Twins (18 page)

“Man on crutches here!” he shouted after her between short breaths.

Leave it alone, Ed, please.

“Gaia! Man on crutches, you know what I'm saying? Man on crutches on hills and in bushes, slipping over rocks in the dark trying to talk to—
mmpf.”

She heard a loud thud followed by the clacking of wood. And then a thick, eerie silence. She stopped in her tracks, listening to herself breathe.

“Ed?” she called behind her.

She heard nothing but the wind whistling through the trees, rustling the treetops in loud, gusty waves. There was some moonlight sifting in through the leaves
and a little reflected light from the lampposts in the park, but it was dark. It was really dark now.
Come on…

“Ed?” she called again, much louder.

Silence.

And the first hint of that not-so-pleasant feeling. The one she'd been learning more and more about every four to six hours. The sound of silence where there should have been the sound of Ed was doing very uncomfortable things to Gaia's chest and throat. Everything tightening. Everything closing, constricting. Sickening.

Gaia turned herself around slowly and began to walk, tracing with her memory which direction his voice had been coming from. “Ed, are you messing with me?” she called out, listening to her feet crunch the leaves as she searched for him blindly. No response. Only gusts of wind rumbling in her eardrums. She walked more quickly. “Ed, come on. Talk to me.” Heart rate increasing. Stomach lurching. Breath shortening.
“Ed!”

She cut through a patch of bushes into a clearing and nearly tripped. Her eyes shot down to her feet. A crutch. One of Ed's crutches. And beyond the crutch…

Ed's body. Blood trickling down his face from the side of his head.

Gaia stopped breathing.
Okay, disappear.
It had to be another hallucination. It had to be. She revisited every one of her horrific memories again right there in the center of that clearing where Ed's body lay. Her
mother, clamping her hand to the side of her head as she cried. Mary's entire body thrust forward by the sharp knife sticking out of her stomach. Sam Moon on his knees, reaching out to her with gaping black holes in his chest… But they had all disappeared.

Ed's body wouldn't.

Disappear, Ed.
“Disappear, Ed.” Now she was saying it out loud, chanting it as her strained eyes stared down at him. She whispered it to herself again and again as she ran to his body and dropped down next to him on her knees.
This isn't happening. It's not happening.
But Ed's lifeless body wasn't going away. She placed her hand on his neck to feel for a pulse.

Still breathing. He was still breathing. Gaia's entire body heaved forward with relief. She lifted his head up off the ground and wiped the blood from the side of his face. “You're still breathing,” she whispered between her own shallow breaths. “Don't you worry, Ed, you're still breathing.”

“Hey, Gaia. Is he dead yet?”

Gaia's body froze. She turned her head back slowly, looking for the man who had just whispered to her. All she could see were trees—staring at her, reaching their contorted arms down to crush her.

“Josh?” she called out. “Stay away, Josh. Stay the hell away from him.”

“It's us,” she heard from her left.

“Yeah, you know. Us. The voices in your head,” she
heard from the right. And then a raw, gravelly giggle from behind her.

“Stay away,” she uttered from deep in her chest, swinging her head to all sides, trying to see past the darkness. “Don't come another step.”

“But Gaia,” he whispered. “How can we stay away? We're already in your head.” Suddenly that voice was inches from her ear. She whipped her head around and saw a glint of his horrid smile before he smacked his fist down right in her face, knocking her over on her side. Two more of them came out of the bushes. Josh after Josh.

One of them grabbed Ed's body, dragging it from Gaia's side. “No!” she howled, lunging for his legs a beat too late. “Stay away from him!” she begged, jumping to her feet. “He hasn't done anything.”

“Well, that's never the point, is it?” Josh said, walking toward her until his face was in clear view. He looked deep into her eyes and smiled. “You know we have to kill him now.”

“No”
Gaia had grabbed Josh by his black shirt, bringing back her arm for a hard punch, when his counterpart grabbed her from behind, pinning her arm behind her back and raising a knife to her face. Gaia squirmed and shook to break loose, but the two of them worked together to restrain both her arms.

Now both her wrists were being held down, and there were two knives to her face. There was no move to
be made as they dragged her toward the third Josh—the one who was now holding Ed's unconscious body.

“Gaia,” he whispered, holding Ed's body up against his chest so that Ed's head was leaning back on his shoulder. “Check this out.”

Josh reached behind his back and brought out a long steel knife. He turned to look at Ed and then brought the knife up to Ed's neck, pressing the blade as close as he could to Ed's jugular vein without making the cut yet. “I think I'm going to gut him. I'm just going to gut him from the top of his throat to the bottom of his stomach.”

“Please,” Gaia begged, shivering from futility and that hollow, painful, nauseating buzzing. “Please don't.”

“But we knocked him out just to bring you back over here,” Josh complained. “Just so you could watch him die. Come on, Gaia, it's only fair. Sam had to die. Why shouldn't
he?
Ooh, maybe it should be in the same spot where we did Sam. That would be more appropriate, maybe.” Josh slid the knife down from Ed's neck and placed the tip right at the center of Ed's chest. “I think right in the heart, guys, what do you think?”

The other two nodded, gripping Gaia's wrists tightly.

“What do you think, Gaia?” he asked. “Are you scared yet?” Josh cocked the knife back and aimed for Ed's chest.

And all Gaia could do was watch. She would stand there and watch it happen. Watch Josh cut open the last
person on this earth that she truly loved while she was held down by her own menacing hallucinations. How sick was that? She felt her entire body cave in as she stared at their knives, waving in her face. Everything was closing in on her again—the trees reaching down at her, the bushes climbing up at her, their cruel hands holding their knives and swirling around her in a blur like some torturous carnival ride as Josh pulled back for the kill….

Wait.

Time almost seemed to stand still. Just for one moment. Just for one infinitesimal split second. But an entire novel's worth of revelations could take place in one split second.

Just wait. Slow it down for just one moment.
It was something she had seen. A blip of vision that had struck her amidst all the chaos spinning around her.

Something about their knives. No. Not the knives themselves, but the hands
holding
the knives. Something tiny she had somehow missed on the hands of her sinister delusions. Tiny black letters tattooed on their inner wrists…

QR1 and QR2.

Those letters struck a chord in her. They sparked a memory. An image of a computer screen popped into her head. Something she'd witnessed on that Clofaze CD. Something about a
prototype.
And then a list of
qualified replicants. QR1—100% success. QR2—100% success,
and on and on down the list…

Put it together, Gaia. Put it all together.
And put it together she did. In that one split second.

Of course. How could she have missed this?

Josh was the prototype.
Josh
was Loki's first specimen for his demented cloning experiment. And Gaia might be suffering from some nasty hallucinations lately, but these sinister delusions holding her hostage… they weren't delusions at all. They weren't nightmares come to life or ghosts who'd come to haunt her for her sins. They were nothing other than
qualified replicants.
Clones. They were Loki's goddamn test run. His early models. First editions. They were more of Loki's expendable pawns. Just like her.

And this revelation did something to Gaia. Something major. She could feel the physical and mental shift inside her. Realizing her nightmares were real… It was like waking up. Waking up from this extended bizarro dream state in which she'd been trapped for the last forty-eight hours. For the first time since her uncle had pricked her with that sedative, Gaia felt completely and truly awake. Able to tell reality from her own psycho fictions.

She'd thought that fighting off these Joshes was like trying to fight off her own madness, fighting off her own fears. But she wasn't trying to conquer her fears at all. She was simply trying to fight off another batch of Loki's goons. The same old thugs that she'd beaten down a thousand times before. They were just goons in Josh's clothing.

And just like that, her split second's worth of revelations was over. She watched Josh's knife coming down toward the center of Ed's chest, and she let go. Finally she could let it all go. And God, did she have a lot of repressed anger to express.

Step one: Total relaxation. It had finally returned to her body. Step two: Attack
now.

With lightning agility she clamped her hands onto her captors' fists and used them as a counterbalance as she kicked her feet out at Josh.

“Hai!”
she growled with deep release, kicking her left foot to Josh's knife and her right foot to his face. The knife flew from his hand as his head snapped back against the tree behind him, sending his whole body tumbling to the ground. Ed's body followed, landing a few feet to the right. Good. She'd tend to him in a second.

The moment her feet touched ground again, she rammed her knee into “QR2's” crotch, forcing him to release her so he could hug both his hands on his lower abdomen as he doubled over. This gave her the free hand she needed to grab “QR1's” arm with both hands and flip his ass to the ground.

“Ugh”
he groaned as his lower back landed directly on a mossy rock jutting out from the dirt. Meanwhile Josh (or “QR3,” perhaps—there was really no way of knowing) had risen back up from his tree collision, and he was coming hard at Gaia.

She flew into a quick somersault that brought her
up next to Ed's left crutch. Josh was charging toward her. She got a firm grip on the strong wooden crutch and sat completely still.
Wait for it….

At the exact moment he was upon her, she rose from the ground, twisting her body and swinging the crutch straight at his head like a long wooden bat. She leveled him with a crack to the back of the head that didn't sound unlike a bat hitting a baseball. Must have been his skull. He passed out cold on the ground. He and “QR1” were most definitely down for the count. But apparently “QR2” had managed to recover from his initial crotch injury.

He picked up his knife and charged straight for her. Why he would do that, she wasn't sure, but it was his loss. Gaia lanced him in the stomach with the rubber stopper of the crutch, causing him to double over yet again. Then she jabbed his foot with the crutch and swung it upward full force like a golf club, most certainly breaking his nose and sending his whole body hurtling backward to the ground.

And then there were none. It had taken no longer than fifteen seconds.

That
was what she'd been so scared of?
That?
Of all the painful lessons she'd learned about fear thus far, this one was perhaps the most important to date: Fear was a waste of time.

Gaia would have liked to inflict more damage, but she had Ed to worry about right now. And that took
precedence over vengeance. She ran back to Ed's side and lifted his head up in her hands—alive and breathing and not a ghost. She tapped on his face repeatedly, harder and harder—until he finally began to come to.

“What happened?” he croaked, looking up at her. “Someone hit me on the head Hard.” He brought his hand to the side of his head, where there was still some blood.

“Not too much happened,” she said. “It was no big deal.”

He tried to lift his head to see the carnage. Gaia gently pushed him back down.

“You know what?” she said. “You really don't need to see it. It'll only confuse you. Do you think you can get up?”

Ed nodded.

“Good,” Gaia said. “Let's just go
that
way.”

Gaia led Ed away in the opposite direction from the scene, supporting him all the way to Fifth Avenue. She helped hold him up on Fifth until she got them both safely in a cab back down to his house. Normally she would have passed out long before then. But she was quite sure she could wait until she got to Ed's to pass out. She had just awakened from a marathon nightmare, and she really had no desire to go right back to sleep.

To: L

From: J

Test complete. Subject has proved fearless under the most extreme of circumstances. Operated at 100% skill level. Results are conclusive.

To: J

From: L

Excellent. We can proceed with phase II of the experiment. QRs to the MedLab. Proceed immediately to your next mission.

She had been wearing her id on her sleeve for two straight days.

HOW COULD HE POSSIBLY NOT BE asleep? After completing a fullscale Crutch Olympics obstacle course in Central Park and receiving a bash to the head that had earned him a bump the size of a small ant farm, Ed had figured he would probably sleep for the next three to five business days. God knows he'd passed out hard enough when they finally got home. So what was he doing up at four-twenty-two in the morning? But whatever the reason, when he turned over on his side, he was glad he had awoken or he would have missed it. He would have missed the chance to see Gaia's face bathed in stripes of blue moonlight and white streetlight as she slept peacefully next to him in bed—the key word being
peacefully.