Anton Strout - Dead Waters

Nothing happened.

“Crap,” Darryl said. He reversed direction, heading back down the aisle and making his way over toward Elyse and Mike at the front of the theater. “Elyse! We’re out of juice!”

Elyse looked panicked and her face sank, but only for a moment. She adjusted her grip on the knife in her hand before swinging it around in a wide arc.

It stabbed into the wall of the theater, but not before passing through Heavy Mike’s hand, pinning it there. His video camera tumbled to the floor of the theater and shattered to pieces as a howl of pain erupted from Mike. “Elyse!” he shouted in a mix of surprise, shock, and anger.

“Sorry, Mikey,” she said. She grabbed Darryl as he pushed his way through the crowd over to where Mike was pinned. Blood was already running thick down the pinned student’s arm. Darryl shoved his phone into the stream and a flair of energy sparked from it. A scene flickered on the screen. It was footage of me from the other night when I had come across the students saying their good-byes to the professor at Eccentric Circles. Something looked different about me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I leaned in closer to the tiny image, avoiding Elyse’s kicks with my bat.

“Do I have a goatee ?” I asked, caught off guard by what I was seeing.

“Computer-enhanced,” Elyse said. “Actually, I think it helps hide your weak chin.”

Something in my mind snapped and I reared back with my bat. “I do not have a weak chin,” I said and swung for her.

A loud crack rang out, accompanied by a blinding flash in front of me, and my bat hit something solid, although it wasn’t Elyse. The young actress/gymnast/killer was standing at least five feet away now. My bat had connected with another figure wearing a leather coat identical to mine.

“That wasn’t nice,” a familiar voice said to me. It was my own. Standing in front of me was another version of me, complete with its phony goatee.

“How ‘Mirror, Mirror’ of you,” I said, looking past him at Elyse. “But I don’t get it. How can I be reborn when I’m not dead like the professor was?”

Elyse laughed. “We’re pioneers in our industry. He’s just a cheap carbon copy. Death isn’t a requirement to summon a quick you on the fly to kick your own ass. Just blood.”

The other Simon punched me in the arm. “Stop hitting yourself,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, focusing back on him. “This is . . .”

“Weird,” Doppel-Me finished. He pulled out his own bat and extended it. “I know, right?”

“This is going to hurt me more than it’s. . . You know what? I think this is going to hurt me just as much as it is you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

I swung my bat, going for his knee, but he came around with his bat and blocked it.

“You think you’re going to get one over on me?” he asked. “Think again.”

“Don’t think this is going to be an issue,” I said. “I’ve had years of experience beating myself up.”

I swung low, but Doppel-Me jumped high. When I lunged for him, he feinted back perfectly, avoiding the blow or countering it. If I faked left, he faked right, countering my every move.

It was no use. Other than the shoddy goatee, this Simon fought like I fought. I couldn’t get an advantage over him no matter how hard I tried.

“Give up,” I said.

“ You give up,” Doppel-Me repeated. “I can do this all night.”

I shook my head. “No, you can’t,” I said. “You’ll eventually come apart at the seams like all these other playthings.”

“Actually, he won’t,” Darryl shouted out from somewhere behind me. “Like Elyse said, we’re pioneers. He’s got a better shelf life.”

“Well, crap,” I said. “Not the answer I wanted to hear. I guess we both can do this all night, then.”

The other me craned his head and I knew what he was looking for.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “There’s no way I’m letting you up the aisle and out through those curtains. You’d have to go through me to get out of here and I’m not going to let that happen.”

Doppel-Me backed away down the aisle, heading toward the door leading into the offices. Of course! I knew the only other way out was through the creepier parts of the catacombs in the far recesses the Gauntlet, and that meant he probably knew it, too. If he made it down there, I’d never catch up to him in all its twists and turns.

In the hall behind him, something stirred in the darkness.

“I do have something you don’t have, you know,” I said, pressing toward Doppel-Me.

“Me, too. I’ve got this stylin’ goatee that you don’t have. What have you got?”

The shadow in the hallway moved even closer to my doppelganger.

“Friends,” I said, and charged him. With one of my fellow agents behind him, I’d be on the dark version of myself in no time, clashing bat to bat.

Evil Simon spun around to run for the door back to the Department, but stopped in his tracks when he saw his way blocked. Two hands flashed out of the darkness, grabbed the sides of his head, and twisted. . . hard. The audible pop of bone and cartilage drove into my ears like daggers. A second later, the other me dropped to the floor, lifeless.

Out of the darkness stepped Thaddeus Wesker. He looked down at the body, and then up at me. He seemed disappointed. “I wouldn’t exactly say we were friends ,” he said.

I couldn’t stop staring at myself lying there, unmoving. “Holy Hell!” I shouted over the dying sounds of combat all around us. Jane and the Inspectre held Elyse at bay at cane point and Connor had Darryl by the scruff of his hoodie. Most of the birds and rats had been dealt with or were already dissolving on their own. I walked over to Wesker, mindful not to step on prone, dead me. Wesker looked at me with an evil grin.

“That,” he said, taking the time to relish each word, “felt good.”

“That’s disturbing,” I said, freaking out at the dead look in my double’s eyes. “You did know that was a doppelganger of me, didn’t you?”

Wesker shrugged.

“What if that had been the real me?” I asked.

He walked past me. “I guess we’ll never know,” he said, heading up the aisle. “I was going to the café to see what they had for fresh pastry. Getting to kill you was just the bonus cherry in my Danish.”

Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike—still pinned through his hand to the wall—all started yelling at one another while various members of the Department fought to contain them.

“Everybody, shut up !” a voice called out. The room went silent. Trent had come out of hiding from behind his seat. When Elyse saw him, her eyes bugged out.

“Hey, pal,” she said, turning on her charm. “How are you? Glad to see you made it out of that fracas at the university alive.”

Trent came out of his row, walked down the aisle toward Elyse, and shoved her. “No thanks to you .”

“Hey!” Darryl called out from between the two Shadowers who were holding him. “Keep your hands off her.”

“Or what?” Trent exploded. “She’ll tie me up again? She’ll bleed me out to power your messed-up little project? You might want to listen to these people. They’ve got some news, and as far as I can tell, it’s true. The professor’s not dead. He’s alive and wandering this city.”

Elyse’s eyes widened, but there was too long a hesitation before it. “It worked?” Elyse said. “The professor’s alive?”

Despite the look on her face, I wasn’t buying it. “You’re going to need more acting training if you want your surprise to sound more convincing. Knock it off.”

“What is that?” Darryl said, puffing up. “A threat?”