The Clone Sedition (3 page)

These boys don’t know the first thing about recon,
I told myself. Judging by the way they ignored me, they might have never heard of the term. One stood with his back to me, paying no attention to anything but his fallen friend. The other was even more stupid. He knelt beside the body, asking, “Butch…Butch, are you okay?”

Using parked cars for cover, I came within ten feet of the bastards. After watching them to make sure they were as stupid as I thought, I stepped out from behind a sedan, and said, “He’s with God and the angels now.”

That turned out to have been an insensitive thing to say.

The short-term survivors turned and squinted into the fog,
trying to find me. The guy kneeling beside the body had a book in one hand and a carving knife in the other…hardly the weapons of an assassin or a mugger. The bearded one on his feet held a two-foot-long metal rod. He grasped it between his hands the way a worker would hold a pickax. All three of them, the two men and the corpse, wore rags instead of clothes. Their hair was long, and they had the dirty, musty smell of unwashed clothes.

Too inexperienced to be military…too dirty to be muggers…too stupid to be assassins. And the book, a black leather book, had gold leaf along the pages. I only knew of two books that people still printed on paper, both were religious texts.

These weren’t assassins, they were goddamned—
missionaries
? Had I just killed a man who had come thinking to save my nonexistent soul? But if he came to save my soul, why did he have a knife? The two who were still breathing carried a rod and a blade.

I took a step closer, and asked, “Do you want to talk about this?” in a voice that was civil and reasonable. The one on his feet raised his rod in the air, yelled, “Father, take me unto the bosom of Abraham!” He charged right at me, screaming and waving his stick.

Bold move. I decided that he’d be the one who lived.

He brought the rod down as if it were a samurai sword. I stepped to the side. Blending my motion with his, I caught his hands, twisted the rod, and stabbed its short end into his gut. I gave it an extra shove, pushing it in a couple of inches, then I yanked it out. The guy coughed up a rope of blood and sank to his knees. I could hear him crying and babbling as I switched my focus to his friend.

The third man stood and faced me. He muttered, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

“Put down the knife and you might just avoid the valley of death,” I said.

The man continued his recitation. “He leadeth me to lie down in green pastures.” He spoke clearly but quickly. “He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”

He swung his knife and lunged.

Trained fighters don’t often lunge with their knives because
the whole point of using a knife is to lash—quick, controlled, lethal. As this guy sprang forward, I used the rod I’d borrowed from his friend to break one of his kneecaps.

As he screamed and fell, he dropped his knife.

By this time I was in the midst of a combat reflex, meaning the glands built into my brain had pumped so much adrenaline and testosterone into my blood that rational thought was the last thing on my mind. Violence became like air when I had a combat reflex, and I breathed it greedily.

I cracked the man across the back of his head with the rod, knocking him unconscious. Then I picked up his knife and slit his throat with it. Once the combat reflex ended, I’d probably reevaluate my actions and decide I had gone overboard; but at the moment, I felt pretty good about my judgment.

Still holding a knife in one hand and a steel rod in the other, still under the influence of the hormones, I walked over to where the sole survivor lay squirming and crying on the concrete. A steady flow of blood coursed from the hole in his stomach, just below his ribs. Every time he inhaled, he made a squeaking sound.

I knelt beside the man, carefully placing the rod and knife where I could see them. For all I knew, there might have been a fourth or a fifth man lurking in the darkness, one with half a brain who walked softly and sacrificed his buddies in the name of stealth.

The guy tried to sit up. I placed a hand on his chest and pressed down until his back went flat. He stared up at me, tears leaking from his eyes, twin streams of blood running from the corners of his mouth. He whispered, “You murdered me.”

“You should have thought about that before you came after me,” I said.

“I…I’m dying.”

“Don’t pack your bags just yet,” I said. “Let’s chat.”

I kept my left hand on his chest, pinning him. Pointing at the hole in his gut with my right hand, I said, “Nasty wound,” and I plunged my finger into it, and added, “Deep, too.”

It was deeper than I expected. I thought I had driven the rod an inch or two into his body, but I was wrong. Reaching in with my finger, I felt a slippery surface that might have been
his liver or possibly his intestines. The tip of my finger brushed against his spine.

The man tried to scream, but he was weak, and the hole the rod had left in him must have grazed the bottom of his lungs. If doctors got here quickly, they might be able to save the bastard, but I doubted it.

Now that I saw the damage I had dealt, I started to come to my senses. The guy was going to die. The question was, would he answer my questions first? I said, “You don’t exactly strike me as your typical dark-alley stalker.”

He squirmed and managed to inhale a chestful of air. Pain showed in his watery eyes. He breathed quickly, held the air, and spit at me. It didn’t work. Flat on his back, weak and dying, he only launched his bloody spittle a few inches in the air. It arced and landed on his chin.

With my left hand still on his chest, I placed my right hand over the wound. I wasn’t trying to torture him, but I wanted to remind him who was boss. I said, “That wasn’t very nice.”

He tried to wrestle free, but he had no more strength than a toddler. His breathing was fast. He whispered, “Damn you. Damn you.”

“I want to help you,” I said. “I’ll show you. Watch.” I pulled out my mobile, and said, “You there.”

“Base command.”

“This is General Wayson Harris.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have my location?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s been an accident. Can you send med-evac?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have it out…”

I looked down at my victim, and said, “That’s a medical-evacuation unit…military talk for an ambulance.”

“We’ll have an air unit there in five minutes, sir.”

Turning my attention back to base command, I said, “You better hurry, this guy has lost a lot of blood.” I looked down at my victim, and asked, “Do you think you can hold on for five minutes?”

The guy began babbling, something about Satan and burning in hell. I listened to him for a second, then told the operator at base command, “Tell them to bring a gallon of plasma.”

I ended the call, then I looked at the bastard, and said, “There. See, I’m trying to help you.”

He shook his head. He convulsed, then he tried to squirm free of me, but I kept him pinned to the concrete. He tried to push my hand away, but he had no strength. Then he started to sob. He took a deep breath, and said, “I failed.” He took another deep breath and repeated himself, “I failed.” He was dying, and he knew it.

Do you feel guilty for killing this miserable speck?
I asked myself.
Hell no,
I told myself, but I did not believe the lie. These guys weren’t killers, they were just pretending to be. Had I broken their legs, these idiots would have told me everything; but no, I had to give in to hormones.

“Hope you’re happy, asshole,” I told myself.

The bastard on the ground must have thought I was speaking to him. He said, “I forgive you.”

I looked down at him. Even in the fog-filtered light, I could see that his face had gone as white as milk. His eyes stared straight into mine, the sockets as dark and empty as the socket of a skull.

“Don’t you die on me,” I said.

He did not respond.

I placed my knee on his chest and slapped him across the face. “Why’d you come after me?” I asked.

He stared up at me, the trace of a smile forming on his blood-smeared lips. He said, “Legion.”

I asked, “Are you part of some kind of militia?”

The son of a bitch showed me the sweetest, most angelic smile, then he coughed up his last jigger of blood and died. Kneeling there on the street, my knee still pinning his chest, I slapped the guy to see if I could wake him up, but I knew it wouldn’t work.

Then that alien thought repeated itself—
Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.
It kept flashing in my brain.
Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.
Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.

“What were you doing on the waterfront?” the cop asked.

“This is the hospitality district,” I said.

“Not at midnight, it isn’t.”

“I came for a drink.”

“Didn’t you say you’re staying at Fort Lewis?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t buy it,” said the cop. “You drove fifty miles for a nightcap. What? They don’t have bars on base? How about in Tacoma? They got bars in Tacoma.”

He had a good point. Tacoma, a fairly good-sized town, was located just north of Fort Lewis. I’d driven forty miles to reach Seattle.

I said, “I felt like celebrating?”

“By yourself?”

Granted, my reason for driving to Seattle sounded thin, even to me. I said, “I didn’t come trolling for Christians.”

I wasn’t going to say it, but the person I had come to see was the opposite of the men I ran into. I came in search of a mercenary named Ray Freeman. He never showed.

As a civilian, the police detective had absolutely no authority over me. Even if he’d caught me torturing these guys red-handed, he couldn’t have arrested me. My participation in these crimes automatically put them under military jurisdiction. Had I wished, I could have ended this street-side interrogation at any time, but I hoped maybe my cooperation would foster a little goodwill. It wasn’t working.

Four hours had passed since the confrontation began, and I was still on the street, standing around in the fog and the cold, watching the crime-scene-investigation unit scour for clues. The police cars’ spotlights illuminated a forty-foot circle with a shortwave light that penetrated the fog.

Why,
I wondered,
are they searching for clues when they have the confessed killer?

With the cars here, I could see the scene clearly. Mostly I saw the bodies of the victims, three soft, domesticated types, two of them barely over twenty years old. They looked like college students.

“Why don’t you tell me the real reason you came?” the policeman repeated.

“I like the bars in this part of town. I like watching the waterfront,” I said. It was a lie, and the detective saw through it.

He pretended to suddenly notice the thick fog shrouding the docks, and said, “Yeah, nice view.”

“Are you quite finished, Officer?” asked Travis Watson, my civilian advisor. I had hired him because he was smart, competent, and natural-born. I needed a natural-born aide to help interface with the civilian population. Having recently been conquered by the all-clone military, a lot of people were wary of clones. Go figure.

Watson was also fresh out of college, brash bordering on disrespectful, and easily distracted by women.

No one is perfect.

“You know what I think, Harris?” the detective said, clearly ignoring Watson. “I think these kids came to the bar for a drink, and you lured them out and killed them. You probably had friends hidden out here in the alley. That’s what I think.

“How many men did you have with you?” The detective was in his forties, a large, pudgy man in a long coat that kept him warm. He glared at me, knowing that I was above his law.

I said, “That’s an interesting theory. Does unsubstantiated guesswork count as police work these days?”

He gave me a wolfish smile, and said, “Listen to you. You’ve got three stars and a civilian assistant, General, but you don’t have an alibi. Does your rank let you get away with murder in the Army, too?”

“I’m a Marine,” I said.

“Same difference. Marines are like ants, they’re real tough in a group. How tough are you when you’re all alone?”

“Good question,” I said. “Why don’t you ask them?” I pointed to the three dead men lying on the concrete where I had left them.

“You want to know what I think…” the detective began.

“Not really,” I said, shutting him down before he blew off more steam. “Look, we know who killed these men, so there’s no point investigating the murder. I did it. My fingerprints are on the rod, my shoe print is on that one’s neck,” I said, still pointing at the corpses. “Now that we know who killed them, the next step in the investigation would be to find out who the speck they are. I want to know why they came downtown and why they were following me, and why they had two knives and an iron rod. What I really want to know is why that asshole over there was carrying a damn Bible.

“Do you get that a lot up here…thugs carrying Bibles and butcher knives?”

“No, we do not have a lot of Bible-toting thugs,” growled the detective.

I turned to Watson, and asked, “Is it just me, or do you find his taste in books as fascinating as I do?”

“We’ll look into it,” the detective barked. Clearly, he did not like taking direction from criminals.

“You might take DNA samples, too. Find out why these clowns attacked a Marine, and you might even save a few lives in the process,” I said.

“Since when did you care about saving lives?” he asked.

“Oh, Detective, my entire existence is about saving lives…both natural-born and synthetic.”

He looked back at the corpses, then turned to me. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing out here.”

“So what were you doing out here?” asked Watson. Like the detective, my civilian adjutant did not entirely trust me. Like the detective, he had been woken by an early-morning call. But the detective had probably woken up on the wrong side of his own bed.