by Schow, Ryan
He was like a twelve year old girl on her period.
Swear to Jesus.
Sometimes he wanted to punch things, other times he wanted to cry. What the hell was that? Aniela said it was a fever. She said it was his heart not having a home.
She was right.
He knew it and it irritated him. He was supposed to be above this crap! Immune to things like falling in love and mourning the loss of it.
Now, he proved he could get just as tangled in the web of it as anyone else.
When he finally left the city for the desert highway, he did so with the lyrics and musical help of Slayer, Black Label Society, and Hellyeah. There was something comforting in hard rock music, in speed metal. It was the aggression he felt transformed into music, if you could call it that. It was his way of punching things without really punching things.
Somewhere in the middle of Slayer’s “World Painted Blood,” he started to cry, and then to sob.
Like a big stupid baby.
2
He cruised into San Francisco on fumes, literally, physically and emotionally. His restlessness broke about three hundred miles ago and now all he wanted was a soft bed and blackout drapes.
His destination was The Fairmont San Francisco, which sat at the intersection of California and Mason on Nob Hill overlooking the Financial District and Union Square. He drove his hearse right into valet parking. The looks on the porters’ faces…priceless.
This was no Ferrari, no Lamborghini, no Bentley. Not even a Honda Accord for heaven’s sake. It was a hearse. With death metal in the CD player, and a bumper sticker that read: “I see dead people.”
“Can I get your bags, sir?” the young porter asked. He was making a valiant effort not to judge Brayden, but the haughtiness was all over his tanned face. They could be the same age, but they were from different worlds altogether.
“Yeah,” he said and slipped a Jefferson in the porter’s hand. All the sudden the boy’s attitude changed. What a douche, he thought.
“What is…this thing, if you don’t mind me asking?” the blonde haired porter who looked like a surfer said from behind the hearse’s wheel.
“It’s me not being like every other rich fuckface in this country,” Brayden said before dragging his tired ass into the lobby.
He checked in at the front desk, still reeling from the size and décor of the lobby. He was in awe. Dumbstruck, actually. He’d always heard about The Fairmont, but to actually be there, to feel so unbelievably small and undeserving, it was something else. This was not a place for running game, this looked like a place for closing billion dollar deals. Or showing off your trophy wife’s brand new tits.
He was ushered to a balcony suite with large windows boasting both city and bay views. Everything screamed old money. From the bedding to the flooring to the draperies to the pale yellow paint, it was gorgeous. He handed the bellhop a twenty, stifled a yawn. After the man showed himself out, Brayden turned to the window and the glowing lights of the famous Transamerica building and beyond.
He practically sighed when he saw the heavy valances, the decorative draperies, and most especially…blackout drapes. He started to shut them, then hesitated. It was such a beautiful view. More civilized than Vegas. Cleaner. As late as it was, as weary as he felt, he left them open. Only after he showered and put on fresh boxers did he pull them shut, crawl into bed and close his eyes.
He was dead to the world when his cell phone rang. He didn’t remember hearing it ring and he didn’t remember answering it, he just heard a girl’s voice in his ear and he stirred to the sound of his own voice mumbling.
After a groggy moment, he realized the voice in his ear belonged to Abby. She was telling him not to worry, that she won’t need him for like another month so stay and enjoy Vegas and his girlfriend.
Speaking at this point felt like a monumental act. He was barely awake, still righteously drunk on sleep. Is this a dream? he wondered. Had to be.
“Already here,” he grumbled. His voice was like dirt: dense and gravely, barely understandable.
“You’re what?” she said, louder. Her voice…OMG, it was ruining his sleep.
He cleared his throat, felt himself emerge from what felt like a coma. He felt he had the biggest resting douche face ever. Not that things like that mattered when you were alone.
“Drove here last night,” he mumbled, realizing this was no dream. His lips were so dry they practically stuck together every time they touched. He licked them with a dry tongue.
Into the phone stuck right in his ear, Abby blew out a long, painful sigh. “Why’d you do that?” she asked. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
There was mucus in his throat, and sleep crust in his eyes. He pulled his cell away from his ear, blinked the blurriness out of his eyes and checked the time: 9:32 A.M. He shoved the forty-five pounds of blankets aside, sat up in bed and ran his hand over his stubbly head. Finally he put the phone back up to his ear and said, “Are you off your freaking balls right now?”
“Why would you say that?” she said. She sounded pissed.
“You called me, Abby,” he said. Jeeeezus fuh-reaking Christ, he was thinking, this is who I’m in love with?! He took a breath, then said, “When you told me Rebecca was re-kidnapped, what in Christ’s good name did you expect me to do? She’s my friend, too.”
“I shouldn’t have called.”
“Are you kidding me?” he barked, finally getting out of bed. The brain fog was all gone. He was thinking clearly now, enough to fully embrace the surge of irritation crashing into his heart.
“What?” she said.
“Don’t play dumb with me. After everything we survived in L.A., after me knowing what I know about you, you just left.”
“I know,” she said, her voice more solemn now.
“You knew your father was kicking me out of your house and you couldn’t at least say good-bye? God damn Abby, you haven’t even called!”
Now he was pacing.
“Doesn’t seem like it’s salted your game any,” she snapped with a cutting bite of sarcasm.
He stopped walking, stood ramrod straight in the middle of the nearly lightless room. “What are you saying?” he snapped.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally she asked, “Why are you so angry?”
“Ugh,” he groaned.
He went and opened the windows. Outside the city was spread before him like a painting. He wanted out of the darkness, into the light. He opened the French doors, stepped onto the balcony and collapsed into one of the patio chairs. The morning air was cool and clean smelling. It was refreshing. Like he could breathe again, like the festering heat inside him drew all its power from Nevada. Now he was in California and it felt good again, clean. In the distance, the bay waters appeared serene, a really deep blue. Below the surface, however, he knew the undercurrent was swift. That it could drag a man to his death in no time flat.
“That girl you were with,” she said, “the one who couldn’t take five minutes to let you talk to me without putting her mouth all over you. That’s what I’m saying about your game not being salted.”
“Oh my God, Abs, are you jealous?”
“No!”
“Well I’m trying to be a friend and you’re acting all this way and that.”
“There’s just so much going on,” she said, defeat sitting heavy in her voice. “I feels like my Titanic is sinking, if you catch my drift.”
“I do.”
“This isn’t PMS, Brayden. I’m really in the shit here.”
“I know,” he said. “I want to see you.”
“No,” she said too quickly, like some kind of a knee-jerk reaction.
The heat flooded back in a rush. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not,” he said. Silence. A freaking eternity of it. “Fine,” he replied. “Call me when you change your mind.”
He hung up the phone. He couldn’t be in love with a narcissist. Not wh
en he was one himself. Two positives equal a negative. The phone rang. He refused to answer it. He hit IGNORE. And for a fraction of a second, he considered tossing it over the balcony.
It rang again.
He ignored it again.
Then a text came through.
And then a second text after that.
He almost didn’t look at it, but he couldn’t help himself. Five minutes later he turned on his phone and read it.
RUDE.
I’M SORRY.
He called her back. “I’m sorry, too,” he said when she answered. Wow, this is painful, he thought.
“I should’ve said good-bye, but I’ve become manic and obsessive and I refuse to take pills for either,” she said. “Not that pills would help.”
“So what do you want to do?” he said, already itching to crawl back in bed. Or start drinking.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re so up and down!”
“I know,” she cried.
The way she sounded, how she had notes of pleading in her voice, he kind of felt bad for being so aggressive. Dammit though, she made him that way!
“Tell you what,” he conceded. “While you figure out what you want to do and what you want from me, if anything, I’m going to get the lay of the land, and maybe make some friends.”
She sat in silence for a minute, and he said nothing while he waited for her to reply, then very calmly and without much emotion, she said, “Okay.”
“Okay,” he echoed on the heels of her reply, but without even a shred of empathy.
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m disappointed,” he said. This wasn’t working. The one thing Brayden recognized from his time in Vegas was when to abandon a conversation thread, and a person. Switching to Vegas gaming mode, the way some people switch personalities, he perked halfway up, so gracefully it almost felt real, and said, “Not that it matters to you, but woman, I’m fully self-sufficient.”
“I’m sure you are. Psycho.”
He gave a half-hearted laugh, then said, “I am.”
“Well I have to get going.”
“Of course, you do,” he said, masking his real emotions. “I’ll hit you up later.”
And then it was over. She hung up. The Vegas façade dropped and he felt more alone than ever. He was reeling. No, he was hurt and irate. How the hell had he managed to fall for her?
Man, he thought, this is so stupidstupidstupid!
Razor Sharp
1
Shelton Gotlieb’s eyes bore the red tinge of a bloodshot stare. His temper blackened. He did not want to kill Savannah Van Duyn anymore, not the way he wanted to when he first heard Autumn had died. She was no threat to Monarch, or to the Virginia Corporation. She was just a girl in a new body. Even Gerhard said she was harmless. Sort of.
No, actually he said she was “off limits.”
Sitting in front of his computer in his office at Monarch’s headquarters, he couldn’t believe it was coming to this. It was time to kill her. Losing her after he worked so hard to track her down, or even faking a similar clone’s death the way Warwick Bundy had tried, would not go over well with the Director. It would be the death of him. So now he must be the death of her.
He had no choice. It was time.
He tracked her long enough with the bootleg NSA domestic spy technology. Time to rip this band-aid off and let whatever wound it created heal on its own. The wound being his guilty conscience. The wound being Savannah’s death.
He swore mightily under his breath, then picked up the phone and dialed the extension of the boy’s handler.
“I have her,” he said. Something inside of him sank. “Get Delta 1A prepped for action. You have the green light.”
“I’ll wake him and give him the bath,” the voice on the other end replied.
A.K.A. he was going to retrieve the boy from The Coffin Room and escort him to The Water Chamber Room where shock therapy would guarantee the integrity of the amnesic walls, i.e. the separation of personalities.
If caught, the boy must always, always remember to forget. Or he must kill himself. That was the bedrock of their institution. Their guarantee to the client.
“I’ll accompany you,” Shelton said. “I want to verify the structural integrity of the boy’s system. If he botches this job the way he botched the last job, we’re all three of us done for, do you understand?”
“Perfectly.”
“As in dead.”
“I understand, Shelton.”
“Good, I’ll see you in The Coffin Room in ten.”
2
Down the cold, empty hallway, a veritable tunnel of grey concrete floors and even darker grey painted walls, stood a series of locked metal doors, each with their own corresponding keypad entrance. The boy’s handler rounded a corner ahead. He went straight to The Coffin Room and punched a series of numbers on the keypad, then pressed his thumb to the biometrics pad. The soft beeping echoed down the hallway, along with the sounds of Shelton approaching. The boy’s handler saw Shelton, nodded, then went inside. Shelton followed him.
Coffin-sized boxes lined the large room’s walls. The handler was already unfastening the metal latches on the box holding the boy. When it opened, the handler lifted the lid, peered inside. The boy looked dead. The handler went through the necessary steps and commands to wake him. It didn’t take long. When the boy’s eyes fluttered open, when life flooded back into his body, the handler called Gem forward.
After a brief system analysis revealed the boy’s system to finally be stable, the boy was asked to accompany them to The Water Chamber Room, a room down the hall. In The Water Chamber Room, four other kids lay in similar coffin-like chambers filled with water. Every so often, the sound of an administered shock followed by the faintest of splashing broke the room’s silence.
The way the water chamber worked was move even a muscle, and the water gets hit with a surge of electricity. Under that kind of physical strain, while trying not to move or even breathe, the brain eventually shuts down. The mind’s only response is to crawl so deep inside itself it practically doesn’t exist.
Perfect dissociation is the key to an undetectable mind control slave. The personality doing the killing does not know the host personality, and vice versa. The kill is made and the host is returned to the front, feeling only a loss of time. Or a blackout period.
Personalities are born and separated by trauma. Amnesic walls are erected to keep the alters, or personalities, from knowing about each other, except for Gem—the on board system administrator. Under these conditions, the foundation for a perfect assassin was both born and maintained.
The boy was not a perfect assassin. He was, however, close enough. He removed his clothes, climbed willingly into the water. He was not a boy with real thoughts, but a human made into a slave designed only to obey orders.
In the case of the water chamber, the recently strengthened Omega alter—the suicide alter—had to be fortified. During a mission, if the assassin was compromised or caught, this alter, the Omega alter, would take over and end the body’s life. All slaves were programmed this way. That was how you tie up the loose ends. That was how Monarch’s programmers and their mind control programs were never discovered. Not even through therapy. With the mind sciences being what they were today, anyone could be a patsy, the perfect fall guy, and they wouldn’t even know it, that’s how developed the process was. History is littered with men like this: Presidential killers, mass murderers, terrorists, gunman out on senseless shooting sprees, cult leaders.
At this point, with the boy’s sordid past, i.e., the screw up of the Van Duyn murder, whether he survived this mission or not was irrelevant to the Director. The boy was expendable. All he needed to do was complete the kill. To give the lovely Savannah Van Duyn a most horrible death.
After that, circumstances would dictate his outcome.
Ruby Skye
1
Netty says, “Let’s go out tonight,” but Geo
rgia doesn’t have a fake ID, and there’s no way in hell we’re hitting the eighteen and over scene. Talk about bush league.
Georgia says, “My ID won’t be a problem.”
Uh, yeah it will, I’m thinking.
We both look at her, but it’s Netty who speaks first. “It will be a problem if you don’t have a fake ID.”
“Mine will do fine,” Georgia says, totally calm, completely confident. Netty looks at me and I look at her and we both shrug our shoulders.
“Just don’t get us arrested,” is what I tell her.
So the three of us head out to Ruby Skye which is one of San Francisco’s premier night clubs. We’re talking two stories of awesome lighting, killer beats spun by some of the world’s most talented DJs, VIP rooms, local celebrities, and Netty assures us some yummy, yummy men.
On the way there, Netty and I can’t stay calm. I’ve got the music blasting, the moon roof open to let in the cool night air, and we’re dancing in our seats.
This is how it should be, how life should feel for girls our age. Even Georgia looks relaxed and, dare I say, happy, although I’m not sure she knows it yet.
Netty’s talking about the fun we’ll have, how the club is dark and beautiful and how anything is possible. When we arrive, you can practically feel the beat throbbing in the cement beneath your feet. A sweeping sensation rolls over me, whispers through me, leaves me with goose bumps and the feel of anxious anticipation. I want inside like right NOW.
But Georgia’s ID…
We wait in line for like forever, then when we get near, the bouncer’s face kind of scrunches up and he folds at the waist just the slightest bit, his hand going to his stomach. It’s like he’s got period cramps or the boiling thunder of diarrhea in the works. Me and Netty hand him our fake ID’s and you can see the strain in his face now, the veins standing out, the chords in his neck pulling taught.
