The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  In other words, Chad Dodd was operating under the legitimate authority of the United States government and had the clout of the president in his corner.

  Dodd blinked at Francis. “So we good?”

  “Don’t tell me we’re gonna let this prick walk,” Mooney said.

  Francis shook his head. “We got no choice.”

  “This is some bullshit right here.”

  “If you don’t mind, gentlemen.” Dodd nodded toward the door.

  “Oh, hell no,” Mooney said. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  They stared at each other like gunslingers in a spaghetti western.

  Dodd narrowed his eyes. “I can have your badges so fast your heads will spin.”

  “Forget about it,” Sam said. “You guys did your best. I owe you one.” He laid the ID on the table and pushed it toward Dodd.

  “This ain’t right,” Mooney said, shaking his head.

  Francis put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “You know it ain’t right.”

  “I know. Good luck, Sam.”

  The two detectives made their way toward the exit. Mooney shot a final smoldering look over his shoulder, and the door swung shut behind them.

  Sam glanced at the look-alike seated across from Jaffe and turned back to Dodd. “Roman Biogenics,” he said.

  Dodd shrugged. “Big surprise. You already knew.”

  Sam blinked and clenched his jaw. “You set me up.”

  “What’d you expect, a round of applause? You fucked with the wrong hombres, detective.”

  “We’re not twins, are we?” Jaffe asked. His gaze never left his double seated across from him.

  “No,” Dodd said, “you’re not.”

  “I’d almost convinced myself we were cybernetic. Androids, cyborgs, something like that. It’d explain how I’d survived a bullet to the head. But Roman Biogenics doesn’t do robotics. Your forte is pharmaceuticals, medical drugs, genetic augmentation, isn’t it?”

  Dodd said nothing.

  “We’re not twins, and we’re not androids,” Jaffe said. “We’re clones.”

  “Well give the man a cigar,” Dodd said, grinning. He jabbed a thumb at Jaffe’s double. “This one is the Alpha. Our first success.”

  The Alpha bowed his head and crossed himself. “So man created man in his own image,” he said solemnly. “And God saw what man had made and, behold, God wept for him. And the evening and the morning were the eighth day.”

  Dodd ignored him and continued. “We cloned the Alpha from the original specimen,” he said. “He’s genetically enhanced, of course. Faster and stronger than anyone else alive. Unfortunately, his social skills were somewhat lacking, so we shelved him.

  “We cloned follow-on iterations from the original specimen as well. But the Bravo and Charlie had deficiencies similar to the Alpha. It wasn’t until the Delta that we perfected humanity in all of its glorious flaws and insecurities and loosed him on the world. That was New York.”

  “So I’m the Delta,” Jaffe said.

  “What? No. You think you somehow survived a bullet to the head? Don’t be ridiculous. The Delta is dead.”

  “You’re lying. How do I remember what happened in New York?”

  “Because instead of using the original specimen,” Dodd said, “we cloned the Echo from the Delta—an iterative process. It was much easier. You were cloned from a clone, but in the process you retained the Delta’s memories.”

  Jaffe gaped at him. “What?”

  “I know,” Dodd said. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Means our consciousness is somehow stored at the genetic level. What if someone in this room is descended from Aristotle and has his memoirs encoded in their DNA? Or Napoleon? Or Jesus?”

  “That’s insane,” Shawn said. The words cracked like deadwood.

  “Is it? Maybe. But it’s also a nut we’re paying a lot of money to crack.” Dodd sighed. “But the bitch of it is, we didn’t just create an Echo but a generation of them. Sixteen to be exact. You are Echo-7.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sam cut in. “You mean there’s more of them?”

  Dodd nodded. “Exactly. But unfortunately, the other Echoes have the same problem. They all share memories with the Delta.”

  “What’ll happen to them?” Jaffe asked.

  Dodd shrugged. “It’s not a complete waste. We’ll use them for research.”

  “But they’re still people,” Jaffe said.

  “People?” Dodd snorted. “You’re not a person. You’re no one, a creation without a soul. You think your name is Shawn Jaffe? Ryan Marshall? You don’t have a name. We grew you in a lab, and the first day of your life began when you woke in Amarillo. Everything you remember never happened.”

  “That’s why Moore City seemed off, isn’t it? It’s why the home I remembered didn’t match reality.”

  Dodd nodded. “Cobbled-together memories. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough until you start peeling the onion.”

  Jaffe turned to the raven-haired woman. “Was any of it real?”

  She lowered her gaze.

  “Your name isn’t even Victoria, is it?”

  She didn’t reply. The Alpha chuckled and, in a singsong voice, said, “Awkward.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” Sam Harrington interjected.

  Dodd folded his hands on the table and met his gaze with a look that was as steady as Zen. “Because I want your help, Sam.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “This isn’t Shawn Jaffe. You owe him nothing. He’s just a clone.” Dodd lowered his voice. “He’s also dangerous like you would not believe.”

  “Genetic augmentation. This is the prototype that got you your defense contract.”

  Dodd smiled. “I like you. You’re smart. That’s why I wanna make you an offer.”

  Sam started to respond, but the Alpha leaned forward, his hands on the table and fingers splayed like talons. “Have the visions started yet?” he asked Jaffe.

  Jaffe jerked back in his seat as if the words were a right cross to the jaw, his eyes wide and mouth hanging open.

  “Our daughter, the war in the jungle,” the Alpha said. “You’re having them, too.”

  “Yes.” Jaffe exhaled the word like the final breath of a dying man.

  “Memories from the Father, the True Alpha. He is us, and we are Him.”

  Dodd knit his brow. “The hell does that mean?”

  The Alpha glared at him from beneath his bangs. “Every story has a beginning.”

  “The visions are of Vietnam,” Jaffe interrupted. “Some kind of battle. There’s a grenade. We’re overrun.” He shook his head and fell silent.

  Sam said, “You said he remembered New York because you cloned him from the Delta. What if this is the same thing? Whose DNA did you start with? Who was the original specimen?”

  “He died in Vietnam.” Dodd stared and nodded. “You’re right. These visions, they’re memories. Amazing.”

  “When the grenade went off, it took our hand.” The Alpha raised a fist. “Poof. Blood and bone and gristle. Do you have any idea what that felt like?”

  He didn’t wait for a response. He leapt into action at a fast-forward speed. Reached for his napkin-wrapped silverware. Tore it free with a flourish. The steak knife materialized in his hand. The napkin flew into the air like a white dove. He stood and slammed the blade into Dodd’s wrist. It blurred as it sawed through flesh and tendon in a spray of crimson. The blade severed Dodd’s hand and thunked to the table. Its handle snapped off. The napkin fluttered toward the floor.

  Dodd screamed and jerked his arm backward. His severed hand remained on the table like an obscene insect, and his bracelet slid off his wrist. He cradled the ragged stump to his chest.

  Conversations at other tables in the restaurant came to an abrupt and violent end. Heads turned. Sam’s heartbeat thundered like a coming storm. A woman shrieked.

  “I guess you do,” the Alpha said.

  �
�Oh my God!” someone cried out.

  Sam pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. He yanked his pistol from the waistband of his jeans. The Alpha held the broken knife handle, a spatter of red across his brow and face. Sam leveled the gun at him.

  The Alpha shoved Dodd, who toppled out of his chair and fell to the ground. As he fell, the Alpha reached into his jacket and took his pistol.

  Sam aimed. Too late. The Alpha was already aiming back and squeezed the trigger.

  The shot hit him in the head. Pain bloomed like a raging inferno. Sam staggered back into a table. It caught him behind the thighs. His legs gave out, and he collapsed onto it. The table tipped over and spilled him onto the floor. He crashed to the ground with a grunt.

  Darkness washed over him. Sam struggled toward the surface, but a cold undercurrent tugged at him and pulled him under. From somewhere far away drifted cries of panic. He reached for them like a man reaching for a life buoy. No use. He was so tired.

  Sam took a deep shuddering breath and let it out in a slow exhale that seemed to go on for eternity.

  The Alpha pulled the trigger, and the silenced pistol spit a muffled report. As Harrington fell, chaos swirled through the restaurant like a tempest. Its patrons rose in a scrape of chairs and stampeded for the exits. They knocked aside tables and each other, shrieking and hollering in a mad trample to escape. Several careened off the giant, like waves battering against an unmovable rock cliff. The giant reached into his jacket and tore his pistol from its holster. Next to the Alpha, Victoria fumbled with her own holster. Dodd lay on the floor and leaked blood and moaned.

  Shawn’s first instinct was for Harrington, but the Alpha turned his gun on the giant. If he missed or if the bullet passed through the man, it would hit someone in the crowd behind him, an innocent bystander with a family and a future. Shawn leapt to his feet, seized the Alpha’s wrist, and forced the barrel down. It bucked and spit. A gouge of wood splintered the floor.

  The Alpha shoved him sideways. The giant fired, and the shot went wide. The Alpha lifted a knee, pistoned his leg forward, and drove the sole of his foot into Shawn’s chest. The force of the blow catapulted him backward. He went airborne. Tables and chairs passed beneath him as he flew across the room. He crashed into the wall. It caved with a cloud of plaster and dust. He rebounded off it and fell onto a table that gave way beneath him with a series of sharp cracks, and he crumpled to the floor in a heap amid its remains.

  Emma Tyler unsnapped her holster. Its leather creaked like an old saddle. Echo-7 leapt at the Alpha, and Dodd’s gun discharged into the floor with a crack of wood. Jensen fired at them and missed. The Alpha kicked Echo-7 and sent him flying across the room like a rag doll. Echo-7 hit the wall, and it imploded with a crash.

  Jensen fired again. And again. But each time he pulled the trigger, the Alpha twisted his upper body to the side. He bared his teeth in a humorless rictus, a parody of a grin.

  He was dodging the bullets.

  Emma drew her pistol and pointed it at the side of the Alpha’s head at point-blank range. But before she could squeeze the trigger, his arm lashed out, and he closed his hand over the top of the gun. His thumb flicked the slide stop, and the slide separated from the weapon’s frame. He swung the steel in a backhand. It caught her on the jaw and knocked her sideways. A nova of white light exploded in her head. She fell onto her hands and knees, her hair hanging in her face.

  Jensen squared off at the Alpha, pistol held in both hands, and squeezed off a volley of shots. The Alpha advanced toward him, as relentless as the tide as he juked left and right with each pull of the trigger.

  The restaurant’s patrons continued to surge toward the exit, a swell of bodies all shoving and fighting to get through the doorway at once. A few stayed, huddled beneath the maelstrom of disarrayed tables and chairs, unwilling to brave the hail of bullets overhead. Music and bass reverberated through the ceiling, where muffled revelry continued to echo from the nightclub, oblivious to the menace below.

  Dodd pushed himself into an awkward sitting position, his pants soggy with the blood that spread around him in a black pool. He’d removed his belt and struggled to loop it over the ragged stump of his wrist in a crude tourniquet. With one hand, he had a hell of a time with it.

  Emma crawled toward him. Dodd guided the belt into the buckle, clamped the free end between his teeth, and cinched the leather around his forearm. He waved her off as she approached.

  “Find the bracelet.” He gritted the words through his clenched jaw. “We have to stop him.”

  Emma nodded and searched the floor, peering through the forest of chairs and table legs. She spotted it seven or eight feet away, opposite Dodd. It lay in a spatter of red, like bloody tears.

  Jensen continued to pull the trigger until the hammer fell on an empty chamber with a dull click. He tossed it aside and swung a fist at the Alpha. The Alpha slipped past the blow as easily as if he’d ducked beneath a low hanging branch. He jammed the barrel of his gun into Jensen’s belly and fired twice.

  Jensen grunted, and his legs buckled beneath him. But the Alpha grabbed the larger man by the neck and held him on his feet. Jensen gagged and his eyes bulged. One hand clutched at his gut, and the other fought to peel the Alpha’s hand away, but the grip was a vise.

  “Look at me,” the Alpha said. “I wanna watch you die. I wanna see what you see.”

  He leaned forward and pressed the barrel of the pistol against the side of Jensen’s head and pulled the trigger. Brains and gore sprayed outward. Jensen collapsed, a lifeless tangle of limbs.

  Emma scrabbled around Dodd. The overhead lights and chandeliers reflected in his pooled blood and shimmered like will-o’-the-wisps. She reached for the bracelet.

  The Alpha stomped on her hand. The bones crunched like glass.

  She gasped in pain. A heartbeat ago, he’d stood over Jensen. Now, he leered at her from behind the barrel of his gun and waggled a finger at her. “Tsk-tsk-tsk.” He ground his heel into the back of her hand. She screamed and writhed on the floor. He bent, seized the bracelet, and tossed it across the room. He aimed and fired. The bracelet exploded in a twist of rubber and circuitry and clattered to the ground in pieces.

  Dodd glared at the Alpha. “You think that matters? They can activate your necklace from anywhere, anytime. When they figure out you went rogue, you’re dead.”

  “But I didn’t go rogue,” the Alpha said. “I carried out my orders, completed my mission, and reported back to Roman Biogenics. Too bad Echo-7 killed all of you first.” He shrugged. “That made me sad.”

  “No one’s gonna believe you.”

  “Sure they will. Hey, I can even say I gave you a hand.” The Alpha plucked Dodd’s severed hand off the table and tossed it at him. It bounced off his face, and Dodd jerked back in revulsion. The hand skidded across the floor and rolled to a stop palm up, fingers curled like a dead cockroach.

  Dodd stared at it. “I’ll see you in hell,” he said.

  “It’s a date.” The Alpha smiled and squeezed the trigger.

  The silenced shot snapped the air. Dodd went limp and toppled backward. His head thumped against the floor, his unblinking eyes fixed on the ceiling. His severed stump slipped free of its tourniquet and leaked a weak stream of scarlet, like spilled wine.

  The Alpha’s weight eased off Emma’s hand. She pulled it free and crawled toward Harrington’s limp form. His pistol lay beside him and glittered in the pale light like an absolution. She focused her resolve on reaching the gun and pushed the pain of her shattered hand into a dark corner of her mind.

  “Where’re you going?” The Alpha grabbed her by the ankle and hauled her back. She flailed for purchase with her good hand as she slid across the floor. When he released her, Emma crawled toward the pistol again. He stepped forward and kicked her in the ribs. She cried out and curled in on herself, but he shoved his foot into her shoulder and forced her onto her back.

  She withered before the black and gaping maw of the pistol’
s barrel, and her heart stuttered in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the end.

  Shawn Jaffe opened his eyes and shook his head to clear it. He lay in a ruin of fractured tables and chairs. Their splintered remains poked up around him like punji sticks. He clambered out of the debris, brushed at his clothes, ran a hand over his face and through his hair. A cloud of plaster billowed around him like the dust of ancient civilizations. He took stock of his injuries—nothing broken, no cuts or bruises, no pain.

  “Genetic augmentation,” Sam Harrington had said. “This is the prototype that got you your defense contract.”

  The muted pop of a silenced gunshot rang out. Dodd went limp and slumped to the ground like a wet rag. Victoria tried to crawl away, but the Alpha grabbed her by the ankle and yanked her back. When she tried again, he kicked her in the side and leveled his gun at her.

  They were halfway across the room—too far to cover. He reached for the pistol tucked into his jeans at the small of his back, but he’d never draw in time.

  “Hey!” he called out.

  The Alpha swung the pistol toward Shawn.

  As with the van hit-and-run at the morgue and the shoot-out in Amarillo, time seemed to dilate, and each moment stretched into the next like an infinite parade of stars. Shawn visualized the trajectory of the bullet. The muscles in the Alpha’s forearm flexed, and his index finger squeezed the trigger.

  Shawn shifted to the right. The gun bucked and barked, and the bullet whistled past his ear. The barrel tracked his movement. He ducked in the opposite direction as the Alpha fired again. Shawn forged ahead and courted the hail of lead as the Alpha continued to fire. But each shot failed to find its target.

  In a knot of frustration, the Alpha turned the pistol on Victoria, but Shawn had drawn his own gun. He aimed and fired. The others had fired with silenced weapons, but his roared like a lion gone mad. The impact ripped the pistol out of the Alpha’s hand. It spun through the air, clattered across the room, and wedged itself in shadow beneath a confusion of overturned tables.

  Shawn pulled the trigger again, but the Alpha dodged the shot. He slipped and sidestepped as Shawn fired, and they advanced toward one another, gaining speed like a pair of runaway trains on the same track. Shawn emptied the magazine and threw the pistol at the Alpha, who batted it aside without missing a step.