The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  And later that night, someone had delivered a hard copy of the Times to his apartment. He’d known there was no such thing as home delivery, but he hadn’t cared. He’d wanted to read it, needed to read it, and damn the consequences. That time, he’d found what he’d been looking for, although he still couldn’t remember what that had been.

  It was how they controlled him. The revelation hit him like a bolt of lightning. They’d programmed him with an addiction just as powerful as a junkie’s or alcoholic’s, an uncontrollable urge to read the classified ads wherever and whenever he found them. He’d live a life based on false memories, and when the time was right, they’d leave him a message in the classifieds, instructions that would fulfill whatever dire purpose they’d intended for him, and he’d go off like a time bomb.

  But this time he knew better, and if he gave in, they’d scratch him out of the equation for good. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow, and he clenched his jaw and his fists and fought the urge to read with everything he had.

  The man waited in front of the refrigerator, one hand on its door handle, watching him.

  “Who are you?” Shawn asked. He wished he’d brought the pistol, but he’d left it in the compact’s center console.

  “You don’t wanna read the newspaper?”

  “Who the hell are you people?”

  “Suit yourself.” He yanked the refrigerator door open, leaned forward, and reached inside.

  The heavy clomp of footsteps pounded down the stairs into the living room. The snick of a latch indicated he had company at the back door as well. The man in the crimson T-shirt stepped out from behind the refrigerator’s door. In his hands, he held a short-barreled assault rifle rigged with a silencer.

  Shawn lunged toward him in three running strides. The barrel of the rifle was still rising when he clotheslined the guy and wrapped his arm around the man’s neck, using it as a fulcrum to pirouette behind him and wrench him into a rear chokehold.

  He scrabbled at Shawn’s arm with one clawed hand and gagged for breath. His other squeezed against the rifle’s trigger, and it fired off a burst into the floor, the shots a muffled whisper, like a lethal secret.

  Shadows stretched out from the archway leading to the living room. At the same time, sunlight flooded in through the back door as it swung open and framed a group of silhouetted figures.

  Shawn cranked back against his opponent’s windpipe and jerked him onto his toes. He grabbed the man’s left hand—the one holding the rifle’s trigger—and lifted it toward the silhouettes. His hostage choked on something like a warning. Shawn wrenched on his windpipe with everything he had. The gun went off. The lead silhouette tumbled to the ground. The rest ducked for cover and retreated out the door.

  Four more assailants skidded into the kitchen, this time from the living room. They fired their rifles blindly from the hip as they rounded the corner. A silenced burst slammed into Shawn’s human shield and threw them both back against the kitchen counter. The man went limp, and his legs buckled. Shawn drove the body forward and propelled it into his attackers. It heaved toward them in a grotesque, shambling slide. They stumbled to get out of its path.

  Without breaking stride, Shawn grabbed the back of a spindled wooden chair standing by the kitchen table and swung it through the air in front of him, a wild two-handed haymaker that connected with the head of one of the assailants in a splintering of wood and bone. The man fell backward into the wall and slid to the floor. The chair disintegrated on impact. Its remains spiraled through the air like shrapnel. Shawn was left with a jagged piece of its frame in each hand, like a pair of cudgels. He tightened his grip on them and set his jaw.

  The three remaining men turned toward him, but as in Amarillo, it was as if he’d stepped out of the current of time and reality trudged by in slow motion. Shawn caught the nearest gunman with a brutal backhand of one wooden spindle across the side of the face and used his momentum to bring the other down on the wrist of the second gunman’s trigger hand. He put all his weight behind it. The blow landed with an audible crack as the bone snapped. The man gave a guttural cry, and the rifle slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor.

  The third gunman brought his rifle up. His finger squeezed against the trigger. Shawn got his forearm under the barrel and shoved it skyward as it went off. The illuminated ceiling showered them in a rain of glass and sparks like embers from a stirred campfire. It flickered and went dark. Shawn lifted his knee and lashed out with his foot, driving with his hips. His heel connected with the center of the man’s chest, lifting him off his feet and shoving him into the living room, where he sprawled on his back with a thud.

  The man whose wrist he’d broken clenched his other hand into a fist and took a swing at him. Shawn jerked his head back, and the blow passed harmlessly in front of his face, hairy and lined knuckles vivid in the gloom.

  He swung the wooden spindles. They whirled through the air in a flurry of forehand, backhand, and jabbing strikes. The man tried to ward off the attack, but Shawn slipped through his defenses and pummeled his temple, neck, armpit, abdomen. The man dropped to one knee, and a final blow to the back of his head sent him face-first to the floor.

  In the living room, the third gunman struggled to his feet, bracing himself on his rifle. Shawn hurled the spindles end over end through the air. They cracked off the gunman’s head, and the man toppled backward. His weapon tumbled over like a felled pine.

  Shawn raced past him across the living room, burst through the front door, sprinted across the porch. Outside, birdsong and the fresh scent of mowed grass filled the air. He leapt over the steps and hit the front lawn at a full-out sprint. A hail of gunfire erupted around him. The silenced shots buzzed through the air like angry hornets and kicked-up clumps of soil and grass in linear bursts. He zigzagged through them toward the compact, which sat at the curb on the far side of the road.

  “Team leader, report! I need a status update now, goddamn it!”

  From the back seat, Emma Tyler bore witness to the disintegration of Chad Dodd.

  They’d parked two streets over. Echo-7 arrived right on schedule. An agent invited him into the house and led him to the kitchen, where he’d find a news app opened to a directive that would close the book on this entire fiasco once and for all. The urge to read it should have been irresistible, yet somehow he had resisted.

  After Dodd gave the kill order, the agent went for the rifle hidden in the refrigerator while those waiting upstairs and on the back porch moved in as well. And then they listened over the car’s audio as all hell broke loose in the house. Overlapping shouts of confusion tangled with primal cries of pain and bedlam.

  “Status! What’s your status? What the fuck is happening in there?”

  Someone screamed.

  “Shit!” Dodd slammed his fist against the dashboard. “Shit, shit, shit! Get us back to the house. Hurry, hurry!”

  Without a word, Jensen stomped on the gas and the sedan rocketed forward, throwing them back in their seats. Emma braced herself as they squealed around one corner after another.

  “There he is!” Dodd pointed.

  Ahead of them, Echo-7 sprinted across the front yard, away from the house and toward the street.

  “Run that fucker down!”

  The whine of the engine became a scream as they accelerated. Jensen clenched the wheel in a white-knuckled grip, head lowered like an angry bull. Echo-7 crossed the sidewalk and dashed into the street.

  He turned and saw them coming, but rather than trying to reverse directions, he threw himself forward, leapt over the hood of the sedan, and slid across its surface. He slammed into the windshield. It caved in with a horrific crunch. A spiderweb of cracks exploded across the glass and blinded them. Echo-7 bounced off the windshield and flew over the roof as they sped by. Jensen jammed on the brakes. Emma twisted in her seat and strained to look out the back window.

  Instead of thumping into the street behind them and tumbling along like a limp rag doll, he ca
me down on his feet in a neat three-point landing—one leg bent, the other extended out to the side, his weight supported with one hand on the pavement and the other outstretched back in counterbalance. From beneath his bangs, his gaze smoldered with fury.

  “Holy shit,” Emma said, the words no more than an exhalation.

  Echo-7 raced toward the compact parked alongside them at the curb. Emma fumbled for the pistol holstered on her hip. He flung open the compact’s door, fell into the passenger seat, and reached into the car’s center console compartment. She pulled the pistol free of its holster, but before she could lift it, he turned with a gun of his own. Their eyes met.

  “Get down!” Dodd hollered.

  Echo-7 pointed his gun at her. She closed her eyes and held her breath.

  The gun had no silencer. When it went off, the shots boomed and echoed and shattered the morning’s illusion of normalcy. Emma imagined families inside their homes, still wearing flannel pajamas and robes and slippers, turning from holo-screens or computers or spoonfuls of cereal in surprise. A murder of crows squawked into flight from the branches of a nearby cedar tree.

  Emma opened her eyes. Echo-7 and the compact sped away, receding like a scroll being rolled up. The side windows were unbroken. No blood on her clothes. Somehow, she was alive and whole.

  Jensen started after him, and the sedan thumped forward, limping with an uneven wobble as it went.

  “Son of a bitch, he shot out the tires,” Dodd said and leaned his head back and pressed his palms to his forehead. “Stop, stop. Just let him go.”

  “We’re not going after him?” Emma asked.

  Dodd shook his head. “First we take care of this mess before the whole goddamn world shows up and starts asking questions. Then we go after him.”

  She stared out her window. In her mind’s eye, Echo-7 stared back at her, pistol aimed at her skull. He could’ve killed her, but he’d spared her life. She told herself it didn’t matter. He was just a lab rat that had escaped its cage, and when the time came, she’d lose no sleep over his fate.

  Chapter Six

  Shawn Jaffe pushed the accelerator to the floorboard. The compact raced away from Moore City and careened headlong down the fractured road. Beneath his grip, the steering wheel shuddered. The horizon fled before him, and he chased after it.

  He’d changed clothes, tossed his wedding ring and everything else he had on him from Amarillo, and they’d still found him. That meant that however they’d tracked him, it was still on him, in him, implanted beneath his skin or, God forbid, somewhere cerebral.

  Ohio State was no longer an option. They’d be waiting for him. He had to keep moving, like a man cast overboard in the middle of the ocean, treading water for hours with no relief in sight.

  No doubt about it, they weren’t cops or Feds. Johnny Law didn’t hole up in your old house and try to kill you when you refused to read the newspaper. And, God, the compulsion had been profound. He’d been programmed, conditioned, and they knew that irresistible impulse would grip him, and they’d tried to use it against him.

  Even his memories of Moore City were flawed. The town from his mind’s eye was a cheap knockoff of the real deal. He might’ve dismissed these inconsistencies as misremembered details if not for the gaping hole in his historical narrative—his home was the wrong house.

  He didn’t ease off the accelerator until the interstate. I-75 South led to Dayton, where he merged onto I-70 East and passed through Columbus without stopping. Around noon, the interstate cut through the northern tip of West Virginia, and twenty minutes later, he entered Pennsylvania.

  Shawn’s stomach gave a low growl. The last time he ate a real meal, Victoria had smiled at him over their plates of pancakes and sausages. Twenty-four hours and a thousand miles later, she’d stared at him from the backseat of the car that tried to run him down like a dog in the street.

  He followed signs to a diner at the next exit. A handful of vehicles mottled the parking lot. He parked facing the building’s glass front. Through the windows, truckers and other transients hunched over heaping plates of food and steaming cups of coffee. They sat in booths or on stools alongside a counter that separated the dining area from the kitchen.

  Shawn took a deep breath, got out of the car, and pushed his way through the doors into the diner. The din of cutlery clattering on plates filled the place, and the aroma of grease and cholesterol hung heavy in the air. A careworn hostess in a red shirt flashed him a tired smile from behind a stand of menus.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Just me.”

  “This way, please.”

  She wove her way through the diner with a grace born of repetition to an empty booth at the back of the room. “Your waitress will be right with you,” she said.

  Shawn slid into the vinyl seat, and she shuffled back to her station to await the next customer.

  A faux-wood laminate covered the tabletop, cracked and bubbling and peeling at the edges. Beneath its cloudy film, a news app scrolled through the latest headlines, and he fought an urge to check the classifieds. Another app displayed the diner’s menu, and he dragged it toward him and flipped through the selection of meals.

  “Coffee?”

  A boney waitress in a white shirt and blue apron hovered over him. A gaudy layer of mascara and rouge accented the angular features of her narrow face. Her hair hung in a limp frizz of tattered locks. A white ceramic carafe dangled from her hand, and a wisp of steam rose from its spout like a smoking gun.

  “Please,” Shawn said.

  She flipped his mug over and poured. “Any questions about the menu?”

  He shook his head. “I’m still looking.”

  The waitress slid the coffee carafe onto the table. “Lemme know if you need anything,” she said and spun on her heels to continue her rounds. Outside, a large semi-trailer truck’s air brakes wheezed as it rolled into a charging station on the other side of the street.

  Shawn settled on a steak omelet with a side of pancakes. He tapped to confirm his order, and time-until-ready flickered at ten minutes. He shoved the menu app aside, reached for his coffee, and fumbled it as he glanced at the news app and saw the headlines scrolling across the tabletop. The mug teetered, and coffee sloshed over the rim. He steadied it with a shaky hand. His breath caught in his throat like a lump of tasteless clay. Beneath “President Hoyt Calls for Unconditional Brazilian Disarmament,” the text “Fatal Shooting in Weatherford Caught on Video” hit him like a slap to the face.

  He reached for it. His finger hesitated, poised over the link. The hair on the back of his neck prickled, and his pulse hammered in his ears like the rush of an oncoming train. He tapped the link, and a video opened on the tabletop screen.

  It showed a high-angle shot inside the charging station with him at the counter, talking to the clerk. His face was turned away from the camera, thank God. The two men entered the store, and the one in the lead drew his pistol. Events played out with the inevitability of prophecy, and the image froze as he caught the gun. No longer was he turned from the camera, and the screen zoomed in on his face with glorious high-definition detail. Teeth gritted in rage, eyes those of a wild animal—he looked mad. Not angry mad, but the kind of mad that would eat a man’s liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

  Around him, the diner’s patrons remained intent on their meals and coffees as conversations droned on. Soon, though, someone’s gaze would wander and fall on him with eyes wide and mouth agape. “It’s him!” Heads would turn. “The guy from the video!”

  Shawn slid out of the booth. His thigh bumped the underside of the table, and his coffee teetered at a precipitous angle but remained upright.

  “You okay, hon?”

  His waitress approached, her eyes creased with concern. Conversations faltered. Now heads did turn.

  He slid the wad of cash out of his pocket, unfurled a five, and dropped it on the table. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “But what about
your order?” she called after him.

  He tucked his head and averted his gaze as he hurried toward the exit and out the door. She and the other patrons gawked at him through the diner’s glass front, their piercing stares like daggers. He threw himself into the compact and tore away, skidding onto the road leading back to the interstate.

  After they cleared out of Moore City, Jensen drove Emma Tyler and Chad Dodd back to Darke County Airport, and Emma listened from the back seat as Dodd laid it out for them.

  “Throwing bodies at Echo-7 isn’t gonna cut it. Our agents don’t stand a chance against him.” He sighed. “God, I miss the good old days. Life would be so much easier if we could just launch a precision strike on his ass, but you can’t fly five feet with a high explosive anymore without a satellite picking you up and blasting you out of the sky. All because that Mohammed fucknut had to go and kamikaze his drone and his RDX into the Super Bowl and ruin it for everybody.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “The inconsiderate bastard,” she said.

  Dodd said, “What we need is someone who can go toe to toe with Echo-7. I’m not talking about an external hire, either. We need someone who’s just as fast and strong as he is, and there isn’t a man in the world that fits that bill. Not a regular Joe type, anyway.”

  “You’re talking about another Echo,” Emma said.

  Dodd shook his head. “The other Echoes are incognizant. I’m talking about the Alpha.”

  “He’s functional?”

  Dodd shrugged. “In a manner of speaking,” he said, but didn’t expound.

  They flew to a private airport at the company’s research center in the Appalachians. Jensen waited with the plane while an autonomous electric car carried Emma and Dodd across the tarmac toward a rectangular building with windowless concrete walls built into the side of a craggy bluff, as if an avalanche had swallowed all but its leading edge. A riveted steel door led into a lounge area with an ultramodern and minimalist decor. Everything gleamed silver or a shade of white.