by Schow, Ryan
“I’ll take it in here.”
A minute later the lab’s phone buzzed. He picked it up.
“Wolfgang,” the deep voice said, “Warwick Bundy here.”
Warwick Bundy, one of the more murderous of the Bundy bloodline, was not as well known as say, a DuPont or a Kennedy or a Rothschild, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous. Gerhard’s senses prickled around the man for a reason. He knew his own kind. Unrestrained, reckless, brazen. After the life Gerhard lived, with all the terrible and inhumane things he’s done, one would think a man like Warwick Bundy wouldn’t get under his skin. But he did. He does. Even worse, after Atticus Van Duyn sold his share of the corporation to the remaining partners, Warwick became the most influential member of the Virginia Corporation, and technically Gerhard’s benefactor.
“What can I do for you Warwick?” Gerhard said, changing his tone to sound very blasé, as if his attention was elsewhere.
“We lost the signal on Savannah Van Duyn’s RFID chip.”
“That’s because she’s dead, Warwick. Didn’t you see the news?”
“She’s not dead,” he said. “Only the signal on the chip is dead.”
Gerhard exhaled steadily, not too dramatically, but not so quiet as to allow the obvious response to be dismissed. Then: “What do you want, Warwick? I’m busy.”
“Could the chip have been removed?”
“Anything is possible,” he said.
“Not the answer I was looking for, Gerhard.”
“I’m not here to pacify you, Heir Bundy, that’s someone else’s job.”
“Listen, Gerhard, I know who you are—who you really are—and I appreciate your life’s work, but if you think for one minute that having a larger body count gives you the right to dismiss me with such—”
“When your body count hits six figures, Heir Bundy, I will give you your due consideration. Until then, you’re wasting my time.”
“You history is impressive, no doubt, but this is a new day and mass slaughter is not a pill the world swallows lightly—”
“No one would believe you if you told them about me. It’s too fantastical of a tale.”
“Never-the-less.”
“Look, if the Van Duyn girl had a reason to go to the hospital, and if she had a reason to have her body scanned for such a device, then it could have been located and removed. But these are big ifs, hypothetical musings, do you understand? Besides, I’m a geneticist, not a technology nerd.”
“She’s your patient, your responsibility. And I happen to know you know technology very well.”
“It’s your technology, your responsibility,” he said, letting his anger bleed through. “Besides, she’s dead.”
“She’s not dead. And you wouldn’t take this tact with me if we were meeting face to face,” Warwick said, biting back.
“Turn on the TV,” Gerhard snapped. “The whole family is dead. Besides, I don’t like you enough to make the trip.”
“You’d better hope we never meet,” Bundy growled.
“Says the angry little boy.” On the other end of the line, Warwick’s breathing sounded ragged, enraged. As Warwick persisted with his wordless vigil, he said, “Are you done yet, Heir Bundy?”
“If I find you tampered with that chip—” he said.
“I have entirely too many things—” The second the line went empty, he slammed the phone in the cradle and for the next few minutes stood before Savannah’s canister, looking at her deformed body.
Behind him, Arabelle cleared her throat. He turned to find her in the doorway, concerned.
“Everything is okay, yes?”
“No,” he says. “Everything is most certainly not okay.”
“What happens?”
“The man on the phone, that son of a bitch Warwick Bundy—”
“Yes?”
He shook his head in frustration, shoved the thought away, then said, “I’ve killed better men than him for less, Arabelle. For so much less.”
Arabelle walked over to him, drew him into a hug and said, “Do not let that man make yourself unhappy.”
“It’s more than that,” he said, starring at the seemingly lifeless Savannah. “The shots aren’t working like I thought. Either that or there’s too much damage to repair.”
“What will happen then?” Arabelle asked, her amethyst eyes wrought with concern. She left his arms to study the girl.
Curious, he thought, watching Arabelle watch Savannah. For all the airs she put on about not liking the girl, Arabelle sure showed a startling amount of distress over her. Could it be she actually cared about her?
“I don’t know, Arabelle. If I don’t fix her, she could go to the press. She could expose us.” He heaved a weighted sigh and said, “I have to fix her, but if I can’t, I don’t know. She could grow old in there. Or her body could simply waste away. Plus, she’s supposed to be dead, which presents another problem entirely.”
“You have good science, Wolfgang.”
“I do, but right now I’m not sure if what I have and what I know will be enough to reverse the damage. If we can’t get a hold of her original clone, which is in Amsterdam right now, or maybe back in Prague, who knows how long it will take? And if that doesn’t work, we might have to get rid of her.”
“And that would be bad thing?”
“I kind of like this one. She’s got the kind of substance you just don’t see in girls these days. For Christ’s sake, she blackmailed me, she shot me, and she killed my war model.”
“She is problem.”
“Yes, but in a good way.”
“You see yourself in her?”
“Sort of. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. It’s just that, for as awful and manipulative as she is, she is also somewhat inspiring.”
“So you will save her,” Arabelle said, definitive.
Running a hand through his wavy dark hair, he said, “Honestly, I’m not sure if I can.”
The Bane of a Guilty Conscience
1
Christine Kennedy was a stable, right minded woman before anything else. Not anymore. Orchestrating a murder felt like the surest way to upend your life. Especially if the target was a child. Or more specifically, a friend’s daughter.
“Please inform Warwick the job will be done quickly and thoroughly.” That’s what the creepy Brice O’Brien said on her voicemail.
Quickly and thoroughly.
Inside, where her tarnished heart beat its guilty rhythm, she knew any day could be Savannah’s last day. The girl’s death was inevitable. She wanted it over already, she dreaded it that much. But then sometimes, when her conscience absolutely tore her in half, Christine thought about calling Atticus to warn him. She tried twice. None of his numbers worked.
Atticus was closest to Tate when he was with the group, but she couldn’t call Tate without risking him going to Warwick.
So she waited.
And the waiting proved torturous. Her thoughts became such a jumbled mess the actual process of thinking felt like bolts being dropped in a blender.
She kept the television off and she avoided news radio. She didn’t want to know that way, so instead she threw herself into work.
Into her social life.
Into her vices.
Even now, after a long night of fine dining and too much wine, her head swam in warm, lofty currents, her body sluggish from the evening’s indulgences.
Readying herself for bed, surprisingly before midnight, she scrubbed her face clean, applied moisturizer, then slipped into her nightgown and crawled into bed. The silky sheets and plush pillows held her like a reliable lover. All snuggled in, her body prepared for the deepest state of relaxation, she went against her better instincts and turned on the television.
And there it was.
The murder of the entire Van Duyn family. On every news station. The air dissipated from her lungs; dread washed over her like ice water. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.
Like a zombie w
hose only emotion was despondency, she sat glued to the TV. Finally she stood and went to her office, opened her safe and took out a half-used brick of cocaine. She hadn’t needed the full brick, but she took it as payment from one of her clients last year, a transaction she both regretted immensely and found deliciously irresponsible at the same time. The first time she got high, her world opened up.
She fetched the mirror and the razor blade. Chopped a fresh line. Chopped two. Christine snorted the blow fast and with purpose. A minute later, when the euphoria lifted her state, she staggered into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Advil and swirled the contents. High and smiling, the pills would be her salvation. She opened the bottle, letting the lid fall on the tile floor, then looked inside the same way a curious child might. There were a good thirty or forty pills. Maybe more.
Perfect.
2
Most people, at least most of the criminals she defended, always wished they had a way back from those life changing moments. Some would have chosen a legal, more honest route around their crimes if given a do-over; others simply would have tried harder not to get caught. The common denominator amongst criminals snared in the legal system was this: there was no way back. No way to undo their error. Innocent or guilty, imprisoned or free, a person like her would most assuredly buckle under the weight of her choices.
She put the open Advil bottle to her lips, threw her head back and gobbled a mouthful of the remaining pills. She chased the entire load with a goblet of Cabernet, then chopped four more lines, each line more robust than the last. She flashed in and out for just a second, her world gushing in slow-motion.
Kitchen to bathroom.
She looked around, saw herself in the bathroom, hardly remembered getting there. Her reflection was a wreck. A goddamn mess. Tears streamed down her face, her pale aging face. She spat at her reflection. Shot through with a spell of awkward dizziness, she flashed in and out for another quick second.
Bathroom to balcony.
When did that happen?
No matter, there she was. Standing seven stories high in the pressing San Francisco wind, the sheer fabric of her nightgown doing nothing to stop the cold from cutting her to the bone. She wavered on unsteady legs, coughed out a laugh that made no sense. Her mind was inside out, coated with a fog as thick as a Bay Area morning, save for one, very clear thought: she was in bed with the wrong people. She was the wrong people. Be it fear or desperation, or even an ungodly amount of pressure that got her to this place in her life, her conscience would never let her off the hook. It would never stop punishing her.
Essentially, her life was over.
She started climbing up on to the thick balcony railing where she planned to contemplate jumping, but halfway up she lost her balance and toppled face-first over the edge, sailing down into the night. She didn’t bother to right herself as she careened head-first toward the sidewalk, towards the people below. And she didn’t scream. She simply pressed her hands to her sides and torpedoed into the pavement face-first.
The Evil Men Do
1
Jamison DuPont and Warwick Bundy should have been enjoying a competitive game of racquetball right then. Or at least the comforts of a dry sauna with women half their age dressed in nothing but small towels and shameless ambition. Instead they postponed their extracurricular activities to retire to the East Wing of Jamison DuPont’s Virginia estate for Gurkha cigars and a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac.
As the two managing partners of the Virginia Corporation with the greatest percentage of shares, they were accustomed to making decisions both together and outside the other members’ influence. Both men were ruthlessly determined to achieve whatever it was they were ruthlessly determined to achieve. That said, their ambitions were not unusual amongst their social class.
Being a multi-billionaire was not the same as being rich. Doing what everyone else was doing felt like watching a thirteen inch TV in black and white with the sound turned way down. Parties weren’t fun enough, drugs didn’t get you high enough and ten naked women writhing around on the bed wanting you, needing you, begging for you just didn’t seem sexy enough to becoming a living god. No, the thrills of the lower upper-class simply bored the hell out of men like Jamison DuPont and Warwick Bundy.
The inherent DuPont and Bundy truths of the world were these: If ninety percent of the world’s population turned on each other and killed themselves in one gigantic, steaming bloody heap, there would still be too many lazy, stupid, useless eaters on the planet. To get this kind of honesty about humanity from either of these two men, however, you would have to be the proverbial fly on the wall.
However, to do something fun—something meaningful—men like DuPont and Bundy had to completely change the landscape of humanity. They needed to become all powerful, to hold sway over the masses, over beauty, over the very fabric of life itself.
2
Jamison was smoking his cigar in a jogging suit his wife bought last year when she was forced to slum it in Nordstrom’s for some forgettable charity event for cancer or AIDS or whatever. After taking the Greyhounds for a walk earlier, he was annoyingly sober, and he hadn’t had enough time to change into something more formal. Not that it mattered. He’d done business in his pajamas countless times before.
Smoke from Jamison’s and Warwick’s cigars clouded the library’s air with the sweetest scent. Gurkha’s premier cigar, His Majesty’s Reserve, was in Jamison’s opinion the finest cigar in the world, and at seven-hundred and fifty dollars apiece, he smoked it with deep appreciation. Jamison’s advancing years weren’t wearing on him all that well, what with the drinking and smoking, but pretty soon—when the east coast office gave him medical clearance and a date—like Atticus, he would have his treatment and the world will once more be at his beck and call.
“You’re going to ruin that suit of yours, Warwick,” he said, exhaling the smoke in his lungs. He sipped his Cognac slowly, respectfully.
Warwick Bundy, philanthropist and private investor, was a man ruled by power and sexual depravity. With an eye for young girls and a penchant for torture, Warwick Bundy practically wrote the book on bondage and discipline, dominance and submission. At his and Warwick’s last meeting nearly six months ago, there was a fifteen year old girl in restraints. Bound and ball-gagged with custom leather straps, chained to the sub-basement brick wall of Bundy’s Connecticut estate, he and Warwick discussed the idea of immortality at length. Jamison would never admit to being disturbed by Warwick’s alternative lifestyle, but he did flinch every time the man threw a metal-tipped dart at the sniffling, bleeding, gagged little girl.
Now Warwick was sitting in Jamison’s luxurious, non torture-proof office wearing his Alexander Amosu suit in what might as well be a forest fire of cigar smoke. At just over one-hundred thousand dollars, Warwick’s hand crafted suit boasted over five thousand individual stitches and reportedly took eighty-three hours of skilled labor to complete. Even more impressive to Jamison was the fact that Frederic Dormeuil of The House of Dormeuil personally selected the fabric, a rich mixture of real gold and platinum threads as well as a blend of Himalayan Pashmina, Qiviuk and Vicuna. That was not even mentioning the nine 18-carat gold and pave set diamond buttons sewn into the garment. Saying Warwick was ostentatious didn’t even begin to describe his friend.
Responding to Jamison’s assertion about ruining his suit, Warwick said, “I’ve got three more just like it. But what I don’t have enough of right now is that Cognac. Pass the bottle, will you?”
Warwick poured three fingers worth of the alcohol, took a generous sip and said, “It’s nearly eleven.”
“She’s just arrived,” Jamison said, hearing a car door shut outside. “Are you going to lead, or shall I?”
“You lead,” he said, opening his briefcase. He took out his beloved QSZ 92 semi-automatic pistol, a short, lethal product of Communist China, and said, “The only thing I want to say to that failure of a woman is open your mouth, bitch.”
<
br /> “Jesus, Warwick, put that away!”
Donning his trademark smile, a sadistic grin honed by decades of ritualistic abuse and meaningful torture, he said, “It only seems prudent considering how badly she fucked up the Van Duyn hit.”
“Let’s see what she has to say first.”
Eying the Louis XV French Rocco Armchair, Warwick said, “I’ve gotten bullets and blood out of more difficult fabrics, if you’re not opposed.”
“You’re not shooting her in my house,” Jamison said, congenial. “If you feel you need to kill her, please do so in the privacy your own estate.”
3
Brice O’Brien was an attractive middle-aged woman, not the kind of specimen one would imagine turning innocent children into sharp and feral killers. Surprisingly she bore no sign of fatigue from her cross-country flight. Her plane landed an hour ago and she managed to still look fresh, but in an inhuman sort of way. To Jamison, she looked more like a brand new doll you would unwrap and display on a shelf than the unrelenting, controlling force behind the teenage mass murderer hired to put down the young and impetuous Savannah Van Duyn.
“How was the flight?” Jamison asked.
“How is any flight?” she replied, monotone.
“Would you care for something to drink? Or perhaps I can have the staff prepare a late breakfast?” Jamison DuPont prided himself on being an attentive host. He once likened it to an art form.
“I’ve eaten, thank you.”
Warwick shifted uneasy in his chair, restlessness prickling off of him like static electricity. He drained his sifter like the alcohol came from a boxed Merlot rather than an eighteen hundred dollar bottle of the world’s finest Cognac. His eyes were bloodshot but crackling with life. Jamison knew too much small talk would only stoke the fires of malcontent already burning deep inside his friend, so he moved the meeting along.
