by Schow, Ryan
I set my cup down and smile. It isn’t a pleasant smile. It’s clearly forced. “I don’t appreciate being lied to. I’m young, but I’m not naïve. Not by a mile.”
Her stiff demeanor breaks. Her eyes sparkle with the start of tears and I see she’s upset about something. Maybe everything. “I didn’t say she was attending classes. I simply said she was there.”
“Oh.”
“As she might have told you, she was diagnosed with Cystic-Fibrosis, and that she had a lung transplant.”
“She mostly mentioned this, yes.”
“She shouldn’t have said anything about anything.”
I sit up straighter and say, “Well she did. Because that’s what friends do, they tell each other stuff. They share their pain.”
“Never-the-less, this new procedure, the attempt to give her a new identity that does not match that of her other friends, has taken a turn for the worse. We think the earlier complications in her health might be the cause, but honestly no one knows for sure. My husband is there now, consulting with Dr. Gerhard.”
“She’s in…his lab?” I say. And here I thought she might still be in San Francisco.
“Yes.”
How have I not seen her? Because I haven’t been down to the lab, that’s why.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“It’s been months and her body is not only deteriorating, it seems whatever measures the doctor is taking only serve to make her situation more dire,” she says, her voice choked up and raw. “I don’t even recognize my own baby anymore. She’s barely even human to me.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say, Mrs. Quick.”
“Don’t tell me how to talk in my own home, young lady,” she snaps, fresh tears sparkling in her eyes. Her tone is sharp, her pain too obvious to ignore.
I stand and say, “I’ll leave you to your thoughts. I appreciate your time and your candor.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll show myself out.”
I’m closing the front door behind me when I hear a sob take her by surprise. “Wait,” she says, but I don’t wait. Whatever compassion she needs from me right now, I simply can’t give her. I just want to get home. To talk to Gerhard. Whatever damage he’s done to Georgia, I’m going to make sure he undoes it.
Taming the Nuisance
1
With Georgia falling apart, her father crawling up his spine on a daily basis, and Arabelle hounding him for more personal attention, it’s all Gerhard could do to stay right minded. That’s when Warwick Bundy called and kicked him over the edge.
“I know she’s there with you,” Warwick barked. “She’s nowhere else on earth, which means Savannah Van Duyn is there. With you.”
“What are you worried about, Bundy? That she’s going to tell our little secret? She hasn’t yet, so I feel comfortable saying she won’t at all. And she’s not here with me, so stop suggesting it.”
“Loose ends always have a way of coming back to haunt us, Dr. Gerhard.”
“I agree, which is why I haven’t stopped looking for her. My private investigators have now broadened their search outside the U.S.” He didn’t have investigators, but he hoped the lie would pry Bundy off his back. Nothing else was working. He’d have no choice but to hire a private investigator now, but for an entirely different reason than Warwick wanted.
“When did you contact them last? These investigators of yours.”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Call them again and get back to me.”
“No, Bundy. I have a problem with one of our clients, and it’s requiring my full attention. If my investigators have anything they’ll call me and I’ll call you.”
“You know, Wolfgang, you’re the link that ties her to us. If you didn’t exist, it would be the same as us not existing.” The threat was less than subtle.
“If you don’t want to exist, Bundy, go jump off a goddamn cliff.”
He hung the phone up hard. Then he stewed.
And then he plotted.
2
Three days later Gerhard’s brand new investigator called him with the good news. With everything set, he called Warwick Bundy with good news of his own.
“My investigators found her,” he said.
“Where?”
“Prague. But my guy says she’s leaving in three days for a tour she booked last week. Rome, Paris, Morocco and Venice. Her tour schedule has her traveling for three weeks, so if you want to get this handled, you’ll have to move quickly.”
“How quickly?”
“In the next three days, of course.”
“That’s not enough time,” Warwick said.
“For what?”
“To make…arrangements.”
“You jelly-spined bitch,” Gerhard snarled. “You tried bragging to me about your body count, yet here you are, trying to farm out a job this easy. I’m so disgusted right now I could spit.”
“I’m a busy man.”
“Too busy for this? Get on a plane, go to Prague, do her then come back. It’s that easy.”
“I’m not above getting my hands dirty, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” he said.
“Says the guy in the mini-skirt,” Gerhard taunted.
The silence on both ends was the telephone version of a staring contest. Gerhard didn’t say a word. Finally Warwick broke. “Right,” he said, his voice sour. “Fine. Send me the details.”
“Doing that as we speak.”
“Oh, and Gerhard? If you’re wrong about her, about this, I’ll personally drive a fucking stake through your heart.”
Smiling into the phone, Gerhard said, “Over the decades, better men have tried, yet here I am, the picture of health and youth, and more alive than ever.”
3
Gerhard emailed Warwick two scanned photographs and the address of the latest girl turned out from subject 452 from Prague in Amsterdam, Savannah’s DNA host. That the latest version of this girl was in Prague was no surprise. 452 from Prague was in fact, from Prague. The similarities between his first version of Savannah and the girl in the photo were close enough to survive whatever scrutiny Bundy might place upon her.
He only hoped Bundy wasn’t a sackless braggart.
The next day Gerhard boarded a plane to the Czech Republic where he eventually tracked down the very social, sexually vibrant girl Warwick was on his way to kill.
It was a Saturday night in Prague’s Central Canal Ring when he finally laid eyes on her. This girl who could be the changed version of Savannah. She was getting kissed in the dark by two men, both wearing leather pants and Goth-themed shirts. The place was Paradiso, a hipster nightclub that used to be an architecturally stunning, three story church in its former, more religious life. Now it’s one of the most popular clubs in Prague.
Later, inside the club, Gerhard watched her entertain various men and some interested women, eventually pushing them all away, flirtatiously, and sometimes with a parting kiss.
Once, around eleven, she made out with a girl, a gorgeous blonde thing with a rail for a body and barely any tits, and all the guys within twenty feet—every single one of them—were literally drooling. Jaws slack, dumbfounded.
Riveted.
Looking at her, Gerhard almost hated the role he was playing in cutting her life short. After all, she seemed to be adapting famously to her new looks and confidence.
What was her story? he wondered.
Maybe she was an emaciated socialite stricken with AIDS from doing heroin and crank with the kinds of scumbag druggies who would share needles with others knowing they were terminal. Maybe she was just ugly. Or sick. Maybe she was fat and unloved, like Savannah. Better yet, could she have been pretty when what her parents really wanted was for her to be drop-dead gorgeous? Whatever the case, she was nothing short of mesmerizing. A product of his science.
Perfect.
Standing under the domed ceiling on the third tier balcony overlooking the stage, he nursed his drink a
nd watched her in the hazy gloom of the darkened club. The music thudded against his ears, threatening to give him a headache, and the cigarette smoke from some homosexual nearby was drying out his lungs.
Despite the smoke, this was more entertainment than he’d enjoyed in years.
Below, on the second floor balcony, the girl was watching the live band performing on the first floor stage. Her body was in sync with the rhythm, almost like she was otherworldly rather than a flesh and bone human being. A sexualized sound wave in motion. Lust personified. If there wasn’t something severely wrong with him, if he had the ability or the desire to love another human being, or even fall prey to the carnal hunger of his youth, he would be enthralled with her. But he was barely human. Nearly incapable of honest love. And as seductive as she was, he felt almost nothing for her.
Later, around two A.M.—with her friends—she got into the backseat of a pearl white Jaguar XF; a straight-walking skinny brunette with big hair and a tiny waist he saw her with earlier was driving. He followed the girls home in his rental car.
The Savannah Van Duyn doppelganger practically fell out of the car, giggled up a storm, then said good-bye to her friends entirely too loudly for entirely too long. When the Jag pulled off, she staggered up the steps, fumbled with the keys for a millennia, then finally managed to open the door and push her way inside. The spring-loaded door shut and the lights in the hallway flicked on. Moments later, a second floor window lit up. Within ten minutes the glow of the window fell into darkness once more.
At this hour, drunk as she was, the girl was no doubt in bed.
He waited. The last minutes of Sunday night passed unceremoniously. Then, in the dark, early hours of Monday morning, Warwick Bundy made an appearance, in the shadows, no less.
“About time you son of a bitch,” he mumbled. Upon seeing the man, every single annoyance crept up at once. It was as if he were holding an avalanche of misery at bay only to have it crash over the top of him all at once.
He watched Bundy break into the girl’s house, quietly, efficiently. Gym bag in hand, Gerhard got out of his rental, hurried through the shadows and slipped in the front door Bundy left unlocked.
“Idiot,” he whispered as he snuck inside.
He tip-toed up the narrow stairway to the girl’s room, and again Bundy left the door unlocked. Gerhard allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness for a moment, then he eased the door open and went inside.
In her bedroom, Warwick was standing over the girl, gun in hand. Bundy clamped a gloved hand over the sleeping girl’s mouth and when her eyes flashed open, he jammed the silenced end of his pistol into her belly and said, “This is for all the trouble you caused me you stupid little ingrate.”
The girl shook her head free of Warwick’s hand and, in harried Czech, said, “Vem si co chceš!” Take whatever you want!
“A pokud to co chci je tvůj život?” Warwick asked with a sneer in his voice. And if what I want is your life?
“Prosím,” she pleaded. Please.
He adjusted the gun, pulled the trigger, shooting the girl in the lung. She heaved out a breath, as if gut punched. Her face opened up with surprise. A dying, slow-motion gasp.
Barely able to contain his breathing, the very excited Gerhard moved through the room in near silence. How long had it been since he killed anyone like this? Too long, he thought.
Way too long.
Five feet from the man, raising a pistol of his own, Gerhard waited for Warwick to turn around. Instead, the giant man stood hunched over the girl, listening to her ragged breathing, her weak crying, as if looking into her nearly lifeless eyes, anticipating the departure of her soul.
“Typical Bundy,” Gerhard announced, referring to the murderous Ted Bundy, Warwick’s alleged cousin. Bundy whirled around and Gerhard shot him once in the chest.
Warwick looked sucker-punched from the shot. “What the—?”
“For a moment, I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Gerhard said. “But here you are. Dying in the flesh.”
Looking down at his chest, touching it and bringing back bloody fingers, Warwick tried to raise his gun, but it slipped from his hand and fell with a clack! on the hardwood floor. Squinting in the dark, trying to focus his eyes, he said, “You.”
“I wanted you to live long enough to know it was me who put you down.”
“But—”
Gerhard shot him again in the chest, then once in the head. Bundy’s head snapped back, but then he fell forward and landed face first on the floor with a bone shattering crack.
Gerhard dragged Bundy out of the way to attend to the dying girl. He was, after all, a doctor. Standing over her, his hands in latex gloves, he peeled back the girl’s eyelids, checked for signs of life. She was barely hanging on.
“You’re not dead are you?” he asked in Czech. She managed a slow blink, her eyes turning to where Bundy was only moments ago. “Two in the heart, one in the head. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
She seemed to relax, but not into death. Good. He switched on the bedside lamp so he could see her better. The resemblance to Savannah was uncanny. Then again, he was used to this, this creation he considered as part of his assembly line of dolls.
“Jsi můj anděl?” she said, barely intelligible. Are you my angel?
“Anděl, ano, jen ne váš anděl,” Gerhard answered. An angel, yes. Just not your angel.
“Tak čí?” she said, blood staining her teeth and drizzling in a line from the corner of her lovely mouth. Then whose?
“Smrt,” he answers with a great deal of satisfaction. “Smrt. Jsem anděl smrti.” Death. I am the Angel of Death.
“But there was only,” she struggled to say, coughing at first then continuing with the faintest of whispers, “only one Angel of Death.”
Taking delight in this turn of events, he says, “Yes, my dear. You’re quite right. There is, was, and will only ever be one Angel of Death. Me.”
“But he’s dead,” she said. “You can’t be…him.”
“Says the dead girl in the bed.”
She blinked, not understanding, and her eyes slid to the right, to the gun in his hand. He lifted it slowly to her forehead, pressed the muzzled end of the silencer into the space between her eyes. In his thick German tongue, in words she couldn’t understand, but words that meant so much to him, he said, “Ich werde sie in Hölle, sie schöne abscheu sehen.” I’ll see you in hell, you lovely abomination.
Before she could die on her own, Gerhard pulled the trigger and sighed as the euphoria of her passing flittered through him like the wings of a million Monarch butterflies. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of souls he sent to the other side, he never tired of the errand. Some people, they were simply meant to die. As if they were born for it.
When the ecstasy finally dimmed its light, Gerhard removed a pair of surgical pliers and what looked like oversized garden snippers. He pulled out both Warwick’s and the girl’s teeth, then used the industrial snippers to take their fingers and toes. After that, he poured acid down their faces so as to completely destroy their identities. When he left the house, just before he shut the door on those two perfect corpses, he set the place on fire and thought of something beautiful.
4
Gerhard returned to his office jet lagged and weary. To make matters worse, when he arrived there early Tuesday morning, it was to an irate looking Abby Swann. She was standing just outside his office door.
“Nurse Arabelle told me you’d be back this morning,” she said.
“What now?”
“I met with Georgia’s parents earlier this week,” she said, pushing off the wall she was leaning on. “You were away.”
He managed to keep his emotions in check, but they were volatile from his non-stop adventure in Prague, and he was having a hard time not snapping at her.
“Your determination is, as always, overwhelming.”
He unlocked the door, walked past her into the office. She followed him.
“
Take me down to see Georgia,” she demanded. “I know you have her here. You need to tell me what’s happening.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
He was still fresh from the kill, the violence, that sensual transition from life to death he clung to like the last bits of oxygen. That wrong, broken part of him that made him homicidal, it was some kind of potion that swam through his blood like adrenaline or drugs. In his mind, he envisioned Abby dead. This one, not the one from Prague. This one he saw with her head cut completely off.
“You will tell me or so help me, Gerhard, I will go to the press this very—”
He spun around fast, cupping her mouth with his hand, the back of her neck with the other. The animal in him broke loose, desperate to add one more death to his already impressive body count. He started to squeeze, saw himself breaking her neck, saw her dying at his feet, and it felt good.
It felt right.
What he did not expect, however, was the weapon being jammed in his gut. Nor could he have foreseen the look in Abby’s eyes. Stone cold determination. The swell of anticipation inside him was on hands and knees clawing for violence.
It pushed against his will to think this through. To be smart. That thing inside him wanted to twist her neck, to hear the joyous sounds of cracking and breaking.
She would get him though.
She would fire off whatever weapon she had on him without hesitation. The same as he had done to the girl in Prague. He felt his mind grow still. Wouldn’t that be an ironic twist of events? Wouldn’t that be a perfect waste of bravado? Not that it would matter.
Slowly he removed his hand from her face; she stepped back and said, “I knew you were a lunatic, but now you went too far.” If she was angry before, she was red-faced with rage now. If he wasn’t wondering about his own play so much, he would admire this fierce little monster he created.
He looked down, saw the tazer gun she was holding.
“So shoot me,” he snarled. The beast inside of him was practically seething, like some blistered demon fighting to overtake his body with need.
