7th Son, page 28
“Stop it,” Thomas said.
Sheridan’s teethed glittered. “I’m being rude, I know. What you’ve learned in the past two days, I’ve lived with for the past thirty-four years. Pardon my insensitivity. So which one are you? Are you the oldest of them—the first to receive the mind of John Smith? Or perhaps a frustrated middle child? Don’t tell me who you are. Tell me what you are. I’ll tell you your number.”
“What you heard from me out there in the hall. That’s . . . that’s me.”
“That’s who you are. You love, you dream, you put on your pants one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Eloquent, in an endearingly naïve way. But that doesn’t tell me what you are. To wit: you don’t look like a soldier. Or a U.N. analyst.”
“I get it,” Thomas said, crossing his arms. “I’m the priest. Enough for you?”
“Quite.” Sheridan smirked. “Johnny Five. You’re alive.”
Thomas blinked, not understanding.
“I’m a little surprised it would be you to come here,” Sheridan said. “Fascinating. This is behavior beyond what you’d typically do. You’re a rule-follower, party-line LTP.” He sucked a lungful from his cigarette, then exhaled. “I thought you might be the wild child. Lucky Seven, the youngest, the black sheep. Kleinman likes him best, you know. He admires the kid’s spirit.”
“Black sheep.”
“Of all the clones, he was the only one who completely rejected the LTP we’d assigned him. A painstakingly devised and plotted LTP, I might add. He was called the ‘failed experiment.’ But not by Kleinman. He told us Seven was the triumph of human cloning and MemR/I integration. Independence. Free will, if there is such a thing.
“But you, priest. You followed the LTP to the letter. It’s just as well. I’m sure you’re doing good things for all those true believers in the heartland.”
“Stop. Please,” Thomas said. “I’m not with you. What is ‘LTP’?”
“Life Template Plan.” Sheridan took another drag of his cigarette. He blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Your road map. Surely you’ve seen the significance of when you were awakened from your fictitious coma, all those years ago.” Thomas stared blankly at him, and Sheridan tried again. “I’m referring to your age. Sixteen. The cusp of adulthood. The time when a youngster casts an eye to the future and to career—but also a time when he is still very, ah, impressionable. Malleable. The scientists here at 7th Son built a Life Template Plan for each of you Beta clones: careers in the military, psychology, biology—”
Oh. My God.
Thomas interrupted, finishing the thought. “And our respective Uncle Karls and Aunt Jaclyns pushed us in those predestined directions. And such a well-rounded childhood would have prepared us for almost any career. I get it now. I truly get it.”
It felt as if Thomas’s stomach were sinking in on itself, deflating his entire body. His mind quickly flashed to fragments of his junior year in high school, after the accident. Still a new school, still a stranger in a new city. Those first few years, he had clung to whatever advice his new foster parents had given him. And why wouldn’t he? In a way, he’d known them his whole life—all the postcards they’d sent from those faraway places. Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn were trustworthy. They were family.
They were anything but. You learned that yesterday, Thomas. But now you realize just how badly you and the rest of the clones were hoodwinked. They preached the faith, didn’t they? Karl and Jaclyn practically pushed your nose into that Catechism. Just what does that mean?
“You took advantage of us,” Thomas said, his voice rising, newfound anger coursing through him. “You woke us up in new cities with new parents and terrible news. And you had already plotted out our little lives for us. What a bunch of self-righteous pricks!”
“Tut, tut, Five. We had constructed the LTPs years before you were cloned and they were for career only. We based the Life Template Plans on future-centric social studies. What ‘future’ careers, technologies, and political climates would be like.” Sheridan grinned. “Those projections were very accurate, I might add, considering that the future is now.”
Father Thomas resisted an urge to reach over and smack the man’s face. It would solve nothing. He fumbled for the rosary in his pocket.
“So I was destined to become a priest, in the great and powerful plans of 7th Son.”
“Indeed. You didn’t go rogue, like Seven. He charted a course into the unknown, damning any guidance thrown his way. You could have been anything you wanted to be, of course. We all have that drive. But you followed the plan. In contrast, Seven had the capacity to become a nuclear physicist. It would have rounded out the team quiet nicely, don’t you think?”
“Team. Kleinman didn’t say anything about a team.” Thomas leaned forward; the rosary beads click-clacked, reassuring him.
“I don’t doubt that, either.”
“He said we were part of a grand nature-versus-nurture experiment. He said 7th Son was designed to observe what forms our seven separate lives would take, seeing how we came from the same ‘past.’ ”
Sheridan threw his head back and laughed. It was a wicked, rattling sound. “Sounds like soggy marketing copy, doesn’t it? Heh. Proof that absolute power corrupts absolutely. He’s rewriting history. Changing the past just for you, Five.”
“Stop calling me that. My name’s Thomas.”
Sheridan laughed again. “Of course it isn’t. You’re Five. Just as the marine is One and the geneticist is Four. Do you think something as insignificant as an identity actually matters in this place? A place where a lifetime of memories can be stored as ones and zeros . . . a place where we can grow a human clone to adulthood in two years? A place where we bent the will of you and five of your brethren to embrace the livelihoods we chose for them? Do you think something as dignified as a name has any place here? You’re even more naïve than I thought.”
Thomas shook his head. He’s not making any sense. “What does that mean?”
“It means, my dear Thomas, that 7th Son was—and still is—something much more than a glorified master’s thesis about nature and nurture. It’s about teams. About creating . . . no, constructing teams. We’re going to play a little game: I start the joke, you give me the punch line. It goes like this. Clone seven different children, give them the same memories, separate them, train them in different fields of study, and then bring them back together. After an adjustment period, what do you have?”
Thomas’s head was swimming. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come now. Think. You’re a preacher. Think about allll of those Christian sects out there, across the world. Each of them uses the Bible as the foundation of their faith. Don’t they?”
Thomas sat in silence for a few seconds. “Yes and no.”
“Explain.”
“There’s different translations of the Bible. Different interpretations. Nuances. Variations on a theme.”
Sheridan’s eyebrows raised in approval. “Precisely. Variations. The same man—in body and in childhood memory—but in seven different adult incarnations. With seven different areas of expertise, brought together for a common purpose. Follow?”
And there it was.
“You’re talking about building an army,” Thomas said.
TWENTY-NINE
Ta-daa,” John Alpha said. The words echoed in the silence of the smashed Folie à Deux nightclub.
The killer wore a black business suit, Italian. Collarless white shirt. Alpha was pale, almost sickly, his blond brown hair slicked back. He grinned past a trimmed goatee and stretched his arms outward from his side, palms facing out.
John gazed down at the villain from the club’s balcony. For a moment, the man looked like a car salesman. Or a mortician.
“I honestly didn’t expect to see you here,” Michael the marine finally said. His voice was low and calm. “I thought you’d be the hide-in-the-bunker type. The puppetmaster who doesn’t get dirt under his fingernails.”
John Alpha glanced down at his manicured nails, then folded his hands together. His eyebrows raised as he smiled. “Who says I’m not? But I couldn’t let my little NEPTH-charged killers have all the fun.”
“Fuck you,” one of the 7th Son soldiers said. Fleming. John Alpha looked up at the ceiling, bored, as if he hadn’t heard. John followed the man’s gaze. He was looking through the hole in the ceiling, probably at the invisible sniper still posted up there.
“My shooters,” Alpha said, turning back to the group on the dance floor. “I’m actually quite proud of them. They were all a mess when I found them days ago. Homeless and hungry, each one.”
One of the Vaporwear guards behind John grunted his assent. The air was thick with that rancid, boozy smell again. John held his breath.
“But with a deep-fried personality change, even human garbage can become government-trained killers,” Alpha continued. “You know a little something about that, don’t you, Michael?”
“Who are they?” the marine asked. “Who’d you put inside their heads?”
Alpha laughed. That laugh sounds like mine, John thought.
“The direct approach is dollar-store material, marine,” Alpha said. “It’s tired, trite, and cheap—and it certainly hasn’t gotten you very far today. Find the answer for yourself, if you live through this night.” Alpha paused, and grinned. “That’s called foreshadowing, by the way.”
“We get it,” Michael replied. “So I guess it comes back to one thing. We’re here.”
“Yes.” John Alpha looked up toward the balcony, where John and a bleeding, wheezing Dr. Mike stood. His eyes met John’s, and his face blossomed into a look of delight. John shuddered; it felt as if someone had poured ice water down his spine.
“Hello, walkabouter,” Alpha called. “Untrained, untested—and yet you still charge into a battle zone such as this. Can I make a confession? Can I admit that I’m unsurprised by the surprise visit? That it’s yet another fine piece of free will you—”
Suddenly, Alpha took a quick step backward. “Kill him!” he cried.
A single shot rang out from above, from the sniper in the skylight. John instinctively closed his eyes. He did not see Fleming’s chest explode and spatter across the wooden dance floor. He did not see Fleming’s body fall to the floor. He did, however, hear the knife Fleming had been holding clatter to the ground. John opened his eyes and watched the man’s blood spread from his body, oozing across the floor, slipping past the fallen blade. Fleming had apparently intended to throw it at Alpha.
“Now where were we?” John Alpha said pleasantly. “Yes, the guitarist. It’s only appropriate that you’re here for the sacrifice. The highly exaggerated deaths of my parents hit you hardest, didn’t they, John? Aimless wanderer you are, playing hopscotch all throughout your life, anchorless, wasting the gift the man-gods at 7th Son gave you.”
Alpha smiled. It was a cruel expression.
“Oh, the life—the lives—you could have lived, Beta. And yet you idly strum and smoke away your existence, so confidently living in your leashless world, inventing the rules as you go, so damned driven to be something you know not what. You disgust me. You have no shackles like the others, and yet you’re damned by your own mediocrity. You’re not a triumph of free will. You’re imprisoned by it. What a waste.”
John felt a tittering doubt tickle at the base of his brain, a voice that insisted Alpha was right, so very right. Had he dedicted his life to being dedicated to nothing? It felt true, horrifyingly true.
But does it matter? he thought frantically. He’s trying to break you before you can ever raise a fist to fight. Trying to . . .
“Shut up,” John said, looking down at Alpha. “I’m not the damned one. I’m not a killer.”
“Nor am I. I’ve killed no one. Not even Dania Sheridan, my—our—mother.” Alpha nodded and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, toward the open double doors. “She’s back there. In the cellar storeroom. The floors and walls must have shielded her thermal readings from your cute RadioShack toys. Well, that and the very special insulation I had installed. John, I haven’t murdered a soul.”
From beside John, Dr. Mike made a half-harrumph, half-groan. “No, you’ve just been the Bond villain calling the shots from the shadows,” the profiler muttered. John turned to look at the man. The color was draining from Dr. Mike’s face. The blood from his wound covered the entire sleeve of his jacket. Now one of the Vaporwear shades behind them was telling Dr. Mike to shut his yap . . . and John winced as Mike’s head recoiled once again from a pistol-whipping. Dr. Mike swayed, then steadied himself.
And that’s when John spotted the hand grenade hanging from Dr. Mike’s chest holster/harness. His mind flitted to what Michael had said just minutes before—a leap of faith. John turned his eyes from his brother to the shimmering statue before them. He began to plan. He even whispered a prayer.
John Alpha laughed. “A Bond villain. That’s nice,” he called to Dr. Mike. “A compliment . . . if I thought what I was doing was evil. You see evil every day in your job, Mike. But I’m trying to save this world. Consider this: Only at the darkest hour does humanity pull itself together to become truly great. Only in times of calamity and chaos do signs of true unity and genius shine across the globe. Wars bring out the worst in mankind—but they also bring out its best.”
John looked over at Dr. Mike, to the grenade strapped to his chest. I can do this, he thought. It won’t take much. A distraction, just a second. He glanced behind Mike, trying to see the shade holding his brother at gunpoint. It was nearly impossible to make out exactly where the shade was. Whatever this Vaporwear was made of, it was doing a bang-up job—even at this close range. John squinted.
“Keep those eyes dead ahead,” the shade hissed. John did as told. One fact played in his favor: he knew exactly where the second shade behind him was standing; the sour-sweet rank of booze was a dead giveaway. And John had a feeling he knew how the shade standing behind Dr. Mike did business.
Meanwhile, Alpha was saying, “Take World War Two. Axis powers decimate country after country, commit wholesale slaughter . . . and the Allies band together. Build the bomb. Win the war. Redirect the course of humanity.”
Come on, come on, John thought. Wrap it up. Make a fuckin’ quip. Just give me a second. Just one measly second.
“But we are complacent,” Alpha droned, “lethargic, morbidly obese from our creature comforts. Humanity shines brightest when there is a problem to solve, but we no longer have problems. America’s enemies are illiterates who live in caves and dream of suitcase bombs. There is no innovation of the human spirit. There are only sleepwalkers. I will wake them up, Mike. I suppose this would be my Bond-villain manifesto—the obligatory monologue the evil genius makes before the tide turns in favor of the heroes. What, pray tell, do you think of it?”
This is it. God, if you’re up there, help us, help me . . .
Dr. Mike chuckled. “I think you’re more Beale than Blofeld. You’re mad. As hell.”
The shade behind Dr. Mike snarled and again cracked his pistol across the back of Mike’s helmet . . . just as John had hoped. Dr. Mike wasn’t stoic this time—he couldn’t be, not anymore—and staggered forward, toward the balcony railing. He cried out in pain.
You can’t come back from this. Not ever. No takebacks.
John stepped over and steadied his brother. The shade behind him began to bark a protest, but John didn’t let him finish. As he held Dr. Mike for leverage, John swung his leg backward in an improbable, ungainly arc—a downright ugly maneuver, graceless. But it worked. John’s boot crashed into the shade’s stomach. The shade belched a ridiculous sound—poooh!—and staggered backward.
In one smooth motion, John snatched the grenade from Dr. Mike’s vest, pulled the pin, and threw it behind them. The grenade smashed through one of the glass walls of the VIP section, leaving a hole the size of a baseball. Somewhere far away, the first shade was beginning to shout.
“The hell?” Dr. Mike whispered.
John nodded quickly to the silver statue standing beyond the balcony.
“We’re superheroes. Time to fly.” He then pushed them both toward the waist-high railing. It wasn’t much of a running start, but it was all they had. Just like track and field back in high school, John thought. Just like the hurdles.
They leaped over the railing, into the void, toward the shimmering statue. Behind them, all hell broke loose.
John and Mike soared through the air and slammed into the open arms of the Folie à Deux sculpture. Both men recoiled from the impact—the statue gonged its disapproval—and tumbled down the warped helix of its silver base. As they landed, the grenade upstairs unleashed its war.
The explosion was brief, but merciless. The glass walls of the VIP section exploded outward, flinging fire and millions of glass shards onto the balcony. For an instant, the air was filled with lost, glittering amber crystals . . . then they found their homes, slicing into the walls, the balcony furniture, and the Vaporwear shades. The blast shoved both shades forward, slamming them into—then over—the railing. They crashed onto the dance floor and flopped to rest like rag dolls.
Then both shades suddenly became men again, the technology inside their protective camouflage suits shredded by the shrapnel. Their bodies were covered in thousands of glass shards.
The diversion was more than enough for Michael and his soldiers. They dashed over to the pile of guns on the dance floor. The lone shade posted at the skylight began shooting at them. The wooden dance floor exploded upward from the gunfire. Lockwood’s right calf disintegrated from a sure shot. Michael grabbed an XM8 and fired at the ceiling. Plaster snowflakes fell from above.
John Alpha scrambled back to the end of the club from where he’d emerged just minutes ago. The doors slammed shut behind him.
The sniper on the roof was going crazy now; his shooting was sloppy, unfocused. Several rounds ripped past John and Dr. Mike, who had taken cover behind the statue.
Michael sprayed more rounds toward the skylight. There was a shriek from up there . . . then silence.
Sheridan’s teethed glittered. “I’m being rude, I know. What you’ve learned in the past two days, I’ve lived with for the past thirty-four years. Pardon my insensitivity. So which one are you? Are you the oldest of them—the first to receive the mind of John Smith? Or perhaps a frustrated middle child? Don’t tell me who you are. Tell me what you are. I’ll tell you your number.”
“What you heard from me out there in the hall. That’s . . . that’s me.”
“That’s who you are. You love, you dream, you put on your pants one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Eloquent, in an endearingly naïve way. But that doesn’t tell me what you are. To wit: you don’t look like a soldier. Or a U.N. analyst.”
“I get it,” Thomas said, crossing his arms. “I’m the priest. Enough for you?”
“Quite.” Sheridan smirked. “Johnny Five. You’re alive.”
Thomas blinked, not understanding.
“I’m a little surprised it would be you to come here,” Sheridan said. “Fascinating. This is behavior beyond what you’d typically do. You’re a rule-follower, party-line LTP.” He sucked a lungful from his cigarette, then exhaled. “I thought you might be the wild child. Lucky Seven, the youngest, the black sheep. Kleinman likes him best, you know. He admires the kid’s spirit.”
“Black sheep.”
“Of all the clones, he was the only one who completely rejected the LTP we’d assigned him. A painstakingly devised and plotted LTP, I might add. He was called the ‘failed experiment.’ But not by Kleinman. He told us Seven was the triumph of human cloning and MemR/I integration. Independence. Free will, if there is such a thing.
“But you, priest. You followed the LTP to the letter. It’s just as well. I’m sure you’re doing good things for all those true believers in the heartland.”
“Stop. Please,” Thomas said. “I’m not with you. What is ‘LTP’?”
“Life Template Plan.” Sheridan took another drag of his cigarette. He blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Your road map. Surely you’ve seen the significance of when you were awakened from your fictitious coma, all those years ago.” Thomas stared blankly at him, and Sheridan tried again. “I’m referring to your age. Sixteen. The cusp of adulthood. The time when a youngster casts an eye to the future and to career—but also a time when he is still very, ah, impressionable. Malleable. The scientists here at 7th Son built a Life Template Plan for each of you Beta clones: careers in the military, psychology, biology—”
Oh. My God.
Thomas interrupted, finishing the thought. “And our respective Uncle Karls and Aunt Jaclyns pushed us in those predestined directions. And such a well-rounded childhood would have prepared us for almost any career. I get it now. I truly get it.”
It felt as if Thomas’s stomach were sinking in on itself, deflating his entire body. His mind quickly flashed to fragments of his junior year in high school, after the accident. Still a new school, still a stranger in a new city. Those first few years, he had clung to whatever advice his new foster parents had given him. And why wouldn’t he? In a way, he’d known them his whole life—all the postcards they’d sent from those faraway places. Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn were trustworthy. They were family.
They were anything but. You learned that yesterday, Thomas. But now you realize just how badly you and the rest of the clones were hoodwinked. They preached the faith, didn’t they? Karl and Jaclyn practically pushed your nose into that Catechism. Just what does that mean?
“You took advantage of us,” Thomas said, his voice rising, newfound anger coursing through him. “You woke us up in new cities with new parents and terrible news. And you had already plotted out our little lives for us. What a bunch of self-righteous pricks!”
“Tut, tut, Five. We had constructed the LTPs years before you were cloned and they were for career only. We based the Life Template Plans on future-centric social studies. What ‘future’ careers, technologies, and political climates would be like.” Sheridan grinned. “Those projections were very accurate, I might add, considering that the future is now.”
Father Thomas resisted an urge to reach over and smack the man’s face. It would solve nothing. He fumbled for the rosary in his pocket.
“So I was destined to become a priest, in the great and powerful plans of 7th Son.”
“Indeed. You didn’t go rogue, like Seven. He charted a course into the unknown, damning any guidance thrown his way. You could have been anything you wanted to be, of course. We all have that drive. But you followed the plan. In contrast, Seven had the capacity to become a nuclear physicist. It would have rounded out the team quiet nicely, don’t you think?”
“Team. Kleinman didn’t say anything about a team.” Thomas leaned forward; the rosary beads click-clacked, reassuring him.
“I don’t doubt that, either.”
“He said we were part of a grand nature-versus-nurture experiment. He said 7th Son was designed to observe what forms our seven separate lives would take, seeing how we came from the same ‘past.’ ”
Sheridan threw his head back and laughed. It was a wicked, rattling sound. “Sounds like soggy marketing copy, doesn’t it? Heh. Proof that absolute power corrupts absolutely. He’s rewriting history. Changing the past just for you, Five.”
“Stop calling me that. My name’s Thomas.”
Sheridan laughed again. “Of course it isn’t. You’re Five. Just as the marine is One and the geneticist is Four. Do you think something as insignificant as an identity actually matters in this place? A place where a lifetime of memories can be stored as ones and zeros . . . a place where we can grow a human clone to adulthood in two years? A place where we bent the will of you and five of your brethren to embrace the livelihoods we chose for them? Do you think something as dignified as a name has any place here? You’re even more naïve than I thought.”
Thomas shook his head. He’s not making any sense. “What does that mean?”
“It means, my dear Thomas, that 7th Son was—and still is—something much more than a glorified master’s thesis about nature and nurture. It’s about teams. About creating . . . no, constructing teams. We’re going to play a little game: I start the joke, you give me the punch line. It goes like this. Clone seven different children, give them the same memories, separate them, train them in different fields of study, and then bring them back together. After an adjustment period, what do you have?”
Thomas’s head was swimming. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come now. Think. You’re a preacher. Think about allll of those Christian sects out there, across the world. Each of them uses the Bible as the foundation of their faith. Don’t they?”
Thomas sat in silence for a few seconds. “Yes and no.”
“Explain.”
“There’s different translations of the Bible. Different interpretations. Nuances. Variations on a theme.”
Sheridan’s eyebrows raised in approval. “Precisely. Variations. The same man—in body and in childhood memory—but in seven different adult incarnations. With seven different areas of expertise, brought together for a common purpose. Follow?”
And there it was.
“You’re talking about building an army,” Thomas said.
TWENTY-NINE
Ta-daa,” John Alpha said. The words echoed in the silence of the smashed Folie à Deux nightclub.
The killer wore a black business suit, Italian. Collarless white shirt. Alpha was pale, almost sickly, his blond brown hair slicked back. He grinned past a trimmed goatee and stretched his arms outward from his side, palms facing out.
John gazed down at the villain from the club’s balcony. For a moment, the man looked like a car salesman. Or a mortician.
“I honestly didn’t expect to see you here,” Michael the marine finally said. His voice was low and calm. “I thought you’d be the hide-in-the-bunker type. The puppetmaster who doesn’t get dirt under his fingernails.”
John Alpha glanced down at his manicured nails, then folded his hands together. His eyebrows raised as he smiled. “Who says I’m not? But I couldn’t let my little NEPTH-charged killers have all the fun.”
“Fuck you,” one of the 7th Son soldiers said. Fleming. John Alpha looked up at the ceiling, bored, as if he hadn’t heard. John followed the man’s gaze. He was looking through the hole in the ceiling, probably at the invisible sniper still posted up there.
“My shooters,” Alpha said, turning back to the group on the dance floor. “I’m actually quite proud of them. They were all a mess when I found them days ago. Homeless and hungry, each one.”
One of the Vaporwear guards behind John grunted his assent. The air was thick with that rancid, boozy smell again. John held his breath.
“But with a deep-fried personality change, even human garbage can become government-trained killers,” Alpha continued. “You know a little something about that, don’t you, Michael?”
“Who are they?” the marine asked. “Who’d you put inside their heads?”
Alpha laughed. That laugh sounds like mine, John thought.
“The direct approach is dollar-store material, marine,” Alpha said. “It’s tired, trite, and cheap—and it certainly hasn’t gotten you very far today. Find the answer for yourself, if you live through this night.” Alpha paused, and grinned. “That’s called foreshadowing, by the way.”
“We get it,” Michael replied. “So I guess it comes back to one thing. We’re here.”
“Yes.” John Alpha looked up toward the balcony, where John and a bleeding, wheezing Dr. Mike stood. His eyes met John’s, and his face blossomed into a look of delight. John shuddered; it felt as if someone had poured ice water down his spine.
“Hello, walkabouter,” Alpha called. “Untrained, untested—and yet you still charge into a battle zone such as this. Can I make a confession? Can I admit that I’m unsurprised by the surprise visit? That it’s yet another fine piece of free will you—”
Suddenly, Alpha took a quick step backward. “Kill him!” he cried.
A single shot rang out from above, from the sniper in the skylight. John instinctively closed his eyes. He did not see Fleming’s chest explode and spatter across the wooden dance floor. He did not see Fleming’s body fall to the floor. He did, however, hear the knife Fleming had been holding clatter to the ground. John opened his eyes and watched the man’s blood spread from his body, oozing across the floor, slipping past the fallen blade. Fleming had apparently intended to throw it at Alpha.
“Now where were we?” John Alpha said pleasantly. “Yes, the guitarist. It’s only appropriate that you’re here for the sacrifice. The highly exaggerated deaths of my parents hit you hardest, didn’t they, John? Aimless wanderer you are, playing hopscotch all throughout your life, anchorless, wasting the gift the man-gods at 7th Son gave you.”
Alpha smiled. It was a cruel expression.
“Oh, the life—the lives—you could have lived, Beta. And yet you idly strum and smoke away your existence, so confidently living in your leashless world, inventing the rules as you go, so damned driven to be something you know not what. You disgust me. You have no shackles like the others, and yet you’re damned by your own mediocrity. You’re not a triumph of free will. You’re imprisoned by it. What a waste.”
John felt a tittering doubt tickle at the base of his brain, a voice that insisted Alpha was right, so very right. Had he dedicted his life to being dedicated to nothing? It felt true, horrifyingly true.
But does it matter? he thought frantically. He’s trying to break you before you can ever raise a fist to fight. Trying to . . .
“Shut up,” John said, looking down at Alpha. “I’m not the damned one. I’m not a killer.”
“Nor am I. I’ve killed no one. Not even Dania Sheridan, my—our—mother.” Alpha nodded and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, toward the open double doors. “She’s back there. In the cellar storeroom. The floors and walls must have shielded her thermal readings from your cute RadioShack toys. Well, that and the very special insulation I had installed. John, I haven’t murdered a soul.”
From beside John, Dr. Mike made a half-harrumph, half-groan. “No, you’ve just been the Bond villain calling the shots from the shadows,” the profiler muttered. John turned to look at the man. The color was draining from Dr. Mike’s face. The blood from his wound covered the entire sleeve of his jacket. Now one of the Vaporwear shades behind them was telling Dr. Mike to shut his yap . . . and John winced as Mike’s head recoiled once again from a pistol-whipping. Dr. Mike swayed, then steadied himself.
And that’s when John spotted the hand grenade hanging from Dr. Mike’s chest holster/harness. His mind flitted to what Michael had said just minutes before—a leap of faith. John turned his eyes from his brother to the shimmering statue before them. He began to plan. He even whispered a prayer.
John Alpha laughed. “A Bond villain. That’s nice,” he called to Dr. Mike. “A compliment . . . if I thought what I was doing was evil. You see evil every day in your job, Mike. But I’m trying to save this world. Consider this: Only at the darkest hour does humanity pull itself together to become truly great. Only in times of calamity and chaos do signs of true unity and genius shine across the globe. Wars bring out the worst in mankind—but they also bring out its best.”
John looked over at Dr. Mike, to the grenade strapped to his chest. I can do this, he thought. It won’t take much. A distraction, just a second. He glanced behind Mike, trying to see the shade holding his brother at gunpoint. It was nearly impossible to make out exactly where the shade was. Whatever this Vaporwear was made of, it was doing a bang-up job—even at this close range. John squinted.
“Keep those eyes dead ahead,” the shade hissed. John did as told. One fact played in his favor: he knew exactly where the second shade behind him was standing; the sour-sweet rank of booze was a dead giveaway. And John had a feeling he knew how the shade standing behind Dr. Mike did business.
Meanwhile, Alpha was saying, “Take World War Two. Axis powers decimate country after country, commit wholesale slaughter . . . and the Allies band together. Build the bomb. Win the war. Redirect the course of humanity.”
Come on, come on, John thought. Wrap it up. Make a fuckin’ quip. Just give me a second. Just one measly second.
“But we are complacent,” Alpha droned, “lethargic, morbidly obese from our creature comforts. Humanity shines brightest when there is a problem to solve, but we no longer have problems. America’s enemies are illiterates who live in caves and dream of suitcase bombs. There is no innovation of the human spirit. There are only sleepwalkers. I will wake them up, Mike. I suppose this would be my Bond-villain manifesto—the obligatory monologue the evil genius makes before the tide turns in favor of the heroes. What, pray tell, do you think of it?”
This is it. God, if you’re up there, help us, help me . . .
Dr. Mike chuckled. “I think you’re more Beale than Blofeld. You’re mad. As hell.”
The shade behind Dr. Mike snarled and again cracked his pistol across the back of Mike’s helmet . . . just as John had hoped. Dr. Mike wasn’t stoic this time—he couldn’t be, not anymore—and staggered forward, toward the balcony railing. He cried out in pain.
You can’t come back from this. Not ever. No takebacks.
John stepped over and steadied his brother. The shade behind him began to bark a protest, but John didn’t let him finish. As he held Dr. Mike for leverage, John swung his leg backward in an improbable, ungainly arc—a downright ugly maneuver, graceless. But it worked. John’s boot crashed into the shade’s stomach. The shade belched a ridiculous sound—poooh!—and staggered backward.
In one smooth motion, John snatched the grenade from Dr. Mike’s vest, pulled the pin, and threw it behind them. The grenade smashed through one of the glass walls of the VIP section, leaving a hole the size of a baseball. Somewhere far away, the first shade was beginning to shout.
“The hell?” Dr. Mike whispered.
John nodded quickly to the silver statue standing beyond the balcony.
“We’re superheroes. Time to fly.” He then pushed them both toward the waist-high railing. It wasn’t much of a running start, but it was all they had. Just like track and field back in high school, John thought. Just like the hurdles.
They leaped over the railing, into the void, toward the shimmering statue. Behind them, all hell broke loose.
John and Mike soared through the air and slammed into the open arms of the Folie à Deux sculpture. Both men recoiled from the impact—the statue gonged its disapproval—and tumbled down the warped helix of its silver base. As they landed, the grenade upstairs unleashed its war.
The explosion was brief, but merciless. The glass walls of the VIP section exploded outward, flinging fire and millions of glass shards onto the balcony. For an instant, the air was filled with lost, glittering amber crystals . . . then they found their homes, slicing into the walls, the balcony furniture, and the Vaporwear shades. The blast shoved both shades forward, slamming them into—then over—the railing. They crashed onto the dance floor and flopped to rest like rag dolls.
Then both shades suddenly became men again, the technology inside their protective camouflage suits shredded by the shrapnel. Their bodies were covered in thousands of glass shards.
The diversion was more than enough for Michael and his soldiers. They dashed over to the pile of guns on the dance floor. The lone shade posted at the skylight began shooting at them. The wooden dance floor exploded upward from the gunfire. Lockwood’s right calf disintegrated from a sure shot. Michael grabbed an XM8 and fired at the ceiling. Plaster snowflakes fell from above.
John Alpha scrambled back to the end of the club from where he’d emerged just minutes ago. The doors slammed shut behind him.
The sniper on the roof was going crazy now; his shooting was sloppy, unfocused. Several rounds ripped past John and Dr. Mike, who had taken cover behind the statue.
Michael sprayed more rounds toward the skylight. There was a shriek from up there . . . then silence.
