Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  Her hand glowed red for a moment, and Grace’s eyes rolled into the back of her head.

  I was panicked, grief-stricken, close to vomiting, happy that I hadn’t eaten lunch, barely able to move a muscle aside from twitching my knees.

  I stabilized myself with a hand on the dresser, the Okay Buy bag dropping to the floor.

  “I didn’t kill her,” Veronique said as she stood. She was still in her tight black combat outfit. Her short blonde hair was in her face, partially covering one of her eyes, and as she stared at me, I found myself no longer able to breathe.

  It was definitely a panic attack, and as I tried to catch my breath – which seemed impossible – she slowly moved over to me.

  “I … I …”

  “You do not have long before I kill you,” she said, not breaking eye contact with me. “That is, unless you have something to offer me.”

  “I have a BMW in the garage downstairs, my laptop too – you can have that.” I was babbling at this point, my words falling out of my mouth before I could actually think through what I was saying.

  She placed her hand on my shoulder, and my knees grew weak, my stomach lurching. Seeing the red energy radiate from her hand caused my lungs to decompress.

  I’d seen what she could do in those videos, and I slowly found myself growing drowsy, delirious, which loosened me a little bit.

  I felt drunk now, helpless, slushed.

  She removed her hand and helped me over to the bed so that I could sit.

  “I’ll give you whatever you want,” I told her, out of breath. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Why did you take her?”

  I glanced up at her. She stood in front of me, her hands on her hips as she took me in. “Are you serious?” I asked.

  No answer; the look on her face told me she was indeed serious – deadly serious.

  “Look, Veronique, she showed up at my doorstep, and now I’m here. Fuck.” One quick glance over at Grace’s fallen body, and I felt a lump in my throat.

  “She came to you?”

  “That’s right, and she showed me what was on her drive. Does that make sense? I don’t know how to explain it, but I plugged into her, just like how I plugged into you.” I touched the side of my neck. “The port.”

  “And?”

  “My pictures were on there too.” My mouth was dry, and I could hardly focus on anything as fear boiled through me.

  I felt empty, hollow even. What could it mean? Why were my pictures there? And here I was, stealing, fucking, and going shopping for electronics, when there could be something terrible happening, something deadly – and something that apparently involved me.

  Veronique’s dark eyes softened. “Suppose I believed you. Why should I let you live?”

  I cleared my throat. “Look, I don’t have any powers, aside from …” I tried to think of a joke and then realized it was not the time to be joking. “Never mind, I don’t have any powers, like I said. But I can do one thing …”

  “Oh?” She tilted her head as she looked at me, her eyes still dark and soulless.

  “I don’t know what was going on back in that laboratory …” I finally made eye contact with her, showing her I meant business. “But whatever it was, it’s wrong, and I intend to expose it.”

  She took a step closer to me, my head now at the height of her waist. I didn’t feel like it was an intimate moment though, I felt like she was seconds away from killing me.

  “Expose it?” she started to chuckle a little.

  “Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but I just have this feeling that there are more like you out there. I know there are. I mean, I don’t have a hundred percent evidence yet, but I feel it in my gut, and I did find a few things searching around on both of your … hard drives? Can we call them hard drives? You two are human, correct? I mean, Grace said you were.”

  I recalled having sex with Grace – they were definitely human. Well, at least Grace was.

  “Grace? How would you expose what they have done to us?” she asked, the look on her face still harsh and cold.

  “I’m glad you asked,” I said, a little too enthusiastically. “Sorry, I’m just excited about my solution to all this. But I do have a plan: I’m going to write a book.”

  “A book?” she asked, her eyebrow rising.

  “Let me rephrase. I’ve already started writing a book, and I’m almost ten thousand words in. The book is about this experience and what you two have gone through.”

  “A book, huh?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m a self-published author. I want to publish a book about all this, and put details out there on the internet where people can contact me anonymously about what’s going on. Hopefully, we can expose and uncover more of these experimental laboratories, or whatever – you get my point. What I’m trying to say is this: whatever they did to you, is not right.”

  She bit her lip.

  “Look, Veronique,” I said, reaching my hand out to her.

  I grabbed her wrist, which was possibly one of the stupidest things I could have done in that situation considering her ability. Much to my surprise, it worked, and the look on her face softened. “What they did to you, and what I am assuming they have done to others, is wrong.”

  “How do you know what they did to me?”

  “I only got a taste by searching through your drive. They had you killing people at, like, the age of thirteen. That’s just the start. What I saw is wrong, and I’m guessing that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It’s wrong, and we should …”

  “Destroy them, and destroy the Rose-Lyle facility.”

  “I was going to say expose them, but …” I nodded. “You called it the Rose-Lyle facility?”

  “Yes, that’s its name.”

  “And that’s where all this happened? Grace too?”

  “Who is Grace?”

  “The other one like you, her.” I nodded my chin toward Grace’s fallen body. “Look, maybe you’re right, maybe we should destroy them. Maybe we should destroy all of them, but to do so, we need to know about the existence of the other locations. Just imagine this: I put the book out, some people contact us – and sure, there will be some kooks – but we get some actual information on more of these places. First, we destroy yours, then we destroy the next one.”

  As Veronique looked me over, a quote from Ambrose Bierce’s Cobwebs from an Empty Skull came to me: “People who wish to throw stones should not live in glass houses; but there ought to be a few in their vicinity.”

  “How long will it take you to write this book?” she asked, as she turned her wrist around and grabbed my hand.

  Fear ballooned inside my chest.

  “At least a couple of weeks,” I said, my teeth chattering. “I mean, I’m a fifth of the way there now, so I should finish next week or so. Maybe a little sooner, but I still have to get the cover designed, get the book edited, get it ready to be published …”

  Veronique shrugged. “Okay, I’ll give you two days.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Something flashed in her dark eyes. “If you are indeed a writer, you will finish this book in two days and publish it at that time, if it does not succeed …”

  My hand tensed up as she activated her power, a red aura forming around her fingers.

  “I got it,” I said hurriedly. I whipped my hand away from hers. “Two days.”

  “I will give you as much information as I can. You can also get information from her.” She touched her foot against Grace’s shoulder.

  “And you promise you won’t kill her?”

  “No, I don’t promise. But I don’t think I’ll kill her. We need her, don’t we?”

  I had taken a personal development course at a job I worked at a few years back, a course which focused on the usage of the pronoun ‘we.’ It came back to me all of a sudden, even though I’d dozed off toward the end.

  “Yes, we need her. We really need her. We really, really need her. Please don’
t suck her energy out anymore.”

  “We will see how your book looks in two days.” She took a few steps away from me and crossed her arms over her chest. “Now, get started.”

  Chapter Thirteen: Creative Nonfiction Gamer Sci-Fi?

  It was time to write my ass off. I had heard of Nanowrimo, the competition in which an author challenges themselves to write a book in a month, but I never heard of being threatened by a superpowered woman to write a book in two days.

  It was madness, unorthodox, and damn near impossible, to say the least!

  So, outlines were out the window.

  My hands trembled as I fired up my laptop. As I fretted, Veronique dragged Grace to the other bedroom.

  Using a coat hanger, and her ability to warp metal, she created a pair of handcuffs for Grace and also used one of the bath towels – the one that I had no idea what you were supposed to do with – to cover her eyes.

  If Grace did wake up, she would be blindfolded, and her hands would be bound together. I briefly recalled wondering how she would go to the restroom, but instead of asking, I pulled up my manuscript, took a deep breath, kissed each finger, and started pecking away at the keys.

  I didn’t write more than two hundred words before curiosity killed the writer.

  “Why did you blindfold her?” I asked as I went to the second bedroom to find Veronique finishing up. I wanted to make sure Grace was okay, so I asked this question as nonchalantly as possible.

  “Her abilities only work if she can see someone. Once she imprints, that person belongs to her.”

  “But she can tell someone to do something, right?” I asked. “And they will still carry it out if she can’t see them, correct?”

  “Correct, but her ability to imprint relies on her ability to see someone. This is why she couldn’t stop me earlier.” She turned to me. “Shouldn’t you be writing?”

  “Let’s go into the other room; I have a few questions I need to ask you to clarify a few things about what I’m writing.”

  “Don’t you want to check her ‘hard drive,’ as you would say?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.

  “Oh,” I said, shaking my head. In my mind, ‘Check her hard drive’ came off as something completely opposite of what Veronique meant. “I checked her yesterday, and I wasn’t able to get much info, but I didn’t check as deeply as I should have.”

  “That’s something you should do, but if you want to start with me, that’s fine.” She moved past me. When I didn’t follow her right away, she turned back. “Are you coming or not?”

  “Tell me everything you know about the experiments that were done to you, where you came from, and who the men were at the hotel,” I said after I’d sat down at my laptop. I never thought of myself as an investigative journalist, but if the shoe fit …

  A thought came to me.

  “Wait, before we get into that, why did you kill the men you came to the hotel with? That’s something I can’t figure out.”

  “Maybe I wanted what she wanted.” Veronique sat down in a purple armchair and crossed one leg over the other.

  Again, ambiguity in the response. I decided to try a different line of questioning: “Okay, let’s start here. Who were they?”

  With a small sigh, Veronique started up a story that seemed familiar, if it weren’t for the fact that it was entirely true. She explained how she had been born in the lab, or at least a lab like it, and the same thing was true for Grace.

  She didn’t know all the terminology – and hell if I knew – but basically, they were the results of some type of powerful gene editing that allowed them to have their powers, and other people could also have these types of powers, if only their genes could be modified.

  The lab where they’d spent a good amount of their life was called the Rose-Lyle Facility, and Veronique and Grace had only physically met once before. Because of Grace’s abilities, she was kept in isolation, but Veronique recalled playing with her once, when they were younger.

  “How did you know it was her?”

  “We have similar features,” was her answer.

  “What is the ultimate goal of this experiment? Why was it started in the first place?”

  She didn’t know the exact answer to this, but I didn’t need to harken back to a comic written during the Cold War to know that it likely had something to do with building a super soldier.

  I remembered thinking at the time how this again felt like a trope, but then, most things in my life felt like a trope.

  Veronique was a bit more social than Grace and had gone on the hunt for others before. This was why she was allowed out, whereas Grace had to escape.

  With Veronique, they could simply keep her away from people to feed on and she would lose her power. After all, she fed, and was nourished, by touching people and depleting their energy, and her metal-wielding abilities became obsolete if she were placed in a plastic cell, of which they had two of different sizes for when she misbehaved.

  “I was always good when we went out. Never out of line.”

  “Until last night.”

  She shrugged.

  “And who had you gone after before?”

  “Others.”

  I probed more, but that was all I could get out of her.

  The usual story of torture – future and past – became evident as Veronique relived some of her experiences. She’d gone through a hell of a lot to become the hardened young woman that sat before me. They’d put her through various psyop drills, from locking her in a small cellar for a week to one occurrence in which they abandoned her in an unknown location and she’d had to get back to civilization.

  Which was pretty much a kill-fest.

  The reason she’d lashed out became apparent: She was to be phased out, Grace too.

  “We were told that they would retire each of us, that the next generation would become the soldiers they wanted.” Anger burnt inside her, evident in the way her nostrils flared. “They told us they’d make us fight.”

  It was an incredible story, but a story that had been told before, played out in comics and movies. I really wished there were a way for me to spice it up a bit, to make it more interesting or a little more original.

  But that wasn’t the point of creative nonfiction with a sci-fi twist and hints of gamer fiction. And I had a feeling that the more the reader identified with the story archetype, the better it would be received.

  Besides all that, this stuff was true. This had really happened!

  Fuck, I needed to unpack some of this.

  “Do you mind if I talk to a friend of mine who’s also a writer? I’d like to pitch ideas off him and see what he says.”

  “You have two days, and if anyone tries to come here, I will kill them and feed off them,” she said as if she were ordering a latte at McStarbucks. There was no emotion in her voice; she only wanted the end result.

  “Well, he’s in Canada, so he won’t be able to get here anytime soon. And he’s like me.”

  “Weak?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are all writers weak?”

  “Physically, maybe. Mentally, no.”

  “You are more like the one you call Grace than me. She never had training.”

  “I’ve had training, but it’s mostly been corporate and related to customer service.”

  God, I sound like an idiot.

  “I went to college,” I told her.

  “That doesn’t matter to me.”

  “I figured as much.”

  My thoughts returned to Luke.

  He was in Canada, only a few hours away from Connecticut, but still, I wasn’t trying to do the ‘send two emojis if you’re in danger’ act by contacting him.

  “It’ll be a quick conversation, trust me, and then I’ll start writing. I have a lot to write in the next two days, and I am not that prolific, nor am I that disciplined, nor am I that fast. You can see now that I’m not that disciplined; I should have started fifteen minutes ago. Point is, I’ll make
the conversation quick. Sorry for rambling.”

  To my surprise, she chuckled at this. “I can see why Grace likes you. You think out loud, so she doesn’t have to read your thoughts.”

  “Oh, she reads my thoughts, even though I tell her not to.”

  To show that she would stop distracting me, Veronique lay on the bed and turned on the television. “Do you mind if I watch?”

  “That’s fine; I’ll just put on my headphones.”

  Before I did that, I pulled out my unregistered smartphone – registered to some guy who worked at the cell phone area at Okay Buy, courtesy of Grace’s ability – and opened up the GoogleFace messenger app.

  Me: Luke, I have a problem.

  Luke: I wondered when you were going to message me. I was thinking more about your dilemma, and getting rid of the bodies. One thing you could do would be to have the psychic one convince someone that they were alive, kind of like that old movie Weekend at Bernie’s, and then they could just put the bodies in their car and drive off.

  Me: Actually, I did something similar to that. But that’s not my problem now.

  Luke: What’s up?

  Me: So, I’m at a hotel – I mean, my Main Character is at a hotel with the two superpowered women.

  Luke: What are their names again?

  Me: The good one is Grace, should be easy to remember. She’s the psychic. The bad one is Veronique.

  Luke: That last one is a French name, and it makes her sound mysterious, which leads the reader to think she shouldn’t be trusted.

  Me: Very observant, but here’s my problem: she has tasked the MC with doing something impossible, otherwise, she’ll kill him.

  Luke: What happened to Grace?

  Me: She was attacked by Veronique and knocked out. Veronique is now asking him to do this impossible thing, or she’ll kill him.

  Luke: What has she asked him to do?

  Me: She wants him to do something that would normally take a couple weeks to a month. That’s all I can say about it for now.

  Luke: Okay, that’s weird of you, but let’s roll with it. So, she’s asked him to do something that normally takes a bit of time, correct?

  Me: Yep.