by Schow, Ryan
He ignored the people talking to them, looking at them, trying to help them. Soon it would be reported that there was a stabbing in the Fairmont, which was probably unheard of, and the cops would be here in no time. And what would they find but a girl with blood all over her, and no wound.
Assuming Abby would heal. Which he prayed she would.
Through the fog, he heard Jake’s voice. Brayden turned and said, “She’ll be fine. I’ll call you in a little bit.”
The professor started to object and that’s when Brayden lost it. “I SAID I’LL CALL YOU IN A BIT, JAKE!”
“But—”
He left the professor standing there with the dumbest most helpless look on his face. For a second, Brayden felt bad.
Then it passed.
2
He had to keep his mind right if they were going to survive this. There was no way out. And nowhere to hide.
If he didn’t do this right, the risk of exposure to Abby, to Astor Academy, her father, Gerhard’s genetics program—everything—would see the light of day. People would be killed to cover the truth because that’s how secrets that big were kept.
He pushed through the restaurant’s front door, heard the host on the phone with 911. He looked into the man’s eyes and the man’s eyes looked into his. There was sheer terror there. Behind him, the dining room was the busy white noise of people being aghast.
He ran into the girls outside. The blonde was the same size as Abby, so he said, “Follow me to the bathroom.” Her mouth couldn’t even make words.
At least she did what she was told.
Good girl.
They found the bathroom, but not before attracting the attention of every person in the entire lobby.
Oh my freaking God.
Inside the girls’ bathroom they went.
“How’s your neck?” he asked.
“Hurts,” Abby said. “But I’m burning up, Brayden. I’m so gosh damned hot I can’t stand it.” Tears sprung from her eyes as the pinkish color returned to her cheeks.
The two people in the bathroom before us, an older lady and her young daughter, saw the bloody mess that was Brayden’s best friend, the girl he didn’t want to love, and made for the door.
He told the hybrid to stand out front and make sure no one came in. She went for the door.
The blonde finally spoke.
“What can I do?”
Brayden told Abby to put her hands on the sink, to stabilize herself. She did. The linen napkin stuck to the wound. It was so soaked with blood it was now dripping onto the bathroom tiles.
The minute she had her balance, Brayden turned and punched the blonde in the jaw so hard she slumped over. He caught her just as her knees buckled. He didn’t want her hitting her head on the floor.
“What the hell?” Abby said.
He laid her on the floor, then ran to the door and locked it. Pounding started right away. The hybrid? Hotel security? Some old lady with incontinence issues?
“Follow me,” he said as he dragged the blonde into the nearest stall. He kicked the stall door open. It hit the wall and flung back on him as he pulled the unconscious girl inside.
He turned the body around and unzipped the dress.
“Take off your clothes,” he barked to Abby.
She did.
Top first, then bloody bra. Brayden didn’t look at her breasts, even though he wanted to. He wasn’t a complete Neanderthal. The blonde, however, he looked at hers generously because he was human, and he was a man. They were nicer than he thought, which made him sad because he wouldn’t be able to play with them tonight. Or ever.
Abby wiped a hefty amount of her own blood on the blonde’s neck and hands once her clothes were off. At this point, Brayden couldn’t help seeing Abby’s naked breasts and torso.
When she was done, she turned and said, “Don’t look at me,” like she was mad. And she was.
“Sorry.”
“What in Jesus’ freaking name was that?” she all but screamed as she scrubbed her neck and hands clean. There was all kinds of pounding on the door now, and voices.
Lots of them, including the hybrid’s.
Panicked.
“How the hell should I know?” Brayden said, trying to dress the girl in Abby’s ruined clothes. The girl started to stir. Brayden groaned, tried to right his mind for what he was about to do, then just did it. He socked her in the chin again.
She went still.
“It was some bald kid,” he said, looking at her neck and marveling at how quickly the wound was closing, “like the singer Moby or something.”
She tried to dry herself off, but there wasn’t time. She slid the black dress on over her damp skin. She fixed her hair as best as she could, then checked her neck.
The cut was healing fast, now just a line where once the skin was flapped open. Amazing!
“We have to go!” she snapped.
“I know.”
Finally he was done dressing the blonde. He appraised the situation for one long second. There was one of his two dates, knocked out and tossed into a corner with blood smeared all over her face and swelling jaw. For the love of God, he thought, I’m going to hell for this. He gave his hands a quick wash, then looked at Abby.
“Let’s go!” she said.
Apparently the blood loss hadn’t affected her yet. The girl was definitely high on adrenaline. Which to him seemed damned near impossible.
When they threw the lock and opened the door, they were nearly trampled. The hybrid was the first to come bursting through the door. She saw Abby, cleaned up and uninjured (but visibly sweating), and now wearing her friend’s dress, and she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. The fact that Brayden’s would-be date (the hybrid) had been drinking worked to their favor, but not by much. Her mouth fell open and one garbled, unclear word fell out. He never did figure out what that word was.
Abby rushed past the people at the door screaming, “She needs an ambulance! Someone help!”
She said this as she walked straight to the front portico and asked valet parking to please bring her car around. The porter did as she asked, not knowing really what was happening or that she was the cause of it. He did, however, ask her if she was okay, because she was sweating a lot and she hadn’t gotten all the blood off her.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m running a fever, and something crazy is happening inside there.”
Through the glass, Brayden saw her get into her S5 and go. He breathed a sigh of relief. Jake, however, was at his side immediately.
“Was that Abby?”
His face was as white as a bleached towel.
“Yes, why?”
He couldn’t even speak. When your dinner date gets her throat slit open and all but bleeds to death in front of you, it’s hard to form complete sentences.
“I think it was a hoax,” Brayden said calmly although his heart was mule kicking his insides. “There’s a girl in there with blood all over her, but it isn’t Abby.”
“Then whose blood is all over you?” he asked.
“Don’t know. I think it’s theatrical blood, or something.”
Brayden went straight for the men’s bathroom and cleaned the rest of it off. Two men were in there barking questions at him before all the blood was even gone.
He kept using words like hoax and terrible joke. He was saying alcohol was involved and some blonde girl tried to punch him but then some other girl punched her in the face and dragged her into the stall.
They asked if he was a guest of the hotel and he was like, “I don’t think so. I was just meeting my parents here for dinner.” He said, “I’m an innocent bystander in all this, I swear.”
If he could just keep them confused, and if he could keep moving, he might be able to get out of there without being arrested.
These do-gooder witnesses said the police would need to speak with him and he was like, “Sure, no problem, as soon as I get all this fake blood off my hands. It takes like syrup.”<
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When they left him alone, he snuck out into the crowd where a couple of men were walking the dazed and moaning blonde out front. His other date. Part of the threesome he’d never have. Brayden headed for the front door, praying to the Almighty God above that he wouldn’t be stopped. Holy balls, he couldn’t even breathe! Not until he hailed a cab and was inside did he allow himself a breath.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. He needed to catch up with Abby. “Take me to a club nearby. Surprise me.”
When they were safely en route, he dialed Abby. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hi,” he said, relieved.
“Hi.”
“You okay?”
“No,” she said. It sounded like she was crying. “Where are you?”
“In a cab. Tell me where to meet you.”
She gave him an address, he conveyed the address to the cabbie and within ten minutes he was getting out at a Shell gas station and walking over to Abby’s S5.
He got inside her car and sure enough, she was crying nearly hysterically, and drenched in sweat. She reached over the armrest, pulled him into her arms and sobbed for ten minutes straight.
Tattered Wings of the Monarch
1
The van picked the boy up two blocks south of The Fairmont. Delta 1A slipped inside the van, the door slammed shut, he sat down. “Mission accomplished,” the boy said.
The man sitting in the back seat with him, his escort and a man of considerable size dressed in all black, radioed in the kill through his secure Bluetooth earpiece.
Delta 1A remained alert but completely still. He said nothing. He didn’t even blink until it was absolutely necessary, and only after he slowed his heart rate to sixty beats per minute.
He might as well be in the water chamber for his lack of movement. With perfect, unchanging physical posture and no visible signs of life except the soft pulsing of his carotid artery in his neck and the occasional blinking of his eyes, he could be dead.
If Delta 1A liked anything at all, it would be the memory of the kill. It was so swift, so flawless in its execution, completely efficient and messy, and he ended her with his karambit knife, his favorite weapon, if he were allowed a favorite anything. Which he wasn’t.
But he did not smile because he was not supposed to feel things like joy, or pride, or a sense of accomplishment. He thought about the blood and inside the body, he felt his heart rate rise to seventy beats per minute. He slowed his pulse back down, thought about nothing. The water chamber. The box. The long, dark silence of a sleep he didn’t want. All he wanted was the freedom to kill. To bathe in the messes he created. To taste the carnage of his victims.
But that wouldn’t be, so he stilled his heart even further, and then he thought of nothing.
2
Beside him, Delta 1A heard the man with the earpiece speaking. He did not know the man’s name nor was he programmed to care. The details of the man, who looked vaguely familiar—perhaps from a previous mission—were irrelevant. What he was saying, however, was completely relevant.
The girl was not dead.
What?
Impossible!
The boy’s head turned and looked at the man in disbelief.
The man turned and looked at him, directly into his eyes. The small, bald headed boy with the lean muscles and the one percent body fat had death in his eyes. The man turned away. Delta 1A straightened his head, dragged up the memories of the kill.
He had seen the girl’s neck, a soft white, flawless target. Before slicing it open, he had seen the pulsing of her carotid artery, and upon contact, he applied enough pressure and hit the right arc with the blade. She should be dead. No one could survive that.
There must be some mistake.
He was thinking this when the man with the earpiece touched something cold to his neck, and he was hit with a massive burst of electricity.
Everything went dark.
3
When he woke up, it was to Gem’s voice. He didn’t really hear it as much as he felt it. From deep inside the body, he felt himself stirring. He was in complete darkness, but he needed to emerge, he knew that.
He felt his presence spill from the void and sink deeper inside the brain of the host boy. Then he felt himself rush through a dark nothingness toward consciousness. On the way up he felt Gem, rather her insistent presence, and it soured his mood.
The word bitch came to mind. The feeling of hatred bloomed, then flowered, then wilted, then died. He opened his eyes. Did not speak. Did not move.
The body was seated on a metal chair in a cold room back at Monarch’s facility. He recognized the space, the empty feel of it, the tiled-floor smell of it.
His handler was standing before him. Looking at him. Waiting.
“Delta 1A?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the mission,” he said. “Spare me no details.”
Delta 1A began speaking. He laid out his movements one by one, showering his handler with details because he could. Because that’s what was required of him.
When he described the arc and pressure of the blade and how he sliced open the girl’s neck, he said he felt the blade cut through both muscle and tendons. He said blood squirted everywhere.
“You did cut the girl,” his handler said, “and there was indeed a tremendous amount of blood spilled, certainly enough to describe the wound as fatal. There was, however, no body.”
“Sir?” Delta 1A said.
“We find these circumstances disturbing, Delta 1A. Especially with your recent track record.”
Four dead in the first hit. None of them a Van Duyn. None of them Savannah Van Duyn.
“The kills were based on faulty information.”
He was hit with a huge and lasting burst of electricity. The boy’s body bucked, straining every muscle in him to the point of tearing. When the surge broke and he could hold himself upright, Delta 1A fought to return the body to its normal state.
“I want to know what happened to the girl,” his handler finally said.
Delta 1A repeated the story, word for word. Exactly. The handler left the room. Delta 1A sat in the same position, once more attaining a resting heart rate of sixty beats per minute. Hours passed. He did not move. When the handler returned, the energy he was emitting was different, less aggressive.
“I spoke with one of my contacts at the San Francisco Police Department and it appears the cut you administered was not deep enough to cause the girl to expire. In other words, there was no body, even though the amount of blood left at the scene would justify one. The police are baffled.”
“I am not wrong,” Delta 1A said.
“You might not be. This child is a product of genetic experimentation. What Dr. Gerhard has concocted to allow this girl to survive a mortal wound is beyond my imagination.”
Delta 1A simply looked at the man, his stare blank, his eyes unblinking.
“If this is in fact the case, we’ll need you to take additional, more permanent measures.”
“Sir?” Delta 1A asked.
“I want you to take her head this time,” his handler said. “I want you to bring it to me in a bag.”
Something deep and anxious stirred inside Delta 1A. His heart rate shot up ten beats per minute at the idea of administering such a satisfying death. The amount of blood loss would be catastrophic! The cutting and slicing through tissue and muscle and tendons and bone left him with a fierce ache, and worlds of need.
He did not smile, however. And he did not blink. He showed no emotion at all because emotion was forbidden. Robots don’t have emotion. Human or otherwise.
“Her head in a bag,” Delta 1A repeated. “When?”
“We tracked her car to a residential neighborhood near the bay. She is not in the car, but the minute the car is on the move, we will dispatch you.”
“You will dispatch me. Until then, what are my orders?”
“You will
sleep.”
His handler spoke the sequence of commands and Delta 1A went under, falling backwards inside the body, backwards into a dark void. Falling, falling, falling…until he found the space where nothing existed.
And then he slept.
This is the Thick
1
Halfway down the road where Abby picked up Brayden, not even a full block away from the gas station, she pulled the Audi over, scraping the front rim on the curb. She was woozy. Brayden looked over at her, concern blistering his stare. She was getting worse. It was the heat, he knew, the healing. Her body was basically one gigantic furnace of fire and pain and she couldn’t stop sweating.
“You need to drive,” she said, her voice faraway sounding.
“Yeah,” he said. “Tell that to your rim.”
He got out of the car and helped her out of her seat into the passenger’s seat. When she saw the rim rash she left on her beautiful wheel, she started crying again.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I know a guy who can fix that.” He didn’t, but he thought it would make her feel better. Who almost gets killed then cries over rim rash? Crazy people, he was thinking, that’s who. With her sweat soaked dress and her matted-to-her-head hair, she was fast becoming a sad sight.
“You have to tell me where to go,” he said, adjusting his seat and mirrors.
She gave him Netty’s address, which he punched into the nav system. She was weeping, softer now, more to herself than anything.
She wiped her eyes and said, “Call Netty.” Her voice gained the slightest bit of strength. “Tell her to run me a cold bath.”
Brayden used the Audi’s Bluetooth to do as she asked, and when Netty answered and started to fire off all kinds of questions, Brayden said, “We’ve run into the ass end of a pooping mule.”
“I don’t know what that means!” Netty said.
“It means she’s fine, but we might be in trouble. Just get the bath ready, and meet us in front of your building. I’m going to need you to help me get her upstairs.”