Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

Henry launched himself forward to slide again, this time baseball-style, intending to sweep the guy’s legs out from under him. But before Henry reached him, the guy flipped over his head, tumbling in midair in a way that somehow managed to be more casual than showy. He came down behind Henry and kicked his shoulder blade again.

For a few seconds, the world turned blinding white while the nerve in his upper back shrieked in a way that sounded a lot like a human voice. Shut the hell up, Henry ordered it and struggled to his feet. So much for paints, varnish, and weatherproofing, he thought; maybe he’d have better luck in power tools. If he could find them.

He pushed himself into a stumbling run. Up ahead, he saw a rack of circular saw blades. Let’s see if he can catch a Frisbee, Henry thought, as a nasty grin spread over his face.

Then something large and hard glanced off the top of his head and he was sprawling on the cement, scraping his palms and knees. What the fuck—

Henry twisted around to see the guy heaving another gallon of paint at him and rolled out of the way before it could smash his face in. And still the guy kept on coming at him, like killing Henry Brogan was the one and only thing he had been put on this earth to do.

Junior’s words came back to him: My orders are to kill you.

Did Clay Verris have a whole platoon of guys dedicated—no, programmed —to kill him? Then, as if things had to be even more absurd, he looked up and saw Danny almost directly above him on a mezzanine. He hadn’t even noticed there was an upstairs—and how the hell had she made it up there with her leg? Her face was shiny and paler than he’d ever seen. Was she crazy from blood loss? What the hell did she think she was doing?

As if on cue, she heaved a gas canister over the railing, straight at the killer. Just as it hit him, she fired. The canister exploded, engulfing the killer in flames.

That’s for Baron, you bastard, Henry thought as the sprinkler system went off.

But instead of falling down and dying like a normal assassin, the masked guy actually walked out of the flames, still hell-bent on killing anyone and everyone.

Henry’s jaw dropped and his heart went into overdrive as he looked around desperately. He was in an enormous hardware store and he had somehow managed to end up against the back wall, empty-handed and unable to get to any of a thousand things he could use as a weapon.

Yeah, it was definitely time to retire. Except it didn’t look like he was going to live long enough—

His gaze fell on a fire extinguisher. Oh, great—that would be a big help. Just not for him.

But the thing next to it might be.

Or it might not, but he pushed the thought aside. This was what he had—a moment ago, he’d had nothing. He grabbed it and flattened himself against the wall. The gas canister had been a good gambit, clever as hell, and if they’d been fighting any other killer, it would have worked. Henry decided he was going to find out why it hadn’t, even if it killed him.

Oh, God, that smell , that fucking smell ; his stomach twisted like a corkscrew and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. He had reached his limit for that fucking smell; if the killer didn’t get him, he might puke himself to death.

No, he didn’t smell anything , he told himself as he stepped away from the wall and swung the fire axe as hard as he could, burying it in the killer’s chest.

The guy’s legs flew out from under him and he crashed to the floor on his back. Somehow Danny was downstairs again, gliding over to Henry on her stool just as Junior appeared. That fucking smell was even stronger, even though the man on the floor was no longer burning. He was struggling to breathe, but bizarrely there was no moaning, no crying. He wasn’t even writhing in pain.

The indoor rain shower petered out. Henry looked from him to Junior. “I’ll say this for your old man. He knows how to train a soldier.” He crouched down and pulled off the guy’s mask.

Everything stopped.

The guy on the floor gazed up at them, his expression dazed, like he was seeing something beyond his understanding. There were probably lots of things he didn’t understand, Henry thought; concepts and realities that a person had to grow into, situations that only someone with many years of experience could make sense of. This guy was just too young. Danny and Junior were kids to Henry but this guy was a real kid—he couldn’t have been any older than eighteen. Only it was himself, Henry Brogan, at eighteen. Or Junior at eighteen. Or both.

Henry had been sure Verris wouldn’t stop at one clone but it gave him no pleasure to be right. Junior looked like he’d just taken a hard blow to the head with a sledgehammer. It was one thing to know something in the abstract but quite another to see the proof lying on the floor with a fucking axe in his chest.

Welcome to my world, Junior, Henry said silently. It only gets weirder from here.

Suddenly, an intense protectiveness toward Junior and Danny swept over him, followed by guilt for failing to keep them safe. Henry wondered if this was how parents felt when they were driving their kids to the emergency room after they’d fallen down and broken their arms.

Or maybe it was more like what his mother had been feeling when she’d jumped into the Philadelphia municipal pool to save him from drowning.

She hadn’t seen his father every time she looked at him, Henry realized suddenly— he had. And his mother hadn’t been able to save him from his own wrong-headed thinking like she’d saved him from drowning. That had always been up to him, and it still was.

All of this passed through his mind in a heartbeat. A shrink might have called it a great breakthrough but he wasn’t in a shrink’s office, he was in a shot-up hardware store with two clones, one of whom had burned alive and was now dying with an axe in his chest, and an agent about to go into shock from a gunshot wound.

Damn, this had to be some kind of record for the most simultaneous crises during the first week of retirement.

Danny was bent over the dying clone looking at all his injuries in horrified incredulity. Ms. First Aid, Henry thought; even if she’d still had her burn bag with her, she wouldn’t have found anything in it to help him.

“Don’t you feel pain ?” she asked the clone.

The dying clone looked from Danny to Henry with a puzzled frown, and then to Junior. Obviously Verris hadn’t let him in on the family secret. Henry wondered what Verris had called him—Junior 2.0? The Next Big Thing?

And what had he called himself?

Well, they would never know. The clone’s eyes fell closed and his breathing simply stopped. As if he’d died peacefully at home in bed, not in the wreckage of a hardware store with burns all over his body and an axe in his chest.

For a long moment, they were all silent. He had to take care of them, Henry thought, looking at Danny and Junior’s shell-shocked faces. It was up to him to help them get through this and then put it behind them, although he had no idea how. Nowhere in any of his training, formal or informal, had there ever been anything about what to do when your clone tried to kill you but you killed him first.

“I don’t know why you’re so angry with me. You were the inspiration for all of this.”

Junior turned from the dead clone on the floor to see his dedicated, loving, present father ambling toward them in an easy, casual way. He looked like he had dropped in to pick up some tools for his latest project and he just happened to have a semi-automatic weapon with him.