Weapon

by Schow, Ryan

  From another part of the facility, a good five or six cages down, someone launched the contents of their bucket of piss at them. Apparently this was a common thing since every time he came into the warehouse, kids were hurling their waste about to make a statement. The watery splash fell far short of its target. The guard’s head spun around. He racked another bean bag into the chamber, aimed the rifle at the offending child. It was a boy with ratted hair and contemptuous eyes. His mouth was pursed lips and defiant eyes. He couldn’t be more than five.

  Gun aimed, the guard waited.

  The boy just stared at him, unblinking. Not afraid.

  Stillness settled like a fog over the lot of them, shrinking the open space to nothing. No one even dared breathe. Much less defy the guard.

  Delgado drew his attention inward. His thoughts were firmly on the doctor from Level Six. The doctor who was neither alien nor man. What Delgado couldn’t get out of his head was that the doctor’s initial assessment about Abby might have been right. Whatever she was, whatever Gerhard made her, her unnatural abilities were irrefutable. And extremely dangerous. How she hijacked the guard’s mind, how she made him shoot others and suicide himself, he was thinking, oh mighty turds of the unholy, I’m balls deep in the Twilight Zone. And the guard? He couldn’t stop thinking about the pained stare in the man’s eyes just before he pulled the trigger and shot Delgado. Whatever Abby had become—whatever she was becoming—she was a threat that had to be dealt with.

  She needed to be killed.

  The problem was the senator. No, it was his promise to her. His promise to deliver the girl, who would kill the boy for nearly half a million dollars.

  Even to him that was a lot of money.

  She called last night as he was icing his severely bruised sternum. As a grown man, he never cried. Last night was the closest he had ever come to doing so because the pain of being shot with the rubber bullet was bright and throbbing and constant. Radiating outwards from the impact point of the rubber bullet was a purplish welt. A red, black and blue mash up of swollen, traumatized flesh.

  Before the senator called, he was considering the consequences of not killing Abby. After his conversation with the senator, and now—staring at Abby’s body on the floor—he was having second thoughts.

  He wasn’t terribly put off at the notion of killing a child. It was because there was almost half a million on the line that his conscience wavered. One kill could lead to more money, though. Especially if the first kill went down without complication.

  She was his meal ticket to the outside world.

  Lately, he could think of nothing else other than leaving this place. He detested Dulce. So much so that all he wanted was a new life for himself. He was obsessed with it—moving to the outside world, with all of its splendor and possibility. Now, with the potential to acquire so much money, that singular thought dominated his entire world.

  He turned to the guard, who was still sighting up the child who had thrown his piss at them and said, “When you’re done eyeballing that runt, will you bring the gurney in here?” The guard broke his stare. He turned and looked at Delgado like he was one of the great unwashed, when in fact, Delgado had the juice to have him fired from this life and the next if he so chose.

  The guard held Delgado’s eye in defiance, then he turned and retrieved the gurney. To hell with this dick measuring contest, Delgado thought. His mind was still wading through the conversation he had last night. With the senator.

  When she’d called, the woman didn’t say hello, or hi, or how are you. She never said things like that. She was the kind of sour apple that got right to the point.

  “Is our asset ready?” she said, her raspy voice more like something out of an anti-smoking TV ad than anything human sounding.

  “Few more tweaks to the program, then yeah.”

  “Timeline?” Even though her voice sounded like scraped rock, it was measurably better than it had been before. Perhaps she was sick when he spoke to her last; or maybe she’d hot boxed a carton of smokes at the time.

  “Two weeks before school starts.”

  “Is that your official?” she asked.

  His chest ached so bad all he wanted to do was hang up the phone and drink himself almost to death. Instead, he sighed and said, “I don’t do official.”

  “You do if you’re being paid four hundred and seventy thousand dollars,” she corrected.

  She was right.

  “Well then,” he said, exhausted, “that’s your timeline.”

  “Splendid.”

  “It can’t happen right away,” Delgado pointed out. “You can’t just send in an asset and have her kill the target on day one. You need an insulation period. A well-defined before and after.”

  “I understand the nature of discretion.”

  “Sure hope so,” he said. “Because for that kind of scratch, I’m not about to make a mistake.”

  “It warms me to hear you say that,” she replied, certain not even a flame thrower could warm this chilled block of ice.

  “Yeah, well this one’s different,” he said, still spooked by Abby’s abilities. “She’s got lots more talent than the others. This one’s…let’s just say she’s gifted.”

  “Do elaborate,” the senator said, intrigued.

  “Can’t right now.”

  Already he’d said too much. If Abby botched the job, if her programming didn’t hold, or she ate down another million volts of electricity and fried the circuitry containing her programmed alters, there would be no way to find her.

  Not at Astor Academy.

  He had no idea where Astor Academy even was, so if she fried her chip outside Dulce, he might never see her again. Unless he put a separate homing beacon in her. Not that such a device would even hold in the event of a second electrical surge.

  Never-the-less, he prayed she wouldn’t self destruct. Not after what he’d seen in her afternoon of hand-to-hand combat. The way she went after that boy, how she nearly killed him just because she could…good God the girl was ruthless. No, the programmed Delta alter, he was the ruthless one.

  The indestructible one.

  The guard rolled the gurney into the warehouse of slaves. No one sailed their evacuated juices at them this time. Together, they picked up Abby, set her flat on her back on the gurney. He said nothing to the guard as he wheeled Abby out of the holding facility and down the long hallway to his lab. There he gave her a shot that would keep her unconscious for hours.

  2

  When he cut and peeled back the patch of hair directly over the original insertion site, he exposed the microchip and the stem holding the programs for Abby’s Gem and Delta alters. It was cooked. As in charred to a crisp. And the skull? Bone plates were healing around the chip and stem itself making it difficult to dislodge.

  With special tools, he unscrewed and then chipped away the remains of the fried microchip. He then dug out the stem like a Neanderthal. When that was finished, he prepared her skull for insertion of the replacement chip and stem. Then entire process took minutes. After that, he sewed her scalp back up and waited for the flesh to mend itself back together before pulling out the temporary stitches.

  Despite her being back under his control (or so he hoped), fear festered in him like some disease, agitating his heart, spreading rot deep into his guts. She was not human. The girl laying before him, she was something else. Something paranormal.

  Even worse, she was now lethal.

  By combining the combat programs with her physical abilities and her temper, by amping up this lethal mixture with the advanced Delta alter inside her, Delgado officially created the monster the doctor from Level Six warned him about.

  This version of Abby could now wreak havoc upon the world. A shiver drove through him, hard and cold, like an icepick into the spine. The minute she realized she was different, what would she do?

  Could the Gem alter control her? He wondered, can I really control her?

  The push and pull was b
ack. He had to make a decision. Kill her or use her? Every fiber of his being told him he had to dispose of her. It was the responsible thing to do. But almost half a million, it was no small sum of money. It was his way out of Dulce. His escape.

  Then again, with the things Gerhard had done to her, was she unkillable? He was afraid she was, and that was why he couldn’t seem to relax. No amount of mental reassurance could stop the righteous spread of terror, or cull his uncertainty. She scared him. No, she absolutely terrified the living hell out of him, so much so that he became obsessed with ending her.

  Shaking off the feeling, he tried thinking of something else. But he couldn’t. Just do it, he told himself. Kill her.

  But he couldn’t.

  Her survival meant his freedom. God damn, he wanted to free himself of this place! So instead of killing her, he wheeled her unconscious body down the hall to The Music Room. Inside was a metal chair bolted to a concrete floor in the middle of a small, tiled box of a room. The big square tiles were done in black and white checkerboard, and they went from floor to ceiling.

  There was no artwork. Not a single window. Nothing to mollify the tricky, dizzying feel of the room. For a second, the stale air seemed almost unbreathable. This was, however, how all music rooms were set up. It was all so very specific.

  His eye went to the middle of this Spartan space, where the bolted down chair sat next to a rolling medical cart containing four drawers with all the tools he needed. On top of the tall silver cart were two iPods with head phones and a pair of modified Virtual Reality glasses.

  When Delgado was first shown The Music Room, the impression it left was that of something from Alice in Wonderland just before you slipped into the deep grooves of a bad acid trip. He forced his eyes to adjust to the nightmare arrangement of tiles. The last thing he wanted was to suffer the snaps of vertigo. It had happened before.

  Worse than the psychotropic look of the tiles was the ceiling. It was laid out in a tubular nest of long, fluorescent lights. There wasn’t but an inch to spare between them. If the entire network of lights were turned on at once, it would be like staring into the sun with binoculars.

  Delgado flicked the light switch on the wall closest him. Only one set of fluorescents lit up. He wheeled the gurney into the illuminated room, transferred Abby’s unconscious body into the metal chair. She was an uncooperative thing. Unbalanced and floppy. Using the leather restraints fixed to the chair, he bound her limp arms and feet, pulling the leather straps as tight as they would go.

  In spite of the straps, Abby’s body sagged, her head lolling forward, curtains of hair draped in her face. Delgado stuck one ear bud from each iPod in each ear. He then slid open the top drawer of the medical cart and took out a roll of black duct tape. He tore off two strips, used them to hold Abby’s ear buds in place. Drawer number two contained surgical clamps. He used these medieval looking torture devices to pry her eyelids open. Looking into her eyes—even though the eyelids were peeled back and held mercilessly in place—the girl was somewhere else. Worlds away.

  He prepared the shot, administered it. Her body woke into a new nightmare. Stirring, she tried to blink. The metal device kept her eyes pried wide open. Her mouth made mumbling, panicked noises while her body squirmed and bucked against the restraints.

  Before she could speak, Delgado slid the Virtual Reality glasses over her head, making sure not to loosen the eye clamps in the process. He switched on the battery powered glasses and a soft glow lit her face. On the glasses were different scenes running on each eye: slow nature scenes in the left eye and rapid action scenes in the right eye. Delgado turned on the iPods. In the right ear, elevator music played, while in the left ear, heavy metal music blistered on. Abby was now awake. Her thrashing and mewling intensified. Pretty soon, a full bellied scream tore out of her mouth and that was all he needed to hear.

  No matter how many ways one could dissociate the mind, be it constant beatings, rape, food and sleep deprivation, box therapy, electroshock therapy, LSD mind warping, making you kill cute animals or shoot your own family, The Music Room always proved to be the quickest, most effective method of tearing a mind in half. This, of course, would pave the way for the newly installed version of the same Delta alter as before, but on a deeper, more permanent level.

  When he left, he hit a different switch and the full nest of lights on the ceiling warmed up and started to strobe.

  Before long, her brain would be jelly.

  3

  After a full day of The Music Room, Abby was a drooling, shattered mess. When Delgado was done, he helped her to The Box. Too exhausted to put up a fight was the point. She would nearly die in The Box. Nearly.

  But when she was done, she would be his and his alone.

  Abby’s trip to The Box was different than before. Instead of breaking her will, and separating her mind, he was breaking her to control her. To stifle the life out of her so he could get her safely out of Dulce and back to Holland. Keeping her disoriented was paramount. The minute she had strength and clarity enough to concentrate, he believed she would do exactly what the doctor from Level Six said she could do, which was precisely what he saw her do in the martial arts class video: break things and people.

  She was a telekinetic. Violent.

  And according to the doctor from Level Six, not fully human anymore.

  What a strange thing, Delgado thought as he zip-tied her wrists and ankles together. In her box, when he stuck fresh ear buds in her ears, it was merely one iPod and it was every Slayer song ever made and put on repeat. Twenty-four hours of speed/thrash metal. The blindfold went on, as did a ball gag so she could not scream. If she panicked, she would blow bubbles of saliva through flared nostrils, which proved an effective way to minimize many a subject’s fits. He closed her lid, secured the latches.

  She was a different kind of a beast, though.

  Wired for mass destruction.

  For the umpteenth time, his wicked, plotting mind suffered the need to relinquish his nearly half a million dollar contract and simply rid the world of her. It wouldn’t be easy. She already died and was dead for days. Yet here she was: the immortal child. If he cut off the limbs, stripped out the entrails and dug out the guts, he’d be assured of her permanent demise. But maybe not. He had to burn the separate parts of her and spread the ashes across the state if he really wanted to be sure. It would be a thoughtful, bloody undertaking, but he believed it would work.

  Not killing her was a decision he was sure would haunt him. Oh well, he thought. God hates the weak and cowardly. He strolled from the room thinking that he could always return and kill her later, if he so chose. Her death might not be his first choice, but it was a choice he needed, just in case.

  4

  She was only locked in her box for two days. Delgado had planned for three. What he was hoping was to vehemently destroy the host personality known as Abby, while giving rise to something else entirely. The Abby substitute. The thing with horrendous, angry eyes; the controllable thing that wanted only to kill: Delta. He could manage Delta with safe words and shut down triggers.

  Plus he had Gem.

  Using Gem and the programmed override, he would own the Delta alter. With Delta and Gem in place, and the original Abby gone, perhaps one contract could turn into many.

  She would play host to a lethal weapon. His weapon.

  What he hadn’t counted on, however, was the doctor from Level Six, and his unsupervised visit to Abby’s box. What he did…it ruined everything.

  Looking back, with his head dropped in his hands and his career all but over, Delgado struggled to imagine what he could have done different. He didn’t realize he’d been crying. He never cried. But there it was. Abby was gone.

  It was only after her escape from the base, and the mind-bending gore-fest that transpired, that he was able to view video footage from The Box and see what the doctor from Level Six did, and how—in some paranormal way—he helped her become…whatever it was she had become.


  Superhuman?

  If he could, which he knew he couldn’t, Delgado would rip that brain-raping super freak limb from goddamn limb.

  His head fell back in his hands, and the blubbering continued. Abby was gone. As was his life on the outside and the nearly half a million dollars that went with it. Silently, he regretted the very day he met Wolfgang Gerhard, that genetic tick.

  5

  As of the last report, the body count inside Dulce was closing in on one hundred. And Abby? Whatever she was, Delgado was certain she was exactly what the doctor from Six warned she would be. With her newfound talents and abilities, that girl—that human pestilence—was indeed destined to become a black plague upon the earth. A harbinger of supernatural destruction. Would he even live to see it?

  Would it matter either way?

  The Flames of Lovers Past

  1

  There was something special about first love. Something so overwhelming you couldn’t even surrender to it, it was that powerful. That’s what everyone told Brayden. He had yet to experience a love like this, but that’s what he wanted. It’s also exactly what Brayden knew he wouldn’t have with Abby, Aniela or Becky.

  He wondered, however, about Netty.

  He wondered about her right up until the time he met with Becky. He was tired, and he wanted to go to bed, but he wouldn’t stand up the woman who taught him how to make drinks and have sex. He didn’t want any more complications. Already, Titan’s and Romeo’s teachings were getting him bogged down in the lifestyle. It was exactly what they promised, but he wasn’t sure he wanted it anymore.