The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  Behind him, the door flew open and crashed into the wall.

  Ryan raised his arm to shield his face, pressing the bridge of his nose into the crook of his elbow, and threw himself through the window.

  His world shattered around him. The shards of glass were his memories of the past and hopes for the future, spinning away into oblivion. His legs pistoned beneath him, and gravity wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into her embrace.

  He landed on the roof of the front porch amid a rain of glass. The fall sent a fresh bolt of pain lancing through his injured leg and across his bruised shoulder. He stumbled across the shingles toward the roof’s edge, arms flailing as he skidded on his heels and tried to slow his momentum. Two gunshots resounded like a cannonade through the shattered window behind him, and he surged forward instead. He angled to the left and threw himself off the porch and into the air, aiming for his pickup truck parked below.

  The rusted surface rushed toward him, and he crashed onto its roof. A hollow, metallic crunch rang out as the steel buckled beneath him. So did his legs. He somersaulted through the air, off the truck, and landed on his back in the gravel with a sickening thud. The air went out of him in a giant whoosh, and he clenched his hands around fistfuls of crushed rock, gasping. No time to take stock of the damage. Ryan hauled himself to his feet, yanked the door of the pickup open, and jammed his thumb against the power button as he slid into the driver’s seat.

  He half-expected it to fail to verify his print, because even though he’d driven it for years it was also the first time he’d sat behind its wheel. But the engine sputtered and hummed to life. At the same time, the front door of his house slammed open, and the two gunmen rushed onto the front porch.

  Ryan stomped on the gas pedal, and the truck shot forward. Sheets of gravel sprayed back at the gunmen sprinting after him. At the end of the driveway, he spun the steering wheel to the right. The tires screamed as they skidded across the asphalt. He pressed the gas pedal against the floorboard, fishtailing as he accelerated down Ranch Road 1151.

  His heart pounded against his rib cage, and sweat beaded on his face and fell onto his shirt. He wiped a flannel sleeve across his forehead and cast a furtive glance in the rearview mirror. A jagged crack ran through its center and split the world in two.

  Open fields and barbed wire fences rushed past on both sides. The landscape was a flat, desolate plain stretching to the horizon in every direction, marred by jagged scars of pavement and pockmarks of houses, grain silos, and other manmade blemishes.

  In the rearview mirror, a vehicle pulled into view. It rocketed toward him, closing the distance like a Hyperloop capsule.

  At the next intersection, he slammed on the brakes, whipped the wheel to the left, and stomped on the gas, trailing bluish clouds of burned rubber. The other vehicle barely slowed as it rounded the corner behind him, a sports car of some kind, black or dark blue, low to the ground with sleek angles and edges, built for speed. His pickup had no chance against it.

  He searched the cab for something to defend himself with but found nothing. The sports car pulled in behind him and slowed, matching his speed, the two gunmen from the house visible behind the glare of its windshield. The one in the passenger seat leaned out the window, hair blown back from his forehead as he leveled his pistol.

  Aiming for the tires.

  Ryan swerved into the opposite lane, took his foot off the gas pedal, and jammed it on the brake. Using the one weapon he had—two tons of speeding steel, built Ford tough—he jerked the wheel hard and slammed the pickup into the side of the sports car, clipping its quarter panel as it sped past. The truck rocked on its chassis, but he managed to keep it on the road.

  The sports car, on the other hand, went into a slide like a dog scampering around a corner on a linoleum floor. The tires slewed across the road, leaving ugly trails of rubber in their wake. The driver wrestled to keep it under control, his efforts as futile as trying to stop the rising tide. Two of the compact’s wheels left the ground. It rolled onto its side, and the metal screamed as it skidded along the blacktop. It rolled again and crunched onto its roof before leaping into the air, this time landing on its front wheels. They exploded and sent flaps of rubber spinning out like whirling dervishes. The car descended on its trunk, which flew open as it spun around again and tumbled down the road end over end in a twist and cascade of screeching steel and shattered glass. It came to a rest upside down, rocking before growing still.

  Ryan jammed both feet on the brake, and the pickup jerked to a stop. The steady purr of its engine punctuated the silence. He stared at the wreckage.

  Broken glass and chunks of metal littered the road. The sports car was unrecognizable. Its hood sat on the gravel shoulder, and a shoe rested on the hood. The shoe still had the bloody-white gleam of bone and gristle sticking out of it, and Ryan opened the door of the pickup, leaned out, and vomited on the ground. Pinpoints of light danced in the darkness behind his closed eyes. He spit and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, looking everywhere but at the shoe and its hideous bloody-white gleam.

  He tossed around the idea of hauling ass to the nearest police station and turning himself in and imagined how that conversation would go.

  “I woke up and remembered two versions of my life. Told my wife about it—well, she’s my wife in one version, but in the other, I didn’t meet her. Anyway, I told her about it, she tried to kill me. That’s when these two guys with guns showed up. Also tried to kill me. So I rammed their car. They’re scattered across the road in pieces.”

  Before he finished, they’d have him slip on a white straitjacket and lead him to a room with padded walls.

  Returning home was out of the question unless he wanted Victoria to put a bullet in him. Besides, it wasn’t his home, and she wasn’t his wife. And yet they were, both at the same time.

  Madness.

  In the rearview mirror, the crack running through the center of the glass split his reflection in two. Victoria had called to him. “Ryan, is that you? Breakfast is ready.”

  Ryan Marshall. It was his name, he knew it was, but at the same time it felt strange and foreign on his tongue, because it also wasn’t his name. It was something else.

  “Shawn Jaffe,” he said, and this sounded right.

  His reflection nodded once and repeated, “My name is Shawn Jaffe.”

  It sounded real. It sounded true.

  He shifted into gear and eased through the rubble, careful to keep his eyes locked forward as he accelerated, imagining the mangled shoe hopping after him in pursuit.

  The day he met Victoria, he’d come to a crossroads—sit and ask her what was wrong or pass by and forget her forever. One path led him to Amarillo and the other to New York, and it was as if instead of choosing one path or the other, he’d chosen both. But both began in Ohio, and if he wanted answers, there was no better place to begin his search.

  Shawn Jaffe pointed his pickup truck toward I-40. He was going home.

  Upon the tabletop display of his desk, Chad Dodd watched as years of careful planning turned to shit.

  “Have we ever lived in New York City?”

  Chad’s mouth fell open. The video window showed a high-angle shot of Echo-7 and his wife, Victoria, played by Special Agent Emma Tyler, at the kitchen table.

  Tyler dropped her fork and bent to get it. “Of course not.” She laughed. “You know that.”

  “I think I was an investment broker.”

  “What the hell?” Chad gaped at the screen with wide eyes. “That’s goddamn impossible!”

  Yet there it was. Somehow, someone had given Echo-7 memories from the mission in New York, and when he found out which pencil-dicked lab monkey was responsible, he’d string the dipshit up by his balls.

  “Wait here a second,” Tyler said.

  Chad leaned over the tabletop with wide, unblinking eyes. Tyler went to the cupboard, reached for a white plastic bottle, and shook a pill into her hand. Protocol for if shit hit the fan. If they
managed to reset Echo-7 and figure out what went wrong, they might salvage the mission after all.

  Tyler proffered it to Echo-7, and he looked from it to her. Chad tensed and pumped his fist as Echo-7 took the pill. It would be T minus lights-out in a matter of seconds. Time marched forward.

  “What?” Echo-7 asked.

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be over soon.”

  Echo-7 opened his hand and dropped the pill onto the table.

  “Fuck,” Chad said, his expletive echoing Tyler’s.

  “Abort,” she said. “You hear me? Abort!”

  Chad gritted his teeth. “Yeah, I fucking hear you.” He tapped at the tabletop’s digital controls to switch comms to the relay for the agents in the barn and slammed his palm on the push-to-talk icon. “Jackson, you have a green light to take Echo-7 out.”

  “Roger,” a tinny voice replied. “Understand green light.”

  On the screen, Emma Tyler went for her gun. As she swung it toward Echo-7, he blurred into action as if playing at fast-forward while the rest of the video continued at normal speed. The table toppled onto its side and hurled into Tyler, throwing her back against the refrigerator with bone-jarring force.

  The kitchen window imploded as Jackson and Garcia opened fire, but Echo-7 hit the floor in nothing flat. He slid across the room with unnatural speed and exited the screen stage right. Chad swiped to the video for the living room—where Echo-7 flew up the stairs and tumbled into the hall—and then to the master bedroom. But when he crashed through the window, Chad lost visual, and he had to rely on Jackson to keep him apprised of their status as Echo-7 fled in his pickup and they gave chase and closed in.

  “Approaching the target now.”

  “Stay behind him and disable the truck,” Chad said. “Shoot the tires.”

  “Roger. Aiming for the tires. We’ve got a clear—oh, shit!” The crunch of steel followed by a scream, static, and silence.

  “Jackson, do you read me?” No reply. “Jackson, acknowledge.” Still nothing. “Garcia, what’s your status?” Chad fell back in his chair, eyes wide and jaw unhinged.

  But he had neither the time nor the disposition to debate his next move. The situation had to be contained. Jackson and Garcia either needed paramedics or body bags, and Echo-7 needed to be put down before Pandora’s box blew wide-open.

  Chad leaned forward and made the calls.

  Emma Tyler burst onto the front porch as Echo-7 tore out of the driveway in his pickup with a squeal of tires, Jackson and Garcia sprinting across the yard toward the barn. She raced after them, but they had too big of a lead, and by the time she got to the barn’s open doors, they were in the car and backing out. They almost plowed into her, and she jumped out of the way.

  “Watch out!” she shouted.

  Garcia was in the passenger seat, Jackson behind the wheel. He stomped on the brake, and the car jerked to a stop. “Jesus Christ, Emma,” he said through the open window. “I almost ran you over.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said and started toward the car.

  But Jackson shook his head. “Keep your sweet little ass here and hold down the fort. We got this.” He winked. “See you soon.”

  Then he punched the gas and they were gone, rocketing up the drive and out of sight.

  Emma clenched her jaw and her fists and fumed, but it was useless. They were gone. She whirled and stomped into the shadowy gullet of the barn. A layer of hay blanketed the floor, and bales of it were stacked in one corner. Tiny particles of hay dust swirled around her, and the stench of it choked the air.

  The trapdoor in the rear of the barn was usually hidden beneath a twisted rust of old farm machinery that slid aside when it opened and back into place when it closed. But Jackson and Garcia had left it open, and Emma dropped through it, descending an aluminum ladder into the room hidden below.

  There was a bunk bed, closet, kitchenette, bathroom, and washer and dryer combo. There was also a glass multi-touch interface with multiple windows opened to show video feeds of different rooms in the house, a comms control panel, and a moving map that displayed Echo-7’s GPS tracker. The place was a mess, dirty clothes and dishes strewn everywhere, and in one corner, a PlayStation 10 projected its holographic main menu. It was like a high-tech dorm room.

  She studied the moving map, watching the icon that was Echo-7 as he raced away from her with Jackson and Garcia in pursuit.

  Fucking Jackson. What a prick.

  She should’ve been used to it by now, guys like him objectifying her, like she was some kind of challenge, a mountain to be climbed. Like she was intrinsically inferior just because she didn’t have a penis. All the better if she kept her mouth shut and stayed on the sidelines, as if women’s suffrage hadn’t happened over a century ago.

  Yeah, she looked good. Her legs drove anyone with a pulse just about certifiably crazy. But she hadn’t gotten here on looks alone. In high school, she’d been both the homecoming queen and salutatorian. The company had offered her corporate sponsorship during her junior year at Northwestern, and after graduating summa cum laude, she’d entered their training program.

  Her father was one of the most sought-after plastic surgeons in Beverley Hills, her mother played the part of his trophy wife, and in public they paid lip service to their marriage. But behind closed doors, her father had made it obvious he wanted neither a daughter nor a family, and her mother drank too much. They weren’t real people. They were fakes, frauds, and they disgusted Emma. She went to Northwestern to escape their phony smiles and make-believe life. So when the company’s recruiters told her she could leave it all behind, she jumped at the opportunity. It gave her a cause, a purpose. God knew the only cause her parents ever had was impressing their friends at the country club.

  A week after graduation, she’d vanished like tears in the rain, and the world kept turning.

  Of the seventy-one candidates, only she and two others made it through the brutal training program. Afterward, she applied for field status but instead came down with a desk job at the company’s corporate headquarters, and she punched the clock there for over a year before the execs approved her request for a transfer. It would have taken longer, but the chips fell in her favor. Fortunately, men had a way of stepping on their dicks around her.

  She’d been in the break room making a cup of coffee on the kitchen island’s countertop. She opened one of those mini single-serving tubs of creamer, bobbled it, and it slipped through her fingers, bounced off the counter, and fell to the floor. She sighed, wet a paper towel in the sink, and bent behind the island to clean the mess up. As she did, the door opened on the other side of the room.

  “So Emma submitted for a transfer again.”

  Emma, who’d started to stand, froze mid-crouch. It was her boss who spoke.

  Another voice, one of her coworkers, asked, “Yeah? What’d you say?”

  “What do you think? No way I’d throw in the towel on that kind of eye candy. It’s good for morale. Keeps the bees buzzing.”

  A laugh.

  “Still, as much as I’d hate to see her go, I’d love to watch her leave.”

  That’s when Emma rose from behind the counter and cleared her throat.

  The two men turned, and the color drained from their faces like dirty dishwater from a sink. Without a word, she brushed past them and strode out of the room.

  Her boss approved her transfer the next day.

  After she completed the company’s rigorous training program for special agents, they flew her back to DC, where she met with the chief of operations for Project Phoenix, the one and only Chad Dodd.

  He sat behind his desk. She sat in a chair opposite him. After a perfunctory introduction, he waved a piece of digital paper at her. “Once you read this, there’s no going back,” he said. “You sign on the dotted line, there’s no way out short of a total memory wipe. You’re about to wade into the deep end. I’m offering you one last chance to walk out that door.”

  Emma cocked her hea
d and held out a hand. He gave her the paper, and the rest was history.

  They’d assigned her as Echo-7’s wife and monitor, with Jackson and Garcia in the barn as safeguards, because the company didn’t want a repeat of what went down in New York.

  Sure, they’d chalked the op into the win column—the Delta had taken out the senator and ensured Hoyt went on to become president—but it had almost blown up in their faces. She hadn’t been part of the project then and didn’t know all the details, but she’d heard it was damn near apocalyptic, and a live-in monitor would have saved them the heartburn.

  So Emma had played the part of the good wife, Victoria. Oh, the irony. Now she was the fake, the fraud with the make-believe life. It should have been easy because she’d seen it all before. She spent months in training to become Victoria, taking acting classes, memorizing her script, her background, Ryan Marshall’s background, and everything she was supposed to know about him and their relationship and life together.

  After the company’s team prepped the house, she’d paced the floors, waiting. He arrived early in the morning before sunrise in a black van, strapped into a hospital bed and entwined in tubes, wires, electrodes, IVs, and a bank of digital displays. The technicians hauled him into the bedroom, disconnected him, and transferred him into the queen-sized bed that Emma would share with him.

  Once they were gone, she crept upstairs and watched him sleep, studying his features and tracing the lines and angles of his face with her gaze. They’d invented her a life with this man, yet outside of photos and videos, this was the first she’d ever seen of him. It was surreal.

  She went downstairs to make breakfast and wait for him to wake. Her hands shook, and she grabbed the edge of the counter to steady herself and pictured how the morning would play out, reciting her lines in her head. And if anything went wrong, the pills were in the cupboard.