by Schow, Ryan
“One of the babies is dead,” she replied. She said it like she was admitting to spilling milk, or getting crayon on the walls. Five or six year old girls, they can’t rationalize death like adults can.
He masked his surprise, his anger, the same as any professional would. “How did this happen?” he inquired. Inside his brain, hundreds of flies were startled into flight. They were fat and crunchy, big as moths. He scratched his head, tried to do so with the most minimal efforts. But things were agitated in there.
“She wouldn’t stop crying. It was hurting my ears. Making me mad.”
“And so what…you killed her?” he asked, still scratching. The need was all consuming. It came on subtle at first, then it opened its mouth oh so wide and took him in one gulp.
“I threw it out the window. The fall killed it. Not me. I didn’t kill it.”
Her statement vanquished all the air from his lungs.
“Well,” he said, licking his lips, “it seems we must teach you restraint.”
She backed away from him. He backed away from her, too, because he felt the homicidal fog sweeping over him once more. He wanted that delicate neck broken.
“What is restraint?” she asked.
“Restraint means not doing something you really, really want to do.” I really, really want to destroy you is what he was thinking.
“Like killing all those women?” she said, looking at the slaughter all around them. “If you had restraint, they would be alive?”
He looked over his shoulder and splayed across the lab were the dismembered body parts of maybe half a dozen women of all colors, races and ages. He counted five heads. Some still on their torsos, two gone entirely from the bodies that used to hold them.
“I have…a problem that I have yet to solve. It’s a chemical imbalance. A genetic abnormality brought on by my transformation, I think.”
“I have problems, too,” she said.
“Mine are worse.”
Her eyes boring right into his, she held his attention, wordless. Then she broke the stare and once again took in the gruesome sight.
“You failed to kill me,” he said to her. There wasn’t even a hint of emotion in his voice. Did it really even matter that she tried? Some part of him felt sad that she failed.
“I did.”
“Next time then,” he replied, speaking from the heart, “try harder.”
3
Holland put all the body parts on the cart and wheeled it to the incinerator. Alice helped mop the floors. Within an hour, the lab was nearly expunged of the evidence of his butchery. He appreciated the strong smell of disinfectant. It warmed him. The odor of bleach was the same as death to him, which was the same as happiness.
“Thank you for your help.”
She didn’t say anything. Was she ignoring him? The phone in the lab rang. He answered it on the third ring.
“Dr. Gerhard? It’s Tate Russell.”
“What do you want, Tate?” he said.
“Um, I want you to let us in for starters. We’re freezing out here.”
Shit, he thought, that’s right. Holland checked the clock. Tate was supposed to be here already. He was late, but in his agitation, Holland had forgotten entirely.
“Hang on,” he replied.
“I’ll finish,” Alice said.
For a long moment, he fixed his gaze upon her as she straightened up the rest of the lab. Finally he said, “If you didn’t scare me the way you do, if you weren’t such an adorable, monstrous deformity, I’d kill the absolute shit out of you. I’d saw that beautiful head right off your scrawny little body.”
She looked up from her task, brushed a long strand of hair from her face and held his eyes. The way she looked at him, she couldn’t be a day over five. She didn’t speak. And she didn’t exhibit a hint of emotion. And it was right then he realized she would never let him kill her.
“I don’t like killing,” she finally said.
“Then perhaps you should never have dropped that child out the window.”
“It wouldn’t stop screaming.”
4
When Holland opened the front door, the man claiming to be Tate Russell was standing there with a beautiful blonde woman and an exotic looking black girl who reminded him of why Hitler started the Aryan agenda.
Tate wasn’t Tate. He was a man Holland didn’t recognize. When the man in the doorway saw Holland, he seemed to think the same thing.
“Gerhard?” he said.
“Going by Enzo Holland now. You are the new and improved Tate Russell, I presume.”
“Quentin Russell. Same surname. Couldn’t give it up.”
Looking up, into the greyish San Francisco sky, Quentin brushed off his shoulders and rubbed his short brown hair in a short flurry. “Jesus Christ,” Quentin said. “It’s raining ashes out here.”
The blonde woman with Quentin looked to be no more than thirty, thirty-five. She reminded him of one of the women he had taken and killed when he was…out of his mind. The beautiful face anyway. The girl’s head was shorn in a frenzy from her body, so honestly Holland wasn’t sure which body she’d come from. He did like the face, though.
The exotic woman, her skin black as ink, she wouldn’t look at him. Did she know who he was? What he was? He clucked his tongue at her and said, “She had to be black?”
Quentin scoffed and pushed past him, walking into the lab. “You wanted the best, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Then don’t be such a goddamn racist. Come on, girls.”
When the two girls brushed past him on the way inside the lab, the black girl said, “Nice teeth,” like it was an insult. It was, to some degree.
The gap in his teeth, it was the only thing keeping him from looking perfect. Why the previous version of himself wanted to keep them, he almost couldn’t remember. This version of him, he hated Mengele’s teeth. He hated Mengele. The man was a relic, a sadistic Nazi prick. He was…a long time ago.
He shut the door, followed the three of them inside. “Come on in back,” he said, taking the lead. He walked them to the lab where Alice was just finishing.
Alice looked up, swept the drape of brown hair from her eyes. For such a ruthless little monster, Holland found her quite endearing. He knew once the fever took over, his face changed. The look went to predator. Everyone else…they became prey. But Alice? She was unmoved by survival. Alice killed for convenience. For control. Not rage, or disgust. She killed for self-preservation. To be able to lob a kid out of a window because the noise became inconvenient, that was Alice.
It would pain him to end her. It would pain him to try.
“Where are the babies?” the blonde assistant asked.
“At my residence here in the city.”
“When can we see them?” the black woman asked.
“Baby. As in singular. No more babies.” In his mind, he was cursing Alice. He distinctly told her if the babies die, she dies. He shoved the thought out of his mind, tried to focus on the task at hand.
“What happened?” Quentin asked, looking in the canister at Rebecca. She really was a beautiful girl. Her red hair was fanned out in the gel, her body so perfect it looked angelic.
“One of them…expired.”
“Natural causes?” the blonde asked.
“No,” Alice said.
“Alice,” Holland interrupted, “please leave us to our conversation.”
She took the mop and bucket and left the room. Whether she went home or went somewhere else in the lab he didn’t know. Nor did he care. She was proving to be a self-sufficient child. Able to find money, get a cab and come here. Able as well to repress him of his murderous ways.
Looking at the black girl, thinking she had a pleasant look about her despite her color, Holland wondered if he could breed the racism out of himself. Perhaps he’d try. If he could fix the unbalanced fury burning holes inside him—if he could cull the black-out rage and the insanity—perhaps he could instill racial tolerance in the next version o
f himself.
Or not.
He dreamt of murdering the black girl, which prompted him to reach out and offer his hand. “I am Enzo Holland,” he said kindly. “Please excuse my behavior…from earlier. It’s a…carryover from earlier times.”
She looked at his hand, refused to take it. “Apology accepted.” No name. Not a single ounce of humanity. He didn’t understand. The beast inside him rolled its neck. Cracked its knuckles. The beast inside him knew exactly what it would feel like to cut out her eyes.
“And you, my dear?” he said to the blonde.
“I’m Sandra,” she said, all business. “When will we be able to see the child?”
“In due time. Tomorrow perhaps. It’s been a long day and I must speak with Tate, Quentin I mean. I’ll be but a moment, if you’ll please excuse us.”
The two girls left the lab. He looked at Quentin, who made a sour look before saying, “There’s nothing like a first impression and you really botched yours.”
“I know. I’m…out of sorts, to a large degree. There’s something wrong with me. I’m spinning through all the past versions of myself and I’ve become quite…shall we say…homicidal.”
“Homicidal?” he stammered.
“Young Alice here was cleaning up from a previous, ahem, incident involving an assortment of kidnapped women. The ash you’re wearing, that’s them.”
With this, Quentin looked on his shoulder, brushed away the tiny flakes of the dead, and then leveled him with a new look. If Holland even bothered to read the expression, he might’ve seen fear simmering just below the surface. Instead, all he saw was revulsion.
“I do not wish to continue on in this fashion,” Holland admitted. “I’m working night and day to correct the imbalance in my system, and I believe I’ve developed a formula that will right the impurities festering inside me.” Not to mention fix these ugly little teeth, he thought.
“Fine,” Quentin said, “but this wasn’t our agreement.”
“Had I known I was going to suffer a…breakdown…when we spoke last, I would have delayed. Alas, that isn’t the case. That is why I need you to oversee my transformation.”
“When?” he said.
“Now. Tonight. I’ll get you the key to my residence and the lab and you shall have full access to both.”
“What about the girl?”
“Alice?”
Quentin nodded.
“She can take care of herself.”
“She can’t be more than five,” Quentin said, aghast. “You can’t just expect me to carry on as if she doesn’t exist.”
“If she needs something, she’ll tell you. But I wouldn’t worry about that. Just make sure she has enough money for cab fare. And groceries.”
“She shops for herself?” he said, laughing, but not because he was humored.
“Even children have a survival instinct, Mr. Russell.”
“Quentin.”
He was about to speak when the lab’s phone rang. He went and answered it, not expecting to hear the voice on the other end. Much less the request.
He listened for a moment, then said, “Absolutely not.”
The person on the other end, however, was insistent.
When Holland slammed the phone onto the cradle in frustration, Quentin asked, “What was that about?”
“Apparently I won’t be going under just yet,” he said, wondering if he would be able to quell the monster inside him. “Do you have a place to stay?”
“We’re staying at The Palace, on Montgomery Street.”
“A fine hotel,” Holland said, his mind elsewhere. “You’ll enjoy your stay, I’m sure. Tomorrow then?” he said looking up. He was staring into the handsome face of Quentin Russell, but all he could think about was the conversation he just had with Brayden. If he couldn’t fix Georgia before, how the hell was he supposed to fix her now?
“Tomorrow then,” Quentin said before leaving.
5
After Quentin and his assistants left, he pulled his files on Georgia, then fetched an unopened bottle of Bärenyäger brand Bärenfang. He poured himself a tumbler full, drank the honey-flavored vodka, then reclined in his office chair and sighed.
The drink, back in the homeland, was not this sweet. Back in Germany in the early days, the Bärenfang he drank used honey made from honeydew rather than nectar, which always seemed to leave a slightly bitter aftertaste. Not this. Even at ninety proof, the drink went down like a dream.
Rolling around in his head was the conversation he had with Brayden. He was in Las Vegas, he and Georgia. He said she had the personality equivalent of a zombie. A zombie! Wasn’t that what she was? The dead risen?
Ha!
He refilled his drink, swallowed the liquid in three short gulps.
To adjust a personality was a very different thing than to adjust, say, the genetic makeup for eye color, or breast size, or heaven forbid, the bone structure of the face.
Personality was a crap shoot.
He was on his fourth drink and really feeling his head starting to swim when the phone rang once more. Looking at it, he frowned. “Nein,” he snarled and finished his drink.
He let it go to the answering machine. Half the calls he received these days went to the machine so he could screen them. With Arabelle gone, he’d become his own secretary, and a terrible one at that.
The phone stopped ringing, clicked over to the answering machine. The man’s voice filled the office, his panic ever apparent.
Dr. Delgado.
“Hello, Dr. Gerhard, I mean, Dr. Holland. Your girl…um, she’s done. But whatever you did to her, man, holy shit. She’s…oh my God, man…she’s…she’s goddamn different!”
The way Delgado’s voice rose to a hyperactive pitch had Holland sitting up straight. His brain was fuzzy on the edges, but his comprehension was dead on.
“And she sort of…um, well, she sort of escaped. Which wouldn’t be possible, like ever. Except, like I said, whatever you did to her, there’s something…inhuman about her.”
Holland couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Yet he couldn’t pick up the phone and talk to the man because, with everything happening, he couldn’t take any more problems. Not with his damn head shearing in two.
“The body count, it’s one hundred plus and counting,” Delgado continued. “And the bodies she left behind? The amount of blood spilled? It could fill swimming pools! What in the Jesus’s name did you do to that girl? Bodies are crushed man. They’re literally crushed!”
Holland was on his feet, but the room tilted and so he sat back down, sick, now starting to sweat.
“Call me, just…I’m not sure what to do…you got major problems on your hands man. Code red, man. CODE RED!”
Then the line went dead. He poured himself another drink, soaked in the possibilities. What was she now? Was Abby like the cow-killing boy? A telekinetic? He had done it! And even though he was filled with a sense of dread, death and destruction was in his blood. The thrill was erotic. Religious. He heard his mouth laugh and laugh and laugh, and then he thought he hadn’t laughed like that since he was a child.
What he said about Alice to Quentin, that children had a survival instinct, it was the same with Abby. Wherever she was, she would survive. And she would find him. Perhaps she would try to kill him. He could live with that, with her—his perfect weapon.
Georgia was a weapon, too, albeit the first of her kind, excluding Alice. No, Georgia was not an original, but a reproduction of a weapon. Phase one of his program. And not without her complications. But Abby? Abby was phase two. He would be phase three, if only he could handle the drama of phases one and two long enough to go through this next transformation.
One at a time, he told himself. Brayden and Georgia were on the way. They would be there in the morning. And who knew how long it would take Abby to get to him?
One at a time, he told himself.
He only prayed he could survive the cravings surging through him. If he blacked out aga
in, if he sunk back into that haze of insanity and awoke into awareness, into the carnage he woke into today, he wouldn’t know how to explain that to Quentin or his assistants. Not when he couldn’t even understand it himself. He only knew killing was his drug. That he was somehow re-engineered for destruction.
Thinking of what he’d done, how he dismembered those bodies in a manic fit, stirred within him an insatiable hunger. It was building again. He thought of Quentin’s lab assistant. The blonde with her perfect eyes, her perfect body, that mouth. The atrocities he ached to commit before stomping each and every bone in her beautiful body to absolute ruin was illegal in at least twenty-six states. And murder? It was illegal in every state, not that he cared. He only knew what he wanted.
What he wanted to do.
From the Catacombs of Dulce
1
I wake up falling. Down to my knees on the desert dirt. Face first into sand and pebbles. Lying on my belly, breathing up plumes of dust from the desert floor, I feel so cold, so unbelievably hot. The heat is a blast furnace that draws tears from my eyes. Crying, lying wasted in the dirt, I can’t stand.
Where am I?
How did I get here?
Flashes of chaos run rampant about my mind. Ghastly things, horrifying images I can’t shut my eyes to avoid. When the doctor who was neither human nor alien activated me, when I escaped the box and the room that held it, I encountered a guard. He pulled his gun on me. I stopped him with my mind. Using my thoughts the way the doctor taught me, I tore the gun from the guard’s hand, spun him around, slammed him face-first into the wall. All from ten feet away. He crumbled to the floor, unconscious. There was a bloom of red left behind where his nose busted open against the wall, but other than that he would be fine.
That’s when I felt Delta awaken. Another guard in another hallway pulled his gun and told me to stay put. I didn’t even need to see him with my eyes because my mind was seeing things no human mind could see. Connecting with the paralayers of everything. The energy that unified each and every aspect of this world.
