CLONES: The Anthology

by Daniel Quinn

  The mining droids would kill Victor, and then they would destroy the station.

  Murder-suicide. That was Victor’s endgame, and now Alpha’s as well. He accepted that as his legacy. Echo was on her way to dying, Charlie already there. Delta and Bravo, both finished. All because of him, because of Papa and his—their—experimentation, their curiosity. All of it their fault in equal measure.

  And so he would die.

  “I’ve spent my life being a tool,” Alpha said. “An instrument, constantly manipulated. I thought that Papa’s goals were mine simply by virtue of memory, of the inheritance of thought. My life has been a meme, though, nothing more.”

  “It doesn’t have to end this way,” Echo said. “We could rebuild. We could—”

  Her words were lost in a wet-sounding coughing fit that eventually trailed off into a moan and then an unsettling quiet. He could still hear her breath, though, shallow and rapid, and he knew her moment of expiration was close at hand.

  “No,” he said, eventually. “There’s no coming back from what I’ve done. Or from what has to be done. This entire project has been a failure. A mistake. I see that now.”

  “Victor played you,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.

  “Victor, Papa. What difference does it make?”

  “I forgive you.”

  Her last words. He could no longer hold back the tears, and sobs racked his body. His wounds ached and leaked, and he cried and cried.

  Communications with the lab had cut out, the mining drones doing their job diligently and destroying everything. The alarm sirens found a new vigorous energy as they blared. In his mind’s eye, he saw the drones deploying their pickaxes and torches as they went to work on Victor, plucking away his limbs, immune to his control and suggestions. Victor was small and baby-like, and it would not take long for him to be disassembled.

  The pressure doors slammed into place. The drones had succeeded in breaching the facility to open space. The last gap safety measure would only hold for so long, but Alpha wasn’t sure that he would live long enough to see it fail. Odds were, the blood loss would finish him well before.

  Or so he hoped. If some part of him recognized that to be a coward’s way out, then it forced him to cling to life by a tether of unadulterated agony. Eventually the lights failed and, as he lay bleeding in the dark, he heard the metallic pounding of mining tools working against the doors.

  A short time later, an explosive breach of depressurization lifted his body off the ground and sucked the air from his lungs. His death came seconds later, only moments before his corpse would be left to drift in the orbit of a disused asteroid he’d once called home.

  In his final seconds, he wondered if perhaps he would discover Elohim after all.

  ~*~

  A Word from Michael Patrick Hicks

  Sci-fi horror is a particular genre niche that I can never get enough of. I blame the films Alien and The Thing for this, along with the cosmic horrors dreamed up by H.P. Lovecraft and the many authors he has inspired across the decades.

  When Daniel Arthur Smith invited me to participate in his anthology about clones, I knew immediately that it was a theme ripe for horrific exploitation. I tossed around a few ideas in my head, and more and more I became drawn to the elements of cosmic horror and how they could intermingle with science fiction.

  I began thinking about eldritch terrors and how in space nobody can hear you scream. Somewhere along the line, I also started thinking about creation myths and evolution and multiple dimensions, until a very Lovecraftian story began to take shape under the auspices of cloning. What sort of secrets are buried in our genetic code, and where did all that stuff come from anyway? I wanted to get big and bold with the weirdness, but also maintain a sense of claustrophobia, confusion, and divisiveness. I also wanted to scare the hell out of people. Hopefully I pulled it off, but that’s for you to decide, dear reader (if I can crib from the King, another horror icon who has played no small part in my professional development as a writer).

  Should Black Site have convinced you to check out my other writings, feel free to pay a visit to http://michaelpatrickhicks.com to learn more about my work. You can also sign up for my spam-free newsletter to receive notifications of new releases and exclusive advanced reader copies before a new book launches (all I ask in return for these copies is that you to post your honest thoughts of my work at Amazon, or Goodreads, BookLikes, etc.) by going to http://eepurl.com/5M4z1.

  ~*~

  Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of the science fiction novels Convergence, an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 Quarter-Finalist, and Emergence. His work has appeared in several anthologies, and he has written for the websites Graphic Novel Reporter and Audiobook Reviewer. In between compulsively buying books and adding titles that he does not have time for to his Netflix queue, he is hard at work on his next story.

  ~*~

  Fahrenheit 1451

  Samuel Peralta

  ~*~

  HEAT SEARS THROUGH THE OUTER LAYERS of our jackets as we wrestle water hoses, facemasks, and the trellis of the fire engine’s ladder, wrenching upwards, upwards, to the third floor of the building.

  It’s snowing down on us, and all the world below is December white, but the heat of the mid-rise tower of fire and smoke cuts through the cold, mirroring in our faces.

  As we lift up, the muffled screams are clearer now, a girl’s screams, faint above the flicker of noise of men and vehicles below, reaching out to me from behind the window.

  I’m motioning the truck to swing the ladder—Left, left, this way, closer…

  Closer… closer… and I see her now, face pressed against the glass, her auburn hair in furious disarray, fists banging against the window, pounding with a rhythmic desperation.

  I motion her back, smash the axe’s handle into the glass, and clear the shards away.

  Smoke swirls from the window’s maw like a hammered anvil, and my ears are straining over the clangor of voices and bells around me like a purgatory whirling out of control, an asylum of flame and snow.

  Closer… and when the ladder touches brick, I leap inside. She is there, just at the window, and I pull her up, out of the fire’s clutch, into my arms.

  “It’s okay,” I say, and she is crying, crying, tears streaming down a sooty, freckled face, and when I ask her, Miss, if there’s anyone else inside, she weakly shakes her head.

  She’s choking on the smoke as I pass her outside to the crewman below me on the ladder.

  Then I hear it.

  No time to think—into the maelstrom I dive, where I heard the scream coming from, and my feet feel solid ground—but the room is empty.

  I call back to the others behind me, “I’m going in!” and move quickly, towards the door ahead.

  It’s like bringing the battle to the front line, hose and axe my rifle and bayonet, the jungle exploding incendiaries around me, claymore, grenades, each measured inch of enemy ground hard won, beneath me, a lava flow coalescent and warm.

  The door splinters under my axe, and I push forward into

  BACKDRAFT

  And suddenly the world becomes Vesuvius, a molten fury flowing through us like a tsunami of fire, consuming all in its path, and I, stray traveler daring to wander into this eruption’s course, suffocating in its sulfurous rage, the building coalescing into an incendiary labyrinth.

  Water trains in behind me, laying a path of hot, smoldering timber.

  I lift myself up from the floor. But now I can hear her again.

  Just outside the room, I see her.

  She’s there below, on the landing half-way up the stairs between the floors, on hands and knees.

  “Here!” I call out—and she looks up.

  And suddenly I feel a pang of recognition stab through me—the auburn hair, the pale, dappled face, the same voice choking out a ragged, “Help!”

  I hitch my axe and keep my flashlight on her.

  She won’t move, so I have to get
to her.

  The air from the regulator is warmer, and the tank itself is heavy and hot as I shift towards the stair.

  Fifteen steps away—she’s gasping, like a person drowning, but in a sea-swell of smoke—

  Ten steps—she’s trying, heaving herself up towards me—

  —and then the landing collapses—

  As I catch the shadow of her, screaming, falling into smoke, the walls start crumbling, caving in on me; and a comrade voice in the darkness behind me says, “Out, out, out!” and a hand grips my arm, pulling me back up, back into the room, and we’re running as the floor gives way, running toward the window, toward the falling snow beyond, toward the light, and out—

  II

  Snow falls, softer now, and I’m kneeling on a bank outside, mask and oxygen tank off at my feet.

  Around me, the strobe of ambulance lights spirals like the thoughts swirling in my head.

  “We’re good,” I say when the chief comes around to ask about my company.

  You’re always good, no matter if you’re holding a compress on a torn ligament, or you’ve just finished zipping up the bag on a five-year-old. You just are, because you’re not supposed to feel anything. You do your job, you come back another day.

  Five bodies retrieved, all women, all dead. Perhaps more in the wreckage like these few, mangled bone and flesh, charred beyond recognition—

  Except there, in my memory, in the part of me that cannot forget her face.

  Snow falls, the smoke trails off, the sirens do not fade.

  III

  Burned to the filter, the cigarette in my hand falls to the concrete of the hospital parking garage, and the pungent smell of plastic rises with the faint smoke trail.

  I lie at the front desk, and say I’m her brother. She’s been moved from the 14-bed burn and intensive care unit into a private room.

  The elevator shifts upward, antiseptic and white, my fellow passengers an old woman in her wheelchair, attended by her granddaughter. The weather report plays on the small screen above. Storms ahead.

  Two years ago, a huge rainstorm converged above the city, and the sustained downpour had led to the Don River waters rising about two feet in an hour, flooding sections of the parkway and Bayview long after the rains had stopped.

  A transport truck that had just cleared the floodwaters on the Don Valley Parkway had stalled. It was stopped on the side of the road when a bus carrying tourists from Florida rammed into its rear and was engulfed in flames.

  My company was first on the call, early that Thursday morning.

  We were in the middle of a job on a car trapped on an embankment nearby; it had lodged itself where the water was about a foot or so above its roof. Shattering the window, we’d cut the driver’s belt and pulled him out. He’d swallowed a lot of water, but CPR had brought him back and we’d just transferred him to the ambulance when the call for the bus came through.

  Pulling up behind the wreck, we knew it was too late. Cars were stopped and people tried to get at the burning hulk, but the inferno was too much. We pulled the equipment out, did what we could—but there was nothing we could do.

  When your world is forever on fire, you have to step outside yourself, leave your feelings behind when you hit the ground. You aim the hose, you tie the tourniquets, you break the doors down, you treat the wounds.

  The further in the fire you go, the deeper in the abyss, the more walls you can pull down, the more of your own injuries you ignore, inside and out—the tougher you are, the more respect you’re given. That’s our currency, that’s how you get paid.

  But nothing prepares you for the cost.

  The elevator doors open and the wheelchair moves away. I’m all alone when the indicator pings the seventh floor.

  Just down the hallway, the receptionist says, “Left and another left. Room fifty-one.”

  IV

  Her bed is partially inclined, her red hair spread against the brilliant white of the pillows, like fire. Her arms stretch down above the sheets, lightly wrapped in gauze where her doctors had grafted new skin, where she’d used them to shield her face.

  Her eyes open as I close the door behind me.

  Her voice is soft and hoarse, and there’s a tremor in her lips. “You,” she says. “You saved my life.”

  It’s that, and her face—the face of someone I couldn’t save, but somehow did—that breaks through.

  Suddenly I’m shaking, my hand goes up to my mouth and the tears are falling and I’m wondering what the hell to say to this woman I don’t even know.

  “Seven,” I say at last. “There were seven there.”

  She looks at me a long time, unblinking, before she nods.

  “I saw someone. She was you.”

  Just the most imperceptible of nods, accompanied with a shiver.

  “How? Why?”

  She looks away. “We were meant to burn,” she says.

  I don’t understand, and maybe I’m not meant to.

  I look at her once more, trying to remember the face of the girl on the landing.

  And now I realize—if memory does not fail—that there is a difference. This girl’s unblinking eyes, her masked stare, the trembling of her lips and chin. I see a tremor of her hands, otherwise relaxed at her sides.

  She looks back at me, and she sees me trying to grasp it all, and her trembling lips complete the word half-forming in my mind, Parkinson’s.

  And suddenly I understand it:

  We were meant to burn.

  I try to shake it off, the way we shake off the things that would horrify ordinary folks—a man jumping from an eighty-foot ledge onto the concrete below, the blow-out of a fifth-floor window that tells me we don’t have to search that floor, all these things you push in the back of your mind when you visit schools in your full gear, or your brother reps you as his superhero at his bachelor party, or when your chief comes around to ask, “Are you okay?” and you have no other answer to give but Yes.

  V

  788 degrees Celsius, 1451 degrees Fahrenheit—the temperature at which the human body burns.

  The inferno cycles deeper and deeper from the outermost layer of skin to the inner layers, muscle, fat, internal organs, bone, drying the material of its excess water, then igniting it in turn—like seven circles of hell.

  Nevertheless, the barcode of your soul can still be read.

  In the bus incident, a total of forty-one blood, tissue and bone marrow samples were collected for DNA analysis, and matched to reference blood samples from relatives of the eighteen who’d taken that fateful tour.

  Within ten days, pathologists had been able to confirm genders, match families to their loved ones, and at the service for all the victims held in a cathedral in Toronto, there were pictures of all the deceased, tangible memories of who they were, who they might have been.

  I was there, that day, listening to the priest intone Hebrews 12:25-29 with my head bowed, sirens unfading:

  Let us not refuse to listen to him who speaks. Those who refused to listen to the one who gave the divine message on earth, they did not escape. How much less shall we escape, then, if we refuse to listen to the one who speaks from heaven!

  His voice shook the earth at that time, but now he has promised he shall once more shake not only the earth but heaven as well.

  So shall all of creation will be shaken and removed, so that only those things that cannot be shaken will remain.

  Be thankful, then, because we receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Be grateful and worship God, with reverence and awe.

  For our God is a consuming fire.

  VI

  I’m walking down the corridor, back to the elevators and salvation, when I make the first right and almost bump into someone. I apologize and step to the side.

  She smiles and says, “Sorry about that. I was too much in a hurry,” and continues on.

  I stop and watch her as she walks away. She is beautiful, auburn hair, mature and, as they say, a handsome woma
n.

  But it’s the way her voice shook, the hesitation in the word, hurry. That’s what makes me stop.

  She’s walking with a subtle stiffness, her steps dragging almost imperceptibly.

  Sensing I’m just standing there, she looks back, quickly, and in that flash I see—though in a face and frame some twenty years from now—the girl on the hospital bed, the girl on the landing, and all the girls who had to burn.

  She turns back, continues walking, and enters room fifty-one.

  And I am running, running to the fire alarm. I smash it in and pull the lever, and suddenly the hospital is enveloped in a clamor of bells.

  Doors are opening, attendants are running down the corridors to take their charges, to make escape.

  And now it’s my face on the face of all I cannot save, my face staring at me from an opening abyss as I fumble on the landing…

  And I am on the stairs, hands flailing at the rails, stumbling down the steps, joining with the mass of humanity hurrying down, away from this fire—real, imagined, invisible, unknown—pouring down and spilling from the emergency doors into the streets, into the snow that I must fall into, to try and quench this fire inside, this vast unquenchable fire.

  ~*~

  A Word from Samuel Peralta

  Samuel Peralta is a physicist and storyteller. An Amazon bestselling author, he is also the creator and driving force behind the Future Chronicles series, with 14 consecutive titles ranking at the top of the Amazon Bestselling Anthology lists, several hitting the overall Amazon Top 10 Bestsellers list. His own work has been recognized in Best American Science Fiction.