The Clone Apocalypse (19 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Unifieds took me to the Naval Consolidation Brig, a well-kept but nearly empty facility on the Maryland side of Washington, D.C. Jeremy Reid, my new warden, was a tall, skinny, white-haired bureaucrat with a soft face and wire-framed spectacles, the kind of cat who can change from stripes to spots depending on who runs the pack. He looked at me, and said, “Wayson Harris, you have been assigned to this facility where you shall remain incarcerated until the Unified Authority elects to execute you properly.”

When I answered, “Get specked, asshole,” he favored me with a tight-lipped, prudish smile and said, “If you show us proper respect, your short stay with us will go more pleasantly for everyone.”

After that, he fell into line with the guards and escorted me into the building, which looked more like a bank with human-sized safety-deposit boxes than an actual prison—a two-story building wrapped around a huge lobby. The place was as empty as a school on the first day of vacation, and immaculate, not just sanitary, like a hospital, but clutter-free, lint-free, dust-free, germ-free, like the reactor room in a nuclear power plant.

Looking across the lobby, I saw that the club chairs were the only things on the floor—two rows of chairs with armrests and straight backs, upholstered in white or green Naugahyde. The floors were done in white linoleum tile; the walls were brick painted a stark white. The bright fluorescent lights left not so much as a shadow in which a speck of dust could hide.

Reid strolled to my wheelchair, and said, “Your cell is on the second floor.”

“You run a clean prison,” I said.

“It’s easy to maintain cleanliness in an unoccupied facility, Harris,” he said.

I wondered how long I would live in this sanitarium. For that matter, I wondered how long I would live.

“We had to do some cleaning before we could move you in,” Reid confessed, a cheerful ring to his voice. “Some of the old staff, the synthetic men who worked here before the Unified Authority resumed control, died at their stations.

“We buried them in a mass grave out back. It seemed fitting because that was also the way they disposed of their prisoners.” Reid had this radiant, smug expression. He was in his sixties, maybe his seventies. He was a weak man, a man who tried to associate himself with other people’s triumphs, a worm.

“Very efficient,” I said, “killing every enemy and burying them where they fall. Maybe that was where the Enlisted Man’s Empire went wrong; we should have been more efficient.”

Reid’s smug expression disappeared, but instead of taking the bait, he told Conlon, “I’m remanding the prisoner to your custody until he is prepared.” He marched off, a skinny, prissy, politician, living proof that adult males can survive without balls.

One of my guards stepped beside me and jabbed his elbow into the side of my head. He whispered, “You know, you’re not really the last clone; there are a whole bunch of them on Terraneau.”

“Are there?” I asked. I’d had a lot of friends in the battle of Terraneau.

The man said, “Oh hell yes, bunches of them. We reprogrammed them.” The man stared at me, his eyes sparkling.

We waited in the gleaming lobby while guards went to the second floor and inspected my room. It was a good thing that this idiot had accompanied me all the way from Mazatlan to the brig. He’d been there when Major Conlon inspected my thermal pack and didn’t worry about my holding on to it. Had new guards arrived, they might have confiscated it.

The man asked, “Did you know we kicked your ass on Terraneau?”

“The ass kicking couldn’t have been too complete if a bunch of clones are still alive,” I said.

He said, “We lost a bunch of ships in the beginning, then our brass invited their brass for a summit.”

“A truce?” I asked.

“Not exactly. They fed them a nice meal, then they reprogrammed them. Once their leaders joined our side, the rest of the clones threw in the towel.”

“Their leaders,” Admiral Jim Holman, the officer in command, wasn’t the sanest man I’d ever met, but he was an honorable man. I’d always admired him. He’d known how to run a fleet, and he had a wicked sense of humor.

One mystery solved,
I realized. Now I knew how the Unifieds had captured the Explorer without damaging it. The reprogrammed clones must have contacted the Explorer, welcomed the crew to Terraneau, and led them into an ambush.

I looked at the bastard, and said, “Let me get this straight; your officers invited our officers to a peace summit and reprogrammed them.”

“Yeah, that sums it up.”

“So much for honor,” I said. “You invited them in under a white flag, then you doped . . .” Before I could finish the sentence, the bastard slammed his fist into my jaw. Strapped in at the knees, arms, chest, and neck, made me a sitting target—literally.

Conlon saw it happen and barked, “Thompson!”

Thompson snapped to attention, shoulders back, chest out, eyes straight ahead.

Conlon asked, “Did you just strike the prisoner?”

The bastard answered, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Do that again, soldier, and we’ll see how tough you are with men who aren’t strapped into a wheelchair.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s out of his mind,
I thought. Conlon stood barely five feet. He was short and skinny and weak, and this other guy, Thompson, he looked like a bruiser.

As Conlon walked away, I said, “Ambushing officers under a flag of truce, beating up prisoners in wheelchairs, honor is in short supply.”

Thompson glared at me, and whispered, “Keep it up, clone. That little prick won’t always be around to save you.” He said this so quietly it didn’t attract attention, but he wasn’t bright enough to stop playing my game. A moment passed, and he said, “Personally I think we should have ordered them to kill themselves after we reprogrammed them.”

“As another shining example of U.A. honor?” I asked.

“Watch yourself.”

Reid returned. He told Major Conlon, “The room is ready.”

Conlon repeated the order to his men and the guards wheeled me up to my new billet. We rolled to an elevator which took me, Reid, Conlon, and four armed men to the second floor.

Reid said, “We brought in a full staff here just for you, thirty-seven guards. Personally, I don’t think we’ll need them.”

I heard him speaking, but I didn’t bother listening to him. I thought about death tolls; mine kept on rising. Along with every man under my command, I had the reprogramming of Jim Holman on my conscience. As far as I was concerned, reprogramming was as bad as death. Holman and his men had become slaves.

“We also have a surgeon on staff,” said Reid. “Personally, I consider the guards an unnecessary redundancy, but Mr. Andropov . . .”

My cell was ten feet wide and twelve feet long, with brick walls and no windows. It had a cot, a toilet, and a sink. I spotted it because it was the only cell with an open door and lights.

As we wheeled closer to the door, I saw that what I had mistaken for a cot was more like a gurney. It was too tall for a cot.

“We will keep you on an incapacitation cage,” said Reid. “You will be paralyzed, but . . .”

They wheeled me past my cell and down the hall, to the “little shop of horrors”; that was the military term for prison infirmaries.
The Little Shop of Horrors.

We marched down the open hall past dozens of darkened cells and turned a corner. For the first time that day, I struggled. I pulled at the cuffs and tried to break my legs free.

“Is something wrong?” Jeremy Reid asked.

I couldn’t break free. I tried, but I wouldn’t have been able to break free even if I’d been healthy.

The corridor snaked on past the cell block and deep into the prison. We passed a doorway that opened to a small holotorium, in which prisoners would have been allowed to watch movies. We passed a staff room, in which guards would have chatted and played games with other guards during their breaks. We passed a doorway that would have led us down to the prison yard in which dead clone guards now rotted in a mass grave.

They had me. Speck it all, they had me.

I struggled, but I had no hope of escape. They would take me into that infirmary, and they would inject me or gas me. Their surgeon would insert two conduction fibers into the spot where my spinal cord met my brain, and I would lie on that table helpless, unable to wag a finger or twitch a toe.

We turned a corner, and I saw a lit doorway. The sanitary scents of alcohol and disinfectant wafted out of the doorway. I struggled against those straps, leaning this way and that, trying to pull my wrists and ankles free, fighting to break the unbreakable strap around my chest.

The entire facility was air-conditioned. The air was cold, not stale but not fresh. The hall was dark except for the dim sunlight coming through the windows and the light from the infirmary . . . the Little Shop. I twisted my chest and shoulders to the left and to the right, but my head and pelvis remained fixed. I wouldn’t escape. I couldn’t give up.

A man waited for me just inside the infirmary. He wore a surgical gown and carried a six-inch canister with an inhaling mask. The prison butcher came closer and raised the mask. I tried to move away. I tried to turn my head. I tried to hold my breath.

TWENTY-NINE

I had placed a few prisoners on incapacitation cages during my career, and now I regretted it. This wasn’t just storage, it was torture. I knew the electricity would paralyze me, but I didn’t realize how it would feel. The electricity made my muscles contract, stiffening my arms, legs, and back. I lay on the gurney with my legs out straight and my arms by my side. It didn’t matter that the muscles were tired, I couldn’t move them.

I could talk, and I could shut my eyes. I could flare my nostrils, hold my breath, and furl my eyebrows. Everything else was just a memory.

Even above the pain, it was the helplessness that bothered me most. Thompson, the soldier who told me about Terraneau, came in to tell me stories about torturing clones. He brought his lunch in with him one day, placing his sandwich, chips, and apple on my stomach, knowing I couldn’t manage enough movement to shake them off.

At some point, one of the guards released a couple of flies in my cell. I heard him enter the cell and unscrew the lid, but he stood behind my table. I couldn’t turn to see who did it.

I should have been grateful; he could have brought a wasp or yellow jacket or an entire hive of bees; I wouldn’t have been able to stop him. He released a couple of chubby little house flies that buzzed around the cell until they spotted me.

I never saw them except when they hovered over my eyes. They darted in and out of my vision as they explored the room. Eventually, they realized that the only thing of interest was me, and then they approached, circling like sharks.

Every time the surgeon changed my drip, he scrubbed me with some pungent disinfectant which drove the flies from my arms. I had socks on my feet and long pants, but my face was uncovered. They must have landed on my table and on my body, but I couldn’t see or hear or feel them. I had no means to shoo them away. I yelled and tried to blow at them when they came near my face, but landing on my stomach or legs and walking around unchallenged, the flies soon realized they had nothing to fear.

Not covered by clothing, my face was the only edible thing in the room. The flies landed on my cheeks and walked over my nose and lips. I blinked my eyes furiously when one of them strolled over my cheek.

At some point, the flies found something more interesting than my face. Eventually, they went away entirely. I don’t know if they died of old age or escaped, but they disappeared from my life.

Along with the filaments in my neck, the doctor had plugged an intravenous drip into my arm. Now that I had a U.A. saline drip poking my arm, I realized that the doctor down in the Territories must have placed some kind of narcotic in saline, something that left me drowsy and relatively cheerful as well as hydrating me.

Time passed so slowly.

I tried to sleep. Now that I was nearly rehydrated, I was too healthy to hallucinate. My dreams only came as I slept.

An officer came to visit me, a general. He stepped into the room, made sure I could see him, and started reciting some litany he must have rehearsed a thousand times. He said, “Well, Wayson Harris, conqueror of worlds.” Then he stopped, smelled the air, and spoke to someone hiding outside my range of view. He said, “Holy hell! What is that stink?”

That stink was me. Along with cutting off any control of my limbs, the electrical current ended my influence over my bowels. The surgeon didn’t bother inserting catheters into my system during my visit to the Little Shop of Horrors, so any extrusions I might have made remained in my pants. Normally, this would have embarrassed me, but seeing how it flustered that pompous U.A. general, I found myself amused.

He tried to fan the air away from his nose. A moment later, he stormed out of my cell.

Now you know what interested the flies more than my face.

THIRTY

Thanks to that general, the Unifieds occasionally allowed me to climb off my cage. They gave me ten-minute windows to walk around my cell and cut the current anytime I even hinted about using the latrine.

My “exercise periods” were a joke. The incapacitation cage left me too weak to stand more than a few seconds at a time, but I was getting stronger quickly.

I missed the hydrating formula Pugh’s doctor gave me at Mazatlan. That drip left me weak but feeling mended, a pleasant illusion. His medicine hadn’t healed me, but it left me feeling relaxed.

Despite everything, I still had managed to keep Pugh’s disposable thermal pack. As time passed, it became the focus of my thoughts. I still hadn’t used it. I didn’t want to use it. Once I did, I would have nothing left.

I began examining it during my “exercise periods.” It took a few tries, but I eventually figured the damn thing out.

The moment started with a guard’s saying, “Okay, Harris, you have ten minutes.”

Steeling my head for a bout of nausea, I climbed from the incapacitation cage and stretched, then I pulled the thermal pack from the spot where I kept it on the sink. Knowing full well that the Unifieds observed my every move, I opened the pack as if confirming that its chemical stick was still intact. I pulled the stick out and inspected it—a tiny cylinder, maybe an inch long, a quarter of an inch in diameter, a clear plastic housing filled with a pearl-colored gas. Still playacting, I fumbled with the chemical stick as I attempted to reinsert it and allowed it to fall into the pack. It sank into the gel and marbles, giving me a chance to examine the pack’s insides more closely as I tweezed the stick free.

The marbles looked normal, completely normal, in fact. I certainly didn’t find a grenade. Just as I was about to write the pack off as being exactly what it appeared to be, my finger brushed across a strip of cloth running through the gel, which was exactly where it ought not to have been. When the gel froze, that cloth would freeze with it.

As casually as I could, I pulled at the cloth with my fingers. It was like a sleeve, maybe a hilt for an ice pick or something. It was flat and about an inch wide, sewed tight and water-resistant so that nothing soaked in or out of it. As I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger, I found a thin stream of viscous liquid ran through it. I only spent a couple of seconds toying with the sleeve; anything more than that would have attracted unwanted attention.

As I closed the pack up and returned it to its spot on my sink, I tried to figured out what Pugh had given me and why. If that sleeve froze, it would be long and thin like the blade of a knife . . . a liquid knife. That was gel inside the sleeve. When I snapped the stick, the gel would freeze and form a blade. It wouldn’t be much of a blade. Like any ice, it would have no tensile strength, but I could use it to kill myself.

As I considered this, I decided that Pugh would have had something else in mind. If he’d wanted me to die, he could have killed me. He’d had plenty of opportunity.

Speaking over the intercom, Major Conlon said, “Okay, Harris, back on your cage.”

When he said for me to climb back on my cage, he meant for me to lie down with my head in the center of the table so that the electrical current would run through the diodes in my neck. The first time he told me to get back on the cage, I laughed at him. I expected him to threaten me, and he lived up to my expectations, but not in the way I expected.

He tapped on the window in my door with a silver canister about the size of a coffee mug. He didn’t even need to tell me what was in it. I saw the canister and climbed on the table without saying a word.

They couldn’t reprogram me, but I hated what that shit did to my head. It felt like waking up from a seizure.

They only had to show it to me once; after that, I became their trained circus animal. Anytime anyone knocked on the door, I climbed onto the incapacitation cage and waited for the electrical current to disable me.

I had no concept of days or time. I had no idea how long I had been in that cell when I finally decoded the thermal pack’s secret.

Conlon entered my cell and chatted with me regularly. Was it daily? If so, I spent twenty days in that prison. He visited me twenty times. He began our latest meeting by asking, “How are you doing today, Harris?”

I looked up at him, and said, “I’m being electrocuted. How the speck are you?”

We began every visit that way. That was our handshake.

A patriotic man, Major Conlon wanted to prove to me that my clones had started the war. He blamed us for everything. On this occasion, his topic of choice was New Copenhagen, the final battle of the alien invasion. By the time we stopped the Avatari on New Copenhagen, they had already captured 178 of the 180 colonized worlds.

He asked me, “You fought on New Copenhagen didn’t you? I heard the natural-born officers won that battle all by themselves.”

I said, “That’s interesting.”

“That’s not how you saw it?” he asked.

“Have you ever seen U.A. officers single-handedly win any other battles?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

I thought about killing him. I couldn’t do it at the moment, but sooner or later he’d make a mistake. Maybe he’d walk into my cell without checking to make sure my cage was on. I’d freeze the thermal pack and stab the ice into his heart. I was slowly recovering my strength; with it came thoughts of revenge.

I said, “The Unified Authority sent nine hundred thousand clones to New Copenhagen. Thirty thousand survived. There were ninety thousand officers. Sixty thousand survived the battle. One in thirty clones survived. Two out of three officers walked away.

“If the clones spent the entire battle running away, they didn’t do a very good job of it.”

Conlon said, “I can verify those statistics.”

“Help yourself.”

Conlon said, “You fought on the Mogat home world, too.”

I asked him how he knew that. Having searched my files, I knew that the Unifieds redacted my military records so that they no longer reflected my involvement in the civil war.

He walked out of the cell without answering.

*   *   *

Sunny visited me.

I didn’t know it was her until after she entered the cell. I’d been sitting on my cage looking at the thermal pack and contemplating my future. Conlon spoke over the intercom. He said, “Harris, back on your cage.” I reached to replace the pack on the sink, but he said, “Back on your cage now!”

I placed the pack on the table beside me and lay back so the current could run through me.

I heard the cell door open and thought maybe Conlon had come for another chat. I heard footsteps, and then Sunny Ferris stepped into view. She looked beautiful, her brown hair as lustrous as mink, her blue dress pinching all the right places. I made the mistake of staring into her eyes.

She looked at me and a certain amount of irony and mirth surfaced in her expression. She said, “Wayson Harris, I almost didn’t recognize you without your beard.”

She was so beautiful. Just looking at her hurt.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I wanted to visit you.”

“Delilah visiting Samson in his prison,” I said.

“Oh, Wayson, I’m a lot more treacherous than Delilah,” she said. “I haven’t just plucked out your eyes and cut off your hair, dear, I’ve caused your entire nation to disappear.”

I said, “I know what you did to me in the underwater city. I saw the video feed.”

She blushed, and said, “Well that’s embarrassing. Still, we had fun. You seemed to enjoy it.”

“That’s not what I saw. I wanted to kill you.”

“You loved me.”

We both went silent. I didn’t want to speak, but my curiosity got the better of me. I said, “You had a spy in the Linear Committee Building. Who was it?”

“Of course we had people inside the LCB, dear. We had to keep an eye on you.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I hoped it was General Strait though I suspected it wasn’t. I never liked him. Neither did MacAvoy or Hauser. We almost always left him out of the loop.

“Was it Watson?” I asked.
He’s the weasel,
I thought.
I should have seen it from the start. I should have known he was weak from the start.

Sunny said, “Watson . . . Watson . . . You wouldn’t happen to know where we could find him, would you? He’s a war criminal, you know. He’s wanted for high treason.”

“Love him like a son,” I said. I was only four years older than him, but he still had some of the youthful misconceptions I’d lost as a teen. He’d seen plenty of war over the last few months; maybe the misconceptions were gone.

I coughed and groaned. Coughing on the incapacitation cage felt like taking a knee to the gut.

She stared down at me, and said, “Wayson, you’re falling apart.” She stroked her hand across my chest and stomach. I would have recoiled from her if I could have. Beautiful as she was, the sight of her repelled me. How many people had she murdered? Sure, she didn’t see them as people; to her they were “synthetics.”

Narcissistic, sadomasochist nymph that she was, Sunny must have actually thought that I couldn’t resist her charms. She stroked me again, this time starting at my chest and trailing down to my pelvis. She said in a slow, flirtatious whisper, “Wayson, what’s wrong? You’re usually much more receptive.”

She stroked me again, and frustration showed in her expression. Her eyes, narrowed. She pursed her lips.

She was desirable and treacherous, as beautiful as a Venus or Aphrodite and more dangerous than a sea filled with sharks. Having overseen my brainwashing, she still believed that she owned me, that she understood my every synapse. She laughed, and said, “But you’re incapacitated.”

I said nothing, but as I looked into her eyes, I saw something I had never noticed before. Sunny was insane. She stared down at me, favoring me with a seductive
come-hither
gaze, thinking that her look of longing would erase every impulse from my brain.

She ran her hand across my face. It was cool to the touch, not cold, but cool. Still battling the flu, I always felt too cold or too hot. At that moment, I felt hot, and her touch soothed me. She placed her hand on my forehead. It felt like a splash of cool water on a summer day.

“You have a fever,” she said. “You’re hot.”

I said nothing.

She ran her fingers along my jaw and down my neck. I hated this woman; she was repulsive. I wanted her and wished she would touch me everywhere. It was as if my brain had been torn into two independent halves, one filled with disgust and hate and sensibility, the other consumed by animal desires. I wanted to kill her. I wished she would lay her body across mine like a satin sheet.

Staring into my eyes, fixing me the way a snake fixes on its prey before it strikes, she climbed onto the gurney. She swung a thigh over my body. We were both dressed, this hadn’t yet become sex.

“Shut off the cage,” she called to no one in particular, and the electrical current dissolved from my brain.

My shoulders dropped. My arms went limp. My neck and stomach relaxed. My fingers found the thermal pack. I snapped the stick, and the knife became rigid. I grabbed the pack and rammed it into her stomach. The blade cut through the gel and the Mylar, through her clothes and her flesh, and I stabbed it deep into her abdomen. As she sat above me silent and stunned, I pulled the blade across her stomach, cutting so deeply that the point rolled across her spine. Her blood splashed out readily; it practically fell out of her.

I unzipped her gut quickly, so quickly that the pain hadn’t registered until it was already too late for her to scream. Shock showed in her watery blue eyes, and her lips puckered as if forming a question. Sunny fell on me, then rolled from my body. She tried to catch herself as she fell from the gurney, but she had no strength in her arms.

That knife had been my only escape. I might have been able to use it to escape if I had waited for the right moment, and I could certainly have used it to kill myself to deprive Andropov of the pleasure of executing me; instead, I had left myself trapped and helpless, but as I watched Sunny slowly slip from the table, I decided that the pleasure of killing her had been worth whatever came next.

The door of my cell flew open. Conlon ran in first, followed by three enlisted men. He placed his hands under Sunny’s arms and propped her up, allowing the other men to grab hold of her. She was still alive, but I had gutted her like a fish; she would not live much longer. Her skin had already turned to the color of whitest marble. Her tropical blue eyes had glazed over, and the color had drained from her lips. Her head lolled as two enlisted men lifted her, the third trying to stanch her bleeding.

“Get her to the infirmary!” Conlon shouted at his men.

One of the men took her in his arms, holding her the way new grooms carry their brides.

As soon as they left the cell, Conlon turned to me, and whispered, “Freeman said you’d do something stupid.”