Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  I should have known better … Please, Grace, say something to me, tell me you can hear me. Please.

  Nothing, dammit. Nothing.

  The helicopter landed about ten minutes later and I was led away from the beating chopper blades. From what I could tell – which was hard to process considering my delirium – I was scanned into one room, then scanned into a second, handed off to another person, and finally led down a long hallway.

  “Welcome home,” a man said as he removed the black fabric covering my head.

  He was a grizzly mercenary in chiseled body armor with gray lettering that read ‘MercSecure’ across the chest. Bald, with a neatly trimmed mustache, and sharp green eyes. A paid killer.

  There was another man with him who wore a balaclava, not unlike a Mexican DEA agent. He held a cattle prod, just in case I got out of hand.

  “Where am I?” I managed to ask, my eyes adjusting to the light.

  “Move to the right so I can take off your zip cuffs.” I did as instructed, and he used a razor to cut through the plastic.

  The two men left, and the door locked on its own.

  I was in a space no larger than a closet, a white room with a metal bed and a single sheet on it.

  Some type of military holding cell.

  There was a toilet completely made of plastic, and just seeing it made something in my stomach turn. At first, I thought I was going to vomit, but it turned out to be number two.

  So there I was, in some secret military prison, shitting and sobbing.

  Some fucking life.

  What was worse, the space was very small, so when I finished, it stank, and I had to wallow in my own filth, literally – no matter how many times I flushed the toilet, the smell lingered.

  I hated myself and my weak digestive system.

  I hated the bright lights glaring down on me, the camera in the corner …

  I glanced around the room, and a sense of utter savageness came over me. Nothing to break the camera with.

  All I could do was pace back and forth, aware they were watching me, reeling as pure hopelessness washed over me.

  I don’t know how long I paced for – minutes, hours, no idea – but my feet hurt when I finally finished. Time had come to a standstill for me, and since there was no light coming in from outside, I had no idea if it was morning or night.

  It has to be night, I thought. I pressed my ear to the door, hoping to get a sense of what was happening in the hallway outside.

  Utter silence.

  Grace! Grace! Grace! Grace!

  “Wake up,” I whispered, sobs welling up in my chest.

  Ashamed to have the camera watching me cry like a little bitch, I sat on the floor and turned my back to it, brought my knees up and wrapped my arms around them as I let it all out.

  There were legal words for the trouble I was in, but I preferred the colloquial term: I was fucked, royally fucked. My life was as good as over.

  I have to get word out, I thought, staring at the white wall. I have to let people know I’ve been captured.

  Then again, who would really give a shit if MercSecure got me? Sure, I had some readers, but I’d be long gone, sent to a black site in Egypt or Timbuktu by the time they learned what had happened to me. My parents? They didn’t even know I’d left Connecticut. Luke? Definitely, but he was thousands of miles away.

  Grace and Veronique. They’d care, but they were just as screwed as I was.

  So I decided to rest. I still had that. I still had my dreams and my imagination. I don’t know how long I ended up sleeping for, but the dreams I had were worth it. Dreams of Grace, Veronique, all of us in Louisiana, driving along the highway, sharing a meal in Austin, the hotel room in Stamford, the cherry blossoms.

  The good times.

  Never mind the fact that unknown enemies waited on the periphery, ready to strike and stop us from being together. Ready to retire Grace and Veronique and bury me.

  Never mind those enemies.

  Gideon, wake up.

  Grace’s voice was far away, a distant whisper, a gasp of fresh air.

  Grace? I sat up, suddenly on high alert.

  No response; it had likely been a figment of my imagination. I slapped my cheeks a few times. Get it together.

  A slot on the door opened up and a pair of eyes peered in. “Get up, or we’ll get you up,” a man growled.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because she’s ready to meet you now. Get on the floor, on your knees, with your hands behind your back.”

  She? I did as instructed. Once I was in place, two men came into the room. One immediately cuffed me and once they pulled me to my feet, still facing away from the door, the second one bagged my head.

  “Is it really that big of a deal if I see things?” I asked them as they shoved me into the hallway. “I’m already fucked.”

  “Looks like you’re finally starting to understand what’s going on here. Now keep your mouth shut,” the first man said. I recognized his voice. He was the one with the mustache and green eyes who’d put me in the holding cell to begin with.

  They walked me through a few rooms and eventually we stopped. After a series of beeps that sounded like some type of scan, we were allowed into another room. Still blindfolded, I was shoved into a chair, and my cuffs were attached to a chain on the floor.

  At least that was what it sounded like they were doing.

  “She’ll be here in a moment.”

  The fuckers left me in the room, my head still covered.

  I sat there a good fifteen minutes, my thoughts lost in the black fabric covering my face, my shoulders hunched back slightly due to the way they’d cuffed me.

  The door opened and I heard the click-clack of high heels.

  “You may remove his head covering,” a woman said, “and leave us alone.”

  The black bag was ripped off my head and my eyes twitched as they adjusted to the light. Like my cell, the room was completely white with no features, aside from the table and two chairs in the center.

  But that was beside the point.

  The woman sitting before me was tall and thin, with brown hair, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes.

  A briefcase sat on the table between us.

  “Mother?” I asked after the security guard exited the room. My throat was parched and clenched up as I spoke.

  “I see you are aware what they call me.” She crossed one leg over the other and shook her head. “I still can’t believe you’re the one who did it.”

  “Did it?”

  “Turned ‘Grace,’ as you call her. And somehow Veronique too. I have to admit, I’m surprised someone like you would be able to do that.”

  “Someone like me?”

  She casually wiped her hands together. “You’re nothing; you have no influence, you’re a nobody, and you certainly don’t have any special abilities. We’ve already discovered that. You don’t have the propensity to be superpowered.”

  I bit my lip. I honestly didn’t know what to say to her, and my only response at that moment was to yell for Grace in my head.

  Grace! Grace! Please hear me!

  Grace is not listening, Mother said in my head.

  I gasped. “You have the same powers?”

  Then I remembered Veronique saying something about this. I soon found out she’d also been right about Mother’s other powers.

  Mother squeezed the edge of the table, and the metal began to morph under the pressure.

  Snap!

  She broke off a corner of the table. Blood oozed from her fingertips as she began crumpling the metal the way one would ball up a piece of paper. Blood smeared on the sharp metal ball she was constructing. Once she was finished, she threw it over her shoulder and showed me the palm of her hand.

  Not only had the cut healed, but the blood had reabsorbed. Now there were just slight outlines of red in the lines on her palm.

  I never thought much about how a healer would work in real life, and this would have b
een a great introduction … if it weren’t for the fact that I was being held in some type of black site and the woman sitting before me wanted to kill me, the urge evident in her dark eyes that reminded me of Veronique.

  “I get it,” I finally told her.

  “I don’t think you do. Your actions have severely taken our operation off track and caused a major distraction. I’m expecting. The new subjects will be born soon.”

  Mother wore a tight black dress under a lab coat, and there was no indication that she was with child.

  She smirked at the look of disbelief on my face. “You really are one of the stupidest men I have ever come across. Of course I am not physically pregnant. You must have known that Grace and Veronique were grown in a lab. How could you not know that?”

  A feeling of animosity bubbled at the back of my throat. “You know what? Why don’t you lighten the fuck up?” I snapped.

  “Excuse me?”

  He’s back! I don’t know how long ‘Breaking Bad’ Gideon would be around, but I let him say his piece.

  “You haul me on a helicopter to wherever the hell we are, put me in a cell for god knows how long, and suddenly you expect me to piece together small hints based on facts I can hardly comprehend? You’re a psychic, you know what’s going on in my mind.” I leaned forward like a badass. “So why don’t you fucking read it?”

  If I could have given myself a high five and a slap on the ass at that point, I would have. But that’s in retrospect. What mother did next was one of the more unpleasant things I’d experienced up until that point.

  A whispery scream rang out inside my head.

  At first it was subtle, static even, but then it increased in volume, followed by something that sounded like a million people biting into a million apples all at once, and then the sound of metal scraping against metal, only amplified.

  The cacophony continued, compounding exponentially until I cried out in pain.

  “I guess you aren’t as tough as you think. Funny, you put on the tough guy act with Angel once or twice and you think you’re one of us.” She laughed. “You actually think you have power. Don’t you realize what’s going on here – what’s been happening since you kidnapped Grace and Veronique? It’s their power, not yours. You are nothing.” And then, to drive home the insult, she added, “You’re not even a good writer.”

  She knows everything that’s going on in your head, she knows your weaknesses, she knows your darkest secrets, I reminded myself.

  That’s right, Gideon and this ends now, Mother thought to me.

  “Ends?”

  She walked over to my side of the table, her heels again clicking on the hard floor.

  “I’m most pissed about Grace,” she said, leaning over me. It felt like every hair on my body had stood up, grown two inches, and was trying to pry itself from my skin in an effort to escape her.

  “My little Grace; she would have been the most powerful of them all, and you had to go and destroy her mind, take her virginity, show her the life of a pathetic normal like you. I might have let you live if it had only been Veronique. I never liked her much. Too cocky. But Grace … I loved Grace.”

  “Loved her?” I looked up at her in astonishment. My lips quivered as I took a deep breath to calm myself. “You kept Grace in solitary confinement her entire life. You’re a piece of shit, you crazy fuck. You didn’t love her.” Anxiety made it hard to get the words out without sounding like slobbering coward. “You … you are the scum of the earth – you and all these fucking people here!”

  Her hand wrapped around my neck.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she snarled. “Even if I weren’t superpowered, I could kill you right now. My abilities will only make your death that much quicker. And you know what, Gideon Caldwell? I think killing you would be one of the highlights of my year. Do you know how much bullshit I’ve had to go through because of what you did in New Haven?”

  Fight back, Gideon.

  Grace?

  Mother tightened her grip around my neck as I called Grace’s name again inside my head. Grace! Please!

  Fight back, Gideon!

  Her voice was miles away, light years away, in a completely different galaxy. Yet I could hear her perfectly, I could feel her, I knew she was there.

  As Mother squeezed my neck even harder, I jerked my feet back and somehow managed to fall sideways, even with my wrists still chained to the floor. She kicked me in the stomach, brought her foot back, and kicked me again.

  I was wheezing now and tasted blood in my mouth.

  “It seems your little cries for help have woken Grace up. She imprinted on you. I can’t believe she imprinted on you. You! She’s only able to imprint on one person and she chooses you!”

  I still wasn’t sure what it meant that Grace had imprinted on me. The first time she’d used that word, I thought it meant that she could just speak inside my head, or that we had bonded over sex. It was shortly after we’d become intimate that she first mentioned the term.

  But could it mean something more?

  Mother grabbed me by the back of the neck and lifted me up, seat and all. “You really think this is going to work out in your favor somehow, don't you?”

  “I don’t know what I think, lady, I’m just taking it one day at a time.”

  I wish I could have been Clint Eastwood saying that last line, but I was Gideon Caldwell, and it didn’t sound nearly as tough as it should have.

  Mother offered me a placid smile. “I guess I shouldn’t be so angry. We have you now. We have Veronique and Grace, and neither of them will be around much longer. Grace, we still need for a little while, at least until we can replicate her, but as for Veronique … goodbye.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Macho Gideon had quietly let himself out of the room; Writer Gideon was back and ready to piss his pants.

  “How would you like to die? Have you ever thought about that?” she asked as she walked around the table and sat again. “I’ve been thinking of how we should get rid of you. We have complete jurisdiction over you, and there really is no point in trying you before a court of your peers. Or even a military court for that matter. It takes too much time. That’s one thing you’ll know about me – well, you won’t know me for very long, but you’ll recognize this about me for now: I don’t like to waste time.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “I suppose putting you in a room with Angel and letting him finish the job would be good. But first, we have to get those books unpublished. I’m not stupid enough to think that the people who have downloaded it already won’t still have them on their devices, but at least we can prevent future people from reading it. So, let’s do that.”

  “What?” I mumbled.

  She pulled a small laptop out of the briefcase on the table. “Do I need to say it again? Books. Unpublished. I figured you could help me log in and do it.”

  The laptop powered up and Mother turned it around to face me.

  “Oh, that’s right, you can’t use your hands. Well, I’ll do it for you then.”

  She moved to my side of the table again and placed a hand on my shoulder. Her eyes flashed white and …

  Something came over me.

  It felt like someone was playing tug-o-war with my brain matter. Mother’s power would advance, then another force would respond, pulling it back the other way.

  The shriek of a thousand violins playing different notes all at once came with each pull of my psyche. The noise would dissipate and then reappear as it moved to the other side of my skull cavity.

  By the time she took her hand off my shoulder, I was completely exhausted, my thoughts like hot knives as they began to repopulate. I gasped, looked up at her, and saw her white eyes fizzle out.

  “In that case…” She closed the laptop and tucked it under her arm. The door popped open, and Angel stepped into the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Incest is Best?

  “He’s being difficult,” she told Angel
as he approached. She placed a hand on his cheek, and Angel moved in to kiss her. It was a long kiss, a fucking gross and sloppy movie kiss, and by the end of it, I was left wondering what the shit was going on.

  And that was when bad boy Gideon decided to return. I didn’t know what it was about Angel that triggered the ballsy version of myself, but my mouth came unhinged pretty quickly. “So that’s what went wrong with you,” I told the scar-faced fucker.

  “Come again?” he asked as Mother stepped aside.

  “You’re her offspring – lab-grown, sure, but you’re related to her.”

  “Yes?”

  Mother shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand my relationship – nor my fascination – with Angel.”

  I laughed. “Maybe, but I do know the definition of incest, and now I know the definition of motherfucker.”

  Angel dropped his hand to Mother’s ass and patted it. “Should I handle him for a bit?”

  She smiled. “Sure, but don’t kill him yet. I still need to deal with his little self-publishing empire. Keep his brain intact. And don’t beat up his face too much. That’s gruesome.”

  She left the room, heels clacking against the floor as she walked away. Just the sound of that pissed me off.

  Angel turned to me and cracked his knuckles.

  I glared at him, still not sure where my sudden confidence was coming from but running with it.

  “I have to admit, Gideon,” he said, walking over to the table. “You’ve made it much further than I thought you would.”

  He placed a single hand under the table and flipped it up, smacking me in the face. My nose gushed blood, and before I could try to wipe it on my sleeve, he grabbed the chain linking me to the floor and broke it in half. Then he gripped the back of my chair and threw me into the wall. The impact knocked the wind out of me, and my chin hit the floor as the chair skidded out from under me.

  Hang on, Gideon.