Brian Hodge: Prototype

“No, no, stop, don’t do that,” she murmured, crawling over Sarah and slipping along on all fours until, midway there, her strength giving way to shock, she sprawled upon the floor while Clay swung the knife, and plunged it, and gouged it, and twisted it, never once looking up from the task at hand —

— until it was finished, forever and ever.

So here the journey ended. He could see it now, unspooled behind him. From Denver through the deserts to Tempe, then back again. To the brink of mountains and down once more, through the mounting losses, then across frozen wastes. To the savannahs within and, finally, north. All the while, sliding down the coil of the double helix, until here he was, a new being. No, not new — complete , the killer he had always been destined to be.

The inevitable quit trying so hard to impose itself, once it was accepted.

And if there were regrets, they were only for the innocent. For Sarah, and for Adrienne too, because she had dared believe he was redeemable. She had deserved better.

She had never had a chance.

Dripping, he rose from the corpse of Patrick Valentine, got as far as his knees before he saw Adrienne’s eyes. In shock, she was, trembling and chilled. He knew the look, but had not realized just how horrible a creature he must truly be until he saw the judgment on her face.

He fetched a silken comforter from the sofa and draped it over her, so she might stay warmer. Stripped away his shirt, his pants and the rest, for he, conversely, was burning alive.

Knife in hand, he trod down the hall.

Their existence was intolerable, of course. He had known this all along, had tried to fight it, had tried to see it as another of nature’s simple ways that were indifferent to the outcome. Much less deserving life forms than they had met with extinction; he would do his part.

Daniel Ironwood he found in the bathroom, trying with nervous hands to light more to smoke. He dropped his paraphernalia when he saw Clay, naked and bloodied, and the knife was swift to fall. They grappled down along a peach-hued wall, a towel bar coming free, with which Daniel managed to strike a bruising blow along Clay’s collarbone. He sank the knife through Daniel’s lower abdomen and hung on despite the sudden burst of fetid odor. Knife grated bone, and together they twitched, and Daniel wept as his struggles grew feeble. Then nonexistent.

Oh, how he had wanted to live.

Ellie he found in the bedroom, sitting on her bed and drawn into a tight ball. He’d thought she might be the fiercest of the three, yet here she had all but surrendered, and he supposed no one was really as tough as they let on.

And Ellie knew him, knew his heart as well as he did.

“I can’t help what I am,” she whispered, and would neither tremble nor cry. Nor beg.

“None of us can,” he said, and proved to himself just how wrong Valentine had been last night on the balcony, on the theory and practice of killing.

The third one is by far the hardest.

He made his way back to the living room, where Adrienne had not moved. He was spent by now. All the days, all the miles, too little sleep and precious little food — he was consuming himself from the inside. He had glimpsed his body in a mirror back there and it had looked wasted.

He fell into Valentine’s chair, one foot on the man himself, and used the remote to turn on the television. Flipped around but found nothing of redemption so he turned it off. The silence left a yawning void.

Adrienne was watching him from the floor, not so certain that her own turn wasn’t coming next — or so her gaze struck him — and he knew he had done far worse than kill her already. The thought made him cry and he hurled the knife away, down the hall.

Clay slid to the floor, crawled to her, and from beneath the comforter one arm extended. She raised herself enough so that they were able to fit together, her head resting against his shoulder, sticky though it now was. An arm around him next, and a hand upon his knee.

But it was no good. Despite everything, the old sour repugnance had returned already, his skin crawling beneath her hands. What is it, he wondered, they’ve got to be dead first?

Adrienne seemed to sense it, perhaps a stiffening across his shoulders, and she pulled away with a single downcast nod. Content to brush two fingertips against his chest, as much as he was able to tolerate.

“So many scars,” she said. “It’s too late. Isn’t it?”

“We tried. So the scars won anyway. We tried.” As if that were supposed to be some consolation.

He crawled away from her, rubbing the scar on his forehead, from early November. Twelve stitches, it had taken? What an amateur. He could do better than that, and crawled toward the marble table.

I want to live in a different world, he had told Adrienne weeks ago, and if he had seen only the worst of worlds, it did not mean he had abandoned hope entirely.

There would be a better world, somewhere, there must be. He would find it, that world where he could touch Erin’s face and whisper her name as many times as she wished to hear it, and know that he could love her without reservation. That world where she could touch him lavishly and his skin would not reject any hand that was not brutal enough to bruise. This place, it had to exist — this could not be all there was.

Anything but that.

He knelt before marble, its smooth rock edge become the ledge upon the precipice. Eyes gone blurry, he stared down until he was one with the stone, its mottled gray and black a universe. It beckoned.

He answered.

He whipped his head down, let his brow crack across marble, and the inside of his skull went white and vast. Skin split; he was as blind as Valentine at the end. Clay reeled, rising up onto both knees, face tipped to an unseen sky, Icarus flying too high. He whipped his head down again, harder than before, all his strength this time, and forever he fell… from the eye of the sun, from the pain of a frozen moon…

Falling from grace.

And she was alone.

Clay’s head had twice hit with a sound like a bursting melon, and the second time he crumpled to the floor, bleeding from a forehead gone sickly concave. In his boneless heap he twitched with convulsive spasms until they shorted themselves out, then fell still but for shallow breaths.

Adrienne found a phone and punched out 911, let the receiver tumble to the floor when it became obvious she had no voice for the task. They would trace it; they would come.

But she couldn’t wait until then, could no longer breathe the air of this slaughterhouse, so with the last of her ebbing strength she dragged Sarah across to the glass door. Dragged her onto the balcony, to huddle with her beneath the comforter in the farthest corner, under the chilly kiss of falling snow.

Sightless eyes, she closed them. Silent lips, she kissed them. Braided hair, she stroked it. She raised Sarah’s sweater and caressed her navel, still healing from the ring that pierced it, and she kissed that as well.

And then? Just held her, until rougher hands would inevitably pry them apart.

Her face running with melting snowflakes, she thought of the rainstick left far behind. If she had it here, she would slam it upon the railing, break it open and let its pebbles and bone chips cascade to the street below.

Sarah would approve, at least, and understand.

Nineteen floors up, while down in the street they all walked past at the end of their workday, and none of them had a clue what went on above. So Adrienne settled back and began to shiver, waiting for the sirens but never quite sure when they arrived.