by David Estes
Mars sneers at him. “While you were getting nowhere with Harrison Kelly, his friend, Chuck Boggs, has already informed me of where he was headed. There’s a good chance Benson Kelly will be going to the same place.”
“Where? I can have a team ready in ten minutes.” The Destroyer suddenly feels frantic, like this might be his last chance to terminate the Saint Louis Slip. His final chance to prove himself.
“You’re not going,” Mars says, tapping the device casually, as if daring the Destroyer to contradict him.
The Destroyer grinds his teeth. “You can’t trust anyone else with this.”
“Trust?” Mars scoffs. “You’re the one I can’t trust. You’ve failed me every step along the way. I gave you a new life, a body that exceeds all others, and what have you done with it? Nothing, that’s what.”
The Destroyer swallows to douse the burning in his throat. “Then who?” Whoever it is, he’ll kill them the first chance he gets.
“Me,” Mars says. “I’m the only one I can trust with this mission.”
The Destroyer grimaces, his eyes flicking to the device clutched between Mars’s gnarled white fingers. Let down your guard, old man, he thinks. Let down your guard one time and we’ll see how tough you really are. There’s nothing left of you but lonesome stories of past glories. “Good luck, sir,” he says, hiding his thoughts. “I’ll try to get information on the Lifer’s whereabouts.”
“You do that,” Mars says. “It’s only you and me down here. Don’t fail me again.”
~~~
When Harrison startles awake, he hears the stomp of heavy metallic feet heading his way. He steels himself, keeping his eyes shut and pretending to be unconscious. His whole body feels cold, like he’s packed in ice, but he wills himself not to shiver.
The footsteps come closer, until they sound like they’re right on top of him. He forces himself to breathe, maintaining a restful cadence, his chest rising and falling in deep undulations.
The punch smashes into his abdomen, forcing a gasp through his lips and flinging his eyes open with shock. He struggles to breathe, the wind crushed out of him, as the Destroyer grabs him around the throat, squeezing him. His eyes bug out and his face goes as hot as the sun and he knows this is the end.
Still, he strains against his bindings, bucking and thrashing and trying to break the unbreakable. Spots dance in front of his vision and the bright overhead lights seem to dim. Exhaustion takes him and he stops fighting. The Destroyer spits in his face and releases him.
Harrison’s mouth, already open like a fish, sucks in a tumultuous breath that seems to sear his esophagus and lungs like a hot poker being shoved down his throat. And yet it feels so good, like breathing is the best thing in the world. His chest heaving, he pants, trying to get as much oxygen into his body as he can, just in case his attacker decides to choke him again.
But he doesn’t.
He just stands there calmly, waiting for Harrison to compose himself.
After a few minutes he says, “My boss is going to go kill your brother right now.”
Harrison’s heart stutters. No. “You’re lying,” he says.
The Destroyer smiles. “Your friend told us everything. We have intel that says your brother was heading toward Saint Louis. Your mother was with him. We lost him in the storm, but now that we know where you were going, we know where he was going. Trying to kill your brother’s Death Match was a gutsy move, I’ve got to give you that.”
Harrison can’t seem to find his breath, and not because of the punch he took to the stomach, or the choking. He did this. In his relentless desire to try to save Benson, he’s put his entire family in danger, leading them like lambs to the slaughter. His brother saw right through his harsh words to what they really were—a lie to get him to hate him.
And now he’s in Saint Louis, charging headfirst into a trap.
Harrison tries to hide his expression. He needs to be smarter. Stop insulting the cyborg. Come up with a better plan.
“I lied to Chuck Boggs,” he says, concocting the lie as he speaks it. “I didn’t fully trust him. Your boss is now on a wild goose chase that will lead him nowhere. If you let me go, I’ll cooperate. I’ll take you to my brother and we’ll see if you can back up all your big talk.”
The Destroyer smiles like it’s all a big joke, but Harrison can almost see the wheels spinning inside his skull. He’s considering whether he could possibly be telling the truth. The risks versus the potential rewards. Analyzing his options from back to front and everything in between.
“You sure you’re not lying?” the Destroyer says.
“I swear it,” Harrison lies.
“Care to prove it?”
“How?” he asks, before he realizes he’d probably rather not know.
The Destroyer’s smile is razor sharp. “A kid I met in military school, a guy named Isaiah, taught me a valuable lesson one day. There was an arrogant prick, not unlike yourself, who’d been messing with him. You know, teenager stuff, putting dog crap in his locker, stealing his holo-screen and deleting his homework—that sort of thing. Harmless but frustrating. Isaiah said he was going to put a stop to it and I asked him how, expecting him to round up a gang of guys to beat the snot out of the guy. ‘Dom,’ he said, ‘if you want to control the dragon, grab it by the heart and not the tail.’”
The Destroyer’s hand curls into a fist, squeezing at the air as if clamping down on an invisible heart. Harrison doesn’t know where this is going, but he suspects it won’t be anywhere good.
“The guy’s kid sister went to our school, too. She was a pretty girl, just starting to bloom. Isaiah snuck into her dormitory and took photos of her. Sleeping. Bathing. He sent the photos, along with a message, to the prick. The guy never did a damn thing to him again.”
Harrison blinks. As screwed up a story as it was, he doesn’t get the point of it. “I don’t have a kid sister,” he says. “Just a brother. And like I said, I’ll take you to him.”
“You’d say anything to get me to let you go. But I don’t mean your brother. I mean a girl.” He walks over to Destiny’s body, touching a finger to her bare foot and running it up her leg, over the towel covering her midsection, along her abdomen, over her covered breasts, along the curve of her neck and chin, around her nose and between her eyes, all the way to the tip of her frizzy hair.
The rage inside Harrison is an erupting volcano, but he won’t let it out. She’s already dead, he reminds himself. This deranged cyborg can’t hurt her anymore. He has to stay calm, for his family’s sake. “What are you going to do—kill her again?” he spits out.
“Have you ever heard of the anacia seed?” the Destroyer asks, throwing Harrison off his guard.
“No,” he admits, more confused than ever.
“The plant was discovered a few years ago, growing high in the mountains. It’s brown and brittle and doesn’t look like much, but when its seeds are ground up and injected into the bloodstream the effects are quite interesting.”
“Interesting how?”
“It slows down the body. Breathing becomes so faint it’s nearly invisible to the naked eye; the heartbeat is so dim and irregular that detecting a pulse becomes impossible; the body essentially shuts down to the point where it appears dead.”
Harrison’s own heart speeds up, an impossible conclusion pushing its way to the forefront of his mind.
The Destroyer slides a long needle from a sheath and flicks it with his forefinger, squirting some of the liquid out. Harrison starts to shout “No!” but the cyborg has already jammed the needle into Destiny’s corpse’s neck.
Only she’s not a corpse. Her eyes spring open and she gasps, sitting up.
Destiny is alive.
Harrison’s initial burst of hope is replaced a split-second later by a sharp prick of fear as he realizes she’s the Destroyer’s next target.
Chapter Thirty
Despite the cloud cover, which Janice thinks is as thick as a woolen blanket, thril
l-seeking shards of sunlight manage to slash their way to the street level and through the window of their aut-car. She holds out her arm, watching as the light cuts her wrist to ribbons of pink and yellow.
It’s funny for her to watch. Not funny ho-ho-ho but funny like interesting. Funny like strange. Funny like…what was that word she used to like so much? Yes, ironic. It’s ironic because a very short time ago she’d wished she didn’t have bars on her windows so she could break them into shards a similar size and shape to the beams of sunlight now warming her arm. Not to escape, no, but to slash herself open. Her blood was so cold inside her body, like melted snow, and all she wanted was to let it out.
But now.
Now her blood is as hot as an inferno, so she’s glad that the knives of sunlight can’t hurt her.
“Mom, you okay?” Benson asks her.
She giggles because she has so many responses that she can’t pick just one. Three maybe, but not one. “Yes because of sun shards. No because of my missing son. Yes because of irony.”
Benson smiles and it makes her smile. His smile looks like a letter u, which is good, but not as good as a letter w, which is what she gets when both of her sons smile at the same time, like at their birthday party. “We’ll find Harrison and then you can have three yesses,” Benson says.
She doesn’t explain to him that she had hundreds of other nos that she just didn’t say.
“Keys, peas, fleas, teas, seize, please, and thank you,” she says instead.
“Keys,” Benson says absently. “The key.”
Minda says, “Don’t think about that. We need to focus on Harrison.”
Of course, that only makes Janice think about it more. The key. Those two words trigger a memory in her mind.
Her husband, Michael Kelly, visiting her in the asylum.
She shakes her head, willing the unwanted memory away.
Her screaming and clawing at her skin, impulses she couldn’t control. Angry words bubbling up from her throat like boiling water. Michael sitting by her side through it all, as the orderlies held her down, securing her in a strait jacket.
“Don’t remember, don’t remember, don’t forget, don’t forget,” she murmurs, not noticing when her mutterings draw Benson’s attention. Minda stares at her, too, her dark expression impossible to read.
“Don’t forget what I tell you, okay?” Michael told her.
She strained against the jacket, trying to rip it apart. “I hate you!” she’d said. She’d hated him every bit as much as she’d loved him.
“Just…don’t forget,” Michael repeated.
“Mom?” Benson says. “Don’t forget what?”
“Don’t forget,” she repeats. Minda leans closer, watching her carefully. She hates when people look at her like that—like she’s a zoo animal.
“This will sound like gibberish,” her husband had said, “but I need you to repeat what I say. Repeat it over and over again until you’ll never forget it.”
She’d stopped straining—stopped screaming—and even her blood had stopped boiling. She always liked games. This was a new one. A remembering game. “Don’t forget,” she’d said in response.
“Exactly,” Michael had said. And then he told her what she had to remember.
“Nonsense,” Janice says.
“What’s nonsense?” Benson asks.
Her son’s eyes are like bright blue marbles and she starts to reach out to touch them before she remembers that eyes are not playthings. Not touchable. “Everything your father said was nonsense, but maybe important, too,” she says.
Benson looks out the window and she can’t see his marble eyes. “I wish Harrison was here,” he says. Janice does, too, but maybe not for the same reasons as Benson.
Minda says, “You might just get your wish. We’re almost there.”
Janice taps at the window glass, which is starting to fog up as their body heat inside the aut-car meets the outside chill.
Her fingers have become claws and she wonders why the glass doesn’t break.
~~~
The table is moving. The head of it is curving upwards, bringing Destiny’s head up with it. Her feet remain in the same spot, hovering just off the floor. Her whole body is in an upright position, strapped to the table, which is now more like a game hunter’s mounting board.
Harrison swears under his breath.
“Harrison?” Destiny says, her wild eyes finally finding him. She’s disoriented, as if waking up from a hundred-year sleep to rival that of Rip Van Winkle.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says automatically, even though it’s probably not.
“Harrison?” she says again. “Where are—” Her second question is cut off by the scream she lets out when the Destroyer cups her chin in his metal hand.
“You’re enticing,” the Destroyer says. “Firm lines. Reluctant curves. Pity I have to take you apart piece by piece. Then again, you are one of the criminals stealing food from the mouths of babies.”
Harrison says, “Get your filthy hands off of her!” but he knows there’s no threat behind his words. The situation is hopeless. He knows that even if he gives the cyborg the information he wants, he’ll still kill them both. Which means…
He has to stay silent.
But he can’t, can he? He can’t watch Destiny be tortured when he has the power to stop it. According to the Destroyer, his brother and mom are already away from the Lifers, and the Lifers have probably moved on anyway, so why can’t he tell his torturer about the deserted town they were squatting in? Would it really make any difference?
Telling him the truth might not save them, but it might save them from suffering. A quick end—that’s the best he can hope for. Especially for Destiny, who’s been through enough already.
The Destroyer turns his attention to Harrison.
“I’m sorry,” Harrison says, looking past the metal freak.
“You saved my life,” Destiny says.
“And led you here.”
“You gave me a chance for redemption.”
“You never needed it.”
The Destroyer starts a slow clap, which sounds like the equivalent of a metal gong being rung. “Touching,” he says. “Want me to move you two closer so you can tongue-kiss and fondle each other before I torture you?”
“You won’t need to torture anyone,” Harrison says. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
The Destroyer cocks his head to the side. “Whoa-ho! That’s a change in attitude. No snarky comment? No insults?”
“I’m ready to talk.”
The Destroyer grabs Harrison by the neck and punches him in the face. The impact is like a hammer blow, or at least what Harrison expects getting hit by a hammer would feel like. He hears something crunch—his jawbone perhaps—and feels the sting of pain and the taste of blood in his mouth when he bites his tongue. His left eye is closed and he can’t seem to open it.
With no other choice, he spits out a mouthful of blood. “Ow,” he says, his voice monotone, trying to hide the agony screaming inside his head. He doesn’t want to give the Destroyer the satisfaction.
“You’re ready to tell lies,” the Destroyer says. “But not if I give you something else to think about while you’re speaking.” He turns back to Destiny. “Rather, someone to think about.”
“No,” Harrison says. “I’m already thinking about her. I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Maybe,” the Destroyer muses, touching Destiny’s bellybutton. Harrison sees her abs clench, her eyes close. Go to another place, he thinks. Anywhere but here. “But that would take all the fun out of things.”
Once again, a knife slides out of his palm. The shriek of metal draws Destiny’s eyes open, even as he holds the knife up in front of her face. Something’s happening to the metal, Harrison realizes. It’s…changing color. Going from metallic silver to a dull orange to a bright red. Getting hotter and hotter. Hot enough to sear human flesh. Hot enough to melt skin. Hot enough to—
&nb
sp; “Most of us take our vision for granted,” the Destroyer says.
Destiny jams her eyes shut again and Harrison says, “No, take mine. Leave. Her. Alone.”
The Destroyer raises an eyebrow, making the tiny hairs brush against the bottom of the metal plate that runs the length of his forehead. “You’d go blind for her?” he says. “You’re even dumber than I thought.”
“And yet smarter than you,” Harrison retorts, unable to hold his tongue any longer.
“Ahh, there’s the Harrison Kelly I know and love to hate. The boy who had everything. You know, you could’ve lived a fine life. Even with your traitorous father you could’ve done quite well. Pled ignorance to his sins. Denounced him as your father. Become a huge celebrity. Instead you’re here, sticking up for a”—he screws up his face—“Slip, throwing everything away for a bunch of criminals you have nothing in common with. Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Harrison says.
“Try me.”
“Because the situation you’re born into doesn’t dictate who you are or who you become.”
“You’re delusional,” the Destroyer says. “I didn’t choose to become”—he taps his metal shoulder—“this. I had dreams, too. I wanted to be normal. But life chose me for a higher calling. And your life gave you everything; all you had to do was take it.”
Harrison is silent.
“Now I’m taking her eye, and you can’t stop me,” the Destroyer says, moving the tip of the knife toward Destiny’s face. She screams, her eyes flashing open.
Something powerful explodes inside Harrison as every muscle and tendon and bone in his body strain against his bounds, which feel like anchors against his skin. Subconsciously, he realizes he’s shouting, trying to use the strength of his voice to snap the cords and buckles.
The knife inches closer, so close that it eclipses Destiny’s eye, so he can only see the other eye, which is wide with fear and pleading.
Harrison screams truths, about the town the Lifers are in and about who their leader is and about where Benson must be going. Names and places and anything that pops into his head. It comes out so quickly and messily that the words run together, like a foreign language with no beginning and no ending.