Abomination: The Young Adult World of Genetically Modified Teens and the Elite (Swann Book 7)

by Ryan Schow

“Your DNA signature. It took more than fifty years, but eventually that was how I tracked you.”

  What I’m seeing in her, what Alice might be keeping from me, chills me to the core. Makes me marvel at who I became to inspire such rancorous hatred from others.

  “I was there…for fifty years?” I ask, horrified.

  Alice nods her head.

  Holland turns those haunting eyes on me and says, “As pissed off as I am that I can’t exorcise you from my life, you’ve finally brought me something intriguing.”

  Saying this, his mouth rises into a sick grin and I expect to see those two front teeth with their trademark gap, that’s how conditioned I am, but the gap is gone and his smile is just…wrong. Like a serial killer going flush with sadistic delight. It’s the kind of smile that precedes malevolence.

  “Whenever you’re done gushing about the entertainment value of this monumentally distorted situation,” I say, disgust creeping into my every word, “let’s get those things off her.”

  “She might never regrow her limbs,” Holland says, returning to the task at hand.

  “It’s not her body that’s the problem,” Alice says, “it’s her sanity. Those earbuds drilled in her ears, they are powered by her body’s energy and they pump noise into her head constantly. Different genres of music. Opposing sounds played solely to oppress her ability to control anything. Everything. I don’t know how long they’ve been in there, but by the looks of them, I’m thinking decades. I think, and I’m sorry to say this Raven, but I think maybe she’s mentally, well, mentally ineffective.”

  “Broken,” I say, my skin flush with goosebumps. Alice looks at me, then slowly, sadly, nods her head.

  3

  For awhile the three of us hover around my battered future self’s body. The rough cut steel stump caps, as I’ve come to think of them, look impossible to remove, grinded down on one side with seemingly nothing to hold them in place. Not screws, or divots. Nothing. What in the hell fixed them so firmly to her stumps? And what about the earbuds jammed into her ears?

  God, I’m practically getting claustrophobic looking at them!

  Holland grips the rusted steel disc on the missing leg, gives it a firm wiggle to see how much play there is in the device, all the while watching my future body to see if this triggers a reaction.

  “Easy!” I bark. He gives no response.

  Despite all the wiggling, the body doesn’t move. Looking closer, hardened tongues of what look like calloused skin have grown around edges of the steel disc. The skin looks halted with rot, gnarled in mutant curls of fouled flesh.

  I touch it and it feels rough. Like the tougher edges of a heel. My fingers skitter away from the flesh; my mind is confused, revolted, enraged. For what someone has done to me, to us, I want answers.

  “I don’t care what it takes,” I hear my mouth saying to Holland, “fix her.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Fix her!” my voice booms, which causes something made of glass somewhere to crack sharply. Before Holland can respond, before my temper spirals out of control, I turn from the macabre scene and vacate the lab.

  “Where are you going?” future Alice asks, trailing after me.

  “If you can imagine it,” I say, walking to the elevator and stabbing the retrieval button, “I have more pressing things to take care of.” Like a dead teenage boy bled out in my bed.

  Tavares Baldridge.

  He would have made an excellent boyfriend.

  The elevator door opens. I step into it, press the UP arrow, then turn and hold Alice’s gaze as the metal doors close between us. Shen never even blinks.

  Bloodless and Depressed

  1

  As much as I want to stay with Holland and future Alice and tend to my ravaged future self, two things are happening: Tavares is a cadaver in my bed (which is now the site of a blood soaked, mind controlled massacre) and Jake can’t sleep (he’s lying awake in bed thinking about me and what I’ve become).

  I’m not sure why I’m trolling his mind, but I am. Perhaps it’s like the person you desire most who becomes the lover you can’t have and you despise him so much for the pain he’s caused that you eventually become obsessed with him, with what he’s thinking. If I see him again, I swear I’ll tell him to get out of my life forever. Or maybe I’ll kiss him. I don’t know.

  As I’m crossing campus, dawn presses near. The chilled morning air and moonless black sky, however, bequeaths me the cover of night. Reluctantly I walk back to my dorm room where the messy business of Tavares Baldridge awaits my attention. The second I open the door, sullied air slinks past me. It reeks of death: coppery and acrid, faintly metallic.

  Aside from the body, evidence of Tavares’s murder is splattered over several significant surfaces of the room. Blood is dried to a reddish-brown color and it’s everywhere: dried on the white sheets and comforter, geysered low on the wall behind the pillows I will never sleep on again, dried in rivers across his naked, abandoned body.

  Using telekinesis (I’m getting better at gracefully controlling more mundane tasks), I lift and tilt the body so he is lying face-up. The gash in his throat is meaty, puckered open. Scabs of crusted blood reveal a revolting texture. Pulling my gaze away from the wound, my eyes meet his eyes, eyes that are glassed over and dead, eyes that remain wide open and eerily vacant.

  I turn away, my emotions welling.

  The smell of his body is crippling. He was once a boy. Now he’s just rotting beef. I cross the room, sit down and try not to look at his naked body lying emptied out on my bed. I can’t help it. The whole room stinks of his passing.

  God, is it warm in here??

  Tears fill my eyes. The room goes so blurry I close my eyes and surrender myself to my grief. I barely knew him. Oh how I wanted to know him!

  But I’ll never truly know him.

  For the better part of an hour, I lose myself to fits of sobbing. I cry for everything. For this beautiful dead boy, for the Abby stand-in and how she almost killed herself, for Maggie who did kill herself, for Netty and her unborn child, for my loss of Jake, for the horrific state of my future self. Because of Tavares I killed Dr. Delgado and the corrupt Senator Wexford. My mind crawls with the memories of the Senator’s screams when I started peeling skin from her face and body, and I can’t scrape that memory loose of me.

  The Senator’s death, to my moral dismay, is the only thing to bring me peace.

  God, the satisfaction of that moment! The high of vengeance floods me, fills me with both pride and horror. To do that to a human being…that I’m even capable of that…it has become more terrifying than thrilling. Even after so much violence, justice of this decree holds sway over me in magical ways I can’t describe. The light of this high dies out fast when I consider everything I’ve lost. Grief has a way of turning gratification into distant thoughts, into evaporating memories.

  Outside my window, the sun breaks over the horizon and morning light finds its way upon me. Still I can’t move. I can’t move because I’m mortified by my actions, scared for what Alice says I’m becoming, exhausted from it all and so ready to not be me anymore. Then it breaks. Something in me splits wide open and I can function again.

  I know what I must do.

  Closing my eyes, I center myself, draw long, sustaining breaths. Using my mind, I release my invisible tentacles, thousands of them, millions of them. They find and attach themselves to Tavares’s blood, every last drop, half drop and dried flake; they bond with every atom, each and every individual molecule. My busy-bee tentacles separate the dried blood from fabric, paint and skin, from hardwood floors, plastics, glass. Eyes still shut, I gather all the blood into the air, reunite it and send it like some giant slithering snake across the room, into the bathroom and finally into the open toilet.

  My focus wavers at the sound of knocking on my door. It’s Jake. He’s been on his way for ten minutes now.

  Just one thought and I’m in his head, knowing why he’s here, what he wants. Gosh
damn, I don’t have time for this shit.

  2

  Without moving, or opening my eyes—without taking my attention off the task before me—I lift a hand and from ten feet away; my dorm room door opens. I can’t see him with closed eyes, but I feel him. He is gasping briefly. Going wide-eyed. Thinking he should leave right now.

  “No,” I say, answering the question in his mind. “Stay.” Reluctant, hypnotized by the unearthly scene before him, he comes in. With my mind, I shut the door, lock it.

  There is a giant twisting blood worm snaking through the air and Jake can’t peel his eyes from it. Dry and scaly looking, brownish red, the three-dimensional object-in-motion surges and reshapes itself with both weight and depth on its way to the bathroom. Jake can’t find his voice.

  He can hardly breathe.

  Flakes of dried blood lift off everything, join the slow-moving worm, make it fatter and longer as it treks through the air to the open toilet bowl, filling it. When it is all done, when the room is clean and the blood worm is drowned in the toilet, I use my mind to flush it, and only then do I draw a nourishing breath, exhale and open my eyes.

  I look right at Jake.

  He’s staring at me, his face sallow, afflicted. At least the room is clean. At least Tavares is clean, save for his razor-bladed neck.

  “You are an…an abomination,” Jake says, low, his voice trembling with something not good, something not the least bit misunderstood. There’s that motherfreaking word again!

  Pointed, my words sharp enough to cut, I say, “Says the guy who had sex with me then shot me in the face.”

  Part of me wishes I had never met Jake Teller, yet smaller, seemingly less important parts wish I knew him better. But I’m not going to crawl his mind to better understand his tone or expression. He’s handsome. Breathtaking really. But I’m seeing beyond that now. I’m on a higher plane. What I want is to talk to Jake, but what I need to do is figure out how to transport Tavares’s corpse to his dorm room without being spotted.

  I’ll wait until later this morning, until classes start. Then I’ll go. Satisfied I can’t do anything to remedy the situation now, I turn my attention on Jake, if anything to distract me from my pitiful life and how I’ve ruined everything.

  “He was an innocent boy in some sick political war,” I say, the sorrow in my words greater even than I imagined. “Both of us were casualties of the elite’s obsession with money and control.”

  Jake stands there like a f*cking mute, not knowing what to say, and this gives me a moment to wonder what happened to the future me. Is the war to control me won already? I can’t help wondering if I know the future, can I somehow change it? Or is it a fixed outcome? I wonder if I can be someone different, someone unkillable and uncontrollable. Can I save my future self?

  Jesus, I don’t know.

  But I do know. Yes, I do. The answer is no. It is clear by the body on my bed, and the body I brought back from the desert—my future self. Everything done to me since coming to this despicable school paints a clear picture of my fate not being my own.

  Jake finally speaks. Well halle-freaking-luiah, Helen Keller’s got a tongue! He says, “I saved my wife from dying. In the future, like we talked about. I arrived in time to stop Holland from giving her the shot.”

  “Then maybe you should go back to her and leave me to this,” my mouth says, weary, resigned to a life without him. Not that I want to be with him anymore. Jake was once a god in my eyes, perfect in every way. He was this unattainable creature I besot with every fiber of my being. Then I found out he was married, widowed, from the future and almost seventy years old. Sure he looks like he’s in his mid-twenties and he’s hot AF to the unsuspecting eye, the same way I’m hot AF and not at all like the fat, mud duck I used to be. The truth can cast shadows over the sun, though, and that’s how I see him now: as the thing that never was.

  He is my Jacob Brantley, my Damien Rhodes, my Tavares Baldridge.

  Looking at him, trying to see what I saw, I can’t muster even the barest thread of desire for him.

  “She said I should be with you,” Jake admitted, unaware my feelings have changed completely. “She said saving her changed the course of her life, and therefore ours. That we are not together yet, her and I.”

  “That’s cold,” I say with no emotion.

  My mind goes back to Tavares, what I did. I murdered people, buried people to death, stripped an old woman of her skin, but this? Oh, God, this?! Tavares’s death, I swear to Christ, will be the one that unwinds me. The death that ends me.

  This begs the question: how could my mind have done this without my consent? Delgado got in my head. I realize that now, but how did he turn me into a…a self-sufficient mind-controlled assassin? Even more concerning is that I’m now the most powerful human on earth and I’m not fully in charge of my person.

  This revelation scares the ever-loving poopsickles out of me.

  “My wife, she has a way of being direct that comes across as caring. It’s what she wants for me. She knows I like you. The other version of you. The less lethal version.”

  Shifting my gaze to look at him, my eyes focus and I say, “So she’s fine with this? With you and me being together?”

  Okay, I admit, this is an interesting turn of events I didn’t see coming. The cosmic hall pass. All I can say is wow.

  “She says I’m already with you in the future. That her and I will meet up later in our lives. She says our grand romance—hers and mine—it isn’t an immediate thing as much as you and I will become an immediate thing.”

  “Ha!” I burst out, almost embarrassed by my reaction. Looking at him with raw eyes, eyes salted with too many tears, eyes wrung so dry they feel sucked-free-of-emotion, I say “So you came here to tell me we can finally be together?”

  “Yeah, until this,” he says, waving his hand at Tavares.

  “Until this?” I snap. “This what?!”

  “Whatever you are, Raven, it’s…not right. And I don’t think I can…I don’t know…if you were normal…” The way he’s saying these things, it’s like he’s scared of me. Like if he pisses me off, he is afraid he’ll end up like Tavares.

  Cut up. Dead.

  “This is my life, which is why I left you in the first place, Jake!” There is so much animosity in my tone, so much of what I’m feeling, it comes out as hostile.

  No, it comes out explosive.

  “You came back to me, Raven,” he argues, “not the other way around.”

  “Yes, and you shot me in the face! You think that’s not completely fucked up?” He shrugs his shoulders. I don’t even know why I’m having this conversation with him right now. I’m so done with him I can’t even censor my bad language. Rolling my eyes, I say, “I didn’t know you were…a traveler, or married, or…or a gosh damn senior citizen for that matter! Now it doesn’t matter.”

  The fight in him, I feel it waning fast. He heaves a belly-deep sigh, his eyes clearing, and then he releases a measured breath and says, “Apparently there’s a lot we don’t know about each other, like how you’ve become Charles Manson’s twisted little sister.”

  It’s his last dig. His final effort.

  “At least I don’t need a glass of wine and a denture cup before going to bed at night, gramps.”

  “Where I’m from, being old is still preferable to being a murderer.”

  “So you say.”

  “I do.”

  “Get out, Jake. Seriously. Get out of my room, out of my life, out of my future.”

  He turns and leaves and this time I’m not the one being rejected. It’s a change. There’s nothing nice about it, but at least it’s different. At least I’m no longer worrying about not being good enough for anyone. At least I’m the one doing the rejecting this time.

  To Shave or not to Shave

  1

  Orianna got a call from Christian. She was filing her fingernails and watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when her caller ID flashed his number on her
TV. Reducing the volume, sort of excited by his call, Orianna picked up the phone and listened sadly as he told her their child was dead.

  That wasn’t the call she was hoping for, but it was the one she was expecting. She said, “Abby’s not dead, Christian, she’s just pissed off at you.”

  Christian told her some punk looking girl from Astor Academy, or wherever, came over and said their daughter died.

  Orianna said, “That punk looking girl’s name is Raven. And our precious Abby, who seems to get dumber and more foul mouthed by the minute—if that’s possible—she’s not Abby anymore. That Abby was never our Abby.”

  “What?”

  “The Abby we’ve been doting on, she was a stand-in for when our daughter legitimately died. Our daughter isn’t the Abby we’ve been calling our daughter. Raven is Abby. Raven is Savannah.”

  “That girl?! With the black hair and ten pounds of eye-liner, that was our Abby?”

  “Yes, Raven is our Abby.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he breathed out.

  “I know,” she said. She muted the TV fully.

  “Orianna, what the hell is going on?”

  “She’s changing, Christian. Our little girl, she’s…evolving.”

  “So the other Abby—”

  “Not ours.”

  “I felt so guilty for how I was starting to feel about her,” he admitted. “How I felt like we lost our little girl and got this shitty reanimated version of her instead.”

  A moment of silence stretched on. On TV, a fight between Kim and Kyle was heating up, and Brandi was trying to explain her side of some story to Lisa. When Brandi came on, all Orianna could see were the TV star’s fake tits. Whatever. The point was, feelings were getting hurt and words were being yelled in the silence of the muted TV, but all Orianna could think of was how much she wanted Christian and how it really ate at her that they couldn’t seem to get things right.

  Why am I behaving like this? she wondered.