He’s not exactly alone, which is part of why I’m having trouble processing the situation. Sitting next to Vince, between him and me, is another Vince, one of his copies. This one appears to be asleep, though. The Vince who spoke has his left hand resting gently on the sleeping Vince’s forehead. Also, the sleeping one is totally naked.
So I think, on the whole, I can be excused for being a bit off of my game. It’s a pretty weird situation to walk into.
“You’re home a few minutes earlier than I expected, Dan,” Vince continues. He grits his teeth, and I can hear them grind against each other from across the room. “I was hoping to have a buffer in play by the time you got here, just in case.”
“In case?” I ask, finally having gotten my mouth functioning.
“In case I can’t stop myself from killing you, you worthless cretin,” he snarls.
The intensity of his hate is almost a palpable force, and I take a step backwards. “I — what?”
“You’re disgusting, Dan. Like an infected boil. You physically revolt me.” His right hand is gripping the arm of the couch, and I can see his fingers sinking deep into the cushioning. “I want to know how to do what you do, but even being this close to you is like standing knee-deep in a sewer. You’re human filth.”
I’m about to say something witty, like “Feel free to leave at any time,” when the sleeping Vince stirs and opens his eyes. He’s clearly not simply waking up, though. There’s none of that muzzy-headedness that comes with shaking off sleep. He doesn’t look around or take in his surroundings at all. Instead, as soon as his eyes open, they focus directly on me. It’s unnerving.
“Ah, this is so much better,” says the naked Vince.
“Easy for you to say,” says the clothed one, removing his hand from the other’s forehead.
“Everything’s much clearer, One. As expected.”
Maybe it’s clearer for them, but I’m totally not up to speed on what’s going on, which is becoming an uncomfortably familiar sensation. I focus on what I do understand: violent criminals have broken into my house and threatened to kill me. Phrased that way, I suppose that I do have a decent handle on the situation after all. I may not be clear on their motivations or why one of them is naked, but those aren’t really the key aspects. Not getting killed is.
Unfortunately, my weapons at hand are a glass of soda and a box of fast food. If the media is to be believed, those are actually fairly lethal, but not in the short term and not as offensive weapons. On the other end of the spectrum, I have pyrokinesis, but that’s rather too lethal. Also, I’m in my own house, and I don’t particularly want to set my own stuff on fire.
Naked Vince stands up from the couch and smiles at me. “Any chance you wanna play the good host and lend me some pants?”
“What did you do to my couch?” I exclaim, which sounds like a bit of a non sequitur. However, where Vince was sitting, my couch appears to have been eaten away. I hadn’t realized it while he was sitting down, but he wasn’t on the couch — he was in it. The fabric, stuffing and even the metal have been consumed around him, as if his skin secreted some kind of acid.
Vince smirks at me. “One needed the raw materials. I wasn’t just going to come from nowhere, you know.”
I gawk at both Vinces, the naked one smirking at me and the clothed one still holding onto the arm of the couch in a white-knuckled grip. “He — made you?”
“What, did you think we were identical octuplets? And one of us is a nudist?” Both Vinces laugh, and I’m once again struck by the stereo nature of it. No two people are ever that exactly in sync, not even twins. And I knew his clones had to be coming from somewhere, certainly. But he can just make them out of whatever material’s around? That’s a terrifying idea.
“How long have you been in my house?” I ask.
Vince shrugs. “Coupla hours. I’m getting faster. Well, One is, anyway. Same thing.”
“Can you make copies of yourself, too?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, Nose? Trade ya secret for secret. Show One how you do your thing, and I’ll tell you more about how this works.”
I glance at the Vince on the couch, who puts on a strained smile. “Show me please, Dan.” B-Rock could take lessons from him on how to make a person’s name sound like an insult. I’ve been cussed out before with less venom behind the words.
There’s a nagging familiarity to this situation, and it finally hits me exactly what it is. It’s not the demands or the company, and it’s certainly not having a jailbird and his clone accost me in my den. It’s the hostility. I got this same unreasoning hatred, the same poisonous vitriol, from Regina, the stormraiser. Every time we talked, she spit words at me the same way that Vince is doing now.
Interestingly, it’s only the original Vince who seems to carry the vicious distaste for me, a fact which he also seems to have spotted. His clones may have it in for me, but they carry a normal grudge, not some ingrained, barely containable, sizzling bomb. Obviously, Vince has realized this, too, which is why he’s spawning henchmen to serve as go-betweens.
“Why not just bring one of your duplicates along instead of ruining my couch?”
“To show off,” says naked Vince, while at the same time the original says, “To piss you off, loser.”
Naked Vince laughs. “That, too, though I wasn’t going to be quite that honest. You owe us a car, at the very least. Least we can do is cost you a couch.”
“So, what? I just show you how I set things on fire and you’ll go away? I heard this story at the warehouse.”
“I wasn’t there then,” snarls couch Vince, standing up. “You showed my copies, but they can’t do everything I can. Show me.”
“And if I don’t? What if I just book it outside and call for help? You’re both all the way over there, and the door’s just right up these stairs.”
Vince smiles nastily. “You think I only made one copy out of your stuff?”
He and the copy both glance over my shoulder simultaneously. I spin around to see a third Vince grinning at the top of the stairs, dressed in my clothes and carrying my old aluminum baseball bat in his hands. The glance was a feint, though. He’s still six stairs up, but as soon as I turn to look at him, both of the other Vinces are on me, punching me in the sides and gut, each blow making my broken ribs flare with pain. I fall backwards at the foot of the stairs, my drink flying everywhere, and with a scream I light the droplets of Coke on fire.
The Vinces fall back from the burning droplets, slapping at their clothes or skin. At the top of the stairs, Vince scowls and charges down, the bat raised and ready to strike, so I scramble past the downstairs Vinces and put the couch in between us.
“How’s a couch gonna save you, cesspit?” taunts Vince. He and his copies fan out, one moving to each side while he advances directly on the couch. Just as he’s about to place his foot on it, I gesture and the entire couch explodes into flame and choking black smoke.
Over the crackle of the fire, I can hear the Vinces stumbling back, cursing and choking. “Good enough, vermin!” one calls, presumably the original. “I saw what you did. I’ll practice!”
I crouch on the ground, ribs crying out in protest at my hunched position, breathing through my shirt until I hear the front door slam. As if this was a signal, the fire alarm immediately begins to sound. I weigh the possibility that Vince is tricking me and is still in the house against the possibility that I’m about to catch the ceiling of my basement on fire, and I make the call to run to the bathroom for wet towels.
Several valiant fire-fighting minutes later, things are back under control. I’ve got a pile of singed towels and I’m hacking and coughing over a charred and ill-smelling pile of cushions that was once a couch. The ceiling is filthy but appears unburnt, so I stagger outside and breathe as deeply as I can manage with my ribs throbbing. Eventually, the cough subsides and I risk going back in to open windows and let the stench out.
When I re-enter the den, the first thing I see is
my Børger Bøx lying on its side on the floor. The contents haven’t spilled, so after opening the windows, I take it out to the porch with me and glumly sit down to have a bite. Naturally, while everything else was on fire, it’s gone cold.
Vince is doing an excellent job of keeping me on the defensive, and I hate it. I can’t let this keep up. Every time I run into him, I come out worse than before, and meanwhile he can just send an army of clones after me. So even when I do end up with the upper hand, it’s a meaningless victory; at best, I’ve managed to save myself, while not inconveniencing him at all.
That’s not entirely true. I did torch his car. But thinking about that reminds me of the terrible sound of the man trapped inside screaming as he burned, and I skitter away from the thought as my stomach lurches.
After a second, though, I set down the remaining half of my burger and force myself to examine the idea. If Vince’s confederates are just made-to-order clones, constructed out of whatever raw materials were lying around, are they really people? I didn’t have any compunction about setting my couch on fire, so why should I care about burning down something that, two hours earlier, was part of that couch? Looked at that way, this goes from an impossible army arrayed against me to just one guy with no relevant powers.
Obviously, the clones are able to walk, talk and function on their own, but if the argument against killing a person is that you’re ending something unique, then that clearly doesn’t apply. Really, it’s no different than when I exploded the gun during the robbery at Børger; it’s just the removal of a dangerous weapon.
This argument might be logically sound, but it’s doing nothing for me emotionally. My disgust at the idea has welled up into full-blown nausea and near-panic. The image of striding towards Vince through a room of charred corpses, the stench of their flesh filling my nose and their shrieks still echoing from the walls, is horrendous. It conjures up the nightmares I suffered after killing the mutated ape-men that attacked me when my powers first manifested.
No, if I kill Vince’s clones in anything other than self-defense, it’ll be cold-blooded murder in my mind. As it is, I’m still slightly horrified at how casually I can consider the idea of killing in self-defense. I don’t like that that’s moving from “worst-case scenario” to “in all likelihood.”
On the other hand, I’d be an idiot to ignore the fact that that’s what’s happening. Vince and his clones are after me, and I’ve got to stop them before they manage to maim or kill me, or worse, my friends.
It’s weird that that’s worse. Logically, nothing’s worse for me than dying. Everything else I can, by definition, live through. This information comes to me from the same part of my brain that claimed that the clones were nothing more than couchstuff, though, and therefore okay to kill. That part of my mind makes interesting arguments, but they’re not ones that impact how I feel in any way at all.
I need a plan to take the fight to Vince. Right now, all of the ones I can think of end in one of two ways: either me burning everyone alive, or me getting beaten into a bloody pulp. I’ve had more than enough of that latter option, and I really don’t think I could bring myself to do the former. I need to mull it over and come up with something that lets me walk away unharmed but assured that Vince won’t come back.
My usual technique to let my brain run is to disengage by watching Netflix, but even as I get up and start to head inside to do that, I remember that my couch has been partially absorbed, set on fire and then covered in wet towels. It’s not exactly going to be the relaxing environment I’m hoping for. Is this a first-world problem? “I can’t comfortably watch Netflix” certainly sounds like one, but “because thugs trashed my house” makes it less so.
And when you add in “So I set my couch on fire with my mind to chase off the burgeoning clone army,” then I really don’t know what that is. It’s pretty specific to just me at that point. It’s a Dan world problem, I guess.
I drag a chair in from another room, but when I try to shove the couch out of the way, my ribs protest heavily and I almost fall into the blackened mess when my knees buckle from the pain. I end up sitting behind the couch, but I can’t get comfortable in the chair, I’m the wrong distance from the TV and occasional drafts blow the stench of smoked couch into my face. I’m not even an hour into the movie before I give it up as a bad call. I take a shower and head to bed, hoping that things will look better in the morning.
- Chapter Sixteen -
In the morning, things look the same.
I take a second shower, but the stink of the fire is still lingering on my skin and in my hair. After several cycles of rinsing and repeating with the shampoo, I decide that I’m as smoke-free as I’m going to get right now, and towel off so I can go face the day.
The kitchen smells of smoke now, too, so after my cereal I go around and open all of the windows in the house, not just the ones downstairs. The thermostat says it’s 27° F outside right now, so it’s a good thing that I’m not feeling the cold anymore. As I’m going around the house, I find where Vince’s other clone came from. He made it out of one of the interior walls.
And whereas the couch was relatively densely-packed material, the wall contains a lot of hollow space, so there’s not a nice Vince-shaped cartoon hole in the wall. Instead, there’s just a big gaping section missing, with severed boards and hanging wires left where the nanomachines stripped away parts for conversion.
The good news is that it doesn’t seem to have been a load-bearing wall. I wonder if I can convince my parents that I took it down intentionally to make a more open floor plan? Probably it’s going to be better to just go buy some drywall, hire an electrician for the wires and fix this.
Also, that jerk stole a pair of my work pants on his way out. My last clean pair, too, so now I have to do laundry again. And again, “I have to use the washing machine in my house” feels very much like a first-world problem, but “because violent criminals stole my pants” makes it less so. Actually, that just makes it sound like part of a weird stand-up routine.
It’s not a great thing to realize that that’s a phrase that can describe your life.
I leave my potentially-first-world problems behind and hoof it to the bus stop. I’ve got an appointment with Doc Simmons at the hospital this morning for more testing. I’m not even sure what she’s trying to learn at this point. I’m starting to suspect that she’s just enjoying playing with fire.
Then again, so am I, and the doc provides a safe and controlled environment in which to do it. So it’s not actually a problem if she’s having fun watching things burn. It’s just funny to picture the look she’d give me if I accused her of that. It would come with a whole lecture on the rigors of the scientific process and the importance of testing things we don’t understand, too. Which would all be true, but I still bet she likes watching the flames.
No one sits near me on the bus, which causes me to suspect that I haven’t gotten all of the burned-foam smell out of my hair and clothes. This suspicion is confirmed when I get to Doc Simmons’s lab and she greets me with a wrinkled nose and a, “What do you smell like, Dan?”
“And a good morning to you, too, Doc. I set my couch on fire last night.”
“Why? Was it intentional?”
“Yes, there was — actually, can we just test whatever you’ve got set up today? I really want to forget about this for a little while.”
The doc persists, “So this wasn’t a spontaneous fire? You set your couch on fire on purpose?”
“Yes, it was on purpose. I’m fully in control of when things do and do not catch fire,” I say heatedly. I flash briefly on B-Rock’s melted sneaker and glance guiltily around the lab, but everything here seems fine. And Doc’s well-intentioned questioning doesn’t hold a candle to B-Rock’s focused needling, anyway. I wouldn’t qualify his hotfoot as a spontaneous fire, just an unwise one.
“Well, if you’d like to tell me why you set your couch on fire, I’d be happy to hear the story, but I won’t pu
sh you,” says Doc Simmons, turning away from me to fiddle with today’s experiment. “Ready to test some limitations?”
She’s set up a number of environments in which it would be difficult for fire to burn, to see where I can and can’t create or sustain a fire. It’s pretty interesting, actually, and does an excellent job of taking my mind off of my problems for a while. It might even be better than Netflix.
Over the next hour, we demonstrate that I can sustain a fire underwater as long as I keep concentrating on it and that I can create one hot enough to burn in moist air, but that without oxygen the fire gutters out. It’s a weird feeling; I can feel the intensity increasing in the target, but it just can’t manage to catch. Have you ever used a camera flash in a dark room, then reached for the after-image of something that wasn’t there anymore? It’s the same kind of feeling, a mental version of seeing what you should be touching and having your hand just pass through.
And like watching Netflix, allowing myself to get totally distracted for a bit gives my brain time to kick around a few ideas. “Hey Doc?”
“Yes, Dan?”
“Would it be possible to borrow an oxygen tank from the hospital?”
She gives me a sharp look and considers her answer. “You said ‘borrow.’ What are the odds of it actually coming back?”
“Good? I don’t intend to hurt it.”
The doc casts a skeptical eye over my various cuts and bruises. “Your track record isn’t excellent on that front, Dan.”
“Can you tell me where I could get one, then?”
“No, I can loan you one. I’d like to ask what you plan to do with it, but I think I’d do better to have plausible deniability there. If you can come by tomorrow, I’ll have one for you.”
She pauses, then continues, “I don’t need to tell you how dangerous open flames are around an oxygen tank. Be careful.”
“I will,” I say. Which is true, for certain values of “careful.”
The Experiment (Book 2): Making Friends Page 10
