Swann: A Contemporary Young Adult SciFi/Fantasy (Swann Series Book 1)

by Ryan Schow

  Back in my room, Brayden is monitoring the nanny cam. When I walk through the door, he’s on his feet, telling me we have what we need. He rewinds the video feed. It shows me leaving just after we activated it last night. The feed then shows Gerhard going to the bookcase, hitting some kind of a switch. The bookcase moves, revealing an elevator door on the wall behind it. A small voice inside me says we’re about to solve this mystery.

  We call Damien and he says, “Let’s go tonight.”

  We’re all in agreement.

  Later, when it’s pitch black outside, Brayden and I make our way across campus, running in stealth through the pooled darkness until we see Damien waiting in his own bank of shadows outside Gerhard’s office. It’s well past midnight, and we’re being overly cautious about security, which has reportedly doubled after the attack on me last night.

  When the coast is clear, we use the fabricated key to get into the office. Brayden hands Damien the original smoke detector and says, “Be careful taking the other one down, the camera inside is fragile.” Damien grabs a chair and goes to work swapping out smoke detectors while Brayden heads for the bookcase. He feels around on the inside lip of the center of the bookcase, not finding anything.

  “What the crap?” he says. “I watched him—it’s right here, somewhere.”

  “It’s just a button.” I say.

  “It’s just a button,” he says in a mocking tone. Then: “If it’s so easy, you come find it.”

  I can’t because I’m rifling through Gerhard’s desk drawers searching for the key to his filing cabinet, which is locked. “I’m preoccupied.”

  Damien asks what I’m looking for.

  “Key.” I tilt the desk lamp backwards and find it underneath. “Got it.”

  I open the filing cabinet to a row of dark green, alphabetized file folders, all hanging on metal rails inside the drawer. I locate my file, lay it on the desk and open it up. It’s thick with dates and notes. I go to the W’s and find Kaitlyn’s name. Her file is thin. Only a few pages. I quickly skim through it. One page stands out more than the rest: a release form, one that’s not the same as the online version. At the bottom of the page is a line in bold that reads: I agree to forego my parental rights, giving full custody to Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard and Astor Academy for the purposes of furthering medical science as explained above and agreed to by—” and there are the names of several attorneys. Below each name is an original signature. Above, where the list of “purposes” should be, there are nine blank lines and the words: See Amendment 6a for full description. Amendment 6a is missing, along with most everything else. I hand the release form to Damien.

  He says, “What’s this?”

  “Your father knew what was happening to Kaitlyn. He agreed to all of it.”

  “But what did he agree to? To helping her cure her leukemia? To fixing her cells? I already know he agreed to it. And didn’t all this become legal when stem cell research became legal?” I look at Brayden and we sort of shrug our collective shoulders. Damien folds the paper, shoves it in his back pocket.

  “Bingo,” Brayden announces.

  The bookcase starts moving, slowly, like a door opening inside. Revealed is an encased metal door: the elevator. Brayden hits a button, the door opens and all three of us pile in. And I mean pile in because this thing can’t have been built for more than two people. It’s nothing like the commercial elevators you’ll find in hotels, casinos and shopping malls. Damien and Brayden stand uncomfortably close, both their bodies mashed into mine.

  “Best sandwich ever,” Brayden mumbles.

  “What?” I ask.

  “The Savannah sandwich,” he says, grinning. “Best ever.”

  “Jesus,” Damien says to Brayden. “My heart’s pounding like a hundred miles an hour and you’re not serious at all. You’re horny.”

  Brayden says, “Aren’t you?”

  “It is a pretty good sandwich,” I say, nervous and grinning like a fool.

  “See, Damien?”

  “Push the button already,” Damien says.

  There are only two buttons: UP and DOWN. Brayden pushes DOWN. The elevator falls the equivalent of three floors, stops, then releases the doors. We’re all holding our breaths, hoping to hell we don’t encounter security, or worse. A long, empty hallway greets us. Damien and I let out a sigh. To the left and right of the hallway are tall glass walls showcasing different labs. At the end of the hallway is a large service elevator. My heart is pounding every bit as much as Damien says his is. Even Brayden is sweating a little.

  To the right is a huge bank of computers and some expensive looking machines, plus two large, four-door file cabinets. To the left, what I see turns my knees to jelly. My breathing stops altogether. Blinking fast, I struggle to comprehend the horrifying, and the incomprehensible.

  452 from Prague

  1

  The large lab—which is square along the windowed hallway, but circular in the back—is filled with bodies. There are maybe twelve or thirteen of them, all stored in what looks like standing, futuristic cylindrical coffins made of metal and mostly tempered glass. They’re framed in alloy, or steel, with full body observation plates made of thick plates of rounded glass. Each canister is filled with a pink-tinted gel-like substance holding the bodies inert. The same stuff in my serum. There are tubes protruding from each body, tubes plugged into the sides of the cylinders. These tubes and long hoses all feed into a ten-foot tall by five-foot wide central cylinder that looks half computer, and half water purification tank. The containers line the outer edges of the room, but are all connected to the main cylinder.

  “Holy mother of Jesus,” Brayden says. To me he says, “Give me your cell phone.”

  Mesmerized, I hand it over. He activates the “video” feature and suddenly he’s narrating what he’s seeing, but my head is a vacuum of silence. His words are just white noise against my crazed thoughts.

  Off in a separate section of the room (really just an alcove), resting in a reclining metal chair housing an entirely different set of machines, is the monster who attacked me. The seven foot behemoth. I startle, but find I can breathe again knowing his eyes are closed. Is he asleep, or shut down? Is he even human?

  He doesn’t look human.

  The beast is in spandex boxer shorts. He’s gigantic with a washboard of stomach muscle and two hulking pectorals. Everything about his muscles and veins looks strained, like the blood flowing inside him is moving with force and power. He must have fifty tubes and wires plugged into him. Beside him is a muted EKG monitor and two small glass canisters, each standing three feet tall and roughly six inches wide. One container has the same pinkish fluid as the other tanks while the other one is filled with a bubbling black solution.

  Okay…

  He’s most likely unconscious because Brayden wasn’t exactly quiet when he first saw the bodies.

  Damien searches the canisters, stopping at one in particular. It looks like Kaitlyn’s. Holy Toledo, is she still alive? The “vitals” monitor on the canister indicates she is, and that her heart rate is normal. Instantly our efforts are worth it. Damien appears to be frenetic, palms flat on the rounded glass, speaking to himself. Or her. He’s searching the canister for a way to get her out. Then he’s pounding on the glass, but she isn’t waking up. He can’t stop calling her name and a big part of me is terrified he’ll wake the giant.

  Brayden is circling the room, filming the bodies, saying, “They’re all nude, should I not film them?”

  My eyes move from one canister to the next. There are two Kaitlyn’s. No, three. “Uh, Damien,” I say. “Are you sure that’s your Kaitlyn?”

  He says, “Her name’s right here.”

  Brayden says, “Hello? Should I stop or—”

  “Keep filming,” I say. “Get it all.”

  The other girls who look like Kaitlyn don’t have names. Like the rest of the bodies, their glass canisters display a plaque containing both a number and a city. I’m going from cylinder
to glass cylinder, taking it all in when I see her, and OMG, my jaw practically hits the floor. That’s when I realize I’m looking at Maggie Jaynes’ model.

  She’s one of us.

  Holy cow, now it all makes sense! Her silence, her reluctance to tease me and the non-triplets, her willingness to speak to Damien in spite of his nasty split with Cameron—she’s just like us!

  I force myself to move on to where there are seven different guys, each one more perfect looking than Damien. Suddenly Brayden is beside me, breathless.

  “Can you believe this?”

  I stand dazed, my brain clocking a hundred miles an hour, yet my mind moving through molasses as I try to understand. “No,” I say, “but yes, too.”

  After passing by the guys, seeing this kind of male nudity for the first time and, strangely, not having a single sexual thought about it, I head for the remaining girls. That’s when I see me. Well, almost me. It’s spine-chilling how we look almost exactly alike. How she is a little more perfect than me, but so close you’d have to be me to catch the differences. I think to myself, if I would’ve completed my regimen with Gerhard, I would look exactly like her. I would look like that.

  “Don’t come over here, Brayden,” I say. “Don’t film this one.”

  “Why?” he says. “You told me to film it all.”

  “This is me.”

  He stops, doesn’t come closer. I continue to stare at the girl, taking in the details of her body, marveling at the similarities, at her unabashed beauty.

  Her eyes float open, causing me to gasp and stumble backwards. I look at her looking at me, moving forward again. I blink twice. Nothing. I press my palm to the rounded glass. Do I really believe she’ll reach out and we’ll press our palms together? It doesn’t happen. So I mouth the words, “Can you see me?” Not moving at all, she looks like a zombie. The sexiest freaking zombie ever, but soulless, or comatose never-the-less. I tap on the glass. No response. Her hair swirls around her face, like a drowning victim. Her eyes close once more.

  Her vitals say her heart and body temperature is normal, but I can’t imagine how. I look at the panel and read the number/city identifier: 452—Prague.

  What the hell?

  The voice behind us says, “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  None of us heard him come in, but we all turn at once and see Gerhard standing there, a pistol in his hand.

  2

  “You son of a bitch,” Damien snarls. He turns away from Kaitlyn; his hands become fists at his side. “What gives you the right?”

  “Your father,” he says, smug. “All of their parents.”

  By now I’m used to Gerhard, to his arrogance. I know he has a temper. “Who is this?” I say, looking at my doppelganger.

  “Four fifty-two from Prague. Part of a batch of perfect children we acquired long before you came to me.”

  “Does she have a name?” Brayden asks. “I mean, a real name?” He’s looking back and forth between Gerhard’s cruel eyes and the weapon in his hand.

  I register the weight of my own gun pressing into the small of my back, but I’m not going for it just yet. If the attack on me proved anything, it’s that I can’t shoot straight to save my life, so the last thing I want to do is get into a shootout where I know I’ll lose.

  “To me she has no name, no family, no language, and in all likelihood she doesn’t even have a soul.”

  “No, but Kaitlyn does!” Damien says. Insanity ripples through his eyes, and I’m terrified he’ll do something that will get him shot.

  “In my field of work, personalizing your subjects with names makes doing the things we do…more imposing. Not that I care. They’re all slabs of meat and a means to an end anyway.”

  “She’s alive,” I hear myself say. “Four fifty-two from Prague.”

  “Yes, but she’s never had a conversation with another human, and she’s never spoken a single word in her life. She will never understand cognitive thinking or reasoning, and she will never leave that glass canister.” He laughs and it is an awful, forbidding sound. “She’s a meat sack, Savannah. A beautiful one for sure, but not really alive.”

  “What do you mean?” Brayden asks. “Of course she’s alive.”

  “She’s technically brain dead, rendered that way from the beginning so as to eliminate any potential suffering.”

  “What am I to you then?” I ask. “Am I a meat sack, too? Just another number?”

  He shifts the weapon from one hand to the other, walks closer to us. Damien is suddenly beside me. The hatred radiating from him is a toxic, pulsing force. Brayden hasn’t moved. His phone—my phone—it’s camera is pointed at Gerhard, just out of view. He’s filming all of this.

  “You’re the end user, Savannah. The final product.”

  “And Kaitlyn?” Damien challenges. “What is she to you?”

  “An anomaly. For some reason the new DNA sequencing took in the beginning, but then she began experiencing random electrical impulses in her brain that eventually caused a long run of seizures. Part of her brain ceased to function, which was why your father agreed to help stage her death. We collected blood from her for weeks, enough for her death to be convincing.”

  “He knew?” Damien asks, aghast. “He helped?” His voice is agony, the confirmation of betrayal tearing through him, turning his unbridled rage into something timid and vulnerable and weak. I can’t help but feel bad for him.

  “What about Kaitlyn’s mother?” I ask.

  “She thinks her daughter is dead, which gave me the time and the space I needed. That woman would have never understood. Damien’s father knew that.”

  “When this is all over,” Damien growls, “I’m going to cut your heart out, you psychotic prick.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Gerhard says, amused. “Your step-sister is fine. Her revised treatments have healed her completely. No seizures, no trace of the leukemia. With her brain function normal again, she’s better than perfect. Don’t you understand? Without me, she would have died. Now that she’s well, you’ll have her for a long, long time.”

  “She’s not better than perfect. She’s in this…damn tank.”

  “Yes, but we’ve recently corrected the problem and now we’re merely figuring out how to reintroduce her into society. They never found a body, remember? Only her blood.”

  “What do you mean, we?” I say. “You said ‘we’re going to reintroduce her into society.’ Who’s we?”

  “Me, Damien’s father, and our benefactor.”

  “The Virginia Corporation,” Brayden says. This takes Gerhard by surprise.

  “Yes,” he says, gathering his bearings.

  He closes the distance between us, but makes a wide berth at the last moment, his gun on Damien. To Brayden, he says, “Get over there with your friends.” Brayden slips my phone into his pocket, keeping it hidden from Gerhard.

  Gerhard walks over to the beast that attacked me and begins unplugging tubes and wires. He hits a button which pumps a shot of the black fluid into him. The monster’s eyes flutter open. The gun is still pointed at us, but lazily.

  “Looks like he eats more than just scabs,” I say.

  “He’s a physical prototype. My war model. Heartless, soulless, lethal to the order. I got him from Iraq, all shot to shit. He would’ve died without me.”

  “So technically he doesn’t exist?” I ask.

  “Right.”

  “And he’s barely even human?”

  “A war model is essentially a flesh robot, built and programmed to take and obey orders, to execute whatever commands it’s given.”

  “And what orders did you give him about me?” Now he’s not even looking at us because he’s disconnecting the main plug low on the war model’s back.

  “Whatever he did, that’s what he was supposed to do.”

  The monster’s eyes stop fluttering. He looks at us. At me. His dark eyes hold a shimmer of recognition. Gerhard works the last plug loose and the monster stands up, gig
antic. He’s even scarier under the fluorescent bulbs than he was standing in my room.

  His mouth is a slash. Silent. Wretched looking. He glares at me, eyes unblinking. The weight of his smoldering gaze compresses my heart, makes breathing impossible. His hands are at his sides, but not easy. Not calm. Shaking like they want to hit something. Everything about him is uncomfortable. Unnerving. Dangerous.

  “So you’re going to let Kaitlyn go?” Brayden asks. “Even though she looks like Georgia, Victoria and Bridget? Won’t that draw suspicion?”

  He takes a breath, the tension slipping a bit. “There lies the problem.”

  “I have a solution,” Damien says, his temper flaring by the second. “You let her out now and we won’t kill you. We won’t even turn you in. We’ll just go. You can keep doing your sick experiments in peace, just not with us.” He looks at me and says, “And not with her.”

  Gerhard smiles, puts his gun into his pants in the small of his back, then tilts his head and looks at his monster. The monster looks back. “Subdue him,” Gerhard says.

  The monster rushes Damien, wraps him in a chokehold, and before I can blink, Damien is out cold. Or dead. At this point, I can’t be sure.

  3

  I rip the gun from my waistband, aim it at the giant and put a shot into the back of his head. He falls sideways, dead? I’m not sure so I shoot him again. I then whirl the gun around to Gerhard, walk up to him fast, keeping the .22 pointed right at his face the entire time.

  “Not human,” I hear myself say.

  “No, not human,” he echoes, his face draining of its color. “But expensive. Nearly four million dollars in research and development costs, devalued only by his missing finger and the bullets you just sent into his brain.”

  “Give me your gun, Gerhard. Hold it by the barrel with two fingers. Do it slowly.” He smiles a little wider, not doing what I ask. I close the distance between us completely, stick the barrel flat on his forehead and say, “I can’t miss from here.”

  He finally hands me the gun. Afraid even to blink, I tell Brayden to take it.