Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

Abruptly, his gaze came to rest on a large mirror hanging over the staircase landing. It had been placed very high up on the wall and although it was fly-specked and filthy, it was still intact. Henry was mystified as to how it was there at all—something like that should have been carried off long ago.

Although now that he was really looking at it, he could see how high up it was—probably well out of reach for the casual scavenger, who preferred low-hanging fruit. Plus it was really big— as in heavy. Breaking a mirror like that might get you fourteen or even twenty-one years of bad luck.

He realized it had been placed there so people going up and down the stairs could see anyone coming the other way. Because passing someone on the stairs was also bad luck, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember. Although he had a few little rituals—tapping his rifle stock before a hit, burning the target’s photo afterwards—he wasn’t superstitious so he’d never paid much attention to what was supposed to be good luck or bad luck. In Henry’s experience, chance favored the prepared mind, especially in a situation like this. The way Junior was coming at him had nothing to do with luck. A guy who could travel by rooftops to stalk a target on the ground had to know the area better than the back of his hand, had to have burned it so deeply into his brain that he could do it with his eyes closed.

But even that wouldn’t explain how he always seemed to know what Henry was going to do at the same moment he himself did, so well he could fire at him while he parkoured down the side of a building.

Or why he had Henry’s face, which had to be completely impossible.

Maybe it was some kind of mind game, psychological warfare, one-on-one. But how—plastic surgery? A high-tech Halloween mask?

Henry shoved the questions aside; he could deal with impossible shit later. Right now, he had to press his advantage if he wanted to survive. Think, he ordered himself; there were more windows on the ground floor, which meant more light, making it easier for him to see what Junior Hitman was doing than vice versa.

Suddenly the already broken staves in the railing exploded into splinters as the guy opened fire on him. Henry fired back, belly-crawling to the stairs where he shifted quickly to feet first before moving down a couple of steps. Junior Hitman paced him; the reflection in the mirror confirmed to Henry again that what he had seen in the scope hadn’t been a trick of the light. It was his own face, circa his early twenties. Henry remembered what that time had been like. He’d been all grown up but still a year or two away from being permanently set, like paint that hadn’t quite dried or clay not yet fired—barely not a kid, convinced he knew the good guys from the bad guys and the right things from the wrong ones, and utterly certain that when push came to shove, he could grab the world by the tail and swing it around over his head.

“Stop right there,” Henry said sharply. “Who are you?”

Junior Hitman looked up at the mirror and didn’t answer. Henry knew he could make out only a vague, man-shaped shadow among darker shadows. Despite having a better view of the kid, however, he didn’t have a clear shot—not a non-lethal one, anyway. He didn’t want to kill him before he got some answers.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Henry called down to him.

“Fine,” said the kid. “Then don’t shoot me.”

All the tiny hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood up. Over the years, he had heard his own voice often enough on wiretaps and bugs to recognize it. What the fuck— the kid had his face and his voice?

“Mind if I shoot you ?” the kid asked, making Henry’s voice sound offhand, like this was no big deal.

“Hey, I could have killed you on the roof,” Henry said.

“Maybe you should have,” said the kid.

Henry felt a surge of anger and exasperation. “Did they show you a picture of me?” he demanded.

“Yeah.” Junior Hitman took another step up the stairs. “You’re old. ”

You’re gonna pay for that one, whether I shoot you or not, Henry promised him silently. “Kid, you take one step closer and you’re going to leave me no choice.”

The kid’s reflection kept coming. Henry took a grenade from the burn bag and made a quick and dirty calculation by eye before pulling the pin and hurling it at the wall, intending to make the kid give ground in a hurry. The grenade bounced off a spot six inches away from the mirror and flew toward Junior Hitman. Eight ball in the side pocket—either he ran or it was game over.

What happened next went too fast even for Henry’s eye to follow but he knew the move; he had done it himself once, in pure desperation:

Junior Hitman took aim at the grenade and fired, batting it back at the mirror. Before Henry could get both arms up to shield his head, it exploded in a burst of shrapnel, plaster, wood, and glass.

The shockwave slammed into him, flattened his lungs and midsection, punched his heart, drove his eyes against the back of their sockets, and made his brain ricochet around his skull. A split second later he registered the sting of countless fragments of mirror hitting his face and hands and larger debris pelting him like stones while clouds of dust billowed around him.

Henry turned his face away, pulled a fistful of his t-shirt up over his nose and mouth, and tried to take a breath, just to see if he could. For a long moment, his mashed-flat lungs refused to inflate. Then mercifully his chest expanded. He knew his heart was still beating—he could feel his pulse in his eyes.

As he raised his head, there was a sudden sharp pain in his cheek; something wet ran down his face. He felt around carefully with his fingertips, then removed a long shard of glass from a spot barely an inch below his eye. He reached for the burn bag and found it had disappeared along with a lot of the railing and part of the staircase. He was going to have to make do with the rifle, the Glock, and the two magazines of ammo he’d stuffed in his pockets. Once again, chance favored the prepared mind. He was just sorry he hadn’t stashed ammo for the rifle as well as the Glock, so maybe this really was only pure dumb luck. If so, it might be the last lucky break he’d get for a long time since he and Junior Hitman had broken that goddam mirror.

Then he reminded himself he wasn’t superstitious; the kid had to handle all the bad luck by himself. So maybe that was his last lucky break.

All he knew for certain right now was pain. Everything hurt, like he’d been tuned up for days by a team of experts. He could barely keep from crying out as he forced himself to get up and run down the closed hall just off the walkway. You can go faster, he told himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the staircase at the end of the hall. The stairs went up; he could do that. He could make himself climb the stairs because if he didn’t move his ass, good ol’ Junior Hitman was going to put him out of his misery.

The stairs led up to another dark hallway with a closed door at the end. Lines of light showed all around it; Henry ran with everything he had and hurled himself at it. The door broke into pieces when he hit and he stumbled forward onto yet another staircase, shorter than the others and made of iron. He didn’t so much climb as he fell up the steps, then tumbled through an open doorway that spat him out onto the roof.

Sound was still so muffled that he wasn’t sure whether he was hearing birds or traffic or the high-pitched tone that meant part of his hearing was dying off for good. He staggered across the roof to peer over the waist-high barrier that ran along all four sides. A graffito informed him that someone named Monte had been there.