Twins

by Francine Pascal

  “Josh?” she called out. “Stay away, Josh. Stay the hell away from him.”

  “It’s us,” she heard from her left.

  “Yeah, you know. Us. The voices in your head,” she heard from the right. And then a raw, gravelly giggle from behind her.

  “Stay away,” she uttered from deep in her chest, swinging her head to all sides, trying to see past the darkness. “Don’t come another step.”

  “But Gaia,” he whispered. “How can we stay away? We’re already in your head.” Suddenly that voice was inches from her ear. She whipped her head around and saw a glint of his horrid smile before he smacked his fist down right in her face, knocking her over on her side. Two more of them came out of the bushes. Josh after Josh.

  One of them grabbed Ed’s body, dragging it from Gaia’s side. “No!” she howled, lunging for his legs a beat too late. “Stay away from him!” she begged, jumping to her feet. “He hasn’t done anything.”

  “Well, that’s never the point, is it?” Josh said, walking toward her until his face was in clear view. He looked deep into her eyes and smiled. “You know we have to kill him now.”

  “No” Gaia had grabbed Josh by his black shirt, bringing back her arm for a hard punch, when his counterpart grabbed her from behind, pinning her arm behind her back and raising a knife to her face. Gaia squirmed and shook to break loose, but the two of them worked together to restrain both her arms.

  Now both her wrists were being held down, and there were two knives to her face. There was no move to be made as they dragged her toward the third Josh—the one who was now holding Ed’s unconscious body.

  “Gaia,” he whispered, holding Ed’s body up against his chest so that Ed’s head was leaning back on his shoulder. “Check this out.”

  Josh reached behind his back and brought out a long steel knife. He turned to look at Ed and then brought the knife up to Ed’s neck, pressing the blade as close as he could to Ed’s jugular vein without making the cut yet. “I think I’m going to gut him. I’m just going to gut him from the top of his throat to the bottom of his stomach.”

  “Please,” Gaia begged, shivering from futility and that hollow, painful, nauseating buzzing. “Please don’t.”

  “But we knocked him out just to bring you back over here,” Josh complained. “Just so you could watch him die. Come on, Gaia, it’s only fair. Sam had to die. Why shouldn’t he? Ooh, maybe it should be in the same spot where we did Sam. That would be more appropriate, maybe.” Josh slid the knife down from Ed’s neck and placed the tip right at the center of Ed’s chest. “I think right in the heart, guys, what do you think?”

  The other two nodded, gripping Gaia’s wrists tightly.

  “What do you think, Gaia?” he asked. “Are you scared yet?” Josh cocked the knife back and aimed for Ed’s chest.

  And all Gaia could do was watch. She would stand there and watch it happen. Watch Josh cut open the last person on this earth that she truly loved while she was held down by her own menacing hallucinations. How sick was that? She felt her entire body cave in as she stared at their knives, waving in her face. Everything was closing in on her again—the trees reaching down at her, the bushes climbing up at her, their cruel hands holding their knives and swirling around her in a blur like some torturous carnival ride as Josh pulled back for the kill….

  Wait.

  Time almost seemed to stand still. Just for one moment. Just for one infinitesimal split second. But an entire novel’s worth of revelations could take place in one split second.

  Just wait. Slow it down for just one moment. It was something she had seen. A blip of vision that had struck her amidst all the chaos spinning around her.

  Something about their knives. No. Not the knives themselves, but the hands holding the knives. Something tiny she had somehow missed on the hands of her sinister delusions. Tiny black letters tattooed on their inner wrists…

  QR1 and QR2.

  Those letters struck a chord in her. They sparked a memory. An image of a computer screen popped into her head. Something she’d witnessed on that Clofaze CD. Something about a prototype. And then a list of qualified replicants. QR1—100% success. QR2—100% success, and on and on down the list…

  Put it together, Gaia. Put it all together. And put it together she did. In that one split second.

  Of course. How could she have missed this?

  Josh was the prototype. Josh was Loki’s first specimen for his demented cloning experiment. And Gaia might be suffering from some nasty hallucinations lately, but these sinister delusions holding her hostage… they weren’t delusions at all. They weren’t nightmares come to life or ghosts who’d come to haunt her for her sins. They were nothing other than qualified replicants. Clones. They were Loki’s goddamn test run. His early models. First editions. They were more of Loki’s expendable pawns. Just like her.

  And this revelation did something to Gaia. Something major. She could feel the physical and mental shift inside her. Realizing her nightmares were real… It was like waking up. Waking up from this extended bizarro dream state in which she’d been trapped for the last forty-eight hours. For the first time since her uncle had pricked her with that sedative, Gaia felt completely and truly awake. Able to tell reality from her own psycho fictions.

  She’d thought that fighting off these Joshes was like trying to fight off her own madness, fighting off her own fears. But she wasn’t trying to conquer her fears at all. She was simply trying to fight off another batch of Loki’s goons. The same old thugs that she’d beaten down a thousand times before. They were just goons in Josh’s clothing.

  And just like that, her split second’s worth of revelations was over. She watched Josh’s knife coming down toward the center of Ed’s chest, and she let go. Finally she could let it all go. And God, did she have a lot of repressed anger to express.

  Step one: Total relaxation. It had finally returned to her body. Step two: Attack now.

  With lightning agility she clamped her hands onto her captors’ fists and used them as a counterbalance as she kicked her feet out at Josh.

  “Hai!” she growled with deep release, kicking her left foot to Josh’s knife and her right foot to his face. The knife flew from his hand as his head snapped back against the tree behind him, sending his whole body tumbling to the ground. Ed’s body followed, landing a few feet to the right. Good. She’d tend to him in a second.

  The moment her feet touched ground again, she rammed her knee into “QR2’s” crotch, forcing him to release her so he could hug both his hands on his lower abdomen as he doubled over. This gave her the free hand she needed to grab “QR1’s” arm with both hands and flip his ass to the ground.

  “Ugh” he groaned as his lower back landed directly on a mossy rock jutting out from the dirt. Meanwhile Josh (or “QR3,” perhaps—there was really no way of knowing) had risen back up from his tree collision, and he was coming hard at Gaia.

  She flew into a quick somersault that brought her up next to Ed’s left crutch. Josh was charging toward her. She got a firm grip on the strong wooden crutch and sat completely still. Wait for it….

  At the exact moment he was upon her, she rose from the ground, twisting her body and swinging the crutch straight at his head like a long wooden bat. She leveled him with a crack to the back of the head that didn’t sound unlike a bat hitting a baseball. Must have been his skull. He passed out cold on the ground. He and “QR1” were most definitely down for the count. But apparently “QR2” had managed to recover from his initial crotch injury.

  He picked up his knife and charged straight for her. Why he would do that, she wasn’t sure, but it was his loss. Gaia lanced him in the stomach with the rubber stopper of the crutch, causing him to double over yet again. Then she jabbed his foot with the crutch and swung it upward full force like a golf club, most certainly breaking his nose and sending his whole body hurtling backward to the ground.

  And then there were none. It had taken no longer than fifteen seconds
.

  That was what she’d been so scared of? That? Of all the painful lessons she’d learned about fear thus far, this one was perhaps the most important to date: Fear was a waste of time.

  Gaia would have liked to inflict more damage, but she had Ed to worry about right now. And that took precedence over vengeance. She ran back to Ed’s side and lifted his head up in her hands—alive and breathing and not a ghost. She tapped on his face repeatedly, harder and harder—until he finally began to come to.

  “What happened?” he croaked, looking up at her. “Someone hit me on the head Hard.” He brought his hand to the side of his head, where there was still some blood.

  “Not too much happened,” she said. “It was no big deal.”

  He tried to lift his head to see the carnage. Gaia gently pushed him back down.

  “You know what?” she said. “You really don’t need to see it. It’ll only confuse you. Do you think you can get up?”

  Ed nodded.

  “Good,” Gaia said. “Let’s just go that way.”

  Gaia led Ed away in the opposite direction from the scene, supporting him all the way to Fifth Avenue. She helped hold him up on Fifth until she got them both safely in a cab back down to his house. Normally she would have passed out long before then. But she was quite sure she could wait until she got to Ed’s to pass out. She had just awakened from a marathon nightmare, and she really had no desire to go right back to sleep.

  To: L

  From: J

  Test complete. Subject has proved fearless under the most extreme of circumstances. Operated at 100% skill level. Results are conclusive.

  To: J

  From: L

  Excellent. We can proceed with phase II of the experiment. QRs to the MedLab. Proceed immediately to your next mission.

  raving lunatic

  She had been wearing her id on her sleeve for two straight days.

  Gorgeous Dent

  HOW COULD HE POSSIBLY NOT BE asleep? After completing a fullscale Crutch Olympics obstacle course in Central Park and receiving a bash to the head that had earned him a bump the size of a small ant farm, Ed had figured he would probably sleep for the next three to five business days. God knows he’d passed out hard enough when they finally got home. So what was he doing up at four-twenty-two in the morning? But whatever the reason, when he turned over on his side, he was glad he had awoken or he would have missed it. He would have missed the chance to see Gaia’s face bathed in stripes of blue moonlight and white streetlight as she slept peacefully next to him in bed—the key word being peacefully.

  Ed had no idea what had happened. But somewhere between his being clocked on the head and his coming to—a period of time that couldn’t have been much more than five to seven minutes—Gai a must have found herself a good shrink and had the most incredible therapy session of her life. Either that or she’d gotten herself off the drugs. Because at least for now, Gaia seemed to have sent her paranoid insanity off for a long vacation.

  Ed watched her sleeping for a while until he could no longer resist touching the beautiful image. Surely she would sleep right through it at this point, anyway.

  Slowly and as gently as possible, Ed reached his hand over to her face, placed his fingertips at the top of her powerful jaw, and ran his fingers along her cheek, stopping at that gorgeous dent just behind the bottom of her ear.

  Gaia suddenly began to shift her head on the pillow.

  Oh, crap. She’s awake.

  Ed’s reflex reaction was to snap his hand away, slam his eyes shut, and fake a very sound sleep. He included a light fake snoring. That always did the trick.

  Comfortable Silences

  “ED. THAT’S THE LAMEST FAKE snoring I’ve ever heard.”

  Gaia raised her head up in the bed to get a better look at him. He opened his eyes and turned back to her. “What are you talking about?

  That’s brilliant fake snoring.”

  “You sound like a goat clearing his throat.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  Gaia examined the bump on his head, touching her index finger gently to the bruise. “Does it hurt?”

  “It kills,” he said.

  “I’ll go get you some ice.” Gaia got one foot off the side of the bed before Ed grasped her arm.

  “Don’t go,” he said quietly. “Stay here, okay?”

  She stopped herself and pulled her foot back onto the bed, looking deep into his eyes. And all she could think of, watching the expression on his face, was how jealous she was. Jealous of his ability to simply state what he wanted and how he felt without the slightest concern for how it would come out, what it might sound like, what it might mean. She wished he could give her some pointers right now. Because there were things Gaia wanted to say to him now, and she had absolutely no clue how to say them.

  “I’m staying,” she replied, laying her head back down on the pillow as she mentally skated over Ed’s profile.

  “Gaia,” he said, turning on his side so they were face-to-face in the bed.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened to you?” he asked. “Because the last time I saw you, you were… how should I say this… a raving lunatic. And now you seem to be you again. Maybe even sweeter than you before you stopped being you.”

  Gaia had no idea how to even begin to answer Ed’s question. Nor could she be at all sure she’d seen the last of raving lunatic Gaia. For all she knew, she’d pop right back up the next time there was a knock at the door.

  To answer his question fully, things would have to come out of her mouth that would surely convince him that her insanity was far from gone. Well, see, I got this injection… blah, blah, blah… and it turned out the three Joshes were real! See? No. That wasn’t going to work.

  And then there was also the fact that Gaia didn’t really know the answer to his question. She’d experienced a whole slew of horrific emotional and psychological blitzkriegs that still made absolutely no sense to her. After all was said and done, it was possible that the only real way to describe it was that whatever was happening to her, for whatever reasons, just seemed to sort of… wear off. Spurred on by a couple of key revelations. What she said to Ed was even less helpful.

  “I think that I forgot who I was for a while… and then I remembered.”

  Ed stared at her blankly. “Uh-huh.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “Sorry. I suck at explanations.”

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  They shared one of their newly established comfortable silences. But Gaia could tell that Ed had another question. Could he tell that she had something she wanted to say? Probably not. As she had already established for herself, she sucked at that, too. It seemed relationships tended to draw attention to the things one sucked at.

  “Gaia…”

  “Yeees?” she said, laughing at his slow delivery.

  “Do you happen to remember back when you were a raving lunatic… the last thing you said… about—”

  “No,” Gaia interrupted him. “What’s weird… is that I really don’t remember much of what I said at all.” That was a full frontal lie. She remembered the “boyfriend” blurt-out all too well, but it was simply too embarrassing.

  “I see,” Ed said. He didn’t discuss it any further.

  Ugh. She was still having massive trouble chalking up any honesty points here. Gaia wondered how many more things she would say that were the absolute opposite of what she was trying to say.

  What she had slowly begun to realize was that raving lunatic Gaia had certain advantages that regular Gaia didn’t. She had been wearing her id on her sleeve for two straight days. And while a lot of that id was chock-full of freak-outs and paranoia, the thing was… whenever she was alone with Ed, it was also chock-full of… that other thing. The thing she was trying to say to Ed.

  But maybe that was the problem. She was trying to say things. Raving lunatic Gaia tended to act first and talk later. Maybe that was the key lesson. Gaia would
never be able to wrap her mind around her feelings for Ed. They were too complicated. Too hard to dissect. The words would never come out right. She needed to act first and let her mind follow. Like the true raving lunatic she was.

  Without another word spoken, Gaia simply placed her body back in the last intimate position she remembered them sharing. She quickly shimmied toward him until the tip of her nose moved past the tip of his and their chins were nearly touching. Ed’s eyes widened.

  Her psycho persona had gotten her this far. Maybe she could take it from here. Maybe she was brave enough now. The good thing about four-thirty in the morning was that there would be no knock at the door this time. This time Gaia was determined to get to that next moment, no matter how the hell she needed to get there.

  Okay. You’re in position. Ed thinks you’ve lost your mind again, but at least you’re in position. Now talk. Say something. Anything. Say whatever’s on your mind. Jesus… what is on your mind?

  “Sometimes… I lie to you, Ed,” she said. That’s what was on her mind. You idiot. Great opening line. First thing a guy wants to know is what a liar you are. Keep talking. Her lips were nearly touching his with every word. Their eyes were so close, it was hard to pick which one to focus on. Especially in this dark blue light.

  “You do?”

  “I do,” she said. At least it was the truth. At least now she was telling him the truth here in the dark, feeling his breath against her cheek. Was it the dark that was making her honest or just being this close to him? “I think I’ve been lying a lot,” she went on. “Like when I tell you I don’t remember saying… things… when I remember every single word I’ve said.”

  “That was a lie?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed.

  “But why?” Ed asked. “Why do you lie?”

  “Because I suck at this, Ed.”

  “At what?”

  “At love, Ed,” she admitted. “I suck at love.” With that she let her lips fall against his with a kiss that fired the warmest, most gorgeous blue electricity down her spine and through to the tips of her once aching toes.