Won't Back Down: Won't Back Down

by Unknown

  *~*~*

  "You've made bail, kid." The cell door slid open with a metallic clatter.

  Liam looked mutely up at his jailer. This officer had been kind to him even though he'd attacked another cop. The man had offered Liam more coffee and told him that the precinct chief doubted he'd had anything to do with Alex's disappearance. Alex's last text message to him, with the alibi Rob provided for him, meant Liam had been mostly ruled out as a suspect.

  It didn't matter, of course, since he'd gone after an officer. Liam didn't regret it, except that he could have been out there combing the city for his Alex.

  "Bail." Liam repeated the word, and his voice cracked. His vocal cords felt swollen and abused, making it hard to swallow. "My mother?"

  The officer shook his head. "She was still trying to raise the funds, last I heard. No, you've got an anonymous friend."

  "What?" Liam didn't understand, but he stepped out of the cell. He had Alex's earbud wrapped tightly in his left hand. They'd taken everything else away from him, but he hadn't been willing to give up that final link to Alex. Even though the iPod the headphones had been tuned to was shattered and hidden away in the evidence locker, Liam couldn't help believing, somewhere in his heart, that the music would start playing again if they found Alex.

  "Here." The officer turned around, and when he turned back, he was opening a Ziploc bag. He laid the items out on the table in front of the holding cells. "One wallet, black with driver's license and forty-seven dollars in cash. One small notebook, red. One Samsung cell phone, black, new model."

  Liam stared at the tiny black phone. Without Alex his mind plodded sluggishly to even the simplest of conclusions. "That's not mine."

  The officer shrugged. "It was in with your stuff. Belongs to a friend, maybe? Sign here."

  Liam put down his signature on the line marked with an X. Then he remembered his iPhone, the one that had come in a matched set with Alex's and looked up sharply. "What about my cell phone? The one with Alex's text?"

  "It's up in evidence," said the officer, not without sympathy. "You might be better off buying a new one."

  With his wallet and the unfamiliar phone in his pocket, Liam trudged upstairs in front of the officer. He kept his eyes fixed on the floor. He didn't want to see the man who'd been interrogating him, the one who'd jumped to all the wrong conclusions about the shared room Liam hadn't had time or the presence of mind to clean up.

  "Oh, Liam, thank god."

  He looked up in the station's waiting room when Serena's arms wrapped around him. She had tearstains all down her cheeks and her phone in one hand. "Oh, my god, I can't believe they'd do this to you." She started to cry again, her fingers gripping the back of his shirt. "My other baby's missing and they try to take you away, too."

  They hadn't told her about the part of the interrogation that had led to his arrest, then. Liam should have been relieved, but he just felt numb as he put his arms around her.

  Serena pulled back to look at him. "They say we should go back to the apartment, in case… in case Alex goes back there. I couldn't go without you, though, baby. Oh, god."

  Liam shook his head slowly. Alex wouldn't be back at the apartment—he would have called. But Liam followed Serena out into the cool night air and stopped suddenly on the sidewalk. His breath gusted out in a faint cloud of steam as the panic struck him again. "Alex, Jesus, he didn't have his jacket. He didn't take it today." Liam started to shake. "He didn't take—he'll be cold."

  Sobs wracked his body, his already sore throat. He cried into Serena's shoulder like a child while she held him tight.

  *~*~*

  In the apartment, Serena cooked supper for them. Liam heard her clattering in the kitchen, using more pots and pans than she could possibly have needed, by the sound of it. Several of them clashed on the tile floor and she swore, her voice rising in pitch with her upset.

  Liam sat on the floor with his knees clutched to his chest. On the day after they'd moved in, he and Alex still hadn't found a table they'd liked. They'd ordered pizza and had a picnic on a blanket on the carpet, Liam chuckling as Alex laughed and gestured with his slice of extra cheese. The floor reminded Liam of Alex, but so did the couch, where they'd made out lazily so many times while the TV played on unheard.

  Now Liam stared at the television. Alex hadn't been gone long enough for him to be featured on the news. The rest of the stories reported by the cheery blonde anchor meant nothing to Liam.

  He shifted and remembered the phone in his pocket. Liam pulled it out to look at it and turned it over. It had no identifying marks or features, not even a serial number printed on the back casing. That made him frown. It seemed strange, even on a day when everything had gone wrong.

  Liam pressed the button on the top to turn it on. The phone chimed pleasantly with a swirl of pastels moving across the screen.

  The image that came up as the background startled him. "What the hell?" Liam whispered. It showed what looked like a human, crouched, face twisted into a snarl to reveal long canines. Liam looked down to its hands and feet: they had been replaced by long metal claws, as long as steak knives but not serrated.

  It had to be a photo manipulation, he realized in the next second. The phone could belong to one of the art students who had classes in the same building where Liam and Alex took their music courses. If Alex had been there he would have liked the picture, found it interesting. Liam let out a shuddering sigh and tapped the screen to look at the contacts list.

  Only one number showed on the list. The name listed for it made Liam's blood run cold: What you're looking for.

  "I'm going out for a smoke," Liam called shakily to Serena.

  He heard her calling after him, "I thought you and Alex quit," still in the high voice that meant she was on the verge of tears.

  They had, or tried to. Liam didn't even have a lighter with him as he bolted out of the apartment. He thumbed the call button once he'd shut the door behind him. A man's voice, slightly higher than either his or Alex's tenor, answered in the middle of the second ring. "Liam Kernon."

  Fury rose in Liam. He clenched his other hand into a fist. "Where is my brother? What the fuck did you do to him?"

  "This isn't a ransom call or a threat, Mr. Kernon." The voice on the other end of the line remained maddeningly calm.

  "You're full of shit," Liam snarled. "If you've hurt him, I will fucking—"

  The man cut him off in mid-sentence. "Hold that thought, Mr. Kernon. I have information that will help you find the ones who did hurt him."

  Liam exhaled hard. He didn't know if he could trust this stranger, but he had no other choice. Alex had disappeared and he couldn't just stand by while the police fumbled their way through an investigation. "You were the one who bailed me out."

  "Yes," the voice replied. "We may have a common goal. Have you heard of the Canis Project?"

  "What? No." Liam shook his head.

  "What about Dogs?" the voice asked. "With a capital D."

  "No." Liam gritted his teeth, frustrated with this waste of his time. "What does this have to do with Alex?"

  "Patience, Mr. Kernon, I'm getting to it. The Dogs are a new, genetically engineered breed," said the voice. "Still in the development and testing phases. They've been designed by one of the largest gen-en companies in the country to be the perfect killers, and now… now they're being sent after targets all over the city."

  Something inside of Liam died then: the faint spark of hope in his heart. "They killed my brother," he said flatly. "My Alex."

  The voice on the other end didn't hesitate. "It seems likely."

  Pain hit Liam like a physical blow. He had to hold the phone away from his ear as he staggered and slumped against the mural wall. He shuddered in silence because no sound on earth could express his feelings of loss and rage in that moment.

  He would never have his Alex back.

  For a long few minutes he wanted to die. His fingers clutched uselessly at the wall. He tried raising
the phone to his ear again, but he could only produce a low, animal-like keen of grief when he tried to speak.

  Finally he cut through it in the only way he could. He bit his lip until he tasted the metallic tang of blood in his mouth, and he lied to himself. Alex was still alive, he repeated in his mind like a mantra. Alex needed protecting. Liam had to protect Alex. He raised the phone back up and whispered, "I have to kill them all."

  "Good," said the voice. "I'd hoped you would say that."

  Four years later, everyone knew about the Dogs.

  Politicians from both sides claimed they wanted to slap more regulations on the big genetic engineering companies: Universal, Biostar, Innovention. Liam saw them on the news when he slipped into bars or cafes to keep tabs on current events. They got into office and suddenly anything else became more important: budgets, job creation, environmental issues. Liam didn't need to be told that the gen-en lobbyists had gotten to them. If the lobbyists couldn't, the Dogs would. Any dissenting voices in Congress had taken to hiring private security. It didn't matter. There weren't enough of them to make a difference.

  The city streets emptied by nine o'clock because the Dogs hunted in the dark. The Dogs were an urban legend, come to life to stalk their streets.

  And Liam stalked the Dogs.

  His latest assigned pickup was on the smaller of the city's two bridges. The stench from the polluted river meant a Dog wouldn't have an easy time tracking Liam's contact when he dropped off the supplies, or an easy time following Liam to and from the area. It'd buy him a few more minutes that night, at least. He knew he'd have another Dog and handler pair on his tail after his last kill.

  Liam grunted, leaning over the bridge's steel guardrail. His contact had taped the package to the side facing the river, too low down even for Liam's long arms to reach. He wiped his arm across the sweat beading on his forehead. Near the water, the early fall weather was unseasonably cold, but Liam had been on the run, laying false trails all day.

  He glanced back and forth to make sure he wouldn't have to deal with any police. They didn't patrol this district that often, and he didn't see a single sign of a car, never mind any cops on patrol.

  Without fear, Liam hoisted himself over the rail. The worst that he could imagine had already happened to him. Death held no terror for him. He would have welcomed it, if not for his quest to avenge his lost twin. If he ever succeeded in eradicating the Dogs, he knew he'd have no reason left to live.

  He lowered himself to the concrete ledge on the far side of the guardrail, turning his feet sideways so they would fit. He leaned down, stretching for the package, and grabbed it. The silver tape that matched the shade of the bridge peeled off easily. Liam tucked it into the side of his vest and held it tight between his arm and side as he slung a leg up and hauled himself back over to the sidewalk.

  Then he could have been any other pedestrian walking off the bridge. He took a route through the alleys between bars, under the neon XXX Entertainment Live Nudes signs and the other blinking marquees advertising liquor stores.

  He stopped once in a basement that looked boarded-over to switch his boots and set off one of his scent bombs—something like a grenade but filled with strong spices—right outside. Anyone passing by, hurrying home from work or to one of the bars, would walk the smell all over the city. Liam's new boots, untouched by sweat throughout the day, would carry the same scent.

  His breath showed in a cloud in front of him as he stopped in the shadow of another building. Somewhere above, a baby cried through a partially open window. Liam ripped the packet from his contact open; he counted the slim roll of cash and slipped it into one of his vest pockets. Then he pulled out the black phone, unnumbered like the one he'd received that day at the police station. His contact provided new, untraceable phones for him every week or so with a new number to call programmed into the contacts list.

  Liam hit the call button and lifted the phone to his ear. "Mr. Kernon," the familiar voice greeted him after the first ring.

  "Have they been sent out yet?" Liam asked tersely.

  "They've just been dispatched," his contact confirmed. "Gray BMW, in-state plates."

  "Can you tell me anything about the Dog and handler?" Liam was already on the move again. If he wanted time to prepare at the apartment, he would have to reach it well before the Dog tracked him down.

  "Not much," said his contact. "We think this team took out Representative Gillian last week."

  Liam thought for a moment. "She had decent security. I heard it was a messy kill, too." An image of Alex with his throat torn out, eyes wide with horror, flashed through his mind. Liam's stomach lurched, and he banished the thought. Every new victim claimed gave him a new and terrible opportunity to imagine what had happened to his beautiful twin.

  "That's right. Don't engage it at close quarters if you can help it," his contact replied. "Good luck."

  "Thanks." Liam snapped the phone shut without saying goodbye. He didn't know much about the man who provided him with supplies and information. He'd been reluctant to trust the voice on the other end of the line until it had led him through his first kill. Now, Liam still didn't necessarily trust a man who knew so much about the Canis Project and the Dogs, but like his fellow Slayers, he had little other choice.

  He'd met only one of them before, an almost silent man named Surush whose sister had vanished around the same time as Alex. They'd been in the same area once and had the same pair of Dogs and handlers sent after them; they'd worked together to take the Dogs down, then gone their separate ways. Two in the same place were easier to track than one.

  Liam tucked the phone into another pocket and climbed a chain link fence. He landed with a grunt in another alley. This one held a fire escape about seven feet off the ground. Liam took a deep breath and put all of his strength into a jump for it, grabbing the lowest metal stair with his bare hands. He grunted as he slowly did a chin-up, and then kicked a foot onto the fire escape.

  Most of the apartments in the building were abandoned. Liam had rented one out with his meager stores of cash because the landlord didn't care who his tenants were, or if they showed up more often than every few days as long as they paid their monthly due. Liam had put down a false name on the lease agreement and he'd never been called on it.

  He climbed in through the half-broken window. Squeezing through had become more difficult as his shoulders had broadened, but Liam remained lithe enough to manage it. He'd never be a bodybuilding champion, but he'd filled out in the years since Alex's disappearance. He'd replaced his natural blond dreadlocks with a single black braid because black didn't show up as clearly in the dark, and because the Dogs could smell the wax he'd used to maintain the dreads.

  Liam snapped off the rubber band he'd been using to hold his braid up, doubled over on itself. He only kept his hair bound up when he was running. The pull at his scalp distracted him too much during a fight if he had his hair tied up so tightly, whereas the braid stayed comfortable, if risky. A Dog couldn't close a hand around his hair, though. The steel claws had been made to rip, tear, and kill, not to grasp.

  This apartment bore no resemblance to the one he and Alex had shared. Any murals in the hallway outside had been painted by talentless graffiti artists who put up new lewd, racist, or homophobic slogans almost every day, covering up their previous work. The single room held nothing more than a file cabinet, a bare light bulb in the ceiling, and a cheap bedframe with a creaky mattress; Liam had replaced the original bed when he'd discovered it was infested with lice. He didn't have a computer anymore because any internet connection would be traceable. As far as he knew, the Dogs hadn't found this place yet. Liam wanted to keep it that way.

  He shouldn't have tied himself to an apartment at all. Liam sat down on the bed with a sigh. His contact had advised him just to keep caches of clothing and supplies and a mental map of a few safe havens where he could sleep through the day.

  But some things were too precious to keep in a basement or u
nder a bridge. Liam pulled a manila envelope from under his pillow, tipping it to slide the contents out. He gazed at the photo on top of the pile. It had been taken the day he and Alex had moved into their apartment. Alex beamed radiantly at the young Liam in the photograph, who looked so thrilled to have his arm around Alex's shoulders.

  Older Liam thought he should have appreciated Alex even more while he had him. That young, smiling Liam had no idea what would happen to tear them apart.

  Liam leafed through the pictures. Before, they'd stored all their photos digitally, but when he'd left to kill Dogs Liam had printed all of these up. There was Serena, laughing and holding a hand up to try and block the lens. He'd given up all contact with her so as not to put her in any more danger than he had to. His contact told him that she'd remarried, had sent a grainy photograph of Serena and a strange man to Liam's phone at the time. The man's arm had been loosely around her waist, and they'd looked happy enough. Liam hadn't been able to make out their expressions, but their body language had said they were comfortable with one another.

  Most of the other photos showed Alex: sometimes with Serena, sometimes with Liam, and sometimes on his own. Liam knew which ones he'd taken himself. He remembered taking them, but he also knew Alex's smile, the sweet little one reserved just for Liam.

  Alex had smiled at him that way so many times. Liam had seen it when they'd met up after class, or when Liam had finished playing a song for Alex on his guitar, or when they'd woken up nose to nose in the warm cocoon of their sheets.

  He set the photos carefully aside and tipped the last item in the envelope into his palm. He still had the second of Alex's cordless earbuds; the first had vanished along with his twin. "I'm fighting for you," Liam whispered. His eyes prickled with tears. "I'm fighting for you, and I won't ever stop." He kissed the earbud and slipped it back into the envelope, then slid the photos in on top of it.