Subject Seven ss-1
Page 21
Kyrie turned and wrapped herself into Tina’s arms and the smaller, thinner girl hugged her fiercely.
“Come on, girl. You gotta be tougher than that.” Tina’s words were whispered. “They’ll eat you alive if you show’em you’re weak.” The words were a chastisement, but the voice was soft and understanding and Kyrie nodded and held on even tighter, and Tina let her.
When she’d calmed down a bit, Kyrie wiped her eyes dry and blinked at the irritation from the tears and remembered to hand the phone to Gene, who grabbed it quickly despite his efforts to look like he wasn’t noticing her turning into a big baby.
She returned the favor. She pretended not to listen in when he called his family.
Chapter Forty
Gene Rothstein
Genehung up the phone. His call to his parents hadn’t gone well. They believed he was still trying to punish them for the adoption thing. He was sure his parents were already calling a private detective to hunt him down.
Gene closed his eyes for a minute and let out a deep, shuddering breath. His heart felt like it would never slow down.
Tina looked at him, a hundred unasked questions dancing over her pretty features. She wasn’t cute. She wasn’t beautiful. She was pretty. There was a difference. Kyrie could have been called cute or beautiful, but Tina didn’t quite qualify.
He handed her the phone. “Thanks.”
Tina nodded and a second later took the battery from the phone. When she was done putting the now dead phone back together, she stood up and walked over to the wastebasket not far from where they were sitting and dropped the pieces in.
“Why’d you do that?” Gene had been raised to never throw away anything useful.
Tina flashed him a short smile. “Can’t trace us if we don’t have that phone anymore. I’ll buy some more when we need’em.”
He frowned in thought and she continued. “Your folks love you. They ain’t letting you run away without looking for you. So, we can’t let them track us with a cell phone. They can do that these days. I saw it on one of the news shows. We’re on the lam. We gotta be smart enough not to get busted.”
“But what about your folks? Don’t you need to call them?” The words were out before he could stop them. Hadn’t the recording of Joe Bronx said something about her family?
Tina’s face lost all emotion again, and for a moment she was a pretty statue and not a teenage girl. “My folks are dead. Didn’t you listen when Joe was going over that on his tape? My dad got himself shot when I was just five so he was never in the picture. And they pulled my mom out of the river a few days ago.”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry.” That was Kyrie. Gene looked down at the ground, hating himself for being a moron.
“Don’t be.” Tina’s voice was as cold as her expression. “She wasn’t much of a mom anyways.”
Gene kept his mouth shut. She was lying. She was hurting. But who was he to call her on it?
Ten minutes later Joe and Cody’s other self-Hank? Yeah, Hank-pulled up. The car was a big old gas guzzler. It was big enough to seat them all comfortably and that was what mattered, he supposed.
Joe stayed in the driver’s seat while everyone piled in. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses and his eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses. It was almost impossible to guess what he was thinking.
“We ready to leave, kids?”
Tina climbed into the backseat and settled herself directly behind him. “Just drive, Jeeves. Chicago is a long ways off.”
In the passenger’s seat, Hank grunted and shifted and moved nervously as the change started. He shrank before their eyes, his rough features growing younger, his thick muscles slipping away until he looked like a little kid playing dress up in the clothes that had stretched to accommodate Hank’s bigger body mass. The pants were suddenly loose instead of tight and the shirt he was wearing looked like a tent. Hank had closed his eyes. Cody opened them, looking a bit disoriented. He looked around for a moment, not saying a word.
Tina cursed under her breath and climbed out of the car. “You stay right here, big boy.”
“Where are you going?” Joe scowled.
“Cody! Get over here!” Her voice was a sharp snap and Cody followed her without question.
Tina bent at the waist and fished into the wastebasket until she found the missing pieces of the phone and then put them together.
“Call home. Tell your folks you’re alive, Cody. Okay? Talk to them and tell them whatever you want, but let them know you’re okay.”
Cody looked at the phone for a long minute and licked his lips nervously. “What should I say?”
Tina shrugged. She had that expressionless look on her face again. “You love your parents?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tell ’em you love ’em and tell ’em you’ll see ’em soon.”
Cody nodded and started punching in the number. A moment later he turned away from everyone and started talking.
When he was done, Tina took the phone from him and once again broke it apart before throwing it away.
Cody climbed back into the car and said nothing, but he wiped at his eyes as if offended by the tears that had fallen when he spoke to his father. He hadn’t dared talk to his mom. He’d surely have taken the first bus back home if he had heard her voice.
Joe started driving. He pulled onto I-95 a few minutes later and accelerated to almost seventy miles per hour. Soon enough they were switching onto a westbound interstate, aiming for Chicago and a part of the country none of them but Joe had ever seen before.
There was a long road ahead of them, and each of them had many things to consider in the silence between them. Behind them, they were leaving all that they had once thought they knew about the world, leaving behind the lies that had been their lives and in most cases desperately wishing they could go back to those sweet lies. Instead they moved forward, seeking answers to truths that made no sense, haunted by the other selves who hid inside of them and wanted answers just as desperately.
And on the highway Joe Bronx drove, a half smile playing around his mouth, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel the beat of a Disturbed song that was playing on the radio as he cruised at just the right speed to look like just another driver, just another normal teenager heading down the long road.
And lost inside of his head, trapped away, Hunter Harrison said nothing, perhaps thought nothing or possibly dreamed of the world he’d known before Joe came into the universe and started destroying his life.
If he was aware of anything at all, he hid it away as surely as Joe did.
Chapter Forty-one
Evelyn Hope
Evelyn shook her head. They’d watched the new footage three times. She stared at the screen and sighed so softly it sounded more like a breath of disappointment.
Beside her, George shifted in his seat. On her other side, a younger man, a boy, really, only twelve though he looked a few years older, looked toward her with a nervous expression. He knew his mother’s moods well enough to know that she was upset.
“Gabriel?”
Her son looked at her. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Did you recognize any of them?”
“No, ma’am.” His voice was clipped and efficient.
“Do you remember me talking about Subject Seven, Gabriel?”
The boy frowned. “The one that killed Dad and Bobby?”
She looked at him carefully. “He killed your father. He took your brother away.”
“You said he was as good as dead.”
She pointed to the screen and tapped one of the figures. The shape was heavily muscled with shaggy hair. “Do you see him?”
“Yes, of course.” He stared at the shape.
“That is Subject Seven, Gabriel.”
Her son stared hard at the screen and the sneer that came across his mouth was unpleasant.
“Do you remember Bobby, Gabby?”
“Of course, he’s my brother. I miss him every day.” She knew th
e words were true. The absence had probably been muted by time, but he still felt it.
“Gabriel, if Subject Seven is alive, then it’s possible that Bobby is alive.” She watched the realization on her son’s face.
“Bobby could come back to us?” Oh, the hope in his voice almost broke her heart. It was so much like the hope she was trying to suppress.
“It’s possible, but we don’t know yet.”
George raised an eyebrow and looked at her but never said a word.
“Gabriel?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Would you be happier if Bobby came back to us?”
Her bright, precious boy looked toward her and smiled. “Yes, ma’am. We’d… we’d be a family again.”
She allowed herself a small smile. The words cut a bit, but she knew how much she’d changed since Subject Seven had murdered her husband.
“Gabriel?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Does the moon always shine so brightly at noon?”
The boy’s face went slack for a second and then he clenched the arms of his chair and moaned. His body tensed, his face grew dark with rising blood pressure and he leaned his head back and hissed in pain as his bones grew, his body changed. The black clothes he wore had been slightly baggy, but by the time the change was done, they were snug. Every Doppelganger had a command phrase, a simple comment that could change them from student to killing machine. The only exceptions that she knew of were the creatures that Subject Seven had surrounded himself with. They were supposed to be dead. That thought terrified her.
Gabriel was in excellent shape. He worked out every day, trained in both hand-to-hand and armed combat, and though he was only twelve, he ran five miles every day and ten to twenty miles when out on maneuvers. He was fit and he was competent.
What took his place made him seem frail. The shape was larger, stronger and as always darker. Everything about him said that he was a predator, designed for hunting and killing.
“Good afternoon, Rafael.” Evelyn smiled tightly. She remained formal with all of the Doppelgangers. It was best to keep them at a distance, as history had taught her.
Rafael stood up and immediately moved his arms to the small of his back, the hands crossed over each other, his legs slightly spread into a quick parade rest stance.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Hope.” His face was calm, but his eyes, oh, how they shone. He was glad to be freed of his prison, as always.
“I have a mission for you and your team.”
He looked at the screen. “Who are they?”
“They’re the ones you fought earlier, Rafael. They’re mistakes, my boy.” She stared long and hard at him. “They’re your predecessors.”
“Like experiment number Seven?” His eyes lit up with a different expression.
She nodded. “As you told me earlier, he’s the Alpha for that group. I want him brought to me, Rafael. I prefer they be brought to me alive, especially Seven, but if a few die, so be it.”
“Really?” And there it was, what she was hoping for, anticipation instead of fear. He wanted a rematch. He wanted to beat his enemy.
“Oh yes.” She leaned back in her seat and steepled her fingers in front of her lips. “So, when do you think you can be ready?”
Rafael smiled. “Say the word. We can be ready to move in half an hour.”
“Perfect.”
Rafael left to collect his team, six members strong and combat ready. They had the best training available, the best weapons and every advantage over their targets.
A moment later and George looked at her with a stony expression.
“Say it, George. Now is hardly the time to get quiet with your opinions.”
“It just seems, well, like it might be overkill.”
“Do you think so?” There it was, the flutter in her stomach, the nerves telling her that she was making a mistake. She crushed the feelings down into the darkness where her soul was hiding.
When she spoke again, her voice was as calm as ever. “None of those… things out there should be alive. I want them back here where I can have them dissected, or I want them dead.”
George rose from his seat without another word. Maybe that was for the best.
Evelyn should have been ecstatic. She was finally going to have Subject Seven delivered back to her, and if all went the way she wanted it to, his other self, her son Bobby, would be returned as well. She would have her family again and she would lock away the animal that killed her husband.
So why then did she feel the flutters of fear deep in her stomach? She had no answer for that, except that even after all this time, Subject Seven scared the hell out of her.
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Document creation date: 12.10.2011
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