This new clone reached them just as Sky ducked under another swing of the pole. While the blow passed Sky by, it struck the new clone across the face and gouged out an eyeball. The eyeless clone stumbled back and smacked against a stasis tank. It cracked all the way up to the top.
Sky spun, flipping the pistols in her hand so she had hold of the barrels, and parried a fresh swipe of the pole. With the stock of one gun she deflected the swipe, with the other she swiped at the clones face. The force of the blow dislodged a tooth and clubbed the clone off to one side. There was a brief stumble and a short cry of surprise, but the clone righted herself quickly and swung again. She missed and Sky’s retaliatory swipe missed too.
A pair of arms suddenly encircled Sky’s chest and tried to restrain her. The clone saw this and readied the pole, she swung it back and prepared to stab forward. Sky jumped and twisted her body up and off the floor out of the way. The clone held firm but couldn’t stop Sky wrenching her lower half up into the air. The pole stabbed forward and the clone didn’t react quick enough, it skewered straight into the eyeless clone’s abdomen. Sky’s legs came back down and she struck the pole wielding clone straight in the face, knocking her backwards. Both Sky and the impaled clone hit the floor in a heap. Sky threw herself back up onto her feet, just as the uninjured clone rose to hers. The clone was now unarmed, the pole was still embedded in her eyeless comrade.
The impaled clone was dead, which was something of a relief. With a harsh battle cry of desperation and pure rage, the clone flew forwards. Sky swiped, smacking her in the left side of the face with the stock of a gun. A punch she didn’t see coming connected with her face and took Sky by surprise. She stumbled. A kick came and landed in her gut, a blow that Sky retaliated with a blow of her own. The clone crumbled to one knee and Sky hammered down with her pistols in a one-two combo. The clone recovered quickly and thrust herself to the side with a pointed elbow. It caught Sky in the groin and made her tumble backwards. She slammed against an empty stasis tank.
A roundhouse kick caught Sky in the shoulder and she crashed to her knees. Infuriated, Sky swung out and clubbed the back of a kneecap. The clone hit the deck violently, but rolled away from the following blow aimed at her head. The clone rolled, swiped and connected mid-strike with Sky’s blow. The precision and speed of the blow knocked the pistol from her hand and it clattered away. The handgun was now lost in between stasis tanks and the shadows beyond. There was a moment of surprise and then Sky had to block incoming blows. She deflected and protected herself from punches and kicks, aware that she was being pushed back up against the stasis tank with every blow. She ducked, avoiding a blow intended for her head and then head-butted the clone. She crumpled and recoiled in surprise.
Sky was upon her, bringing her knee swiftly up into the clones face. There was a sickening crunch and pop as the clone’s nose broke. The clone hit the deck, stumbling and flailing onto her back.
Sky spared no second and brought the stock of her remaining handgun down. She struck her straight in the mouth and smashed out the front row of her teeth. She then swiped from left to right and struck the clone under the chin. Her head snapped violently upwards and she suddenly stopped moving. Sky was high on adrenaline and she was taking no chances. She brought the gun down on the clone’s forehead and hammered a gruesome hole into the skull. There was no response, or retaliation, but Sky wasn’t about to take any chances.
She brought the pistol up yet again, but the strike didn‘t fall. She’d caught herself, mid-rage. She felt herself reattach to her conscious self. Slowly she became aware of how breathless and winded she felt, and how her injuries were throbbing and aching. A quick glance around her told her there was no new clone coming for her. Were they all dead? Finally?
She took a deep breath and tried to ignore the dull ache all the way up her side. With a weary groan, she hauled herself back onto her own two feet.
Now for the original bitch.
She headed around the tanks and found Rain laid on her back. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t even bothered to try and escape. A surprise considering just how close to the open exit she had fallen. That struck Sky as odd immediately. Surely she hadn’t resigned herself to the incoming death already? She approached warily.
“Oh Sky… One day you’ll look back on this moment and you’ll understand…” Rain sighed.
Rain slowly turned her head and the two women locked eyes.
“Here,” Rain tossed a small remote towards Sky’s feet.
“What is it?”
“The trigger for the explosives…”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“Because I’m giving you the choice… Will you destroy this place so they can’t make anymore like us…?”
Sky’s attention slowly drifted to the remote control. She didn’t like it but Rain had a point. This factory was the place where she’d been made, if she destroyed it then the company couldn’t just create her replacement. No. She shook the thoughts from her mind.
This was exactly what Rain wanted, she wanted Sky to question her loyalties.
“Regardless of what you do, it’s never going to be the same again…” Rain remarked.
Sky stooped and collected the trigger. For a split second she had the impulse to push the button, to level this factory and destroy all the clones.
“Why didn’t you run?” Sky stepped close. She was darkly suspicious.
“Because I was just to slow you down…” Rain answered with a triumphant smile.
“Another clone… Another body…” Sky realised aloud. She glanced around but there was no clone to be seen. Rain had jumped bodies again. Should’ve seen that one coming…
“Kill me Sky,”
That was what she wanted too. The cowards way out. Bowing out of the torture and the questions the company would have in line for her. Sky wasn’t going to give her that. Not when hundreds of innocent lives had been put in the crossfire of her ultimate plan. She wasn’t going to be spared, she wasn’t going to experience the nicety of death. No, she would suffer. If for nobody else, than for Ashley.
“No.” Sky answered firmly. “You’re gonna answer to everything you’ve done…” She gave Rain a once over, she was too injured to flee. Her work here was done…
She turned and began walking towards the exit, a giant metal door that had been slid open and had let faint light slice into the factory. There was a shuffle and then a scraping behind her. She turned and saw Rain had sat up, and had levelled a revolver at her. She had a gun?
For a second Sky expected to be shot, she saw her very short and confusing labyrinth of life flash before her eyes. But then the revolver was suddenly pressed against Rain’s temple, she understood what was happening.
“Fuck!” She growled in disbelief just as the scheming bitch pulled the trigger. The gunshot was loud and echoed sharply through the factory.
“Fuck…” She cursed again as Rain’s body dropped backwards. The top half of her head had been obliterated. “FUCK FUCK FUCK!”
Sky closed her eyes. She was angry with herself, why hadn’t she seen it? Why hadn’t she thought of it? The same could be said of all of it, why had she been played time and time again?
There was no questioning her now… Rain had probably only wanted to test Sky to see if she could do it… See if she was corruptible perhaps? Must’ve been why, otherwise Rain would’ve shot Sky on approach. She had many moments to kill Sky and yet she had not. The realisation that Sky had been spared made her feel uneasy. Why?
Goddamn this woman and her endless barrage of questions circling her. She was like a slippery snake.
Sky turned around and reached the giant factory door. She gave it a push till it slid open further. The cool evening greeted her a like a cool bed on a hot summer night. The faint smell of the sea was refreshing on her senses.
She pressed the interface on her smart watch and called it in.
When the conversation was over her attention rested on the remote in he
r hand. It was a petite black remote, how could something so small have such significance? She wanted to detonate, but she wasn’t really sure why. Was it self protection? If the factory was destroyed would that make her an irreplaceable asset to the company? Or would they just find a new factory and start again? Would she only be staving off her death sentence…?
She heard Rain’s words. They wouldn’t be able to trust her anymore.
It pained Sky but she knew Rain was right. She was a liability suddenly and how could she even begin to prove she was indeed Sky and not Rain? Would the company believe her or would they just execute her and roll out her replacement?
She glanced at the factory behind her. There were already clones in the making. What would stop them?
A rather bleak reality was facing her and she wasn’t sure what to do. She stepped out into the yard and noticed a motorcycle leant up against one wall.
Suddenly her life was over and there was nothing she could do to change it. Now she just had to adapt to this new course that Rain had put them both on. She glanced once again at the twinkling blue lights of the stasis tanks. There wasn’t much to consider about it, she knew what she had to do.
She found her concealed knife. The skin on the back of her neck was thin and it sliced open easily. It hurt like Hell, but she had no choice. She rooted under the skin until she found the foreign mass. It was long and hard. She tugged it free and then proceeded to pull the long length of wire out too.
Her tracking chip.
She really had no choice, if she stayed they would execute her. They would never be able to trust her. Rain was right, everything had changed.
As the helicopters arrived at the scene Sky was already several blocks away. She was weaving between gridlock traffic on the motorcycle. They didn’t realise she was gone till it was too late and she was already long gone. The only trace of her the tracking chip left behind in a small puddle of blood.
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Nat was smoking a cigarette and it wasn’t helping the headache that was beginning to claw around her brain. It was getting progressively more intense and she was beginning to worry it wouldn’t be long and it would be a full blown migraine. She hadn’t had one of them in years…
She was leant over the railings of the tram station, watching the crew go about their business. She had changed into more civilian clothes of trousers, T-shirt and a summer jacket. Courtesy of a little stop off at a surprisingly well stocked petrol station.
“We thought you were dead,” a male came and joined her. He was attired in a suit, an impeccably fitting black suit. He wore a white shirt and had a red handkerchief tucked neatly in the breast pocket. His black hair was grey at the sides and had thinned out at the back. He removed a cigarette from a pocket and brought it to his pock marked face. He was clean shaven and well kept. His oval face wasn’t particularly attractive but he had a certain charisma about him. He didn’t wear a wedding ring Nat had previously noticed.
“Who wouldn’t,” Nat remarked lightly.
“We was expecting the research from Encarta Island, but this place…” he jabbed back to the underground facility behind him, “is a real boon. Not what we wanted, but good nonetheless. Well done.”
Nat would’ve smiled with pride but she wasn’t feeling well enough.
Instead she took a long drag on her cigarette and closed her eyes.
Sky had left her hours ago, as she departed to give chase to Rain. She’d organised a crew to arrive to collect Nat, so she could be brought in for questioning. But Nat hadn’t been there for their arrival. She’d immediately left and rang her own boss, after a little stop for supplies she’d returned to the site.
XTECH was her employer and they had employed her to be a mole on Encarta Island. Her intention had always been to discretely steal the data the laboratories were working on. However when the bio-attack happened, her objective became complicated. What was a simple task of stealing the research had become endlessly complicated in the wake of Rain‘s attack. She’d befriended the survivors, bluffing her way into their graces while she’d worked on acquiring the data. A task that might have become impossible without the right clearance, something she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to achieve, until the original Sky clone came along. Because of the clone’s investigations, she’d succeeded in her own mission. She’d accompanied the solider pretending to be looking for her non-existent brother, working alongside her but to her own agenda. She’d then stolen the research data from the bio-dome and then even managed to secure a copy of the data from the main labs too. When Rain cut her loose at the labs, she had been deposited in a server room. She only then had to concentrate on her own escape. She’d fled from the main labs and pinged her location, after the communications had finally come back online, using one of XTECH’s private military satellites. She’d thought she was home dry when she clambered into a waiting helicopter. It, however, went down in the blast of the island and she died.
Being reborn was a surprising turn of events. Quite what Rain’s interest in her was Nat didn’t know and it was still niggling at her.
As the XTECH crew had breached the Arlowe Facility, Nat had sealed herself in Zena’s office. She had reviewed the CCTV recordings and watched all the footage of Rain. She’d watched the white haired clone mercilessly and cruelly torture the researcher by injecting the pug, before she killed him. She’d watched the very same clone throw Annette to the sharks. Watched her pretend to console Ashley before injecting him with whatever serum she had. Oh Nat had watched every step of Rain’s cruel and nefarious dance in this facility, but none of it was more harrowing that watching the clone do something to Nat’s stasis tank during the indefinite stasis. The footage was grainy but Nat was adamant that Rain had injected something into the system. But what? It can’t have been Rain’s consciousness because she surely would’ve been overwritten already. And it didn’t seem to key into the plan, why would Rain implant herself into a human retrieved from Encarta Island? A disguise wouldn’t’ve necessitated such a costly and expensive task as cloning Nat back to life.
Besides Nat was very aware she was still very much Nat. So what was Rain up to?
Finding this white haired clone had become one of her new and most important tasks.
She’d watched the rogue clone gut the safe in Zena’s office and make off with all of the Usurper research, just as they’d theorised.
Rain now had quite the dossier of research at her disposal, as she’d theorised too, and it well and truly pissed Nat off. She wondered if Sky had tracked her down by now and beat the shit out of her. The bitch had it coming. But it wouldn’t be the end, oh no. Nat knew Rain would have a failsafe in place, she would implant her consciousness into yet another clone and make sure she escaped. She was like a virus, spreading from host to host, impossible to pin down and wipe out.
She slowly became aware that conversation had fallen as she stood alongside the man. Neither of them however spoke to break the silence. They merely watched the hustle and bustle of the XTECH crew.
At least not everything had been lost.
One crew had been organised to scrape up the remains of the creature that had one been Ashley and take it to the XTECH facility off the coast of Hawaii. Another crew was investigating the sunken lab, and one group of individuals were currently making a mirror copy of the servers Annette had restored. Rain might have the finished formula, but Nat knew XTECH’s finest minds would be able to finish it themselves with all the data from Zena and Annette’s research.
When the team had finished ransacking and raiding anything worthy, the place would be razed from existence.
“Good work kid,” the man tapped her on the shoulder and stepped away. He was being beckoned by a scientist who was attired in a yellow hazmat suit.
Nat flicked her cigarette, depositing a plume of ash into the air.
This goddamn headache. It was starting to make her feel nauseous.
She watched her boss converse with the scien
tist for a moment. She hadn’t shared everything in the facility, some of it she had destroyed. The stasis tank where C3LL had grown her from a simple slice of DNA was destroyed, smashed up so well it was unidentifiable. The CCTV system had been hacked and irreversibly corrupted, meaning that none of what happened in the facility had been captured - so XTECH wouldn’t know anything that happened. The research data and notes on Nat’s rebirth were missing, she’d secured them in her jacket and out of her employer’s sight. As far as the company was concerned, she was the same woman they’d employed. A woman who had somehow cheated death and reappeared three months after her mission with a great scoop. A woman who could never have been written off as officially dead because Rain Corp had taken possession of her remains and nobody would step forward and claim her and expose her as a spy. She and the two helicopter crew were merely AWOL.
They didn’t need to know that she had been cloned back into existence.
She stubbed out the cigarette and headed back inside. Surely someone would have some paracetamol somewhere. She headed back into the main hall. She nearly walked into a figure she didn’t recognise.
“Move,” a solider instructed forcefully. He was shoving an inmate along towards the front door. She noticed the once solider, now inmate, was confused and disoriented.
What now? That was the question on her mind as she stepped into the first door off the main hall. It was a dining room and it had already been extensively disassembled. The white dining table that no doubt had once been the pride of the room was laid in pieces against a wall. The chairs were unceremoniously dumped along the edges of the room too.
What now…?
Her first plan was to hand herself into the Rain Corporation, answer their questions. She had her alibis all worked out and her cover story was still in place from when she infiltrated the island first time. She, however, was only doing it so she could figure out the means to gain access to her remains. It was a high priority that she disposed of her remains and any evidence that she wasn’t the real deal. She also considered the possibility that her possessions would be in storage too. If she was lucky, Rain Corporation would’ve, unknowingly, kept the hard-drive and the memory stick. They probably wouldn’t have checked it and she might just be able to steal all their research data from under their nose, again.
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