I take a moment to let his words sink in. It’s sad to think about, but there’s little I can do about it. At the back of my mind, a question starts to itch just as my gut shoots pain through my body. I ignore it and exhale harshly. Liddell gives me a worried glance but I don’t let him inquire.
“There’s just one more question I have for you,” I say. “How did you manage to kill people without ever leaving behind evidence? No poison on the planet can do what you do.”
Moses shakes his head. “We take their form.”
“Taking their form kills the other person?”
“We’re complex beings, Detective Baxter,” Howard says. “But nature has stringent rules for what it will and will not allow. When we shift, we become an exact duplicate of the person, right down to the smallest detail, including their memories. It starts a bit fuzzy at first, but it straightens out over time.
“Nature doesn’t like there being two people of the exact same makeup existing at the exact same time, and so it chooses to kill one. Because we’re much more complex at our core, nature will remove the human as it has a much simpler biology.”
My eyes shoot open as I recall Helen shifting from Genevieve’s form. “How long does it take for a person to die?”
Liddell sighs. “It varies. It depends on the memories. If a person lives a simple life with little variation throughout their years, it can take only a few minutes. But if a person lived an exciting life, it can take up to an hour for the memory to fully form.”
“If she dies . . .” I begin but can’t quite get the words out.
“Who?” Liddell asks. “What happened?”
I sneer, wanting nothing more than to punch the creature in the face. “Your woman shifted to look like Genevieve, my partner and best friend. If she’s dead, then I can’t make you any promises.”
“We’ll discipline her when she gets here.”
My threat seems hollow when I think about having to tell them about putting a bullet in her cranium.
“She’s already dead,” I say. “She threatened my wife and me. I couldn’t let that slide. But if Genevieve is dead because of her attempts at tricking me, I will fight you with every fibre in my body.”
All three men widen their eyes and frown. “You killed her?” Moses asks.
“You killed one of ours,” Howard says. “If your friend dies, then I believe it’s fair play.”
“Not even close,” I say, my blood boiling in my veins. “Liddell was my friend, and you killed him. Moses was a bit of a bad egg but not like you in the least. Howard had his flaws, but he wasn’t all bad either. He just wanted to be happy. And those are just the ones I know about.”
It then hits me like a ton of bricks. Brandon. He’d died suddenly without any cause. My heart sinks in my chest, and I stare Liddell directly in the eyes.
“You killed my brother too.” A lump forms in my throat as the number of dead who were close to me reaches a higher number than I’d like.
Liddell shakes his head. “No, we didn’t kill your brother.”
“Bullshit,” I shout. “You killed Brandon for no reason.”
“There was a reason,” Moses shoots back.
“Oh yes, that’s right,” I sneer. “You wanted me to impregnate Ruth Sutton. What a reason to kill a man’s brother. I swear on the blood of my family, if Genevieve is dead because of Helen, I will stop at nothing to eradicate every doppelganger and their progeny from the face of this planet.”
The three appear scared for a moment; I believe I have them right where I want them. It’s not until they all start laughing where the confusion sets in. “What’s so damn funny?”
“You,” Howard says. “You actually believe you can hunt us all down before we all die on our own?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s going to be worth a shot.”
Liddell shakes his head. “No, you won’t be able to remove all of us from the planet, Mister Baxter. You’ll be long dead before the last of us dies off.”
I frown, pulling my hand from my jacket pocket and getting ready to draw my piece. There it is — the confession that I’m not going to survive the night. I eye Liddell and shift my focus to Howard and then to Moses. I gauge their distance, the possibility of them moving as soon as I take my first shot, and which way they’ll move.
“Don’t do it,” Liddell says, watching me closely.
“If I’m dying tonight, I’m taking the three of you with me.”
Howard cocks his head to the side. “We can’t shift into your form.”
“What are you talking about?”
Howard stands and approaches me. My hand immediately goes to my heater; I pull it out and point it at the creature with my friend’s face. Liddell steps back and raises his hands. “Hey now,” he says. “No need for that.”
“You may have misunderstood what Liddell said,” Howard pipes in.
“What are you talking about?”
“Thomas,” Moses says. “You’re not the Thomas Baxter who was born here on Earth.”
My eyes narrow and I point my heater at Moses. “You better explain yourself right here and now.” I shift my movement from Moses to Howard, to Liddell, to Howard and back to Moses. “I don’t want any cryptic messages, no misunderstandings. Speak plain and clear, you get me?”
“Of course,” Liddell says. He takes in a deep breath and shakes his head. “You’re not going to like what I have to say.”
“I haven’t liked a word you’ve said yet; why start now?”
Liddell nods and purses his lips. He doesn’t want to say a word, but I’m not going to give him a choice. I fire my piece into the ceiling, sending splinters down over us. “I’m not messing around.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you’re one of us,” Howard says quickly.
I shake my head. “No, I’m not. I’m a man born of Earth. You’re a creature from another reality.”
“No, you’re not,” Liddell says. “You’re a doppelganger, just like us. You were one of the first to come to this world with intentions of impregnation. But you had a change of heart; you believed our plans were wrong. You then chose the detective’s form and hid his body in the warehouse we managed to get the deed to. One of those skeletons in that warehouse is a perfect match to you, Thomas.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not possible. If I were one of you, I’d remember my eternity in whatever dimension you come from.”
Liddell shakes his head. “Under any other circumstance, you just might have. But you stayed in your form too long. If you hold one form long enough, you start to lose your original identity and begin believing the memories collected by your form are yours. It's a means of getting us as replacements to accept our positions much more easily and to fight death more aggressively than we would have if we’d remained doppelgangers.”
I don’t lower my gun, but I can feel their words penetrating my brain. I’m almost close to questioning my identity. “I’m not saying I believe you, but how long would I have had to stay like this to lose myself?”
Liddell shrugs. “I don’t know. More than a few months for sure. You, though, you’ve been in that form for seven years.”
“Seven years?”
“It’s shocking, I know,” Howard says. “We weren’t quite sure how to tell you. Mostly because we knew you wouldn’t believe a word of it.”
“I still don’t.”
I feel like squeezing the trigger. I want to kill them all and go back home to my wife. I want to go to the office and check in on Genevieve. I want to raise my child in peace.
My child.
Just like that, everything starts falling into place. Ruth Sutton and Moses’s desire to get me to impregnate her. Brandon’s small note about me not being his brother. Howard running into me shortly after seeing the original Howard on the slab. Everything they’ve done to this point has been planned. I’d believed the doppelgangers had been three steps ahead of me the whole time, but they were miles beyond me. They knew exactly what I woul
d do and when I’d do it, including when and who I would impregnate.
“Brandon was a loose end,” I say. “That’s why you killed him.”
Moses nods. “He saw you shift into his brother all those years ago, and he went mad from it. The nightmares he had were not from the war, though he did get his fair share of nasty war dreams too. But no, he was dreaming of watching a formless grey shape take his brother’s form and then watching his brother fall dead minutes later. He’d told you it was from the war to avoid hurting you. To him, you were still his brother.”
“I did that? I gave Brandon his nightmares?”
Howard reaches for the barrel of my gun, his movements slow and easy. He places his hand on the end and slowly pushes it down. I let him. “I’m afraid so,” he says.
“But that’s not right,” I say. “I’m not a killer. I don’t kill for nothing.”
“Thomas Baxter doesn’t kill for nothing,” Liddell says. “You? You’re a killer through and through, but only out of necessity. You understood that what we did was a necessary evil.”
I frown and point the barrel of my gun at Liddell.
“Don’t tell me what I used to think.” I stop and lower my peashooter, letting my arm fall to my side. “Will my memory come back?”
“We can do that for you,” Moses says. “But you have to trust us.”
I nod. “All right.”
I almost don’t want to go through with it. But if what they’re saying is true, I need to know. If not, they may implant the memories into my head. At that point, it won’t matter. I’ll believe what they’re saying regardless.
Moses, Howard and Liddell approach, calm and straight-faced. They place their palms on my head, two on the sides and Liddell in the middle. They close their eyes, and bright light envelopes me.
Chapter 23
The Memory
We can do this.
The thought runs through the collective mind. Each of us is a small part of something greater, a being of ultimate proportions, the sort who could create or end a universe if it so desired. But instead, it maintains benevolence. It did for several hundreds of billions of years, choosing to serve the living since the cataclysm of magic overtook the entire planet for a moment and ripped hundreds of millions of threads into the fabric of reality, including its own.
Slowly, the being shrinks, finding itself in the world of the living, the land of bioorganic life. This fascinates the being more than any existence it’s experienced before. It feels the life it takes over and the inevitable death the piece experiences. Death is the most interesting part of life, the act of no longer being alive. The being couldn’t fathom such a fate; it’s timeless and eternal within its reality.
But after a time, the shrinking ends. The being screams in frustration, a shriek lasting for a hundred years; or maybe it only lasts an hour. Time has no meaning after so long.
A small piece chimes. They can do something about this; the rest listen in. We can do something about this. We can go out on our own, take a form and live our lives.
As expected, the idea ends faster than it takes for the initial thought to get from one side of the being to the other.
Hear me out. It begs.
We die out there. We won’t last more than a decade. Even if we go out in small groups, we will still die sooner than a century.
But the idea is planted, and there’s nothing more that can be done to stop it. In almost no time, all the pieces are thinking about living a life in the real world. Then the real idea hits, the one to quell all dissenting opinions.
Survival is not about us or me as a single being. Survival is to be measured based on the biological ideal of passing on genetics. The act of reproduction, the cycle keeping every species going, culminates in the eventual evolution of a species. This is what we will do.
We all stop and pay attention to the one small piece, the imagination, the one and only capable of coming up with such an idea. There’s no stopping it.
A piece goes through the rift and chooses a form, then another piece, and another. It’s not too long before I go through the rift. I’ve never been, and I have no idea what to imagine. Though that’s the problem; I don’t know how to imagine. To have imagination requires experience and a concept of more than what there is.
I cross the rift and come face to face with a human, or what I believe to be a human. It might be a horse; I’ve heard horses are quite lovely and come with lifespans that rival our own. It could be a great disguise. I can’t be too sure what I’m looking at.
What I assume to be a man stares back at me, his mouth agape and his breathing sparse. His eyes widen as I take his form, my outer being becoming his skin. Hair sprouts from my head and face as muscles and bones form, giving me shape and structure.
The man begins to tremble as his breathing deepens. I know he’s a human now, the male of his species, a man. I look at the genitals the form gives me; I don’t like how they look.
Memories start to form. His name is Thomas, he has a brother, his parents are dead. How did his parents die? I try and reach through the foggy memories, attempting to create a whole picture. No answers come. Thomas doesn’t seem to know.
Odd that he doesn’t know his job is detective. He looks into killers and solves dead bodies . . . or something like that.
I close my new hands into fists and clock him upside the head, knocking his lights out. The slang of his native tongue comes to me. “Hadble, Genblblbl. . .”
I need more practice with a tongue. I don’t have the opportunity to learn slowly as most have before me. I’ll get it for sure as soon as the memories come to me.
I reach down and undress the human. Their outer vegetation – clothing keeps them warm from the elements and is used as modesty. I don’t understand; why do humans fear nakedness? Then the reason comes to me, and I nod as I grasp it.
It takes much longer than I would have liked for the memories to fully develop. I thank his deity that he lives alone and that I came at night when nobody would be around. I look at the naked corpse and pity his luck. Had I arrived anywhere else, I would have taken their form instead. I’d have killed them. He didn’t deserve to die; it was just poor luck on his part.
I drag the body to the next room and close the door. I don’t want anyone barging in and seeing me with it. That won’t go well for me. I’ve heard humans have a poor reaction to death, especially the deaths of those they’ve grown fond of.
Something catches my attention at the corner of the desk: a bottle of amber-brown liquid. Hooch. That’s what his memories call it. I reach for it, unsure of what to expect. I have memories of drinking the beverage but no real-world experience of it. The body craves the hooch, and something he keeps in his pocket known as a cigarette.
I take a quick drink of the hooch, and the body relaxes. The liquid burns all the way down, but oddly enough the body responds with relaxation. I become confused. I take another swig, a much bigger drink, and my head starts to get dizzy. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wonder if the others are having difficulties getting the hang of their new bodies.
I pull the pack of cigarettes from my pocket and light one with a book of matches I see on the desk. Like the hooch, the smoke burns my throat as it goes down, but my body reacts the opposite way from what I’d have expected. I don’t know what’s going on with me, but the word addiction continues to run past my consciousness. I don’t know that word; I’ll have to be sure to look it up later unless I can remember what it is.
And then I do.
The body I got is defective. It’s a lost cause, and I’m better off with someone who doesn’t allow his mind to be clouded with hooch and poison his body with cigarettes. Maybe someone with better-looking genitals. The thought of female genitals entices me, though I can’t be sure if it’s because they look better or because of the male brain’s affinity and desire for them.
I shake the thought from my head. I was chosen for this body for a reason. Something bigger than me or t
he being chose this body for me. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. I can get off the hooch, and I can quit cigarettes, no problem. I take another drink of the hooch and pull a drag from the cigarette. I hate myself for it.
I close my eyes; the hooch is taking control and making me drowsy. I don’t want to sleep, but I don’t have a choice. Something in my head tells me to put out the cigarette before I pass out, and I do just that, squashing in a tin ashtray. I manage to stumble to the couch before everything goes black.
***
“Drunk again. Time to wake up, Mister Baxter.”
I open my eyes, and Genevieve stands before me. She’s Thomas’s receptionist. Everything feels natural. I no longer question everything around me. I can put names to all the items in the office and whatever Thomas knew in life.
I peer over to the next room, the one with the dead detective, and I breathe a sigh of relief; she hasn’t taken a look inside. The last thing I want is another body on my hands. I groan and scratch an itch on my face.
Genevieve slams her fists on a table, and my eyes shoot open.
“Time to wake up, Mister Baxter,” she says, annoyed.
I sit upright, my head pounds and my gut turns. Perhaps drinking so much hooch is not a good idea.
“Oh, all right, I’m getting up,” I mutter. I stretch my shoulders and hear the joints pop. “You’re here early.”
Genevieve scoffs. “I’m not early; you slept in.” She looks like she’s going to tear into me, but before anything comes out of her mouth, her face goes from annoyed frustration to one of sympathy. “What’s got you into the hooch again, Mister Baxter?”
Unable to think of a good enough reason, I grumble something under my breath and stand. I look over to see Genevieve busy moving papers around and picking up many that I didn’t see getting knocked over during the night.
“What are you doing?’ I ask.
Genevieve stops and stares at me. She cocks her head to the side. “What you pay me for. I’m cleaning this place up.” She gets back to work and mutters, “God knows if I don’t do it, nobody else will.”
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