Chapter #35Send in the Clone by: Seuzz   You yearn to follow Joe, to see what has become of Verity, but you are also leery of this "shadow piercing" thing that they all keep talking about. It seems safer to cling to their boss, who seems to lack Frank and Joe's magical powers.
He strides quickly down a tiled corridor, and you have to jog along quickly behind, hating the slapping sound your feet make no matter how quiet you try to be. But he doesn't seem to notice. You gulp as he enters an elevator, but you've still got the pistol, so you feel safe in ducking into the lift alongside him. Again, he ignores you; but then, his gaze is also very distant.
The elevator sinks rather than rises; and it sinks even after the indicator has passed the lowest marked floor. The doors, when they open, reveal a short corridor ending in a beige door. There is a keypad next to it. You sidle up beside the boss fellow, to try to see the code. But he doesn't press any buttons. Instead, he puts his fingertip to a glass pad. A bell softly rings, and he opens the door.
It swings back almost immediately in your face after he's through, and you have to push it open again to squeeze through. It closes with a heavy click behind you. The boss freezes in mid stride and turns around, frowning through you at the door. He cocks his head, and his eyes dart about. He holds this pose for several long seconds, then turns back around.
You are in a windowless apartment, with almost all of the furniture in a single large room: queen-size bed; wardrobe; dresser; sofa; coffee table; book shelf; refrigerator; sink. There are three doors. You glimpse the edge of a toilet through one; the second pierces what looks like an enormous cube of oak wood that has been set in the wall; and the third leads into another large but ill-lit room.
To your embarrassment, the boss now begins to disrobe, pulling off jacket, shoes and socks, trousers and shirt, and underthings. He pulls a silk dressing gown from the wardrobe but doesn't put it on. Since you're watching him without trying to see him, you only have the impression that he is reasonably well built with only a very slight paunch. He is, however, quite pale, and the black hair on his chest and legs is quite pronounced.
He then enters that badly-lit room, and you gingerly follow.
He snaps his finger and a light comes on. The room is rectangular, thrusting deep into the earth. At the far end is a tall cylinder, made of glass or thick plexiglass. Near the doorway is a console, bare except for a large monitor and a row of keys built into the surface. On the left-hand wall is a sheet of beveled metal, looking like the door to an industrial-sized refrigerator.
The boss presses a key, and the cylinder at the far end of the room rotates; after it has stopped you realize that it is actually half a cylinder, and that the open half is now facing you. The boss tosses his dressing gown onto a chair and strides the length of the room to the cylinder. He steps into it, frowning slightly. The cylinder rotates again, sealing him off. He raises his head, straightens himself, and holds very still.
A blue dot appears in the middle of his forehead, and slowly begins to move back and forth. Another appears just below it, and also begins to move as the first dot quickens in motion. More dots appear, traveling down the length of his body. He remains ramrod straight and perfectly still. The dots quicken in tempo, until they cease to be points and becomes lines, and then blurs. His entire body becomes suffused within a bluish glow.
You peer up at the ceiling, and see tiny holes from which blue lights glow. Lasers? Possibly. You watch for maybe ten minutes, trying to feel fascinated, but you are soon rather bored.
The glow fades from the figure, and the cylinder spins open again. He blinks, and pinches the bridge of his nose. He shakes his head, and comes back out. He dons the dressing gown. He presses another key. The cylinder closes again.
Now there is a rumbling sound, and a hissing. Something tall and white, like a monolith, slides from the ceiling into the cylinder. The boss presses another key. A blue dot appears on the monolith, and slowly swings back and forth. A second dot appears, and also begins to swing back and forth. Second verse, same as the first? The boss seems to think so, for he brushes past you--you have to jump out of the way--to return to the main apartment, where he gets dressed.
You remain where you are, glancing back and forth between the boss and the cylinder. The former moves about indolently until his phone rings. "Yeah? Uh huh. Not my problem. Well fuck you too." He hangs up. "Moron," he mutters.
You let out a sigh of relief; you'd worried it was Frank with word that the cameras have tracked you to this apartment. When you glance back at the cylinder, you do a double take.
The cylinder is wrapped in a blue glow, but through it you can see the outline of a figure. Slowly it resolves into focus, becoming sharper and better defined. You choke a little when you recognize it: It is the twin of the man you have been following. You double check to confirm, and hop out of the way as the man himself comes back into the room. He watches the apparition of the double for a minute with only a listless kind of attention, then with a grunt leaves again. Too late you hear the sound of a door opening, and look out just in time to see him vanishing through the exit. The door clicks shut, and when you grasp the handle find that it is locked.
You hurry back into the room with the cylinder. The blue glow has almost completely faded by this point. You intently watch the figure in the cylinder, wondering if what you fear is going to happen actually does.
And it does happen, in a way that would be slightly comical if it weren't frightening. The figure in the booth blinks, pinches the bridge of his nose, and shakes his head in the exact same way the since-departed boss had done. Warned, perhaps, by some sixth sense, you duck down beneath the console, and hold your breath as bare feet slap past. You peek into the main apartment. The clone--
That's got to be what it is. That's what it always is in those god-damned sci-fi telefilms, one of which you seem to have fallen in to.
The clone looks around with his hands on hips. "Fuck," he mutters. "Forgot the phone upstairs. Well, he did. Moron. If I were in charge--"
He twists around, too quickly for you to draw back, and his gaze falls on you. His eyes go wide, and his mouth falls open.
So much for invisibility. Maybe it doesn't work on clones. You raise the pistol, and from a bad angle get off a wild shot. The clone yells and clutches his shoulder and spins around. You fire again, and his head jerks, and he falls. You scramble toward him, for he's twitching and moaning. His eyes are rolling as he tries to look up at you, and froth pours from his mouth. There's dark red goop all along the side of his head.
Is the thing really alive? Whether it is or not, it seems a greater mercy to put it out of its misery. You fire point blank at its head, and most of the skull shatters. Limbs twitch and convulse, but the thing is clearly dead.
You run into the bathroom and throw up all over the floor.
* * * * *
You give yourself a minute to recover, for you've no idea how long you have to accomplish you know not what. You can't get out, so--invisible or not--you will be in serious trouble if anyone returns to find that dead thing in the floor. But how can you get rid of it? Push it under the bed? Hide it in the bathroom? Through the door opposite you catch sight of that cylinder, and a thought forms. That man left before the clone had finished forming. If he found this corpse inside the cylinder, maybe he'd think something had gone wrong with the procedure. Well, it's worth a shot.
You grab the thing by the ankles and drag it along. You almost give up when you see the streak of dark red you're leaving behind. Fuck it, that cylinder is as good a place as any other anyway. You huff and strain past the console, muscles creaking, until you bump into the cylinder. Now comes the horrible part. You drop its ankles and move around to lift it under the armpits. Its hot, wet, sticky, matted hair slides up your chest. You almost vomit again. Higher you hike it, staggering under the weight, until its head is lolling your shoulders. You try to toss it into the cylinder, but it's no use. You'll have to drag it inside with you, and squeeze back out.
But almost as soon as you step into the cylinder, it starts to rotate. A hard edge slams into your arm, and you drop your burden. The corpse slides away, pushed by the cylinder. You gasp and try to catch the edge before it can close, but have to snatch your fingers away at the last seconds. You bang on the glass, and it rings dully. You stagger back a step as a blue light comes on in the ceiling, and bump into two vertical hand rails. You grasp them.
Then you're blinded by a blue flash that fills your vision. It fades to purple, to black, to ultraviolet, and finally to the colors on the other side of reality.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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