by Schow, Ryan
It’s practically inevitable.
“I can’t seem to get you out of my mind,” he says, lower into the phone. Funny thing about the truth is it isn’t as loud as lies or excuses.
“Yeah, well you stomped right out of mine when you rejected me. I’m basically over you, Professor Teller.”
“Then hang up on me,” he says. The note of challenge in his voice pisses me off. I think of doing just that. I almost do. But I don’t.
Damn.
Am I not over him? I’m out of bed, pacing the room. I’m gritting my teeth thinking I’m about to start screaming obscenities into the phone.
“You suck,” I tell him.
“You suck,” he mocks with laughter in his voice.
“Why do I suck?”
“Because all you had to do was hang up,” he says. “Because if you would have hung up, my life would be so uncomplicated right now.”
“As would mine, Jake,” I say, trying his first name on again. Right now he isn’t my teacher. He could be more. Something in me begins to flower. An idea.
No.
This isn’t real. The ice returns to my voice.
“So why are you calling me? To tell me when I’m eighteen we can hook up?” My dream man doesn’t answer right away, so I roll over in bed and huff out a sigh. “Answer the question, Professor.”
“Stop calling me that,” he says. “It makes me feel old.”
“At this point, why should I give a shit? Forget calling you Professor, or Jake. I should call you master manipulator because that’s what you are. You let me into your hotel room in the middle of the night, you kiss me, you suck my tits for heaven’s sake, and then it’s all no, no, no. I never expected to hear from you again, yet here you are, calling me. How did you get my number anyway?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Omigod.
“Really?!”
“You could’ve hung up,” he says softly. His voice, it’s warm toffee. It’s sexy and reassuring and it leaves me aching deep in my bones. In my loins. “But you didn’t,” he says.
Damn.
I remain completely silent. At this point, my heart rate can be measured on the Richter scale. Is this really happening?
“No,” I reply. “I didn’t hang up.”
“I want to see you,” he says. “I have to see you.”
“No.” My voice is firm, but inside, I want to say yes. I’m dying to say yes. Inside, thankfully, everything has gone quiet. I’m not thinking of all the things I can’t stop thinking about and this has me scared. Jake Teller is one giant red flag.
“Why not?” he says.
“My life is…complicated.” It is. But is it that complicated? Too complicated for the yummy, irresistible Jake Teller?
“It will not get less complicated the older you get,” he replies.
“You don’t know me well enough to make that assertion,” I say. My tone is tight, but that’s only because the steady unraveling of my life comes roaring back into my head. Rebecca, Brayden, the ultra-ferocious Sensei Naygel.
“You’re right,” he says, “I don’t. But I’d like to. I mean, we could maybe get together for a normal kind of a…I don’t know…whatever. Lunch or something.”
“Like a date?”
“Yes.”
“God, you’re a dork,” I say, trying not to laugh. Now he starts laughing and I say, “So what did you have in mind?”
“I haven’t gotten that far,” he says. “I didn’t think you’d say yes. Hell, I wasn’t even planning on asking.”
“Why not?” I want to make this hard on him. If only because I can.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d hang up on me or not.”
“I almost did.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he says.
“Just remember, I almost did.”
“Okay,” he says.
“I’m staying with a friend in San Francisco, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out there—”
“I’ll come to you,” he interrupts.
“Let me think about it,” I tease. “Can I call you in a week or so?”
The disappointment in his voice is not hard to miss. “I guess. If you want to wait that long.”
“I have a friend coming to see us, and Brayden is probably going to come here, too.” To help me wage war on Rebecca’s captor and my assailant. “When I have a free day, I’ll definitely let you know.”
“If you don’t—”
“I will,” I say, a little too fast.
“Okay,” he says.
The confidence in his voice is returning. I suppose that’s okay. When I think about it, he was only trying to do the right thing. The legal thing. The moral thing. How can I hold that against him?
I can’t.
“I’ll call you as soon as I can. I promise.” I put all the sincerity in my voice I can muster because truthfully I don’t want him to change his mind.
I so want to be with him.
He gives me his number and I write it down breathlessly. Professor Jake Teller is taking me out on a date! Holy crap. This can’t be real!
After saying good-bye and hanging up, I look at the number again, pinch myself, then look at it again and think: this is real.
Cooked Potatoes
1
Night had fallen on San Francisco, the day expired. Inside her place, Arabelle made dinner, but she couldn’t get the new version of Wolfgang out of her mind. When he was removed from his canister, when he was brought out of his medically induced coma, he came to. He was groggy, too groggy and not right. His new body was adjusting. Just not fast enough. He couldn’t seem to steady his head.
He was like a newborn.
Dr. Heim made the decision to put him under again. Only so he could wake Wolfgang a little bit slower. The waking process was always different. Some specimens woke in ten minutes; others needed more time, sometimes a full day.
Wolfgang’s eyes were loose.
Unfocused.
Arabelle feared something was permanently wrong with him. She looked at Dr. Heim and there was concern in his eyes, too. She tried not to panic. Memories of Georgia sprung to mind. During her last transformation, the girl nearly died. She had to be taken to Canada.
Arabelle panicked a little.
For a moment, this new version of her savior looked up at her and the trembling in his eyeballs ceased, but only for a moment. That’s when she saw it. The look.
It filled her soul with ice.
Inside those new pupils was pure darkness. The phrase “harbinger of death” seemed fitting. Her first thought was, this is the old Wolfgang Gerhard. The previous version of him. She thought, this is Josef Mengele. The Nazi war criminal. The Angel of Death.
His original, sadistic self.
She looked away, quickly, like a reflex. The look penetrated her, though, a cancerous, creeping thing, an ominous sensation she couldn’t shake. When she left the lab, she did so thinking there was a soullessness about him, a wickedness that—quite honestly—made her feel like fleeing the city, the state, perhaps even the country.
Instead, she focused on Alice. Back at home, they were standing in her kitchen, chicken was frying on the stove, and an open bottle of Merlot stood on the counter. Alice looked at Arabelle’s glass of red wine. Arabelle handed it to her.
Alice drank the wine.
The face the little girl made, it was like she was drinking straight lemon juice. She put the glass back on the counter and went to the fridge looking for something less…alcoholic. She pulled out the milk, took a dirty glass from the dishwasher and filled it to the top.
She drank and wiped her mouth, and through all of it, they didn’t say a word to each other. It was like that sometimes.
At dinner, they sat on the couch looking out the large window overlooking the bright lights of the city. There was only silence.
Finally Alice said, “Why are you so sad?”
“I was thinking of my life as little girl. Before Wolf
gang, Dr. Gerhard, saved me.”
Alice said nothing for a long time. Then she looked at Arabelle and wouldn’t blink. She was creepy and gifted like that.
Arabelle swallowed her mostly chewed chicken, took a long sip of wine, then cleared her throat, rolled her neck and said, “I was pretty girl made ugly by life in Ukraine. When I was twenty-one, my face was like the cooked potatoes I ate as child. My skin”—she says, making an disgusted face and motioning to her cheeks—“was bad. Cigarettes, alcohol, so much abuse for young girl. Made me old before I should be. No longer good for love. Or sex.”
“What’s sex?” Alice asked.
“It’s when man puts his penis in a girl’s vagina and baby is sometimes made.”
“What’s a penis?”
“It’s an ugly thing. It’s the private parts of a man and it brings only pain.”
“I don’t like penises,” Alice said.
“When I was twenty-one, I was sold to man who own massage parlor. Made to rub fat, lonely men all day, to jerk them off.”
“What is jerking off?” Alice asked. She put a forkful of green beans in her mouth, but she didn’t blink. Her face was constant curiosity.
Arabelle made a stroking motion with her hand, pointed to her privates. Alice finally blinked. Her face went red and she looked down.
“One day, Wolfgang come into massage parlor. He was not like dirty men I see all day. He keep his underwear on. He keep his hands to himself. He ask me where I am from and I say Ukraine. When I was done with massage, he said, ‘Would you like me get you out of here?’ and for some reason I start to cry.”
“Why did you cry?” Alice asked.
“I tell him the sadness of my life. That I am slave. I tell him my past and instead of trying to use me for sex, he takes my hand and walks me out front door. Just like that. Then he puts me in here, in the canister and now I am free and beautiful. But still sad. Canister cannot erase memories.”
“How old are you?” Alice asked. For the first time, she looks like an innocent child. Not like the supernatural killer Arabelle knows her to be. It’s almost tender.
“Almost thirty, I think. Maybe more. I do not celebrate birthdays. And after Wolfgang changed my body, I think I am looking younger than my real years.”
Alice just stared into Arabelle’s amethyst eyes, mesmerized. Finally she said, “Dr. Gerhard is not a nice man.”
“He has awful heart, but he is kind to me,” Arabelle replied.
“Awful?”
“During war, he was monster to many people. He killed…so many. But he is genius, too.”
“I watched him kill some people,” Alice admitted in a small voice. Then, in as small a voice, she said, “I killed people, too. I killed a boy.”
“There are many boys I wanted to kill,” Arabelle said. “Men, too.”
Alice stood, dragged her chair around the table next to Arabelle. The woman just sat there, expressionless, watching the child. Alice climbed onto her chair, took Arabelle’s hand. Looking up at her the way a child looks up to her mother, in the sweetest, most innocent voice ever, Alice said, “Maybe we can kill them together.”
The Curious Case of Shelton Gotlieb
1
Most of the principles at the Virginia Corporation were either dead or disappeared. Even the robotic Brice O’Brien was missing. As in gone. Dead at the hands of the ruthless Warwick Bundy. Shelton Gotlieb knew this, but he wouldn’t tell the higher ups at Monarch Enterprises that Bundy admitted to killing the woman. The Director still had people searching for her.
He was still thinking she might be alive.
Even worse, Warwick Bundy was now dead. Found shot and burned to death in an apartment in Prague with a young corpse who could very well have been Savannah Van Duyn, but according to Gerhard was not the real Savannah Van Duyn. That it never made the national news was a mystery Shelton had yet to solve. Someone—perhaps a member of the Bundy family—did not want the scandal, so they somehow managed to suppress the media.
Such was the influence of the power-elite.
It was a good attempt at putting the Savannah Van Duyn matter to rest. Gerhard got to Bundy, then he killed the copy of Savannah. Warwick Bundy, he needed to be killed, but one of the girls fashioned after Savannah’s original clone, 452 from Prague? Not really. Gerhard bore a certain, unusual fondness for this girl. For Savannah. In spite of what he did to Bundy and Savannah’s doppelganger in Prague, either there wasn’t enough evidence recovered to make an identification, or the story was in fact squashed locally. If the media had a wider reach or more influence, if identifications were indeed made, the Director might know about Bundy, and he might have fallen for the ruse of the Savannah model. But that wasn’t the case, so the Director was in the dark. And now Gotlieb was forced to cross Gerhard, a position he was fast regretting, but committed to never-the-less.
2
Shelton Gotlieb was responsible for multiple contracts in Brice’s absence. He feared he would be Miss O’Brien’s permanent replacement any day, but he did not want the job. Too risky. He would take it if asked, but he would surely regret it. The minute he agreed to close out Savannah’s contract, he realized his error. With the demise of the Virginia Corporation, he wondered the point anymore.
This damned contract. It haunted him more than ever now.
So as not to go against Gerhard’s need to protect the girl, Shelton considered staging her death, just as Warwick attempted before he found himself dead, only better. Done properly, he could close the contract once and for all. The higher ups would never know. They wouldn’t even care. To them, a contract was simply moving funds from an escrow account into their offshore account. How the job got done wasn’t really their concern, was it?
He just didn’t want Gerhard knowing. The man was a killer. The worst kind.
In the end, the weight on his shoulders should have broken his back. What a mess! His own tragic dilemma. The thing that kept him up most nights. More than ever, he cursed himself for ever trying to be more than he was.
After weeks of this kind of pressure, he was cracking and decided to come clean. Taking a deep breath, he picked up the phone, dialed the Director’s extension.
“I know about Brice O’Brien,” he admitted to the man. His voice carried the tenor of defeat, but the relief he felt in unburdening himself drained the weight of his guilt. Who knew secrets would weigh so much?
“Tell me what you know,” the Director said in a brisk, curious tone.
“I just learned Warwick Bundy killed her in the meeting about the botched hit on the Van Duyn family.”
Shelton heard a soft intake of breath, then a long exhale, then silence. “A catastrophic blunder,” the Director finally said regarding the public deaths of four innocent people based on bad intelligence and one unreliable Monarch slave.
“Yes, sir. A terrible mistake.”
“How long have you known?” the Director asked. His voice left shivers racing down Shelton’s spine.
“This is fresh intel, sir,” he lied. “But it’s been an unbearable burden. I should have told you earlier, but I wanted to verify it first.”
“You’re human,” the Director replied. “Humans don’t always follow orders to the letter.” In a strange sort of way, he sounded more tired than upset. Shelton could hardly believe it. Was the Director really going to buy the lie, that he didn’t know all along?
“Sir?”
“Sadly, there is nothing to make you do what we need done because you are not one of ours.” A programmed slave. A human robot. Emotionless. “You’re doing a job not meant for a feeling human.”
“I believe I understand, sir.”
But he didn’t understand at all. The humility the Director was showing him set his teeth on edge. Was the man going to have him killed?
“We have someone, one of ours, who will take over Mrs. O’Brien’s current projects. You’ve done well with what you’ve been given, but I am officially relieving you of Mrs. O’Brien’s
duties.”
Oh, no. Release of responsibility…could this be his end? To willingly step down would most certainly be seen as an act of cowardice, which was the same as weakness. With Monarch, weakness meant death.
“I’ve found her, sir. No one else has been able to do that. So, if you permit me, I would like to oversee the completion of the Van Duyn contract.” He spoke too quickly, almost defensively. Dammit. What the hell was he thinking? He didn’t want this encumbrance anymore! This was his way out! All he had to do was take it. Just take the out.
“There is no need for bravado,” the Director replied. “You are a programmer, not a manager.”
“I understand, sir, but I want this. I can do it.” He could hardly believe the fraudulence spewing from his mouth right now. He wasn’t anxious to do this job; he was anxious only to live.
The minute he failed to have purpose, he was dead.
“In light of this new information,” the Director said, “Warwick must be eliminated.”
Obviously the Director did not know he was dead. Okay, Shelton thought, I can manage this.
“I will have Warwick…taken care of, sir,” he said, confidence finding its way into his voice once more. Especially since the man was already worm food. “And what about the surviving members of the Virginia Corporation? Are they to be eliminated as well?”
“No. The Virginia Corporation still has value.”
“But sir, all the principles are either dead or in the wind.”
He had a conversation with Gerhard about this recently. About eliminating Jamison DuPont and Tate Russell. It was now in the news that DuPont was killed, but Russell was wanted for questioning in the deaths of three women at his home in L.A. He thought of Autumn, how she was one of the deceased found on Russell’s property. How her face looked after having being shot-gunned into meat soup. This bothered him immensely. It had him squirming in his skin and vowing to have Russell killed.
