Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  Me: Yeah … We got out of there okay.

  Luke: We can video chat about it.

  Me: It’s only going to get more complicated from here.

  Luke: I’ll say! Have you checked your sales ranking yet?

  Me: Nope, I’ve been too busy getting accosted by a superpowered guy named Angel.

  Luke: I don’t know what that means, but it sounds crazy.

  Me: It’ll be in book two.

  Luke: Do I have to send you a screenshot? Check your rankings!

  I clicked on the EBAYmazon app on my phone and brought it up. I went to the search bar, pressed it once and said the name of the title, “Mutants in the Making.”

  It took my phone a moment to show me the results, but I saw the orange tag next to my book title that said ‘Best Seller’ before the cover finished loading.

  “No way,” I said as my phone refreshed, telling me I had several messages in my inbox.

  Two of them concerned me the most.

  One was from an anonymous sender, evident by the title of their email address: Throwaway_NewHaven@googleface.com.

  Gideon Caldwell,

  I know Subject S and Subject V are with you. I worked with S for several years at the Rose-Lyle facility. Please respond to my email with a number where I may reach you. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to track you. I’m not, so please get a fake number or use some type of phone number forwarding service. There are plenty available.

  --KK

  The other was from a man named David Butler.

  Gideon,

  I read your book and loved it. To cut right to the chase, I know about a similar experiment going on in Austin, Texas. Please let me know if this information interests you by replying to this email. We can discuss more when we meet in person. I’ll also send some pictures soon.

  “Can we find a place to sleep?” Grace asked me.

  “Sure. It’ll be another hour before we’re out of Connecticut, and we can find a place to stay in New York. Somewhere nice.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Cherry Blossom Girls, Inc.

  We took a big left when we got to Port Chester, saying goodbye to I-95. Besides, we weren’t heading to New York City. As I let the car auto drive, I reread the message from the guy in Texas, David Butler. I sent him a reply, fishing for more info, wondering if I could possibly get a few more details before I headed down south.

  But I knew in my heart that was where we were heading; we had to go south to eventually go west. If Texas didn’t pan out, we could hide out in Santa Fe for a few days as the emails came in, as I was able to verify things a little further.

  I also needed to start the second installment of the Mutants in the Making series.

  The second installment would cover what happened after Angel first showed up. So, in a way, it was a living document, because what “happened” was what was currently happening.

  I decided not to reply to the scientist at the Rose-Lyle facility. I had a feeling about him, and opening up a dialogue didn’t seem to be in our best interest.

  I was, however, happy to see that my book had already reached someone there. Even if they lobbied EBAYmazon to shut down the book, it would still be out there, and it would still reach an audience, either through illegal downloads on a torrent site or with people posting the book online in blog format.

  I also had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last I heard from the scientist, and boy, would I turn out to be right.

  Goodbye New York, hello New Jersey.

  I would need gas at some point in the future, but we could get it after we passed New Jersey, sometime tomorrow. They still pumped the gas for you in New Jersey, something that’s always weirded me out. Not that the gas attendant would care if there was a woman passed out in the back.

  Still, the lower profile we kept, the better.

  Gideon ‘Low Profile’ Caldwell.

  Grace laughed.

  “I thought we had a thing about reading my thoughts.”

  “They are just so loud.”

  Damn, I thought as we pulled up to the Marriott in Hanover, New Jersey, we need to get some type of discount card for this chain.

  Which made no sense, seeing as how we hadn’t spent a dime to stay in the place.

  Thoughts like that would come to me every now and again. Even with the situation I was in, it was still hard for me not to think the way I used to about goods and services.

  “And what shall we say this time?” Grace hadn’t spoken much during the ride, aside from an occasional comment on my thoughts. She focused instead on the lights along the highway, the vehicles, and something we were listening to on NPR.

  Ira Glass again.

  I should go on This American Life.

  Was there anything more American than what I had just done over the last few days, risking it all for one big payday, an uncertain future?

  I’m not saying I was some sort of Lewis and Clark, but I definitely wasn’t a loser sci-fi writer who worked at a Yale gift shop that sold lamps any longer.

  I considered that for a moment. “Let’s go with she’s drunk again. We’re business people – no, look what I’m wearing … we’re scientists … No, we’re doctors – hell yes, we’re doctors. We work for a biomedical company called Cherry Blossom Girls, Inc. And she’s drunk. She’s a drunk nurse.”

  “Girls?”

  “Or boys. I don’t know. It’s the name that came to me. Nothing sexist or anything. We could be Cherry Blossom Non-Binaries, if you like that.”

  “Girls is okay, as long as you don’t mind it.”

  “We can go by the abbreviation too. CBG. It has a ring to it.”

  I looked in my rearview mirror at Veronique, who lay sideways in the backseat, still in the scrubs and lab coat we’d put on her. She was dry now, but her hair was a bit matted.

  “That sounds like a pretty good plan,” Grace said in Ira Glass’s voice. “You should probably take your military helmet off.”

  “Shit, I forgot about that.” I removed the remains of my helmet. “But regarding our strategy, no one’s going to care anyway. Your powers are incredible. Just fry all their brains if they try to get in our way.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “Fry all their brains?”

  “I’m kidding, please don’t do that unless we really need to get rid of someone.”

  The things I said now that I had broken bad …

  “Okay, I’ll only fry brains if necessary,” Grace said as her body morphed from her base form to her geisha form.

  We parked the Dodge Charger – no valet here – and I lifted Veronique into my arms. Grace took my duffle bag from the back seat, and without further ado, we entered the lobby of the Marriott Hanover.

  I pity the fool who looked over at us and instantly had their mind wiped by Grace.

  There were only a few people in the lobby anyway: the receptionist and a family that had just checked in and were waiting for the husband to park the car.

  “We’d like your best room,” Grace said to the receptionist, offering him a curt smile. “Two beds, and we have a reservation. Should be under the name Edward King or possibly our company, Cherry Blossom Girls, Inc.”

  “Let me just see here …” the mustached clerk said as he clickety-clicked on the mouse. “Found it. Edward and Jill King, CBG, INC. Great. Let me just prepare your room key and you should be good to go.”

  As he went to work, I took one more look around the lobby.

  This place wasn’t as tall as the Marriott we’d stayed at in Stamford, but what it lacked in height it made up for with space. It was expansive, with red carpets and orange accents, plenty of seating areas and plush leather couches, glass countertops near the continental breakfast area, and of course some generic, yet warm, art.

  About a minute later, we took our elevator up to the suite on the top floor.

  It was one of those mirrored elevators, and it was a little strange for me to see myself – head shaved, scar on face, bruised, and carrying Ver
onique in my arms – next to Grace in her Asian female doctor form with her bangs cut high and tight, cute glasses, and dimples.

  We found our room and the lights came on automatically.

  The suite was nice, and it had two queen-sized beds facing a large television that sat on a long wooden table. Near the floor-to-ceiling windows were two sofas and a reading nook. Next to the second queen-sized bed was a writing desk.

  Damn, I needed a beer.

  Luckily, the room had a mini fridge and refreshments on top. No beer, but I did down one of those small bottles of whiskey.

  “We need to get her some new clothes,” I told Grace as she morphed back into her base form.

  “We can get some tomorrow.” She sat on the edge of the bed and crossed one leg over the next. “Also, a new car.”

  “I was just thinking that. We’ll need to switch out cars daily. It shouldn’t be hard.” I moved to the writing desk to set up my laptop. “We’ll just trade whatever car we have with the person whose car we’re taking. To throw anyone tracking us off, we’ll alternate that with simply giving the vehicle to whatever random person we see. We have a ton of cash. Maybe we’ll buy a used car too.”

  I opened my laptop and clicked on the EBAYmazon direct publishing dashboard.

  I gulped, the blood rushing to my head as I saw the incredible day I’d had.

  I’d sold three hundred books over the last twelve hours and had over one hundred thousand page reads.

  It’s not fucking possible.

  Even though I’d seen the ‘Best Seller’ tag, my hand shook as I refreshed the data to make sure it wasn’t a dream.

  Nope, that’s what you’ve done so far today, I thought.

  Sure, the sales were at $0.99, but I had a feeling my bank accounts would be tracked anyway and besides, I had unlimited access to cash with Grace around. The book was getting out there, finding a wider audience, and that was all that mattered. Whatever magic Luke had worked had fundamentally changed the sales trajectory of my book.

  I clicked the link to part one of Mutants in the Making to see that I was ranked in the top one thousand, no small feat considering the millions upon millions of ebooks that were published. EBAYmazon had made it so easy to publish an e-book, and self-publishing had become so widely accepted, that by 2030 everyone and their dog had a book out.

  The highest I’d ever been before was the top two hundred fifty thousand.

  “Great job,” Grace said, relaxing onto the bed and turning on the TV. She found a home improvement show and increased the volume. “I think your ranking will improve tomorrow.”

  “Maybe,” I said, not wanting to jinx myself.

  I checked my emails again and saw that I’d received another one from David Butler in Austin, Texas. This one had pictures of a facility near a body of water.

  I clicked through the photos, not really finding anything that would cement the fact that it was a facility used for the experiments.

  Then I looked through some PDFs he’d attached about the people guarding the facility. It was definitely MercSecure, the same group guarding the now-defunct Rose-Lyle facility. Thinking of that name reminded me of the ring of dead guards I’d seen when I looked over the rooftop.

  Damn, I thought, trying to swallow that memory. Of course, attempting to suppress a memory only created another one.

  I saw Angel in my mind’s eye, his skin shriveled, the look of death on his face. He was likely dead. There was no way he could have survived that blast.

  I took a deep breath and clicked through more photos. Nope, there wasn’t concrete evidence that this was a similar facility to the one that we’d just destroyed.

  That was, until I found a photo of a group of men and women entering the facility.

  Almost all of the people were slightly blurred in the photo. The one person in focus was a slightly older scientist with thinning white hair. He wore a tie, glasses with white frames, and a shaved head.

  He also had the requisite lab coat on.

  I would have clicked through to the next photo if there hadn’t been directions on the photo to “Show it to one of the supers.”

  “Hey, Grace,” I said, bringing my laptop over to her. “Does this person look familiar to you?”

  She shook her head and returned her attention to the screen, where they were ripping out the foundation from an old Boston brownstone.

  I was just about to move back to the desk when Grace gasped.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She tore the laptop from my hands and touched the screen to zoom in on the image.

  She wasn’t focused on the man; however, she was focused on the partially blurred woman who stood next to him.

  “It’s her,” Grace said with a certainty I seldom heard from her.

  “Her?”

  “The founder …” She glanced over at Veronique. “Mother.”

  Everything came to me at once, aided by some of Grace’s psychic powers. I saw this woman throughout her life – images only though, as Grace was never actually allowed to meet her.

  I then heard the woman speaking to Grace, and realized that she had actually met her, but that Grace had been blindfolded, which meant she couldn’t link to the person.

  “All of you are my sons and daughters,” Mother had whispered to her. “But you are my favorite.”

  I took a step back.

  I figured Grace would be distraught, but the act of transferring this experience to me seemed to have calmed her. She returned her attention to the television program while I clicked through more photos, saving the photo of Mother to my desktop.

  “She was in Austin,” I told her after I snapped my laptop shut. “That’s where we’re going.”

  Grace nodded, a determined look on her face. “That’s fine.”

  Realizing that checking my sales numbers again wouldn’t really prove anything, I placed my laptop back in my duffle bag and took out my sleep clothes. One sniff at my armpit and I figured a shower was in order.

  I entered the bathroom, turned on the hot water and waited to see just how hot it would get before I took off my clothes. Once I was satisfied with the temperature, I stepped in and let the water spray against my face.

  My thoughts traced over the day, from the morning planning session to the assault on the Rose-Lyle facility. The important thing was that we had Veronique, and we had a plan. I’d never been to Texas – never been south of the Mason-Dixon line, actually – but it seemed like a viable next step.

  We needed to get to Texas and we needed to find out more about Mother.

  Changing locations and vehicles would make us harder to track. That said, there must have been some type of tracking device embedded in each woman; otherwise, they wouldn’t have eventually found us at the hotel in Stamford. We had to keep on the move and stick to public locations.

  As the water turned my skin red, I thought about the message I’d received from the scientist who worked at the Rose-Lyle facility. There was more to this message, but I was still uncertain whether we should start up a dialogue. I needed to speak to Grace about him and figure out if he really was one of the scientists that would interview her.

  Again, something to do later.

  I nearly slipped and cracked my head on the tiled wall when the bathroom curtain was pulled aside.

  I was greeted by a naked woman, story of my goddamn life.

  “Veronique?” I asked, déjà vu slapping me in the face like a motherfucker.

  “Any room for me in there? I’m feeling dirty.” She was completely nude, her nipples erect, and a perfectly straight line shaved in her pubes …

  She was clean-shaven last time. And hadn’t there been a birthmark?

  “Just kidding.” Veronique’s face folded, starting from the middle, and Grace’s unique, Scandinavian features formed. Her hair grew in length, her dark eyes turned blue, and the change cascaded down her body, her breasts increasing in size, her hips widening.

  “That’s a terrible j
oke,” I said. “A terrible, terrible joke. Don’t do that again.”

  “Too many rules,” she said playfully as she got into the shower with me. “No reading your mind, no changing into your mom, and no changing into Veronique.” She turned to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Anything else you’d like to add to that?”

  “No, we’re good for now.”

  I thought of the long day ahead, the fact that we were under threat, and the additional details emerging from Texas.

  “Quiet, Writer Gideon, just enjoy it while it lasts,” Grace said as she moved in to kiss me.

  The end.

  Cherry Blossom Girls Book Two

  Chapter One: Biker Feast

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the most fucked of times.

  All this to say, a tiny bar in Chattanooga, Tennessee, wasn’t a place I would normally end up. Sure, there was Shakespeare’s Pub in Hamden and a few other small Irish joints back in New Haven, but a bar that came with the prerequisite that you would likely have to fight your way in and fight your way out?

  My, how things had changed.

  A thin man with a wiry mustache and a black leather vest pointed a grimy knife at Veronique.

  It was almost comical how fucked he was, but I didn’t feel bad for what was going to happen to him. True, we came here looking for a fight, but we would have also left without one.

  However, knife guy just happened to be stupid enough to grab Veronique’s ass, which led to her slapping his hand away, which led to him pulling a knife.

  Knife man’s biker friends were already backing him up – four of them, all dressed in leather and denim and each with their own collection of prison tattoos and violent backstories.

  Grace and I sat at the bar, Yours Truly nursing a margarita and Grace sipping a glass of water. I’d recently learned not to get a shifter drunk.

  “Are you ready?” I asked her.

  The bartender, who was just about to call the police, put the phone back down, his eyes flashing white. He grabbed a rag and began cleaning the back counter, completely oblivious to what was happening before him.