by Skye Knizley
“I forgot to mention slime, I hate slime,” Ethan said in a soft voice.
“You could have told me about slime, does this stuff come off?” Cadence asked.
Ethan was blank. “Why? It didn’t get on your foot, did it?”
Cadence pointed at her foot. “These are from Wyld Pair, limited edition, you can’t get them anymore.”
“I’ll be sure to warn you next time, bein’ a hero might be detrimental to your footwear,” Ethan said, striding past.
Cadence stuck her tongue out at him. He was such an odd man. Sometimes he sounded educated, like he’d grown up in New England somewhere. Other times he sounded like he’d just stepped out of a western movie playing on Saturday afternoon at the Cineplex.
She scraped the gunk off her boot against the wall then continued down the hall. There was no sign of Ethan, but he couldn’t have gotten far. There was likely only one way in or out of this place.
“Ethan? Where’d you go?”
Her voice echoed into the distance, but there was no reply.
“E? Come on, don’t leave me down here by myself,” she tried.
The gunshot that followed was deafening in the enclosed metal maze. She clamped her hands to her ears and waited for the echoes to stop, and it was then she heard the pounding of boot heels on metal. Two more shots followed, then Ethan appeared, running like the devil himself was behind him.
“I found it, run!” He said as he passed.
Cadence half turned to watch him disappear around the corner, then looked back the way he’d come. The… thing that followed him was taller than a man, with scaled skin, long, gangly arms that ended in sharp claws and legs that matched. It was skinny, and looked built for speed. If it had once been human, all vestiges were gone. She couldn’t even see eyes on its skull, just a blowhole that was leaking a thick, yellowish mucus.
It charged, letting out a high-pitched wail, and Cadence raised her shield. The creature slammed into the blue energy with enough force that she slid backward across the deck and blood trickled from her nose, but its claws were useless against the barrier. It pushed and clawed at the shield, then opened a mouth of sharp, pointed teeth covered with the same slime that leaked from its blowhole and screamed, trying to bite through the solid wall of sound.
“Damn… you are one ugly mudsucker,” Cadence grunted.
The creature squealed and its barbed tongue licked across the shield, leaving a trail of slime that sizzled and hissed.
“Let’s not antagonize the dangerous monster, okay?” Ethan said behind her.
“Did you try shooting it?” Cadence asked.
“Now why didn’t I think of that?” Ethan said. “Of course I did, I shot it three times right in the face. It’s bulletproof or armored or something.”
Cadence arched an eyebrow. “Interesting. Hey monster, can you understand English?”
The creature hissed and pushed at the shield again. It was so powerful, it was giving Cadence a headache and blood was running freely from her nose and down her lips.
“I guess that’s a no. I’m real sorry about this.”
She took a deep breath and unleashed her scream while pushing with her shield. The thing flew backward, tumbling head over heels into the wall. Cadence saw skin and slime dissolve under her attack, and it squealed in pain before scurrying away into the darkness.
“You didn’t kill it,” Ethan said.
Cadence straightened and looked over her shoulder. “I wasn’t trying to. I don’t know who or what that was, or why it attacked us. For all I know, it’s my great grandmother or something.”
“I doubt it,” Ethan said, reloading his pistol.
“I was kidding.”
“You great grandmother’s name was Giulia, she talked to ghosts and was fair to middlin’ at telling fortunes,” Ethan continued.
“Why do you know so much about my family?” Cadence asked.
“We go way back,” Ethan said. “Come on, you pissed it off, that makes it more dangerous. Let’s see what else is down here and get the hell out before it comes back.”
He walked off, whistling between his teeth and Cadence followed. “You have to stop being so cryptic, Ethan.”
“Kid, I don’t have to do anything. I saved your ass from the hybrid and done more than I bargained for already,” Ethan said.
Cadence stepped in front of him and held out a hand. “You started this, Mr. Crawford. I didn’t ask you to follow me or show up in my motel room, that was your decision. You tagged along, and I thought you gave a damn about what’s happening.”
She turned on her heel. “You can bail anytime. I was doing fine on my own.”
“Now wait just a damn minute,” Ethan snarled. “You’ve got a strange definition of ‘fine−’’
She whirled again and almost smacked him with her shield. “No, you wait! I woke up in the trunk of a car with no idea who I was, no family, no clothes, just this stupid tattoo and a photograph with my name on it. Since then, my father’s been murdered, my girlfriend was almost killed and people keep crawling out of the woodwork trying to capture or kill me and I still have no idea why! Then you show up with your gun and your card tricks and tell me things are even crazier than I thought they were, and you keep dropping cryptic crap on me like you’re some strange Yoda in a cowboy hat. Fuck you!”
She wanted to slap him, to hit and punch him and take her frustrations out on him. Instead, she turned and continued down the corridor. Part of her hoped he would follow, she liked his company and it was nice to have a friend. Part of her hoped he would leave and take all of the weirdness with him.
The hallway ended in another corridor at right angles. Both directions were strangely quiet, though Cadence had a feeling they were once full of screams. Across from her was another door, and the source of the strange light. It filtered through a broken sliding door that looked as if it had been ripped off its hinges by the creature.
Cadence slipped through the broken portion of the door and into a small office. There were two office stations, both with desktop computers and file cabinets attached. One of the computers was still on, its screen was the source of the light. She sat down at the desk and poked experimentally at the mouse. The screen lit up more with the Crimson Assurance knight logo, and then the desktop. It looked as if someone had been in a hurry to leave and hadn’t finished deleting all the files off the hard drive. Cadence was no computer whiz, but she knew enough to search through the recent documents. Most were garbled junk, but she found a collection of short videos attached to a file marked “Xenoid.” She played the first one and watched as two men in lab coats, their faces covered with full masks, approached the test subject, a young woman, who was strapped down to an exam table. She struggled helplessly, but was unable to escape. The men attached the IV’s to her arms and left her. The video then ended.
Video by video, episode by episode, Cadence watched as the young woman in the video grew a sort of cocoon of mucus and skin that surrounded her, then emerged eight days later from the scabrous mass as the creature she’d seen in the corridor. According to the notes, the staff at the lab had been unable to stop her and was forced to abandon the lab taking their final test subject with them.
“Who was the final test subject?” Cadence muttered to herself.
She tapped the keyboard and forced the whining, almost dead computer to search its remaining files. There were no more grainy videos, just a data file with corrupted data. A few taps on the keyboard produced a photo, however, and the girl in the photograph was unmistakable. It was a photo of her, taken in one of the cells. She was wearing nothing but a surgical gown and she looked terrified.
“What the hell?”
Cadence touched the computer screen and memories came flooding back, so hard they made her skull ache. Images of some kind of sensory
deprivation tank, being chained to her bed in a tiny cell like the ones here, the half-hidden face of a white eyed doctor…
It was too much, too fast. Consciousness fled and she sank to the floor. She didn’t even feel the cold steel against her face when it came up to meet her.
When she woke, her head was resting on what she realized was Ethan’s folded up jacket. He was sitting at the desk, head resting in his hands.
“E? What happened?” She asked, her mouth dry and thick.
Ethan swiveled in the chair. “You passed out, I found you lying on the floor a little while ago. How are you feeling?”
Cadence sat up and ran a hand through her hair. “Like I got hit by a bus. I saw that picture and the memories came back. At least some of them.”
“What memories?” Ethan asked.
“I think this was where,” she paused as pain lanced through her skull. When it passed, she continued. “Where they made me. I saw a cell and a doctor with white eyes. They made me, Ethan, like a car or a test-tube baby.”
Ethan slid off the chair and knelt beside her. “Nobody made you. CJ, I was wrong to say that. They drugged you, that’s all. All that you are is because of choices you made, things you’ve done, not because of anything they did to you.”
Cadence wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her head on them. “How do you know? Maybe its just a matter of time before I become like the others, a heartless monster.”
“Not gonna happen, darlin’,” Ethan drawled. “You’ve got a good heart, you’re brave, you’re strong, how many other eighteen-year-old girls would do what you have? Not many, not even in my time.”
There he went again with the vague references to ‘his time.’ Someday she would have to ask him what exactly that meant, but not right now. Right now she wanted a drink and half a bottle of aspirin. The pain in her head felt like the top of her skull was trying to unscrew and fly to Uranus.
“Look, kid, I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but I do know people, and I know you’re one of the good guys. Better than me, and that’s a fact,” Ethan said.
He extended a hand and smiled. “Let’s get you up and out of here, get a drink and some food, you’ll feel better.”
Cadence let him help her up, but she wasn’t ready to go. She turned to the computer and opened what was left of the file about her. There wasn’t much, but she found a destination for where they were taking her, a base called X-Delta-Five in Utah. She wrote the general address on her hand, then picked up the computer and smashed it against the wall.
“Let’s go,” she said, while the computer’s guts popped and fizzed behind her.
The door out of the complex was in sight, no more than a dozen paces when the Xenoid appeared at a dead run. She was on all fours and moving at an incredible speed, squeals of anger escaping her jaws.
Cadence raised her shield and braced herself. “Stop! I don’t want to hurt you!”
Ethan fanned his cards and selected five of them. “I wouldn’t mind hurting it a little. That thing is going to give me nightmares.”
“It’s not a thing, Ethan, her name used to be Rachel. Specter did this to her,” Cadence said.
The Xenoid didn’t slow. She slammed mindlessly into the shield and fought it, clawing and head-butting in animal fury.
“Please, Rachel, we’re not with them, we’re on your side and I don’t want to hurt you,” Cadence tried. There was no sign that the Xenoid understood or even cared, just hopeless, mindless hunger. For all she knew, Rachel could no longer hear or even think, at least not at a human level.
“Rachel, don’t make me do this,” she whispered. “Just let us go.”
The creature responded by lashing out with its tail, a whiplike affair attached to its lower spine. The barbed end slammed into the shield and punched a hole, making Cadence cry out in pain. Blood spilled from her nose and her head ached worse than she imagined a person could stand. She closed her eyes and pushed back, trying to drive the Xenoid into a cell. Every inch of her wanted to save this person, to find some way to reverse what had been done. It was the right thing to do.
But the creature wasn’t going to let her. It either didn’t want to be saved or simply didn’t understand what she was saying. Its tail pierced the shield again and again until the pain was too great and Cadence collapsed, unable to even raise her head. She looked up into the creature’s mouth, at the poison dripping from its fangs, and saw her death coming.
“Please,” she said. “I want to help you.”
The creature screamed and reared back for its final lunge, and Ethan stepped in, cards held in front of him. Sparkling black energy shot from the deck into the surprised Xenoid’s chest, and it exploded, showering them both with blackened tissue and burned mucus.
When it was over and mucus stopped raining from the ceiling, Ethan knelt beside Cadence and dabbed at the blood on her face with his kerchief.
“Come on, partner, still with me?”
She pressed her back into the cool steel wall. “Yeah… yeah, I’m here. I didn’t know anything could get through my shield. Goddess, my head hurts.”
Ethan kept cleaning, dabbing at the blood with a gentle, experienced hand. “If its any consolation, neither did I. I’ve seen bullets, powers and flame all turned away by that thing. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“I’m not as strong as you thought I was,” Cadence said.
“Of course you are,” Ethan said. “You could have killed her at any moment, but you were too busy trying to rescue her. You were willing to put your life on the line to help someone trying to kill you, and that’s what makes you a hero.”
He put his kerchief away and helped her to stand. “Come on, its time to get some rest, you did all you could here.”
For once, Cadence didn’t mind being helped. She wasn’t sure she could walk out on her own, and Ethan’s arms were comforting. They reminded her of Phoenix and the day he’d found her in the car.
Outside, the sun was high over head, a welcome sight after the darkness of the facility. The ground was wet and the air was crisp and cool, the clean left by the rainstorm that had followed them from Reno.
Cadence used a wet-nap from her first aid kit to clean the rest of the blood from her eyes and nose, then unbuckled her gun and dropped it into the trunk with her other belongings.
“Doing okay?” Ethan asked, lighting a cigarette.
“I am. Thanks for the rescue, Ethan,” Cadence replied.
“Least I could do,” Ethan said.
Cadence paused and looked at the village around them, trying to think what to say next. After a moment, she looked back at Ethan.
“About what I said earlier−”
Ethan waved her comment away. “You were right, CJ. I showed up on your doorstep full of myself, and I’ve been avoiding the conversation we should have. But you have to understand, I’m not being cryptic, I just don’t know all the answers.”
He turned to look at her and tossed away the end of his smoke. “Look, as far as I can tell, aside from a few holes in your memory, you’re the spitting image of my old friend. Not just the way you look, the way you walk, the way you talk, even the way your hair changes colors when you use your powers… aside from your Swiss cheese memory, you are the CJ I knew in 1944.”
Cadence could see the sincerity in his eyes, he wasn’t lying this time. But there was something else: sorrow. Something had happened to the CJ he remembered.
“She died, didn’t she?”
Ethan shrugged and leaned against the Mustang. “I thought so. When I first saw you, I thought you, she, must have survived somehow and been in hiding or something. I was shocked at how young you looked but happy to see you. When you didn’t recognize me, I thought you had amnesia.”
“I do,” Cadence said. “I woke up two ye
ars ago with no idea who I was. I’m getting little bits and pieces, but not all.”
“But if you were you… her, my CJ, Specter wouldn’t have had to give you the MK serum. She already had powers, she was one of the first test subjects,” Ethan said. “You also wouldn’t look and act eighteen years old, you’d be pushing sixty. The serum might slow your aging, but not that much.”
Cadence studied the ground at her feet. She’d always held out hope that she was simply kidnapped and had a normal family waiting for her somewhere, and that she would eventually find them. Now, it sounded as if she was either created in a lab somewhere, or was a sixty-year-old war hero. Neither was exactly appealing.
“Maybe there’s another explanation,” she said.
“I don’t even know the explanation now, CJ. All I know is looking at you is like looking at a doppelganger,” Ethan said. “Or a ghost.”
Cadence shook her head. Specter, magik, demons, secret KGP labs in the middle of America, it was too much. She was tired and didn’t want to think anymore.
She opened the door and slid inside. The cool vinyl felt good on her back, almost comforting, like the hug of an old friend. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to check the mirror and look at her hair. Ethan had said it changed color when she used her powers, but she’d never noticed anything before. To her surprise, he was right. A pink streak now ran from the crown of her head down the side of her face, while blue highlights had appeared all over. She felt the hair and it was the same as it always had been, just a different color, and she decided she liked how it looked. If it bothered her, she could always dye it again later.
“I’m going to find food. Then I’m going to find a room, a hot bath, and a full night’s sleep. You coming?” She asked through the open door.
Ethan looked uncertain, then pushed his hat back and walked around to the passenger side. “Of course I’m coming, someone has to keep an eye on you.”