Betrayed

by Francine Pascal

  Tom of course had no choice in the matter. Gaia watched as he bottled up every one of his real impulses and muttered his dishonest response. “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Loki hollered. “Yes, of course, you do. Well, here is the answer, Tom. Here is the truth that every one of us should have come to terms with long ago. My newfound lack of fear has shown me the way. I’ll never know why you didn’t come to this conclusion yourself long ago, Gaia, and kill me, as any enlightened person would have.”

  I’m working on it, Gaia thought, pointlessly checking her straps yet again for possible leeway. Another minute listening to his voice and she would have to do something very drastic. Something. Anything to shut his lunatic mouth.

  “You see, all this time I’ve been the victim of one very simple and overwhelming fear,” he said. “And here is the key. Here is the revelation, so pay attention: Our greatest fear in life is not what you think. Death. Death is not what we fear most in this world. Do you know what it is, Tom? Do you know what we fear most in this world? It is loneliness.”

  His gun was battering her face with less and less control. Gaia could feel his hand on the brink of something. She couldn’t tell if he was getting weaker by the moment or just more anxious to shoot.

  “Yes…yes, loneliness…,” he went on, his voice quavering with intensity. “Having no lover, no companion. Having no family, no one on this planet who is a true reflection of you. That is what we fear. That is the equivalent of death to the average human being. That is what I have feared for all these years. And you see, that is why I am free, Tom. That is why all this foolishness can end.”

  His entire body suddenly hunched over. Gaia saw her father inch forward, but Loki regained his balance, however shaky, and shoved the gun back into her cheekbone. QR2 plugged his gun more firmly into her father’s head.

  “Don’t you even…, ” Loki warned. He was forcing out every word now. Pushing each consonant and vowel through his contorted lips and his bobbing head. “You’re not hearing me, Tom. You’re not paying attention. You see, I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not afraid to be alone. I am ready now. I’m ready to be completely self-contained, self-reliant, and self…defined. I am ready to accept…that my own flesh and blood despises me. Katia despised me…. You despise me…. Now Gaia. So, you see…I no longer need a family. I am ready to…dispose of my family. I am ready to say…good-bye.”

  He squeezed his trembling finger on the trigger, and Gaia could swear she felt time freeze. It was as if time had added two seconds to this minute, granting Gaia one extra moment before her death. There would be no chaos, no panic. Her entire life wouldn’t pass before her eyes as she’d always been told, but rather her thoughts would become simple and concise. And though she had wondered it many times, now she finally knew. Gaia finally knew what she would be thinking at her death. There would have been time for more, but in the last moment she found herself with only a few thoughts: (1) Dad, I forgive you for all your mistakes, and I love you. When he shoots me, you make your move. You take him down and everyone else in this room. And bring Heather home. (2) Ed, the three words were I love you. I said them only once, but I loved you, Ed. I loved you like nothing I ever could have remotely understood or handled. And (3) Mom, Mary, Sam…I’ll be there in a minute.

  Gaia locked her eyes with her father’s one last time and then prepared for the sound of the gunshot. She would not flinch. She would not move in the slightest. And just as she had always known, her eyes would remain wide open. Until the end, and long after her death.

  But the gunshot never came. Instead Loki fell quite suddenly to his knees.

  He dropped down to the floor in a half-convulsive, half-paralytic heap. His hand stayed glued to his gun, but his arm had given in to a wild series of spasms. The sight was so horrific that Gaia could do nothing but stare. Her quick preparation for death fell away as the impulse to escape instantly replaced it, coursing through her body faster than adrenaline. But the unfortunate realities remained. She was still thoroughly immobile, and her father was still being held at gunpoint.

  And then another voice was shouting instead of Loki’s. A voice from across the room. The voice of Dr. Glenn.

  “Do you see now?” he called out, staring down at Loki with a kind of desperate disapproval as he dug his hand deep into his lab coat pocket. “Do you understand that you need the counteragent? You need it now.”

  Gaia’s eyes zoomed to the doctor’s pocket. He’s got it. He’s got the counteragent in his pocket. You need to get it. How the hell do you get it? Think. But no amount of thinking would do a thing. The counteragent was across the room. It could have been six inches in front of her face, and it still wouldn’t have mattered. It was a dangling carrot she could never reach.

  “Shut up,”Loki hissed, struggling to lift his decimated body off the ground. “You think these…harmless spasms frighten me? They mean nothing to me. Nothing.”

  “You need this injection to survive,” the doctor shouted. “I don’t care what you fear. Being fearless does not make you a fool—now, take it.”The doctor dug farther into his pocket.

  “You don’t call me a fool!” Loki hollered, finally getting back to his knees as he tried to steady the arm that held the gun. “You don’t issue orders or ultimatums, Doctor. You don’t talk anymore. You shut your fearful, weakling, idiot mouth or I kill you first!”

  “I’m trying to save your life,” the doctor pleaded angrily. “Let me save your life, for God’s sake. Complete paralysis is the next step. Complete paralysis and then coma. Now, if you would prefer to spend the rest of your life in a coma—”

  “Enough!”

  Gaia could barely hear Loki’s scream over the booming echo of his gun. He fired off two thunderous shots at the doctor that reverberated through the empty room like a sawed-off shotgun. Heather screamed at the top of her lungs as she pulled her head deep within her shoulders and crushed her useless eyes closed from sheer reflex.

  Somehow, despite his wild spasms, Loki had still found the strength to aim. Gaia watched as the first shot erupted in the doctor’s shoulder, knocking him back against the wall. And then the second shot hit. It blew a black, bloody hole in the left side of his stomach.

  The room became eerily quiet. Dr. Glenn stared wide-eyed at Loki, gazing in shock and disbelief at what he had just done. And then he began to fall, sliding slowly and painfully down to the floor, leaving a thick trail of blood down the ugly white wall.

  “I can’t…,” the doctor uttered quietly. “Why would you…?”He seemed too shocked to complete a sentence as his breathing rapidly became more labored. He could no longer move, but he panned his eyes across the room, looking at the silent audience who could do nothing to prevent his death. And then the look in his eyes took one last shift. It shifted to something cruel and hateful.

  “Good,” the doctor stated, taking in only shallow quarter breaths as he fixed his eyes on Loki. “I’m the only one who could re-create that counteragent. I…told you this was the last vial. You’ve just signed your own death sentence, you idiot. You pathetic…ignorant…No—”

  Loki fired off another flailing shot. It didn’t even hit the doctor. It only left a black hole in the wall next to his head. But it didn’t matter. The doctor had already died. His face fell to his shoulder as his arms sprawled out on the floor like an old rag doll’s.

  And Gaia could already see the thought pass over Loki’s face. She could see him realize what he had just done. Finally he seemed to have discovered whatever remained of his rational mind.

  He needed that counteragent. Of course he needed it. He needed it right now. And killing the doctor had left him with only one vial of it remaining. So he began to move, ever so slowly. He rose to his feet, still hunched over by his spasms and his paralysis, looking like some pathetic joke—looking like someone’s horrible imitation of some operatic monster—the Hunchback, or Igor, or The Fly. It would have looked so fake if Gaia didn’t know how very real it was. It would have been funn
y to stare at or so sad…if it weren’t so disgustingly ugly.

  “I don’t want to see anybody move,” he ordered, each word sounding awkward and twisted pouring from the corner of his contorted mouth.

  He barely kept his gun aimed at Gaia’s face as he backtracked step by step toward the doctor’s corpse and crouched down next to him. He set down his gun and kept his eye on Gaia as he dug his usable hand into the doctor’s lab coat pockets.

  “Where is it?” he shouted, patting down the pockets again and again. Gaia could see his rage and desperation fast approaching the boiling point. “Where the hell is that counteragent!”

  “It’s right here.” A voice echoed through the room. All heads turned to the source of that voice.

  The once dour-faced QR1 was now proudly holding up the vial to Loki.

  Gaia’s heart sank to new depths. She had hoped that perhaps the last vial might have been lost somewhere in that room, somewhere where they might have found it after Loki had been subdued. Then she could have given that last dose to Heather, who had been growing grayer and more vegetative by the minute. At the very least, Gaia had hoped that someone had destroyed it—that Loki would never see the counteragent again and that he would succumb to every symptom the doctor had predicted, falling into a tragic state of complete paralysis and then a lifelong coma.

  But once again, the slightest bit of optimism had been too much. QR1 had obviously been protecting the vial for Loki this entire time, being the mindless thug that he was. He had simply been holding it for safekeeping until the Grand High Boss needed his medicine. Gaia was overcome by a wave of utter hopelessness and nausea as she stared at this pathetic excuse for a father-son team. The test-tube slave saving his master’s ass. How thoroughly repellant.

  Loki breathed out a desperate sigh of relief. “Excellent,” he said, holding his trembling arm out to QR1. “Give me the shot…quickly.”

  Gaia did everything in her power to will that vial out of QR1’s hand as he stepped forward. If she could just will that last vial to drop from his hand and crash to the floor.

  But it was no use. The vial stayed firmly in his grip. He stepped toward Loki and looked down at him.

  And then he turned away.

  He turned to his right, crouched down next to Heather Gannis, and gave her the shot.

  Remnants of a Scream

  “WHAT…WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Loki cried.

  Gaia was rather sure her jaw was still hanging open. As was her father’s. As was QR2’s. The entire room had been left dumbfounded and speechless. All of them with the same question. The same question Loki had just whimpered childishly from the floor. What was QR1 doing?Why? Why had he used the last vial on Heather and not Loki?

  Gaia had never seen this look on Loki’s face. Never. She had never seen his eyes without that veil of confidence and absolute power. She had never seen his brows arched in total shock, like a child who’d gotten lost in the woods or an old woman who’d just had her purse snatched. The epitome of helplessness.

  All he could do was stare and watch it happen. Watch as QR1 injected Heather with the counteragent and then threw the empty vial down on the floor, breaking it into infinitesimal shards. Heather let out the remnants of a scream, but that was all. She was too weak to resist. And thank God for that. Her life had just been saved, and she probably didn’t even know it.

  “What are you doing?” Loki squawked again. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  QR1 rose to his feet and walked slowly to Loki until he was towering over his gelatinous body on the floor. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing, sir. I’m doing something you’ve never done in your entire life.” He knelt closer. “I’m honoring my brother.”

  “What?” Loki raised his eyes up to his. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Josh,” he spat. “My brother. My twin brother. The one you killed.”

  “Oh, please, he wasn’t even your—”

  “Shut up,” QR1 shouted. “Yes, he was. He was my brother. We were all brothers, whether you ever understood it or not. And my brother wasn’t an idiot. He knew his days were numbered. He could feel it. So he asked me. He made me promise that I would get Heather that counteragent if he couldn’t to do it himself before he died—no, let me rephrase—before you killed him. And I promised. I swore to him that I’d get it done. And I did.”

  QR1 suddenly turned to Gaia. “I was trying to give it to Heather in the hospital,” he explained, “but they were watching me, and she was so nervous, and then you came barging in, Gaia. I told you that you didn’t understand what was going on in there.”

  Gaia couldn’t possibly have uttered a response at this moment. Nor did he seem to need one. He turned right back to Loki before she could have even opened her mouth.

  “So that injection was for Josh,” he proclaimed. “Not for you. Never again for you.”

  “That’s enough,” Loki hissed, trying clumsily to climb to his knees. “Not another word, you little—”

  “No, I’ve got another word,” he barked. “I’ve got plenty more words, sir.”

  “You’re an experiment!” Loki growled. “A goddamned test case for an experiment that failed. I should have terminated all of you years ago—”

  “I am just so glad that it’s done!” QR1 howled, ignoring Loki entirely. Finally his patented smile had returned. Only now it was in an entirely different context. “I’m so glad that was the last of the counteragent and that you’ll probably rot right here in this crappy torn-down apartment like an old petrified fossil. That’s what you deserve. Not just for Josh, but for every other one of my brothers that you’ve killed without even thinking twice. You think we’re nothing but experiments? You think we’re less than human? Us?You’re the subhuman here. You’re less human than we will ever be. And now you’re done. I hope once that coma kicks in, you never wake up.”

  Loki’s eyes had glazed over by now. His expression had moved beyond rage or disbelief or spite into some strange blank netherworld. But Gaia knew exactly what his expression meant.

  He had just had his final revelation. A revelation Gaia would have been happy to impart had she chosen to even dignify his pseudophilosophical psycho ranting with a response.

  She knew next to nothing about fear, but she certainly knew this much: Yes, people fear death more than most things. And yes, they might fear loneliness even more. But the thing that people fear most…is the combination of the two. The thing that people fear most is dying alone. Which had always struck Gaia as extremely odd. Since everybody dies alone.

  But of course, Loki had always placed himself above everybody else. He suffered from hubris to the nth degree. And he would never accept the notion of dying alone. Which must have been why he started shooting.

  He thrust his convulsive arm forward and fired off his deafening gun again and again, waving it around wildly as he howled out a stream of indecipherable hatred. He clearly had no specific target in mind now. He just wanted to take them all down with him.

  QR1 was the first to go. Gaia had barely had a chance to blink before his entire torso was covered in bullet holes. The sheer force of the shots forced him to shuffle backward three steps before collapsing to the ground. The chaos turned so ugly, Gaia almost wanted to shut her eyes. Not because she was afraid, but simply to avoid stocking up on more images for her nightmares. But chaos always moved too quickly to avoid.

  QR2 swung his gun away from her dad and took his first step toward Loki to protect his brother, but it was already far too late to protect a corpse. He hadn’t even finished the first step when Loki’s wild bullet spray decimated his ankles, sending him to the ground as two more holes erupted in his head.

  Move. Move now and move fast, Gaia ordered herself. You are in the line of fire, wherever the hell that is.

  Gaia pushed off with her toe just to knock her chair over to the side. That was the only maneuver she had left. But as her chair tipped over, she saw him.

  She
saw her father covered in blood and falling to the floor headfirst.

  Irrational Reflex

  TOM HAD TO MAKE A SPLIT SECOND decision. Seeing Gaia’s chair tip over had made his heart stop. If she’d been hit, then his ability to live with himself would have finally reached its limit. But the only way to be sure no one got hit again—the only way to put an end to this thing—was to get to the source. Loki’s gun.

  With the twins, or whatever they were, dead on the floor, Tom knew he’d be next if he kept his feet to the ground. He had to jump. But which way? Over to Gaia to pull her out of the line of fire, or over to Loki to disarm him?

  You know the answer, Tom. Get that gun out of his hand or you’ll all be dead in five more seconds.

  So he jumped headfirst, covered in his dead captor’s blood, and prayed he could dodge the bullets for just one more second….

  “Aaagh!” Loki let out a high-pitched wail.

  Tom ripped the gun from his frail hand and plowed his shoulder into his chest, rolling his brother flat against the floor as he cried out again. The sound gurgling up from Loki’s chest was so painful and pathetic, Tom almost regretted tackling him so hard. But that was just an irrational reflex. He quickly reminded himself of the amount of pain his brother deserved—so much more than one man could inflict. More than an army could inflict. In fact, Loki deserved much worse than pain. Tom knew for a fact that nearly every system of justice, from that of the most primitive tribe to the most civilized country, would agree….

  Loki’s crimes were punishable by death. It was more than justified.

  Images were rapid-firing through Tom’s head. Katia’s dead body lying flat on the kitchen floor. Gaia lying on the floor right now, strapped to a chair like a prisoner of war.

  Tom grabbed onto the front of his brother’s shirt and hoisted his torso off the ground, pressing the barrel of the gun firmly to his forehead. If there had ever been a time to make an exception to his strict moral code, it was now. One simple gunshot to the head would finally ensure that this war was truly over—that Tom would never again have to look behind his back and wonder when the next murder attempt on his loved ones was coming.