by Brian Parker
“What’s the down side, then?” Jasmin asked.
“She’ll be in danger. She’d be a target for politicians and their lackeys, not to mention the religious hardliners. We do something like that and we might as well paint a bullseye on the back of her head, because that’s where the bullets are going to go.”
“So it’ll be dangerous if I talk to a reporter about who I am?”
“Yeah, sweetie,” Jasmin agreed. “I can see what Zach means now. It’s too dangerous.”
Sadie thought about it and said, “I want to do it. I can’t go through the rest of my life pretending to be something I’m not and ignoring what’s happening to other clones.”
“Are you sure?” Jasmine asked, giving the clone one more opportunity to back out and live a life of anonymity. “It might be too much for you right now. You can always decide to talk later. Even just a few days may make a difference.”
She shook her head fiercely, her auburn hair whipping around her face. “No. I want to know who I am and I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.”
Sadie touched her bruised and scabbed face. “In a couple of days, the worst of this will be fading. I want the city to see me like this.”
I pulled out my phone and tapped the code to unlock it. “Andi, put me in contact with Chris Young.”
I drove Sadie over to a small studio in Milneburg to meet with the only investigative reporter that I knew who wasn’t a complete oxygen thief. If I had to put a number to it, I’d say he was only depriving the earth of her oxygen forty percent of the time.
I’d met Chris Young a few days after the Sex Club Killer case came to a head at Jackson Square. He’d obstinately sought me out until the police department finally relented, granting him an exclusive interview to learn the details of the events leading up to that night. We’d struck an uneasy friendship and had kept in touch every few weeks, mostly when Chris was struggling for a story. He’d come down to Easytown and see what smelled fishy.
The problem was that the whole district was dirty and he had a hard time finding just one topic to focus on, which is why he needed me.
I didn’t want Sadie to feel like a bleeding seal in shark-infested waters, so I’d asked Chris if I could bring her to the recording room in his house. The studio was small, but private and away from the bigger news agencies downtown. He’d agreed to talk to us, even though I was cryptic about who I was bringing because I didn’t want to trip any keywords that the government may have been listening for.
Chris was waiting outside of his home when the Jeep pulled up. “Zach,” he said when I opened my door. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“This young lady right here,” I pointed at Sadie as she came around the car. “Chris, this is Sadie.”
To his credit, Chris didn’t comment on her obvious physical trauma when he shook her hand gently. He glanced around the neighborhood and his eyes narrowed as he stared at a spot off to his left. “I think we should probably go inside. You never know who’s out here.”
I turned, following his stare, and saw a parked car down the street. It appeared to be empty and I didn’t see anyone else outside in the fine mist that fell from above.
“Worried about being scooped?” I chuckled.
“No. I’m probably being paranoid. I’ve been seeing that car down there for months—since my interview with you went live. I’ve never seen anyone in it and the homeowners down there don’t know who it belongs to. I’ve asked. The car will show up at random times, but nobody ever sees anyone get out. It just seems like they’re watching me.”
“An empty car? I’m as skeptical as the next guy, Chris, but if you’ve never even seen anyone in the car and they haven’t tried anything, I wouldn’t be too worried. Maybe they’re parking the car and commuting in to work with someone, or one of your neighbors has an illicit lover that they’re covering for.”
“I guess so.” He didn’t appear convinced. The paranoia in his eyes was evident.
We walked around the back of the house to the separate building where his studio was located. Once inside, he locked the door and flipped the switch on a white noise generator before leading us into the heart of the structure.
The walls in his sound studio were covered with noise-dampening foam, divided into varying patterns to further break up any sounds and eliminate echoing. He sat down in a hovering maglift chair—another innovation to remove sounds from the studio—that was positioned in front of a giant sound board and several small microphones. Chris leaned back in his chair and indicated we sit in the row of chairs spaced loosely in the small room.
“Alright, Zach. What did you bring me?”
“Have you ever seen a clone before?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course. They’re not new; been around for as long as I’ve been alive.”
“You’re right, but they were always easy to spot. Full-grown adults with a third or fourth grade vocabulary, awkward quirks that most people would have grown out of after other kids made fun of them in elementary school, things like that.”
“Sure.”
“Well… I don’t know,” I pretended to stumble. “Sadie, maybe you could explain it better.”
“Of course, Zach,” she replied with a rehearsed nod. “The clones that are being produced by a company called Biologiqué International are more than exact physical replicas of a human. The company has figured out a way to map the original person’s brain and download their memories, personalities, even the mannerisms that Zach just spoke about. That ‘human essence’ is then imprinted into their exact physical replica. When the full-grown clone is born, it has every memory up until the moment of the brain scan.”
“That’s impossible,” Chris interrupted. “They’d be no different than anyone else at that point.”
She shrugged. “As best we can tell, the clones probably think they’re the real person—unless some type of trauma occurs and they lose memories.”
We’d practiced what she should say on the ride over. While it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, it was close.
“Chris, meet Sadie,” I said, reintroducing her. “She’s a clone.”
“No she’s not.” He looked at me and then back at her. “You’re not, are you?”
Sadie pulled down her right ear to show the numbers tattooed there. “Fresh off the production line it would seem.”
“But you’re so… Human.”
“I am human, Mr. Young,” she replied.
“No. Like a real human. You seem just—”
“Just what?” she interrupted, her fiery temper beginning to peek through. “I have every single molecule that a human grown inside a woman’s womb has. The only difference is that my womb was a laboratory.”
“But you don’t talk like a clone,” he countered. “And I assume you have all these memories implanted into you, or else you wouldn’t have mentioned them. Those aren’t your experiences; someone else did them and you got the vidfeed.”
Sadie’s nostrils flared and her eyes narrowed. “Are you willing to help me or not, Mr. Young? If not, I don’t want to waste any more of Detective Forrest’s time—or mine.”
I hadn’t seen her upset before now and I wasn’t sure if she was preparing to come out of the chair to claw the reporter’s eyes out at any moment, or just verbally dress him down. The real Sadie must have been a wildcat in the boardroom.
“I’m not even sure what the story is here, guys. I mean, you say that Sadie’s a clone, but the only proof you can offer is a tattoo on her ear. What am I supposed to do with that? Is this supposed to be a public awareness piece to inform the public of the presence of a new type of clone? I don’t get it.”
“We want to give you a lot of information in exchange for running a story on Sadie,” I answered. “We want to know who she is. Her fingerprints were burned off and I can’t do a DNA workup on her, so I think an interview with you will do the trick. Somebody will recognize her.”
“Why can’t you run her DNA?
Seems simple enough to me.”
“I’ve been explicitly ordered off the clone case; if I run a DNA scan, they’ll know I disobeyed their orders.”
“Wait. What clone case?” he asked, suddenly interested.
“Four days ago, I was called to a dump site for three bodies in Easytown. I don’t know where they were killed. They’d been put into a dumpster and the only thing that kept them from being lost forever was the human DNA sensors in the trash compactor that emptied the dumpster.
“The bodies were mutilated. They’d been tortured over a long period of time, suffering terribly in life. Burns, cuts, broken bones, abrasions…those three experienced every imaginable type of trauma that one human being could do to another. When I got the coroner’s report back, it was only five pages, including a cover sheet.”
“They were clones,” Chris surmised.
“Yeah. Clones.” I paused and leaned back in the chair so I could dig a digichip out of my pocket. The chip held the entire video that my cell phone recorded at the warehouse last night.
I tossed it at the reporter. “Have you ever heard of torture tourism, Chris?”
THIRTEEN: WEDNESDAY
I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.
I rolled over and abruptly fell off the couch, jarring my bruised body even further. It took a moment for me to get my bearings and remember why I was on the couch.
Oh yeah, I got jumped by four ninjas at Chris’ house.
I’d stuck around while Chris interviewed Sadie, checking outside periodically. The longer they talked, the more reporter’s paranoia rubbed off on me. The car that he’d mentioned earlier still sat where it had been when we first got there so I walked down the street to have a look at it.
The car turned out to be empty, but by the time I got back to the interview booth, four men were stacked up outside the door, ready to go inside. From my angle to the side of them, I could see that they all had knives drawn. The fuckers meant to kill us inside, but they hadn’t expected me to be outside.
“Hey! New Orleans PD!” I’d yelled. “Drop your weapons.”
The men turned as one, all eerily similar. Then I saw that they were each an exact replica of one another. Clones. They were Asian, with short-cropped hair and a thick, square jaw that looked like it could take a few punches.
I’d advanced slowly, thinking I could get them to surrender, but they attacked when I was a few feet from them. I shot two before I had to rely on my Krav Maga to save my ass.
I was a street brawler fighting against two men who were clearly masters in some type of martial art. The first to reach me did some type of fancy flying kick that hit me in the shoulder as I ducked my head out of the way. I elbowed blindly behind me as he soared by and was rewarded with a solid impact against one of his kidneys.
The second man was on me before I could worry about what else the first would do. He threw a flurry of punches, about half of which I blocked, and then kicked me hard in the crotch. I doubled over and fired my weapon blindly into him, the bullet tearing a large hole through his abdomen. He collapsed, screaming in pain.
Then I got a heel kick to the spine from the first guy, causing me to drop my gun. I fought the urge to sink to my knees and surged upward, swinging my arm in an uppercut that caught the man unaware. His jaw could take a punch.
After a few minutes of fighting and a nasty cut to my forearm that would have been much worse if I hadn’t been wearing my heavy raincoat, I was able to subdue him with an arm-bar that dislocated his shoulder. A black and white arrived to assist, probably alerted by the report from my pistol. They handcuffed the clones while a paramedic bandaged my arm.
Once the officers found out that the four men were clones, nobody asked me anything. It was as if I’d been transported to a strange alternate reality where everyone ignored the clones like they weren’t even there. The officers on site threw the bodies and the two live clones into the back of a van and took them to the Milneburg precinct. I’d expected to have to answer a string of questions since I’d killed two of them, but the questions never came. No one wanted to hear my paper-thin excuse as to why I was at Chris’ house. Nobody cared that I’d discharged my firearm in a residential neighborhood outside of my precinct. The fact that I’d been injured was swept away with the bodies of the clones.
Even Chief Brubaker avoided the issue when I called, which was uncharacteristic for him. When I’d asked him what was going on, he replied that the mayor had convinced the governor to give full powers to law enforcement officers to eliminate the clone threat that had erupted upon the city. I didn’t know what he was talking about and his answers confused me. He ordered me to get some sleep and come talk to him in the morning.
Tommy Voodoo’s fear of being overheard came back to me. The men running the torture tourism ring were rich and powerful. They were willing to do whatever it took to keep their multi-billion dollar industry secure, including goading the mayor into wiping out any known clones, no questions asked.
All the while, Chris and Sadie were clueless, locked away inside the soundproofed studio in the shed.
After their interview was over, they’d been shocked to hear my story. In truth, if my coat hadn’t had a gash in it and my arm wasn’t encased in a layer of rapid-heal bandages, then I might have been convinced that I’d hallucinated the whole thing in my sleep-deprived mind.
Chris said he needed a couple of days to put together the interview and the footage I’d provided him. Plus, he said he wanted to have a geneticist look at a sample of tissue that Sadie had provided as proof that she was a clone. I cautioned him against staying in New Orleans, and he promised to leave immediately and do the work at his network’s sister station in Slidell if he felt threatened in any way.
I guess the four guys planning to murder him in his sound studio weren’t enough of a threat to him.
After that, Sadie and I returned here, to my apartment—which is how I ended up on the couch.
“Coffee,” I groaned to Andi and stumbled through the bedroom into the bathroom to do my business. A ruffled lump under the covers on my bed and a splash of red hair on the pillow told me the clone was still asleep.
When I was finished, I went to the kitchen to wait for the deep, dark goodness in a mug.
“I’m relieved to see that you’re feeling better, Zach. You did not appear well last night when you returned.”
“Thanks, Andi. I’ve had better days. I still need to shower and then go meet Brubaker, but I don’t know what to do with the clone.”
“I have the ability to restrict access to everything in the apartment except the kitchen cabinets and your closet. All the other doors are equipped with a magnetic lock that I control. She could stay here without any worries of something important being stolen.”
I laughed. God, that hurts, I thought, holding my ribs where I’d been kicked by the last clone. “I’m not worried about Sadie stealing something from this place.”
“Is she going to stay here?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask her.”
“Understood. You have six messages and seven missed calls. I felt it best to let you sleep.”
“Six messages? Oh shit.”
Last night was Tuesday. I was supposed to take Teagan to dinner on her self-imposed date. I’d forgotten about it and now I was in deep shit.
“Call Teagan Thibodaux,” I said, not bothering to listen to the messages she’d left.
“What do you want, Zach?” she asked after answering on the fourth ring. She’d chosen to accept voice only.
“Teagan, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? Are you kidding me? I went out and spent a lot of money on a new haircut and got my nails done,” she exclaimed. Then, in a softer voice she said, “I don’t know why I let myself get excited about you.”
“I got stabbed yesterday. I couldn’t—”
“Oh my God, Zach! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. The paramedic patched me up quick and wit
h the rapid-heal bandage, scar tissue should form in the next day or so.”
Teagan sent a video call request and I accepted it. Her face filled the screen. Even the day after, I could tell that she’d gotten her hair straightened as it hung down to her shoulders.
“Where did you get stabbed?”
“Over in Milneburg.”
“Huh? No, I mean you. Where did you get stabbed?”
“In the arm.” I held it up for her to see the bandage. “I’m sorry about last night. I wanted to go out with you.”
“No you didn’t,” she replied. “I forced you into agreeing to take me out and regardless of why you didn’t show up, I know that you didn’t really want to go out with me.”
“Teagan, I did—I mean I do want to go out with you.” Is that true? I asked myself.
“You’ve been one of my better friends for years and I don’t want to lose that,” I told her. “We should be able to go out as friends, have fun and spend time together socially. You’re beautiful; I’d be crazy not to want to go out with you.”
She smiled. “You don’t need to try to make me feel better. I’m a big girl, Zach. I can handle being told that you’re not interested.”
“That’s not it at all, Teagan. You know that my only hang-up has been our difference in age.”
“The difference in our age? We’re only eleven years apart. I’ll be twenty-four in a few months—but what does that matter? We get along great. I can deal with your occasional grumpiness and you know how to make me laugh without trying too hard.” She frowned before continuing. “I’m going to graduate in a few months and once I start teaching, I won’t be working at the Pharaoh anymore. I want to see how we’d do together.”
“And if we’re horrible together, what then?” I asked. “You heard how my last break-up went. Women always think they can change me, but it’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t want to change you. I like you just the way you are—even if you did stand me up for some lame excuse like getting stabbed.”
