Rob Thurman - Doubletake

Disappointing, and the memory of his flavor was making me want to vomit. I sighed and continued to wrap a bandage around my chest. I’d leave it until the edges of the two sword cuts meshed back together. I healed faster than the other half Auphe had. I thought I healed faster than the Auphe themselves had. I laughed at that. More proof I was above them. I’d told Caliban we were evolution in motion.

Or had I told myself that?

Or the Bae?

Who knew?

I didn’t worry. My memory was fine. Top of my class. Top…of…my…class. I didn’t remember, because I didn’t care. I was all that mattered. My plan all that mattered. Memories came and went, but I didn’t forget a single part of the plan. The plan that was born of the only beautiful thing I’d known in my life: biology. There was more to it than plague and flying bodies.

Although those were as beautiful too.

I’d always been the most Auphe of the others in Nevah’s Landing—insane and weak every one—and years later the Auphe in me had grown, then continued to grow and spread. When I took biology…I’d enjoyed throwing the irritating lab tech off the roof. Him I had no desire to eat. He was greasy and flabby with the stench of STDs following him like a cloud. How he’d gotten anyone, even a whore, to give them to him was a mystery. And loud. He was loud enough to puncture my eardrums. Off he had to go. I didn’t leave that class. I wasn’t finished and he was an obvious suicide. He covered the sidewalk in an explosion of bacon-grease-coated syphilis. He…

Where was I? Where was I? Where…

Biology.

I’d learned and what I learned combined with what I knew and felt happening in me. It wasn’t hard to figure out. The Auphe were the first predators of merit on earth. Didn’t Sidle the warden tell us that enough? Brown-nosing, cocksucking shit.

The Auphe genes had survived and evolved the longest. Mixed with any others, they couldn’t lose. You could start out half Auphe, but given years—I didn’t know how many, but I could wait—all the human would be gone from the inside. Consumed. Perhaps the outside too. We’d see.

With time, you would become pure Auphe. And with us, better—smarter. Able to learn and knowing it necessary to learn. Auphe times two. The Second Coming.

Caliban’s cattle companion taught college classes. I’d watched. He’d taught Caliban because that’s what cattle companions, loyal and true, do. They would both know biology as I did. They would have seen the changes in Caliban over the years.

They knew.

But they didn’t know.

Because they didn’t want to know.

And so they would refuse to know.

Caliban could tell he was becoming more Auphe, but completely Auphe? He wouldn’t believe that. He’d think monster… stupid word… predator, crazed, thoughts and actions of an abnormal beast. Close to an Auphe, but not an Auphe. He was right, but not in the way he wanted to be. We would make the myth of Auphe forgotten with what we would be and the things we would do.

The Auphe would be nothing next to us.

Caliban would’ve been happier to be pure Auphe if he knew that.

But all he saw were snakes and a half-breed. He’d believe one day. Denial didn’t last forever when your hair turned silver, eyes red, your fake family became a pool of blood and flesh at your doing.

Denial couldn’t turn its back against that.

I rested against the Bae’s cavern wall. The separated succubae, can you imagine, weren’t fond of me. The rapists didn’t like the raper. Hypocritical worms. I pointed at the nearest Bae. “I’m hungry.”

It nodded and disappeared into the murk. The only light was from the small opening far above us. It was cooler down here. I enjoyed it. I liked the warmth, but up above was too warm a good deal of the time. I examined my hand that Caliban had put a blade through almost at the same moment I’d put mine through his. I’d played nice. I needed him for the Coming, whole, not a cripple—although he’d healed fast from Janus’s attack. I put the ice pick center and parallel in his hand. My need to accelerate the Coming made me weak in that one action.

Caliban hadn’t been. He’d slammed his blade home transverse. He’d broken bone, torn tendon, sliced through nerves—doing the worst damage he could. He’d said he’d won that round. The son of a bitch had been right. While I needed things from him, he didn’t need a thing from me. And if I broke his new rule—stay away from his cattle—he would splatter his brain with whatever gun he happened to have in hand.

But I’d known that before he told me. Watching, watching, thinking. He was still the smallest measure too human to let that go. I’d always planned to let him solve the cattle problem himself when he was ready, and he would when he finally became what he’d always been born to be. What the Auphe themselves had never imagined could exist beyond them.

I tried to move my hand, but I could hardly twitch my fingers. I could try for anger, but…he was a worthwhile opponent. The only one I’d had. I’d heal sooner or later and the game was the game. If it didn’t hurt, if you were positive you wouldn’t die, why the hell would you play?

“Food, Father.” The Bae was back with a large chunk of meat. It had been skinned, but one whiff said what it was. Wolf. Not desert wolf, but werewolf. They were one of my favorites. They weren’t difficult to catch or slaughter, but they had a strong taste. Wolves had an appetite for anything. When you ate one of them, it was a regular buffet of tastes. Human and non.

I took it and dropped it in my lap before whipping out Caliban’s switchblade and pressing it against the Bae’s neck. “Are you afraid?”

It opened its mouth to hiss at me, black cobra fangs ready, red eyes unblinking. “No, Father. It’s the game. We play it too…some of us. From your stories.”

I narrowed my eyes in thought. “How old are you?”

“Ten years, Father.”

Ah, one of my first. “When does the fear go? How many years before the corruption of your breeding lizard bitches passes?” Caliban and his shitty assessment of my new race. Fearful. Little snakes. If he couldn’t force himself to accept what he was becoming, he couldn’t accept what my children would become, and, as rapidly as they matured, faster than he could think.

Imagine any of it, he couldn’t yet.

Lie, lie, lie, lie to yourself. That will only lose you the game and by then maybe make you eager to join the Coming. You can’t fight what is in you if you cannot admit it’s there.

“Five, Father. Some four. Some six. Some never. But at five years the fear usually goes.”

I was thinking how I’d like to be in Caliban’s face to tell him that—while perhaps cutting out that lying tongue—but a rumbling from outside distracted me. Janus. Time to put him back down until tonight. For a machine made for nothing but murder, my favorite hobby, it was nothing but an unholy pain in the ass to keep penned.

After tonight that wasn’t my worry anymore.

If anyone was still alive after this round, it was my gift to them.

Merry Second Coming.

Tonight at Fort Tilden. There went the two more days I needed to gate Janus to Tumulus, inescapable graveyard of radioactive bones and assholes like this that couldn’t die. We could run to get those two days, but Grimm would take it out on someone. Someone I couldn’t claim to care about to include in my protective circle, someone I might not know, but someone who didn’t deserve to die.