Project Pandora

by Aden Polydoros

  “Hades, is Artemis with you?”

  At the sound of Zeus’s voice, Tyler’s hand tightened around the pistol. He moved his finger off the trigger guard, afraid he might squeeze the trigger by accident.

  At that moment, if Zeus had been standing where Hades was, Tyler would have had no qualms about shooting him in the head. Then emptying the rest of the magazine into his body for good measure.

  Hades gave Tyler an even look, then said, “Yes, she is.”

  “Good. Now, regarding Apo—”

  Tyler saw the warning flash like fire in the boy’s eyes a split second before Hades ducked forward and to the side. Tyler’s finger went to the trigger, but he wasn’t fast enough. Before he could even touch it, Hades seized him by the wrist and yanked his arm down and away.

  “—lo… Hello? Hades?” The phone had fallen facedown onto the carpet, but Zeus’s voice still projected loud and clear.

  Although Tyler had about two inches on Hades, the other boy had the advantage of surprise. Even as Tyler reacted to being grabbed, Hades was already bringing his other arm forward.

  There was no immediate sensation of pain, just a great red pressure exploding from his nose outward. His head flung back so hard he heard it crack like a whip. Spots darkened his eyes, swarming.

  Hot liquid rushed down his face. It took him a second to realize it was blood. His blood.

  Before he could raise a hand to cup his gushing nose, a second pain flared up in the hand that held the gun. As Hades yanked the pistol from his fingers, he regained enough sense to hurl himself at the boy, driving him into the wall.

  “Stop!” Shannon shouted. “Stop moving! I’ll shoot—”

  As they struggled, the gun landed on the floor and spun out of reach. Tyler felt the hard toe of a boot glance across his calf. Then he slammed his knee upward and was rewarded with a loud grunt as it came in contact with Hades’s stomach.

  “Go ahead!” Hades’s hoarse yell came to him through a pain-reddened haze. “Try! You’ll miss! You’ll shoot him!” He sounded almost excited, like he enjoyed being hurt. Or enjoyed hurting others. Or both, simultaneously.

  As his hands found Hades’s throat and closed around it, Hades punched him a second time.

  Blood filled his mouth almost instantly. The pain from his nose traveled through his face in sickening liquid pulses, blurring his eyes with tears.

  His vision shifted drastically, and without realizing how he fell, he found himself on the ground with Hades on top of him, straddling him.

  Gasping, breathing through a nose plugged with snot or blood, he tucked his legs inward, trying to kick Hades off him. At the very least, he hoped to catch the other boy in the balls. When he heard a yell, he thought he had succeeded. Until he felt cold steel press against his chest and realized it was not a cry of pain but of murderous triumph.

  “Have a nice afterlife,” Hades said, lips so close that Tyler felt his breath fan across his cheek. He spoke in a voice that was husky and erotic, deep with sick yearning.

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  Case Notes 35:

  Artemis

  As the two boys struggled, Shannon tried to get a good line of sight on Hades. Her hands kept shaking. The barrel jiggled up and down, back and forth, refusing to focus on a single target.

  She was afraid to pull the trigger, certain she would miss and shoot Tyler instead. While instinct told her to fire anyway, she hesitated.

  There had been enough bloodshed, but that was only part of it. Mainly, she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him.

  She moved closer, hoping to find an opening. When Hades reached for the gun, she knew she had to act. There was no time left.

  As Hades raised his pistol, she brought hers down, catching him in the back of the head with the side of the barrel. He collapsed immediately, landing on his side. A thin drizzle of blood ran down his neck and onto the collar of his leather jacket.

  Tyler sat up and picked up the gun, turning it over in his hands. His face was pale and bloodied, but a tremulous smile crept across his split lips. His teeth were marbled red, though all in place. “Safety’s on.”

  His words dawned on her. The safety was on. It had been on this whole time. They had threatened Hades with a pistol that wouldn’t have fired if Tyler had pulled the trigger.

  “Thanks,” Tyler said, staggering to his feet. “Christ, this hurts like a bitch. Is it broken?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, taking a closer look at his nose. It didn’t appear to be tilted, but the surrounding skin was swelling up pretty badly. There was no way to tell for sure.

  He groaned in answer. He used his shirt to gingerly wipe at the blood that drenched his chin, avoiding touching his nose and mouth directly.

  “What are we going to do about him?” Shannon asked and looked at Hades. Blood plastered his hair to his scalp and dribbled down his neck. If not for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, she would have thought she had killed him.

  She leaned down and brushed away his hair to check the wound. There was no skull visible, no broken bone. The tip of the pistol had cut open his scalp, but if there was any damage to the brain, it was internal.

  Even though Hades had come here to kill them, she hoped she hadn’t pistol-whipped him into a human vegetable. Maybe if he woke up, they could talk him out of his programming.

  “For starters, help me get his hands and feet tied,” Tyler said as she put her gun on the nearby side table. “I’ll feel a lot better when he can’t try anything.”

  He held Hades’s hands behind his back as she wrapped the duct tape around his wrists. She did the same with his ankles. In his boot, she found a small sheathed knife, which she promptly confiscated.

  “I think there’re some painkillers in my dad’s medicine cabinet,” she said, putting the knife next to the gun. “Do you want me to get them?”

  “Yeah, but hurry. I don’t think we should stay here for very long.”

  She paused. “What?”

  “Zeus knows where you live, so there’s a chance he’ll send more people. And with that phone call…”

  “We’re both marked for death,” she finished, dread sinking into her. How many others were there? How many more assassins lurked in the dark?

  Tyler just smiled wryly and continued to wipe away the blood as it flowed anew.

  She went into the master bedroom. She took a good look around, scanning over the unmade bed, the clothing hanging from the hamper, the photos on the nightstand. In the bathroom, she inhaled the ghostly remnants of her foster mom’s perfume and her foster dad’s cologne.

  As she retrieved the bottle of painkillers from the medicine cabinet, she wondered if it’d ever be safe to return here. A lump formed in her throat at the thought. It was like trying to swallow a stone.

  After putting the pill bottle in her jeans pocket, she took a clean hand towel from the linen closet and wetted it with warm water.

  She returned to the foyer.

  Tyler had moved to the window and was looking out. He held the gun at his side and had the drapes only partially opened. One half of his face was chiseled by the ashen sunlight, while the rest was lost to blood and shadows. Cast in that cold light, he looked like a character straight out of a noir thriller, hardened and weary.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the bottle.

  “Thanks.” Tyler returned his gun to its holster and took the bottle. He shook out two pills. After swallowing them dry, he shoved the bottle into his pocket.

  “Let me see your face.”

  “It’s fine. We need to go.”

  “Tyler, your face is covered in blood. The last thing we need is to attract attention. Just give me a minute to get you cleaned up.” Gently, she dabbed at the blood streaming from Tyler’s nostrils, taking care to avoid touching the nose itself. His lip was split, too, and she wiped around the area.

  The tension drained from his features, and his clenched jaw loosened. His eyes slid shut, just for a mo
ment, and he exhaled softly. She had never seen him look this tired before, and she wished that she could provide a helping hand to carry his burden or a shoulder for him to rest his head on. But their burden was already a shared one, and there was no time left to comfort each other.

  After cleaning away the blood, she tossed the soiled hand towel on the floor.

  “You have a car?” he asked.

  She nodded. “It’s parked around back. The keys are in the kitchen.”

  “We should hurry.”

  Shannon glanced at Hades again. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  The last thing she needed was her foster parents coming home to find an unconscious boy tied up on their floor. Besides, maybe he knew something about Zeus.

  “I’ll carry him out to the car. Just get the keys and open the door for me.” Tyler dragged Hades into an upright position and then with visible difficulty hauled him over his shoulder. He staggered under the dead weight but didn’t complain.

  Remembering her gun, she retrieved it and the duct tape roll from the side table. She led Tyler into the kitchen, where she took her keys from the ring on the wall then went to the back door. She held the door open for him and closed it behind him.

  There was no backyard at all, just an alley that led between the two rows of houses. As she opened the trunk of her car, she glanced at the houses on the other side of the alleyway. Dark windows peered down at her like gouged sockets. She had the unsettling impression that someone was watching her.

  Tyler dumped Hades unceremoniously into the trunk. The black-haired boy stirred and groaned but didn’t awaken.

  “Well, at least he’s not dead,” Shannon said sarcastically, slamming the lid. She circled around to the driver’s side and shoved her gun into the door’s compartment, but not before removing its magazine. She put the duct tape in the center console, just in case they needed it for something else.

  When she started driving, she realized she didn’t know where to go. She kept going anyway, preferring aimless travel over waiting like sitting ducks.

  “You know where you’re going?” Tyler asked after a few miles.

  She shook her head. “No, not really.”

  “Should find a place to lie low for a bit, at least until he wakes up. We need to get rid of your car, too. Switch vehicles. You have your cell with you?”

  At first she thought he was talking about the flip phone he had destroyed. Then she realized he meant her smartphone.

  That’s how I tracked him last night, she thought and remembered the rest of that evening in an instant. It shook her to know she had shot at him, almost killed him. But she hadn’t, and she had tossed the gun afterward. Maybe her programming had already begun to glitch at that point.

  “I don’t have it,” she said. “But that’s how Zeus knew where you were last night.”

  Tyler stared at her. “Wait, are you the one who tried to kill me yesterday?”

  Shannon focused on the road ahead, refraining from looking him in the eye.

  “Never mind,” Tyler said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “We should be safe for the time being. I don’t think he’s tracking our cars. But we can’t just run.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “But we can’t call the police, either, can we?” Shannon asked, glancing at him.

  Although it was a rhetorical question, Tyler’s thin smile was answer enough.

  “Can you think of somewhere we’ll be safe?” she asked.

  “No, I can’t,” Tyler said, sagging in his seat. He regarded her through half-closed eyes. She could tell he was beginning to feel the painkillers. Hopefully he didn’t have a concussion.

  After giving it some thought, she sighed. “I think I know where we can go.”

  Less than two minutes into the drive, Hades began yelling from the trunk and kicking the back of the seat.

  “Get me out of here!” he shouted, and Shannon winced at the sound of broken glass.

  “I think he just broke one of the taillights,” she said.

  “Great. Pull over.” With a sigh, Tyler took off his shoe and removed a sock.

  She watched him in the corner of her eye. “Uh, what are you doing?”

  Tyler put his shoe back on. “If he won’t shut up, I’m going to make him.”

  “Let me out, Dimitri!” Hades kicked the trunk once more.

  “Dimitri?” Shannon asked, lifting her eyebrows as she pulled into an alley between two row houses.

  “I think you might have hit him too hard,” Tyler said, and after retrieving the roll of duct tape from the center console, exited the car. She got out, too, walked around to the trunk, and opened it.

  Hades rolled over onto his back, chest heaving with gasping breaths and teeth bared. His feverish blue eyes burned through his curtain of tangled hair, and with a jolt, she realized the other boy was terrified. “Don’t put me back in the tank!”

  “Maybe we should just move him into the backseat,” Shannon said as Tyler rolled up the sock.

  “He’s faking it,” Tyler said, seizing Hades’s chin and holding it still.

  Hades growled and shook his head back and forth, snapping at Tyler’s fingers. It was as if his containment had awoken a rabid part of him, reducing him to the feral beast that humans had evolved from. Even after Tyler stuffed the sock into his mouth, the boy continued to writhe, his jaws working to spit out the bunched-up fabric.

  For a moment, she felt sorry for the boy. Then she remembered how he had tried to shoot Tyler without hesitation, and her sympathy soured into anger and disdain.

  As Tyler peeled off a strip of tape and wrapped it around the other boy’s mouth, she turned from the brutal scene and returned to the driver’s seat. Seconds later, Tyler slammed the trunk lid and joined her, looking a bit disgusted and a bit ill.

  “He was just faking it,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “Being scared like that.”

  She said nothing.

  “You think we’ll get pulled over for the broken light?”

  “I hope not,” Shannon said, turning back onto the street.

  Though the thought of a police chase chilled her, she forced herself to obey the speed limit and drive safely. It was raining pretty heavily now, and she figured the weather might, at the very least, obscure the fact that one of her taillights was out.

  “What do you think he meant by ‘the tank’?” Tyler asked.

  The tank. Those two words sent a twinge of unease shooting down her spine, and as she drove through a yellow light, she found herself nibbling on her lip.

  Shannon shrugged and said, “Do you think we acted like that when we were, uh, brainwashed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He bothers me.” She flinched when Hades kicked the trunk lid, rattling it. “I mean, how could he use the code on us? Wouldn’t it affect him, too?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  She thought back to Hades’s behavior, how he had made jokes and mocked her. Those weren’t the actions of a numbed machine. Those had been deliberate, intelligent responses. There had been humor there, as dark as it had seemed to be.

  Which only meant one thing: Hades wasn’t working off the same program as she and Tyler were. Although he might have been following someone else’s orders, his actions were his own.

  After thirty seconds, the kicking stopped, and no movement came from the trunk. She glanced into the back window, worried that Hades might have managed to escape.

  The trunk lid was closed.

  She wondered if Hades had hit his head and knocked himself out. Then she wondered what his parents would think if he never came home. Would they cry and put up posters of their missing son? Would they hold a funeral over an empty coffin?

  Would her foster parents do the same or just dismiss her as another troubled kid who had come through their home?

  Shannon banished the thoughts from her head as she entered a neighborhood of older houses in varying states of decay.


  Normally, driving through Victoria’s neighborhood made her nervous, but it didn’t today, and she sensed that it never would again. At least not in the way it once had. The gun in the door compartment reminded her that the true danger didn’t lurk on the street corners or in the dark windows of homes but in her own head.

  She pulled up in front of a mid-century brick bungalow and climbed out of the car. “I’ll be right back,” she said, looking back at Tyler. “Just wait here.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered, reclining in the seat. His nose had stopped bleeding, but some blood crusted the corner of his mouth. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Sure.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  Shannon shut the car door and strode through the rain. She pushed the doorbell and glanced over her shoulder. The street was empty. No sign of pursuit. No helicopters flying overhead. They were safe for now.

  The front door flung open.

  “What do you want?” Victoria snarled, then froze at the sight of her. “Oh, it’s you. I thought you were one of those solicitors.”

  “Hi, Victoria,” she said, rubbing her neck. “Can I come in?”

  Victoria held open the door. Once she shut it, she looked Shannon up and down. “What’s up? Didn’t get enough of me on Friday—wait, is that blood?”

  Shannon looked down at the dark splotches on her shirt. It was blood, all right, but not her own.

  “It’s probably Tyler’s,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s so much better. Wait, did you say Tyler?” Victoria raised her eyebrows. “That makes a lot of sense now. I never took you for a blood-play kind of gal, but sure, if that’s your kink…”

  She trailed off as tears welled in Shannon’s eyes.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” Victoria asked, touching her shoulder. “I was kidding. Did he have a nosebleed and spew blood all over you or something?”

  Shaking the palm off, Shannon blotted her eyes with the back of her hand. “There’s a guy in my trunk,” she said and felt a hysterical little giggle rise in her throat. She managed to keep it at bay, afraid that if she began laughing, she wouldn’t be able to stop.