by Schow, Ryan
She cranked her head around, voiceless, speechless, almost robotic, and turned those opaque eyes to the two girls in the glass tanks: Rebecca and the Salt Lake City girl. For a long time she just stared at them, saying nothing.
What is this? Gerhard wondered. He said, “Abby, can you say something?”
The thing that was Abby just turned its head back around, looked at Gerhard for nearly a minute with that unblinking gaze, then closed its eyelids and fell into a deep sleep.
The whole of his body shivered out the hardest, widest pebbling of goose flesh he had ever had. Whatever the hell that was that woke up, he thought, it wasn’t human.
He studied the Abby-thing for another two hours, the rhythms of her breathing, the tenor of her body. Did it dream? he wondered. He might never know. Either way, he had to take a break because he was growing tired of looking at her with such fear and intensity.
What had he created?
2
Later that night, after studying Abby’s chart, he was preparing to go home to Alice and the babies when the Abby-thing opened its eyes again.
Much of the wet, foggy surface coating its eyeballs had lifted and the opaque, almost pearlescent shine beneath was gone. The Abby-thing looked at him with clear eyes, blinked twice, then yawned.
Human? he wondered with growing optimism.
“Abby,” he said, gentle, “can you hear me?”
She looked at him the way a cat looked at its owner: cold, ambivalent, wordless. She had even cocked her head to the side, but for what reason Gerhard could not fathom.
“Can you speak?”
It just looked at him, blinked, found not one single emotion to tell him what was going on in that head of hers.
He gave a long sigh, then picked up his phone, called Alice and asked if she fed and diapered the babies. He never once took his eyes off Abby.
“When are you going to be home?” Alice asked, her delicate voice betraying nothing of the dark shadows inside her. The Abby-thing, it closed its eyes, went back to sleep.
“Later,” he mumbled
The line went dead. Alice wasn’t big on good-bye’s, so she just hung up when the conversation was over.
He appreciated that about her.
The Absence of Everything
1
Me hovering in the air above my body and my friends, it provided me the answers I needed. Their lips had moved and their eyes had cried, and their hands had touched my arms and hands and smoothed my hair, and though I didn’t hear their words or feel their touch, what I knew was their devotion, their love. And this was more than enough.
I have to go back.
The minute I choose to live, my soul slams into my body, and my mouth makes a sort of wet pffting sound. But I can’t seem to focus. I feel only halfway back in the body. Then I’m gone again. Up in the nothingness. Things in my body are still disjointed, broken, especially my brain, which feels dangerously off center in my head. I want to speak, but not only do I have nothing to say, I can’t even form words. Much less move my lips.
The way you think of dudes that stutter as having the hardest time ever getting their thoughts smoothly out of their mouths, imagine that same strain to speak, to make a sentence—even a single word—and not being able to. That’s me. The halfway Helen Keller of reanimated corpses.
Jesus Christ, I think, I’ve become a retard. Granted, I’m still a sexy retard with the superhuman power to not die no matter how dead I get, but still…wtf?
Back in my body, my eyes see things, send signals to my crippled brain. A man standing over me, staring: the new version of Gerhard.
Once Dr. Green.
Before that, Dr. Josef Mengele.
Such a beast of a man should frighten me, unnerve me even—the way he was glowering at me with such intense, probing eyes—but I feel no fear, not even an ounce of apprehension.
Only revulsion.
That’s when I realize something: I’ve come back from the dead, but part of the dead has returned with me. How do I know this? It’s not something I feel as much as it’s an absence of feeling. I’m not mad or sad or afraid. Not needy or wounded or even lost. What I want now that I’m in contact with my body is exactly nothing. Not even to speak. What would I say? It wouldn’t matter. So I say nothing.
Because I can’t.
So I sleep.
Then Gerhard wakes me up again. Gets me to stand. I stand. He takes me to the bathroom on bare, shaky legs, and makes me look at my naked self in the mirror.
He says, “Look at you, my beautiful, immortal creation.”
I look at me. He’s right, I’m beautiful.
He says, “Frankenstein’s monster now has tits.”
Should I feel embarrassment? Shame? Absolutely, but I don’t. Standing beside one of God’s truest abominations, I don’t cover my girl parts; I don’t even care if the handsome new doctor looks at my nipples or my vagina lips or even my bare butt because the part of my brain that cherishes modesty seems shielded by something, blocked. Or perhaps my emotions were lost to science. Have they died completely? Is that part of me gone?
Either way, feeling feels…inaccessible.
That’s when the pain hits, a sharp burning in my head, like a lit fuse. The searing heat radiates through my brainpan hard, like an electrical current frying everything it touches. Everything starts to turn black and I feel my body falling.
I am dead again, hovering, watching Gerhard work on me on the table. The EKG is a constant buzz, a flat line. Yep. Dead. And then it’s not a buzz anymore but blips. Suddenly I crash back into my body again, but not to be awake, only to sleep.
Before being given a shot right in the heart and submerged once more in the pink goop, I hear the word leave the handsome new Gerhard’s mouth: coma.
Maybe I dreamt it. The word seems to be said from so far away. Or maybe not. Either way, faintly, as I drift off to sleep deep inside myself, I hear pieces of what the doctor is saying to me, or to himself. He is saying this is only temporary, until he figures out what is…wrong with me.
Things are wrong with me.
The words echo in the chamber of my head, chase me down into the darkness, into the stark nothingness. No longer do I hover outside myself. I just sink, sink, sink into the mire inside myself, disappearing.
Here there is no beautiful space, no choices to make and no guardian angel to provide me with the answers to all the questions I have the moment I have them.
There is simply…an absence of everything.
Into the Mouths of Sharks
1
The dead arose. Gerhard watched her wake into this world. Stretched out on the gurney, her essentials covered with hand towels, she appeared perfect. In every way. After pulling her from the pink solution, after drying her skin and pulling her hair away from her face, he simply stared at her, marveling.
He seldom knew a peaceful moment; this, however, was one of them. A moment to reflect upon his successes once more.
“What a lovely little diversion you are,” he said. There was so much uncertainty in his life, but not with her, not with this young woman.
She blinked her eyes, made tiny stretching movements with her fingers. So innocent, he thought. So unsuspecting. Her toes spread out, curled. She yawned, made the wake up face. Then Abby opened her eyes and saw him.
“Good morning, Abby,” he said.
Her body went rigid, as if she heard something that didn’t make sense.
“That’s not my name,” she said. One day he would tell her she was Savannah before she was Abby, but only when she was mentally equipped to understand why she had a different name.
“Ah, but it is, my dear,” he said, surprised by the gentleness in his voice.
Who is this weak version of myself that I am becoming? he wondered. I am not kind. I have sympathy for nothing. He appreciated himself better when he was cold and unemotional. In science, detachment was critical and logic trumped emotion.
Emotion was the enemy.
“I don’t think so,” she said, looking down the gurney at her new body. Curiosity kept her from being horrified.
She lifted the towel covering her breasts, inhaled sharply. Her old ones, the breasts he knew she remembered, they were floppy and unfortunate. She rubbed her belly, felt the silken softness, marveled at the flatness. He could see her thinking of lifting the towel covering her vagina, but then she looked at the man with the gapped teeth and thought twice.
“My voice,” she said, listening. “It sounds different.”
“After the…incident…you were damaged pretty badly, your body broken in ways that should have left you dead, but I saved you, gave you a new life.”
“I didn’t have an accident,” she replied, pressing the towel over her breasts.
“You suffered sufficient trauma to the brain, so I am not surprised to hear you are having new experiences, and forgetting old ones. You will need time to heal.”
With as much discretion as she could muster considering the proximity of their bodies and the intimacy of this conversation, the girl pressed the towel over her vagina, tucked it deep into the space between her legs so there was no possible way her privates could be seen.
“Who are you?” she finally asked. Her breath smelled sweet, not like anything distinguishable. It was warm, clean.
“You can call me…Dr. Holland.”
He didn’t know why he chose the name, only that it popped into his mind and he liked it. Later, he told himself, I will find an appropriate forename, one befitting of a man with an entire country for a last name.
“Where am I, Dr. Holland?”
“You are in my lab. But this is no ordinary lab, this is Wonderland, a place of science and miracles, a place to become anyone you want.” He said this overenthusiastically, a symptom of his newfound genes. He almost blushed at the absurdity of his tone. It was nearly shocking.
The minute he isolated the DNA sequence that was turning him into an estrogen saturated bitch, he was going to route it out and redouble his aggression indicators, even though he was sure those were off the charts as it was.
The girl looked around at the glass canisters holding the other bodies, staring a little too long at the host men, and thankfully not enough at the other girl. Then her eyes landed on the pile of ruin that was the boy-assassin.
“What is that?” she said.
Gerhard’s face showed distaste. He couldn’t even bear to speak of the boy, not after the damage he caused. “A boy. A dead, dead boy.” And certainly not after what he did to Arabelle.
“What happened to him?” she wanted to know.
“He was a small fish who swam into the mouth of a shark.”
She considered the doctor’s statement for a long time, long enough for Gerhard, for Holland, to realize it was time to dispose of the charred remains.
“I don’t know what that means,” she finally said.
“It means he picked a battle he couldn’t win against an enemy with superior might and power. The boy suffered a horrible death. One he deserved, I might add.”
He fought to clear his mind of Arabelle. He missed her terribly. He missed her to the point of both loving and hating her. That she could have such an effect on him either spoke to her likeability or his frailty. A scream was starting deep inside him, but so was the crush of misery.
“When did this happen?” she said. “The boy being—” She didn’t seem to have the word for it, but he understood what she was asking. She wanted to know how the boy ended up as a crispy, ruined pile of ash and meat in the middle of his lab.
“Days ago.”
“Are you just going to leave him there?”
“That heap of a boy, that unholy…thing…he is but a reminder,” Holland said. “A reminder that even trusted allies can be dangerous foes, that acts of treachery deserve stern consequences. The reason I have not scraped this scheisse into the nearest garbage bin is so when these feeble, sympathetic genes I now possess try stopping me from meting out vengeance, my more ruthless side will remember this boy, and what he did, the things he and his unfortunate handlers took from me.”
“What will you do when you find the people responsible for”—she looked down at the burnt boy without an ounce of sadness or outrage—“this boy and his actions?”
The question stirred something inside of him, something old, a long forgotten recklessness. His chest tightened. The thrill left him nearly breathless. Slithering through him were delicious reminders of his days as Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death. The idea of him being a mass murderer sent shivers of delight racing down his back. In those days, at the height of Nazi Germany, torture was the birthright of the blue bloods and murder was a form of artistic expression. For an artist like him, torture was a fine medium.
God he missed those days!
He thought of the director of the Richmond offices of Monarch Enterprises. He thought about doing so many, many things to that son of a bitch. He had looked him in the eyes days ago. He should have killed him then. Should have pulled his guts clean out of him. In Auschwitz, he had done that so many times over.
Sadly, there would never be another Auschwitz, and there would never be another holocaust of such magnitude, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t resurrect the past on a select few.
The girl was staring at him.
Studying him.
Waiting patiently for an answer to her question.
He had only a straight line for a mouth, but his eyes, oh, he could feel the wild shine returning. Lines formed between her brows. She inched away from him ever so slightly. Inside his wicked heart, the sadist, the voracious beast of decades past, he was clawing at the walls to rise again, to reclaim his most industrious compulsions, to wreck and ravage those responsible for Arabelle’s death.
“When I decide to exact my revenge,” Holland finally answered, low and very serious, “I will tear their very spines from their bodies, and then I’ll bathe them in the most Satanic of fires.”
Awakening
1
Georgia took a late morning flight out of SF International. Brayden knew she was leaving because, last night, just before she closed her eyes and went to sleep, she told him she was going. She said it like she said she was ordering Chinese. Or heading to Target for tampons. Without an ounce of emotion, while lying next to him in bed in the near dark, she said, “Dr. Gerhard kept me alive, but only to make me into a supernatural killer. What he made me do…I murdered an innocent boy, Brayden. That’s why I can’t be around him. Why I have to go.”
The clock said 1:34 A.M. Brayden’s eyes adjusted to the dark. From the window, the soft glow of moonlight illuminated her face. But only barely.
“You don’t have to go, Georgia. You could stay, just for a little while.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand your friends need you,” he said. Then quietly: “I need you.”
She sat up in bed, faced him and said, “You don’t understand that there is something in me that wants to murder him. It’s more than instinct. More than self-preservation. It’s like a need. But I can’t because Abby needs him, and so I have to go. I have to not be selfish.”
After saying that, her voice trailed off, but how she trailed off, how she seemed exhausted and vacant, and how he thought he saw the clustering of memories in her eyes, it spoke volumes to him. He couldn’t imagine going through life feeling nothing but the impossible highs and the dreadful lows, and only shades of everything in between.
If she could embody sadness for everything happening, Brayden knew she would. Looking at her, he knew she wanted to feel something more than homicidal tendencies, if only to make her more human, more…herself.
She blinked.
In her eyes, he saw nothing.
He blinked.
In his heart, he felt everything.
He wanted to cry for her, but he wouldn’t. He’d cried enough already, so much so that his tear ducts were practically paved with salt.
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Jesus in heaven, he thought, will this torrent of emotion ever stop?
In the back of his mind, he dreamed of leaving town as well, but instead of returning home, he dreamt about going someplace with only one stop light and a handful of businesses: a gym named Gym, a bank named Bank, a gas station named Gas and a restaurant called The Diner. A town like this would be stocked full of ugly girls with decent bodies who aspired only to get knocked up and shit out a couple of miserable kids, and that might make him happy. No one would die; he wouldn’t have to kill anyone. There would be no Astor Academy, no Dr. Gerhard and no genetically modified teens.
He could live with that.
If only he could forget his past, the things he’d seen and done, the atrocities he and Abby had committed…
Any day now and the Giardino’s deaths were going to come out. What would he do then? He couldn’t escape everything. The way shit always came back to haunt him, he was fairly certain he was going to end up in jail by the end of summer.
“Abby is alive,” Georgia finally said, “which is important.”
Brayden flipped a bitch out of la-la-land, snapped back into the real world. At this point, it was just the two of them laying side-by-side in bed, not sexual, but like friends. The new more lethal Georgia, she had no filter between her brain and mouth, so she said whatever was on her mind. Things like: Abby is alive, which is important. Who says that?! he wondered. Of course her being alive is important!
He rationalized Georgia’s condition. Told himself she survived the unthinkable. Was it possible her emotional impotence was her modified body no longer playing host to a soul? Did this body possess a soul at all? Is this Georgia? Or just a reanimated corpse? If he wagered a guess, Brayden wouldn’t be able to pick one way or another. His mind plowed deeper still into the real problem here: could science and genetic modification eventually rob you of your humanity?
Looking at her, it was an easy leap to make. She was impossible to read. And those eyes! They were vast spheres of darkness, a glistening abyss, a way to feel iced over fast. By comparison, all he had to do was look at her eyes to know his were more human, that he had a reason to live, but did she?
