Nat nodded. She then sighed, “She made you inject yourself with it, to spare me… She blackmailed you…” Or did she? Was it all just a nightmare, a private Hell that only Nat endured…? “Encarta Island… it happened right?” she looked at Sky with wet and pleading eyes. She was so sure the events on the island had happened, but now she wasn’t so sure… It had been too fantastical, surely it was just a horrid nightmare…?
But when had she fallen asleep?
“Yes, it happened…” Sky nodded.
“Then I fell… I died… how… How am I…?” she glanced down at her naked legs and wondered how she had cheated death. Her head was spinning that fast she wouldn’t have been surprised if her brain suddenly combusted in her skull.
“They remade you, from cells from your remains off Encarta Island…” the dark revelation took Nat by surprise. Suddenly she had a reason, as incredible and incredulous as it was. She was a clone…? A fucking clone… She turned her hand to look at her palm, this body was not really hers.
“I’m not who you think I am… I don’t know how much my previous clone told you, but I’m not her. My name is Sky, but I’m a completely different clone. A second.” Sky decided to come clean. Perhaps because she understood the confusion that she was experiencing. Once upon a time, she had felt just the same. Snatched from one moment and placed in another, by the power of science. “I’m sorry but I‘m not the same clone as the one you met on Encarta Island…”
“Y-you’re the second?” Nat recoiled in quiet surprise.
“The first clone, the Sky you met, she apprehended Rain, but was injured in the process. We extracted her and healed her, but three weeks ago she escaped the facility and fled. She has been on the run ever since. We caught a glimpse of a brief signal here and I came to investigate,”
Nat took a moment to process all that, she then nodded. Rain was dead, but she wasn’t sure if that satisfied her.
“Where is here?”
“It seems to be a secret research facility for the pharmaceutical organisation called C3LL,”
Nat took another moment to absorb it before she nodded again. She managed to disguise the bristle of surprise.
“How long has it been, since…? How long have I been… y‘know…?” How long had she been dead? She couldn’t manage to utter the words.
“It’s been three months since the safety protocol detonated and erased Encarta Island. There were no survivors of the incident. Everybody died.” Sky let that sink in, “You‘ve been in stasis for a few days,” Sky gestured to the piles of paperwork near them both, “Like I said you were cloned from the remains of your body retrieved off the cliffs of the Island. You were not cloned by Rain Corporation, instead you appeared to have been cloned by C3LL. Someone went to great lengths to secure a sample of your genetic material so they could bring you back to life. You were to be in indefinite suspension till someone named R came to review you…”
Nat nodded a little dumbfounded. It took some getting your head around; one second she’d been falling to her death and the next she’d been cloned from her own dead body. Had she cheated death? It was an intensely spiritual question that she wasn’t even sure she could begin to dissect.
“So you have no idea why I’m here either?”
“No. This is a top secret facility, they built it underneath an abandoned asylum. I came here looking for clues to track the rogue Sky clone, I did not expect any of this,” that nice and easy mission she’d expected had very much gone down the drain. She’d wanted to do this mission thoroughly, to prove herself to the company, only every stone she overturned just made everything all the more confusion and overwhelming.
“So what do we do now?” Good question and Sky didn’t have much of an answer. She should’ve and she realised that, she took a moment to consider.
“My employees will want to ask you some questions about what happened on the Island, so I say we continue to search this place together, then I‘ll take you to them when we‘re done here…” she wondered what HQ would make of this rather strange turn of events.
“Right…” Nat answered a little hesitantly.
“I’ll find you some clothes,” Sky nodded awkwardly. She turned and headed back out into the main area of the lab, she stalled and returned, “You said my clone injected herself with a liquid, something Rain made her do? Do you know what it was?”
“No idea.” Nat shrugged.
Sky looked disappointed for a moment then she departed. Suddenly Nat was alone with her thoughts. If she thought her mind had ever been blown before, well this was a whole different level. She blinked a little dumbly and tried to just comprehend everything. She studied her hand once again as if she would have some difference being a clone and all. Only it was the exact same hand she’d always had. Had once had. She wasn’t the same person. Or was she?
Nat shook her head, it was like falling down a rabbit hole of philosophical conundrums. She decided that for now, she would concentrate on leaving with this clone of Sky. When she got topside and away from this facility, then she would make her escape and she would come to terms with her current situation.
Sky searched the other cubicles looking for clothes. She was lost in deep thought as she went from each workstation. What had the Sky clone injected herself with? What had Rain made the clone inject herself with? And why had Sky done it to save Nat? It was frustrating to not know the events of the island. Was the events on the island the reason that Rogue fled? Had it been so horrific and that was why the clone had experienced a psychological breakdown?
Sky couldn’t believe the clone had been returned to home-base and might have carried a possible contagion in her blood. The company had never scanned her blood, they had merely given her a once over. What a glaring oversight! The clone herself had been too exhausted and injured to inform them of any possible contamination herself. What was in her system? There was now a giant question mark hovering over that liquid and it was niggling at Sky. What was it and what had it done to the clone?
She found, after searching many cubicles, a cupboard full of hospital gowns and paper slippers. She also spotted a lab coat hung on the back of a chair.
She returned to Nat with two gowns, a pair of slippers and the lab coat.
Nat had managed to climb out of the tank and was doing stretches when Sky reappeared. The stark and bold female nudity took Sky by surprise and she suddenly didn’t know where to look. It was the first naked body she’d seen in the flesh and it made her feel incredibly uncomfortable. It stirred a plethora of strange emotions and latent memories. She tossed the clothes at the woman’s feet and excused herself quickly.
She rounded the nearest corner and leant against a cubicle wall.
She wanted to concentrate on the mission at hand, at the multiplying threads of a mystery, but now she couldn’t think beyond Nat’s naked form. And how it made her feel. Embarrassed yet curious. She knew Fiona’s sexual history, but it wasn’t her own. The concept of sex and sexuality was not something Sky had ever considered, it was a territory well out of Sky’s comfort zone. She took a breath and tried to clear her head.
Yet still the sight of Nat’s naked hips, the soft smooth skin of her thighs and the furry mound of hair between her legs persisted. It made Sky feel… odd.
“Fuck… get a grip,” she scolded herself under her breath.
“Ready,” Nat appeared next to her. She had dressed into a gown and thrown the lab coat on too. The turquoise paper slippers looked greatly unpleasant but they did match the purple specked pattern of the gowns. She looked like a patient in a hospital, which both women concluded she essentially was…
“Let’s move then…” Sky nodded.
-------------------------------------
Conversation was a little stilted between them. Neither women had any sense of how to approach their peculiar predicament. Nat knew Sky’s predecessor, not the Sky stood next to her. It was difficult to reconcile that, feeling like you knew someone but you didn’t. Sky
just didn’t know where to start at all. What had the previous Sky seen in this woman that had made her put herself in jeopardy? Was it duty… or something else?
Yet, despite the silence, both women felt a comfortable and modest kinship to one another. Both were clones and both understood what it felt like to have life begin at the moment of someone else’s death. They understood how weird it felt to be a walking reflection of someone long dead. That nagging question of their place in the universe and the circle of life sitting heavy in the bottom of their heart.
They’d cleared the giant lab, and the many cubicles, and were now heading down another corridor. It was grey and a mint-sort of green. It wasn’t a colour combination that Nat would’ve picked, but she supposed it kinda worked. Sky was beginning to question just how big this place really was. What a monstrous build it must’ve been. All under thousands of tons of earth and the forest.
“…They’ve been experimenting on their own militia, their own task force…” Nat remarked glancing up from the file she’d collected on their travels. Sky gave her an unsurprised glance. That explained the soldiers in the cells but it didn’t explain why they’d gone mad.
“Does it say what they did to them?”
“It just keeps mentioning some compound called the ‘Usurper Agent’, they’ve been injecting it straight into the brain…” Nat sounded horrified. It did indeed sound very grim.
They came near to the end of the corridor, passing several offices and storage rooms as they did. A curiously ajar door caught Sky’s attention. She caught a peek of a long shadowy room lined with metal cages.
She stalled and Nat bumped into her, she glanced up from the document in surprise.
“What?”
Sky didn’t respond, instead she approached the door. Something had piqued her interest. The room revealed itself to be a containment area, lined with square cages stacked in rows.
There was the faint sound of scratching deeper in the room.
“What is that smell?” Sky whispered. She couldn’t identify it.
“Animals…” Nat concluded. She gripped the lab coat tighter around her as if apprehensive and followed Sky.
They stepped further and automatic lighting blinked on overhead, the once gloomy room became awash with bright light. Something meowed loudly nearby.
Was that a cat? Both women continued and found the source of the noise. A mongrel black and white cat was pacing around its cage, rubbing its body up against the bars. It turned and rubbed against the bars continuously, purring as it did so.
Sky was utterly surprised to find a cat down here, but it was just another weird element to the story now. She’d fell down her own rabbit hole and was convinced she was in a sort of wonderland. The cat meowed once again upon their approach. Sky almost expected it to grin at their approach and then she would’ve been sure she’d lost all grip on reality.
“Oh my god…” Nat whispered in disgust. Sky turned and looked, there was a strange distorted feline shape scratching at the metal floor of its cage opposite. It had once been a black and white cat, but it looked like it had been stitched together with a different cat. Long pulsating tufts of ginger hair sporadically protruded from its body. When it lifted its head upon Nat’s approach, it revealed a face that was two different cats merging as one.
It was like a biological Frankenstein’s monster…
It meowed, but its voice was broken. It then dropped onto its side and rolled, exposing its belly. “What were they doing down here?” Nat whispered in disgust. It was freakishly malformed and mutated.
Sky turned and headed deeper, several cages contained dead cat corpses.
Then she found something remarkable.
In one moment it was a sleek and slender black cat pacing the cage, and then in a moment of wondrous transformation it became a ginger long-haired one. Its body shrank, bubbled and contorted around itself as it slid from one identity to another.
Sky stopped and watched it in wondrous amazement. The cat didn’t seem phased by its sliding appearance, it meowed and extended a paw through the bars. A paw that turned from jet black to burnt orange, and back again.
Nat stopped in amazement too.
The two women were completely speechless suddenly.
The cat meowed sweetly, like it was enjoying the wondrous attention being shined upon it.
Nat was the first to break free of the spell, she turned and departed around the other cages. Sky, after a further moment of mesmerisation, turned to the left and headed for the small office nearby. Nat was quick to return, she’d found nothing of note in the cells except dead animal bodies.
The small office was warmly lit and bathed in yellow light. It had a cosy and studious aesthetic, but it belied the horror within. A dead scientist was slumped in an office chair against the furthest wall. He had been shot in the head, and judging by the state of his slump in the chair he had been volleyed across on it with the impact of the slug. His features were distorted with the cavernous hole in his skull, his brains was splattered on the desk and walls. It was the first scene of real violence and Sky was perturbed. Why had he been killed when everybody else had left?
Something breathing a horrid and wet rasping noise caught her attention, there was an unfamiliar shape on the floor. Whatever it was had taken solace under the nearby desk, she carefully approached. It was only small, the size of a small dog. A soft golden yellow in colour and covered in fur. Its square little body was misshapen with tumours and pulsating growths. She stooped, morbid curiosity had reeled her in.
It sighed and snorted to itself, but then whimpered softly when Sky’s hand touched it. A little motion caught her eye, a curly tail wagged. It was a dog. Gently she slid her hand over the warm mutated and warped body, sliding the dog over and to face her.
Her heart unexpectedly broke at the sight of it. Its already squashed and flat face was bulbously distended and morphed. Its left eye had swollen and mutated into a blue watery bubble, patches of its fur had fell away to reveal pale skin underneath. It had sprouted a slowly developing pink flesh lump that burst through its ear canal. It was opening like a fleshy flower, or a perverse human ear. Its once canine features had been so freakishly distorted that Sky recoiled. It whimpered, a soft and pathetic mewl of pain. One of its short and compact legs had split into two, a fresh long pale appendage was sprouting from the elbow. It was crooked and shaped like a human finger, she feared to look lest she saw a fingernail upon its end. Tears welled up to her eyes, memories of a dog not even hers surfaced. Peppy, the border collie from Fiona’s childhood took precedence in her mind. The happiness that dog had brought Fiona, and then the utter sadness of its death from old age. All of it came back to her mind.
Slowly and gently she placed a hand upon its swollen head, it was too weak and pained to even lift it. This poor dog was in utter pain and misery, yet it managed to find comfort in her touch.
Sky’s eyes closed but fat tears were already leaking free.
Nat found them both in the office, but she didn’t say a word. She was horrified at the sight herself, but to see the strange enigmatic soldier bow her head in upset shocked her more.
She didn’t know what to say, wasn’t sure if she should even say anything. She turned her attention to the walls and took stock of the numerous photographs and certificates. A smiling crew of researchers contradicted the sorrowful nature of this room. She closed in and saw the team celebrating numerous advances, snapshots of time long gone by. Then she found the heartbreaker, a picture of the pug dog in a little lab coat and a name-badge that said “Loco the lab dog”. The team apparently had embraced this dog as one of their own researchers, he seemed to have brought genuine joy to everyone. Smiling faces abounded in every photo he cameoed in.
What had they done to the poor dog?
Gunfire made Nat jump, but she didn’t turn.
There was no need, common sense told her what had happened. She closed her eyes in a little prayer for the dog.
When she turned Sky was still knelt, unable to lift herself up off her feet.
Again, Nat didn’t have the words. She instead decided to make herself useful, rather than dwell on the surprisingly tender and private moment they’d shared together.
She found the nearby files, rooted through them.
“What did they do to them?” Sky enquired in a darkly neutral voice.
“It seems they were injected with the Usurper Agent…” Nat answered quietly. Why were they experimenting on animals? To what end?
“Like the soldiers…” Sky confirmed to herself. She slowly stood up, replaced her gun in her holster and wiped her eyes. She was putting the emotions on lockdown, she had a mission to achieve here and she couldn’t jeopardise it because of some dog.
She turned back to Nat and had already affixed a stony expression upon her face.
“What is this ‘agent’?” She probed.
Nat shrugged, that information appeared to be classified. She noticed that every canine experiment had been unsuccessful, almost instantly killing the host. She didn’t know if the Pug had suffered the same fate, or had simply been strong enough to survive longer.
Nat dropped the file on the nearest desk, and it dislodged something that clattered to the floor. Both women saw a silver pistol drop, but as Nat picked it up she concluded it wasn’t a genuine firearm. Instead it was loaded with a hypodermic needle. The contents of the syringe was empty. Wasn’t this just the sort of thing that Rain had made Sky use back on Encarta Island? She offered it to Sky who studied it intently, she found a few stray dog hairs at the muzzle. Whoever had used this had used it on the dog. Something tightened in her gut, a flare of anger letting its presence be known.
“Who killed him?” Nat pointed to the dead researcher. It was rhetorical.
Sky shrugged, she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she cared, the sick fucks had been experimenting on innocent animals. She quickly wrenched those thoughts back down. The anger had already turned into a simmering resentment.
The Rain In The Sky Page 14