“So how do we change? Do you make it happen?” Not-Gene looked at him with that petulant scowl of his firmly in place.
Joe shrugged. “I can. But that’s not the only way. Sometimes it happens because you’re stressed. That happens to me a lot. If Hunter thinks he’s in danger, sometimes I wake up to handle it. I think it’s almost instinctive.”
Not-Cody stared hard at him, his eyes narrowed as he studied Joe. It bothered Joe that something about Not-Cody made it almost impossible to read what he was thinking. But in the end, Not-Cody accepted the truth of Joe’s words. He ordered shrimp scampi and two additional entrees. The others order several entrees each, and the entire table shared every appetizer on the menu.
When they were done eating, the limo that had dropped them off earlier took them to the next destination, an old warehouse that had been converted into an illegal party hall.
The music was a mix of heavy drums and screeching guitars, a primal mess that was supposed to add to the excitement of attending an underground party. The volume was loud enough that every beat of the bass pulsed through Joe’s chest. He liked it. The feeling was exhilarating.
Around him the excitement increased. The Others looked at the people, the seething mass of the crowd, and he felt their gratitude. Not just for the clothes, though that was part of it. Mostly, they were grateful because this was something that was new. It had nothing to do with the other teenagers who normally controlled their bodies. This was just for them.
He bought all of them one round and warned them to nurse it. Not because he was cheap but because they weren’t used to booze, and killing half of the people in this place would not help them stay hidden.
The music was too loud to let him even consider talking to each of them, so he cast the thoughts out for all of them to catch. Go. Mingle. Have fun. You need me, you call out and I’ll be there. They needed to stretch their legs and get to know the better side of their world. Mostly they’d been shown the violence, the bloodshed, and this was something new, something special. This was what they could have if they worked together.
He found a spot not far from the DJ and watched as his new friends went on the prowl. Not-Kyrie looked at each person with sharp, alert eyes, never staying focused on any one for long, but instead seemingly sampling each one with her eyes. After five minutes of moving through the crowds, she found a boy who struck her fancy and moved with him to the dance floor. The girl who was with him protested, but she ignored the noise and half dragged her new toy away. He wasn’t exactly complaining.
Not-Gene looked around for several minutes and then decided to try his luck with dancing. He moved awkwardly for a few moments and then let himself relax, blending into the crowd in ways his Gene had never managed in his life. Joe looked on, interested by how they were all becoming different individuals from their other halves. Not-Gene started dancing with a girl who looked to be in high school, moving with her in a slow, sensuous dance that perfectly fit the rhythm of the music. He kissed the girl and she returned the favor. Had Gene ever even kissed a girl? Joe thought it was unlikely.
The Others didn’t even know what they were hunting for, but there was no doubt that they intended to find it. The people in the place knew it too. Maybe it was instinctive, maybe it was in the way the Others moved, an unconscious predatory gait, or even in the way they looked at the people around them. Whatever the case, the strangers in the place deferred to the Others as surely as hyenas make way for lions.
Predators always stand out from the scavengers.
Not-Tina moved from one guy to the next on the dance floor, her body in constant motion. Somewhere out in the mass of people, he could sense Not-Kyrie kissing the boy she’d chosen. Not-Tina was different. She wanted the attention of all the guys on the dance floor.
He watched her kiss several different partners as she moved along the dance floor and she watched each of the men she’d kissed look after her as she vanished into the crowd, wanting more of what she’d offered.
Not-Cody was just as bad as Not-Tina. He moved through the crowd, dancing, touching, and moving from girl to girl. Cody would have never had the nerve to speak to a girl, but Not-Cody made up for that by diving into excess. Girls of all shapes and sizes caught his attention and became the center of his world until he grew bored and started dancing with the next one.
Joe watched it all, felt it all vicariously through his new family. His family. The idea was intoxicating. He had never had others like him in his life, not really. There had been other subjects when he was young, but they’d all been as isolated as he was, only meeting on rare occasions when they were in the same test areas. And as much as he hated to admit it, he’d missed having the others around. For the first time in a very long time, he felt almost complete.
All he had to do was get rid of Hunter once and for all and he’d be ready to take on the world.
He closed his eyes and felt the others as they moved and experienced life with new eyes. Not-Cody sat on the edge of the stage not fifteen feet away from Joe, a pretty redhead in his lap, locked in a deep embrace and a deep kiss. His left hand was swollen. Somewhere along the way, someone had annoyed him enough to make him take a swing. Whatever. Violence was the last thing on his mind. He was focused on the girl and while he might have wanted her to scream, violence had nothing to do with his intentions.
Joe watched. This was for them. This was their night for rewards. He was just there to keep a lookout. Someone had to keep them safe.
They were so young, so naive, and he wanted them safe.
He needed them safe.
He needed them.
For now.
Chapter Thirty-five
Gene Rothstein
Every muscle in Gene’s body ached. He felt like he’d been dragged through a taffy puller and then roughly mashed back into his normal shape and size. His eyelids were closed, but his eyes still burned. His mouth tasted, well, it tasted wrong. He knew what cigarettes smelled like and if he had to guess, his mouth tasted like he’d been licking the inside of an ashtray. His head was making the most amazing protests. Every time his heart thudded in his chest, the noise was echoed and amplified in between his temples. He opened his eyes and quickly squeezed them shut against the explosive light coming through the hotel windows.
Daylight. That was good. Maybe. He didn’t know if it was light from the same day.
The memories came back, watching the people around him go into fits, their bodies twitching, the muscles under their skin contorting, moving and rearranging themselves.
That happened to me, he thought. I changed too. I became something else.
The thought didn’t want to fit inside of his skull. It was too big, like a tractor trailer trying to squeeze into a one-car garage. His stomach tilted to the left inside of him and his mouth watered with sour spit.
Half afraid of showering the bed with his vomit, Gene rolled over and stood up, compensating for the way the room wanted to sway even when he was standing still. He was wearing nothing but underwear but didn’t have the time to worry about finding anything to cover himself with. A quick look told him the same was true of the two boys and two girls currently sharing the room with him. He spotted them as he moved toward the bathroom and the sweet salvation of the toilet. He felt like he was going to puke, and he knew he’d piss himself if he didn’t take a leak soon.
He navigated past the sleeping forms, stepped over the discarded clothing on the floor and made it to the bathroom with what seemed like seconds to spare.
And as he was relieving himself, the thoughts that refused to fit inside his skull pressed down again until he gritted his teeth and groaned softly. This was wrong. All of it. He should be at home in his bed, waiting to hear how Uncle Rob was doing and dealing with the whole adoption thing. He’d come all this way, to Boston for God’s sake, and he still didn’t know much. Just that he was A freak! A sad joke, a loser -
– just that he wasn’t the only one whose life was all screwed
up.
Someone in the other room let out a small moan and Gene flushed the toilet. He wanted to brush his teeth, but there was only one brush and it wasn’t his. Instead he washed his hands, then used his finger to smear toothpaste around and over his teeth. The taste was the same at least, and anything was better than the dead cigarette and stale beer breath that had been haunting his taste buds since he woke up.
He’d been raised in the Jewish faith and now he was uncertain about so much. Did he have a soul? How could he if he didn’t have parents? He wasn’t born of man and woman, he was brewed in a vat or put together from spare parts or grown in a test tube. The thought was horrifying, the possible complications even worse.
Kyrie opened the door to the bathroom and started in before she realized he was there. He’d have been hard pressed to know which one of them was more embarrassed, but he was sure he blushed a little harder. Like him, she was dressed in only her underwear and a tank top. He forced himself not to stare, but it wasn’t easy. Half naked or not, hungover or not, she had a great body.
“’Scuse me.” He muttered the words and tried to sneak through the doorway without rubbing against her. He was only partially successful.
She mumbled something that sounded like an apology, and as he was moving into the main room, she called his name. “Gene?”
He looked toward her. “Yeah?”
Her eyes were wide and she chewed lightly at her lower lip. “Did we really change?” He thought for a moment before answering. He’d seen her transformation, had watched her grow taller, more muscular; her hair had even looked completely different, wild and thick and curlier.
“Yeah. We did.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“This is crazy.”
“Yeah, Kyrie. It is. It’s very crazy.” Gene took a deep breath and forced the sting away from his eyes. He wanted to scream, wanted to cry and throw fits, but he’d been raised by parents who believed in self-control almost above all else and of course, the idea of acting like a baby in front of a girl as hot as Kyrie went against his nature.
“I hate this.” Her voice cracked a bit and he looked at her again, focusing on her face. He felt like crying. She was actually doing it. Her eyes were wet and her lower lip was freed from her teeth now and trembling as she lost control.
He didn’t have to think very hard. He had a little sister and a little brother and even though they were sometimes a pain in the ass, they were his family. He did what he had always done for them when the world knocked them senseless, and moved over, offering a hug as comfort.
Kyrie took the invitation and clutched him fiercely, her face pressing against his neck, her breaths washing over his shoulder and chest as she started crying quietly against him. Her hands clawed at his arms as if she was afraid that if she lost her grip, she’d fall to her death. “What did we do? Why is this happening to us?”
His face flushed red and he patted her back softly. She smelled good. Even after a night of who knows what, she had a sweet, pleasant scent. He had to wonder if his deodorant was still holding up, but that wasn’t much of a concern, not really. He was smart enough to know that the way she was holding on to him had nothing to do with passion or desire. She was a wreck. It meant nothing more. And in truth, he needed comforting just as much as she did.
“I don’t know, Kyrie. I don’t. But maybe we can find a way to fix everything.”
“I just wanna go home… I want to go back to my stupid life and my stupid family, you know?”
He nodded and held her tighter as the sting came back to his eyes. “Yeah. I do. I want my dumb life back too.” Uncle Robbie’s drunken rants, his mom’s distant way of dealing with everything. His dad’s stupid jokes at dinner. Trish’s bratty ways and Kevin’s endless whining. He missed them all, more than he would have ever thought possible.
“I just want to go home.” She sighed the words into his shoulder, and while he should have been either dying of embarrassment or worrying about how his body was reacting to the half-naked cheerleader hugging on him, Gene just hugged her back, taking comfort from a girl who was almost a stranger and who had more in common with him than most of the people in the world.
Chapter Thirty-six
The Failures
Gene and Kyrie scrounged their money together and snuck out of the hotel room. They came back twenty minutes later with donuts and a six-pack of toothbrushes.
By the time they got back, the others had awakened and managed to survive the embarrassment of waking up mostly naked around a group of strangers. The one who seemed to take it the best was Tina, but if any of them had actually known her, they would have understood how good she was at hiding her feelings.
They read the complimentary newspaper and then watched the TV together as they ate. Not surprisingly, the destruction of part of the warehouse district was big news. They didn’t know the details, but none of them doubted that their other parts were responsible not only for them still being alive, but for wrecking half a city block in the process. There were just enough little flashes of memory to confirm that. Cody seemed to remember more of what had happened than any of the others, but all of them had seen the others around them changing. All of them had been awake and alert this time when they became something else. There was no denying that much of what Joe Bronx had told them was true.
“What do we do from here?” Cody lay on the bed, his narrow rib cage and bony knees pointed at the ceiling and his head hanging over the edge.
Hunter was the one who answered him. “We need to watch the rest of the tape Joe Bronx gave us.” He pointed at the TV. “There’s a built-in player.”
The tape had survived everything, which, all things considered, seemed almost like a miracle. They’d found it waiting on the dresser next to the TV.
They popped the tape in the player and watched, and if Hunter stared with more intensity than the others, they all pretended not to notice.
A flicker of static and then the image resolved into the shadowed face of Joe Bronx. “So the thing is, we have two choices. Well, you have two choices. I only have one. Either we go together to find out who did this to us, or I go alone. I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the idea of being hunted down or killed for being a mistake. I for one want to take control of my life.”
He stood again and paced for a moment around a room that no longer existed. They waited. What else could they do? Finally he sat again. “I want this done. I want this over with. I know that Hunter would like to go back to his family. I know that Kyrie wants to get back to Seattle. I get that. I do. I want to get on with my life too. Of course, that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? My life and Hunter’s…they’re locked together. I can’t be myself when Hunter is doing his thing. He can’t be himself when I’m doing anything at all.” His frustration was evident.
He leaned in closer to the camera again, staring hard at the lens. “Someone did this to us, all of us, all of you and all of your counterparts. We’re not the enemy here. We’re all victims. We all want to have our lives back, don’t we?” He chuckled. It wasn’t a comforting sound at all. “That’s the thing. We all want our lives back and the only way any of us are going to get them is if we work together. I can’t do it all myself. I’ve been trying now for a long time.” He spread his hands. “I can admit it. I need help. Mostly, I need the Others that each of you carries, but I can’t expect them to help me without it affecting your lives. You, all of you, are in control of your lives. Except when you aren’t. Except when they come out to play.”
He sighed and shook his head. “Gets damned confusing, doesn’t it? It only gets worse. So far each of you has a few questions. You want to know what you did to deserve this, I’m sure. The answer, near as I’ve figured out, is nothing. You were born. That was all you did wrong. Now, because your counterparts are awake and you are here, there’s a good chance that you can’t even go home without this being resolved. Well, you can.” Joe leaned in closer to the camera again and
his smile was not a pleasant one. “But it’s gonna suck to be you when your other halves get out and decide to hit the town. You already know something about that, don’t you, Cody? Woke up in a jail cell as I recall. He got busted breaking into a closed store. He was hungry. Never had to eat before he was born, did he?”
He held up a hand to stop anyone who might want to start talking. The gesture wasn’t necessary.
“Gene, your other self has a few issues with authority. It won’t get better. I guess you know who put your dad’s good friend Rob in the hospital, don’t you? What you don’t like, he doesn’t like. The difference is, he’ll do something about it.” He sat silently for a moment, composing what he wanted to say next, perhaps. “Tina. I’m sorry about everything that’s happened to you. I’m sorry about your mom, especially.” Tina shook her head and her lips pressed together into a tight line of rage or something else. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, but aside from that, no one would have known anything serious was wrong. “You’re alone in the world now. No dad. No family, no mom. There’s not as much in this for you. You don’t need to worry about what your other half will do to loved ones. Just the occasional would-be rapist.” He looked at the screen closely again, as if he might somehow be able to see into her eyes. “Your other half killed, what was it, five people? All of them mobsters. All of them connected to your boyfriend. She had to. They had something we needed.” He squinted for a moment and looked at the ceiling, then back at the camera. “Tony, isn’t it? Not a great guy, true, but he has friends. They’re looking for you. They’ll keep looking. Not just because you killed some of them, but because you took one hell of a lot of their money. You want to get out of this alive, you better figure out how to talk to your other half.”
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