by Ryan Schow
“What is all this?” Veneshia asks.
Answering the question, but in a way she does not expect, I say, “This is the child that serves as a test case for two experiments. One is a quick birth experiment, as I’m sure you know. Two is a longevity experiment. But she is also my niece in a really twisted way, the wife of the first man I had sex with, and a woman who will prosper in the future as long as I don’t allow her to be his guinea pig.”
“I’m totally lost,” Veneshia says.
Holland’s nostrils are flaring now. My protective bubble is down. Looking at Alice, she’s still just one angry eye waiting for Holland’s command.
“She is not your weapon,” I tell Holland while nodding to Alice.
Alice’s one eye doesn’t blink. Not that the room isn’t heating up…it is. A quick glance at her hands and they are loose at her sides, not gnarled and conjuring fire. But the fire’s on tap. I can feel it. She’s warming herself up the same way you rev an engine before you slam it in first gear, dump the clutch and smoke your tires.
“You don’t know what she is to me,” Holland hisses, now pacing like an angry lion.
“I know what she is,” I snarl back. “She’s your AIDS monkey, your patient zero, but with genetics rather than disease. If you want a killer, just tap into that shitty soul of yours and be who you are.”
“You are not taking that baby,” he says, wild-eyed with rage.
“Your little bomb there is about to blow.”
“Alice, calm!” he turns and shouts. Her angry eyes flick at him. “And you…you’re not leaving.”
“Watch me,” I say, shouldering past him.
When I get to the door, I open it with my mind and no one stops me. When I get to the sidewalk, my ride is arriving. Skye starts to shift and squirm in my arms, her little face crinkling out the first signs of crying.
I set my bags down on the sidewalk and rock the poor thing, talking to her, filling her little body with telepathic peace. She stops crying, looks up at me, her eyes seeing me for the first time. She makes them wide for a second as a smile crosses my face.
The window rolls down and the driver, a heavyset Hispanic woman, says, “You got a car seat for your baby?”
“It’ll be fine,” I say.
“No it won’t,” she tells me, puffing up.
Drilling into her eyes, into her soul, I say, “It. Will. Be. Alright.”
“Yeah,” she says, visibly relaxing. “I guess it will be alright.”
Looking down, Skye’s face breaks into a small smile for the first time, and then it curls to the side and she lets out a small grunt. I’m thinking she might be crapping, but I can’t deal with that right now. I’ve got to get us home where Orianna can change her diapers, if she is indeed…oh God, yep. She’s totally making mud.
“I can do this,” I say to myself. Rocking her, I gather up her things and say, “If you can sit in your own crap for a few minutes I can get you home where you’ll meet your mommy for the first time.”
Holland storms out of the apartment with a pacifier in his hand. Handing it to me, he says, “If I need her, for some samples, or even for a day, how will I find her?”
I open the sedan’s back door and place the bags inside. “You won’t,” I tell him. “Heim is gone and with him, your little speedy-incubator experiments are done.”
“I want Heim back,” he says, irritated and far from hopeful.
“And I want a Lamborghini.”
“Want to trade?” he asks, sheepish, almost like he thinks he has a chance.
“The man came into my house, put a rubber hose into my heart, filled it with gasoline and lit the match. He is a monster, like you, but unrefined and beyond sadistic.”
“You did take his subject.”
“Rebecca isn’t a clone. She’s human. The girl was kidnapped, changed and dropped into a tank for the better part of eight years.”
“Don’t talk morality with me, Sunshine.”
“If you so much as try to find us, I will smoke your brain. You got that?”
“Smoke my brain?”
“Yeah, that’s something I can do now. I can read minds, but I can also tinker around, disappear what I want, mask your memories, hide them in a hole so deep inside you that you’ll never know they even existed.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Famous last words, Cupcake,” I say, patting his cheek before getting in the car. Before shutting the door, I look up and say, “You try to find me, and I’ll wipe your brain for a thousand years.”
“This is like a bad marriage,” he snarls.
“You lips to God’s ears. Now go fizzle your bomb,” I say, referring to Alice Jr. “She’s running hot.”
Holland leaves and by some miracle, we manage to get Skye back to Palo Alto without incident, unless you consider making the car smell like the inside of a baby’s ass an incident. I’ve got the windows rolled down and diapers packed around the baby, but damn…
As we’re pulling into the neighborhood, I find myself nearly outraged that Holland had all those people “taking care” of the child and no one was really “taking care” of the child. Just feeding her and changing her diapers isn’t all a child needs.
Nowadays, that just isn’t enough.
“Up here,” I say to the driver. “On the right.”
She pulls into the driveway. I get out, gather up the child while trying not to gag at the smell. Orianna will know what to do with her.
I give the woman a hundred dollar bill and apologize for the smell. Her eyes are watering. She looks like she’s in pain.
I walk Skye and her things up to the front door, open it with my mind, then push through and head into the kitchen where Orianna makes a big fuss over her. Rebecca comes to see what all the commotion is about and I know she knows Skye is hers.
She doesn’t say anything. Seeing her child, it’s like she’s paralyzed in place.
“She shit her pants,” I tell Orianna, handing her over, “and I’m not changing them.”
Orianna doesn’t miss a beat. To Skye she says, “Let’s go get you a clean diaper,” but in a baby voice.
Even when she leaves, Rebecca stands there, almost like she’s staring at the spiritual residue of what’s left of Orianna and Skye. Her eyes begin to water and her hand moves over her belly. I go and hug her, lightly, not letting go—like a sister just wanting to be near her, not solving any problems, just offering comfort.
“Have you thought of a name?” I ask.
She nods her head, a wayward tear dripping over, skimming her cheek.
“Skye,” she says.
“That’s a beautiful name,” I tell her.
“What do I do now?” Rebecca asks. Then, with a sob, she says, “I don’t know what to do.”
Looking in the direction of that awful smell, I say, “Orianna needs to teach us how to change a diaper. After that we have to find out if you have milk.”
“There’s milk in the fridge,” she says.
“We need to find out if there’s milk in this fridge,” I say, nudging the side of her boob. She looks at me, sheer panic on her face, then down at her chest. “If we’re going to do this, you’re just going to have to go with the flow.”
“How…how do—”
“Orianna will tell you if you have milk. Bodily fluids for babies isn’t my thing. But if you have any questions about vomit or nervous diarrhea, I’m a freaking encyclopedia.”
It turns out she does have milk and so Orianna teaches her the ins and outs of nursing while I throw on a bathing suit and head out to the spa to enjoy an otherwise warm winter day.
The cuteness of Skye captures Christian and Orianna in ways I didn’t expect. By bringing Skye home, I’m not only bringing Rebecca closer to my parents, I’m bringing all of us closer together. We’re going to rally around this child, give her an amazing life, and raise her to be a good, strong woman, so that one day I can lose my virginity to—and later get shot in the head by—her widowed,
time-traveling husband.
God, what a total mind f*ck!
I don’t miss Jake, but I kind of do, too. I take a psychic mind bump off him, realize he’s got a hall pass from his future wife, this Skye but far older. She’s going to let him be single here. He doesn’t want it. All he wants is to be with her. When Jake saved her from the life ending shot Holland was about to administer to her, she returned from the future to tell him they’d meet up later in life, just not now. He saved this child’s life to have the woman. Now the woman didn’t want him back. Not just yet. When future Skye winked out of this existence and left Jake behind, he fought to be okay with it. Now he’s terribly sad. At least she’s alive. But due to the altering of historical events, he’ll have to wait longer to be with her because she’s with someone else right now. How’s that for getting gang raped by your own well laid plans.
Sadly, it won’t take him long to find a young student, or a barmaid, or someone he meets in the mall or at the Apple store. He’d going to go through a bit of a man whore phase, but it won’t last long. I know this because I saw one potential outcome for him and it wasn’t him being with me. For him, the prospect of starting anew was never a possibility. I was merely a distraction. A sideshow. Now I’m thinking about giving him a time travel device, but I’m also squashing the hell out of that thought. The man shot me in the head! And not just that, he rejected me repeatedly and took my virginity. But I’m a big girl now. Capable of forgiveness.
And I’m always a sucker for a good love story...
Chapter Eleven
That night, after dinner and a relatively tame evening with the parentals, Rebecca and Skye, I crawl into bed, only to be woken sometime later by a warm, gentle energy. I open my eyes, look up and see the reptilian doctor from Dulce standing at the foot of my bed in the dark.
I startle, but not like before. His energy is very different. Not hostile, but kind. “That’s a nice change from nosebleeds and headaches,” I say, yawning and waking to his arrival.
“I have my more civilized side,” he says.
“What do you want?” I ask, rubbing sleep crust from the corners of my eyes and sitting up.
“We need to talk.”
“I’m listening,” I say, laying back down because I’m soooo tired. Using my mind, I turn on the bathroom light—a soft light that lets me look at him as a person rather than a shadow.
“You’ve created quite a stir among the elders who know history as a contained series of events rather than a linear unfolding.”
“Meaning?”
“If you put ten thousand years of human history into a box, there are definitive beginnings, middles and ends. You can pull every last detail about every last person from it if you have the mental capabilities to not only separate people and events, but observe the trajectories of said people and events.”
“And these elders of yours can do this?”
“Our elders are the same as your quantum computers of the future. They are thousands of years old and wise in ways you humans could never fathom.”
Admittedly, this is interesting. I find his words a bit intoxicating. The air slowly permeates with the subtle smells of cognac and chocolate. Is this the smell of him? How have I not picked up on this earlier?
“So what are you trying to say?”
“You were supposed to kill Adolf Hitler,” he says, pointed.
“Yeah,” I say, “I got that.”
Waves of his energy roll over me, soothing, awakening, slightly electric on the edges. This is him. Intoxicating smells, the warm and fuzzies, civilized conversation…have I misjudged the Doctor?
“You say you got it,” he says, “but I don’t think you do, or I wouldn’t be here.”
Sitting back up, brushing my hair out of my face, I say, “Apparently I don’t get it right now, this very minute, because I’m sleeping, but I’ll get it in the morning.”
“By allowing Adolf Hitler to live, you’ve allowed other things to come into this world.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Think of them as a pestilence you let in your body without even knowing. This pestilence seems harmless at first, but before you know it, you’ve got sickness and death inside you and it’s rooted in like a tick, impossible to expel, your eventual undoing.”
“You’re talking about the vampire-like creatures I saw in the future?”
“Among the highest elders are seers, and these seers talk of dark days ahead. As the timeline progresses, we are forced up to the surface to try to help you take back your world. Many of us perish in an apocalyptic war, one of our casualties being our top elder. That is why I am here. A distress signal was sent out among us. A distress signal from the seer about the future.”
Okay, now this is getting interesting…
“Future Alice showed me a world of ash and destruction. But as you know, she also showed me those creatures.”
“Your species crossbreeds its way into a race of mutants unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Dr. Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum insures they do not expire. Natural selection never favors the weak, and everyone who is not mutated is weak and dies out. This is a perfect example of few having control over many. These monsters destroy almost everything. Even us.”
“A bomb went off,” I hear myself saying.
“That wasn’t a bomb,” he replies, his energy changing. The smells change, too. The chocolate smell deepens, takes on notes of cinnamon. The crackling edge of his energy softens to a subtle vibration.
“It sure looked like a bomb had gone off.”
“That was a nuclear human being. You saw what Georgia was able to do with the child assassin, what future Alice can do with her fire?”
“I did.”
“Imagine the force of this Alice multiplied by ten, by a hundred, by one million. This is our future. This is the tangent you’ve put us on.”
“I have it handled…bro,” I say, my words more confident sounding than they are. The reptilian sees through it. He sees my lie like I’m not trying to hide squat. And besides that, what the hell am I supposed to call him? Doctor? Humanish thingy? Lizard man?
“Draco. Not lizard man, humanish thingy or doctor. And certainly not bro.”
I look at him, cough out a smile.
“Is that like lizard humor or something?”
“Or something.”
“Like I said, Draco, I have it handled.”
“You don’t,” he retorts. “But you know that, don’t you?”
“Then do it yourself, butthole,” I grumble, totally over it already.
The crackling edges of his energy sharpen to needle points, then disappear. His scent is gone, too. He’s protecting himself now that I’m mad.
“You come into my bedroom, interrupt my sleep and tell me the same thing I was told earlier this week. I screwed up the past and it threw us into this vile future and I said ‘I got it’ because I got it.”
“Yet you cannot figure out why this happened and so you don’t act.”
“Why can’t you act?” I spit.
“Because I am not you. Your human component allows you the ability to walk through the world as you. I cannot hold this form for very long. It takes an incredible amount of energy.”
“Then stop pretending.”
“You don’t want to see me the way I am,” he says softly.
“I’ve seen you in your form before.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“You do you, boo,” I tell him, yawing again, my body in protest.
He looks at me, nods slowly, and then the façade falls away and I’m staring at a monstrous reptilian humanoid. At first my eyes are feasting upon the tall reptoid with scaly greyish green skin and eyes that become slits, but then this form begins to lengthen, growing taller still, his head barely a foot from my ten foot ceiling. Instead of two arms and two hands, Draco has four arms and four hands. Clawed hands with excessively long fingers that are as sharp as talons at the end. If he wanted
to, I’m sure he could swipe across my mattress and tear it in two that’s how dangerous all four of these hands looked to me.
My eyes gaze upon him in a new light.
At first blush, he is this horrifying creature with a block face like a snake and scaly armor that almost looks plated. Looking down, his legs are muscular and lean to his form, but huge to someone like me. Behind him is a long, scaly tail that must be seven feet long or more. He is so far around the hideous side of the circle he’s touching the high side of beautiful.
“You are just as ugly to me by my standards as I am to you by your standards,” he says telepathically through a link I didn’t realize he’d opened.
“I’m glad we’re clear on that,” I say aloud. Then: “So how did this happen? I’m talking about this mutation, this human bomb, the attacks on our species?”
“It is best I show you,” he whispers into my mind, raising his top two hands my way while gripping the other two on the bed. “Come…”
Scooting back, I say, “I have enough horrors in my head, plus whatever bad shit you put there is like fresh porn to The Operator.”
“Ah yes, him,” he whispers, still in my mind, but now standing up straight.
Looking past his plated torso, to my bedroom door, I see the door handle, envision the lock, turn it with my mind. If anyone came in and saw this gigantic reptilian God standing at the foot of my bed they’d probably drop dead of a heart attack right then and there.
His hypnotic whispers permeate my mind. The soft reptilian voice becomes the warm edge of everything, a summer breeze with weight and the slightest hint of moisture.
“Adolf Hitler spent decades in hiding, strategizing, planning, preparing to drive the world to its collective knees in reverence to him. The world has forgotten him, though. They’ve moved on to fear new, more menacing dictatorial fiends. So he tells himself he must remind them of why he was so feared. Of why the Third Reich had reigned supreme for so long.
“In South America he has amassed stores of dirty bombs he will eventually set off in cities in South and Central America. After that he will hit San Diego, Tucson, El Paso, San Antonio. He will ride that wave of terror up into the heart of America.”
