The Rain In The Sky

by Antony J Woodward

  “She betrayed you,” Sky finished.

  Annette nodded glumly, “But the thing is it’s a failure! The compound doesn’t work efficiently. It only works on the site it was injected into. It lacks the ability to move to other cells and travel to other areas of the body… All the test results, they only created a schizophrenia as the two separate identities competed in the same consciousness…”

  That was why the soldiers had gone mad, they had had criminals implanted directly into their minds. Sky felt a small ball of sympathy emerge in her gut. The poor bastards…

  But what of the animals?

  “Do you think this ‘Rain’ will still be here?” Nat turned to Sky. It didn’t seem likely she would hang around once she secured her fresh samples.

  “I don’t know…” Sky shrugged. She still didn’t understand why the clone had come here? Wasn’t Rain dead? Was Rogue carrying on Rain’s work? Had Rain converted the rogue clone to her side on Encarta Island?

  “I don’t think she’ll still be here, but you could check Zena’s lab, it’ll contain all the data you need. We should be able to access security footage there and see what time Rain left…”

  Didn’t Annette understand that the woman she called Rain was actually the rogue clone? Someone different… Someone different but with the same face.

  “Can you take us there?” Sky asked.

  “I don’t have a key card to get you into her lab. Rain stole mine when she threw me in with the sharks. Zena also outranks me with her security clearance. She was the one who primarily dealt with Rain…”

  Now Sky was curious as to why Zena hadn’t mistaken her for Rain…

  “I have her key card, Zena‘s…” Sky brandished the card at the scientist.

  “How did you get that?”

  “She gave it to me,”

  “She’s still here? Why didn’t she evacuate?” An infusion of suspicion slowly crossed her face.

  “She’s looking for her brother…”

  “Her brother?” Annette remarked in surprise, but she didn’t elaborate.

  “Just one more question,” Nat stepped forward, “Why did you clone a survivor from the Encarta Island?”

  A curious expression washed up over Annette’s face, and then a realisation unfolded in her expression. She now understood just who this woman was.

  “Rain wanted you, she provided us the technology to revive you and the samples necessary. She said she wanted you…”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know…” Annette answered with a sigh.

  --------------------------------------------

  Nat was quiet, a heavy and pregnant sort of quiet. She ambled behind Annette and Sky, lost in her own thoughts. Both her and Sky were wondering why Rain had gone to such effort to clone Nat. What was her intentions?

  It made both women feel uncomfortable.

  “Where is my…body…?” Nat asked as the trio emerged back in the corridor where they’d first encountered Zena.

  “On ice at the Rain Corporation treatment plant,” Annette answered. “We only took a sample of your DNA,”

  “And you managed to cultivate me from that…” she remarked in surprise. The science was staggering.

  “With Rain’s guidance, its not a technology I’m familiar with…” Annette answered, “so how do you fit in? Are you a clone of her? Of Rain‘s?” she had turned to Sky now.

  “We‘re both clones. I’m here to investigate why one of our clones, who was involved in the Encarta Island incident, came here… She‘s gone… rogue.” Sky answered. She wouldn’t normally have divulged such sensitive information, but she was feeling a little lost and off kilter. The day’s events had put her on an uneasy tilt. Besides, hadn’t Annette been open and honest herself? She should reciprocate. Well to a degree, Rain Corporation had its own classified secrets.

  “I read that the Island exploded, I thought everybody died?” was the official news story not the real story? Annette had always harboured a deep suspicion there was more to the great tragedy.

  “We recovered only one asset,”

  “The clone…?”

  “Yes, only she escaped and has been in hiding.”

  Annette nodded and didn’t say anything.

  She now regarded this woman differently, she seemed very different from the Rain she’d met. But if she was a clone, were they actually any different? She wasn’t sure whether she could actually trust this woman or not. Perhaps she just ought to give her the benefit of the doubt? Nurture over nature…

  The trio entered the main hall. They didn’t find Ashley or his sister waiting for one another.

  Annette led the ascent up the stairs and took to the first floor. She led the way to a rather nondescript door further across the balcony. She then gestured for Sky to swipe them access.

  “Where are you going?” It was Ashley, he’d appeared from a nearby door.

  “Ashley?!” Annette remarked in surprise. “Why are you still here?”

  “Zena,” was his only response.

  “Your sister is still here, she’s looking for you, we met her earlier. Have you not found her?” Sky knew this facility was big but surely not that big! How could they keep missing each other?

  “You can’t go in there. It’s Zena’s!” Ashley shouted as Nat reached for the door handle. The sound of anger was a surprise to the three women.

  “Ashley, we need to use Zena’s computer.” Annette stepped forward, she smiled warmly to try and coax him from the rage that seemed to be knotting in his cheeks. She didn’t however close in nearer. “We need to find out what happened to the woman who came here… We need to see where Rain went,” she tried to reason with him. It seemed to only irritate him further. His eyes darkened.

  “You can’t. She said nobody is allowed in there…” he stammered.

  “I’m Zena’s friend remember…” Annette persisted.

  “Then you’d stay out of there…” Ashley persisted himself.

  “Ashley come on, we need to find someone. We need to see if that woman Rain-”

  “She’s not here. She’s left.” Ashley cut her off sharply. His voice was beginning to clip hard and his mannerisms were beginning to tighten. The atmosphere around the group was growing strained and hostile as his temper began to fray. His left eye suddenly twitched, a sight that told the three women he might be veering towards some sort of mental episode. It didn’t look like it would take much before he began to suffer a complete and utter mental breakdown.

  Desperate to keep a handle on the situation Annette stepped forward, despite her gut screaming to run. Nat went to step forward to coax Annette back, she sensed the situation was escalating out of control, but she didn’t reach her.

  “Ashley, I‘m not interested in-” Sky tried to reason with him but he suddenly snapped. Like a gun firing he bolted forward and grabbed Annette by the throat. She flailed in defence but he was too quick and too strong. He pushed hard till he slammed her up against the nearest wall and pinned her there. It was so fast and so violent that it took Sky and Nat a few moments to comprehend. Meanwhile his vice grip crushed on her throat and she couldn’t break free. She flailed and flailed but it made no difference. She squirmed hard but she couldn’t loosen his grip enough to draw breath. Sky came charging in, landing a punch into Ashley’s side. “Let her go!” She roared.

  The man didn’t respond, or even flinch. She threw another punch. Despite a rib audibly cracking, he still didn’t flinch. What the hell? She was amazed that this weird nerd was so strong! She jabbed a third time and still no response.

  Annette was starting to black out and she was clawing wildly at his hands. Her eyes were bulging and a waxy paleness was sliding up and across her contorted expression.

  Out of any other choices Sky swiftly booted the back of his knee and floored the two of them. They crashed to the floor in a heap. Annette was instantly scrambling away. She let out a barking wheeze as she gulped air and began frantically crawling towards Nat.
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  Ashley was up on his feet in a flash, way too fast for such a large guy, and he charged in towards Sky. She retaliated with a roundhouse kick, one that sprung off the nearby wall for extra height. It connected with finally enough force to affect him, it sent him flying over the balcony. There was no scream as he toppled over headfirst and landed in a heap on the cold tile floor. A sickening crunch and thud, but no shout of pain.

  Shit!. She hadn’t meant to kill him… Sky landed on both feet and hesitated, she hadn’t meant for that. She had wanted to floor him, not kill him. The practice of death had overtaken her…

  Nat helped Annette raise up onto her feet, she looked over towards Sky. It had all happened so fast, and so violently, she was still reeling. Annette barked and rasped as glorious oxygen nourished her system. Sky however looked a little shell-shocked by her own hand in the events. Was she mortified? It was an unexpected layer to the cloned soldier.

  Slowly the three women all came to the same thought simultaneously. They neared the railing and peeked over. Ashley was crumpled on his back and deathly limp. His head was facing the completely wrong direction and one of his knees had inverted. He was definitely dead.

  Sky didn’t know how to process that. It hadn’t been her intention in the slightest, yet instinct had taken over. Her body was a weapon and she’d fired it without thinking beyond impulse. And now he was dead. Her first death, first death by her hand. Sure there was Fiona’s kills, but they weren’t her own. This revelation was muted in her mind, numbing even. Surely she should’ve felt some form of guilt for it? Instead she just felt a void of nothing. That was more disturbing. Surely she was better than that?

  “He was crazy, that‘s not like him…” Annette coughed rubbing her throat. Thick bruises were already beginning to taint the skin on her neck. Was she trying to reassure Sky?

  It wasn’t enough to cure her concerns, but it was enough to rouse Sky from her thoughts. Now was not the time to reflect on his death, be it accidental or not. He had been an assailant, she reminded herself.

  Sky turned to the door to Zena’s lab, she swiped the key card and the door opened.

  The militaristic and detached way she seemingly nonchalantly passed Nat reminded her of the other clone. That efficiency was a little welcoming.

  God, how fucked up everything had come when she found that reassuring.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  The office was dominated by a huge wall of computer screens, it was so large and encompassing, it swallowed your whole attention. Every screen however, of which there must’ve been at least a dozen, displayed an error message. Critical memory had been lost and the system was unable to boot. Someone had tried to wipe the system clean.

  When Sky finally managed to prise her attention from the screens, she saw a polished modern and sleek desk. The contents of the desk had been scattered across the plush russet carpet in a wide and violent arc. Velvet chairs lay on their fronts, having been tossed ruthlessly to one side. The wall to the left of the screens was one long continuous wall of books shelves, intersected in the middle by a plastic houseplant. Several rows of books had been torn to the floor. To the right of the monitors a safe, that had been concealed behind a fake wall, stood open and ransacked. But none of that was as surprising as what laid in the middle of the room.

  Slumped on the floor in a large pool of dark blood was Zena. She was on her front, doubled over herself in a crumpled pile, yet Sky recognised her instantly. But if that was Zena, then who had they met earlier? In a world of clones, it was pretty easy to get lost who was really who. But yet, Sky wasn’t convinced she was looking at clones. Hadn’t Annette said they’d only known to clone Nat because of Rain’s input? Unless Zena had utilised the data to clone herself on the side?

  Only the timeline didn’t match up very well, and there didn’t seem to be any other devices capable of duplicating human life in the facility. And why would Zena clone herself?

  It didn’t seem likely that Zena would have need to clone herself… But then, she reminded herself, she was currently several thousand feet underground in a top secret facility. All bets were off. It seemed the world was filled with questionable scenarios and decisions.

  Her pattern of thoughts drifted to Nat once more, just why had they cloned her? She wasn’t a soldier, she wasn’t even a scientist, she was just a random visitor to the island. Or was she? Hadn’t she been escaping via the unidentified helicopter? Who the fuck was she? Why was she on the island at all? She almost asked her, the words in her throat, but she decided now wasn’t the most appropriate time.

  “That’s… That’s Zena,” Annette remarked in surprise catching Sky from her own thoughts.

  Sky didn’t respond, what was there to say except agree.

  “So who was that earlier…?” Nat didn’t need to finish the sentence. Who had they met that gave them her key card? Both Sky and Nat felt a little betrayed by the mystery.

  Annette gulped, she had always been a bit squeamish, then headed towards the other side of the desk and plucked up the discarded keyboard.

  “It’s a rather strange office,” Sky remarked. That wasn’t even referring to the current state of it. Why so many monitors? She began to circle the room, curious to poke in all the corners and crannies.

  “Zena was always a bit…odd,” Annette remarked. She was typing into the keyboard.

  “In what way?”

  “Paranoid mostly, she spent hours monitoring every member of staff. Accounting for where they were, who they were talking to, everything…”

  “Even you?”

  “Yeah… I kinda got used to it, feeling her eyes on me all the time. Besides, I knew I had nothing to hide…”

  It seemed a little at odds with the blonde they’d met down in the corridor. The same woman who had shared details of the facility, was not one who had not appeared a highly paranoid individual. But if Ashley had suffered a mental break then perhaps she had too? She reminded herself that the Zena she’d met was clearly not the real Zena… Or was it?

  If Zena had indeed been cloned, how did Sky know that this dead Zena wasn’t the clone? Perhaps the real Zena had killed the fake one? It was enough to make your head spin wilder than a tornado.

  “And her brother? What was he really like?” Sky concluded the safe was empty apart from some odd legal papers that didn’t amount to anything interesting. Whatever was inside was long gone. She glanced back to the dead body. There was something bugging her about this all. If she had met a fake-Zena, then how could she believe that the Ashley she’d killed was even the right one? How long had she, this mystery Zena, been dead? She looked relatively fresh. Within the last few hours…?

  “…Strange. I don’t think he was, erm…” She trailed off, “I think he was on the autistic spectrum yes, he was a little… quirky, but not crazy like that”, she subconsciously rubbed her neck, “I didn’t think he was capable of hurting people like…” she trailed off. She didn’t really wanna discuss it anymore.

  Annette turned her attention back to whatever commands she was typing into the computer. She didn’t really want to talk about any of it. She was hungry to just get the hell out of here, so finding where Rain went was more important. Help these two strange clones and get the hell out! She suddenly had a burning need to retreat to some sunny hot spot replete with cocktails and youthful men, anywhere but fucking here…

  “So who killed her?” It was a rhetorical question as Sky hovered over the dead body. “Perhaps Rain killed her too? She threw me in the tank with the sharks… I wouldn’t put it past her to - wait!” the error screen rolled off a nearby monitor and was replaced by a purple one. A garish purple that cast a peculiar glow over the room. One by one the screens became one giant screen. The room became bathed in the strange purple light.

  “She wiped the system but she didn’t wipe the cloud servers, I can do a partial system restore…” Annette confirmed. She typed in the command and a progress bar appeared on the screens. “Then we can check the CCTV,
see where our little friend went…”

  “And maybe we can see who killed Zena…” Nat offered. She was hovering near the ransacked bookshelves. All three women were pretty convinced they would find Rain to be the culprit. Back from the dead somehow and in the middle of another shit-storm, Nat reflected bitterly. The horrifying contagion had all been Rain’s doing, this weird facility seemed to be too.

  “I’m wondering what was in the safe…” Sky thought aloud, she was trying to make sense of the crime scene.

  “I’d guess the master formula of the compound. I’d assume that Rain took it, she probably came here for the research data as well the batches of the Usurper Agent…” Annette answered. She sounded chronically bitter. But why wouldn’t she, she’d been betrayed. Used and tossed aside.

  Sky noticed the progress bar wasn’t in any particular hurry to finish, so she sat on the desk and reflected on everything she knew.

  Rain had funded the research into the compound that could theoretically transfer consciousness, but all the experiments had been failures. Had she found somebody else who could finish the work and that’s why she’d returned here?

  But then Rain had died following Encarta Island, so why did a clone suddenly pretend to be Rain and come collect the research? And tie up loose ends? How did she even know what loose ends to tie up?

  Was the rogue clone really in league with Rain? Is that what happened on Encarta Island…? But Sky recalled that Rogue had been found alongside Rain’s dead body on the boat, so surely they weren’t in cohorts with one another? It didn’t make sense, why would Rogue align with Rain, why would she continue on her work? Sky and Rain had barely met beforehand, there didn’t seem to be enough time to concoct the sort of plan they had.

  Sky sighed to herself. What wasn’t she seeing?

  Why had Rain seemingly orchestrated the research here before she attacked Encarta Island? How did she even attack the Island? So many goddamn questions!

  “What are you thinking?” Annette enquired.