The Clone Apocalypse

by Steven L. Kent

  Now my three intelligence guys, they were more alert. They dropped to the floor like most of the customers, but out came their guns. All three had weapons. One of them jumped to his feet, his pistol out and waving around like an antenna as he searched for the proper target. I shot him.

  The guy by the front door finally spotted me and fired. He hit a woman kneeling a few feet from me, and I shot him. Then I spun and fired at the guy at the back of the bar. I hit him three times, but I didn’t wait to see if he fell; when trained men are caught unready, their confusion only lasts so long.

  Panic had set in at the Lion and Compass. People screamed. Some people ran, others disappeared behind tables and booths. I spotted a man in BDUs running toward the far end of the bar. I shot him in the chest as he dived for safety.

  Another of my three intelligence guys tried to shoot from behind a table. I hit him in the arm, the shoulder, and the head. Now I had one U.A. spook left, and that guy started running. Half the bar followed on his heels.

  It was a human avalanche, a stampede of two-legged cattle. I sprinted after the guy. He was short, shorter than a standard-issue clone. He blended in with the people around him.

  People pushed and jostled as the herd wrestled out to the street. I heard a woman scream and saw her fall. The people behind her trampled the spot where she landed.

  Somebody grabbed me from behind. I spun, saw he wasn’t armed, and merely knocked his hand away. In the moment I spent dislodging his hand, several people ran into me, knocking me off balance. I stumbled, caught myself, kept pace with the current of people. We ran up the stairs, and through the door, and back into the dusky evening.

  Most of the people continued running even after they reached the street. That agent sure as hell did. He’d seen his two buddies dropped; now he sprinted like a world-class athlete. He had his head down and his short legs pumping like pistons in a race car.

  I had a clear shot at him, but at that moment, his life meant more to me than my own. If I could catch him, maybe I could get some information. He might lead me to a lab or a computer, with a cure for the flu. I didn’t know how much he knew, but I knew he knew something.

  He ran. I ran. He reached a street corner and ducked around a building, not pausing to look back in my direction. Did he know I was after him? He seemed alert enough, maybe even smart.

  A fleet of sedans screeched to a halt in the distance behind me. More came rumbling down the street and speeding past me. Apparently no one knew what had happened in the bar, just that shots had been fired.

  The Unified Authority didn’t provide jeeps for its soldiers, but they’d commandeered cars from some of the locals. They had achieved the symbiotic relationship that had always eluded us clones.

  The U.A. MPs must have known that several people had run down this street and that there’d been shooting. They could see the crowd around me, but the farther we ran, the more the herd thinned. A couple of men slowed to a stop ahead of me. I streaked past them. One of them yelled, “Hey.”

  That short spook, the one I was chasing, slid as he tried to round another corner. He might have been fifty feet ahead of me, but I was gaining quickly. I heard shouting behind me. Somebody had finally noticed us running from the scene.

  Damn, I wished Freeman had come.

  The guy made a sharp turn and started up an alley. That turn helped me more than him. Anything that got me off the street was fine by me.

  Not much light in that alley. I heard him stumbling over trash or boxes; it could have been a cat for all I knew. I followed, hitting debris and rolling my ankle, but not injuring myself. No sprain, no break, I kept running. He reached a door, wasted a second opening it, and darted through. I followed. It didn’t matter if the building was filled with convalescing patriarchs or armed assassins. I no longer cared. I kicked the door open and ducked to one side. One gun fired at me, and it belonged to my rabbit. He fired three shots into the stone wall on the other side of the alley. Fired in an enclosed hall, those shots sounded as loud as howitzer shells.

  I had an M27 and the beginnings of a combat reflex; you better believe I wanted to shoot the bastard. I wanted to dive in low, firing as I leaped. I hoped his friends would come to join him.

  I had learned to control my combat reflexes more or less. I drew a steady stream of oxygen in through my nose, spooled the air in my lungs, and exhaled through my mouth. I counted moments and listened to the beat of my heart. You need him alive, I told myself. You need him alive.

  I grabbed the lid from a nearby trash can, clapped it against the door to make a loud noise, then flicked it out, holding it vertically so that he would see the circle instead of the edge. The bastard shot two holes in it and ran.

  I heard his footsteps on the tile floor and followed.

  The shooting attracted attention inside the building. People stepped out of doorways. Had this been a military barracks, they would have come with guns, but these were locals. They liked the Unifieds more than us clones, but not enough to shoot at me.

  Seeing me run past his door, one old man yelled, “Who is he?”

  I almost yelled, “War criminal.” Instead, I sprinted ahead without speaking a word.

  You can shoot him in the leg, I told myself. Maybe not the thigh. Hit the wrong part of a man’s thigh, and he’ll bleed to death in a matter of minutes. That was the inner, upper thigh. You’d never hit it if you were aiming for it, not on a running man. I needed the bastard alive, and I wasn’t aiming for it, which meant he might spin or trip as I shot.

  I couldn’t take the risk.

  He spun and shot at me. We were still in the hundred-foot hall of a small apartment building. The lighting was low, restaurant bright, not office bright. There might have been twenty apartment doors between him and me, some had opened, but when most people saw guns, they closed their doors and hid.

  With my combat reflex now in full gear, I saw the world around me so clearly that it seemed to move in slow motion. I saw the bastard plant his right foot, spotted the twitch of his shoulder, and watched as his left shoulder swiveled back. The gun was in his right hand; eons passed as the muzzle lifted and pointed in my direction.

  Can’t risk killing him, I thought.

  He was still aiming wide when the combat reflex got the better of me and I shot at his planted right foot. Good thing I had an M27 instead of a Weinstein; my first shot hit his ankle. The bullet flattened when it hit bone and just about disintegrated everything after that. The guy screamed and dropped, his momentum spinning him around as he hit the floor.

  What a quandary I caused for the people living in these apartments. We were both dressed like civilians, both young, and both armed. They hadn’t seen the Nader or the Weinstein pistol, and my clothes were as clean as his . . . cleaner, my pants didn’t have blood all over them. I might have been the cop and he could have been the criminal for all they knew.

  The innocent bystanders had no one to phone for help. Since Unifieds had taken over the neighborhood, they couldn’t call for the regular police, and the U.A.P.D. didn’t exist. That’s what happens when neighborhoods turn into war zones. It isn’t fair. War isn’t fair.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  I had caught myself a U.A. intelligence man of some sort. I had no idea what role he played in their organization. I had shot him to stop him from running, but my bullet did a lot more than hobble him; it left the bastard screaming on the ground, his foot attached only by a few thin strips of skin and muscle.

  My M27 pointed at his face, I said, “We can take this game in two directions. Either you tell me what I want to know, or I stick my finger up into your ankle and start playing with nerve endings.”

  Someone yelled, “Hey! What happened here?” I looked up to see two soldiers at the other end of the hall. Good thing I had ditched the Weinstein. Hitting them at a hundred feet with my M27 came as second nature.

  Muffled screams came from behind the nearest doors. I scared these people, but that didn’t ma
tter to me. By this time, my reflex had hit full stride. Doing violence provided me with a sense of serenity. Compassion was not even an afterthought.

  The U.A. spy looked at his ankle and sobbed. He had no fight in him. If he’d held on to his gun, he wouldn’t have had the will to shoot me or himself. He sobbed like a little child, rocking back and forth, chanting words that came out in an incoherent wail.

  Remaining cold and calm, I said, “You’re going to take me to your headquarters.”

  “Get specked! Get specked! Get specked! Get specked!” he screeched, huffing and puffing and hyperventilating between words as his voice became shriller.

  I said, “Wrong answer,” and pulled him toward me by his nearly missing foot.

  What a noise he made. I regretted that move even before I released him. The guy wailed like a sidewalk siren. It was deafening. His shrieks echoed through the halls. Anyone in the alley would have heard him; he was louder than the gunshots.

  “Where are your headquarters?” I repeated.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he sobbed. “You specking bastard. You bastard . . .”

  I made a theatrical grab for his leg, and he flinched, but he didn’t talk, so I flipped him on his stomach and searched him for knives and guns and garrotes. I’d have to carry him to a car if I wanted his help, and I didn’t want him slicing my neck or back. Seeing the amount of blood he’d lost, I removed my belt and cinched it around his calf. As I prepared to tighten it, I said, “This is going to hurt,” then I yanked the belt tight, tied the slack into a knot, and twisted that knot so tight that it stanched the flow of blood.

  He, of course, narrated the entire operation by screaming in my ear.

  I took the sorry bastard by the jacket and slung him over my shoulder like a man carrying a gunny sack. As I walked toward the door, I growled, “You lost a foot so far. How much more do you want to lose?”

  He only sobbed.

  Was I willing to torture him? Under normal circumstances, I rejected torture as an option. Even with the hormones running through me, I knew the difference between hurting people and torturing them. Normal circumstances didn’t include my entire nation dying from a manmade flu over the next few days.

  I thought about signaling for MacAvoy and my Marines to begin their invasion but decided against it. Not yet. I didn’t have the lab. I had a spy, but I got the feeling I’d rendered him worthless.

  We got to the front door of the building. Three soldiers stood by on the street by a car they had commandeered. In the daylight, they might have recognized me as a clone, but the light was to my back. They saw my profile, my height, my camouflage. I shot them before they reached for their guns.

  “Lucky you, we have a car,” I said. I opened the passenger door and flipped him in. He fetched his skull a hard lick against the roof, but he was already in shock and might not have felt it.

  I drove a few blocks away, found an empty curb on a mostly dark street, and parked. I looked at my victim and saw that he had gone comatose. “You don’t get to sleep through this, pal,” I said, and slapped him. His head lolled back and forth, and he stared at me.

  I said, “Don’t you make me work your leg. Don’t you do it. I’ll stick my finger right up that wound if I need to.” Even then, even with the combat reflex pumping adrenaline and testosterone into my blood to provoke me, I knew I had already crossed a line with that bastard. I’d cross another if I had to, but I didn’t want to.

  I grabbed his chin, pointed his face at mine, and yelled, “Listen to me! You listen to me! I am going to fill your life with pain in another moment.

  “Where is your headquarters?”

  “No headquarters,” he stammered.

  “No headquarters?” I yelled. “Bullshit. Bull specking shit! Where’s your lab?”

  Still sounding like he was in an eerily dreamy state, he said, “No lab.”

  “There has to be a headquarters! There has to be a lab!” I slammed my fist into the dashboard of the car, and muttered, “How the speck did Sunny get that shit?”

  He seemed to wake out of his stupor. He moaned. Buried in that moan, he repeated the name, “Sunny.”

  She wouldn’t have cooked it up herself, I thought. She’d have needed scientists and the equipment. Developing a strain of the flu, a modified virus that would affect an entire population, something like that would require an enormous facility. They couldn’t have set up a facility like that in some random suburb.

  There are a lot of schools and hospitals and research centers around the capital, I reminded myself. They wouldn’t have started from scratch. The Unified Authority probably had a lab in space or maybe on Terraneau. They would have developed the strain there and shipped it to Earth.

  Sitting beside me, the pathetic shell of the man slipped in and out of delirium. He sat slumped in his car seat, so limp he could have passed as an invertebrate, and babbled. “Sunny . . . Sunny,” and he giggled and sobbed. “Sunny . . . Allison . . . she did it.”

  “Did what?” I asked. “Who is Allison?”

  “That’s why you came.” He laughed. The dying bastard smiled and laughed and groaned. His teeth chattered. He said, “She killed you.”

  I said, “Do I look dead?”

  “But that’s why you’re here. She did it.”

  I didn’t like what he was saying; it sounded too specking close to the truth. I asked, “How do you know Sunny?”

  He said, “I know Allison. She said you’d all be dead by now.”

  “Who is Allison?” Realizing that he was trying to tell me something, I asked the question gently.

  He must have bitten his lip involuntarily; he had bloodstains on his teeth. He said, “Captain Ewan said she killed you. You’re Harris. You’re the Liberator. You’re Harris.”

  “Where is Sunny?”

  He laughed this dreamy, lazy giggle and seemed to fall asleep. I shook him, slapped him, started to grab for his ankle. He moved a hand to stop me, but he was weak, and I batted it out of my way.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I laid two fingers on the outside of the ankle. I didn’t press them into the wound. I didn’t squeeze. He needed to know that I could hurt him, and there was nothing he could do about it. “How do you know Sunny?”

  “. . . know Allison Ewan . . . my boss,” he shouted.

  “Your boss,” I repeated.

  “Intelligence,” he said, rushing the words as if handing me a bribe.

  Not everyone in intelligence is a spy. Spies gathered the data that intelligence analysts interpreted. He might have been the technician who maintained their satellite links. He could have been a saboteur or an interrogator or an assassin. The more I thought about his possible job titles, the less sympathetic I became. Adrenaline and testosterone surged through my system, flooding my thoughts, stimulating my bloodlust; I could barely keep myself together. In another few moments, my combat reflex would wane, and only violence would keep the hormone flowing. The pangs of withdrawal would begin.

  “Don’t know where she lives. Don’t know where she lives. Don’t know where she lives,” he chanted.

  “Where do you go to meet with her?” I asked.

  “Don’t know where she lives.”

  “Meet her,” I said. I shook him, grabbed his jacket and drew him toward me, then slammed him back into the seat. “Where do you go to meet her?”

  “Never met Sunny. Met Allison,” he said.

  I sighed. The bloodlust had nearly taken over, but I had regained control of myself. Torturing this man would get me nothing; he was a dead end. If I were going to get anything out of him, he would have spilled it by now.

  I reached across the car and opened the far door. That woke the bastard. He asked, “What . . . what are you doing?”

  I said, “I’m letting you go,” which was the truth, but not the whole truth. Restarting my hunt would be dangerous even without the poor bastard’s blood all over my clothes. I planned to let him ou
t of the car, then shoot him.

  He said, “You’re going to shoot me.”

  What do you say to that? I couldn’t leave him alive, or he’d start screaming. I could have pointed out that he’d just tried to shoot me. Instead, I said, “You can get out, or I can shove you out.”

  I felt bad about saying that, but in a moment I’d pull the trigger, and the reflex hormones in my blood would surge. Any regrets would be forgotten.

  He said, “No. Please.”

  The boy wanted to live. His foot was shot off, and he was in shock. Pain had clouded his brain, but his survival instinct remained.

  He put up his hands, and stammered, “I know where she kept the poison!” and I thought, God bless the will to survive.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  I saw the neighborhood and realized that I had never understood Sunny. The girl I had known lived in a luxury apartment, dressed like a model, attended law school at Harvard, and came from a wealthy family. She was pampered. She was spoiled.

  The neighborhood this dying U.A. spook took me to see was a forgotten row of two-story tenements. The war hadn’t reached this neighborhood, but it wouldn’t make the streets any uglier when it did.

  The unending row of apartment buildings butted right against the street, old buildings with dirty concrete steps leading to doors with iron bars over their windows.

  By this time, my prisoner had settled down. He still felt the pain from his nearly disintegrated ankle, but he’d fallen into a meditative, almost comatose state.

  “You still there?” I asked him.

  “Specking clone. I hope you die,” he muttered.

  You’re going to get your wish, I thought. We drifted through streets without streetlights. Light glowed inside some windows, but it wasn’t bright, and sometimes it flickered. Some of these people probably used fire to cook.