by Ryan Schow
“So, no leads?” Brayden says.
“Follow my thinking, Brayden. Two detectives. Both dead of unnatural causes. A huge story suppressed from not only the media but the whole internet. A missing girl pronounced dead without a body for proof. A German scientist specializing in somatic human genetic engineering experimenting on kids at a school for the elite. One gigantic, creepy, scab eating beast of a man who threatens girls in bathtubs. Brayden, this isn’t an Investigative Journalism assignment. This is the kind of mystery that’ll get us killed if we’re not careful.”
“It’s cool, isn’t it?” Brayden says, halfway excited.
“It’s not cool. My freaking nerves are on edge.”
“Then let’s drop it. You’re beautiful, I’m funny—we have each other. Isn’t that enough? I mean, all joking aside, seriously, if it’s smart to quit while you’re ahead, trust me, you and I are ahead already.”
“Yes, we are ahead. And no, we aren’t dropping it. What we’re going to do is what we talked about doing, and that’s break into Gerhard’s house and steal his key. I’m not going to let some freak of nature scare me. Besides, what if what happened to Kaitlyn’s going to happen to me? What if she wasn’t killed? What if it was the treatments that killed her?”
“So, I guess we’re still on then?”
“I said so, didn’t I? Tomorrow night we get to know the doctor. We stake out his SUV, we stake out his house, we find that sweet spot in between. The vulnerable spot.”
“You sound so dramatic right now,” he says. “It’s actually turning me on.”
I smack his arm and say, “We need to focus right now, not joke around. We can’t afford to take half measures.”
“Okay,” he says, rubbing his arm, looking hurt. “You don’t need to be so violent.”
Breaking and Entering
1
After Brayden leaves, my mind continues to spin. I need to see Damien. He needs to know what is happening. If something happens to me, if we get caught—or worse—then at the very least I want to know he will continue investigating.
Professor Rhonimus says there must always be a place where your research is stored for safe keeping. Usually with someone you trust. Someone with a strong stomach. In politics you have to do the same thing with the dirt you have on others. What I have so far is leverage, even if it’s not concrete yet, it’s enough to at least point a suspicious finger at Gerhard. Who knows? This information in the right hands just might save my life.
Professor Rhonimus told us the story of how he was investigating a huge drug laundering scandal in Tallahassee and ended up with a shotgun jammed in his mouth. He said, “If not for leverage, I wouldn’t be here today.”
I amass my files, and at about nine o’clock, I head over to the boys’ dorms and knock on Damien’s door. He answers, clearly upset. Maggie is on his bed. Oh, boy. She’s beautiful and she’s crying.
“Is this a bad time?”
“Yeah, kind of. What do you want?”
I show him the folder. “This is everything I have on Kaitlyn’s disappearance,” I whisper. I hand it to him; he takes it. He starts to pull back and shut the door. I stop him. “I think I know what happened to her.” He glances back at Maggie who is wiping her eyes. She looks at me. I look at Damien. “Whatever you have going on in there, this is more important.”
He invites me inside and I’m thinking, what a tool! We stand inside the room, the three of us, all looking exceptionally uncomfortable. Maggie excuses herself and leaves, not looking at me at all.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she tells Damien, her voice choked with emotion.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” I say, and Maggie offers the faintest of smiles.
When it’s just me and Damien, I say, “Cameron’s not going to like this. You and Maggie and…whatever this is…the two of you.”
“Cameron’s a non-issue.”
Taking a seat at his desk, I say, “Cameron’s not going to see it that way.”
“Whatever, it’s not what you think. Besides, who I choose to be friends with isn’t any of your business anyway.”
“Always so sweet,” I say, giving him my best new smile. “Forever a gentleman.”
“Just talk.”
“Okay,” I say. “Fine.” He runs a hand through his hair and his eyes become narrow with impatience; I frown. Then: “How much do you know about Wolfgang Gerhard?”
“Enough to know there’s something…off about him,” he says. He toes off his shoes, sits on his bed Indian style. “He’s into genetic engineering and he’s obsessed with altering the DNA of people like you. From what I found, he spent his entire life studying the subject. He’s sort of a genius about it, I guess.”
“Did you know that’s not even his real name?”
“What?” he says. “No.”
“Do you know who Josef Mengele is? The man they call the Angel of Death?”
“He was a Nazi war criminal, right?” he says. “Head of the Nazi death camps in World War Two?”
“He was an esteemed officer in Hitler’s SS and the head physician at Auschwitz. He personally sent over four hundred and twenty-five thousand Jews and Jewish sympathizers to their deaths in the gas chambers. He did this in just under two years. He’s considered one of the worst mass murderers in human history. A real monster.”
“What’s he got to do with all this?”
“When Germany fell and Auschwitz was liberated, Mengele was put into a concentration camp, this time as a prisoner. He was quickly smuggled out and ended up in South America where he assumed a different identity. He went by the name Wolfgang Gerhard.”
“What? Are you saying—”
“Mengele’s dead,” I assure him. “I mean, they never really saw his body, but he was old. Much older than Gerhard. It’s the idea that our Dr. Gerhard would idealize this human terror so much as to take that fake name for himself. It’s disgusting. And it’s frightening. Mengele did a lot of inhumane experimentation on women and children without anesthesia. Then, when he was done, if they weren’t dead already, he’d just gas them.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you see the significance? Mengele was a murderer, a sadist of the highest order, merciless. He experimented on unwitting people. He was the kind of monster who tried turning people’s brown eyes to blue by injecting chemical solutions into their eyeballs, while they were awake. Can you imagine? Mengele was obsessed with eugenics. So is Gerhard. Our Gerhard.”
“What the hell is eugenics anyway?” Damien asks.
“Eugenics is a bio-social movement founded to improve the genetic composition of a population. Although there might be good people involved, most eugenicists loathe the idea of the undesirables—the plain, the ugly, the retarded, the deformed. They call them useless eaters. The unwashed masses. How much do you know about Adolf Hitler?”
“I know he wanted a more perfect society, that he thought Jews were standing in the way of that.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” I say. “Hitler hated the Jews because he thought they were the only group of people who could quell his rise to power. He feared their collective strength. At least, that’s what he eludes to in some of his writings.”
“Okay, fine, but this isn’t Nazi Germany, and World War Two is a non-issue.”
“Don’t think about the Nazi’s as being war criminals from a dead movement. The idea of a perfect race is a Nazi idea that still has traction. Under Adolf Hitler’s vision of a Master Race, he believed the Nordic people, i.e., the Aryans, were superior to all other races, and so they were entitled to world domination. With eugenics, the concept of ‘pure bloodlines’ rule above all else. With Gerhard’s form of science, this is how Hitler’s plan survived his death and is alive and well today.”
“How come I’ve never heard of this?” he asks.
“The people in power today, the well-funded power elite, they’re still dying to create the perfect race of human beings. It’s just not something they ment
ion outside their social circles.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’ve been a busy bee, Damien. Plus, if you look at me, if you look at who I was on that first day of school, I look nothing like my old self. Before long I’ll be perfect. Just like Georgia, Victoria and Bridget. Like your step-sister. Perfect, but different.”
“So Dr. Gerhard, or whomever he really is, he’s carrying the Nazi torch?”
“Forget the Nazi label. It’s just a distraction. Gerhard seems obsessed with the idea, not the movement. He’s a small part of a greater problem. I learned that he works for and is funded by a group called the Virginia Corporation, a cutout corporation with offices all across the globe, and our campus being listed as one of them. Astor Academy is classified in their financials as a ‘Corporate Retreat.’”
“Again, how do you know this?”
“I have friends in low places. Friends who know how to hack just about any server in the world, including the IRS servers.” Okay, so maybe I don’t have friends in the plural sense, but I do have Brayden, and he’s enough. More than enough.
“You hacked the IRS?”
“Not me.”
“Then who?” he wants to know.
“Forget that right now,” I tell him. “My sources are my own. What you must understand is what’s going on here is the work of long dead sadists like Josef Mengele and Adolf Hitler, and it’s being carried out as we speak. The imposter calling himself Wolfgang Gerhard, he’s running the show here and we’re paying for it. You, me, Kaitlyn, our parents. Where does it end? When we’re dead? When they get tired of you asking questions and you’re dead? With a world full of Georgia’s, Victoria’s and Bridget’s?”
Running his hand through his hair, he lapses into a lengthy, contemplative silence. The way his eyes seem to see nothing and everything, how he stands uncertain—not at all the cocky, angry boy-God I’ve come to know and all but despise—I feel drawn to him. Attracted to a part of him not physical, maybe his dedication to Kaitlyn. In the back of my mind I’m wondering if he can get past the fact that before long I will be known as the fourth clone, and parts of me will resemble his beloved step-sister. I’m wondering if he can get past this enough to be attracted to me, too. To maybe want to date me. Considering how he’s acted towards me, though, I’d have to be mentally defective to even entertain such a thought. Which I’m not.
“So you think he’s taken Kaitlyn’s genes and he’s pumping them into you. Into the other clones?”
My girlish fascination with his good looks wears thin. “Don’t call them that. Whatever they are, I’m the same as them, the same as Kaitlyn. And no, I don’t think he’s using Kaitlyn’s genes. I saw her photo before Gerhard got a hold of her. She was pretty in a really understated sort of way, but not gorgeous the way she was when she went missing. I’m certain we’re getting someone else’s DNA, or genes, or whatever the hell’s in that pink solution he injects me with.”
More silence. He’s trying to wrap his mind around it, and just when I think he has it, it slips away and the brooding, angry Damien is back. I can’t stand this version of him.
“I don’t believe it,” he says. “It’s impossible.”
“Do be so stupid, Damien. Did you ever see the back of Kaitlyn’s left thigh?”
“Yes,” he snaps. “So what? Jesus, quit being so damn cryptic!”
I unbutton my shorts; he sees this, turns his head and says, “What are you doing? God, don’t do that.”
“Oh shut up, you’re embarrassing yourself,” I say. I’ve had about enough of his crappy attitude. “Besides, I’m not that ugly little mutt anymore.” His face heats to a blistering red, but he forces his eyes upon me. I pull my shorts down, happy to be out of my granny panties and into a G-string (Victoria talked me into it, said my ass would look luscious in one). I turn and, show him Alaska. I hear the sharp inhale of breath, which could mean my butt looks that good, or he’s shocked by the “birthmark.” Or maybe, hopefully, it means both.
“Look familiar?” I say.
Looking over my shoulder, I breathe in his expression. His face is completely white and he’s staring back and forth between the mark and my new butt cheeks.
“Hers looked just like that,” he whispers. “Her mark, I mean.” His face turns an even deeper shade of red.
I pull up my shorts, button them, then say, “Georgia, Victoria and Bridget…they all have the same mark. Gerhard’s been trying to undo it in me, but—obviously, so far—he has failed on a massive scale.”
“I just can’t believe it.”
“Read what I gave you and we’ll speak tomorrow. I have a plan. A way to find out what really happened to Kaitlyn.”
He gives a vacant nod, his eyes lost, his body inert. Things shift behind his empty gaze. He’s coming back to life. “I’ll read it now,” he says. “When you leave, I mean.”
“Good, because when I tell you what we’re going to do, we will find out just how serious you are about getting the truth.”
2
How well do you trust your friends? That’s what Brayden asked me last week. He said, “If you blow this wide open, to the media and everything, it will expose them and their families. You’ll ruin their lives. And your own. I mean, can you imagine the headlines?”
The scary thing is, I can.
Lately Victoria has been saying things like, “You’re a lot taller than before, maybe two or three inches. It’s time for new clothes.” I feel taller, and according to Victoria, a girl can always use new clothes. “We need to get you into something sexy,” she’s been saying. “Something that really flaunts your new personality.”
I’ve been less shy, not nervous at all around people even though most everyone who stuck up for me when I went head-to-head with Julie and Cameron has now abandoned me and taken to calling me “Number Four.” Meaning the fourth clone.
I’ve been thinking a lot about me and the girls lately, trying to determine the fallout from breaking Kaitlyn’s and our story. The way I’ve been thinking, going national might be the only way to keep us all safe. It’s when you don’t go public with something like this that your chances of getting killed skyrocket. The dead detectives working Kaitlyn’s case taught me that much. Still, the non-triplets are the best friends I’ve ever had and I don’t want to lose them.
I can’t.
Sitting at the breakfast table eating steel cut oatmeal and fresh organic peaches, I say, “Are you guys friends with me because all three of you were just like me?”
“Were like you?” Georgia asks. “We’re still like you.”
“No you’re not. Pretty soon, yes, but not yet.”
“We’re friends with you because you’re a good person. Because we all know what you went through before coming here and that was just sad.”
Something has been bugging me from the beginning, a question I couldn’t ask because I didn’t know how until now. I didn’t have the courage. “How did you know I would get the treatments? That I would be like you?”
Georgia smiles, tilts her head slightly and says, “We didn’t.”
My heart wants to flutter, but I restrain myself. Tell myself not to be foolish. “If that’s the case, how come you’re not friends with any of Janine’s ugly four?”
“Because they’re not you,” Bridget says. “We tried with some of them, but they don’t like us. Especially Sunshine.”
Victoria says, “They hated us. But you didn’t.”
All I ever wanted was to be beautiful. I just wanted Margaret to love me. To not act disgusted by the sight of me, or have to explain to people that no, I’m really not adopted.
Georgia says, “We come from parents who are extremely successful but not attractive, with the exception of Margaret, and the way our parents want us to have the things they never had, well beauty is now achievable. Even if it’s a side effect from curing other ailments, like leukemia or cystic fibrosis.”
“Yes, but you all look the same.”
�
��It doesn’t matter to us,” Georgia says.
“Speak for yourself,” Bridget says.
“Yeah,” Victoria echoes.
“I thought you guys were okay looking the same,” I say. “I mean, you dress different and have different styles and makeup, but I guess…I don’t know. Lately I’ve been wondering how I’m going to feel looking like you.”
“You’re the new model,” Georgia says. “You’re skin is different. Your face, too. There are some similarities—our similar eyes and body shapes—but you’re not as tall as us, and your skin color is different. You have a more female shape to you, too. Where we’re pretty straight up the sides, you get the hourglass figure all of us would kill to have. And your hands, they’re different, too. Better fingers.”
“She’s still changing,” Victoria says. “She’s not done.”
“I don’t know,” Bridget says. “I grew first then changed. We all did.”
“Yeah,” Georgia says, “but that was a year and a half ago.”
“Regardless,” I say, “I wonder if looking so similar, it makes you unpopular.”
“Haven’t we gone over this already?” Bridget asks.
“Isn’t that the same as being ugly?”
The girls look at each other, pondering the question, then together say, “No.”
Georgia says, “If being popular is treating everyone around you horribly, or walking around with your nose in the air like you’re better than everyone else, then I don’t want to be popular. That’s Julie Sanderson, Cameron O’Dell and Theresa Prichard. Besides, we can change our hair and makeup, and the way we walk and talk and dress. I think sharing a few common traits is no biggie. Swear.”
“It’s a biggie to me,” Bridget says. “You don’t seem to get that, Georgia.”
“It’s a biggie to me, too,” I say. “When you’re in the spotlight all the time, like me, when you have the paparazzi jonesing for the most trivial of flaws to exploit, looking exactly like three other girls from wealthy families like yours—maybe four if they find out about Kaitlyn—it’s not hard to imagine shit going south real quick. Especially if there’s a formal investigation. Haven’t you guys thought of that? Good investigative reporters will travel anywhere, skirt any unreasonable law, dig through mountains of garbage to turn people like us into the kind of scandals that lead to gigantic paydays.”