by Schow, Ryan
I know this like I know my own soul.
6
How Maggie is held hostage by her defining traumas, that’s how much I’m held hostage by my need to do something. Anything! I have to help Maggie, and I have to help the clones. It’s not right, the way they live. Someone has to do something for them! Someone should at least try giving them some sort of dignity!
When I wonder what to do, all that happens is I start feeling really small against that cause. It’s a cowardice I can barely admit. But it has me thinking. I’ve been wondering if they can be integrated into our world, and I reason that it might be possible. Seeing Maggie tortured by her memories, knowing the clones are hostages to science, I decide that—unless I do something for both of them—all I will do is obsess about killing the rapist.
Which I can’t do.
The rapist is not a genetic freak, not like Gerhard’s war model. That piece of shit is a real flesh and blood person. A flaming prick that deserves to be set on fire and burned to death, yes, but he’s real never-the-less. What I decide, while laying there with Maggie—what is critical to my survival—is that if I don’t put my energy elsewhere, I’m going to do the unthinkable, which is kill that motherf*cker for real.
7
When it comes time to go to the Stanford party, we get ready together until about halfway through, I see Maggie crashing again. She just stops doing her hair. It’s like she quits breathing for a moment. Then these gigantic tears gather in her eyes like storm clouds and I know our night with the Stanford boys is going to be a bust.
“I can’t do it,” she says, the tears finally dripping from her eyes onto her cheeks. Some people are ugly when they cry; Maggie isn’t one of them. For some reason, she looks so beautiful when she’s crying and that makes me feel so much worse. I hug her tight, holding her shaking body up against mine for safety.
“It’s okay, Magpie. We don’t have to go.”
“It’s just, what if one of them wants to, what if he—?”
“Let’s stay in,” I say. “We can stay in.”
Instead of partying with the Stanford men on campus, we end up chilling with my father. We watch The Host, a movie about aliens taking control of our minds, and it seems fitting. All these crazy thoughts of rape and murder and genetic modification, they’re alien thoughts to girls our age, but not us. Sometimes it feels like our minds are not ours anymore.
We turn in by eleven, Maggie to the guest room and me to mine, and I just lay there, worrying, plotting, seething. I can’t scrape my brain clear of these toxic thoughts. Maggie was made to endure a grievous injustice, one I feel compelled to do something about. What is it about having boy DNA that makes you want to break things?
I kick the covers off my legs, punch the pillow to fluff it, cross my arms. Why can’t I be more of a normal girl? Why can’t I obsess over purses and shoe shopping and makeup and clothes? OMG, life would be so cake and ice cream if that were the case!
It would be so easy.
God in heaven, I swear my life was more manageable when I was fat and unpopular. Netty and me were besties, I had no boy problems, and fugly or not, I was all girl. Not some science experiment. Like I said, easy. Or maybe not.
I don’t know.
My feet kick the covers completely off the bed. Violently my hands re-fluff my pillow. All this thrashing around, trying to get comfortable…it isn’t working. Will I ever get comfortable? I guess it’s the newness of my pretty-girl problems that has me flustered. Jesus, I hate feeling like I’ve got sand in my vagina all the time. My life is good! Blessed. It’s just…I don’t know…I can’t really ever seem to get my bearings, and it has me bristling. The way I’m feeling so quick tempered, I could be a feral cat.
Or a terrorist.
I roll over in bed and it’s two thirteen in the morning. Here I am, wide awake with my thoughts. Wide awake fighting for sleep, fighting my linens.
Man, I hate this.
It’s about fifteen minutes later when I decide I’m going to do the right thing and kidnap one of the clones. Two minutes after that I decide to do it first thing in the morning.
Georgia
1
The lab was quiet. Dr. Evan Cameron’s mouth sat perfectly shut. He looked at Gerhard who appeared equally puzzled. The naked girl in the tall glass canister, she was improving, but they couldn’t get her to look the same. Her facial structure was different. Not vastly so, but enough that she looked more like a cousin to the girl she was before. That should be okay, shouldn’t it?
“I don’t understand,” Cameron finally said. He looked older than Gerhard, but just as fit. With wispy blonde hair combed neatly to the side, and wire-rimmed glasses sitting halfway down the bridge of his nose, he looked more studious. More introspective.
“We replicated everything,” Cameron said. “The original solution, the same DNA components, the same base components.”
“Nature is anything but an exact science,” Gerhard said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. “She’s still beautiful though. Don’t you think? I think so.”
“There’s that.”
“We don’t have informed consent for the additional…modification, do we?”
Gerhard was lost in the girl. “The C-714 modification?” he said, unblinking.
“Yes.”
Gerhard finally blinked, then turned to the unlicensed and previously disgraced doctor and fixed him with a stare. “You didn’t really think you’d get permission for that, did you?”
“I’d hoped to try. If anything to avoid any unnecessary scrutiny.”
“Hope is a fool’s burden,” Gerhard said. Turning his eyes back to the girl, he said, “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Besides, the girl looked like a giant, newborn cat, and now she’s not.”
Cameron took a moment’s pause. “So we do the modification?”
The girl floated in stasis in the glass canister filled with a viscous, pink solution. Her hair was suspended in motion, a snap shot of that space between life and death. Like a recently drowned victim not yet pulled from the still waters that held her.
“Of course we do the modification,” Gerhard said in a clipped tone. “When the hell else are we going to have this kind of opportunity?”
“She could die,” Cameron replied. “The body could reject the serum.”
“I’m well aware of the risks, Doctor.”
“I thought you liked this girl,” Cameron said.
“The time for compassion, or even caution, has passed. This child has all but expired in the minds of her parents. A perfect opportunity. Besides, we’re scientists, are we not?”
“We are,” Cameron said with a creeping grin.
“Young Georgia here,” Gerhard said, his tone less grating and more poetic, “will be our greatest triumph.”
“Or she’ll be another dead child,” Cameron said, the grin melting.
Gerhard turned to Cameron and, with a straight face, he shrugged and said, “I can live with that.”
After a moment’s consideration, Cameron said, “As can I, Doctor.”
“Good. Now let us administer this new serum and pray she does not expire.”
History Favors the Bold
1
Normally I’d say you would have to put a shotgun to my head to get me up at six A.M. on summer break, but not today. Today I’m going for a premature evacuation. I’m pulling out early. Heading to the city. Finally. I say finally because I made the decision to kidnap the clones not last night, but several nights ago. Since then I’ve had a gigantic case of the chickenshits.
But not now. Not anymore. This morning, I reach into my panties and find my big girl testes.
I’m awake long before the alarm goes off. Lying in the dark under the not insignificant weight of my comforter and a throw blanket on top of it, I turn the plan over in my mind. It’s got all kinds of holes in it. Oh, well.
I convince myself it’s best to do something, even if it’s wrong, over doing nothing
. And so it goes. Silencing my alarm before it goes off, I haul myself out of bed and go to the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror, I pull my hair in a ponytail, put on black sweats, a black sweatshirt with a hoodie and a kangaroo pouch, then grab the bag under the counter containing my tazer and my stun gun. They should be charged enough to take down a decent sized man.
Maybe two.
When it comes to assault, you can never be too prepared. Besides, it won’t be a man I’m taking down. It will most likely be Nurse Arabelle, which leaves me conflicted. We’ve been getting along so well lately.
As I’m silently wolfing down a menial breakfast, I’m rolling over the details of what will soon be my first daylight B&E/kidnapping. Before anyone can so much as crawl out of bed, I’m in my Audi, racing toward the Bay Area. Weaving semi-erratic through traffic, my restless mind continues to refine this otherwise haphazard plan.
F*ck it. History favors the bold, the brazen, the absolute fearless, right? The more complex the details, the greater the chances of failure. So I keep it simple because I’m not an idiot, I’m courageous.
Yeah, right.
The truth is, I’m terrified.
2
San Francisco’s morning traffic is a veritable nightmare, but eventually I get to Gerhard’s downtown office and by God’s will alone, some douchebag in a beamer pulls out of a spot like twenty yards from the front door. I edge out some dick in a beat-to-crap Toyota Corolla for the spot, do a bang up job of parallel parking, then swallow hard and deep and prepare to do my thing.
One twist of the knob of Gerhard’s office door tells me it’s locked. Great. Looking around, knowing I must be as conspicuous as possible, I pull out my tazer, conceal it in my kangaroo pouch, then knock on the door. I slide my hoodie over my head, lower my face into the shadow of it, then I wait.
As I expect, Nurse Arabelle opens the door. I don’t look up. She says, “Can I help?” and I say nothing. I don’t even move. She steps forward, like she’s going to touch my shoulder, or pull back my hoodie, and that’s when I step forward and zap her. She slumps in the doorway, cracking her head on the door frame sideways before dropping like deadweight onto the cold, tiled floor.
Dammit.
I kneel down, take a closer look. She’s out cold, not from being tazed, but from the fall. The act of tazing someone, it’s a pretty sick thing to do. Even if you’re a cop. But tazing Arabelle—a woman I worked extra hard to play nice with—holy balls, this is worse than horrible. I betrayed her trust. Now she’s hurt. The only reason I don’t double over and puke is because I’m considering the greater cause.
I step past her, drag her electrified, knocked-out body inside before anyone sees us, then close the door. Her neck is bent at an odd angle. Red-tinted saliva bubbles slowly on her parted lips. Her Amethyst eyes are rolled back. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise: she hasn’t seen me yet.
It’s crucial I keep it this way.
I’m assessing her when suddenly someone digs their fingers into my shoulder, spins me around and socks me in the gut so hard I double over from the pain. Before my brain grasps what’s happening, this monster in a white lab coat throws me to the floor and starts soccer-ball kicking me. Like, over and over again.
Both my tazers skid to the floor.
The size ten feet in leather-soled dress shoes stomp on my ribs and shoulder. They hammer my arms, my hands, my legs. I curl into a ball, pull my knees to my chest. One kick after another, it keeps coming—the assault. Finally, I scurry loose, weathering more kicks, grab the tazer and flip awkwardly toward my attacker. The foot kicks me right in the forehead. Pain flares in starbursts of light and heat. Reflexively, my hand relaxes on the tazer, my will slowly but certainly seeping from me.
Ohmigod, I’m thinking. It isn’t supposed to go this way…
Blood runs hot down my face, dripping onto the white tiles. He kicks me again and again. The same feet in the same place at the same unrelenting pace. My eyebrow splits and a niggling, vibrating, incredibly painful force works its way into my organs. Like things are being rearranged and punctured. My organs maybe, and my bones.
I cough, I choke, I swallow massive quantities of blood. One thought climbs over the rest: if I don’t do something now, I’m dead.
Through the flurry of kicks and German insults, my hand finds my tazer, the dart-pack loaded. Seeing the weapon, the man’s attack on me intensifies. OMG, he’s f*cking ruthless! I work to a knee, raising my face enough to see the lower half of his body coming at me. I try blocking the kick. It’s worse than I thought. The full force of his shin hits my forearm like a battering ram. A bone breaks. Mine.
My body sags, pitches forward. The tile meets my cheekbone, hard, the impact like a punch of stone thunking my whole skull. Then my mouth moans in pain. Already, my broken arm feels useless.
He keeps coming. Keeps kicking. My back, my sides, my butt and my legs.
Rolling over, pushing off a heel to get away from him, the thing I feel most is desperation. He’s a stern faced animal with a high, black hairline who takes a half-second break from his forward assault. I manage to point the tazer up at him and fire. I was aiming for the chest, but my efforts to survive left me all but depleted. The two darts bury into flesh: one in his outer crotch, one high on his thigh.
With everything left in me, I light that motherf*cker up. Yes, even as I’m zapping the hell out of him, I’m censoring my language. Trying to act like a lady in the midst of roasting some maniac’s nuts, it’s as stupid as it sounds. The truth is, a lady should never drop f-bombs, except in the company of her friends. And maybe not even then.
Then again, the situation being what it is, I say society’s unwritten rules can go f*ck themselves. As for now, my finger won’t let off the trigger. That crackling, electric sound is a symphony to my ears. After too long, I let go of the gun and the reception room falls silent.
My body softens with the weight of victory. There’s blood all over the floor. All over me. I try to stand, but the slightest pressure on my fractured arm and destroyed midsection has me barking out in pain. For the first time since nearly being radiated to death, I berate myself for being so single-minded. This cause, good God, it’s going to get me killed.
Yet some part of me likes this. Craves it. That boy part of me that yearns for trouble, chaos and aggression, the part of me dying for justice to be meted out, I swear I’m so in heaven right now! Except for the pain. Holy crap, I’m really hurting right now.
I work my way to my feet—trying not to slip in slicks of my own blood—then stagger down a long, sterile hallway leading to the lab. My fingers find my face; they return with smears of red.
So much for my perfect looks.
But thank God for adrenaline. If not for that, the swelling and pain might be unmanageable. I mean, for shit’s sake, my freaking face is soooo hot and swollen right now! And the tingling starting in under the skin, it’s like the fire ants marching. Pushing past my physical woes, I force myself forward. Remind myself why I’m here.
Down the hall in the lab, I expect to find one or maybe two clones, but there are four of them and once more I’m overwhelmed. At best I can get one of them free, maybe two. But all four of them? My arm won’t do the work. And my beat to crap face, it’s a throbbing mess that feels worse with exertion.
Plus, I’m sweating like a pig right now. The thing about adrenaline is sometimes it hits so hard you feel nauseous. I force myself to think. To focus. Make a decision! I tell myself. Whom do I save? Is one less deserving than the other?
Holy balls, my arm burns! And I’m sweating worse than ever. Seriously, the fire ants with their gigantic torches are marching! Finally I choose a girl who looks about my age—a startlingly attractive red head—and get started releasing her.
The flush of adrenaline has me high as a kite, and I’m terrified of the come down. The pain is starting to dull. All that’s left is a muted, scalding hot version of it. I’ll hit bottom sooner than later, I tell myself,
so I keep moving. I keep my mind occupied.
After haphazardly pushing several buttons right next to the girl’s glass canister, the pink fluid starts to drain. Outside, in the hallway, I hear moaning and a physical bump. Like a drunk stumbling around at night. Or falling down. Instantly I’m alert to more than just myself and the clone.
Grabbing my tazer with my good arm, I change out the spent head for a fresh dart-pack, then move toward the lab door. I ease it open, peek into the hallway. Down the corridor, ten feet away, a shaky looking Arabelle is trying to rouse the fallen man, who must be a doctor judging by his lab coat. She’s trying to pull him to his feet.
My brain is trying to figure out just what the hell to do when Arabelle’s eyes flick up and find me. Shit. The change in her is instant and disturbing. Like the very sight of me has her possessed by demons.
“Вы гнилые мало баба!” she snarls in her native tongue. I don’t know what all of that means, but I’m pretty sure баба means bitch.
She’s really unloading on me now, with that angry, foreign mouth. The purple-eyed woman is standing up tall so she can adequately project the force of her rage. Her words are fast, sharp as daggers. Her once beautiful face is inflamed. No longer is she the gorgeous nurse with the killer body and those wild, mesmerizing eyes. Not at all. What this one hundred and five pound Ukrainian minx has become is a homicidal maniac, the kind of blue-blooded psycho normal people turn and sprint from because you can just see the train’s coming off the tracks.
Practically paralyzed, I’m looking back at her and what I see is a hatred only the worst betrayal can produce. I clench and unclench the hand attached to my injured arm and find it no longer hurts so bad. Interesting. Stepping into the hall, I face her.
Wait for her.
She doesn’t see the tazer, or she’s too crazed to care, because she practically drops the fallen man in a heap and starts after me like she wants to kill me twice.