“Mr. Everton? Is everything all right?”
I cast a sidelong glance at the desk officer, but he’s not paying attention. I lower my voice anyway. “It’s Vince. His clones — he makes them out of inanimate matter. Whatever’s on hand. If you’ve left him alone in a room, he can take it apart and make an army.”
“He’s in an observation room. I’m sure everything is fine.”
As soon as those words leave Peterson’s mouth, someone shouts “Get down on the ground!” behind him, followed by several more people adding things like “Now!” The sound of chairs being pushed back and people leaping to their feet echoes through the room, but over it all, I hear Vince’s voice, clear as a bell.
“Where are you, Dan? I can tell you’re close. I can feel your psychic stink. You sit on my brain like rancid oil, Dan.”
The shouted orders continue, but Vince keeps speaking to me. “Come here, Dan. Or I’m going to start hurting people.”
I eye Peterson desperately, then push past him to enter the station. “I’m here!”
The scene inside is barely controlled chaos. All of the officers in the room, maybe twenty or so, are on their feet facing away from me. Loose papers are drifting to the floor, phones have clattered to desks, and hastily-pushed-back chairs are slowly spinning in circles.
The focal point at the far end of the room is Vince Amano, standing calmly in an open doorway while half a dozen police officers point their guns at him, and twice that many shout various instructions. A few conflict, but they’re mainly still along the lines of “Get on the floor!” or “Get your hands up!”
Vince acts like none of them are there, though, and instead locks eyes with me from across the room. He sneers.
“Good of you to join us, Dan. Thought this might bring you running. You hypocritical, self-important, conniving waste of space.”
“What do you want, Vince?” I’m having to shout to be heard over the continuing clamor, but I’m not about to add to the confusion by striding into the middle of it. As it is, I’m getting a number of looks assessing whether I’m a enemy or ally. I do my best to project friendly vibes.
Vince laughs, the easy laugh of someone in total control of a situation. “In general? I think I’m moving up from the small time. This is a pretty nice place here. I think maybe I’ll move in.”
Great; I’m being toyed with again. I don’t see an option other than to play his game, though, so I ask, “But what do you want from me, Vince?”
He grins. “From you, Dan? I’m going to kill you. And there’s nothing anyone here can do to stop it.”
Vince takes a step forward, and immediately the room rings out with gunshots. I have no idea how many were fired, but at least two hit Vince, both squarely in the chest. His shirt shreds in two places and blood spurts free, darkening the surrounding material and spattering the floor, but although Vince staggers back a step, he does not fall.
“Ow,” says Vince, brushing at his chest like a man brushing away crumbs after a meal. Where he wipes away the blood, I catch a glimpse of unbroken skin beneath it.
“He’s got a vest!” someone shouts, and there’s a second volley of shots, one of which strikes Vince in the head, rocking it sharply to one side. Again comes the brief spray of blood, and skin flaps freely from the wound for a second before falling free and drifting to the floor.
Vince straightens his head and, while looking directly at the cop who shot him, uses the back of his hand to wipe away the blood. His head, like his chest, is whole and unblemished.
“Ow, I said,” he says with quiet menace. “Stop that.”
The officers are all frozen, unsure of what they’re seeing or what to do next. Vince raises his voice again. “Like that trick, Dan? I haven’t figured yours out, pyro, but I stumbled across that while I was trying. I’m fast, Dan. I can replicate myself to fix damage, using the material from whatever hit–”
I hear the jittering sound of a Taser being fired, and Vince convulses briefly before continuing, “–me. A lesson that not everyone here seems to be getting.”
He glares over his shoulder at the officer with the Taser, now trailing two useless wires that end without barbs. The policeman stares back, transfixed.
While Vince has his eyes off of me, I mutter sharply, “Peterson!”
“Yes?” he says, equally quietly.
“Get them out of here. As many as you can.”
“What’s that, Dan?” calls Vince. “I’d hate to miss a single sewage-laced word from your cesspit mouth.”
I take a few steps forward. “You’re a loser, Vince.”
Vince laughs, but sharply. “So, it has a spine!”
“Couldn’t get a crew until you made one. Couldn’t hack it as a robber until you became invincible. You know regular criminals knock over fast food places all the time, right? They do fine. You got beat by, what was it, a mop bucket?”
“That wasn’t me!” spits Vince.
“Not directly, but it was you. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Finally someone who’ll put up with you, and all you had to do was build them yourself.”
With hands clenched, Vince starts toward me again, only to go down in a hail of bullets. He’s struck over a dozen times, driven to his knees on the floor, but while my ears are still ringing with the echoes of the shots, he rises again, his clothes in tatters.
“Enough of that,” he snarls. “Come!”
From the door behind him, the clones pour through. A few are in street clothes, but most are wearing a motley assortment of prison scrubs and police uniforms, clearly looted from the police station. Over two dozen clones come through the door, outnumbering the police officers, and Vince’s expression settles back into a cocky grin as the police fall back from the emerging mob.
“If I’m so easily beaten, you whimpering rodent, then come and take me on.”
I start to respond, but before I can, one of the policemen tackles Vince from the side, driving him to the ground. As one, the mob of clones rushes to his aid, and the officer disappears under a tide of bodies. Drawing batons, the other officers enter the fray, and everything devolves into a sea of fists and incoherent yelling.
I think about joining in, but considering how easily Vince has taken me out on every occasion we’ve tangled, I can’t see how I would add anything helpful. The tide is already quickly turning against the police; although a number of the clones appear to be injured or at least bleeding, their teamwork is impeccable and they’re using it to great advantage.
Also, every time one of the cops hits the real Vince with a baton, it dissolves on contact as his nanomachines tear it apart to restore his body. Vince is making the most of this, putting himself in the way of the blows and methodically disarming the police.
In minutes, over half of the police are unconscious on the ground, and the remaining seven have pulled back into a tight protective knot. One of these is Peterson, bleeding heavily from his nose but looking otherwise unhurt.
“Get them out of here!” I shout at him. “It’s only going to get worse.”
Vince laughs mockingly. “What makes you think I’m going to let them go, toy hero?”
Instead of answering, I gesture, and the ceiling between the two groups erupts into flame, dropping chunks of burning tile even as it roars outward. The Vinces and the police all recoil, and I shout again, “Get them out!”
At last, Peterson listens, and with a barked command leads a run for the door. As he passes me, he shoots me a significant glance, but I have no idea how to interpret it. Is he telling me to take Vince down? To wait for backup? To not accidentally set the unconscious cops on fire? I need to get better at nonverbal communication.
As it stands, though, all I can do is follow through on the plan I came in here with. It honestly wasn’t all that good a plan to begin with, and it really made a lot more sense when I pictured fighting Vince in some sort of empty building. Also, I had hoped that there would be a lot fewer of him. I didn’t know about the invu
lnerability trick before, either. They say that no plan survives contact with the enemy, but this thing’s so far past survival that sticking with it at this point feels more like necromancy.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, though, everything starts to look like a nail. All I have is fire — and when you get right down to it, this building’s as flammable as any other.
“Come on, Vince!” I shout over the crackle of the fire. “I don’t care how many of you there are. I’ll take you all out!”
The Vinces circle slowly around me like a pack of hyenas, edging closer as they go. From somewhere outside the circle, one calls out, “Oh, but Dan! You haven’t seen all of my new tricks yet. It’s not just how many of me there are. It’s also how much.”
The ring of Vinces around me laugh at the look of confusion on my face. Before I can figure out what he meant by that, I hear a quiet popping noise coming from the floor, and look down to see a spreading stain coming from one side of the circle, which has parted to let it through. At the far end, I see the original Vince crouched down, fingertips pressed against the carpet.
Near me and closing in by the second, I see a nightmare.
Vince has clearly branched out from creating complete copies of himself, and learned how to make partial copies. Rippling toward me, converting the carpet as it goes, is a horrifying pale mass of fingers, toes, eyes, hands and more, joined in a sickening pool of skin. I have no idea if this organic carpet has any sort of intelligence, but it is clearly alive, as every limb, every digit, every organ is moving.
I flash the carpet in front of me into flame, halting its advance, but I’ve now cut my space in the circle in half, and the clones are dangerously close behind me. Fire in front, street-fighting clones behind, and a writhing mass of flesh threatening to literally consume the entire building — at the very least, my plan can’t make things much worse for me.
I turn my back on the fire I’ve created and face the clones, arms at my sides, palms up.
“All right,” I say. “Who’s first?”
In the movies, there would have been a moment of hesitation while they all looked at each other. One of them would have stepped forward to begin the fight, and I’d start taking them on one by one. Unfortunately, Vince has clearly seen the same movies and knows that that doesn’t work out in favor of the mob, as the eight clones in front of me all rush me at once.
I draw two lines of fire in wide arcs behind them, one on the floor and one on the ceiling. This encircles them in a space about 20 feet across, trapping them in a relatively small area. Of course, I’m also trapped in this area with them, but that’s all right; I was bait for this part of the plan.
Getting a firm grip on my backpack, I swing wildly at the nearest clone, catching him in the shoulder. It’s not a particularly damaging hit, but since he had no idea that the backpack contained an oxygen cylinder, the unexpected force of it knocks him sideways into his duplicates, tumbling them into each others’ way for a split second.
He grabs for the backpack, but I’ve already pulled it back and tucked it tightly to my chest. Then, shutting my eyes, I run backwards as quickly as I can.
For a moment, heat engulfs my entire body, and light flares against my squeezed-closed eyes. There’s a crackle like brittle plastic being crushed right next to my ears, and the unpleasant smell of burning hair. Then I’m through, stumbling backwards and colliding painfully with a desk which is thankfully not yet on fire.
Frantically, I check the backpack, but it seems to have survived the trip unharmed. I think I’m all right, too, though parts of my skin feel a bit crisp and I can see that my arm hair’s been singed away. The surface burn joins the still-healing nose, ribs, finger, skull and assorted bruises in the catalog of damage. I’m starting to forget what it’s like to not be in at least mild pain all of the time.
There’s no time for self-pity right now, though, as the architect of most of that pain is bearing down on me now. He comes in swinging, but I duck and clobber him with the phone from the desk, tangling him briefly in the cord.
He kicks for my knee as he frees himself from the obstruction, but it’s a glancing blow and, as stated, I’m getting used to powering through injuries. Grabbing the computer monitor off of the desk, I bash it haphazardly against the side of his head, and my lucky shot connects; Vince goes down hard, cracking his face against the side of the desk on the way down.
Of course, three more clones are already on their way, and the desk is clear of large objects now. I grab a cup full of pens and hold one threateningly in front of me.
A Vince laughs. “What are you going to do, write a letter of complaint about us?”
I throw the pen at him, and as he reaches to swat it disdainfully aside, I explode it into the hottest flame I can manage. He lets out a surprisingly high-pitched shriek, clasping his hands to his chest like an offended 1800s schoolmarm. The other two clones, warier now, fan out slightly, working to surround me.
I sit on the desk and swing my legs over, twisting as I land on the far side to keep facing the clones. Once there, I heave the desk over at them, setting it on fire as it goes. They recoil, drawing back closer together, and I draw another ring of fire around them, hemming them in. Obviously, any of them can break out the same way I did, but I’m hoping that the knowledge that there are others out there to stop me will cause them enough hesitation to stay put, at least for a little while longer.
I need to find the real Vince. The air is becoming thick with smoke and hazy with heat, and fires are casting strange shadows everywhere. If he escapes, this was all for nothing.
It’s possible that he already has. He could have ducked out the back door as soon as I lost sight of him behind that second wall of flame. If so, I’m wasting time with his doubles here while I should be chasing him.
He set this up, though, so I don’t think he’s gone. He planned this as a showdown, and as far as he knows, he’s still winning it. He’s got to still be here somewhere.
I try the quickest way I can think of to draw him out: taunting. “Hey Vince! You…loser!”
I need to work on my vocabulary. Vince has a seemingly bottomless well of names to call me, and Regina did before him, too. Meanwhile, pretty much all I’ve got is “loser.” It’s kind of embarrassing. I’m getting shown up by a two-bit criminal.
Repetitive or not, though, it works. From somewhere in the smoke, I hear, “I’m going to watch you swallow your own intestines, Dan!”
Shoot, that’s really evocative. I have seriously got to step up my game.
I start to walk towards where I heard his voice, but something’s wrapped around my ankle. I look down, preparing to free it, and shout aloud wordlessly.
Vince’s horrifying human stain has been spreading, and has now come up behind me. My ankle is caught in the grasp of a half-formed hand, a thumb and two fingers melting directly into a puddle of formless, freckled flesh. An eyeball turns to look at me, and a mouth bursts forth to sink into the side of my shoe. More fingers extrude as I watch, reaching upward and pulling hands behind them, clambering their way up my leg.
This is not a person. You can burn it, says the logical corner of my mind, and for once the emotional part fervently agrees with it. With a shudder of revulsion, I light up the writhing pile of flesh, and tear myself free from the burning mass as it flails, trying to escape the flames. The smell of roasting meat rises from it, sickening me even as my mouth automatically waters.
I’ve left my right shoe behind, burning along with that section of the fleshpuddle, and my sock and pants leg are also on fire. I slap at them with both hands, stifling the fire, as Vince laughs somewhere in the dimness of the station.
“Keep laughing, Vince!” I shout, then stop to cough as I inhale smoke. “Keep laughing. I’m coming for you!”
“Bring it, parasite! I can do this all day.”
I kneel down on the ground and peer in all directions, squinting to see through the smoke. I know Vince must be able to see me, j
udging by his laughter, so it follows that I should be able to see him, too.
At first, I see nothing but furniture, fires, the grasping limbs of the body pool, and the unconscious forms of the fallen cops. Then, just as I’m about to give up, I spot Vince, crouched on the floor exactly where I last saw him. He’s on one knee, his hands pressed against the floor at the origin point of the replicating mass. His face is tucked into the armpit of his jacket to breathe, which means he isn’t looking at me right now. This is perfect.
I break into a run — not toward Vince, but toward the cops. The arms of the puddle grab for me as I leap over it, and the two spot fires I run through add to my burns, but I make it there successfully.
“I see you, Dan!” Vince calls out mockingly, and a clone lunges at me from the haze. He slams a fist into my temple and I see stars, but there’s no immediate followup. My vision clears and I see the clone stomping on the hand of one of the cops, who’s awake enough to have grabbed him around the ankle. With the clone thus distracted, I swing as hard as I can with the backpack, cracking him across the side of the head. He staggers to the side and, with the policeman’s hand holding his ankle in place, falls over.
The clone screams as teeth sink into his neck and hands clutch at his eyes, seeking purchase. The flesh mass has closed the distance and is apparently unconcerned with friend or foe. I start toward the clone to pull him out, but with a dozen cops on the ground and both the fires and the mass closing in fast, there just isn’t time. I turn my back even as his screams choke off wetly.
I start dragging the nearest desk over to the cops. The one who’s moving looks up at me.
“Can you get up?” I ask him, and he nods. “Then help me make as much shelter as you can. I’m — this place is about to go up.”
He lurches to his feet and grabs the other side of the desk. As we pull it, he catches sight of the rapidly approaching pool of body parts.
“What — what –” he coughs, pointing.
“No time! Pull this!”
“You’re surrounded, Dan!” Vince calls out, and I see that he’s right. He’s brought the mass in on all sides, and we’re in the center of a circle no more than thirty feet across and shrinking quickly.
The Experiment (Book 2): Making Friends Page 12