by Lee Hayton
“There has to be.” Feet clumped up the stairs again. “The tracker is still pinging up here.”
“Look for yourself.”
I followed his pointing finger to see the line of bullets creating tiny skylights above my head. “If there were anybody up there, I’d have hit something. It’s nothing. The old witch has sorted out some sort of weird distraction. What the hell was going on outside?”
“Some weirdo cat attack.” Soldier two shrugged and swiveled around to return downstairs. “It’s been shot out on the lawn. Stupid thing jumped off the roof, and the men started firing. Three of them got clipped by friendly fire.” He snorted with disgust. “The whole damn thing is a bloody mess.”
Miss Tiddles?
When I heard the soldiers on the ground floor, I let myself down from the roof as silently as I could manage. By keeping to the edges of the loft, I made it to the window without making any boards creak.
My small ginger cat lay on the lawn, blood dribbling from her mouth and the patch of white hair on her chest darkened. In the moonlight, the blood looked like an oil stain.
Why didn’t you run when you had the chance?
I moved over to the stairwell, wondering if I’d be able to escape down it without bumping into another soldier heading up. God hates a coward, I figured and started down.
“There’s no sign of her, sir. I think we’ve just got to call this situation now and upload a new copy from the hard drive.”
I kept to my trick of staying close to the walls as I walked across the lounge.
“No. There’s genuinely no sign. The tracker is pinging, but there’s no evidence that it’s still in the house. She’s not here, that’s for certain.”
The soldier listened to a barked command, his radio pressed hard enough against his ear that I couldn’t make out the individual words.
“Well, just upload the new one and have them cast the spell to render the old one unusable. Didn’t that work last time?”
The yelling that greeted that sentiment had the soldier shifting the receiver far from his ear.
“Don’t you tell me what to do. I’m the one in charge of this operation, and I’m the one who makes the decisions. Or would you like to go in front of the board and tell them how a few rejects from the employment pool managed to free the only operable witch in the entire state? A new body and upload would cost us about the same as a new army unit. Do you want to retire now without a pension to free up the funding to do that?”
“No, sir,” the soldier said, a glum expression on his face.
“Then I suggest you take another look at every inch of that property. If you can’t find her by eight in the morning when the intelligence office opens for business, then it’s your ass on the line.”
The soldiers stared sullenly at each other as soldier two clipped the radio back on his belt. “Okay. I’ll start upstairs and work my way down while you get the remaining men outside back on their feet. Got that?”
“What about the tracker?”
“Forget about it. If you find it pinging somewhere on its own, fine, but I think she’s just put a ghost into the machine. Could have been gone for hours, for all we know. Days even, given the smell in that kitchen.”
As soldier two returned to the loft, and soldier one moved outside, I cut the tracker from my throat. It tried to slip away from my fat fingers, but I ignored the pain involved and snagged it. As I followed the path of soldier one outside, I flicked it off into a rose bush, was had been pared back for the coming winter. It could be a prize for diligence if someone found it in amongst that.
The soldiers had moved the dead cat. Judging by the fact it now lay on a patch of dirt near the fence, they’d shifted it to get it out of the way, rather than to preserve it for later examination.
I tiptoed closer. Once I was satisfied the soldiers’ attention was focused elsewhere, I picked Miss Tiddles limp body up and stuffed it inside my coat. What with the extra clothing and the dead cat, I was now full up.
If it hadn’t been for my extra luggage, the move from the shadow of the cottage to the tree line would have been a smooth transition. As it was, I had to struggle over the hedge, unable to use one arm and with my padded legs catching on every twig.
I fell flat on my face on the other side, spitting out a mouthful of dirt and grass while I staggered back to my feet. Luckily, no soldiers were close enough to hear my passage or just wrote it off as background noise if they were.
Once inside the shelter of the forest, I took a deep breath and checked that I still existed. Yup. I felt my head, my shoulder, my crotch. All present and accounted for.
Now, I just had to get back to the parsonage, rejuvenate the cat, and work out how the hell to turn back into a human.
Chapter Eighteen
“See.” I pulled the old laptop toward me and booted it up. “Even Percival has a computer, and he’s ancient.”
“Yeah, all right,” Percival said with a frown. “No need to get personal.”
“Sorry.” I tapped my fingers on the bench while waiting for the thing to start up. Asha had fiddled with the electricity meter that fed the parsonage, convincing the poor machine that Percival was all paid up.
Miss Tiddles was lying, stiff and still, on the dining table behind us. I’d tried to clean up her fur a bit, then gave up. She’d do a much better job herself when she wakened.
If she awakened.
Not that I disbelieved Asha’s story about what happened after the conference center massacre, but you never know. Maybe Miss Tiddles had lost count somewhere along the way. Dying and then coming back to life couldn’t be easy on a feline.
“They’re not going to have the information just sitting out on the internet, though, are they?” Dory had scoffed a glass of wine to ‘steady her nerves’ and was looking about thirty years younger as a result. Not the stunner who’d opened the door to us, but certainly headed toward the MILF range.
“Asha has a way with these things, you watch.”
“Hey, I didn’t promise anything. We’re just giving it a go and hoping that we get somewhere further now that we’ve got the location and timing locked down.”
“Of course,” I patted her on the shoulder. “Didn’t mean to imply that you could work miracles.”
Asha sniffed and lifted her chin. “Well, if you put it like that, I guess I am pretty impressive.”
“Oh, get over yourself. You haven’t even got the damned thing to turn on yet.” Dory pushed away from the counter to investigate the dusty bottle of wine. Hooray for her, it appeared there was another glass in there.
“Once you’ve found out some information and got a list of instructions, then we’ll celebrate, okay?”
“What’s your situation, that your mind is uploadable?” I asked as Dory scoffed down the glass in about three seconds flat.
“Eh?” Dory’s tone of voice was confused, as though she didn’t understand or thought I was talking rubbish. I’d been watching her, though. When I’d asked my question, her eyes had narrowed defensively.
“The soldiers,” I continued, feeling for her pressure points the same way that Asha would feel for brain chemicals. Pressing on your last nerve was something my mother once accused me of. When you lack other skills, you take what you can get. “The soldiers, they said that since you were MIA, they’d have to upload you to a new format, or something. What’s that about?”
Asha had turned and was frowning at Dory, too. When her friend didn’t speak, she faced me. “What specifically did they say?”
“They started it when they were talking about Dory splitting into little bits and pieces and how that had worked out last time.”
Dory interrupted with a bark of laughter, shaking her head when I raised my eyebrows.
“Then, one of the soldiers went through the same thing on the radio. The guy on the other end reminded him how expensive it was.”
Asha leaned over and pinched Dory’s arm beneath her fingers.
“Ow!
”
“Nope,” Asha said, leaning back. “That’s just normal flesh. She’s not a rebuild job.”
“Of course, I’m not a rebuild job. You basically bankrupted the department with yours. They were hardly going to go through all that palaver again.”
“But he’s got a point.” Asha glanced at the computer, still with its cursor lazily completing the same slow circle, over and over, then looked back at Dory. “They must be doing something with you, given how old you are. I know what they did to me, what the hell did they do to you?”
Dory shrugged and upended the wine bottle over the glass. Empty. Still, she tried to tip the last few drops into her mouth. I hoped Percival had another bottle stored somewhere. It looked like Dory was now reversing through her late thirties.
“They just took a backup copy of my brain,” she said after a long pause. Dory stared down into her glass so intently that I wondered if she was trying to conjure it fully. Then she placed it down on the bench with disgust and folded her arms across her chest.
“They did it with most of the operatives. Nobody thought much about it at the time. I got shoved into a large machine—looked just like one of those old-fashioned MRIs, or a coffin—a few hours later, it went ping, and they popped me back out.”
Asha began to tap her fingers on the countertop again. “And…?”
Dory shrugged. “And when my body gave out to the point that I wasn’t any use to them anymore, they switched me out to a new one.”
I looked at her in confusion. “Switched out what?”
“My body.” Dory plucked at the skirt lying against her thigh, then let it fall back into place, clinging with static electricity.
“Not this body, not back then. They traded me into a much younger person.” Dory nodded at me. “Probably not a lot older than you.”
Asha stared at her friend in horror. “They killed off a teenager, so they could upload a copy of your brain into her body?”
“No!” Dory sounded horrified enough for me to relax. Whether it was the truth, she obviously believed it. “A young girl had killed herself over a boyfriend or some such rubbish. Rather than tip her into a grave or burn her up, they harvested her body and popped me into it.”
Dory shrugged. “I don’t know what they did with my old body. I fell asleep in the old people’s home and woke up, looking like I was in high school.”
Percival looked even more interested than the rest of us. Not surprising, he’d been turned at such an old age I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded trading in for a younger model. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind trading in for an elder version of myself.
“Do they still have the technology to do this?” the old man asked. His voice was quivering, and not just with the excesses of talking he’d done that day.
Dory shrugged again. For a person who had experienced the procedure, she seemed remarkably uninterested in the whole thing. “They can do it with me. Over the years, I’ve banged into one or two from the old days who’re the same.” She pulled at her nose as the years started to pile back onto her face. “It takes a bit to recognize some of them. I’m lucky that at least I have a spell to do some reconstruction on my face.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice almost fading into silence. “Lucky.”
“Anyway. I don’t know the answer. I’d guess that at some point, the guy in charge of the process died and they’re just following along with the little bits they learned.”
“Holding the operation together with chewing gum and string,” Asha said with a wry smile.
Dory smiled back, apparently sharing a private joke. “That’s the one. If they’re going to upload me to a new host, then I might pop out of existence at any time.”
That statement made my stomach hurt, and I pulled the laptop closer to see what the holdup was. Installing updates – 3 of 247 was written on the screen.
“Oh, god.” I put my head into my hands. “The sun’ll be coming up soon, and this isn’t going anywhere.”
“Don’t worry, Norman.” Percival laid a hand on my shoulder. “If that dimwit Eldon could figure out the transition back to human, I’m sure you’ll manage.”
I didn’t like to tell him the truth I’d started to realize about myself—that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d always thought. His earlier joke about inheriting my parents’ stupidity seemed to be closer to the mark.
“Maybe,” Asha said, continuing the conversation with her friend as though Percival and I had never interrupted. “You’ll end up with two consciousnesses operating at the same time.” She stared down at the floor, as though the old stone tiles would have the answers written upon them. “Wouldn’t existing in two places at the same time be fun?”
Dory shook her head. “No, it wouldn’t. I’ve already got a spell for that, but you won’t believe the mess it makes. Having more than one body to control at the same time just gets confusing very fast. I’d rather than I just winked out somewhere at the same time I turned on someplace else. Much tidier, thank you.”
“But you’d lose everything that your new body had experienced,” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Dory stared blankly at me, aging a few days with every passing second. “I don’t know. If I don’t remember it, there’d never been any way of knowing.”
“Or,” Asha said, a frown deepening on her forehead until the silicone polymer was in danger of permanently wrinkling, “that’s what the device was. Not a tracking device for your physical body—although it was that, too. Maybe that was constantly uploading your new mind.”
“Lots of maybes in that sentence and not much chance of proving them, either way. Not since your friend ate it.”
“I cut it out,” I said, pointing to my neck, although the incision I’d made there had long healed. “The chip’s now in a rose bush by the side of the front door.”
“Well, then. You’d better hope that didn’t contain my whole brain,” Dory said with a smile. “Or you’re the one who finally killed me. Not a very nice thing to do when I’m about to make you a real boy.”
“How many times have they switched you over, then?” Asha asked. “Or don’t you remember that either?”
“After the teenager, there was a middle-aged man. That was nicer than I expected. He lasted for a long time. Just before they locked me up in the cottage, they put me in this.” She swept her hand along the length of her body. In the absence of a further alcohol top-up, it was aging rapidly. “From the looks of it, the agents just waited outside an old-persons home and mugged the first hearse to come calling.”
“It’s not that bad,” Asha said in a conciliatory voice, but Dory just snorted.
“When you look like this, and I look like a Victoria’s Secret model, then I’ll come and give you a nice dose of condescension in return.”
“It’s ready,” Percival said, clapping his hands together. “Now, I hope you bright young things can work this because I’ve never quite gotten the hang of it.”
Bright young thing Asha took control, while I looked at the increasing glow through the windows with a frown of worry.
“About time we went to bed, then,” Percival said. “We’ll be in the cellar if you need us for anything.”
I almost turned and ran when Percival dragged out the coffin. I mean, what the hell? Even when I lived here, and the vampires were grooving on the fact that they were monsters, I couldn’t remember anyone going quite that far.
“What?” Percival said, striding into full defensive mode straight away. “It’s comfortable.”
“So’s a bed.” I looked around at the stone floor and gave a tug on the handle next to his coffin. Another casket rolled out. Great. “I don’t suppose you’ve just got a simple mattress lying around?”
“Got rid of those years ago.” Percival folded up his cape and then began to climb inside. “I found that the people of the village respected me more if they came calling and found me like this. After spending so many years frightened that they’d turn me in, it seems
they grew to like me so long as I fit in with their stereotypes.”
I tilted my head to one side, still not convinced. “You said that some girls come around…”
I trailed off, unsure of where that conversation would lead.
“Yeah. Some of the old council members organized that for me. I like to think that I’m their “fuck you” gesture to the state.”
“And you’re fine with that, are you?”
Percival gave me a stern glare. “I’m better with it than I would be cast down in a pit and expected to work all night for no pay.” After a second’s pause, he raised his eyebrows. “You?”
“Fair enough.” I climbed into the coffin and wriggled around. He was right, the thing was comfortable. Satin wouldn’t have been my first choice for bed clothes, but the cotton padding beneath was nice and thick, supporting me in all the right places.
“Now. Let's just hope that things go okay upstairs. I hate it when I don’t get my full ten hours.” Percival lay back and crossed his arms over his chest.
When I spluttered out a laugh, he opened one eye, causing me to react with even more hilarity.
“For a guest, you’re very rude, you know.”
“I’m sorry. It’s been the strangest day.”
“For me, too. But I’m not going about questioning your life choices and then sniggering about your sleeping habits. I’ve already shown you the door once, don’t think I wouldn’t do it again.”
Once I got my laughter under control, I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. I’m extremely grateful for your help.” I paused for a few minutes. “And for not judging me for wanting to change back into a human.”
“Oh, I judge you, all right,” Percival said, sporting his own grin. “I’m just not going to say it to your face, that’s all.”
I gave another short laugh. “Well, then. I’m grateful for that, too. I hope you have a lovely ten hours sleep.”
It was lost on Percival who’d already begun a gentle snoring. I shifted position in the coffin, feeling the oddity wash over me. After a few minutes, I gave in and crossed my arms over my chest. It really did seem that the coffins were just built to be most comfortable that way.
