Two Girls Book 2: One Nation

by Justin Sirois

  The drone recorded him from the doorway while keeping watch.

  He stood at the foot of his bed. A bed he knew he’d never sleep in again. Somehow this filled him with melancholy, but it wasn’t this particular bed or room that made him reflect. It was the knowledge that, as a clone, he didn’t deserve to sleep anywhere, anymore. Abominations like him could only be put to sleep—forever. Prince knelt and inhaled and paused to understand what he had done and what he was about to do. Some of this was for the camera. Some for himself.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, not knowing at what. “Okay.”

  From the footlocker, he lifted out a compact rocket launcher.

  Over him, the drone closed in for a closer camera angle. And the girl, his persistent hunter, wasn’t far behind. Prince propped the rocket launcher on his shoulder and gripped the handle. Picking up the bottle of Pappy V, he swigged and felt the burn through his nostrils and mouth and throat. Did it taste different now that he knew he was a synthetic version of himself? A laboratory-born fake? He held the bottle up to his body camera.

  “This was a gift from the man who brought me back to life,” he said, tapping the bottle against the rocket launcher. “The man who lied to me. Who made me believe I never died.”

  He drank again.

  Prince unclipped the camera and set it on a shelf. Clearing his throat and combing his fingernails through his hair, dusting off his fatigues, he stared into the lens. The words didn’t come naturally. They carried pain inside and between them. Every consonant would be sharper, heavier with grief. He swallowed and stared, hoping the girl could hear him too. “I’ve led or engaged in a decade-long conspiracy engineered by Gray Altar. Under the command of Merrick Cunningham-Foster and my father, I have targeted Set activist organizations and Separatists groups to systematically pit them against each other… to destabilize regions of our country and gain control. To control you. For profit.”

  Closing his eyes, Prince breathed deep and released. Eyes open and on the camera, he continued, “Gray Altar used the Set Mutation to its political and corporate advantage. They… we …used it to divide the people. You. All of you. And with this cure, we’re about to lose the control that the government has relied on for so long.

  “Prince!” Merrick yelled so loud it made him jump. He looked at his forearm to make sure his recording was still being streamed to One Nation. “This is treason! You’re acting against your country’s own self-interests!”

  Prince stared closer into the camera.“I don’t know what One Nation had planned for the cure,” he said, looking up at the overhead speaker his commander was hollering through. He leaned further into the camera. “But it’ll be far more beneficial to mankind than what we would do.”

  “Treason!” Merrick roared. “Punishable by death!”

  Prince’s whole body shook as he laughed and scooped the body camera up to clip it to his chest. He spun and slapped the wall. “I’m already fucking dead! I’m already mother fucking dead!”

  At the door, he looked for Penny, but she was so good at hiding. Please be here still. Please. The camera was still aimed into the room. “And this is the room they gave me when they woke my clone body up. See?” He turned left and right and left.

  Walking over to Sam and Penny’s belongings, he lifted a partly finished black and white painting of a forest. Birch trees brushed with intricate care. “I had all of the girls’ stuff brought here because… I wanted to know them. I wanted to understand who killed me. The real me.”

  There was no doubt that millions of people were watching this now, if One Nation had successfully started streaming. Sets and their parents, nationalists and hardline anti-Set separatists. He needed this to be true—for his voice to be heard for the first time in his life.

  “I want you to know that Gray Altar doesn’t care about the cure. They just want to control it. Sell it to the highest bidder.” He paused. Quieted. “Maybe this doesn’t come as a surprise.”

  Merrick roared over the intercom. “Are you streaming this!?”

  Prince looked around the room, wondering how his commander could hear him. “And the voice you’re hearing. Merrick Cunningham-Foster. He’s a clone too. Died years ago… in action. One of the highest paid private military executives on the planet. Paid with your tax money.” Prince pointed a thumb at himself and the body camera. “He’s the one who gave the orders. Him and my father.”

  “Stop this at once!” Merrick shouted. “He is lying!”

  Prince laughed. “You’re talking to a dead man, remember?” And secured the rocket launcher onto his shoulder. “A zombie!”

  “If you’ll just calm down, we can work this out,” Merrick said.

  Prince swung his pistol out of the room and pointed it in the direction he was headed. The rocket launcher in the opposite direction. Shouting, he made it obvious to Penny that he wanted her to hear this. “One Nation. I hope you’re getting all this.”

  Penny peeked into Prince’s room to see if he was bullshitting about having her and her sister’s stuff. She only made it a few feet past the doorway. Against the far wall sat all of her belongings and Sam’s, separated into two stacks. Trophies and magazines and books. Her clothes, some she hadn’t worn in years. It was like seeing relics of her old self, collected and combed over by one of the creepiest people on the planet.

  She touched her metal arm. The one thing the new Penny owned. In some ways, a gift from Prince himself.

  Standing in the doorway of his room, Penny was overwhelmed with the inevitability of her decision. It was possible now, in the next few minutes, to leave this place and slip out undetected. The pandemonium in the streets would conceal her escape. But even as her bowels seized, the drive to pursue Prince wouldn’t ease and she reached into the footlocker and grabbed a machine pistol with a short belt of bullets dangling from it. She tapped the trigger and aimed at the wall. This custom pistol with every part filed and balanced—she wanted to kill Prince with his own fetishized tool.

  As she left the bedroom, she traced the wall with the gun’s barrel and shot one round into Sam’s painting.

  Down a carpeted hallway.

  Down another corridor, this one painted dark gray with no lights. Penny heard Prince kill three more soldiers. Heard him cackle as the man over the intercom promised that backup was coming and Prince didn’t have a chance. “Stand down now and we will let you live.”

  Smoke layered the ceiling like thin fog.

  Penny covered her mouth with her bent-in shoulder. She turned a corner and stopped to see the same camera that Prince had clipped on his chest, sitting in the middle of the hallway, pointed at her. He put it there, she thought. She walked up to it and almost kicked it, but stopped and picked it up. What does he want? for me to put this on? she thought. Yes.

  Making sure she was in view of the lens, she crouched, picked it up, and held it to her face. Her eye’s reflection blind at her. Whoever was watching—Sam, Mason, her mom—now they knew they were seeing this from her perspective, not Prince’s. Did he want them to know he was leading me on?

  Penny clipped the camera onto her chest. Adjusted it straight and waved her fingers in front of the lens. There was nothing to explain, assuming that the camera was streaming over the net. And just as she had felt that there was no way to not be a part of the media spectacle that One Nation had created, she knew that ignoring this opportunity would be stupid. The world deserved to see this through her eyes.

  Penny tapped the tiny microphone on the camera and let the soundtrack of Prince’s murdering draw her closer.

  More men were dying. Yelling and gargled breaths. The clicking of an empty rifle before a hand-to-hand struggle with he sound of Prince’s gleeful success.

  “C’mon! Who trained you!?”

  Penny raised her machine pistol and stepped slowly down the hall, hand shaking. Inside the smoke, Prince’s speedy figure came into view. A long blade extended from his right forearm. A soldier ran away from Prince and toward her, ho
lding his throat. Blood flooded the seams of his clenched fingers. Before Penny could duck out of his way, a bullet burst through the back of his skull and sent him spiraling down only a few feet from her. Prince’s pistol left a thin trail of gray smoke. Penny gasped and aimed her pistol at the man, but his lifeless body lay folded against the wall. A streak of clumpy leakage painting the trajectory of his collapse. Her camera caught it all.

  Prince had already turned away from the shot man though his pistol was still aimed in Penny’s direction. He hoped he hadn’t splattered her, but if he had, it might have been worth it for the audience. Maintaining his detested status was vital for maximizing empathy for her even if he was orchestrating this destruction. Prince wiped the man’s blood from the blade before retracting it back into his forearm. He re-shouldered the rocket launcher and flicked its power button to armed.

  His destination was within view.

  In front of him, the armored door to the genetics lab was locked shut, but at last the few guards that were left had either easily died by his hand or retreated outright.

  Merrick’s voice warbled through the intercom. “Whatever you’re planning, Emmett, please. We can talk this through.”

  Prince slid the rocket launcher off his shoulder to admire it. With its four square tubes holding four cylindrical grenades, it should be powerful enough to take out a barrier twice the strength. All he had to do was not kill himself in the process.

  Backing up, Prince knelt and looked behind him. The girl was there. His deadly angel holding a stolen pistol. “Don’t kill me yet,” he whispered to himself. “Not quite yet.”

  “Prince!” Merrick yelled. “You’re throwing everything away. Everything you’ve worked towards.”

  Prince looked through the launcher’s digital scope and flipped up the trigger guard with his thumb. The pixelated display mapped the door, zeroing in where all four rockets would hit. Four squares moved together to form one blinking reticle. He hoped Penny’s camera was pointed at this—at the entrance to Gray Altar’s secret, undead crypt.

  “Nothing you can do will change what we’ve done. Think about that,” Merrick said.

  The more the old bastard spoke, the more Prince wanted to make him suffer. His thumb eased down on the trigger. His drone knew to hover between him and the door, anticipating debris and shrapnel. Imagining Merrick’s terror pleased him more than anything now. Make the old bastard cower. Prince pressed the trigger so slightly, the rockets surprised him when they fired, a trail of smoke and flame behind them. Four cylinders corkscrewed—hardened with depleted uranium and made to penetrate the thickest armor.

  Forearms over his face and head, Prince hunched and dropped the launcher as the door crumpled like a soda can. Every overhead light shattered. Steel and concrete blew inward. The blast sent a shockwave backwards, rippling through his teeth. He turned away to see Penny crouching too, her body quaking with the explosion.

  The drone zipped back and forth, scanning the lab’s interior.

  “Christ!” Merrick screamed.

  Prince’s forearm display flashed. The drone streamed new targets to his targeting system, one of them being Merrick. His StiffArm snapped up without him willing it and Prince fired knowing that the bullet would strike some kind of threat. Beyond the rubble, a soldier fell. Other soldiers returned fire, bullets striking the drywall and tiled ceiling.

  Prince stood and snapped his aim from one man to the next, dropping them. Who knew if they were naturally born men or clones? It didn’t matter now. “Nowhere to run, Merrick!” Prince yelled.

  Behind him, Penny followed.

  Let the world see, Prince thought. Through your eyes. Please.

  To her surprise, the camera made Penny feel more empowered than her wrecking ball or pistol. Prince was relying on her now, using her in a way she didn’t mind as long as she wasn’t in his line of fire. He had looked back twice to check on her. As her collaborator, he would protect her. Otherwise, the world would never see his one good deed.

  Penny angled her body camera into the exploded doorway.

  Making sure notwo was following her, she stepped over the mangled debris and aimed her pistol into the lab. The first room was devastated. Burning furniture and a splinted desk were the only recognizable things left in what looked like a reception area. Behind that, steel tables and stools were overturned through a field of shattered glass and computer equipment. A pile of something burned black. Penny shimmied through the shadows. She could see Prince running from one side of the room to the other, popping up to fire his machine pistol.

  “PRINCE!” The man from the intercom screamed, though she could hear him calling from deeper inside.

  Penny crouched through the wreckage, over wrinkled metal lab stations and partitions. Now she could see large glass cylinders with tubes jutting from their shiny metal tops. They lined both walls of the next room where Prince was standing, pistoled aimed at somebody. Closer and Penny could see people inside these large cylinders. They wore breathing masks and floated inside bubbling liquid.

  “Holy…,” she whispered.

  She aimed her camera up and down, getting a full shot of the suspended bodies.

  The man had stopped talking on the intercom to address Prince in person. “You motherfucker.”

  Prince’s laugh didn’t strangle her guts anymore. Penny tucked her pistol into the back of her waistline, unclipped the camera, and held it in his direction.

  “Why’d you do it?” Prince asked.

  She stood behind Prince—close enough to see the blood caking his shoulder and the sweat beading his neck. Now Penny could see this Merrick person too. He was trying to take cover behind a rack of computer servers. No weapon. Was he a clone? Were all these dead men and the men in tubes clones too? The bodies were still, either sleeping or yet to be animated.

  Her body camera could see her open claw pointed at Prince’s back. The commander either hadn’t seen her yet or didn’t care. It would have been so simple to release her wrecking ball at them, three spinning wedges into Prince’s head and neck and heart, one for the commander’s leg to make sure he didn’t follow her. Maybe kill him too.

  “You knew,” the commander said, “when you were promoted, when you took an executive position, you knew you’d be part of the program.”

  “I signed papers!” Prince yelled so hard he sprayed spit. “I had a no reanimation addendum specifically for me!”

  Penny slinked around to the right, getting a cleared angle of Prince’s face and the commander’s—the man propped against a control panel now, holding his shoulder. Had Prince already shot him once? Maybe injured in the blast.

  The commander lowered his eyes. “Your father. He wouldn’t have it. You’re too valuable. So am I.”

  Prince fired a silenced shot to the left of the man, shattering a glass vat and sending thousands of gallons of thick liquid to the floor. “He doesn’t own me!”

  “What?” the commander laughed. “You don’t think he owns all of this.” He gestured around him and then pointed to himself. “Me. You. He owns all of us. The only laws we follow are his.”

  “I am not his property,” Prince scowled and shot a round to the commander’s right, bursting a cylinder with an inanimate woman inside it. The liquid rushed out and she flopped through the half-broken glass. A crunchy thump on the floor.

  The commander shook his head. “I’m just shocked you didn’t realize it sooner.”

  “What do you mean?” Prince yelled, taking a step closer. “I swear, I swear I will end you right now and you’ll never wake up, not cloned. Never.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” The commander winced, gripping his shoulder. “It’s over.”

  Prince fired. The commander’s knee exploded.

  “AAAAHHHH!” he cried, grabbing his knee and writhing. Legs jerking. The commander hunched onto his side and grunted and panted and cried as he slid to the floor. “UUGGHH! Prince! Please!”

  Penny struggled to keep her camera ste
ady. Prince didn’t look back once, but she knew he was aware of her presence.

  Walking to the man, Prince crouched. “Tell me now or I’ll take my time killing you.”

  Prince pressed the barrel of his pistol to the man’s other knee.

  “Years ago!” The commander’s face twisted. “Iran. You didn’t… you didn’t make it out. You died there. You woke up here, after… your coma.” Blood pooled on the tiled floor. His hands gripped at the soaked pant leg. “Get me a medic!”

  Prince’s shoulders jerked. His head lowered and turned away. Penny couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying. “That’s impossible.”

  The commander rocked and groaned. “You were one of the first, Emmett. Before me even. And your genetics. Your natural talent and creativity. It’s inside them.”

  Prince looked back up at the man. Paused and hissed, “…what?”

  Something in his hand started rattling.

  Merrick’s pain was the only distraction from the betrayal he was revealing. Prince gripped his pistol so tight it shook, making the belt of bullets chime like little bells. His mind raced—Iran—the mission years and years ago—his downed chopper and the crash that only he survived. He had woken up stateside. Told he had gone through surgery in Germany, but was damn lucky to have made it out without anything but head trauma. The crew, dead. The pilot, dead.

  There was the same dullness this time when he was woken in a hospital bed. The weird unfamiliarity of self. Disembodied. Déjà vu always straying on the periphery, but never quite there.

  Prince touched his chest. “I’ve been…?”

  Merrick nodded and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  “For five years?” Prince grunted.

  Merrick nodded again.

  Prince raised his pistol again, sights lined on Merrick’s forehead. “You’re only saying this so I will kill you,” he yelled.

  Merrick raised his bloody hand. “No…” Coughed and pressed back to his knee. “Our men. Soldiers. The duplicates. We…”