian woman.
His former mistress.
When Agent Straus answered his secure line, Shelton said, “A favor for a favor, old friend?”
Straus understood immediately. “Of course,” he replied warmly.
“I need the eyes of the city,” Shelton said.
“I’m listening.”
Shelton gave him Savannah’s license plate number, the same one acquired from their now dead, former Child Protective Services asset in Reno.