Startled, Storm looked up at her. “What?”
“I said, get out of the way.” Penny tugged her baggy pants down to her knees, exposing white panties, and what looked to be a rough brown bandage wrapped around one thigh, only the bandage was bulky, bulging in places.
“What is that?” Storm asked.
“It’s a fucking medical kit,” Penny said. “And you don’t deserve it, goddamnit.” She shouted this at Faller. Faller couldn’t understand why Penny was angry at him. She peeled a strip of Velcro from around the kit and unrolled it beside Faller.
Melissa knelt, slid a vial out of a pouch and examined the label.
“Give me that.” Penny plucked the vial out of Melissa’s hand.
“Morphine? Jesus, do you have antibiotics?” Melissa asked. “Why didn’t you tell us you had this?”
Faller watched as Penny straightened his bent arm and injected something into the crook of his elbow with a remarkably bright, tiny syringe. Then she pulled something thin and silver from the pouch.
“A scalpel?” Melissa said.
Penny paused to give Melissa a look. “Would you prefer I leave the bullet in?” She turned her attention back to Faller. “I gave him a dose of morphine, but I don’t have anything to knock him out completely, so you two will have to hold him still. This will hurt even with the morphine.” She gave Faller a cold look. “I’m tempted to make it hurt more than it needs to.”
“How the hell do you know how to get a bullet out of someone?” Storm asked.
Penny drew another vial from her pouch, shook red liquid into her palm and rubbed it all over her hands. “I’m a doctor. A psychiatrist. I don’t have much surgical training, but extracting a bullet isn’t exactly brain surgery.”
“You did recognize me.” Faller’s tongue felt slow and thick. The medicine she’d injected into his elbow was sending a warm flush through his body, right down to his toes. “That’s why you fell off your bike.”
“Oh, I recognized you all right.” She tossed the bandages aside, picked up the scalpel, looked at Storm and Melissa. “Hold him down.”
Faller’s eyes flew wide as fresh pain cut through the warm haze of the drug. The urge to pull away was almost irresistible. He squeezed his eyes shut, ground his teeth, and tried to hold still.
It took only a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. While Penny was packing the wound, Faller fell asleep.
43
SHOUTS WOKE him. It was pouring. Storm, Melissa, and Penny were shouting, encouraging the rain to keep falling.
Faller was afraid to move. He felt as if he’d been beaten by a mob with pipes, dragged up and down a flight of steps, then stomped with combat boots.
It occurred to him that he should open his mouth, catch some of the rain.
Penny interrupted the celebration. “He’s awake.”
Storm appeared with a canteen. She bent, poured water into his mouth, which absorbed right into his lips and cheeks, none of it reaching his throat. The next dollop allowed him to swallow.
Penny watched, hovering in the background. She had a medical kit. Even more astonishing, she’d known how to use it. She’d also been furious at Faller for no apparent reason.
“What happened?” Everyone was blurry, because the rain was in his eyes. He felt too weak to raise his arm to clear them.
“Penny is a spy.” Melissa pushed her soaking-wet hair away from her face.
“I’m not a spy,” Penny said. “I’m a psychiatrist. I was doing research. Monitoring the effects of the blackout virus.”
“The effects?” Melissa took a step toward Penny as if she were going to take a swing at her. “The effects are a billion people dead.”
“I didn’t release the fucking virus,” Penny shot back, “so get out of my face. And the blackout virus wasn’t responsible for most of those deaths. Peter’s little black hole had something to do with it as well.”
That diffused some of Melissa’s anger. “We wouldn’t have had to rush to deploy the singularity if that asshole Ugo hadn’t been about to lobotomize the world’s population. How did you avoid infection, by the way?”
“Peter’s what?” Faller gasped. “I thought you said I was Peter?” He was so confused. Penny was a spy?
Penny pointed at him. “Yes. You’re Peter.” There was no mistaking the heat in her eyes. “How am I supposed to hate you when you don’t even remember what you did?”
“What I did?”
The rain eased, shifting from a torrent to a steady drizzle.
“You want to find the person who did this?” Penny squatted, rifled through her pack. She held a small round mirror to Faller’s face. “There. There he is. Tell him what a son of a bitch he is.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Faller croaked. He pushed the mirror away and looked at Melissa, who stared at the ground.
“Melissa’s been lying since you met her,” Penny said. “You did this. You’re the greatest mass murderer in history, and you don’t even know it.”
“You are so full of shit,” Melissa said. “I was there, right in the middle of it—”
“Oh, I know you were,” Penny said.
“Elba and her people are the murderers. Ugo is a murderer. Not Peter.”
“I’m not a murderer.” He wanted to say more in his defense, but he was still so weak.
“You’re right. You’re not,” Penny said. “Ugo Woolcoff turned you into an innocent.” She turned away. “That’s why I couldn’t sit back and watch you die.”
Peter looked at Storm, who was squatting beside him, knowing she didn’t have any answers. At least she was someone like him, someone from the world he knew, the world that had begun on Day One. Storm reached out, stroked his good shoulder. The tenderness of the gesture brought a lump to his throat.
“We were born on Day One,” Storm said, speaking softly. “You, me. Snakebite. This has nothing to do with us.”
Faller wished he could believe that. He’d done this? He’d torn the entire world into pieces? Him?
“Oh, and don’t worry too much about Storm being a duplicate of Melissa,” Penny said. “You’re a duplicate, too. You murdered the original Peter Sandoval and took his place.”
He looked to Melissa.
“Peter was dying. Ugo intentionally infected him with a disease,” Melissa said. “It was Peter’s idea, not yours.”
There was no way Faller would ever understand this world he had lived in. He felt like he’d been hit with a brick. He, personally, had created a machine that ruined the entire world?
“Is anything you told me true?”
Melissa sat on the ground beside Storm. Her dress, which had been so clean and white when he’d first set eyes on her, was filthy, and ragged at the knee where she’d torn strips to make bandages for him. “I didn’t want to burden you with this. In your case the blackout virus was a mercy.”
“That’s for sure,” Penny said.
Melissa shot her a warning glance. “The broad strokes of what I told you were true. I left out the part you played.”
“The broad strokes,” Faller repeated. He thought of the early days, after Day One. He’d been a nobody, not even worth killing. If they’d known, he would have been the first one tossed over the edge.
“Penny’s the reason the assassins were able to locate us on her world, and on the one we just left,” Storm said. “She’s been communicating with them using a machine. A walkie-talkie.”
“They don’t know where we are now, though,” Penny said. “They probably think we’re dead.”
“Why didn’t you tell them where we are, now that we have nowhere to hide?” Faller asked.
Penny looked at him like he was the dimmest of insects. “When I told Ugo they’d taken your parachute and you had no way to escape, I thought he was going to send more assassins. Instead he tried out his shiny new toy—your singularity—and killed hundreds of innocent people. He thought it would kill me as well.” She looked from one of them to the next. �
��You’re supposed to be the ruthless ones.”
“Evidently he also killed the original me, so you shouldn’t be too surprised,” Faller said.
Penny shook her head. “I’ve never heard that before. I’m not sure I believe it.”
Melissa laughed bitterly. “Fine. Go on living in your hermetically sealed fantasy world.” She folded her arms. “You never explained how you avoided the blackout virus. How did you get chosen to be one of the lucky few?”
“My father worked in the Department of Defense, under General Holland.”
Melissa sighed heavily, rolled her eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that. The rest of my family had their memories wiped. Three brothers, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. I got in because I had skills they needed.” She looked at Faller. “Two of my brothers died before we could get to them. Plus my grandparents, and an uncle.” She looked around, spotted her medical kit, pulled out a small bottle and fished a blue oval pill from it. She set it on her tongue. “Xanax. I’ve been sneaking them since this started. I was scheduled for pickup in two weeks.”
“Then why did you come with us?” Faller asked.
“Because Peter Sandoval showed up, and they told me to stick close to him. Believe me, going down that slide was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. You have no idea.”
“You said a few thousand people weren’t exposed to the virus. Where are they?” Melissa asked.
“Some are on the base world with Elba—a piece of Andrews Air Force Base, near D.C. Others are with Woolcoff, at Peter’s lab in Williamsburg. The rest are spread all over, trying to establish order on strategically important islands, or they’re intelligence-gathering.” She shook her head. “For the most part, it’s chaos. There’s no power, no food.”
“Except now they have the singularity,” Melissa said, “and all the notes and recordings in Peter’s lab to understand how to use it. They’ll establish themselves as the leaders of the world, make it over in their swinging dick image.”
His notes. His lab. It was still hard for Faller to grasp.
“You came from Ugo’s world?” Storm asked Penny.
Penny nodded. “After the apocalypse Ugo quietly shuttled people to some of the nearby islands for reconnaissance, and to keep an eye out for Peter, you, Harry Wong, the others who might know where the singularity was, or how to make another.”
“With the other power sources gone the singularity is more valuable than ever.” Melissa looked for a relatively clean spot on her sleeve, used it to wipe rain off her face. “Now he has it, thanks to me.”
XXIII
PETER AND Harry were waiting outside when Kathleen and Melissa barreled onto the lawn in Kathleen’s Lexus, skidding to a stop half a dozen feet away.
Talking with rapid-fire speed, Peter filled them in on Ugo’s visit. When he got to the part about wiping the memories of everyone on Earth, save for a small cadre that would become the de facto rulers of the planet, Melissa cut him off.
“No way. There is no way Ugo would be complicit in this. He was bluffing to get you to show him the singularity.”
“Melissa, he tried to kill me,” Peter said. “Or did kill me, depending on your—”
“This is different.”
“Not from where I sit, it isn’t,” Peter shot back. He pointed at his temple. “The man is a nut. A psychopath.”
Harry held up his hands. “Come on, let’s not argue. We have to decide what to do.”
“If they really are planning to release this blackout virus, knowing the singularity exists is going to accelerate their timetable,” Kathleen said. “But they’re military. They’re going to have a strategy meeting before they act. We have a day, maybe two.”
“I’d need five of me to get everything done in a day,” Peter said. “Most of it only I or Harry can do.”
Kathleen tapped her lip, thinking. “Then we’ll make five of you.”
It took Peter a second to understand what she meant. He held up both hands. “No way, Kathleen. I’m not going down that road.”
“Not just you. All of us,” Kathleen said. Down at her side the index finger of her right hand looped and swirled, writing out the crucial words as she spoke them.
“Come on, Kathleen,” Harry said, but Kathleen ignored him. She touched Melissa’s shoulder.
“Melissa and I will sound the alarm on Elba’s plan, try to stop it before it’s implemented. Actually, we could use a hundred of us for that.” She laughed delightedly at the thought. Peter thought she sounded slightly deranged, and wondered if the pressure was getting to her.
“Kathleen, no. That’s an insane idea. We’re not duplicating ourselves.”
Kathleen shoved Peter in the chest, hard, with both hands. “Wake up. The world as we know it is about to end. We have to do everything we can to stop it. If that means jumping through the fucking duplicator, we jump through the fucking duplicator.”
Peter looked to Melissa for help.
Melissa took a deep breath. “If you really think Ugo is going to do this, then I agree with Kathleen. But I hope to God he’s not playing you.”
“He’s not.”
“Then let’s go.” Melissa pointed toward the lab.
* * *
“WAKE UP, Peter.” Someone was slapping his face.
Peter groaned, lifted his hand to ward off the light but exceedingly annoying blows.
“Peter? Time to wake up.” It was Kathleen.
Not far away, Harry was saying, “Peter, wake up.”
Peter pried one eye open. Kathleen was leaning over him, her face very close. “There you are.”
Everything came flying back to him. He opened his eyes wide, tried to shake off the grogginess of the anesthetic. Kathleen helped him sit up on the gurney. Peter looked around, noting that he was on the left, on the side where the original comes out. So he was the original, or, at least, the original duplicate, rather than a duplicate of the duplicate. It didn’t matter, really, but somehow it felt important to know this.
The other Peter stood, limped over woozily. He stuck out his hand. Peter shook it.
“This is just too bizarre,” the other Peter said. “You want to head to the lab while I go through again? Seems only fair, since evidently I’m the copy.”
“That’s okay,” Peter said. “You go ahead to the lab.” He wanted to be there when his friends went through, although again, it made no real difference that it was him and not his duplicate.
* * *
“WAKE UP, Peter,” Peter said as he slapped his fifth duplicate’s face, while Kathleen tried to wake his fourth duplicate, who had gone through to produce the sixth. His fifth duplicate opened his eyes, groaned, closed them again. “Come on, Peter, we don’t have time.”
* * *
KATHLEEN ADMINISTERED the injection of methohexital to another Kathleen as a third Kathleen waited to help lift her into the iris. The Kathleen giving the injection looked up at Peter. “You might as well get busy. I’m going to make of lot of me, send them off on various missions as they come out.”
The Harrys and Melissas were already gone; Kathleen was right, there was no need for him to linger, save for a feeling that the duplicator was his baby, and he should watch over it while it was being used.
“Remember when I asked if you could turn D.C. into a crater, if you wanted?” the other Kathleen asked him.
“Sure.”
“It might come to that. We have to power up the fuel cells first, but if it looks as if Elba and Ugo are going ahead with their memory-wipe plan, we may be forced to take them out.”
Peter looked out through the big window, at the lawn, the crumbling brick remains of the building across the way. Two security people—one of them Paula—were standing on the lawn with their arms folded, talking. “We’ve done some trials. I’m fairly sure I can use the singularity as a weapon, if necessary.”
She lifted the now unconscious Kathleen’s legs while the Kathleen who’d spoken first took her arms.<
br />
“The problem is verifiability,” Peter said. “The blackout virus has something like a twenty-four-hour incubation period. They could release it and we wouldn’t know for a full day.” He dragged his hand through his hair. “For all we know they’ve already released it.”
Outside, Paula sank to one knee. Her companion grasped her arm, said something. He lunged for his rifle just as the side of his face exploded.
“Soldiers,” Peter screamed. “Everyone downstairs.” More of his security forces appeared. The tatter of automatic rifle fire erupted, muffled through the glass. “Downstairs.”
Through the glass door Peter spotted Melissa—one of the Melissas, anyway—in the lab’s business office, on the phone. He threw open the door. “Soldiers attacking. Downstairs.”
Melissa dropped the phone and ran.
They raced through the long hall, down the dimly lit stairs, through the locker room. Peter had no doubt these were Elba’s troops, sent to seize the singularity, probably with orders to take Peter alive. In all likelihood they were elite troops—Special Forces. His security people had no chance against them.
As they rounded a corner three of his security people passed, running in the other direction.
“Hang on,” Peter called.
They paused. One of them, a small, stocky man, said, “We need to get up there—”
“No,” Peter said. “They’re Special Forces. Get on the radio and tell your people to get downstairs, below the level of the off-limits factory floor. It’s very important they’re below.” He continued toward the factory floor. Releasing a burst of energy into the air from the singularity was simpler than directing it into fuel cells. It should take him no longer than sixty seconds to set it up.
“Peter? What’s going on?” Harry was heading toward them, from the direction of the factory floor.
“We’re under attack,” Peter shouted. “Get everyone down in the subbasement below the factory floor.”
With Kathleen at his heels, Peter raced through the doorway, onto the factory floor. He screamed, “Everyone downstairs.” The Peters and Harrys sprang into action, helping to corral the few who weren’t duplicates down the stairwell, which was half blocked by rotting plaster and concrete from the partially collapsed roof.
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