Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book One - The Earth Transformed

“What?” asked Mad Dog. “But he told us to stay away. Every day on the PA. “Don’t come near the facility!”“

“I know.” Liz nodded. “We heard him too. But he’s been… experimenting on us in the next room. Exposing us to rads, then… cutting us open.”

“But why?” Metal was in tears. “Why?”

Liz shook her head. “He’s crazy, Maniac. Who knows why?”

I joined them. “Are there any other prisoners anywhere? Is there anybody else we need to rescue?”

Liz looked around, then stared at me. “You again.”

I frowned. I’d never seen her before in my life. “Uh, what about me?”

“You were here before. A few days ago. You and your… twin brother promised us you were going to get us out of here. I… I thought you’d died, or given up or something, but you… did it. Thank you.”

I blinked. “My… twin brother?”

“Yes. Is he okay? Did he come back with you? He looked pretty hurt last time.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out and before I could try again Vargas came and stood by Metal and Mad Dog. “Hey listen, can we leave it to you two to get these people out of here and dose them with the Prussian Blue? We’re gonna keep looking for Finster and the sec pass.”

“We got it,” said Mad Dog.

Metal pulled Liz gently up into his big arms. “You find him, you bring him out to us. We wanna give him what he deserves.”

Vargas shrugged. “If we can, we will. But if it gets messy? Well, no guarantees.”

The two men nodded, then got to work.

The room beyond the cell block was a lab as spotless and bright as the rest of the facility. Everything shined, the dissection tables with their channels for blood drainage shined, the trays full of knives and saws and retractors and other implements I had no idea about shined, and the wall at the end of the room that had a four–by–three grid of square steel doors set into it shined.

Me, Kate, Athalia, Ace, and the rangers moved through the room like hungry coyotes, looting the scalpels and other things that could be used as weapons and ransacking closets and drawers full of bandages, splints, trauma packs, and antiseptic creams. Kate was practically giddy at the sight of it all. I stuffed my pack.

“Hey.”

We all turned. Thrasher was looking at a cluster of photos on the wall by the far door. Had he spoken? I’d never heard him speak before. He must have, because he tapped on a photo and waved us over.

Athalia was busy looking into the ranks of the square steel doors on the end wall, but the rest of us gathered around the big man. He pointed to one of the photos. It was a framed pre–war pic of a bunch of people in white lab coats standing outside the facility, smiling and squinting in the bright sunshine another guy in a lab coat shook hands with a fat man in a military uniform in front of them.

Hell Razor scowled. “Scientists. So?”

Thrasher tapped the glass again. Beneath it was a strip of paper with typed words on it, fixed to the photo with yellowing tape. “Read that.”

Who knew he could read? Hidden depths.

Angie leaned in. “General Wade Huntsinger congratulates Dr. Irwin John Finster on his appointment as project director of the DOD’s newest research facility, Project Darwin, which will study biological solutions to various hypothetical national security scenarios.”

Ace grunted. Vargas frowned.

“Can’t be the same guy, can it?”

I laughed. “From back before the bombs fell? Not a chance. He’d be what? A hundred and fifty years old? He’d be the oldest man in the world.”

“Maybe our guy is his son,” said Kate. “He could be Irwin John Finster Junior. Or the third, even.”

“Could be,” said Vargas. “Though none of the townies mentioned anything like that.”

“Might be a clone,” I said.

Angie shot me a look, then cleared her throat. “Well, we’ll ask him when we find him. I’ve got a list of questions for that son–of–a–bitch, as a matter of—”

“Ghost.” Athalia was looking up from one of the open steel doors in the back wall. “You better look at this. I found something else.”

She stepped back as I approached. Apparently the steel doors were connected to some kind of refrigeration unit, because a cold mist drifted out from the open one. Inside the door was a long metal tray on rollers, and on the tray lay a big rubberized bag with a zipper down the front. Athalia had unzipped the bag half–way and pulled it open.

There was a body inside, pretty cut up — like there had been an autopsy or maybe more experiments — and at first I didn’t recognize it. Then I noticed the missing finger and the scar on the forehead. The body had other scars — beyond the incisions made during its recent dissection — that kindled a few ancient memories in my head.

“Hello, ‘twin brother,’” I said.

Angie sobbed, and I looked around to see that the others had followed me.

Ace put a hand on Angie’s shoulder to comfort her, but she squirmed out from under, still sobbing, still looking at the old, dead me. “I… I’m sorry. I guess I was still hoping that you were… That he was still….”

I nodded. I knew just how she felt. “I guess I was too.”

Yeah, I should have known. I did know, basically, but there’s still a difference between being pretty damn sure somebody’s dead and seeing their corpse with your own eyes. I was dead. The original “I” — the guy I was trying so desperately to remember how to be.

I zipped the zipper all the way down and peeled back the bag to take a better look at my corpse. It turned my stomach. The only fatal wounds on my body had been made with a scalpel, and the bruising at my ankles and wrists suggested that those wounds had been made while I was alive and conscious.

“Looks like you fought like hell,” said Vargas.

“Yeah.”

Kate, who’d never been brought up to speed on my history, looked confused. “So, this isn’t your twin brother?”

I shook my head. “I cloned myself at Sleeper One. Twice, I think.”

Athalia crossed her arms. “The part I don’t understand is how you — I mean he — are — uh, is — here. How did one of your bodies end up here, and the other in Sleeper One?”

“I think I’ve got that figured out.” I turned to face them. “I think I’m doing this all over again, like the world’s worst case of déjà–vu.”

“How do you mean?” asked Angie.

I pointed east — at least I thought it was east. “I’m not the only dead body in Sleeper One. My whole squad died there, fighting killer robots. We’d come there on your orders, hunting that advanced armor, and we got slaughtered, but not before we found the note about the sec pass that would open the door to the armor being here in Darwin. So, my guess is I — he — was the only survivor of the fight, and he was pretty badly wounded, so he used the cloning machine to make a copy of himself. Then together he and the clone came here to look for the sec pass.”

Vargas nodded. “Unfortunately, there was a fight here too, and Finster got ahold of him.”

“Right” said Angie. “But the clone got away. He was half dead, but he was free, so he went back to Sleeper One to make another copy of himself….”

“And he died while he was waiting for the second clone to come out of the oven,” I said. “Which is where I found him when I woke up, on the floor outside the cloning chamber.”

Hell Razor laughed. “Gotta hand it to you for tenacity, brother. Seriously.”

I laughed too, then the laughter drained away, and all I could see was the brutalized face of the man who had traveled across half of Arizona with his head caved in to try to save the man on the metal tray in front of me, who had died by vivisection and lost a chance at a life of love and laughter with the woman who was dripping tears on his battered leather jacket.