“Get dressed. Drink some coffee. Rub one out of you need to,” Merrick said, tapping the tip of his boot into the doorframe. “There’s something we need to show you.”
Prince looked to him. “What?”
Merrick pointed at the espresso machine. Ran his tongue under his lower lip as if remnants of tobacco were caught there. “My wife. She loves the one we have. It’s a gift from her. Just push the button on the bottom. Great coffee.” He knocked his knuckles on the doorframe. “Welcome back, brother.” And with that, his commander turned and left, closing the door behind him.
The dated office space hushed to silence. Prince switched on the shiny machine and listened to the water pressure rise as he dressed. Instead of black military fatigues, he slid on his worn jeans and button-up shirt that were folded next to them and pulled on the scuffed cowboy boots set by the dresser. Someone, probably Merrick, had made it a point to have these personal items shipped to the base. Smart. Prince’s shoulders and neck were stiff, but not as much as he thought they’d be after weeks of laying in bed. Groaning and wincing, he stretched back and forth before reaching down to the tiny cup of espresso.
He sat on the edge of the bed, leg crossed, the cup resting on his boot heel and his head on his hand. No sound in the room except for the fancy espresso machine’s hissing. He felt his heart beating, nearly racing. Prince breathed with intent. Head begging to throb with each deep inhale. He flexed his fingers and bent his wrists. Cartilage slowly loosening with each pop. Now there was time to dwell. He thought about the soldier who died that night, under his command. He prayed for each of them even if he didn’t know their names. The shame of failing such a vital mission overtook him. He understood it was his brashness that compromised their position and might have gotten people killed. They had rushed in with no real plan. The mother should have surrendered, easily. The girls shouldn’t have been armed, obviously.
Prince scrutinized the memory of that night wondering how these two girls had bested him. He was the creative one, naturally reading the environment and mastering whatever technologies were available to gain the upper hand. There was no excuse for allowing two children to almost end his life. His worst nightmare, other than being cloned, was to be killed by twins—to have one of them shoot him in the back and the other finish him off. There would be no more humiliating way to die. Killing people as young as those two girls had never troubled him. Women and children died all the time and he knew that, like all things in the creative universe, life only meant something if you decided to give it meaning. That appreciation for the subjective laws of nature made him more powerful than most people. His willingness to accept its amoral brutality permitted him to execute whoever opposed the greater order and the greater order was Gray Altar. But as Prince prayed for the men that had died that night, prayed for their families and for himself, the shame of failing that pivotal mission became convoluted with the presence of these strange teenage twins.
If they were different from each other, could they be two of the only twins not affected by the Set Mutation? And if that were true, they were in some way his peers and that could explain how they acted independently to corner him.
“Mexican fucking standoff,” Prince grumbled. “Classic.”
It was impossible not to respect them. The more his mind cycled over the events that night, the more he wanted—needed—to know their story.
Prince kneaded his temples as a headache nudged the seams of his skull. Inside the nightstand, he found new packages of painkillers and condoms, ibuprofen and mints. He pocketed the pain killers and popped a few ibuprofen, wondering if Merrick put the condoms there.
His fingers traveled back to the flap of scalp that had been peeled and mended and stapled. He hadn’t even asked if he had a metal plate, but he figured as much and wrapped his knuckles on the medieval helmet the same way Merrick had knocked the doorframe. The helmet rang like a dull dong.
After finishing his espresso, Prince walked to the door and found Merrick behind it. In his hand was a wrapped cheeseburger, in his other were two more. “No ketchup or tomato, right?”
Prince nodded and took the burger. “Right.”
“You need to eat all of these,” Merrick said, waving one of the remaining burgers at him. “We’re going to the Com. Need to show you something. C’mon.”
Prince unwrapped and bit, savoring the juicy grease as if he’d never tasted something like this before. He had to look away from his commander, nodded and held the back of his wrist to his lips. “Oh man…”
“Ha! Yeah, thought you’d like that.”
One of the largest offices at Fort Walters was the communications division—the Com—a hub for data collection from across Occupied Baltimore and suburbs of D.C. that networked every closed-circuit television, silenced gun detector, and surveillance drone in the area. Tendrils of intelligence gathering extended as far as Pennsylvania and Virginia so that Gray Altar’s real-time dragnet had the furthest reach possible. Prince had only been inside the massive room a few times to watch live footage of raids and to oversee missions remotely, but he loved standing inside one of the most intelligent brains in the Mid-Atlantic.
Analysts were too busy typing at terminals to turn and greet them as they entered. Prince found that unusual. Normally everyone in the room saluted them.
“What are we watching?” he asked Merrick.
“Here,” Merrick said, wheeling a chair to him. A large monitor was open to the internet.
Prince balled the wrapper of his first burger and opened a second, remembering he wasn’t supposed to have food in the Com Division, but those rules never applied to him. He watched Merrick type into the browser and chuckled. “I didn’t come out of a coma to watch YouTube videos with you.”
“Well…” Merrick said. “You kinda did.”
At the door, Janet, his gunship pilot, leaned in. “Can I say hi?”
Prince got up and hugged her hard. “Good to see you. Good to see you.”
She hugged him back, stretching her toes to see over his scalp. “How’s the noggin?”
“I’m afraid to look,” Prince said.
Janet straightened her uniform after their embrace. “I just wanted to check in.”
Merrick gave her a solemn glare. “I’m about to show him.”
“Oh,” Janet said.
Typing and chatter dissipated. The other analysts in the room slowly looked over to them.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Janet said, half bowing.
“Catch up later?” Prince asked.
“Yup.” And she was gone.
Merrick turned back to the keyboard and brought up YouTube. As Prince watched, he set the third burger down on the console knowing he might not be hungry after viewing whatever his commander was pulling up. It seemed to sag along with the souring mood of the room. Merrick typed One Nation into the search field.
“New propaganda?” Prince asked.
“Just watch,” Merrick said as an image of Jill Van Best emerged in the media player. He clicked play.
In the half hour that followed, Prince confirmed everything that he already knew, but he saw, from the over 37 million other views tallied under the video, was that the rest of the nation and probably the world was in on the secret. The editing was smart. The video began with a grainy overhead shot of the interior of the RV, no narration except for Jill Van Best saying, “That night… you can’t imagine… how scared we were. For us. For the baby.” A new scene showed the inside of the RV. Struggling. The boys shouting. Now a new shot from over Sam’s shoulder, Prince watched Jill laying on one of the RV’s back bunks, anguished as she pushed. Sam was crying. Jill was crying. A man in the background, probably Clint Bourgeois, yelled something to someone, probably one of his sons. The video looked as if the camera was angled high up, too high for a person to reach. Prince stopped chewing and paused the video.
“The RV was rigged?”
“With cameras, yeah,” Merrick said.
My
god, Prince thought. Clever.
Prince clicked back to the beginning of the video. “That night… you can’t imagine. How scared we were. For us. For the baby.”
Baby.
Singular.
That was their hook.
“Have they shown the baby yet? In the videos?” Prince asked.
“Not yet,” Merrick said.
Oh so fucking clever.
Prince put down his half eaten burger and stared at the screen. In a darkened studio at One Nation headquarters, Jill wiped a tear from the corner of her eye and said to the interviewer, “I was concerned for my girls and their safety. We were all fighting for the baby, together.”
Offscreen, a narrator asked, “When you say baby, what do you mean?”
Without answering the question, the video cut to baby photos of Sam and Penny. Tender music behind the shifting montage of playing in the yard. The twins at their first birthday, two identical cakes. The tone of Jill’s voiceover softened. “Growing up, they were like all other Sets. They played together, every minute, every second. They were inseparable.”
Merrick turned to Prince. “The mother must have brought these photos along with her when they fled. We didn’t find any photo albums at the house.”
Prince nodded, hushing him.
The mother knew about the cameras in the RV all along.
Jill continued, “But as the years went on,” photos cycled from elementary to middle school, at first showing the girls together and then in separate scenarios doing different things. “I could tell they were different from each other.”
A photo of Sam, sitting in a town park or playground with a large sheet of paper in front of her. A photo of her artwork, then another, black sketches of trees and houses and animals. “Sam started drawing every day. Any spare minute she had.”
A photo of Penny in running shorts, full-sprint, ponytail lashing the air. Another of her leaping over a hurdle. “Penny took to sports and competition, though she could never have signed up without her sister beside her.”
“Holy shit,” Prince mumbled into his hand.
“Yeah, you see what they’re doing,” Merrick said.
Prince breathed in deep. “They’re controlling the message.”
“Hell,” Merrick said. “They’re turning those two outlaws into internet stars. There’s millions of new views every day. The next episode is supposed to post in 36 hours.”
Prince shook his head, attention on the screen.
As the photos continued, the video showed side-by-side comparisons of Penny and Sam. The older they got, the more divided their interests became. It was as if they wanted nothing to do with each other. The last two photos split the screen with Penny on the left in a white dress, her dark hair up—a very recent photo—and Sam on the right in a black t-shirt, her hair mostly shaved except for a tuft flopping down into her eyes. Those two images stayed on screen and slowly faded as Jill explained her adult life from the very beginning. “After college, I had no money. I had an unpaid internship and two jobs.”
“This is where she explains the genetic testing and medical trials,” Merrick explained. He tapped the keyboard to advance the footage forward.
“Is this the only video?” Prince asked.
Merrick let the video play. “So far. They plan on rolling them out slowly, episodically. At least that’s what it says at the end.”
Prince planted his elbows on his knees and held his head. “So they’re holding information back?”
“That and they want to keep viewers hostage. The more people watch and want to see more, the greater their chances are at controlling this thing.”
“Do they show the birth? The baby?” Prince asked, partly shielding his face with his fingers.
“No,” Merrick said. “We’re assuming they’re saving that nugget for later.”
“Oh good lord,” Prince groaned.
Scenes showed One Nation’s base and the doctors responsible for the gene therapy trials twenty years ago. As the doctors answered interview questions about the thousands of failed attempts, Prince’s mind wandered back to that night again and the violence he had orchestrated. The quick thwap of the girl’s rifles. The repeated muffled bursts of his own machine pistol. A darkness. A nothingness. No feeling in a way he had never felt no feeling before.
Merrick’s voice snapped him back to reality, “They know what they’re doing. Ending with a cliffhanger.”
The video ended where it began, in the back of the RV, showing just a little bit more of the impending birth, but now with shots of the front of the vehicle’s cabin where Penny lay wounded, unconscious, with one of the boys applying pressure to her wound.
Chest swelling, Prince found himself unable to look away. “Wait, is that? Which girl is that?”
“Penny, we think,” Merrick said.
“I shot her?” Prince asked in such a low voice he might as well have screamed it.
“Yes,” Merrick said. “I thought you knew. I told you…”
Prince turned to him so that the other in the room couldn’t hear. “And she’s alive? Only wounded?”
For a second, Prince knew that Merrick interpreted this as empathy. That was the last thing he wanted. He leaned back in his chair and let one of his boot heels crack down on the console. The half eaten burger flipped to the floor. “I thought that was a headshot. She must be dead.”
Merrick stared at the video as it ended with the simple words, Episode 2 will post next week.
Merrick scratched his jaw. “From what we know, Penny Van Best is alive. They all are.”
Prince rubbed his forehead, eyes closed. “How?”
“One Nation hacked our drones soon after you arrived. We didn’t know until it was too late.”
Prince stared at the gray carpet, a neutral office gray that seemed to trail him wherever they set up base. “So that means they have footage from the drones too.”
Merrick nodded. “It would appear that way. And they blocked our transmission. We don’t have any of the footage.”
Prince groaned.
This meant there was hours of footage from multiple angles. He had already seen a few cuts in the online video taken from treetop level and now it made sense how that was achieved. This advantage, along with the cameras embedded in the RV, gave One Nation the ability to sculpt public sentiment however they wanted. The story was theirs. And as Merrick explained how One Nation was encrypting messages and using hackers to post their videos anonymously, how Gray Altar had tried, unsuccessfully, to make YouTube take down all the videos, Prince’s mind looped the events of that night over and over, trying to remember what he had said to the mother, remembering her desperation inside the RV as she held a rifle, hand shaking, the sweat and strain on her face letting him know she was going into labor. Was all of this on video? Would they use his image against him?
“There are protesters outside right now,” Merrick said as he stood. “You probably heard them before we sat down.”
He had. Outside. That grumbling.
Merrick walked to the window. “Of course, One Nation has no idea what they’re doing. Jill Van Best is a fugitive. The entire family, they gave up their rights when they attacked us.”
When Prince concentrated, he could hear a low-level something from outside. Chanting, maybe. How many people were out there?
“We need to find them,” Merrick said.
Barely bobbing his head, Prince agreed.
Merrick was at the window, looking down at the crowd that Prince imagined. “Before they post any more of these videos.”
Those words weren’t a comfort. Prince traced the staples in his scalp again like a zipper he wasn’t allowed to pull. All of this information was doing nothing to elevate his headache. He wished he could unzip his skull and let it roll off his shoulders, roll over that gray carpet past the high-heeled analysts and graduate degree techies. Instead, he looked up at the massive monitor and clicked the mouse to scroll down, seeing the tens of thousan
ds of comments underneath the video: The BABY, meaning ONE BABY, right? Is this possible?? and This is way too well produced to be a scam. Is this some viral marketing bullshit? and ONE Nation, under ONE God. and on and on and on as he kept scrolling through the endless voices.
Merrick said something but it didn’t matter. He was rapping his knuckles against the window, scorning the crowd below.
Prince picked at a staple on the top of his scalp as he scrolled back up to the top of the page and hit play.
“That night… you can’t imagine… how scared we were. For us. For the baby.”
CHAPTER 4
Running with her new arm was tricky. With every other step, Penny had to counterbalance the slight weight differentiation by swinging her titanium prothetic up. It was almost second nature, like the arm was learning her habits. On the base’s indoor track, she rounded the quarter mile oval for the eighth time as the overhead DCLs mimicked the image of a clear, sky. It was convincing, the clouds and slowly shifting lens flair of the sun. Blackened silhouettes of sparrows dashed from end to end. And she wondered how One Nation afforded such a luxury. With nearly the entire base underground, this was the only space where she could get exposure to ultraviolet light, albeit artificial.
The awkward thing was, the real sun had set hours ago.
“Making great time!” her physical therapist called form the the sideline. She, like always, was typing away at her tablet. Penny wondered if she was secretly filming her to use in the web videos that everytwo was excited about.
Penny ignored her.
Episode two of the web series was debuting right now. She wanted nothing to do with it even if most of the damn base was crowded around TVs and monitors to see the latest footage. Penny had refused to watch the first episode even after people at the base praised it for its emotional impact. They said to her, “Oh, you should watch it. It really tells your story the way it should be told.” and “You should be so proud, you and your sister.” Their eyes always skittering to her arm and away.
There was nothing to be proud of. They weren’t given a choice that night when they were attacked. She and Sam acted the only way they could.
Two Girls Book 2: One Nation Page 4
