The Clone Apocalypse

by Steven L. Kent

  Pugh said, “Give it a good snap, and everything freezes. You only get to use it one time, Harris, then it’s trash, so I figure you want to use it when you get real hot. You got a long ride back to Washington.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “What are you doing, Brandon?” Kasara asked, sounding more than a little suspicious.

  Ignoring his niece, Pugh said, “Harris, I got nothing against you. I hope you make it out of this alive.”

  We left it at that. For what it was worth, I believed him. He’d been a criminal on Olympus Kri; he planned a life of crime in the Territories, and he couldn’t afford the Unified Authority breathing down his neck. Men like Pugh considered themselves businessmen, not outlaws, and preferred to maintain a symbiotic relationship with the law. He wanted the Unified Authority to view him as cooperative, so he handed me over to them. What happened after he handed me over, well, that was my business.

  Kasara didn’t see it that way. I think she loved me; why, I’m not sure. She didn’t understand her uncle’s pragmatic motivations. She said, “Maybe I should go with you.”

  Pugh said, “That’s not such a good idea.”

  I agreed and said so.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what little surprise Pugh might have hidden into his thermal pack, but he had something up his sleeve. Maybe he’d stashed a grenade among the marble-sized pellets.

  Pugh said, “He’s not going on a joy ride, honey. Andropov isn’t giving your boy the key to the city. For all we know, they might just push him out of the specking plane before it lands.”

  Kasara turned to me, and said, “They can’t do that.”

  “That’s pretty much what I’d have my men do if I had Andropov,” I admitted. It wasn’t true. I’d captured Andropov before and locked him in jail. He escaped. If I ever caught him again, I hoped I’d have learned from my mistakes.

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  I said, “No,” as forcefully I could, then I coughed up my innards. I made an idiotic pun in my head using the words “phlegm” and “phlegmatic,” and I laughed at my own worthless witticisms. This flu would kill me; I didn’t want it killing Kasara as well.

  I squeezed the thermal pack with my clean hand and felt for a walnut-sized pellet among the pea-sized marbles. Nothing. What’s in there? I wondered. Pugh saw me squeezing and nodded his approval.

  When the Unifieds arrived at the hospital, both Kasara and Pugh received a call. Pugh excused himself. Kasara remained by my bed.

  “You should go with him,” I told her.

  “I want to go with you.”

  This was my day for puns. I said, “I’m a dead end.”

  Kasara looked me straight in the eye, her irises focused on mine, and asked, “Do you want me to go with you?”

  I said, “No,” and I did not look away.

  “You killed me,” that was what Ava had said in my delirium. It wasn’t Ava or her ghost or her angel; the vision I’d had was purely my ego speaking to my id, but I didn’t want more lovers calling me from the depths of my subconscious. I liked the idea of dragging as many Unifieds as possible into my grave, but lovers need not apply. Too much had happened for me to go down with a clean conscience, but I wouldn’t take any more friends along for the ride.

  The Unified Authority military had arrived—ten men in dress uniforms—nine enlisted men and the strangest-looking officer I’d ever seen—Major Joseph Conlon. A prissy wisp of a man wearing white gloves and formal dress greens, Conlon carried the same pearl-handled, nickel-plated revolver that Perry MacAvoy had aimed at me in my hallucination.

  Kasara stayed as the Unifieds filed into the room. She asked, “Are you trying to protect me?”

  It was a stupid question; of course I was. I said, “Yes.”

  “What if I don’t want you to protect me?”

  “What if I don’t want you to come with me?”

  “For my sake?” she asked.

  “For mine,” I said.

  The major traded a few words with the policemen by the door, and they left. He turned to Kasara, and asked, “Are you his nurse?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “I see,” he said. “Listen, friend, visiting hours are over.”

  Kasara was dainty, but she had her uncle’s mouth. She said, “Who the spe . . .”

  Seeing the major’s haughty demeanor and knowing that the bastard wouldn’t think twice about arresting her, I placed my hand on Kasara’s arm, and said, “Go.”

  Major Conlon glanced at me, then smiled at Kasara. He said, “See now, friend, the prisoner has given you some very good advice. I’ll give you one last chance to take it.”

  Kasara glared at him and smiled at me, but she knew that she’d been beaten. She kissed me on the cheek and left the hospital room.

  Conlon watched her leave, then he said, “You like ’em extra bony, don’t you?” His men laughed.

  I didn’t answer.

  He stepped closer to the bed, and said, “I just spent the last year of my life floating in space thanks to you, Harris. I have a wife and two children. They spent the last year alone, again, thanks to you. They didn’t know if I died on Terraneau or I survived, all because of you and your specking rebellion.

  “Don’t cross me, clone. My orders say I need to bring you in alive. They don’t say anything about bringing you in with both arms attached and there’s nothing about bullet holes or busted ribs.

  “You get me, Harris?”

  The bastard was only five feet tall and skinny; if he packed 150 pounds I’d have been surprised. He had brown eyes and blond hair and a forehead that spread out like the bow of a boat.

  When I didn’t answer his question, he glared into my eyes. and I stared straight ahead as if he weren’t there. I didn’t just ignore him; I pretended he didn’t exist.

  He said, “Oh, I see, you’re a real tough guy. I tell you what, hero; I’m supposed to have a doctor look you over and say you’re fit for travel, but seeing what a tough guy you are, how ’bout we skip the doctor. What do ya think?”

  He placed a hand on the crook of my arm, pressing his palm over the place where the needle entered my forearm. “What do you think, hero, are you fit for travel?”

  Under his grip, the needle dug another half inch into my arm. Normally that kind of pain didn’t get to me. Maybe the flu had weakened me. I didn’t groan or pull my arm away, but my back tensed, and I exhaled sharply. Gritting my teeth, I said, “Let’s skip the doctor.”

  Conlon said, “Good choice. The medics in these parts are all quacks anyway.”

  None of the enlisted men made a move as Conlon bullied me. No surprise there, I suppose. Enlisted men seldom question officers. Nothing good ever comes of questioning officers; the officers themselves make damn sure of it. Also, I was the enemy. I was the last clone.

  The soldiers didn’t bother wheeling me out on a gurney. They had come with a wheelchair with arm cuffs, ankle cuffs, and even a strap that ran around my gut. They wheeled the chair beside my bed and ordered me in. When I tried to stand, my blood rushed to my head, and I promptly fell on my face. Conlon and his detail snickered and applauded as I pulled myself into the seat.

  Major Conlon, a poster child for the Napoleon complex, asked me if I planned to wet myself during the flight.

  Conlon told me to place my arms on the armrests. I did. Two enlisted men strapped my wrists into place. I lifted my feet onto the pedals, and they strapped my ankles to the chairs. They wound the belt around my diaphragm and cinched it so tight that I had trouble breathing.

  After they had fastened a thin strap around my throat, Conlon stepped in front of me, smirked, and asked, “Still feeling like the king of the galaxy?”

  There is a world of things that enlisted men watch carefully and officers take for granted. He didn’t notice the disposable thermal pack in my hands. He might never have noticed it, but as his men strapped down my arms, one of them tried to pul
l it out of my hand.

  I struggled to hold on to it, and a tug-of-war began.

  “What’s going on here?” asked Conlon.

  “He’s got something in his hand,” said the soldier.

  Conlon looked at it. He asked, “Is that a thermal pack?” then he took it from me and tossed it in his hand. He fondled it, and said, “Still has a stick. Are you saving this for the ride?”

  I said, “It could keep me from getting airsick.”

  He probed the bag with his finger, probably searching for a grenade. Bright or idiotic, Conlon did something I hadn’t gotten around to doing. He opened the stem and pulled the chemical stick, then nearly turned the pack inside out as he searched it. He exposed the gel and the marbles and showed them to the other soldiers. “See anything?” he asked.

  A few answered, “No, sir.”

  He seemed to agree. After swishing the marbles and gel around with his fingers, he pronounced the thermal pack, “Harmless enough.” He pulled it right side in and dropped it on my lap. His aim wasn’t perfect, but he came close to the mark. The pack mostly landed on my left thigh, but some of the weight came down in the crotch.

  He said, “Better hold on to it, clone. No one’s going to pick it up for you.”

  And then we left, an eleven-man parade, with the major at the front and me in the middle. We marched out of the hospital. Well, they marched out of the hospital; I rolled out. No one pushed me. My wheelchair had a motor and a little sensor. It followed the sergeant, who followed the major.

  People stopped and stared as we filed down the hall. They watched as the soldiers loaded me onto the elevator. When the doors opened to the lobby, I saw a new crowd of spectators. Kasara and her uncle hid in the crowd, watching me carefully, trying to remain inconspicuous.

  The U.A. soldiers played to their audience. Major Conlon remained three paces ahead of his men. He strode on without looking back or to the side. His men marched in unison to his footsteps.

  The lobby remained nearly silent except for the sound of their synchronized footsteps. A few people whispered. I heard words like “clone” and “execution” and paid no attention to them. I didn’t look at Pugh, even as I passed by him. For all I knew, the device on my crotch really was a disposable thermal pack. I would have preferred a grenade, but a regular pack might still prove useful. Anything that held on to temperatures the way that the gel in this pack stored them just about had to be toxic. One sip of that shit, and I wouldn’t worry about ropes or firing squads. I could die on my own terms. That idea appealed to me.

  Is that why he gave it to me? I wondered. Had he meant it as a suicide kit? That didn’t fit his profile.

  The Unifieds loaded me into the back of a personnel carrier. We drove to the airfield, where a couple of transports sat waiting. The soldiers wheeled me into the first bird, and we flew toward Washington, D.C.

  I sat in the kettle of the transport, a windowless, bell-shaped, metal chamber designed for conveying men into battle. They wheeled me in backward, allowing me to catch a glimpse of the Johnston Meadowlark as the heavy doors at the rear of the transport slowly closed behind me. I wondered if I should have flown somewhere beside Mazatlan and decided it wouldn’t have mattered.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Date: August 24, 2519

  I wasn’t there when MacAvoy died, but I saw the security feed and filled in the holes with my imagination.

  The Unified Authority had an army, but not a large one. Thirty thousand U.A. soldiers landed at Carmack Gateway Spaceport, the very spaceport from which I had stolen the Meadowlark. Most of the soldiers remained in the spaceport, but two thousand men boarded armored personnel carriers and crossed the Potomac on the Curtis Memorial Bridge.

  They met no resistance. By this time, the clone virus had run its course. We’d died in our barracks and bases, like so many termites, fumigated in their hives.

  The convoy didn’t include a single tank or Jackal, just personnel carriers, jeeps, and men armed with M27s. The convoy wound its way east, passing old monuments of ancient presidents. They passed the Lincoln and Jefferson temples, and the George Washington spike. Then came the war memorials, ancient and modern alike. There’d be new memorials soon enough, one celebrating the sacrifices of natural-borns and their valiant fight against the evil clones.

  The convoy turned north on 17th Street. What thoughts entered those soldiers’ heads as they passed the ruins of the Pentagon and the National Archive Building, landmarks that their ships had destroyed? Did they blame us? When we invaded, we captured the capital without destroying a single building.

  Traffic was light on that day, and the convoy reached the Linear Committee Building just before noon.

  The twenty personnel carriers and ten jeeps formed a loose ring around the perimeter. Once the area was secure, three government-issue limousines pulled into the parking lot.

  That was when Perry MacAvoy shot off the first of his shoulder-fired rockets.

  You have to hand it to MacAvoy; he sent the “Unies” a message just as he promised. Instead of using a handheld rocket-propelled grenade, which would have weighed about three pounds and fired from a foot-long baton, he used a Flaws Rocket, an obsolete weapon used for shooting down gunships. You could destroy a low-gravity tank with a Flaws Rocket; it was also powerful enough to disintegrate a small iceberg. The damn things fired from a five-foot bazooka that weighed twenty-three pounds.

  How MacAvoy requisitioned that antique I never found out. I know how he transported it. He no longer had the strength to stand. He’d commandeered one of Howard Tasman’s motorized wheelchairs and turned it into a tank by strapping rocket launchers to the armrests. Once he knew Andropov was coming, he drove to a third-floor window that faced the main entrance, and there he had sat and waited for the limousines to arrive.

  He was weak; he was dying. He had an oxygen bottle attached to the back of his wheelchair as well. He sipped flu fighter from a mop bucket.

  Knowing that protection protocol called for bodyguard personnel to ride in the lead car and the car in the rear, MacAvoy hit the limo in the middle, then, on the off chance that there had been a fourth car as well, he fired a rocket at the third limousine.

  By sheer coincidence, Tobias Andropov was riding in the first car, the one MacAvoy skipped. Having thought that the war was over, he’d absentmindedly stepped into the lead car. It was the junior members of the newly formed Linear Committee who died in cars two and three. Sitting in the first car, Andropov escaped the ambush without a scratch.

  Fifteen hundred Unified Authority soldiers stormed the LCB. They ran through the lobby, which was empty, not a clone to be seen. Some soldiers took the stairs; the officers rode the elevators.

  They searched the first floor and found hundreds of corpses. Realizing his men would die wherever they went, MacAvoy had summoned his senior staff to the building. Those who had strength enough went there to die, the rest died in infirmaries and barracks. Every soldier died; everyone but MacAvoy.

  There must have been magic in that flu-fighter drink. It protected him from the flu, but it didn’t make him bulletproof.

  The soldiers made their way to the third floor of the LCB. Here they found boxes of bullets and cases of grenades. This was the floor on which Perry made his last stand. It was one very unhealthy clone against fifteen hundred soldiers, but he scared them more than they scared him.

  Now that he’d fired both rockets, MacAvoy abandoned the window. He drove his wheelchair out of the office and into the hall. He must have hated riding in that wheelchair. It drove at barely better than three miles per hour. MacAvoy, a man with more adrenaline than patience, kept hitting the accelerator and swearing at the top of his lungs.

  He rode the wheelchair down the hall to a spot where he could see all four elevators. The warning bell dinged, a light flashed above the first elevator, and MacAvoy fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the doors as they slid open. The grenade hit and exploded, blowing the vario
us pieces of the elevator into a dozen different directions.

  The next door opened. MacAvoy fired an RPG into that one as well. When the third elevator opened, he struck again. The fourth elevator door never opened. Battered by debris from the other elevators, the cable holding the last car snapped.

  Despite his cussed nature and the oranges and peppers in his drink, Pernell MacAvoy was nine-tenths dead by this time, but that last tenth, the one that came with a death reflex hadn’t yet died. Destroying three elevators filled with officers had returned some of the color to his cheeks, but the man had no strength. Had he been able to stand on his own, he would have rigged the stairwell with explosives. His spirit was willing, but his flesh was cooked, and the best he could do was to connect a single mine to the door. A Unified Authority soldier opened that door, and the mine exploded. The force from that blast sent the door shooting through the air, decapitating the five closest men. The percussion deafened a few hundred more.

  The only weapon MacAvoy had left was an M27. He was alone and weak and nearly dead. He pulled out his gun and curled into a coughing fit. He was still coughing when a couple of U.A. commandos finally captured him. Had he not been coughing, he might have shot himself.

  A soldier ran up behind him and kicked the wheelchair out from beneath him, spilling him onto the floor. Another man grabbed his M27. A third rolled the dying man onto his stomach and handcuffed his hands behind his back.

  Now that they’d caught the dying old clone and taken his weapon, the Unified Authority soldiers became downright brazen. They rolled him on his back, and one soldier kicked his gut. His broken cigar still in his mouth, MacAvoy coughed up blood, then gave the man a cherubic smile.

  Security-system cameras captured the moment from several angles, but they didn’t record the sounds. Any words spoken were lost. In my mind, I imagined MacAvoy laughing hysterically as he fired his weapons, probably still laughing even after taking that boot to the ribs.