by Schow, Ryan
Ten feet across the lab, the second girl—so beautiful even he looked upon her in reverence—turned around: Savannah Van Duyn. The new version of her. From the picture his handler gave him.
“Target confirmed,” he thought to Gem, who was instructed to get confirmation of the girl prior to the kill.
“Proceed,” Gem said.
He was taking aim when Savannah did the unthinkable. She turned and ran at him, zigzagging as he started firing rounds. He popped off three shots, all three hitting her, but none lethal enough to stop her.
One clipped her left ear, another trenched the outside of her right shoulder, and the last grazed her left arm.
She was a force of will, her eyes like black sunshine.
He dropped the gun, prepared for hand-to-hand combat. She leapt into a jumping sidekick. He parried left, let her kick sail by.
He spun to go after her, and that’s when something loud and metal cracked the back of his bald, white skull. Whipping his ringing head around, he saw the man Savannah was talking to standing firm, a heavy silver tray in hand. Delta 1A snapped a vicious sidekick into the man’s ribcage, targeting the floating rib, which was the easiest to break.
The handsome man folded in half, clutching his side. He dropped the tray on the concrete floor with a loud clatter. And then he sunk to his knees, his face twisted by the pain. Delta 1A was going to kill him, but not with Savannah on the offensive. She was already on him.
The boy took a solid fist to the jaw, then one to the solar plexus. His air left him, but he was used to not breathing. From behind he felt something hot and sharp stick his kidney.
The boy with buzzed hair and a decent build.
They were converging in on him, Savannah and the boy. Delta 1A stepped swiftly into the boy’s guard, driving his elbow directly into his face. The boy turned his head, but still caught the sharpest point of Delta 1A’s elbow on the hinge of the jaw. Like the girl he pistol whipped, the boy went down hard, his head bouncing off the concrete floor. Delta 1A looked behind him, down at the place of pain on his back. The stainless steel end of a surgical blade protruded from his kidney.
The bastard stabbed him.
He turned to Savannah, eyes cold, inhuman. The killer in him simmered with anticipation, an ilk of ruthless glee dulled only by the injury he sustained.
“Just you and me,” the boy’s mouth started to say. But Savannah struck with fists and feet. She was fast. Relentless.
Arms up, parrying, he blocked most shots, and avoided others. But some got in and they hurt. The interesting thing was, the girl wasn’t even beginning to tire.
Delta 1A couldn’t help but wonder, what is this Savannah creature? He couldn’t stop thinking, is she like me?
Then that wicked little hand of hers shot in and grabbed the boy’s testicles. She clenched and twisted, slid in his personal space. His knees buckled. He lashed out, clawed at her face. Fingernail trails the color of blood opened the skin on her face, then shut. Healed. His brain couldn’t comprehend this. Cocking his head, he thought, did she just heal?
She squeezed tighter, the grip on his balls tightening. Scowling, grunting, she twisted without remorse. Sounds resembling sheer agony fell from the boy’s mouth.
If he could feel any emotion, he would feel shame.
Then the pain became so great, it became something else. Something sweet. Delta 1A reminded himself this body was born into pain. Pain was his life. He told himself this was nourishment, for it was pain and determination that fortified him, pain that made him who he was today: the perfect assassin.
He felt renewed. Like he’d found a gear.
His crinkled face went slack, completely emotionless. The girl saw this and paused. She looked stricken. Then she made one final, mighty attempt to end him. She curled her fingers, made an iron-tight fist around his balls, then jerked with all her might. Like she was trying to yank them clean off.
The pain was warm honey, brittle as ice.
It was fuel.
His mouth made a little smile. She startled. Stared wide eyed at him. Right then she let go of his nuts, made her thumb into a spear and drove it into his right eyeball.
Now that hurt.
The pulped eye made a wet popping sound, and half the boy’s vision winked out. When she pulled her thumb out, the ruined eyeball popped out, too. Dangled on his cheek, attached by roped sinew.
More pain.
The kind that really hurt.
Viscous fluid, like broken egg yolk mixed heavily with globs of red mucus. A watery mess that drained from the boy’s impaled eye. Delta 1A wanted to scream. Instead he lashed out, hit the girl with a fist. She staggered backwards. He hit her again. Broke her nose. Blind in one eye, supercharged, he railed on her with one brutal punch after another.
The fury inside fueled him.
Awakened him.
Even the voices in his head were screaming, raging, skittering like agitated bottle flies across the surface of his brain. His head was an insane asylum.
All the inmates were loose.
Savannah’s face opened up with all kinds of grisly wounds. She managed to find an opening, but her counter attack was weak, her punches telegraphed. Delta 1A tucked his chin, head butted her incoming fist. The sound of knuckles breaking satisfied him.
An involuntary howl escaped her.
The pain was all over her face. The defeat. A thin sheen of sweat coated her bloody face and lean forearms. His good eye took her in. That bitch. She had his eyeball juice all over her thumb.
He swiped the hanging eyeball and all its bloody, snotty goop away, but it just swung back in place like a pendulum. Like a busted quail egg on a twist of sinew. From his sheath he withdrew his karambit knife, sliced through the lengthy strands of flesh keeping the eyeball from falling. The glob plopped on the floor with a wet splat. He kicked it away, re-sheathed the blade.
Better.
Savannah watched all of this, watched him watching her, watched the murderous grin creep upon his shaved-clean face. She lunged, but he kicked her in the ribs, elbowed her in the face, then drove a knee into the side of her thigh.
He wanted to break her, ruin her, cut and bend her in inhuman ways.
He saw the chance, took it. Winding up hard, he drove a kick to the inside of her knee, snapping it sideways. It crumpled at the wrong angle then folded hard.
Savannah went down screaming.
Delta 1A admired his work. Soaked with sweat, bleeding heavily, the girl scooted backwards with her good leg. He matched her pace. She slid away from him; he closed the distance.
Finally she stopped.
He towered over her, blazing with hysteria, wracked with glee, the ugliest smirk on his face. She studied his face and her knee, both in glances. Her leg at the knee, it was horrible the way it was broken. She tried to straighten it. Delta 1A cocked his head.
Interesting.
Using all her strength, grunting, she managed to force it back in place. The pop and clicking sounds it made shocked his heart a little. She howled, an angry, agonizing scream.
He smiled.
Then he sensed something. His ears perked for just a second, and then he fired a mule kick to his rear, catching a jawbone with his heel so flush he was sure the perfect looking man would no longer be a nuisance.
Like a sack of meat, the man crashed to the ground. Unconscious.
Reaching down, Delta 1A grabbed Savannah by the hair, hauled her up off her butt, but not all the way to her feet. He lifted her to that uncomfortable in-between place, the place where she had no leverage, where she couldn’t fight or escape. Growling in pain, moaning, she clawed at his hand.
It proved useless.
He bled, but it didn’t matter. This was her end. Not his.
Delta 1A rapid-fire punched her in the face, over and over and over again. He wanted to beat her to death. He wanted to see the life in her slowly dim. Delta 1A savored every last morsel of muted joy he was ever made to hide or contain. Then, after beati
ng her unconscious, he dropped her.
She was done.
He bent to one knee, studied her, then lapped up the blood on her face, slowly with long strides of his tongue. It was delicious, disgusting, perfect. The wounds, however, they were closing.
He didn’t understand.
Grabbing her wrist, he dragged her to a nearby canister. He sat her in front of it, then went and retrieved his gun where he had dropped it. The weapon felt like home.
Turning back to her, he took aim.
Black Rage Blooming
1
Swimming in darkness. Then a sliver of light. Then pain. Light blossoms flaring. Heat radiating from the lumped knot on the back of her head, from her shoulder and hip. Georgia opened her eyes, felt the room tilt one way then the next, dreamlike and lopsided in its consistency.
She blinked once, twice, three times. The blurriness and the feeling of waking up from a deep, deep sleep overwhelmed her before gradually burning off. Her head ached.
She was furious.
In front of her, she saw everything: the skinny bald boy picking up the gun; the new version of Dr. Gerhard laying on the ground, barely conscious, moaning; Brayden laying off to the side, sprawled out, eyes rolled up in his head leaving only a blank slate of white.
The bald boy raised the gun and pointed it at Abby.
Oh, God.
No.
On the floor, Abby was slumped over, her face red with abuse, her skin the color of pounded meat. One eye was swollen shut; the other open, although not with consciousness. Her eyeball was rolling loose, set in a delirious, slow-motion wobble. Blood leaked from her crushed nose.
She was a sight.
Everything happened in half speed. Abby’s one working eyeball rolled back into awareness. Then she looked up, saw first the boy, and then Georgia…and then the boy pulled the trigger.
Abby’s head slapped backwards against the glass tank, the explosion of blood flowering behind her like spattered paint. Crimson gore oozed from a smoking hole in her upper forehead.
If Georgia’s heart could stop beating from surprise, from horror, from the sharpest stab of agony she ever felt, she would be dead now. Raw emotion swept through her like a torrent, turning to a hard, blistering rage that became something impossible to measure, something calloused and all consuming. To go from feeling almost nothing after her last transformation to feeling this fifty foot tsunami of hate surging inside her nearly ripped her body apart.
Her hands shot out before her as the boy fired on Abby again, the second round hitting her dead center between the eyes. He put a third round into her heart, but Abby was already gone.
Already dead.
The force behind Georgia’s eruption was a paranormal upwelling of the blackest, fiercest, most concentrated hatred, a gathering of power and vengeful energy the likes of which she had never known before. She was a bomb. She was nuclear.
Her eyes bled to black in fractions of a second, casting the room in blacks and greys. The power mounting inside her was too much for her mortal body to contain. Her skin smoldered, plumes of smoke whisking up from her pores. Seams in her body that were never there appeared, threatened to split wide open and surge with fire.
The boy let the gun sink to his side, sagged against the weight of the struggle, then blew out a triumphant sigh.
Georgia’s eyeballs sizzled. They vibrated in their sockets. Her cheeks shook and trembled with something indescribable, a blistering heat and animosity, a ravenous mandate for vengeance. Even her fingernails glowed with firelight. She was going to explode. Her body was literally going to blow apart and bathe the world in fire.
Georgia shoved all her hatred and all her rage into a cone-shaped force of energy and she heaped it with all her might upon the boy, whose back was still turned to her.
The murderous child who felt victorious, the teenaged boy who took her best friend from her, his hands flew to his head, his knees bent against the sudden, searing pain. Pale, exposed skin didn’t burst into flames because the fire coming from Georgia was too hot. The exposed skin just sizzled black and orange. Like the crackling embers of old, burnt newspaper.
A scream tore loose from the boy’s mouth, a howling noise so sharp and loud it must have ripped the skin of his throat wide open. It seemed to go on forever, getting louder, higher pitched like a girl.
And then the back of his head caved in. It just collapsed in on itself, like a rotted pumpkin ten days after Halloween, except worse. Ashy and more hellish. His gummy knees folded and he went to the ground, patches of charred skin breaking off his body like popped-loose puzzle pieces. A meaty, bubbling red simmered just beneath the crisped skin.
His body was turning gooey; it soon bore the consistency of melted cheese. The seams of the boy’s clothes caught fire and his body finally burst into flames.
He continued to degrade, the charred, slopped flesh of him rolling and running south. A wax statue melting. Within seconds the smoke from his corpse triggered the lab’s overhead sprinklers.
The manufactured rain cooled Georgia’s skin, pulled her from the inner depths of madness. The power she expelled sucked back into her and her hands dropped like stones at her sides. She collapsed, her body drained of its energy, fully consumed.
There were lay lines of blood on her arms, the physical separation of her skin. Everything hurt. But her eyes went to Abby and the rage-fueled agony was nothing against her grief. Everything in her was shaking: her face, her hands, her heart. A different kind of force was now building inside her. One even greater than the last. She couldn’t contain it anymore. That’s when she succumbed to the sobbing, to the wailing.
Is this insanity? she wondered ever so briefly.
Yes, the voice in her head said.
But even the expulsion of emotion couldn’t provide the release she needed, so she screamed at the top of her lungs because she couldn’t do anything else.
There was too much energy in her, firelight still slipping through slivered lines along her body.
Brayden was soaked from the sprinklers and coming around, but Gerhard was already standing up into the overhead rain, his mysterious new eyes taking everything in.
Georgia looked at him and felt so small, so insignificant, so powerless against all this…feeling.
What am I?
“My God,” Gerhard said. He looked at Georgia in horror. In awe. Then he let out something that sounded like a whimper and a maniac’s laugh. He stopped the noise abruptly at the pain in his jaw. Softly, in a genial whisper, he said, “It worked.”
Everything was lost, yet Georgia couldn’t help wondering, what worked?
Her eyes were a question.
“Behold, my new war model,” he said, looking at her so lovingly, even though his injuries had him wincing.
To the question, what am I, she now had her answer.
She was his weapon.
His angel of mass destruction.
Georgia found her legs, managed to stand and then stumbled toward her dead friend. She was a shattered, weary thing. But she was alive.
Abby, however, was not.
Her friend lay slumped over sideways, her blood all over the destroyed glass canister. Georgia lowered herself to her knees, took Abby’s hand into hers. It hung limp, unresponsive. Her friend’s skin was already cooling. She checked for a pulse.
Nothing.
Behind Georgia, the new version of Gerhard was suddenly there. Standing above her, his tone changed. All the excitement in him gone.
“No,” he whispered, dread setting into his features. Had he not seen her before? Had he been so preoccupied with Georgia’s new abilities that he missed the very thing Georgia was crying about?
Beside them, Brayden was on hands and knees when he saw Abby. He started crying. Fell hard into a fit. Then he vomited on the floor. Georgia’s own body operated completely out of her control. It continued to weep. But the dark side of her, the side that ached for something more, it wanted to turn all this rag
e on Gerhard, roast him to the marrow. Reduce him to a smoldering pile of reanimated flesh.
Holding his nose from the cooked flesh smell hanging heavy in the air, the doctor said, “I think I can save her,” but he didn’t sound so convincing. “Just please, stop bawling, both of you.”
Brayden was suddenly there, beside Georgia, beside Abby, watching the oozing bullet holes in her head very closely. Looking at the bloom of red on the inside of her left breast.
They wounds weren’t healing the way Abby claimed she could heal, and Georgia could see what this was doing to Brayden. Did he expect her to survive this?
“She’s immortal,” he kept saying, over and over again. Between the tears, amidst the hiccupping sadness, he kept repeating the words, like a mantra. An unfounded hope.
“She’s immortal.”
“Move,” Gerhard said, pushing her and Brayden away. Both were too weak to resist.
Too stricken.
So they let themselves be moved, because deep down, they hoped he could, in fact, do the impossible, work some miracle.
It didn’t matter what or how he did it, they just wanted Abby to live.
Epilogue
1
The new version of Dr. Gerhard went to a metal wall panel, swung the small door open and disabled the overhead sprinkler system. The onslaught of water stopped. Instantly the war zone of a room fell into complete silence, save for the blackened heap of flesh that was once a teenage psycho. A violent killer. The way the last kernels in bags of microwave popcorn keep popping after all the others are done, that’s what was happening with the melted boy.
Pop.
Pop. Pop.
Everyone tried not to look at it, that smoking, compost mound. They tried not to think of it as once human. It was easier said than done.
Pop.
Gerhard lifted Abby’s body onto a nearby table, took a pair of scissors, cut away her shirt and bra. Immediately he drew blood, enough to fill two medical bags. He wrestled her over, used another needle to take spinal fluid. Lastly he drilled a hole in the front of her skull just above the highest bullet hole, extracted tissue samples.