“Roman, how does it hurt?” continued Russ.
“It just does. But I know how to make his head hurt too. That’s how I get him to leave me alone.” Roman placed the last piece into the puzzle and crossed his arms, looking up at Russ. “What do you want me to do?”
“Roman, how would you like to go for a walk with me?”
“Russ, no.” Brina stepped forward. “You can’t use Roman as a trap. He’s just a little boy. All we have to do is wait until morning. The sun will be out and the snow will melt. We can get out of here!”
“I waited until morning yesterday. With enough time and opportunity, he’ll kill all of us. Roman tips the odds in our favor.”
“Use him.” Edward spoke from the open bathroom doorway. He wore a fresh shirt and trousers. His hair was combed, and he looked vigorous compared to this morning.
“They can sense each other,” he said. “But having Roman as our warning system at least it evens the playing field.”
“And what if Roman gets hurt?” asked Brina.
“He was never meant to be in the first place,” replied Edward. He was back to being his old self, wall in place and motives securely hidden. “Anyway, better him than us.” He ran his tongue over his teeth and disappeared back into the bathroom.
“I won’t let him get hurt,” promised Russ. “We’ll stick together.”
Roman smiled. “I can do a lot more than you think. This is going to be fun.”
Chapter 36
Russ changed shirts, the creases around his eyes showing the effect of his last encounter with Mathew. He walked in with a hitch to keep his side from hurting. “I want Roman with me. You and Edward stay here.”
Edward sat on his bed, with the covers drawn over the pillows. His earlier burst of energy had passed, and now he looked on, subdued. He had Mathew’s computer open in front of him. Brina stood looking over his shoulder.
“He’s still sending messages,” Edward said.
“What’s the latest?” Russ asked.
“Basically,” said Brina, “‘come and get me.’”
Russ pulled out his gun and checked the clip. He seemed satisfied with his findings and slapped it back in place.
“Then let’s go. Roman?”
“Check.” Roman scrambled to Russ’s side. He stood at attention and fingered his pockets.
“What’cha got in there?” Russ dug his hand into Roman’s small pockets and came up with rocks and dirt. “Where did you get these?”
“Outside.” Roman pulled one from the selection in Russ’s hand. “I have a book that says this one is quartz, and this one”—he pulled a rust-colored stone out for inspection—“this one has ferrite in it.” He took the rest from Russ and put them back in his pocket. “I’m going to hit Mathew with them.”
“You plan to throw rocks?” Russ brushed the dirt from his hands and checked Roman over. He rolled Roman’s jeans up over his sneakers and retied his shoelaces. “If you see Mathew, I want you to hide. Just tell me where he is, and then I want you to stay far enough away so he can’t hurt you.”
Roman rotated from side to side as Russ hiked up his pants and tucked his shirt in. “I said I wasn’t talking to you!”
Russ jerked back. Roman pressed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. “Stop it!”
“Russ, move.” Brina grabbed Roman’s shoulders and turned him around. “Roman, look at me. Look at me!”
His teeth rattled as Brina shook him. “Roman!”
Roman inhaled sharply and then crumpled to the floor.
“Oh no, Roman, wake up, wake up.” She straightened his body and checked his breathing. “Russ, what’s happening to him?”
“I don’t know.” He pressed two fingers to Roman’s neck. His hands slid along his jaw, then pulled at his eyelids to check his pupils. “I think it’s something to do with this connection they have.”
“It sounded like he was talking to him,” said Brina.
“Then Mathew knows we’re coming after him. He knew Roman was coming and somehow stopped him.”
Roman whimpered and turned onto his side, curling into Brina. Edward watched, disengaged. He closed the laptop and set it aside. “They will both self-destruct. It’s their nature.”
Brina ignored him. She reached a hand under Roman’s head and slowly lifted him to the foot of the bed. “Russ, can you get a wet cloth from the bathroom?”
Russ pocketed the gun and fetched the compress. She brushed Roman’s cheeks and neck, watching the blood trickle back into his face. “He’s not coming to.”
She laid her cheek to his face, trying to feel his breath. His chest rose too slowly for her to believe he was really breathing. “Wake up, Roman,” she whispered in his ear. “What’s happening to him?”
“I don’t know,” Russ said. He stood to her side, not touching Roman and being equally careful not to touch her. “There’s more about Roman that we don’t know than what we do know.”
“That’s not true. You made him.” She turned to Edward. “He knows.”
“I met the criteria of the project. This connection they have is beyond anything we did,” said Edward. He adjusted his glasses and then stood, crossing the room to look out the window. “There’s more than we’ll ever know. Roman is advancing more rapidly than the others, but this mental link . . .” He left the thought unfinished.
Brina held her head in her hands, too beat to think through all that Edward meant to say but wouldn’t.
“I’m so tired,” she said. “Russ, you’re not going anywhere. I hated the idea of you taking Roman out there with you, and I hate the idea of you being alone even more.” She looked from one face to the other. Russ could barely stand. She knew he would keep going until he killed Mathew or was killed himself in the process.
Then there was Edward. He was a liability when he was weak and an adversary when he was well. That left her to figure out how to keep them alive for one more night. And then what? The thought washed over her with alarming clarity. Then they would keep running.
“We’re stuck here, and we’re stuck with each other, so deal with it.”
Her tone snapped Edward out of his daze. “You’re not the one calling the shots.”
“And neither are you,” said Russ. He opened the door and surveyed the hall. “We need to secure what we can.” He dragged Brina’s suitcase in and shut the door. He unzipped the canvas bag and rummaged through her clothes before coming up with a bag of toiletries. He separated out her hair spray and a bottle of perfume. “I have a few tricks left.”
Chapter 37
The room was half-lit and too noisy for Brina to sleep. Russ’s breath wheezed, and Edward snored. Roman whimpered in his sleep. Outside, she imagined Mathew having an equally loud night, wherever he was hiding.
Russ had a lighter and her hairspray next to him. He had stuffed gauze into the perfume bottle for an improvised grenade. The two weapons looked pitiful in the face of the creature bent on killing them. She wasn’t even convinced killing was what Mathew really had in mind. He wanted to get even.
At some point, she had stopped thinking of him as a clone, or offspring, as Edward called him. They were all Mathew. She could see the original Mathew Roman in him: compulsive and vindictive. It wasn’t a flaw in the process that was making them unstable; it was the original Mathew gone unchecked. Edward and Russ had selected genes for health, longevity, and intelligence; there was no way to engineer how those factors were put to use. They had produced extreme intelligence with no morals to harness impulses.
She ran a hand over Roman’s back. “You have one advantage: me.” She hoped that for once nurture would triumph over nature. This small Mathew Roman lying next to her might one day decide that he wanted revenge, too. He might see her boundary setting as the same kind of control Edward and Russ had imposed on him. We’ll figure out what to do when the time comes, she thought.
Brina sat up, rubbing her shoulder and stretching. The floor was permanently flattening he
r spine and making her muscles, already sore from digging snow, even stiffer. How many more would come after them? This was just one, and he had said there were at least a half dozen. Six? Six more visits to hell, she thought.
She crept to her suitcase and reached into the side pocket. The appointment book was there. MNR; the initials would forever look like a code. The entries that hadn’t made sense before may be similar codes. She opened the door and stepped out into the hall. The fresh air bathed her lungs. Edward’s room was beginning to smell like an overused hotel room.
She glanced around, trying to determine the safest place to read. The house gave no signs of Mathew creeping around. Even the clock in the hallway had wound down and stopped its ticking and chiming of the half hours.
She walked softly to the end of the hall, opened the attic door, and fumbled for the light, leaving it on just long enough to find the flashlight. She turned the switch off and went up in the dark, hoping the brief light had not been visible from outside.
The attic was in the same disarray in which they had left it. She found a chair in the corner and cleared it of bags of paperback books, a tiny bit of the stuff stashed up here to be forgotten. The plaid tweed fabric on the chair was a mottled orange and brown, with a home sewn pillow squashed into the corner. She tossed that to the floor and sat.
Air drafted through the eaves, and she curled her legs under and pulled her sleeves down. To her left stood the armoire and bed frame hiding the storeroom. How many total, she wondered again. One was in there, and she couldn’t help but look over at the wall that entombed a small infant duplicate of Roman. Edward never completely explained the files. She wondered if opening the room again would serve any purpose. Could there be more there than what they had found?
Cobwebs swirled overhead in the draft, where spiders harvested tiny cocoons with struggling victims. She was afraid she knew what the DNA samples were for. Mathew was a rich man who got everything he wanted, legal or not. There was probably another person out there right now having the same thoughts she was having while a deranged lab specimen plotted to kill them. The fact that the whole situation sounded ludicrous made it that much more terrifying.
She held the flashlight to the book. The gold embossing on the cover flecked off under her fingernail, and the book looked more like pressed vinyl than leather. She opened the slipcover and pulled the book free. It was a cheap drugstore calendar with blocks for each day of the week followed by a page for each day’s notes. She turned back to Mathew’s final week and worked backward.
He had a meeting with someone named Glover at 10 p.m. last Thursday. The name meant nothing to her. She turned the page around, but the new orientation didn’t suggest a code for the name. She would have to ask Russ about the meeting; it was odd for it to be so late at night.
The day before had two notes in Mathew’s handwriting. “M4@Widepath.” The M could be a three—like in the door code—four, and two, maybe, if it’s the same key? She couldn’t think what Widepath would mean. “At. At where? At an email address?” she answered her own question. “Mathew four at Widepath dot com.” She saw in her mind the instant messenger box, mocking her. She would have to check Mathew’s computer to see if that address was in the buddy list; a message couldn’t get through otherwise. “That means Mathew knew all along that one of them was out there.”
She dog-eared the page and kept looking. The entry was repeated several times, going back almost a month.
Brina closed her eyes and laid her head against the dust-dried chair back. Even with the cold and secrets boarded up just a few feet away, this was the safest she had felt in days. It had something to do with feeling as if she were hiding, like when she was a kid and would disappear for an entire day. Eventually she would have to go down, and Mathew would be waiting, and so would Russ.
Why had he complicated the matter? Just when the world was sane again, it all fell apart.
She stretched her legs and looked at the collected clutter, finally crossing to the armoire and opening the inlaid mahogany doors on their black iron hinges. For its age, it was quiet, and not so dirty inside. A few clothes swung from wooden hangers over a box that filled the entire bottom of the enclosure.
“God, another box.” She closed the door, thought about it, and opened it back up. She pushed the clothes to one side and pulled back the lid. Brown fur swaggered over the edges of the cardboard with a silky opulence. It felt cold to the touch but warmed quickly from her body heat. She pulled it out. The floor-length mink looked almost new, with tags hanging from the sleeve. There was a card in the box, which she pulled out and opened as she draped the coat around her shoulders.
“To My Love, Always. Happy Birthday.”
She wondered what had happened to make the coat still be here and not on the woman who had received it. There were no other clues, but the coat was warm, so she kept it on and continued looking.
The books in the bags were crumbling with dry rot. After a while, she realized she was just looking for delays, not clues. Brina sat in the chair and looked once more at the appointment book. She had uncovered one item, and there were probably more in there they would have to figure out. So far, the book and Mathew’s computer were the only real means of information they had. They were words from a dead man.
She swept down the stairs in the fur ensemble and peeked out into the hallway, then tiptoed to Edward’s room and slipped in.
Edward was missing.
“That son of a bitch.”
“What?” Russ roused from his sleep and sat up. “Where’ve you been?” He looked at her full-length mink. “What the hell died on you?”
“It’s a fur coat; I found it in the attic.”
He held his hand up and asked, “Okay, why were you in the attic?”
“I needed some space.” She dropped the coat on the bed and handed him the appointment book.
“Well space could get you killed,” he replied, taking the book from her.
“Forget about me. Edward’s gone, and I think Mathew knew what was about to happen all along.” She filled him in on the codes, and the possible email address noted in Mathew’s handwriting. “It just keeps getting better,” she added, sarcastically.
“Sit down,” ordered Russ, who was now trying to stand himself. He crossed to the bed and pulled out the laptop. As soon as it came on, he clicked on the instant messenger and looked at the allowed users list. “It matches.” He looked at Brina, who was sitting cross-legged beside a sleeping Roman. “Now, where does Edward fit into all this?”
“Do you think Edward knew?”
Russ nodded, “It makes sense. He was Mathew’s only confidant, and he is the only one who knows how many times this has been attempted, as well as every outcome.”
“Or, how many are still out there,” she added.
“We need to find Edward.”
“You don’t think he went looking for that crazed loon, do you?”
“I’m beginning to think Edward’s the crazed loon.” Russ pocketed the lighter, hairspray, and homemade grenade. “Give me the flashlight.”
She handed it over. “What about Roman? We can’t leave him up here alone.”
“We’re not,” said Russ pointedly. He handed her the gun. “You have a better chance with this.”
“What about you?” She tried to force it back into his hands.
“It didn’t help last time. Besides, I have a few things in the lab that are just as deadly. And he won’t recover from them like he did a blow to the head.”
She reluctantly took the gun back and laid it on the desk. “How’s your side?”
“It hurts.”
“Let me see.” She eased the bandage and tape away from his skin. The flesh had pulled together, and a ridge of dried blood scabbed over the wound. “It looks better, but you feel hot.”
Russ pressed a hand to her forehead and then felt his own. “I’m probably okay.”
“No you’re not. Here, take these.” She handed him a whit
e box marked sample. “This is Floxin; I had it once. It’ll do the trick, and it won’t make you feel sick in the process.”
Russ pulled three inches of cotton from the bottle to reach the handful of pills inside. He shoved two in his mouth and headed to the bathroom to wash it down. He came out wiping his face.
“Wish me luck.”
“Luck,” smiled Brina. She leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
She knew it would happen. Russ’s arms circled her body and pulled her close; his breath warmed her ear. “Stay alive,” he said, and then kissed her.
Brina surprised herself, kissing him back, this time without the guilt. Gradually, her lips parted from his, and she settled back from her tiptoes and waited for him to say something. When she opened her eyes, the door was just closing. She reached over and locked it. “Now we wait.”
Chapter 38
Edward counted to twenty before getting up. He didn’t know where she was going, and frankly, he didn’t care. This whole mess had gone on long enough. He was still dressed and only had to slip his shoes on before skulking out the door. The gun in his hand had a solid weight that felt substantial and equalizing.
He considered taking care of Russ and Roman while they slept, but he preferred to take out the real threat first—Mathew. Control may be a fleeting notion, he thought.
The overcast sky blocked the moon from lighting up the stairs or hallway. Deep shadows loomed from potted plants, chairs, and innocuous knick-knacks. He contemplated the most likely place Mathew would be, holed up like a rodent curling in on itself to stay warm. The lab was the logical place to start; it was the root of the trouble, his and Mathew’s—all of them.
He lowered each foot, feeling the steps descending. As his hand reached for the wall, gilt-edged frames brushed his fingertips, and the dry wood and paint crumbled to a powder that smelled of old wood and oil as it drifted down. He reached the landing and stopped to listen, then finished the last few steps to the foyer.
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