Phoenix Rising (Book Two of The Icarus Trilogy) (44 page)

“You… enjoying yourself, Christopher?” Carver asked as he covered his mouth with his left hand.  It was a grisly sight and it didn’t help that the overweight scientist was moaning in pain.  The old man was startled when he noticed that the scientist was missing his eyelids, but he did what he could to hide his reaction.  He scanned down, noticing a patch of bare muscle where Hawkins’ nipple used to be, and decided to look at the opposite wall.  There was just too much to take in.

“Not the word I would use, Carver.  Believe it or not it’s no fun, but I think that makes it worse for him,” Roberts said as he looked down at his creation.  It would have made him shiver, but he did what he could to repress the reaction.  “He can take sadism, but violence mixed with apathy seems to have the best effect.”  Carver looked at the man’s face again, determined to take it in, and noticed that the scientist was looking at him, pleading for mercy with those lidless eyes.

“Seems so,” Carver said before looking down.  He shouldn’t have.  The old man noticed that Hawkins’ left leg was missing just below the knee.  He pursed his lips and Roberts became aware of the veteran’s reaction.

“Yeah, that was a bit of work.  I actually broke the toes first, then cut them off, then I started taking off a few centimeters at a time.  He was still laughing until I got halfway up the calf.  I kinda stopped talking then,” the boy soldier said, a sort of despondency pervading through his voice.  He was ready for this to end.  The very act of torturing the man had become painful for Roberts, both physically and mentally.  He had dealt with too much pain to enjoy handing it out.

“Thorough, I guess,” Carver said before looking back at Hawkins’ bloody face.  The scientist was lifting his head slightly, fighting the urge to scream in agony and started to hyperventilate.

“End it….. please.  That’s enough.  I’m…. I’m ready to go,” the weasel-faced man said.  Carver looked back at Roberts, who shrugged at the comment.

“I’m… I’m done, too.  We need to get back to the barracks and this… isn’t working.  I’m never going to…” Roberts started, but he looked down at the ground at the thought.  It seemed so petty, now, thinking that he could turn the scientist’s mind and convince him that his life’s work was evil and useless.  Roberts didn’t care what dead men thought about themselves; even Hawkins was allowed to have his sense of security.

“Never going to have a normal life?” Hawkins asked from his restrained position.  “I did that.  Doesn’t that just make you mad enough to kill me?  And you didn’t break me,
Roberts
.  I might want to die, but my work will live on, just you wait and see.  Just you wait…” Hawkins said before coughing up blood, “and see.”

Carver couldn’t take it anymore.  This was not the way it was supposed to go.  Roberts might have been fine with letting this stand, but the veteran had seen far too much.  Hawkins was the kind of man that should have been hunted down and killed without a thought.  He was the closest thing to a monster Carver had ever seen, even when civilians were being gunned down on orders.  This was the kind of man who smiled at such a sight.

The old man walked over so that he was standing over Hawkins’ face, those lidless eyes staring right at him.  Carver could tell that Hawkins was frightened, much more so than he was willing to let on.  Carver didn’t smile; he didn’t show any malice or emotion at all.  He just leaned down so that he was face to face with the scientist and set his hand on the cushion by Hawkins’ head.

“I told you once that I had a few choice words for you.  I told you that I would tell them to you when you were dying.  Do you remember that?” Carver asked, making sure he said all the right words in all the right places.  It would have no effect otherwise.  Hawkins looked at him and gulped down air, taking some blood with it.  His head was shaking, but he gave a weak nod soon after the question.

“Well, this is what I had to say to you, Peter.  You have a great mind.  You had the capability for great things; terrible or saintly.  You were one of the greatest people I ever met,” Carver said, seeing that Hawkins was appreciating every word; his ego consoled by the veteran’s praise of ability.

“But you chose those terrible things, and the problem with horrible, evil acts, is that they don’t draw respect.  Not the good kind.  It draws out fear and wariness and skepticism and all the terrible qualities in humanity.  You surrounded yourself in it and maybe without noticing, you mired yourself in it,” the veteran said, seeing the change in the scientist’s reaction.

“By throwing yourself into these depths of humanity, you darkened and allowed your greatness to be swallowed into the void.  While you had the potential for great things, the only acts and accomplishments you ever had were negative.  They took away from humanity and from yourself.  You had the ability to be one of the greatest men in existence, but you allowed yourself to disappear into the shadows; into the darkness.”

“In short, Peter,” Carver said, knowing that he was destroying a man from the inside out.  “Nothing you have done has mattered, and will never matter.  Some other evil man will surpass you; find some new twist on your tortures and findings.  You have not added to humanity or the universe, only taken away.  You were not great, Peter.  You were less than
nothing
,” Carver said, standing up to his full height, looking down at his victim.  The man was shaking in his restraints, rage and fear and sadness all mixing together.  Tears started to form, but because of the blood seeping from where his eyelids used to be ran red.  The bloody tears fell in streams along his bloody cheeks.

“Time to end it, Christopher,” Carver said before turning and walking to the doorway.  There was no use in further torturing the man.  There was nothing more to say.  Peter Hawkins yelled after the man, refusing to believe what he had just heard.

“You’re wrong, CARVER!  You’re WRONG!  I was great, I AM great.  You’re fucking wrong,” Hawkins shouted, his anger mixing with his pain and banishing rational thought.  The old soldier didn’t even bother to turn in response.

“You know I’m not,” Carver said before exiting from Peter Hawkins’ life.  The scientist stared at the man’s back, unable to blink and when the old man disappeared he looked to Roberts.  He desperately wanted a reaction from the soldier, who had picked up one of the scalpels he had used to remove flesh from the scientist’s body.

“You know he’s wrong!”  Hawkins shouted.  Roberts merely sighed, shrugged, and then plunged the scalpel just below Hawkins’ sternum and dragged it downwards, opening Hawkins’ abdomen up to the stale air of the research area.

“But what do
you
know?” Roberts asked before turning and leaving Hawkins to his dying thoughts.  Christopher finally had his answer; he finally knew how to break the scientist.  Roberts would leave him alone to die.  The child soldier turned and exited the room, not bothering to close the door behind him.  Hawkins looked at the ceiling and could feel the cool air touching his insides.  He was unable to stop the bloody tears continued coursing down the sides of his face.

“You know….” he said weakly, but he realized the boy wasn’t coming back.  Carver wasn’t going to return.  And the worst part was that it didn’t matter. 

None of it mattered.

-

It finally happened in the mess hall.  The artificial soldier was taking a break from moving furniture into makeshift barricades when he noticed the man enter the fortress of a room.  This was where they were going to keep Jenkins during the assault.  This was the last line of defense for their messiah.

It was only appropriate that the two clones would meet in this room.

The false Jenkins was sitting against a wall while Templeton and Laurence argued about choke points and tactics when the newborn soldier appeared at the doorway.  Almost immediately, silence fell across the giant room and every pair of eyes turned to the hero of the revolution.  Then, almost immediately, they all panned back to the rejected soldier.

“Hey… Ryan,” the artificial soldier said, not bothering to stand for the man who shared his DNA and memories.  He waved slightly as a courtesy, but the most he could muster was a half-smile.  This man was his replacement; better and more authentic.  This was the man who was going to lead a revolution after committing suicide. 

It didn’t matter to the artificial man; he was on break.

“Umm, let’s go check these out,” Templeton said as the exchange began.  He grabbed Laurence’s shoulder and walked out of the room swiftly, trying to get out of the way before anything happened.  Corrigan had been sitting near the entrance, but as the two resistance agents made their way to the exit, the drone quickly realized that he shouldn’t be present for this.

The newborn soldier walked towards his clone.  He looked at the artificial man and realized that nothing was different.  The Jenkins sitting on the floor had a little more hair, looked a little more tired, but it was as if he was looking at a mirror.  And what made it seem all the more appropriate was that there was a clear sadness behind that soldier’s eyes.  The suicidal soldier walked past one of the barricades and stood a couple of meters away, at first.

“I think I know what you’re going through,” the messiah figure said before sitting down, his back against the barricade.  He knew it was going to be more comfortable.  He had always preferred to have his back to something; a quality his clone obviously shared.

“Do you?” the artificial soldier asked, his head tilting at the assumption.  He had been behaviorally modified, after all; he didn’t particularly know how similar they could be.  The soldier sitting across from him shrugged at the question and twisted his lips in a show of defeat.

“I guess I don’t know,” he said before looking down at his feet.  He started to wring his hands as the awkward silence continued.  The newborn soldier knew that this conversation had to happen, but he had no idea
how
it was supposed to happen.  This was a first for the universe.

“I don’t have a lot of your memories, did you know that?” the artificial soldier asked, holding the wrist of his left hand with his right.  He felt like he didn’t have a comfortable place to put his hands and didn’t want to just have them lying at his sides.  His clone looked up from the floor and tilted his head questioningly.

“Really?  How do you know that?” the newborn asked, curious as to what Hawkins had done to him to make this man in front of him.  The artificial man shrugged at that and sighed.  The suicidal soldier almost laughed at that; maybe they weren’t so different.

“Conversations with the others.  Started to leak out a couple of weeks ago.  Sometimes I feel like I can get to them; there’s this pressure in the back of my head when people remind me, but… well, I just can’t.”

“Hawkins is an asshole,” the newborn said, expecting and getting a laugh from his clone.

“Well, yeah, but we already knew that,” the artificial man said before looking down at the rifle at his side.  He picked up the weapon and looked over the instrument of death.  He was going to have to use it pretty soon.  “I’m supposed to be a monster.  They call it the ‘hero’ program, but monster’s the real definition.  I was supposed to enjoy killing and warfare and all those terrible things.  I was built for this world.”

“I don’t see a monster,” the suicidal soldier said, trying to cheer up his counterpart.  It seems like they shared a predisposition to misery.  The clone scoffed at the remark and looked up from his rifle.

“I think that’s the point, Ryan,” the would-be hero said.  “I’m supposed to look the part of the hero.  I’m supposed to be … marketable,” he said, his voice trailing off at the word.  He looked back to the floor and sighed.  “You know what the hardest part was?”

“They just wanted you to be me?” the newborn asked, already knowing the answer.  The clone smiled at that.

“Same fucking logic, eh?”

“You don’t seem all that different, Ryan,” the messiah said, hoping to illicit a positive reaction from the clone.  The artificial man looked up at his better version and gave a sad smile.

“Well, since I found out about the modifications I’ve been doing a fair amount of soul-searching, we’ll say.”

“I did quite a bit of that, myself,” the suicidal Jenkins said, returning that mirror of a smile.

“Oh?  What did you figure out?” the clone asked, knowing that seriousness had gone out the window.  The real Jenkins put his index and middle fingers underneath his chin in mock recreation of his own suicide.  The clone laughed at that and shook his head before looking down at his rifle.

“Guess nobody’s perfect,” he said as he ran his hand alongside the stock of the weapon.

“I think
that’s
the point, Ryan,” the messiah-figure said, knowing that his counterpart would enjoy the turn-around.  He wasn’t wrong.  The false Jenkins smiled before leaning his head back and running his hand through the fuzz of his brown hair.

“We have
got
to figure out new names, because this is going to get real complicated,
real
fast,” the clone said before looking down at his predecessor, who was also chuckling at the remark.

“Yeah, but what?  I think both of us will still respond to our middle names.”

“We can call you Jenkins Christ.  How ‘bout that?” the false Jenkins asked with a grin.  The new messiah groaned and shook his head at that.

“You already know that ain’t gonna work,” the newborn remarked with a slight smile.  They were quiet for a moment before the false Jenkins broke the silence.

“How did we get here?”  The messiah figure sighed at that and pushed both of his legs out in front of him.

“God, I really don’t know.  I still remember Justin and Phil and them on the sidewalk,” he started.

“And we got them to fight over fucking Kristen Harrison,”

“And they had to walk around for a week with double black eyes,”

“And we called them the
raccoon brothers!”

The two Jenkins collapsed into laughter at the memory.  It was so vivid in their minds, but even then it was somewhat hollow.  The only reason it had brought them anything was that they both remembered it.  It didn’t feel like it was really their experience.  The two soldiers looked up at the same time and knew the same thought had crossed their minds.