Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

His anticipated triumph cut off; underneath the four thousand rpm music of the M134, he heard the sound of police sirens. Glennville’s small-town police force was riding to the rescue. They took their police vehicles home with them; it was the sort of thing they did in small towns. After Glennville’s station house closed at nine, emergency calls were forwarded to Chief Mitchell’s home phone. It must have been ringing off the hook with panicky citizens reporting that World War III had broken out on Main Street.

Verris had intended to call the chief as soon as Henry Brogan’s plane had landed but Junior’s belated adolescent crisis had distracted him. It was crucial to keep Mitchell and the rest of his Barney Fifes from cluttering up his battlefield. If any of them got hurt, the county authorities would open an investigation and who knew where that would end. At the very least, it would be inconvenient.

Verris tapped a button on the comm set he was wearing. “Chief Mitchell? Clay Verris. I need your units to stand down. We’re engaging with a terror cell that has a weaponized biological capability.”

“ Shit ,” Mitchell said, in direct violation of FCC regulations governing acceptable language on police frequencies. Not that Verris was going to file a complaint.

“Federal authorities have been notified and are en route,” he told the chief.

“Affirmative. Keep me posted, Clay,” the chief said.

“Yes, sir,” Verris said in his best just-doing-my-job voice. “Will report back to you shortly. Thank you.”

He clicked off before Mitchell could enlarge on how grateful he was that Gemini was on the scene to save Glennville from evil terrorists, or to tell him to call if he and his men could help in any way, although the latter was highly unlikely. If you wanted to keep civilians out of your face, all you had to do was say weaponized biological capability and they vanished as if by magic. They wouldn’t even ask if they could observe. Nobody in their right mind wanted to be within sight of people infected with Ebola—what if they sneezed while you were downwind? Mitchell was probably hiding under his bed with a ten-gallon bottle of hand sanitizer and a twenty-gallon barrel of Savannah Bourbon.

Now, where the hell was Junior?

Henry and Danny lay on the ground amid some overturned trashcans while the Gemini soldiers fired on them, keeping them pinned down. Maybe Verris planned to come and finish them off personally since Junior wasn’t going to do the job. In any case, it allowed Henry to figure out the position of each shooter just by listening. When he had pinpointed each one’s location, he conveyed this to Danny in sign language and was gratified to see she knew what he wanted to do.

He and Danny mouthed the countdown together silently: Three, two, one.

Go.

They rose up back to back, and took out their targets. Three, two, one.

And that’s why a machine gun is no substitute for someone who can actually shoot, Henry told the Gemini soldiers silently as he and Danny ran down the alley to the next building. This one was a lot larger than the liquor store and more substantial, not as easy to destroy with an M134. Henry shot out the lock but just as he opened the door there was a second shot. Danny cried out in pain and fell to her knees with a ragged, bloody hole in one thigh.

Henry looked back toward the liquor store and saw one of the soldiers had dragged himself up on the side of a garbage can and was taking aim, about to fire again.

Henry let out a wordless yell of rage and put a round through the guy’s forehead before dragging Danny through the door.

Junior’s shoulder hurt like hell. Rolling out of the Jeep had partially reopened the gunshot wound. He could thank the ham-handed medic on the plane for that.

He’d told her to just get the goddam bullet out and close up the hole but she’d tried to insist he get undressed and put on scrubs. He’d had no intention of letting his father see him in scrubs. The medic had kept arguing with him about hygiene this and sterile that and he’d finally gotten so frustrated he’d removed the goddam bullet himself with his combat knife. Then he’d told her if she didn’t want to close the incision he could handle that, too, with a sewing needle and some dental floss.

For a moment, he thought she might go off on him; instead, she gave a resigned sigh and told him to take his shirt off—just his shirt, he could put it back on later—and lie down. Even though she used glue instead of stitches, she had injected his shoulder with lidocaine before he could tell her not to. She gave him a couple of other injections she claimed were antibiotics but Junior knew there was something extra in them; he could feel analgesics at work.

The medic had probably thought she was doing him a favor. In fact, the drugs had screwed up his sensory control. The painkillers were starting to wear off and his usual techniques for managing pain weren’t working as well as usual. And of course she hadn’t given him any extra pills for later, expecting him to march over to the infirmary and see the doctor right after they landed as if he were some delicate flower of a civilian who needed to be hospitalized for a mere flesh wound!

Still, he probably shouldn’t have parkoured his way up to the roof of the Masonic Hall with his shoulder in that condition. But he knew his father would be up there watching everything and it was the only way to get to him without some bodyguard tipping him off in advance.

It wasn’t really that the pain was too much—he had managed to get the better of it so it was now background noise rather than a blaring siren. But it had put him in a foul mood, too foul to tolerate his so-called father’s son-I-love-you horseshit. Especially not after that RPG.

Just the sight of Verris standing there looking down on Glennville like he was a heroic general overseeing a battle to decide the fate of the world made Junior want to kick his ass.

Fuck it, he thought and drew his sidearm. “Stand your men down, Pop,” he said. “ Now. ”

Verris turned, saw the gun in Junior’s hand, and looked positively delighted. “You did the right thing,” Verris told him happily. “Getting away from Brogan—”

“I did the cowardly thing!” Junior shouted at him. “And it makes me sick !”

His so-called father shook his head. “I was asking too much of you,” he said in a soothing, reasonable tone. His father was handling him again; it made Junior want to punch him. “I see that now. But that doesn’t mean you—”

“He deserved better than a missile fired at his car, Pop!” Junior said angrily. “They all did!”

“ It doesn’t matter what he deserves. He has to die,” said Verris, his voice still relentlessly reasonable but with an undertone that suggested Junior was starting to try his patience.

“ Are you gonna call these clowns off? ” Junior demanded. His shoulder was throbbing like a second heart, pumping angry pain all through him.

“No,” his father said. “But you can. All you have to do is fire that sidearm and take command.” He spread his arms; there was a radio in his left hand.

What. The. Fuck? Junior looked from Verris to the radio and back again. Was his father telling him to shoot him —kill him ? Junior had thought he might have to fight Verris and subdue him. But kill him? Was this really what his father wanted? It didn’t make any sense.

Over the years, Verris had been harsh, rigid, immovable, domineering, tyrannical, and sometimes unforgiving, but everything had always made sense—granted, a very twisted kind of sense, like Verris wanting him to kill Henry. That was pretty demented—the whole clone thing was batshit—but he had always been able to follow his father’s thinking. Not now, though; he didn’t get this at all.