Kingsley drew a shaky breath.
“Jane…was never really here, Dexter. Somehow her doubles managed to reach us along with the others you see about you. I think…Jane’s lingering brain activity in the doubles…However they’re made they have to be made out of the same traces of DNA or they wouldn’t be exact replicas. I think…What I’m trying to say is that Jane saved us. Was sending us a warning. That somehow she knows that I have the answer. You see, I have Leona’s DNA on me…”
“How?” Dexter felt himself withering at the look of shame on Kingsley’s face.
“Because she…she forced him.” Kiara stepped up. Joseph was shaking. Harrison cleared his throat.
“You mean, like…She raped you?” Harrison’s eyes popped and he shook himself.
Kingsley looked to the ground.
“Her blood got in my wounds…I know what she does. I just can’t see it yet. If this psychotic power can create clones of dead people who then take up arms against us, then it can help me tap into the secrets. Good can still come of all of this…If not…I’m prepared to do what is right for the good of all of you. I owe it to Jane. She would have wanted me to own up to everything.”
“Jane’s not…Jane’s not coming back, is she? She…She did what she went to do. It’s done.” Dexter sank to his knees. He’d never loved her more than he did today when she was out of his reach forever.
Kiara knelt in front of Dexter.
“She saved you. Make that mean something.”
He bowed his head. Even as the tears fell, he clenched his jaw. Something was hardening in the pit of his gut. The tenacity to do what no other person could do. He wouldn’t be inhibited by fear or the need to survive like they were. He was worse than dead now. This was walking damnation. Hell would have been easier.
“I’m going with you.” Kiara turned, letting the wind gently lift her hair from her eyes.
“What? Kiara no!” Kingsley’s eyes popped.
“This is my fight, Kingsley, whether you like it or not. Besides, she’s my sister. I know her better than you do. Hell, better than I know myself. There is one place to go that she would only follow if hell was opening beneath her. A place from our past that she swore on pain of death never to return. The serum will be safe there for a while. No one can say how long, but we can take whatever time we can get now.” Kiara nodded.
Reilly coughed and drew close to Dexter’s leg.
“No worries. I will watch out for them.” She smiled.
“Thank you, Reilly.” Kingsley smiled. He nodded to Dexter and looked carefully at Harrison.
“It might not mean much to you, Harrison, but…I am sorry.”
“I forgive you.” He nodded. It was done.
Kingsley turned to his father and squared his jaw. Joseph felt his tongue clinging to the roof of his mouth. Kingsley nodded.
“Thanks for not giving up on me.” He turned and walked away, with no more words. The weight of the world was coming down on him. Kiara drew to his side like the faint shadow of hope. They watched as he disappeared into the eerie light that rolled over New Orleans like that snowfall which never came.
“I never thought I’d see the day when my son would become a good man.” Joseph smiled. The silence was shattered by voices moving through the outside and vehicles crunching down the bodies and debris. The pirates were coming back around covering the ground that the Doppelgangers had blocked off for them. The battle resumed whether they had the heart or not. Jane’s fire guttered and blasted the walls out of a whole block of buildings. It was enough of a surge to move them into action, even if it wasn’t enough to carry them through the indefinite leagues of darkness opening before them.
*****
Chapter 2
She felt her feet scrape the open air. Never in her darkest dreams would she have seen this scenario playing out. Here she was the self-appointed terror of the Earth. The destroyer of many worlds to come. Yet Leona Kelley had become the victim of her own creation.
Andromeda’s eyes didn’t move to blink or water in the least from their glassy staring. She held Leona by her throat over Time’s Square. Made her scramble and clutch at her forearms to maintain breath. Forced her to look out and down.
“Pl-Please, Jane. Please.” She sputtered and reached a gentle hand to the alabaster face. With her index finger, she drew the flaming hair back from the spectral pallor, revealing the light that emanated from her now. She was made of glass. This wasn’t the spirited girl from before. This demon she had created was cold like the intestines of Hell beneath its last embers and far less forgiving.
“Look down…” Andromeda’s jaw clenched and she tilted her head to the side.
“I—” There was a sound of terror from the sidewalk. Tourists were beginning to take notice as they photographed the sweeping peaks of America’s empire city.
“You…Terror? The mistress of the Earth, afraid of heights?!” Andromeda laughed and dropped her again. Leona shrieked. This was the hundredth time. How long would it be before she failed to catch her?
Once again Andromeda froze her half of the way down with the invisible magnetic force emitting from her carpal tunnels. Her palms were turning the deep black of gathering lead as fine metallic particles pierced into her skin. She was clothed in something that looked like necrosis from all the minute debris that gathered to her. She hauled Leona up. Wriggled her fingers with sinister glee like the spider drew its web back to herself.
She held Leona in the air on the fine blades of thin metallic grains rolling through her currents. Both of them were slice with a thousand paper cuts. The granite powder stuck into their teeth. Their gums bled like shower heads, misty drizzle that rose in small red clouds. Andromeda gurgled as her teeth were filed down into sharp points by the fly swarming metals. Her skin was breaking and beading little droplets of blood and sweat as the metal pierced it slowly flaying it away. It floated around her face like rotten seaweed until magnetism pieced it back together almost as soon as it began to float free.
“Afraid. You’re afraid. Now you understand. Humanity…” Andromeda twisted her hand. Leona felt her heart clenched, trying to beat against the vice-grip that was imploding it and restoring it all at once, all over again.
“Please…Jane!” Her hands flew to her chest.
“Who?” The Andromeda’s head thrashed on her shoulders in a violent electric masking convulsion that coursed through Leona’s whole body. Her heart jumped back into motion, beating at the pace of three adult hearts at once. She gasped and closed her eyes. Even in the darkness of her own mind, she could still see the outline of the electrically charged face. The face of her Frankenstein, who would never leave her.
“There is no one here by that name.” Andromeda smiled. Leona watched her face. Her cold, searing eyes. Something told her that finally she had met her opposite, equal force. That there would be a day of reckoning for all that she had done. It would come from the hands of her own creation.
“You…Have something you need to do. Something that you will do. If you don’t then terrible things…Things both wonderful and dark…Unholy and mortal…Will find you. Will you be able to stand on that terrible day? Will you be able to give an answer for the things they will ask of you?” She tossed her head. Leona felt something subtle ripping the molecular structure of her body into many little fragments.
“I… I’m…”
“Ill-prepared. Uncaring. Too proud to stoop so low. All of this and more, I agree. You will learn. My God, you will learn! You will fall upon the stone of the grave you carved for your own family. I will break you.” Her voice got softer with every word. It hung in the air with a hint of a whisper, the last hiss of the snake moaning from thirst, dying in the desert sun.
Andromeda hurled Leona. She fell like a meteor, flaming from the electric force of the hand that cast her from this edge. Magnetism then suspended her three feet from a bus’s roof, arms spread in the crucifix. She moaned as the blood began to seep at her trembling lips,
welling from the sides of her eyes.
People shrieked. Leona felt fissures in her psychosis. The walls of genius were beginning to implode as she hovered in the air, suppressed, restricted by the will of her greatest specimen. Madness began to spring from her desperation. Madness that gave her previous reputation a saintly air.
*****
Chapter 3
She was chasing her through the airways, spiriting her down the lamp-washed streets of the Big Apple. The City had been sleeping through the nightmare they’d created. It was far away from them for now. In New Orleans, or Mexico, or some other southern ocean that eluded the enterprise and glamor of life in their City. Now the wool was plucked from civilian eyes. They could see them moving robotically, manically from street to street, over cars, under buses, on their pathway down into the Subway system. Now they knew that there was no escaping the Lady Frankenstein and the monster she had created. The world wasn’t big enough to hide from their fury.
“May the City of the Wayward Souls tremble and exhale before this! Behold! The pawn before the masses is the wolf among your sheep. Your servant is your master, New York!” Andromeda hovered against her own magnetism at the mouth of the Subway tunnels. The whole City shrieked and moved to evade her. Leona had fallen to her knees where she’d been planted. She snarled and plucked the cap from her Nazi costume from her head, casting it into the wind that emitted from Andromeda’s vortex electron charge. Andromeda peeled the street from the pavement like ripping tender flesh from bones. There was a chalkboard shriek as the NYPD closed in around them.
“Drop! Get on your stomach!” The Police Chief trained a tactical rifle on Leona. She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t think you’ll find either of us compliant, officer.” Leona tilted her head. Would she allow herself to be bullied by this child? Everything she was she had become because of her.
“Come, dear girl! Is that any way to talk to your mother?” In the end, the Andromeda was merely a puppet of the willful Jane Lewis, wasn’t she? She was as filled with the ill-will of her creator as she was the righteousness of her host. This internal conflict would make her a very pliable opponent if Leona dealt her cards right.
“My mother? My mother?!” Andromeda made a low gurgling sound in her throat and bowed backward, head resting on the small of her back. Electricity rolled from her in sporadic fields that were shaped like double-helixes, rolling cars onto their roofs by the sheer force and melting the paint from them. At least ten cars caught fire, exploded, and blew the walls out of the buildings behind them. Another field bottlenecked down the Subway tunnel and caught the terminal on fire, shooting the Subway down the track like a molten bullet shot from the barrel.
The Fire Department was scrambling to stop the outbreak. Andromeda shrieked and convulsed, gripping her electrical fields like reigns, trying to force them down her throat to contain them. She caught fire that shot from her eyes, from her teeth.
“My mother! Ha!” Her head swiveled from side to side, shooting blood and electric sparks in effervescent shots that melted the asphalt. It splattered against the officers’ face shields, blinding them as the chemicals reacted and folded the shields against themselves like origami. People screamed and sobbed and hid beneath newspaper booths, burning benches, or anything they thought might give them some cover from her and her sadistic laughter.
“You are not my mother! A vixen…The woman who wanted to rule the world…”
Andromeda’s skin cracked and began to effuse foaming blood in smoke clouds. She was a porcelain doll in the midst of all of this, one that’s limbs moved in stiff circular motions. Yet somehow Jane Lewis within the creature had regained consciousness and mastery. Andromeda shrieked a cougar shrill wail, beaten for now, as another wave of lighting like the first that had shot from her when she’d hauled Leona away captive went blasting from her nostrils.
The highway was surrounded then by Jane’s Doppelgängers. One of which had been copied so as to wear an NYPD SWAT officer’s uniform. She stretched forth her hand and magnetically drew a semi-automatic rifle from the seat of one of the armored trucks that came gliding into view.
“Leona…” Jane’s double was barely holding on by a thread of consciousness. Yet Leona had underestimated the will of the girl to overcome the creature mold she had forced her into. Like an eagle confined to its cage, Jane’s lingering spirit was only enraged by the constricting casket her own body had become.
“There’s more fight in you than I could have ever imagined. Well done, dear girl. Well done.” Leona swung in tight, skill saw spirals and kicked three officers into each other. Their rifles were cast up. She swung out and grabbed one. Jane fired on her in a sweeping arc. Leona swung her rifle down to break Jane’s skull. Jane caught the barrel of it even as some of her other doubles began to shriek and catch fire, arms spread in the shape of the cross.
“Kyrie Eleison.” The doubles hit their knees, chanting their Greek prayer as the smoke rose from their lips. They began to thrash. Sparks shot from their eyes like fireworks displays. They burst with a wet pop that sent bloody water spouts raining in sparkling fountains down on the civilian body. The civilians thrashed making frightened snow angels in her blood. The final double wrenched and bent the barrel in her clutching hand.
“My God! Aren’t you the crowd pleaser, Ms. Lewis! Heaven help me, I’ve created a star!” Leona batted her lashes with a feline smirk. Jane reached up and clawed into the skin above Leona’s heart.
“You will learn…You can kill this body, but I will rise.” Her teeth began to gnash together, filing themselves viciously to the gums.
“I will rise against…”
Her eyes rolled in her head showing their naked whites. Leona giggled.
“Oh, that’s precious. So, I admit. You’ve made me step up my game. Don’t think you’re any match for me half lit as you are, doll.” Leona snapped the double’s neck, twisted and goaded a fallen officer with the bent gun barrel until she’d rolled him over and snatched a canister of tear gas from his belt. Closing her eyes, she pulled the pin. She disappeared into the mist even as the police and citizens reeled in the chemical release.
“Dispatch all available units. Somebody call in the Guard on this one too. I don’t care what strings you need to pull, get the President— the whole damn Congress! — on the line, pronto. I want an APB on that thing!” The Police Chief crunched his mic, watching as Andromeda spiraled into the skyline. Another blinding flash of light disguised her disappearance. The terror in New York ended as abruptly as it had begun.
*****
Chapter 4
Derek felt his heart beating against the frigid tile of the cage’s floor. It wasn’t utterly dark here. He had Leaf’s tormented fire to thank for that. His sergeant groaned beside him. It seemed that sleep sedated his incessant fire and waking fanned his flames. He never had any peace from his torment.
“It would have been better to let you die. God, I hate myself for saying that!” Derek rolled himself to his left hand and inched forward. Leaf looked up at him, eyes bursting into flame. He breathed softly, spurts of smoke and embers shooting from his nostrils and then being sucked with a machine’s tormented whirring back into his lungs. There in the darkness of the submarine and the glare of Leaf’s fire, Derek was as wondering and terrified as the small boy he’d once been. He believed in dragons and demons again. Yet seeing that the one demon in his shadows wore his brother’s face, he no longer feared the dark. Of all those things he knew he had good reason to fear, the darkness wasn’t one. It was a strange comfort from the things he could feel being set in motion ready to appear.
“I think you’re right. There’s nothing you can do about it now, man. It’s better to let me live to see payback. I can die when I’m done.” He eased himself to his knees. Derek held his breath. Leaf’s whole body took on a deep burnt orange luminosity that sent tremors of heat through the floor. It cracked the marble tile and sent fissures through the walls. Even the metallic bars of th
eir cage rang with some electrically induced acoustics spawned from that unholy fire.
“Good sentiments. Those never live long in the festering sewage she breeds with the likes of us…” A voice spoke out of the dark and the stench of marine putrefaction.
Leaf turned chin-length hair prickling on static ends. He shuddered. A silhouette was posed in the corner of the dripping cell, brooding long, claw-like fingers over a lobster’s rotting shell. There were only open, smoking sockets where his eyes should have been.
“Who are you?” Leaf clutched his stomach. The air had been converted to poison by the breath of this creature.
“Not who, my boy. What.”
There was silence as the soldiers listened to the heavy, aching breath of the creature.
“I am the heart and brain of the one man my mistress ever loved. I am woven together from grafts of her skin, and skin from the men she used to devour, before her sister, gracious sister, began to swallow the skin and blood to save their souls. I am collective consciousness. She has a drug for that, you know. Tested it on young Jane once. I have young Jane’s consciousness too. Her consciousness gave me speech. This is the first time— gah! The first time I can speak because of that girl. The girl is dead but…lingering…painfully lingering.” The creature groaned and pressed his hands to his temples.
“My mistress held me together with the body of her father. The entrails of her mother. The lungs of her brother, who is somehow still lingering on the planet as well. I don’t know. Not who, my children but what. I am the Geryon. The first of her suspended puppets. Not alive or living on looping pause. I am no echo. I am an illusion. The first abstract thought that lead to the dawn of all of this.” He stood up with a toucan’s purr and began to rake his curling fingernails along the bars of the cage.
“I will turn to rend you again, young men. That is what a monster does. Amoral, objective. Silent observer to the chaos— the random, indifferent chaos descending upon the world. Jane the girl, the first one to enter this continuum of collective madness with any empathy, she has a message for you. A message from beyond the echo of the collective voices…The preserved, kept alive, bottled lighting in the first drug…The one who lit the girl on fire…Gah…” The Geryon began to claw at the space where his eyes should be.
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