The whir of the engine sounded like a giant sucking in air, inhaling all available oxygen, leaving nothing to breathe. The world around me turned from light to dark, and I realized I was in a coffin. I panicked, and cried out, “Don’t let me die! I don’t want to die!”
There was no one to save me. I was alone out in space, floating through nowhere in a coffin.
As the dreamer of my dream, I could see both inside and outside my coffin. I could see the claustrophobic darkness that surrounded me and the endless expanse on the outside. I floated past giant suns, but the trapped version of me inside the coffin never saw them.
Aaaaung. Aaaung. Aaaung.
The dashboard computer warned me that the plane had reached its destination. I woke up and saw the distant sun. It had crossed over me in my sleep and hovered in the western horizon. It was late in the day in this part of the world.
Below my plane, I saw desert and ocean. The mountains to the east looked like a giant mirage, like an optical illusion.
I knew where I was and forced my eyes to remain open as I landed my plane. I felt so sick, so tired, and sleep strangled my thoughts, but I managed to stop the Meadowlark safely. I opened the door to let in the fresh, dry air. I let it engulf me as I sat, and my thoughts drifted off one more time. The hot air baked my lungs and warmed my aching arms and shoulders.
I wanted water, and I needed to get to town, but my need to sleep was overpowering. Water and safety would have to wait.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
I had landed in Mazatlan, a recently repopulated area in the geographic territory once known as Mexico. The Unified Authority depopulated the entire region hundreds of years ago, relocating almost all of the residents to colonies in space. For centuries, cities and towns sat empty, their infrastructure slipping into disrepair.
A year ago, the Enlisted Man’s Empire repopulated the area with refugees evacuated from Olympus Kri, one of the first planets incinerated by the Avatari aliens. We’d scattered them through most of Mexico and given them nearly unlimited autonomy.
Society hates a vacuum. Without the Unified Authority or the Enlisted Man’s Empire pulling their strings, the New Olympians turned to their own leaders—gangsters who had survived the evacuation with their organizations intact.
The gangster who had claimed Mazatlan was Brandon Pugh, a massive, powerful, ruthless man. Pugh and I weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies, either. He’d nearly gotten me killed once, so we had history. Also, I was practically family. Kasara was his niece.
It would have been nice if Pugh and some of his buddies had driven out to meet me and maybe brought me something cold to drink. I would have liked that. They could have brought me a sandwich, too, but I wouldn’t have eaten it. What was the last thing I ate? I asked myself. It had been a long time ago. I ate something before driving into the eastern suburbs after Sunny.
What had I eaten? That had been a lifetime ago.
What was going on back in Washington, D.C.? Had the last of my clones already died? Death by death reflex was quick, at least they had that. Their bodies tensed as the deadly hormone entered their brains, a sudden twitch, and they died. There must have been some sort of trauma; blood poured out of their ears. I imagined death by reflex to be as fast and as fatal as a bullet through the skull.
I thought of Hauser and MacAvoy. One lost in space, the other practically drowning himself in his mugs filled with a noxious home remedy that wouldn’t work. Neither of them would walk away from this. Nor would General Strait, the chief of the Air Force, but I didn’t really give a shit about what happened to him.
The airfield was a good ten miles from town, ten miles of arid wind and desert heat. How much of it would I walk? How much of the trip would I spend crawling? Ten miles. Growing up in the orphanage, I used to run farther than that—run, not jog; now it seemed like an unfathomable distance.
I spent an hour sitting in the Meadowlark, trying to persuade myself to leave, but the sun had set, and my head hurt. Sitting and resting made sense, so I sat and rested with my legs hanging out of the door of the plane, the dry air parching my throat, the heat soothing kinks in my shoulder and neck.
I drifted between consciousness and delirium. Sometimes I dreamed. Sometimes I hallucinated, speaking to people whom my conscious mind would have identified as dead.
Sergeant Tabor Shannon tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Shannon was my mentor. He was one of the final Liberators. He’d been in his fifties when I met him. His hair had gone white, but he had the face of a twenty-year-old. He’d been “sentient.” He knew he was a clone.
The night I found out I was a clone, we drank ourselves numb. We drank Sagittarian Crash. We drank two, maybe three glasses each and would have kept drinking had the bartender not cut us off. He didn’t want us to die at his counter.
I said, “I’m resting.” Shannon didn’t hear me. He was already gone.
Ava Gardner glided up beside me in his place. She had dark brown hair; hidden in those brown locks was a hint of red that only showed in the right light. She had a cleft chin and ruby lips. She looked at me, and I saw anger in her green eyes. “Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “You don’t get to lie here and wait for it all to end.”
“That’s how you died,” I said.
She said, “That’s not what happened. Don’t you remember? You murdered me.”
“You wanted me to leave you,” I said. “You told me to leave you. You said you were tired of living.”
She giggled, and said, “Silly, I was already dead by then. That wasn’t how you murdered me; that was how you buried me.”
“No, that’s not true,” I said.
Before I could get the words out, she had already gone. Night had set in. The air felt cold. I heard the buzz of insects. The man who stared into my face was big, so big that it had to be Ray Freeman, but he didn’t talk like Freeman. He had a high voice, and he spoke in whispers. He said, “Sure he’s alive; he’s breathing.”
I asked, “Where’s Ava?”
“Ava who? Did you bring her with you?”
A man with a voice like Ray Freeman said, “He means Ava Gardner.”
The whisperer said, “If you find her, let me know.”
“I left her on Providence Kri. She wanted me to leave her there. She said she was tired of living.”
“What is he talking about?” asked a person who sounded too nervous to be Freeman. Somebody said something like, “Hey, he’s saying crazy shit. Is he supposed to be saying crazy shit? Something’s wrong with his head.”
Someone else came, someone I didn’t know. He shined a bright light into my eyes, and said, “Doesn’t look like anybody’s home.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the man placed his hands on my face and forced one of my eyes open. He shined a bright light into the open eye, then he opened the other eye and repeated the process.
“Are you planning on dying?” asked Freeman. He must have been hiding somewhere behind the guy with the light.
“Got any good reasons for me to live?” I asked.
“Will he live?” asked Freeman.
I saw the outline of a big man, but he wasn’t Freeman. In a voice I recognized but could not place he responded, “We’re talking a head cold and a little dehydration. For this guy that ought to be a snap; I mean, he survived a bullet in his gut. Give him a day or two, and I bet he’s singing in the shower.”
Someone said something I didn’t understand, then the big man said, “I’m not putting my money on a dead horse; there’s no percentage in it.”
I said to myself, That’s not Freeman; that’s Brandon Pugh. How could I have mistaken him for Freeman? It didn’t matter. The moment passed, and these ghosts left as well.
My next visitor was Perry MacAvoy. He stood outside the plane glaring in at me. He scowled, pulled his cigar from his mouth, and said, “Stop goldbricking, Harris
. Damn waste of synthetic flesh. Five million dead soldiers and you, you damned shit-for-brains Marine, you’re taking a breather. I don’t know what I ever saw in you.”
I said, “Get specked, MacAvoy. What do you want from me?”
“Get your ass off that bed.”
“It’s not a bed; it’s a seat. Do they put beds in Army planes?”
“The Army doesn’t use planes. You know that.”
“Leave me alone. I’m dying here,” I said.
“Dying? You call this dying? What do you know about dying? You don’t even have a specking bullet in your lungs, and you think you’re dying? This isn’t dying; this is sunbathing, princess.”
I said, “You’re lucky; you’re already dead, asshole.”
“Are you shitting me, son? You think it’s better to be dead?”
“What do you have to worry about? The worst thing that can happen to you already did. As far as you’re concerned, it’s already over.”
“You piece of maggot-ridden sewage waste, how did you get it in your maggot-infested brain that I am done fighting? I’d give my shriveled left testicle to be where you are right now. Shit, I’d give my perfectly good right testicle just to have another shot at those bastards.”
I laughed, and said, “They aren’t doing you any good; you already lost them. You’re dead.”
“Dead? You think I’m dead? I’m not dead. I’m going to live forever.”
“Get specked,” I said.
MacAvoy came and stared me in the eye. He stood so close I could have kneed him if I wanted. He wore a dress uniform with an antique revolver hanging from a holster on his belt. The pistol had a silver finish and a mother-of-pearl grip. The gun was ornate, but it shot real bullets; of that I had no doubt. Officers like Lieutenant General Pernell MacAvoy never wore lipstick, and they didn’t sport ornamental firearms.
I asked, “What’s with the prehistoric pistol?”
He drew it and aimed it at me. He said, “I use it for shooting cowards, you know, soldiers who run away during the battle. Harris, you ran away.” It was MacAvoy who said this, but the voice belonged to Ava.
Did I fall asleep or did I wake up? One way or another, MacAvoy disappeared and so did my world as unknown amounts of time elapsed. I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew that a new day had begun when I saw the glow of sunlight through my eyelids.
The air was too cold for Mazatlan. It made my skin prickle.
A soft hand stroked my forehead. I knew it was Sunny’s without opening my eyes, so I batted it away. I said, “Bitch, get away from me.”
“That isn’t very nice.”
The other voices had seemed real, but I knew that most of them had come from inside my head. This voice was real, and it didn’t belong to Sunny Ferris.
With some effort, I managed to open my eyes. I was in a hospital room. Two armed policemen stood near the door. Kasara sat beside my bed. She had a basin of water and a wet cloth in her hands.
“You’ve been asleep for a long time,” she said.
“How long?” I asked.
“They found you talking to yourself inside your airplane yesterday morning. The doctor said you were badly dehydrated.”
She was beautiful. She’d put on some weight since the New Olympian refugees moved to Earth, and she looked healthier. Her eyes were blue and piercing. Her hair was blond and thin.
She said, “You shouldn’t have come here, Wayson. You know Brandon. He’s not going to protect you.”
So the news was out. The world knew that the clone empire was done, even down here, in the New Olympian Territories, even down here, in gangster-controlled Mazatlan.
Four tubes ran into a manifold needle that poked into my forearm. I coughed, and Kasara held up a cup with water, so I could drink from the straw. The water was cool, but it burned when it reached my throat.
“Has he called them?” I asked.
“Those guards aren’t there to protect you,” said Kasara. “He put them there to make sure you don’t leave before the U.A. gets here.”
I remembered the words I had heard during a recent delirium, and said, “You don’t get any percentage for betting on the wrong horse.”
“You play a mean game of possum,” she said as she replaced the cup onto the bed tray.
“Your uncle has a loud voice. I heard him in my sleep.”
Kasara said, “The Unified Authority has a plane on our airfield.” She dabbed at my forehead again. She was tough, but sorrow and sympathy showed in her eyes, even if she concealed it in her voice. She said, “Brandon says you’re all alone. The Unified Authority has wiped out the rest of them. Wayson, you’re the last clone, the very last one.”
I used to be the last Liberator clone; now I’m the last clone, I thought. No more Liberators. No more general-issue clones. One day, after all of humanity has died, some alien scientist will find my DNA and resurrect me; then I’ll be the last human as well.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
As a show of his confidence in his New Olympian allies, Tobias Andropov only sent a platoon to arrest me. He could have sent a division and declared martial law in the Territories. By Unified Authority standards, the New Olympian Territories qualified as a lawless state.
Kasara waited with me in the hospital room, taking updates every few minutes and relaying them to me. She sat beside my bed like a wife sitting vigil with her dying husband. We weren’t married, but considering the future Andropov had for me, she was sitting vigil.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
I hadn’t tried sitting up. I tensed my stomach muscles, made my back rigid, and tried to sit up. My head spun. It felt like someone had attached an air pump to my head and started inflating my brain.
“Did somebody put some drugs in my saline?” I asked.
Kasara said, “I don’t think so.”
“Then I’m probably sick,” I said.
When I first met her, Kasara couldn’t chat without flirting. So much had changed in her. She gave my joke a knowing smile and let it pass.
Kasara’s phone rang. She listened to what the caller had to say, said, “Thank you,” then said, “They’re at the capitol building.”
“Are they meeting with your uncle?” I asked.
She laughed, and said, “He’s not the governor.”
“But he’s the one who handed me over?” I asked. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.
“Yes.”
The platoon leader’s visit to the capitol was just a formality. Andropov knew Brandon Pugh ran Mazatlan.
The door opened. Kasara saw who stepped through, and said, “Speak of the devil.”
Brandon Pugh said, “You never told me you were religious.”
He came sans bodyguards, though, I supposed, the sentries at the door would have protected him if I tried anything. I wouldn’t have tried anything; he was big and strong and menacing, and I was weak as a child. Pugh was powerfully built but heavy, like a professional athlete who has retired and learned to enjoy life.
He stood in the doorway, and asked, “How are you feeling, Harris?”
I said, “Like a dead horse.”
When I saw his flummoxed expression, I decided to help him out. I said, “‘I’m not putting money on a dead horse.’”
“Oh, you heard that,” he said. “I thought you were down for the count.”
“I was. You spoke so loud, I heard anyway.”
Pugh turned to one of the guards, and said, “He says I talk too loud,” as if it were a joke. The guard laughed. I got the feeling he would have laughed no matter what Pugh told him.
Then he turned back to me, and said, “The doctor says you only got the flu, Harris. A little flu bug isn’t gonna kill you.”
“The Unified Authority will,” said Kasara. She stared at her uncle, her face frozen in anger, her eyes shooting lasers at his. She was skinny and tiny, but she radiated fierceness at that moment. She reminded me of a praying mantis preparing to strike.
> Pugh ignored her. He said, “Look, Harris, I didn’t have any choice. They tracked your plane here.”
“How’d they know it was his plane?” Kasara asked.
Pugh didn’t say anything. Kasara did. She said, “Liar.”
Pugh said, “Honey, you don’t know what’s going on right now. All the clones are dead.”
“You told me that last night,” she said.
“Did I tell you that the Unified Authority Fleet came back from Terraneau? Andropov and his army marched into Washington this morning. It’s like the Enlisted Man’s Empire never existed.
“Your boyfriend isn’t a general anymore; he’s a criminal. He’s got nowhere to go and no one to help him.”
I said, “And there’s no percentage in betting on a dead horse.”
“I got trouble enough with Andropov without harboring his worst enemy.”
I wanted to blame Pugh, but I agreed with him instead. He was a gangster, and from his peculiar perspective, the Unified Authority wasn’t the law—it was the biggest gang.
He walked over to the side of my bed and tossed me a thermal pack. I caught it, but it cost me. My arms and shoulders had no strength, and the needle in my arm poked deeper into my flesh.
He said, “I heard you got a fever so I brought you a present. I had one like it back on Olympus Kri, used it when I got sick.”
It was a disposable thermal pack, a device our medics carried by the case into battles. At the moment, it wasn’t cold. If anything, it was slightly warm.
The viscous gel and radiating marbles inside its sack were designed to absorb and retain temperatures produced by a chemical caplet, be they hot or cold. Pugh had just carried the pack outside, in the hot Mazatlan sun. The gel had leached traces of heat from the air.
Pugh said, “It’s disposable; you only get to use it one time.”
I knew that. There’d be a small plastic vial, maybe an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, in the center of the pack. They called it a “stick.” Snap the stick, and you initiated a chemical reaction either heating or freezing the gel and the marbles. Packs like this one would stay cold for an hour.
The Clone Apocalypse Page 17
