James Moore - Subject Seven

His face flushed red and he patted her back softly. She smelled good. Even after a night of who knows what, she had a sweet, pleasant scent. He had to wonder if his deodorant was still holding up, but that wasn’t much of a concern, not really. He was smart enough to know that the way she was holding on to him had nothing to do with passion or desire. She was a wreck. It meant nothing more. And in truth, he needed comforting just as much as she did.

“I don’t know, Kyrie. I don’t. But maybe we can find a way to fix everything.”

“I just wanna go home… I want to go back to my stupid life and my stupid family, you know?”

He nodded and held her tighter as the sting came back to his eyes. “Yeah. I do. I want my dumb life back too.” Uncle Robbie’s drunken rants, his mom’s distant way of dealing with everything. His dad’s stupid jokes at dinner. Trish’s bratty ways and Kevin’s endless whining. He missed them all, more than he would have ever thought possible.

“I just want to go home.” She sighed the words into his shoulder, and while he should have been either dying of embarrassment or worrying about how his body was reacting to the half-naked cheerleader hugging on him, Gene just hugged her back, taking comfort from a girl who was almost a stranger and who had more in common with him than most of the people in the world.

Gene and Kyrie scrounged their money together and snuck out of the hotel room. They came back twenty minutes later with donuts and a six-pack of toothbrushes.

By the time they got back, the others had awakened and managed to survive the embarrassment of waking up mostly naked around a group of strangers. The one who seemed to take it the best was Tina, but if any of them had actually known her, they would have understood how good she was at hiding her feelings.

They read the complimentary newspaper and then watched the TV together as they ate. Not surprisingly, the destruction of part of the warehouse district was big news. They didn’t know the details, but none of them doubted that their other parts were responsible not only for them still being alive, but for wrecking half a city block in the process. There were just enough little flashes of memory to confirm that. Cody seemed to remember more of what had happened than any of the others, but all of them had seen the others around them changing. All of them had been awake and alert this time when they became something else. There was no denying that much of what Joe Bronx had told them was true.

“What do we do from here?” Cody lay on the bed, his narrow rib cage and bony knees pointed at the ceiling and his head hanging over the edge.

Hunter was the one who answered him. “We need to watch the rest of the tape Joe Bronx gave us.” He pointed at the TV. “There’s a built-in player.”

The tape had survived everything, which, all things considered, seemed almost like a miracle. They’d found it waiting on the dresser next to the TV.

They popped the tape in the player and watched, and if Hunter stared with more intensity than the others, they all pretended not to notice.

A flicker of static and then the image resolved into the shadowed face of Joe Bronx. “So the thing is, we have two choices. Well, you have two choices. I only have one. Either we go together to find out who did this to us, or I go alone. I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the idea of being hunted down or killed for being a mistake. I for one want to take control of my life.”

He stood again and paced for a moment around a room that no longer existed. They waited. What else could they do? Finally he sat again. “I want this done. I want this over with. I know that Hunter would like to go back to his family. I know that Kyrie wants to get back to Seattle. I get that. I do. I want to get on with my life too. Of course, that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? My life and Hunter’s…they’re locked together. I can’t be myself when Hunter is doing his thing. He can’t be himself when I’m doing anything at all.” His frustration was evident.

He leaned in closer to the camera again, staring hard at the lens. “Someone did this to us, all of us, all of you and all of your counterparts. We’re not the enemy here. We’re all victims. We all want to have our lives back, don’t we?” He chuckled. It wasn’t a comforting sound at all. “That’s the thing. We all want our lives back and the only way any of us are going to get them is if we work together. I can’t do it all myself. I’ve been trying now for a long time.” He spread his hands. “I can admit it. I need help. Mostly, I need the Others that each of you carries, but I can’t expect them to help me without it affecting your lives. You, all of you, are in control of your lives. Except when you aren’t. Except when they come out to play.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Gets damned confusing, doesn’t it? It only gets worse. So far each of you has a few questions. You want to know what you did to deserve this, I’m sure. The answer, near as I’ve figured out, is nothing. You were born. That was all you did wrong. Now, because your counterparts are awake and you are here, there’s a good chance that you can’t even go home without this being resolved. Well, you can.” Joe leaned in closer to the camera again and his smile was not a pleasant one. “But it’s gonna suck to be you when your other halves get out and decide to hit the town. You already know something about that, don’t you, Cody? Woke up in a jail cell as I recall. He got busted breaking into a closed store. He was hungry. Never had to eat before he was born, did he?”

He held up a hand to stop anyone who might want to start talking. The gesture wasn’t necessary.

“Gene, your other self has a few issues with authority. It won’t get better. I guess you know who put your dad’s good friend Rob in the hospital, don’t you? What you don’t like, he doesn’t like. The difference is, he’ll do something about it.” He sat silently for a moment, composing what he wanted to say next, perhaps. “Tina. I’m sorry about everything that’s happened to you. I’m sorry about your mom, especially.” Tina shook her head and her lips pressed together into a tight line of rage or something else. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, but aside from that, no one would have known anything serious was wrong. “You’re alone in the world now. No dad. No family, no mom. There’s not as much in this for you. You don’t need to worry about what your other half will do to loved ones. Just the occasional would-be rapist.” He looked at the screen closely again, as if he might somehow be able to see into her eyes. “Your other half killed, what was it, five people? All of them mobsters. All of them connected to your boyfriend. She had to. They had something we needed.” He squinted for a moment and looked at the ceiling, then back at the camera. “Tony, isn’t it? Not a great guy, true, but he has friends. They’re looking for you. They’ll keep looking. Not just because you killed some of them, but because you took one hell of a lot of their money. You want to get out of this alive, you better figure out how to talk to your other half.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you can’t do it all, but I bet we could work out an arrangement to make sure the losers looking for you either stop looking or just plain vanish. Yes, I mean we work as a team, and when the time is right, we take care of your problems. Any way we need to.”

He stood again and paced, and all Kyrie could think of as she watched him was a caged lion at the zoo. Too much energy bundled into too small an area.

“You don’t have to join up with me. You can try to figure all of this out on your own. Hunter’s been my unwilling assistant for a while; he knows some of the details. He might even be able to figure everything out. But I have more information. I have most of the knowledge in my own noggin.” He tapped his temple. “I’ll share when I’m ready. I’m the one in charge if you come along for the ride. Think about it.”