Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

Better keep my head on a swivel, Henry thought uneasily.

Henry didn’t pick him up again until he reached a parking lot almost ten minutes later. As he walked briskly along a row of cars, some impulse made him stop at a bright yellow VW bug and use its side mirror to check behind him. He caught a glint of metal and ducked a heartbeat before the mirror exploded into fragments of glass, plastic, and rubber.

Dropping to the ground, he crawled around the VW to the Jeep on the other side, dragging the burn bag with him. He waited a few moments and then used the barrel of the Glock to angle the Jeep’s side mirror so he could see the rooftops behind him.

Nothing; his stalker had disappeared again. Being gone was a great idea; Henry decided to try it himself. He crawled under the Jeep to the other side and raised himself carefully, first to his knees and then to a half-crouch. The nearest street was about thirty yards away on his right. Henry hesitated, then made a break for it, forcing himself to stay low until he reached the street, where he straightened up and pushed himself into a sprint. Something whizzed past his head, close enough that he would have sworn he felt the breeze of it cutting through the air before it punched a hole in a brick wall on his right.

Henry veered into a narrow alley, sprinting faster than he had in a long time. The shooter was stalking him openly now, no longer caring that Henry could see him leaping from one rooftop to another. Like he wanted to show he could go just as fast as Henry on the ground, but without as much effort.

Time to turn and fight—gun time, not run time, Henry thought, hoping Danny and Baron were well out of harm’s way. He ducked behind a telephone pole, worked the sniper rifle out of the bag and got it assembled.

Okay, Mr. I-go-so-fast-on-rooftops, let’s see who you are , Henry said silently. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and looked through the scope.

Gone.

Fuck . Henry fumed as he scanned roofs through the scope. It took a few seconds before he finally saw a skewed line and a glint of metal and glass that didn’t belong to the structure.

He adjusted his grip on the rifle. Come on, buddy, he said silently, poke your head up so I can introduce myself properly. I’m Henry Brogan. And you are…?

The guy’s head rose slowly from behind the line of the roof and Henry froze.

The face he saw peering back at him through the scope was impossibly, unbelievably, and unmistakably his own.

Henry had heard guys talk about this kind of shit, weird nightmares where they were tracking down a target, and when they looked through the scope, they saw their own faces looking back at them. It wasn’t that unusual among snipers. According to common wisdom, if you had it more than twice a week, it meant you’d been on the job for too long and it was your subconscious telling you to quit. Some guys dreamed it the other way round, like what was happening to Henry now—they were being hunted by someone who turned out to be their doppelgänger. That one seemed to occur less often but it still wasn’t unusual.

Henry had never had either dream. He only had one nightmare and it was all about drowning. It came and went in frequency and the details varied—his subconscious would swap out his father for Verris and vice versa and often he was simultaneously five and twenty-five as he drowned. He couldn’t remember ever having the evil-twin dream. Therefore, as absurd as this was, he couldn’t be dreaming. The man with his face was real—quite a bit younger, he saw now. But it was his face.

Except it couldn’t be real.

Except it was.

Caught between real and unreal, Henry lowered his rifle.

The man on the roof responded to that with a burst of machine-gun fire.

Okay, that was definitely real, Henry thought, squeezing himself into the space behind the telephone pole while real splinters flew and real chunks of concrete burst from the real wall behind him. Apparently the guy was no longer worried about attracting attention. If he ever had been.

He fired another burst of real gunfire. Henry leaned out from behind the pole to answer with a burst of his own, just to make him duck, then scooped up his burn bag and ran like hell, although his legs were so shaky he stumbled and dipped from side to side like the ground under him was a rolling ocean. But those real bullets nipping at his heels straightened him out pretty quickly; again he pushed himself into a hard sprint, making for an abandoned building at the end of the alley.

Now he would see if all abandoned buildings really were alike, Henry thought, feeling surreal. Maybe the ones in Cartagena’s Old Town were classier, dripping with history. The sign on the boarded-up entrance said something about how trespassers would be prosecuted. Next to it was a legal-looking notice he might have worried about if he hadn’t been under fire. Henry raised his rifle and, still sprinting, shot out the boards, obliterating both signs. Tiny fragments of the road pelted him from behind as he made it to shelter.

This wouldn’t fool the shooter, of course; the guy knew where he was. But at least he wasn’t such an easy target. Or so he hoped, he thought as he scanned the place quickly. It had been an apartment building, its three floors built around an open-air courtyard. Definitely nicer than the usual abandoned building—for all the good that would do him, Henry thought, going up the nearest staircase two steps at a time.

He found himself on a walkway with a broken railing on one side and several doors on the other—tenants could come out and see who was in the lobby. Through the street-facing window at the far end, Henry saw the shooter leaping from balcony to balcony of the neighboring apartment building as he parkoured his way down to street level.

The guy’s head suddenly snapped up and around as if he’d actually felt Henry’s gaze. He raised the rifle and fired even as he was rebounding from the railing of one balcony to the next one lower down.

Staying low, Henry moved toward the window, and returned fire, his bullets kicking up tiny puffs of powder at each spot where the shooter had been only half a second before. He got to the window just in time to see the guy hit the ground and run into the building.

Okay, how about a little game of Hide’n’Kill? Henry thought at him, crouching close to the wall. There was another set of stairs leading down to the lobby at this end, this one with a landing to break up the climb. Henry heard broken glass crunching under the shooter’s feet as he approached it.

Henry leaned forward to peer between the broken staves of the railing. An object slightly smaller than his fist suddenly flew up and over in a curved trajectory that would end in his face. He batted it away reflexively while throwing himself backwards and covering his head with both arms. The grenade exploded in midair, making the walkway shake and taking a bite out of the railing. It also deafened Henry but he knew it had done the same to the shooter. He raised his head, brushed off the splinters and other debris, and crept forward to peer over the edge of the walkway.

The shooter was looking up at him from the lobby with a surprised expression on his face. On Henry’s face.

Yeah, you’re the junior hitman here and it ain’t gonna be that easy. Henry felt a grim satisfaction although he could barely hear himself think over the ringing in his ears. The blast had been closer to the lobby so the kid probably wouldn’t be doing any better. He hoped.

Doing his best to shake off the grenade’s effects, Henry slung the sniper rifle over his left shoulder and grabbed the Glock from his bag. As he made sure the gun was loaded, he heard the sound of sliding metal, albeit faintly; his hearing was coming back. Well, his mother had always said strong eardrums ran in the family. Thanks for the great genes, Ma. Now I’d just like to know how this bastard got my face—