Raven: The Young Adult World of Genetically Modified Teens and the Elite (Swann Book 6)

by Ryan Schow

  “We don’t have time to stop. Puke out the window or something. Or hold it down.”

  “I…I—”

  “Keep going!” he barks.

  I keep going, swallowing my stomach about a half dozen times to keep it from shooting out my mouth.

  “My wife was born a triplet, but one of the children was born stillborn, and the other was killed by some goddamn little monster child—”

  “Alice,” I say.

  He swallows a breath, then says, “You know Alice?”

  “Unfortunately,” I hear myself say. I push my tethers out, search for the child…almost clip the back end of a Honda Accord, but hit the brakes hard leaving inches between us. Cursing, breathing high, hard and shallow, I clear my head again, focus. At this point, though, it’s like this conversation is taking place at the end of a hallway, that’s how far removed my shock has made me. The way Jake’s dropping bombs on me, I’m about to drop one on him. “I was there when your wife was born.”

  “What? I thought it was just Holland. Maybe some of his lab assistants. Or Arabelle.”

  “The people who were there, they were my friends Netty, Brayden and Georgia. There was a dead boy, too. Just roasted to death. And a dead girl. Two shots to the head and one to the heart.”

  “And you? How did you fit into all that?”

  “I was the dead girl.”

  The Poo Parade

  1

  It’s all set. The social demise of one Abigail Swann. The way this has to go down, it has to be at lunch, in the cafeteria. Cameron was thinking, there’s no other way.

  Theresa starts the relay race of harassment where the end result is a broken Abby Swann. Abby is putting a scoop of lunchtime macaroni and cheese on her lunch plate when—on one side of her—Theresa smacks her in the head and says, “Watch where you’re going.” When she turns and faces her assailant, before anyone notices what’s going on, Cameron squirts a full dropper of Visine eye drops in Abby’s water glass.

  That’s it.

  Part one is over. Easy-peasy.

  Part two is more tricky. This is where the distance to bathroom A and bathroom B from Abby’s fourth period class matters. When you’ve got explosive diarrhea from ingesting Visine, a mean trick of the waiters and waitresses of America, what you’ll positively slaughter innocents for is the closest toilet before you shit your favorite pair of pants, or whatever.

  Cameron was waiting in one of the two stalls in the bathroom nearest Abby’s classroom when Abby practically kicked down the nearest door to get in. There was all kinds of moaning and groaning going on, and maybe a bit of whimpering as pants and underwear were torn down. Cameron was in the stall next to hers, furthest from the main door. With Cameron’s feet up on the toilet seat, Abby assumed she was alone.

  She wasn’t.

  The minute Cameron heard Abby’s butt plop down on the toilet and the diarrhea come charging out, she lowered her feet to the floor, plugged her nose, then bent over and began to film the scene from under the stall’s tall metal partition. Cameron shot the video from Abby’s neckline down, but twice she panned up to a face smothered with tears and perspiration. The way she looked, Abby was dying on the toilet.

  Cameron had to take a breath; breathing in the diarrhea fumes was far worse than she’d imagined. The toilet might be able to take a punch like that, be she wasn’t as reliable. In fact, each second she was conscious was a fight not to gag and give away her presence. Sweet Jesus, she thought, this is a goddamn death sentence! Not to Abby, but to her.

  Still, she kept the video feature of her cell phone running.

  Every single degrading fart, squirt and splash was documented on camera; every uttered curse word, her sobbing, the way she kept saying she wanted her mommy, it was all digitized for mass consumption. Cameron was physically sick from the smell, but inside, as she saw her plans taking shape, the efforts and the suffering felt justified. Before pulling back and working herself back up on the toilet, she took one last shot of Abby’s face for identification purposes.

  Thus, Operation Colon Launch was concluded. Unfortunately, it was not a tight finish. Next door, in Abby’s stall, little fits and spurts of watery shit hosed out, becoming less and less frequent though, until finally the girl stopped sobbing, reached for the toilet paper, and wiped away the hot shame of a tainted macaroni and cheese lunch. And thank God, because Cameron was on the verge of going septic.

  Abby left the bathroom thirty minutes after the first spout of watery turds hit the bowl. Cameron was just two minutes behind. She hurried across campus to her dorm, uploaded the video, sent it to her hacker friend and said, “Do it right bitch. XOXO.”

  Knowing her friend, this part of the video was going to be priceless. We’re talking about high resolution, amplified sound, digital cutting and splicing for cinematic effect.

  After class, after dinner (where she told Theresa and Blake what happened) Cameron put in a call to her friend, Lola (an acronym for Laugh Out Loud Asshole), and said, “Do you have the IP addresses and instructions I asked for?”

  “Yep. This Abby Swann bitch, her computer damn near ate mine. Talk about trap door central. The coding in it was downright malicious.”

  “Great,” Cameron said, lackluster. “Good job.”

  She paused long enough that Cameron woke up. She said, “If you knew how good I am, you would seriously do more than yawn out a compliment. This swamp donkey’s laptop is all but unhackable, and I did it in under an hour.”

  “What can I say?” Cameron said. “You’re amazing.”

  Within moments she received an encrypted email with instructions for hacking the laptop computers of Abby Swann and Caden Reynolds. She had no idea what she would find when she hijacked their cameras, but knowing how people look so normal in front of everyone else but are seriously screwed up in private, she was hopeful she would find what she needed.

  She hit the freaking lottery with Abby that night. Her laptop was on the desk facing the room, giving her a perfect vantage point. Abby finished her homework, sat in perfect silence for about an hour, cried for the next fifteen minutes, then put on the radio and presumably got ready for bed.

  Dang, she was thinking, I thought I was a mess. Talk about a nutcase!

  Nothing happened for a long time. Then Taylor Swift’s Blank Space came on and that’s when the radio got really loud and it happened. The second she saw Abby, Cameron hit Record.

  She showed up in the hacked laptop’s camera field, dancing topless in boy cut underwear, singing loud and way off key.

  “Holy shit,” Cameron said, snickering wildly, “she’s off her freaking rocker!” She could hardly comprehend the mood swings of this girl. It was like multiple personalities.

  All this and Abby’s still dancing, her perfect boobs bouncing around as she twirled and flipped her hair around and sang along to the song, word for word. It was truly embarrassing in ways Abby could not yet fathom. If this was embarrassing for Cameron to watch, it would be a million times worse for Abby.

  “Thank you for making this so damn easy,” Cameron said, powering down her computer the minute the song changed, the radio and lights went off and Abby crawled into bed.

  2

  Around two a.m., Cameron woke up to the screen on her computer flaring bright white. She had taken it off and switched monitoring to Caden’s room. She never saw him, until now. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up in bed, then walked—panties and tank top—to her desk. She looked at him and he was looking right back at her. Well, his screen anyway. Talk about awkward! She was looking at him, but he was staring at something else on the screen.

  The look on his face was pure focus, and something else. Pure, creepy ecstasy. Shirtless, his eyeballs wandering from this to that, and rapid clicking through internet pages, or something, he was staring at the computer. Then it hit her. OMG, she thought, he’s jerking off!

  Cameron groaned, clicked Record, then yawned long and hard and tried not to look as he worked his way up to his �
��O” face. When he came, it wasn’t pleasant to watch. Not even close. She forced herself to look away. God, she thought, he seemed so nice and beautiful.

  So…decent.

  “Looks like someone’s got porno problems,” she slurred, her voice somnolent, her filthy conscience never less clear than in that moment.

  Before class the next morning, she sent both videos over to Lola and said, “Mash them up how I instructed, then send me the rough cut.”

  Lola didn’t say anything right away. Cameron presumed she was watching them. Then: “You are seriously one twisted wreck of a person.” Her tired voice was coffee and smokes. Her friend once stayed plugged in for seventy-four hours before passing out. The hacker was rushed to emergency by a friend: Cameron.

  “We’re all a little twisted, Lola.”

  “You’re worse than most.”

  “Uh, duh,” she said, which made Lola laugh, but only half-heartedly.

  Cameron hung up wondering if Lola was right. Last time she did this, a classmate died, she had been crucified in the media—the same media who nearly destroyed her father’s singing career—and her father’s publicist made her go on live TV to apologize for being a bully.

  Her battle of conscience took exactly two minutes and ten seconds to resolve. What she was about to do would annihilate Abby. Hers would be an enchanting victory. The slut would leave school for sure. But all of this, it wasn’t bad enough to make Abby kill herself. She was so much stronger than that. So much stronger than the two girls who killed themselves before.

  3

  At breakfast, Cameron told Theresa what she had. “I’ve got something, too,” Theresa said. She handed her iPhone to Cameron who started the video already queued up for her. On the screen, there was a fist knocking on a door. Theresa’s fist. Gripped in it was Blake’s tazor.

  Cameron’s heart rate soared.

  A bleary-eyed girl cracked open the door: Abby. Theresa hit her with the tazer before the girl could even get her eyes open. The voltage slammed into Abby’s body so hard she crumpled to the floor. Theresa kept filming. It was jerky here and there and had limited production value. She kept filming as she leaned over and hit her with the tazer again. She never let up.

  “Jesus,” Cameron said, “is she still alive?”

  Theresa said, “Barely.” Then: “Are you sure we should do this? I mean, this isn’t right. Shit could go south fast.”

  “You’re too sentimental for having done what you just did,” Cameron snapped. Theresa told her how Abby spoke at the funeral for Maggie, but Cameron said, “Girls kill themselves all the time. It’s a ‘cycle of life’ sort of thing.”

  Other students were walking by their table with food, and Theresa was hand-covering the video, but only because the sharp ticking of high voltage, pain and humiliation was difficult to watch. In the video, Theresa finally let up. Abby was stiff, frothing at the mouth, eyes rolled up into her head. A hand rolled the body over on its stomach, and that’s when Cameron saw it: the big brown flower pushed wet and wide into the butt of her pure white, boy cut underwear.

  “Oh my God!” Cameron blurted out before collapsing into a fit of laughter.

  “Yeah,” Theresa said, conflicted. “I got snaps.”

  And then she took Cameron through a series of pictures, each more undignified than the last. When Abby finally started to come around, before the electrified girl saw her face, Theresa said, “You speak of this to anyone, bitch, the next time I swear to Christ I’ll juice you to death.”

  “Send it to me,” Cameron said.

  They synced up their phones via Bluetooth and Theresa sent her the video. After she ate, ten minutes before class, Cameron stepped out and called Lola.

  “I sent you video and pictures,” she said. “For the big finish. Oh, and I need a list of all the phone numbers of every student here at Astor grouped together and uploaded to my contacts tab under the group heading ‘Astor.’ There are a hundred names, minimum. Just hack the main server and pull the numbers from the student roster.”

  “I didn’t agree to all this,” Lola says.

  “I know, but ten grand is more than you make in a month, so I won’t be offended if you show a little gratitude.”

  “You keep asking for more and more. Understand, the price is about to climb.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Lola,” Cameron breathed into the phone, “you act like we weren’t besties for like, forever!”

  In a non-cigarette, non-coffee voice that didn’t sound so tired today, she said, “This is going to be just like last time. It has that feel, you know?”

  “It’s not.”

  “It is!”

  “Did I ever bring your name up?! No. Seriously, I need those phone numbers and I need them tonight. When you’re done, send me what you have, and if it’s good, I’ll string together an intro for you to texturize and add in.”

  “You know this is seriously flexing the boundaries of our friendship.”

  “I’m not paying you for your opinion,” Cameron said, “so don’t be so freaking dramatic.” She hung up before Lola could respond.

  After classes, using the latest video editing software on her new computer, she uploaded a cell phone video of Abby and Caden together at lunch. She then stitched it together with another video of them kissing in the hallway. When prompted for the video’s title, she typed the words: POO: A LOVE STORY.

  “This is bad,” she said aloud, laughing to herself, but at the same time wondering if Lola was right. If she was indeed going over the top. “No,” she reasoned, “it’s just right.”

  When Lola’s portion of the video arrived via secure email that night, it was perfect. The scenes were shot using digital video, but it had a gritty sort of 8mm projector look to it. Which seemed impossible. Yet there it was.

  “Genius, Lola,” she said, watching it two more times. Via encrypted email, she sent the intro portion of a the video shot of Caden and Abby kissing to Lola’s secure account. She then left a message saying, “Did I tell you how unbelievably talented you are???”

  When Lola called hours later, near midnight, Cameron expected good news. What she heard, however, was a buzzkill. “The file’s too big to send,” Lola said.

  “How big is it?” she asked.

  “Big.”

  “Can it be done?”

  Lola laughed. “Anything can be done, for a price.”

  It was getting late. “This is where we stop being friends and I treat you like a client.”

  “No,” Lola said, “this is where I treat you like a client. And for the record, we’re talking about overriding the account parameters of more than a hundred students to accept a way-larger-than-normal file. Don’t you get it? The file will be in HD. On a cell phone. Do you have any concept of the time this will take?”

  “How long?” Cameron asked. “And how much?”

  “Five grand. And it’ll take twelve hours at least.”

  “Fine, five grand, done,” Cameron said. “But don’t say we’re clients when we’re friends. Don’t ever say that shit again.”

  “You started it, bitch.”

  “Whatever. I’ll look for it in the morning.”

  When they hung up, Cameron tapped into her trust fund, then wired fifteen grand to an account overseas that from there bounced around and around until it eventually located Lola’s numbered account in Switzerland.

  By morning, the video was complete. And it was a work of art. She also had a grouping of cell phone numbers loaded into a group text file in her iPhone. Per encrypted text, the video was ready to send. It would then use an auto-link-run feature to activate the video which would be dispersed to the users via a separate file-sharing program.

  Cameron was still in her pajamas. Still with sleep in her eyes and still having to go to the bathroom like crazy. Still early enough that breakfast was possible. Sitting at the desk, watching the polished video a second time, she said, “Abby, you brainless mud duck, there’s still plenty of time to kill your
self.”

  Preggo My Ego

  1

  Netty’s mom was turning into a royal butt sucker. We’re talking about a blue ribbon bitch kitty on wheels. Then again, Netty was one to talk. She took being an asshole to entirely new levels. But that’s what happened when you woke up and puked every day. Or when you checked your undies daily for spotting because you got so tired of bleeding and not having a period. Her body wasn’t her own anymore. It had been hijacked by a bean. And her tits hurt just looking at them. In her diary, she wrote, bras are the devil. The way her nipples hurt just…being nipples, it was all she could do not to abort.

  So when Netty woke up to her mother crying over eggs that never got cooked all the way, all Netty could do was shake her head and say, “Get out of the way, I’ll finish.”

  At this point, she was tired of trying to console her mother. It was like being in a prison camp where all anyone ever did in their free time was cry. Jesus! Whatever it was that had her mother dying on the vine was of no concern to Netty. Honestly, Netty couldn’t stop thinking, if it’s that depressing for her mother, did she really want to know about it?

  Um…hell no.

  “You know,” Netty said while stirring the eggs, “if you’re going to fall to pieces all the time, could you please do it in private? It’s hard enough to get out of bed in the morning, much less start every day listing to your mom sobbing like a freaking child over…whatever the hell it is you’re sobbing over now.”

  She turned around and her mother had something held out in her hand, a white stick with a pink plus on it.

  “Unfreakingbelievable,” Netty whispered.

  “Yeah,” her mother said, as if that would explain everything. Her beauty was lost to puffy red eyes and dehydrated lips. Plus, she could see like five pores on her mother’s nose. Which should be horrifying enough for a woman her age.