by Peter Clines
Her codes were still active. Shelly had said the programmed exes could take simple orders. And sometimes they understood priority.
Danielle took in a breath and looked at the closest ex. It was a man, shaved bald, in a sand-colored tee-shirt with a bullet hole in the chest. No blood. She cleared her throat. “Soldier,” she said, “I order you to let me pass.”
The ex didn’t move. She inched forward and it took another lumbering step toward her. Its hands shifted on the rifle.
“I order you to let me pass,” she repeated.
It didn’t move. It also didn’t change its grip on the M16. The ex stared past her with blank eyes.
“I repeat, this is a direct order from Cerberus three-zero-three-alpha.”
The dead thing started to move but shuddered to a halt. The withered head turned and locked eyes with her. It knotted its brow.
“I said, this is a—”
The M16 clattered to the ground. The dead thing lashed out with an arm that moved too fast and grabbed her throat. It glared at the redhead and marched her back, off-balance, until the work table hit the small of her back. The arm bent her over and she fell back next to the laptop. Her feet swung inches above the ground.
Cracked lips pulled away from the teeth. “Fucking puta bitch,” it growled. “Not so tough without your fucking armor, are you?”
She flailed at the arm, but she was weak. Just weak skin and bones.
The dead soldiers took in a dry, shuddering breath and spoke as one.
“IF I’D KNOWN IT WAS YOU,” said the chorus of exes, “I’D’VE RIPPED YOUR HEAD OFF YESTERDAY!”
Chapter 22 - Ghost in the Machine
THEN
Thinking is bad. That’s the lesson of the past year. I don’t want to think any more.
Captain Freedom told me the most fascinating story a while ago. He was very careful about telling it. He knew it was still a touchy subject at the time. Thin ice, as they say.
It’s been fifteen months, seven days, two and a half hours since Eva and Madelyn went missing during the rescue attempt. I still look at clocks and assign mental labels to every date. One month since they vanished. Ten weeks since they were lost. Six months since they were lost. One year since they
I mentioned it to John the other day and he said he did the same thing for almost two years when his father passed away.
Two years? How can I live like this for another year? I still feel cold and empty all the time. Will it be twice as long because I don’t know what happened to either of them? I can’t take four years of this.
Freedom came to see me. It was almost a year ago, now that I think of it. Three months since they’d gone missing. He had a puzzle, of sorts. They had gone out that morning to get the armored vehicle, the Guardian, he called it. It had been sitting out there all that time. Ever since they were
They
I need to get more work done. I still haven’t managed to get the Nest working and reboot the exes. They’re needed more than ever now. I need to focus on that. Must stop my mind from wandering so much. They weren’t here in the lab before, so it shouldn’t be hard to work now that they’re
Now that they’re
Madelyn Sorensen. Everyone said we were so cruel to give her rhyming names. That we were bad parents. Did she think I was a bad father? Did she blame me? God, I hope she knows how hard I tried. I wanted to go to them. I wanted to be with them.
Freedom said they were going to tow the Guardian in but they didn’t have to. It still had half a tank of fuel. Sitting there in the sun for months and still over twenty gallons of diesel in it. There was no reason it should’ve stopped.
I remember at first I was very happy, because if the armored carrier still had gas, perhaps it meant Eva and Madelyn hadn’t... that the whole thing had been a mistake. Perhaps they were still back at the airstrip. Maybe they never even got on the plane.
Freedom was very good about calming me down. He was a good man. He still is, I think. I don’t see him that often. They leave me alone. They all have a lot on their minds.
The puzzle had been that half his soldiers still insisted the tank was empty. He had a dozen of them look at the gauge and only five of them saw the needle above E. Even when they drove it in, some of them still said there was no gasoline. Nothing the captain did could convince them otherwise. A few of them couldn’t even start the engine.
He’d wanted to know about hallucinations. If they were a side effect to the process I didn’t warn the Army about. He hadn’t reported it yet, but he was very firm his soldiers couldn’t be put at risk. “I don’t want anyone else to die,” he told me.
I think it was a year ago today he was here. It may have been a year ago yesterday. No, it was two days ago. When I was talking with Freedom it had been exactly ninety-nine days since they went missing. Since one of the super soldiers I created tried to bring my little Madelyn across half a mile of sand and was attacked by an army of exes that tore him apart. Since they crawled into the armored carrier and they
I need to work. I need to think of other things. That’s all I need these days. To work and be left alone.
On the other side of the lab there were six exes strapped down on gurneys. They were also handcuffed to the rails and gagged with a wooden bit. One of the soldiers trained as a field medic, Franklin, I think, came up with the clever idea of using back boards and head restraints to keep them immobile.
All my attempts to return the brain to a cogitative state had failed. This set of exes had new contacts in place. I think they were in place. I remember I was drilling placement holes in skulls when Captain Freedom came to talk to me. He had a problem he was trying to work out. That was day ninety-nine. Not yet one hundred.
I attached the Nest box to the leads and it sent a new pattern of electricity down into the dead brain. Nothing. No response at all. I checked each of the six subjects. Their EEGs were all flat.
Back to the first one. It was a young man with blond stubble and a large hole in his right cheek. I think it was a bite, but they’d all been cleaned up before they came to me. For the first six months they’d also all been male. I think that was John’s doing.
I could see the young man’s teeth through the hole. He didn’t have a single filling on this side of his jaw. Madelyn had very good teeth, too. Freedom said he couldn’t find their bodies. There was no trace left of them. Not even one of Madelyn’s glittery sneakers. He was polite while he told me they were dead. He insists on seeing the evidence that way. I tried for weeks to tell him it could also mean they got away, but he wouldn’t listen. Still won’t.
I’ve had dreams about those sneakers. I see them running across the desert toward the gate. I still wake up crying most of the time.
No, no, no. Can’t think like that. Must stay focused.
There was something odd about the young man’s eyes. All exes have the same gray eyes. They accumulate dust because of the lack of tears and then get scratched. It’s a process of refraction, the same way a scratch on clear glass looks white.
Its eyes were gray and they were odd, but I wasn’t sure why they were odd. I checked one of the other exes to be sure, then I came back to the first one. I moved my head back and forth to see if it was something about the light. Something was wrong. I needed to focus on this better. I was missing something obvious.
Oh. Of course. Exes always turn their heads. They lack the fine muscle control to move their eyes. I’m still not sure they need to move their eyes, in the same way some blind people never move theirs.
The dead man with the hole in its cheek was watching me. It was following me with its eyes.
I found myself very focused. I checked the Nest again. It was still on, still sending the new pattern.
“Wehhh ahhh I?”
The ex was trying to talk. This was more than I’d ever hoped to achieve. I was so amazed I couldn’t wait to tell Eva and Madelyn about it, and then I was horrified I’d forgotten they were
How could I f
orget? It was only fifteen months. Since they went missing.
“Wahhh tha fugg ess thsss,” said the young man. Its face had twisted into a scowl. I could see its jaws and tongue working through the hole in its cheek, trying to get the bit out.
My mind tripped over three or four different things to say. I leaned over the ex and its gray eyes focused on me. One of the irises had a small tear in it. “Can you understand me?”
“Wahhh tha fugg! Gehh diss hing owdda ma moff!”
I knew I shouldn’t take out the bit. At the very least I should call for a few soldiers to stand guard. But part of me was too intrigued.
And the other part... the other part didn’t care at all.
I unstrapped the neck brace and tossed it aside. A normal ex would be stretching its head, trying to bite me. This one just looked annoyed. I reached behind its head and tugged at the velcro straps which kept the bit in place.
The ex started talking as soon as the wooden bar was out from between its teeth. “‘Bout fucking time,” it said. “What the hell is this? What you doing to me, pinche?”
It was looking around. It was making observations. It was thinking.
“What is...” I tried to think of an appropriate question. I’d never expected to have this level of success. “What is the last thing you remember?”
“I was in Hollywood,” it said. “Just outside the Mount. Fighting with that metal...” The ex seemed to lose track of its thoughts, and for a moment I wondered if I’d made a mistake. “No,” it said. “I was in the mountains. One of those ski towns.”
Its tone was familiar. It was uncertain. Hesitant. I realized it sounded like me.
It also had a strong Spanish accent, which was odd for a young blond man with Anglo features.
“I was a bunch of places,” it said. “Like I’ve been traveling, but I don’t ...”
The head lunged up, looking down at its torso. It turned to me and I yelped. Its expression was vicious. “What the hell is this? What you trying to pull?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“What is this? Where’s my body?”
“What... what do you mean? I don’t under—”
“This isn’t me,” it shouted. “Where’s the rest of me? You sew my head on a new body or...”
Its voice trailed off. It stared at me again.
“Waitaminute,” said the ex. It ran all the words together into a mishmash of English. “I know you. You’re the mad doctor.”
I shivered. “What do you mean?”
“You’re the one who got me out. They wanted to court martial me and shit and you gave me a clean bill. Said all those drugs and things were out of me and I was good to go.”
The phrases swam in my head. I knew this should be familiar, but it was from before. The longest conversation I’d had with anyone in a year and I was freezing up.
“This is, whassit, Project Krypton, right? Some Army base?”
I blinked. “Yes. You... you’re that private. Casares. The one from the previous trials.”
“Yeah. What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“No, stupido, I mean what’s the number? The date?”
“The fourteenth,” I said. “Of December.” As I said it, I realized I hadn’t done any shopping, and Eva and Madelyn would be so upset. I’m a very good gift-buyer. And then I remembered I didn’t have to buy gifts this year, either. And there still wasn’t anywhere to buy them. And they probably both hated me.
I must stay focused on work.
He growled. “A month,” he muttered. “My boys prolly fell apart without me.”
It wasn’t until that moment that I started thinking of him as a he. He was conscious. Sentient. No longer an it.
“Your mind has been reactivated,” I explained to him. “There’s a device on the left side of your skull which I call a Nest. It stands for neural stim—”
“Hey, esse,” he said. “Your gizmo don’t do jack shit, okay? This is one-hundred percent Rodney talking, you get me? How long have I been here?”
“Your body was brought in two weeks ago with three other—”
“No, doc,” he said, shaking his head. “Me. My head. Did they ship it here or something?”
“I... I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Get me a fucking mirror!”
There was a hand mirror in the scrub room. I used it to make sure nothing splattered on me when I had to drill. I brought it in for the ex and caught a glimpse of myself in it. I needed a haircut. And my beard needed to be trimmed. Eva always hates it when by beard gets too long, because it was short when we met in grad school.
“What the fuck,” he said. The ex tilted his head left and right. It took me a few moments to realize he was looking for a different face. He turned his head and poked his tongue out through the hole in his cheek. “Guess I can get in a lot of practice for the chicas, eh, doc?” His mouth pulled into a grin.
It was an eerie expression for a dead thing.
I cleared my throat. “You... you said the Nest wasn’t working?”
His eyes came away from the mirror. “What?” He squinted his left eye a few times, making the Nest unit shift on his temple. “Naw, this thing’s crap. It was keepin’ the brain warm, that’s it. Kinda gives me a headache, too.” He lifted his chin to his chest and let his eyes roam around the room. “So what is this place? You still trying to make everybody be all they can be and that shit?”
“Yes. And trying to return some of the exes like you to a semi-cogitative state.”
“Not like me,” he said. His eyes focused past me and flitted back and forth. It was as if he was speed-reading an invisible book. Or in REM sleep. “Three fences,” he said. “And you’re low on guards.” He squinted. “Fuck me, is that Colonel Shelly? I hated that fucker.”
“How did you...”
“I’m everywhere, doc.” He looked at one of the other test subjects. “So, what, you need to get ‘em all under control? That’s what your thing’s supposed to do?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Well look at this. Put your left foot in and shake it all about, eh?”
The five other exes all swung their left feet side to side.
“Or what about this. Drumroll, mi amigos.”
One of the exes was missing a hand, but nine sets of fingers tapped against the padded gurneys. They were in perfect unison, already like a military unit. They stopped and their fingers went straight to the sides of their legs.
The dead man grinned again. “I’m gonna make a deal with you, doc,” he said. “You need a bunch of exes doing what you say. I need somewhere to lay low while I figure out what I’m doing. You see where I’m goin’ with this?”
I didn’t.
The grin spread even wider. It pulled at the flesh around the hole in his cheek, forming an oval crater in his face. “Congrats, doc,” he said. “Your gizmo works.”
Now I did.
“Why?”
“Because I can,” he said. “Maybe I owe you one and I don’t like owing people nothing. You made me into death incarnate.”
“I didn’t do anything but run some tests.”
“You said they could let me go. That’s enough for me. I’m tryin’ to do you a favor.”
“It wouldn’t be that simple,” I said. “If he thinks it works, Colonel Shelly will expect me to have dozens of exes outfitted with the Nest. Maybe hundreds. You can’t—”
The ex’s grin faded. “Don’t you tell me what I can’t do. If I wanted, every dead thing for three miles would pick up a rock and beat their own skulls in. Or anyone else’s.” He glared at me with his dusty, scratched eyes.
“I don’t want any—”
“I can find them for you.”
He spoke with such certainty it made me shake. “What?”
“The soldiers at the fence,” said the ex, “they’re talking about you and your kid. You think your girl and your old lady got away, right? That’s what they’re s
aying.”
“Colonel Shelly is—”
“He’s fucking stringing you along’s what he’s doing. You really think he’s going to send his people out to look for corpses?”
“They’re not dead!”
“Sure they’re not, doc,” he said with a smile. “And I’ll help find them. I got a thousand eyes here in the desert. If I see them, I’ll let you know where they are.”
“You... you’d do that?”
“Hey, doc, familia is everything, you know?”
I knew it was wrong and I didn’t care. I could tell he was as mad as me in his own way—in a dangerous way—and I didn’t care. I just wanted to know Eva and Madelyn were safe and be done with the Nest project so they would all leave me alone and I wouldn’t have to think.
I looked the dead man in the eyes. “What do you want?”
“Just tell them the thing works. Tell ‘em I’m still kinda slow, so they won’t expect much. Then I’ll be free to move around.”
“That’s all?”
“We may need to iron out some details later,” he said, “but that’s all for now. Deal?”
His right hand bent up under the strap, ready to shake on it. A gentlemen’s agreement.
I reached down and unfastened the strap.
Chapter 23
NOW
“So,” growled the ex, “we meet again and all that shit, eh, dragon man? Bet you weren’t expecting this.”
St. George pushed Sorensen behind him. “How the hell did you survive?” he asked the dead man. “Cerberus killed you. We burned your body with a few hundred other corpses.”
“And I got better.” The ex laughed. It was a dry sound. “I’m Peasy, esse. Patient zero. D’you think I’d go down that easy?”
“You’re not patient zero,” said St. George. “You’re patient zero’s first victim, a street punk and a murderer who lucked out and got superpowers.”
“It wasn’t luck,” said Sorensen. He cleaned his glasses in a half-hearted way. “He was one of the Krypton subjects before I took control of the project a few years ago. I thought we’d flushed all the synthetic hormones and steroids from his system, but when he was exposed to the ex-virus they reacted in unforeseen ways.”