by Mikael Aizen
"Oh, Kyle," Del sighed, gathering him up. She made soothing sounds and whispered words of comfort. Support. Love.
Kyle let the tears roll, they almost flew down his cheeks, soaking into her blouse. In her arms, he felt the sort of feeling he'd never felt even within his father's embrace. It felt like everything would be OK and nothing in the world could touch him or hurt him.
Kyle pulled away and wiped at his eyes with a sleeve. In the background, Kyle saw a lone figure wearing dark shades and holding a tablet poised like he was looking right at Kyle. A hand came up and the shades came off. The man's gray eyes met Kyle's and a small smile lilted the edge of his lips. Then he turned and walked away, his dark coat riding the back of his knees.
Del's face took over his vision's field. "Tell me what you saw," she said gently.
She'd seen the man? No, she was asking about El's murderer. Kyle refocused on Del, his mind stumbling. "I..." He trusted her and believed in her. And he loved her back.
He'd hurt her if he told her the truth. "I didn't see anything."
"Kyle!" she exclaimed.
"Nothing happened to me when I was kidnapped, either." His eyes dried and his heart closed. "I don't know anything," he said. He stood up, his legs shook as he walked toward the 3D obstacle course. "Can I go play now?"
She nodded dumbly at him and he left her. It was better this way, he was protecting her. I love you...Mom.
The muttering boy was quiet. He didn't yell or scream or cry as most boys would've. He just hung there upside-down in the trap Kyle set for him. Kyle had followed him to his house and found a way in. When the boy had left again, Kyle set a trap in the boy's own room. The muttering high school bully lived alone in a run-down apartment and it hadn't been hard to set the trap with the exposed pipes and beams in the ceiling.
The boy smirked at Kyle. "Pretty good, kid, but now what?"
Kyle didn't answer.
This time the other kid laughed. "You never think that far, do you? Same as last time."
"What's your name?" Kyle asked.
The other kid grinned. "It's Ryant. Kyle's your name if I remember correctly. That's what the file said at least."
Ryant. He remembered now. He'd overheard the name when Del had been talking to Jess. Kyle walked to one of the wooden beams in the wall. He kicked it and it broke enough so that he could tear the nailed end from the ceiling.
Ryant lifted--or dropped depending on your point of view--his eyebrows. "Damn, that drug really works. No wonder the other kids never had a chance."
"No wonder," Kyle repeated. He spun the tip of the board with the slightly bent nails sticking from its end. Then he swung it face forward into the kid's back. Pulled out, and swung again. There it is. The screaming.
"You bastard! You fucking bastard! Let me down right now! You have no idea how much trouble I can get you in, you have no idea what I'll do to you! Let me down!" The kid screamed and swung and screamed. No more muttering, no more cool, no more smirks.
Kyle smiled. He looked at the kid's shirt which had begun to grow little red circles. "Looks like I got you good."
"LET ME DOWN!"
"It doesn't work that way. You have to tell me stuff, first. If you don't, I swing. If you do, I don't swing." Kyle swung again, the nails bit into the boy's stomach. "See? You haven't told me anything so I swung. Does that make sense?"
The boy let out a half snarl half sob. "What you do want to know?"
"Anything. Just talk. I'll decide if it's something to swing for or not."
It felt good knowing that Kyle wasn't crazy. The boy clearly knew something, and he wasn't bothering to hide it.
"I'm not allowed to say an..."
Swing. Scream.
"You don't understand, if I do..."
Swing. Scream.
"You fucking bastard! You fuck..."
Swing. Scream.
Sobs. Begging. Crying.
Swing. Scream.
"Be careful," Kyle said. "If you keep leaking like that, you'll die."
"Fine," Ryant gasped. "I'll talk."
Swing. Scream. "Hurry," Kyle said.
"Fuck!" Ryant gasped. And as Kyle raised the board, "all right! My fiancée's dad is doing an experiment. He doesn't tell me much, but it has something to do with epigenes."
"What's an epigene?" Kyle asked, walking around the boy.
"It's a part of your genetic makeup that can change DNA expression depending on stimulation."
Kyle hesitated. "You almost made me swing again. Tell me what that means."
"It means that your DNA, you know DNA right? It can change, or look different if we do certain things to it."
"OK." That might explain the skin sample and why he was so strong now. "What else?"
"That's all I know. Really!" the boy gasped.
Swing. Scream.
Kyle prepped to swing again. "Who's your fiancée's father?" he asked.
"Andre," muttering boy sobbed.
"Last name?"
A voice came from the doorway. "Mollinda," it said. It was Jess in the doorway. "That's all Ryant knows, Kyle."
"Jess!" Ryant gasped in relief.
"You're part of this too?" Kyle said. Mollinda. "And you're Callie's sister?"
"Half-sister," Jess answered, looking at her fiancé. “Hi Ryant.”
“Help me down,” Ryant begged.
Jess worked her way behind her swinging fiancé to where Kyle was standing. “You know the whole world is up in arms about El.”
“You don’t say,” Kyle answered.
“It’s big news. The first murder in a Clean Area. This’ll be the second,” Jess said. She walked up to Ryant and put her arm around his neck and began squeezing. Ryant started kicking wildly, but she held him tight, ignoring his flailing arms and hands. A minute later and Ryant had stopped moving. She hadn't even let him say a single word. Jess let go and shoved his body lightly so that Ryant swung with an almost calming, pendulous rocking.
It was shocking to see someone else doing the killing. A bit surreal and disturbing deep inside, worse that it felt when he did the killing himself. “So you are part of this too,” Kyle said again.
“Not willingly. Not because I want to be. Not because I chose to be. I’m just like you.”
“You’re an experiment?”
“A experiment. Not the experiment. Father left that honor to you.”
“Why me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”
“So Ryant...”
“He chose his role.”
“Why didn’t you kill him before then? Why now? And why are you telling me this stuff?”
“Because I had to wait until you did something so unexpected that Father wouldn’t have cameras set up to catch what happened.”
“Cameras.” Callie. She must've done everything she could by telling me about the experiment. That was probably why Kyle never saw her again.
She suddenly held a hand to her jaw. “I’m on it,” she said to someone. “No. I haven’t heard from Ryant. Yes. Yes, Father, I’ll check.” She took her hand away. “We don’t have much time,” she said to him.
“Why are you helping me?”
She gave Kyle the sad-sweet smile that he wished would still make his heart-break. “Because we hate what Father’s doing to you. Callie and I. We hate all of it. Father trusts us but we see how evil he’s becoming, my experiments were bad, but nothing like yours. He’s so obsessed with your experiment that he’s gone too far this time.”
“What’s the experiment?”
Jess shrugged. “We don’t know that. Dad’s a purist. He believes in Natural Science and won’t accept anything but Natural Science.”
“What’s Natural Science?”
Jess shook her head. “Look it up at school--no, don’t. He’ll see that.” She sighed, speaking fast. “Let me try, but I’ll have to be brief. Natural Science is a movement replacing the Scientific Method. Psychology and Science merged when the Scientific Met
hod wasn’t sufficient to properly study behavior with how long it took to study one variable and how impossible it was to control all the excess variables. That’s when they developed the Natural Science Method." She looked at Ryant, grabbed him by his limp shoulders, spun him in a circle as he swung. His dead eyes wobbled in their sockets. "It is the newest, highest level of scientific study, using psychology to control experimental variables to see in exquisite detail a single case study in its natural environment. Or at least an environment believed to be natural. This way you can test a subject and gather a huge amount of information on the subject’s response to any and several stim...” Her hand came up to her jaw again. “I’m almost there,” she reported. Jess shook her head at him. “You have to go.”
“Del and Tim.” Kyle said. “Are they...?”
She gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. Everything that seems real probably isn’t and is just part of the experiment.”
Del, Mom, wasn’t real then? The highest form of science... He’d killed people, there was no way of faking that. There was no way of pretending people died. This was science?
She pulled fire tags--rectangular pieces of paper--from her pockets and put them on the walls, slapping them to light them one by one. They burned in tiny squares until they caught, licking at the wooden boards. “You should go,” she said. “We’ll help you however we can, Callie and I.”
He wanted to ask her more, but he knew he should leave. “Callie,” he yelled as the flames blossomed around them. “Is she OK?”
She nodded. “She misses you.”
Kyle managed a small smile. Then he ran from the burning apartment, back to “home.” And “Mom.”
Chapter 23
This is who I am.
I was born this way and I've always been this way, who are you to judge me? If it was choice, why would I choose this path?
If God didn't want me to be this way, why would did he give me these desires? Why did he create me this way if he didn't want me to fulfill my desires?
Because he didn't.
I was born this way and I am blessed.
-Unknown
"Ahhhhahhh-haa," Jay groaned. He had a thing for waking up in pain. He grabbed at the back of his head where it throbbed deep inside, deeper than he could actually touch. "Fuuuckkkk."
"Rise and shine, Jay, time to move." Bitch sat on a rock looking like a perched hawk.
"Bitch?" He tried to move his head but a lightning shock sensation shot down his spine. "Aaahhggg," he groaned again. Someone glided into Jay's peripheral. "Xiaos? Is that you?"
"Yes, Jay. Welcome back to the living side."
"I died?"
"Nearly." Xiaos knelt above Jay's head. "Can you move your neck?"
Jay tried again, the electricity shot down his spine again. "Arrggh. No. I can't move my head more than an inch in any direction."
Xiaos grabbed Jay's head and wiggled it.
"AHH, you FUCKER!" Jay bellowed. "What the hell are you doing, Xiaos?" Jay jerked his head away from Xiaos's hands and pain shot through him again.
Xiaos looked at Bitch. "He may have broken his neck. Or bruised his spine. We'll have to keep carrying him."
"You've got to be kidding me," Bitch said. "I told you we should've left him."
Xiaos looked back down at Jay. "He's kidding. Bitch was the one that insisted that we carry you."
"And you...?" Jay said.
"I believed it wise to leave you for dead." Xiaos smiled softly--humorlessly. He wiggled Jay's head again, gentler and with minimal pain this time. "Based on the fact that you moved your head--foolish as that was--and the fact that you aren't paralyzed because of it, I feel that we can assume you didn't break your neck. Probably a spinal bruise. You should recover with time if you rest and the bleeding inside your spine stops."
"If it doesn't?"
"We leave you for dead."
Jay rolled off his back onto all fours and despite the immense pain he stood quivering to his feet, head locked face forward. "Where we going?" he asked.
"That was foolish," Xiaos said again. "You might have damaged your spine further."
"Maybe," Jay answered Xiaos. "But I'm not going to be carried around like a sack of grain any more than I already have. So tell me boys, what happened?"
Bitch chuckled. "In a nutshell? After you tried to commit suicide? Nothing happened. We found you napping and got you the fuck out of there."
"Where's Karah and Hunter?"
Bitch shrugged. "Karah was with the Korees president last I saw her. But I lost sight of her when you tried to blow them up."
"What about Hunter?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," Bitch said. "He went running off when the commotion started."
"So what about before this, after Karah betrayed us?"
"Just about what you'd expect. I led Hunter to Esperanza. Sorry about that by the way." Bitch winced. "Didn't have much choice...anyway. Hunter teamed up with the Gamers since apparently no one's a fan of Esperanza. Fighting, killing, etcetera etcetera. Hunter kept me and Xiaos because he thought we'd be useful. Xiaos refused to help him so Hunter keeps Xiaos in a prison, I joined and worked for Hunter. Boom Blah Bang, Korees win, we get captured, Xiaos gets taken along. We find you."
"All of Morir belongs to the DPRK?"
Xiaos answered. There was a darkness in his eyes as he spoke, without spark. "Almost. There's still fighting amongst Morir's survivors," Xiaos said.
"And do we have any idea what the DPRK want?"
Bitch spoke. "Yeah, Hunter said that they had a plan to escape Morir and take over the U.S."
"Damn," Jay said. "I was right."
"What about you?" Xiaos said with an accusatory tone. "What did you accomplish since we last saw you?"
"Accomplish?" Jay laughed. "Are you kidding me, Xiaos? I hid here the entire time without a care in the world until the Slant-Eyes appeared. Then I hid some more until you bastards showed up." He grinned at them. "It's good to have you two around again. I was lost without you guys." He'd missed them both.
"Lost enough to light a match and get a fucking million DPRK blown up?" Bitch asked. He raised an eyebrow. "You don't seem to have enough bells to cover that."
"I didn't do it, I just sparked it," Jay said.
"Oh, is that the new rule?" Bitch asked.
"I can't be responsible for what others do, or else I'd be taking responsible for a lot more than just the Slant-Eyes." Then again, maybe the DPRK weren't even human. Humans weren't human anymore when they bowl heads at limb-pins and play water-balloon tag with beating hearts. And, things were different now. He'd realized something between the time he'd nearly disintegrated and the time he'd woken up. Near death experience or something, or nearest death experience at least. Issak had said it, but Issak hadn't realized just how right he was.
When Jay had rushed in to fight the whole DPKR by himself, it hadn't been because of his suicidal tendencies, it was because he'd been driven to rescue Bitch, Xiaos, and yes, Karah too. He'd ignored his Murderer Survivor instinct entirely, choosing to act like a Protector instead. When he'd tried to rescue people from Morir, bringing them to Esperanza, it'd been because he wanted to save as many people as he could. Protector instinct again. When he'd challenged Gamer the first time and gotten his face exploded out like a whale’s blowhole, it was the Thriller in himself. And then when he'd found a way to kill Gamer in the Lair, it'd been his Murderer instinct. He could've walked right by, but he chose to stay and kill Gamer instead.
Issak was right that The Code was a lie--that everyone with the Code was a murderer, but he was wrong in that people couldn't choose which sub-expression they chose to express. The fact was that they had a choice to be anything they wanted within The Code's tendencies. It made sense that society would have two kinds of people. A kind of people that could fight and defend and kill without qualm, and the kind of people that built and developed and created for general progress. Both were necessary in society, both were needed for growth
and survival in a hostile world. Without the defenders of society--those with The Code--the developers would die incapable of defending themselves against enemies. Without the developers of society--those without The Code--the defenders would degenerate into their primitive selves like what Morir had become, self-destructive in their own nature.
But the fact was that BOTH were necessary for societal and social survival. Both.
Jay realized this now. It was time the rest of Morir learned this.
The US and every other country had exiled their defenders. If Jay was right, these societies wouldn't and couldn't survive for long. The Self-Genocide movement was too young for them to see it yet, but in short time Jay was certain the civilizations would fall apart. They were destined to extermination by the countries that hadn't exiled their defenders. The DPRK for example. The world was a sitting duck to them.
Jay slowly shuffle-spun himself around, unable to move his neck much. "Where are we?"
They were in a part of Morir that Jay didn’t recognize. While most of Morir looked pretty much the same, the patterns of broken buildings and the landscape became landmarks for each area in Morir.
This place had houses.
Real houses with neighborhoods and streets and real world civilized crap.
Bitch gave him a strange look. "You’ve never heard of here?"
"No. Should I have?"
Bitch shrugged. "Just thought you of all people would’ve checked this place out. This is Casa."
"Casa?"
"You really don’t know."
"Just tell me, Bitch."
"Casa is where the Enforcers keep their families. Kept their families." Bitch corrected himself. "Enforcers were given special treatment for doing their jobs in Morir. They got food, houses, running water, their families shipped in if they wanted, the stuff we only dreamt of. When the Enforcers started dying off, they bargained with some of us and offered things in return for information and cooperation. After the Esperanza raid, they decided to allow some of us to become Enforcers ourselves and live here with them." Bitch laughed. "That was your fault. Before you they would’ve never considered it, they didn’t even think of themselves the same as everybody else with The Code."