by Quil Carter
He…
… asked about me?
Mantis’s words were like liquid dizziness being poured on top of my head. I could practically feel it slowly dripping down my face, blinding my eyes and covering my mouth to make it seem as if I was breathing through a hot damp cloth.
I swallowed Mantis’s words and remembered myself. “What did you say to Todd?” I asked. I left the Mortal Kombat game and the two of us walked to the couch. To busy myself, I picked up the bowl of potato chips that had been brought down here for us, and began to slowly nibble on them.
“I said you weren’t around much,” Mantis said with a shrug. “I didn’t tell him you were a house hermit.” My brow knitted but Mantis, being the close friend of the family and my brother’s best friend, was unfazed. “But I said you were really shy.”
I looked at him horrified. “I didn’t want him to know that about me!” I said. I wiped a hand down my face and leaned my head back on the couch. “I wanted to–”
“–go into that school and pretend to be someone else?” Mantis asked, bemusement dangling off of each word.
“I’m not going to pretend! I’m going to be that person,” I said. “So next time he talks to you…”
“… lie?”
I glared at Mantis and he smiled smugly back at me. “I really hate you sometimes.” I threw a potato chip at him and rose to my feet.
Perish arrived about ten minutes later and our food was delivered an hour after that, giving our guests and our family a lot of time to mingle and talk amongst themselves. Perish was his witty and sly self, dressed in a blue dress shirt and black pants. He wasn’t making as many scavenging trips in the private jet since he’d found what he needed to further his chimera research and his genetic engineering, so his appearance was clean-cut and sharp: A shaved face, black hair cropped short, and a healthy appearance. He was in a good mood too, and in a deep discussion with Silas over our new brothers which were being planned out right in our living room.
Nero and Ellis were downstairs since science things were boring to them, but Garrett, Mantis, and myself were in the living room listening intently to the fascinating conversation they were having. I absolutely loved genetic engineering, cloning, and things along those lines. Garrett would always be a better scientist than me because of his coding, but my coding had me excelling in all areas, not just science. So I was still better than him.
“A red-haired one?” Perish said, the right side of his face was creased from a half-smile. “I thought ginger people freaked you out.” He was leaning over the coffee table which his laptop was placed on. On that laptop were a bunch of documents and grids with numbers, formulas, and charts. Only recently had these complicated things started making sense to me. Now I excelled at any work that Perish gave me to do. I’d even taken over writing down baby Lennix’s daily stats, which included his weight, measurements, heart rate, things of that nature. That child was watched like a hawk, and it had been the same when my siblings and I were growing in our steel mothers.
But though I enjoyed the daily maintenance of taking care of the baby, my favourite thing to read were the giant walls of text which were Perish’s ramblings. He’d get ideas in his head, theories, or formulas, and he’d type them out without care of paragraphs, grammar, or punctuation. My job was to translate these ramblings into readable notes for the scientists who worked under him to read and make sense of.
“No, not a ginger kid!” Silas said aghast, his face twisting in disgust. We all laughed at that reaction, the atmosphere in the room jovial and laid back. “As South Park would call them… a daywalker. I don’t want his skin to be all weirdly white like those gingers have. Or freckles. Just reddish auburn hair, that’s all. You know red hair is beautiful and he’ll be a handsome man once he’s of age. You’re a talented man, Perry, you know exactly what I want.”
Perish’s eyes flickered to the ceiling, a joking gesture to make it seem like he didn’t know what Silas was talking about. “Yes, I’ll make him attractive. Heaven forbid we have an ugly chimera for the king.” He looked at me and tilted his head up. “This one is aging nicely, isn’t he? I think out of all of them, he’s the most stunning. Garrett has a classically handsome look to him, Nero, of course, is the brute bear, Ellis obviously is beautiful… but this one… he’s at that awkward gangly stage currently, but once he fills out…” Perish whistled, just as I blushed hard and threw my hands over my face.
“He is coming together nicely,” I heard Silas say. “I’m going to use his genetics for the identical twins.” I withdrew my hands, the shock of his words flooring me. “I had abandoned my plan to after his nervous breakdown, but he’s been impressing me with how he’s bouncing back. Elish’s mental endurance is impressive, especially after what he went through four years ago. All it took was for him to decide that he was going to change and he did it. I didn’t push him at all. On the contrary, I’d given up on him and I was going to start with a clean slate for the twins… but I’ve decided to use him for the future chimeras. Elish for the intelligence twins, and Nero for the brute boy.”
I lowered my hands, just as everyone in the living room turned to look at me. The shock of what Silas had just said rocked me hard.
“W-what?” I stammered. “You’re going to clone me?” I could hear my own heart thumping against my rib cage, as if it was banging on the door demanding for the person on the other side to give him answers. They were looking in the wrong place however. I had no answers to these questions, just a hell of a lot of them to ask.
This was the first I’d heard of this. I’d known that Silas wanted to create three more chimeras, including identical twins, but I’d always assumed that their genetics would come from Silas. We all had various amounts of Silas in us. And the unique traits that we all had, like Nero being a brute with his muscles, tall stature, and other things that made him unique, were all engineering. Silas was our base basically. He was the clay, but science was our sculptor.
“No, lovely,” Silas said smiling. “Not cloning you exactly. I’m going to use your genetics and my own for these twins. The two of us combined will make for a fascinating set of intelligence chimeras. Fifty percent me and fifty percent you. Now, with the brute boy, I’ll–”
But I didn’t hear him, my ears were roaring, as if my blood had become a waterfall, and my mouth was moving around aimlessly like that waterfall was rapidly turning a turbine.
Did he just say what I think he said? Part me… and part Silas? I looked to the other staring faces, seeing no floored shock like I myself was experiencing. Were they not also confused by this admission? I didn’t understand why it seemed that I was the only one alarmed by what Silas had just announced.
I was only twelve years old and… I was going to be…
“I’m going to be a father?” I stammered.
As if my words had physically struck him, Silas recoiled. He stared at me, in a way that suggested he was trying to convince himself that I hadn’t said what I’d just said, and his lips pursed as if hiding clenched tight teeth.
An urge took me to run away from him, because I knew I was in for it.
I wasn’t wrong.
“Don’t you ever fucking say something like that again,” Silas said angrily. His tone echoed around the living room, amplified by the awkward silence that had fallen as soon as I’d said those doomed words. Everyone shifted nervously in their seats, staring down at glasses of wine and ChiCola with blank looks on their faces, looks that reminded me of a robot who’d had their power supply shut off. It was as if my family and friend’s self-preservation had snatched from them their very consciousness and they’d retreated inside of their own bodies.
“Do you understand me?” Silas snapped.
I stared at Silas dumbly and nodded.
Then Perish laughed. He fucking laughed like he was watching a tragic comedy. I was so scared by this reaction I shrunk down. I no longer trusted adults, and I definitely didn’t trust them when it came to diffusi
ng situations and finding ways to prevent them from escalating. Once I had, once I’d thought that adults were infallible and knew everything – but too many times had I been proven wrong, and now I looked to Perish like he was a human blowtorch, just waiting to light this living room on fire.
“You can’t get angry at him for that,” he said through his chuckling. “In all respects, he’s right. He doesn’t understand your neuroticism about not wanting this family to appear incestuous.”
Incestuous? What the heck does that word mean?
I wasn’t going to find out…
What happened next happened so fast I at first didn’t realize it was something I’d witnessed before.
As soon as that last syllable left Perish’s lips, he let out a strangled half-choke, half-whine, followed by a gasp that shook his body. His hands then flew up to his head where he clenched his hair, and as he pulled on it, choking and gasping, his eyes rolled back into his head. The tremor then multiplied all throughout his body, and as if he was performing the most morbid and twisted of dances, he began to seize and writhe.
At this terrifying display, chaos descended and broke the awkward silence like a hammer being thrown through a glass window. At once, everyone moved, as if they were all one unit with a shared consciousness. Zamir grabbed Mantis who was sitting beside Perish and got out of Silas’s line of sight, Garrett cried out and ran to Perish, and I just stared dumbly at the scientist as his neck wrenched back and his torso pushed forward. His entire body was twitching and contorting like his muscles had become spaztic.
My buried recollection then burst from the ground like a fetid zombie determined to feast on my already infected soul.
Yes…
I’d seen this before.
Cristo and that doomed scientist.
“Uncle Perry!” Garrett cried, calling Perish a pet name that Silas had forbid him to use. He grabbed onto Perish’s arm and shook him. It was seeing that, my little brother in such a dangerous spot, that snapped me out of the throes of my paralyzing thoughts, and tossed me, not just back into reality, but also into action.
Knowing how dangerous it was to be in Silas’s view when he was in such a state, I leapt up and snatched my Garrett. He wailed as I pulled him away from Perish, and when he saw blood drip down Perish’s eyes like tears, he full-on screamed.
I didn’t know if it was Garrett’s screaming or something else, but Perish’s eyes snapped open – and those icy blue eyes immediately fixed on Silas.
Then they turned black.
Perish… Perish could do it too?
My head turned towards Silas when I heard him release a strangled scream, a gurgling cry like there was something constricting his throat. To my shock, Silas was now writhing on the couch, his emerald eyes bulging from their sockets like a tropical island centered in the middle of the arctic.
“I’m fucking tired of you treating me like one of your slaves,” Perish snarled. He rose from the couch, his body heaving from anger and his lips peeled back in a snarl. “You’ve gotten too bold for me, Seiben Zwei, much too bold.” Silas screamed, a scream echoed by Garrett who I was holding firmly in my arms. “I think it was a mistake allowing you to be king. You seem to think you’re above me now. You seem to think… you can treat me as an inferior.”
What… what was he talking about? Why did he call him Seiben Zwei?
That was… seven two in the German language.
Blood began trickling down Silas’s nose, and to my horror, blood filled his ear canal and collected in the creases and grooves. I knew I had to do something, but this was all happening so fast, I felt stunned.
Perish, now towering over the king whose body was still twisted up and knotted on the couch, grabbed Silas by the collar of his shirt and wrenched him forward so they were nose to nose.
“I should force you to tell those boys your plans for them once they’re fifteen. I should force you to explain just why you flip out whenever one of them dares draw attention to the elephant in the room. Why the man who is raising them is never to be called Father. Nor is their genetic descendants, their veritable children, never to be called sons. It would just be too weird for you, wouldn’t it, King of the World? So we all have to ignore it and let you twist and abuse their little minds.” As Perish spoke, blood sprayed from his mouth and onto Silas’s face. And when he smiled after saying those horrific, barbed words, his teeth were red. “Elish… Garrett… he doesn’t let you call him Father… because once you turn fifteen, you’re going to be his lovers along with his heirs. He’s going to fuck you as soon as you’re of age. You’re all engineered to be gay, except the girl since he has little use for her. And I doubt he’ll let any of you–”
Before I even knew what I was doing, or Perish for that matter, I was raising my fist and aiming for his face.
I hit him as hard as I could, and though it wasn’t enough to knock Perish off of his feet, it was enough for his eyes to turn back to blue, and for him to drop Silas.
But just as the king fell to the ground, Perish’s attention turned to me. There was an anger in his eyes that made his face look demonic, two comets made out of blue flames that told me I should be counting down my last remaining moments on earth.
Perish raised his hand and backhanded me. Unlike my blow, this one threw me off of my feet. I felt myself become airborne and I landed on the side table which held a ceramic lamp and a glass bowl that we kept our remotes and game controllers in.
There was crashing and screaming all around me. I fell to the ground and pain sprung up in several different parts of my body, but my attention was focused on the chaos around me. The maelstrom that had hit a whole new level after the punch that threw me off of my feet.
From the floor, I saw Silas and Perish in an all-out brawl. Their firsts were swinging, and their eyes flickering from black to their natural colours. Silas was shouting something but it was all just a deafening roar to me, another overture of chaos to add to this terrifying symphony; a symphony that had its audience watching in a state of catatonic terror, myself included.
Perish pushed Silas down and kicked him in the ribs. He rose, blood covering his face and dripping down his neck like the wax from a red candle, and kicked Silas again, this time in the chest.
Confusingly, he took the half-step to his laptop. He leaned over it and used the touchpad, then after navigating and clicking for several tense moments, typed a few things before rising.
“Happy Skyday. I just set the Gosselin lab to self-destruct. Say goodbye to baby Lennix. Who knows, maybe he’s viable and you can–” Perish was cut off when Silas let out a horrific, gut-wrenching scream. But Perish only raised his voice. “–you can sit in front of that burning building like you did Sky’s lab and wah wah until the flames cool.”
“NO!” Silas shrieked, the agony so heavily implanted in his words gutted me. My master staggered to his feet, his blood-covered face twisted in pain. “Call it off! CALL IT OFF!” Silas began to stumble towards Perish. “Perish, CALL IT OFF!”
Perish, who was halfway to the door, turned around and flipped Silas the middle finger. “I hope this further cripples your pathetic little mind, and stops your useless attempts to clone my brother. Go kill yourself.”
“Call it off… call it-it off… CALL IT OFF!” Silas screamed. Then he let out a sob and I saw tears spring to his eyes. “CALL IT OFF!” He continued to stumble towards Perish, madness now taking him.
Perish lowered his hand and turned to the door.
But when he reached out for the handle, his movements froze, and he suddenly became still. My eyes then went from him to the king. Silas was still stumbling towards that door, but his movements were awkward and not coordinated, obviously from the damage Perish had inflicted on his brain.
However, that damage was not solely reserved to him, that was clear from Perish’s seemingly becoming frozen in ice.
Or so I thought. Just as I felt a hand on my shoulder, Perish swayed, then fell to the carpeted floor with a
thump that shook the ground underneath me. He slumped over onto his back and the arm which held the hand that had flipped off the king, landed beside him with a second, albeit smaller, impact.
And it was obvious that he was dead.
Silas collapsed to his knees, droplets of blood falling from his face like rain. He stared forward, and though his gaze seemed hollow, I saw a pain so deeply embedded inside that I swore he had a thousand people behind that gaze, instead of one sad, lost man.
Then a scream that I would never forget fell from King Silas’s lips. It was a scream of agony, a scream of despair, a scream so filled with pain that tears sprung to my eyes. How a man could make such a noise, I didn’t know, all I knew was that I never wanted to hear such a sound ever again.
Moments later, the scream faded, and in the heavy coppery-smelling air that surrounded us, the lingering trill was consumed. But only for a second was everything quiet… the silence was broken when Silas slumped over onto the floor.
He was dead.
CHAPTER 14
I stood in front of King Silas’s bedroom door and took in a deep breath. So many times in my short life had my feet rested in this exact spot, staring at the closed door while mentally building myself up to put a hand on the handle.
And today was no different, but there was an unease inside of my chest that was different than before. On other occasions I was scared, anxious, or terrified, not wanting to disturb the king that dozed inside, or just wanting to be close to him because I’d had a nightmare.
But this time, it was because seeing him in the state he was in was uncomfortable to me.
This morning was supposed to be an exciting one, a happy event. It was my first day of school and I’d been marking down the calendar, anticipating this day with jolts of electricity in my heart and a smile on my face. But after the events of last night, that excitement had turned sour, and the house had been blanketed in a shroud that trapped the dark atmosphere that Perish had brought and released.