Successors (29 page)

59

The elevator doors opened and Cori stared out at the ostensibly infinite line of cells before her. She pulled her maintenance cart out onto the floor. She rummaged through her cleaners until she found the one with the masking tape label that read “transmorphs” in blue indelible ink. She pulled out a cleaning cloth and sprayed some of the liquid on it.

“Hello, my love,” Vince’s voice purred from beside her. She turned to the cell, dropping her jaw and her bottle at the same time. “How are you?” Vince’s doppelganger asked in perfect pitch. His voice was deep yet soothing to the ear.

For a moment, she basked in the view. His sturdy muscular V-frame that barely hinted at the strength he possessed. His upper lip always threatening a hint of five o’clock shadow before the rest of his face. Loose wavy brown locks not quite long, but not quite short. He even smelled like Vince, that antique musk that suggested he used the same aftershave as his father before him.

He’s dead.

The insistence in that thought was violating to her composure. Her eyes watered as she tried to get back to that first moment. The moment she heard his voice. That split second where it was all a dream, and he wasn’t really gone.

He’s dead.

“I know he’s dead!” she screamed out loud at her mind. She leaned down to pick up her bottle, determined to get on with her work despite this machination to unnerve her.

“Hello, my love,” said the same deep voice from a different cell. She looked down the line of cells and, one by one, Vince duplicates stepped forward to thread their arms through the bars. They all in turn said, “Hello, my love.”

Cori’s hands began to shake and her eyes blurred, refusing to blink. The infinite line of Vinces was just too much. One Vince could be used to shock her into letting her guard down, thereby leaving room for escape. Multiple Vinces was just torment. Her pain was one big joke to them.

She leaned on her cart and tried to compose herself. Not wanting any more of her grief on display for them she latched onto her favorite tried-and-true emotion—anger. She fumbled through her cleaning supplies and pulled out an orange bottle. The bright bottle displayed several faded hazard stickers.

She had been trained to exhaustion on Material Safety Data Sheets before she was allowed to do her janitorial work, so she was familiar with the coding on the bottle. Class E substances erode metal and…

She ripped the top off her bottle and threw its contents on the first Vince doppelganger. She almost looked away when he began to scream and thrash.

…destroy animal tissues. Acid, and a nasty one at that.

Vince’s facial features rippled and jumbled to disfiguring Picasso proportions. The transmorph fell to the floor lamenting his agony as he crawled to the far corner of his cell. He cowered there, cradling his blistering face.

She turned to the remaining replicas, some visible, some just hands through bars. “Anyone else?” she asked with menace in her voice.

One by one they retreated from view, first the faces, then the hands.

An hour later Cori sat in Danato’s office alone. She had been called up after a guard discovered the wounded transmorph on a walk-through. A quick glance at her supplies, and she was carted off to face her judge and jury. She wasn’t really concerned about being yelled at. She didn’t even care what her punishment would be. What she did care about was that she had been waiting in the office for twenty minutes.

During those twenty minutes, the clock on the wall insisted on ticking loudly. The chair she sat in was determined to make farting sounds every time she shifted her weight. The water cooler had plenty of opportunity to make a “glug” sound, but for whatever reason it was silent today.

Danato entered, slamming the door behind him. She marveled at the strength of the glass window in that door. Danato sat down in his desk chair. The old metal springs groaned and squeaked as he maneuvered himself closer to the desk. The chair had to be from the 1970s. Upgrading apparently wasn’t in the budget.

Danato set several file folders down on the desk and tented his hands over them. He looked across the desk at Cori with his mouth parted, prepared to speak.

She waited… again.

If she didn’t know it was impossible, she would have sworn the clock was ticking even louder now. If he didn’t say something soon, she was going to rip it off the wall and perform an apen-tick-tomy on it.

“You amaze me, sometimes,” Danato finally said without the expected rage in his voice. “It must just be pure luck on your part. The things you stumble onto.” He slid the top file across the desk to her.

She picked up the manila folder and opened it. The first page showed a list of stats, medical requirements, and food requirements. Paper clipped in the top right was a photo of the transmorph she had burned with acid.

His face was blistered on his right side, starting at his temple and finishing below the neckline. His right eyelid was depressed and sealed shut.

She closed the file and put it back on the desk. “I’m sorry.” She hadn’t thought she would be, but seeing that photo, she realized she had tortured that poor creature out of revenge for a cruel but otherwise harmless mockery. “I let them get to me. They appeared to me as Vince. I just couldn’t handle them wearing his face. I let my anger take over.”

Danato nodded. “You did lose your temper. It was an understandable reaction given the last two weeks, but excessive and certainly not condoned.”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t need you to baby me just because Vince is gone.”
He’s dead.
“I’m ready for my punishment.”

“Oh, it will be a big punishment.” Danato paused. “Which I’ll think of later.” He pushed the file back to her. “Did you notice anything different about that file?”

She looked down at the folder. “Compared to what?”

He shoved the other files across the desk, which pushed the first one off to the floor. She picked it up and opened it again. She flipped through the others, leaving them open for comparison. One of these is not like the others. “There are no photos in the other files?” she said, questioning whether that was the correct answer.

“Correct.” Danato rubbed his hands together. “These are the files of transmorphs. They have never had photos, because we don’t know what they really look like.”

“So now that I’ve scarred him for life, you’ll always know he’s a transmorph,” she surmised.

“No, his tissue will repair. The eye may take a bit longer, but… no, no, don’t worry about him. The damn creatures never age, they certainly won’t scar. What we are seeing in this picture…” Danato stood and moved around the desk to point out the picture to her. “This is his original form. His core shape.”

Cori stared at him blankly.

Danato poked the picture again as if that would make it all clear.

She nodded.

He laughed and shook his head. He knelt down in front of her. “What you did was very bad. Bad, bad, bad.” He shook his finger at her. “However, because you did it, we can utilize a similar, albeit more humane, technique to induce the creatures to show their true face. Once we can identify them, we can keep track of them better.”

“Why would that help? Just because you know what they are supposed to look like doesn’t mean they will look like that,” she said.

He laughed again and raised his hands just short of cupping her face. “There is a catch in the creature’s defense. If it sees its own image, it has to form into that image.”

“Really?” she said, furrowing her brow.

“Yes. Something about the reflection and stimulating the mind and muscle reaction to what it thinks it should be… anyway, the point is I can now make an entire floor safer.”

“Because of bad, bad me?”

“Because of your reactive temper.”

She thought for a moment. “So, it never occurred to you to just dump acid all over your prisoners?”

“No, oddly enough, we just figured food and water was sufficient.” Danato said smiling ear to ear.

She shook her head. “I don’t know how you survived without me.”

Danato patted her arm tenderly. “Well.” He stood rather abruptly and opened the office door. “Come with me. I have your punishment picked out.”

She put the folder back and followed him out.

60

Outside the prison, the wind whipped around Cori, chilling her to the bone. The snow flurries it carried stung her face. From what she understood, the so-called summer temperatures could reach sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but naturally she had returned to her internment at the beginning of a new winter.

They trekked away from the mostly barren acreage that surrounded the western part of the prison and toward the cluttered outbuildings that occupied the eastern edge of the courtyard. Even during her first tenancy there, she hadn’t bothered to explore the countless outbuildings. Aside from most of them being locked, she found that the arctic climate sapped most of her curiosity.

“How much further?” Cori tucked closer to Danato, but so far he had been useless as a windbreak.

“Not far.” His booming voice turned to a murmur through the wind.

Cori kept her head down and trotted on until she butted into Danato’s back. He had stopped at one of the buildings. The outside wall looked like a grass hut, but the structure itself was as big as the house they lived in. He unlatched the door and ushered her in before him.

She charged into the warm entryway, shaking off the layer of ice that had developed in her hair. Danato pulled the door shut and latched it. He removed his coat and hung it up on a peg by the door.

“Take your coat off,” he instructed and reached to take it from her.

She shook her head, not willing to give up the warmth.

“You’ll be too warm with it on, I promise.” He fluttered his fingers, demanding the coat. She gave it to him and he hung it up by his.

The entryway was walled in opaque plastic. The room beyond was filled with artificial light. A distant, constant hum hinted at electrical equipment. She wondered though why she could smell fresh-cut grass and manure. “Oh, crap, this is a sewage plant, isn’t it? Oh please, I don’t want to know what happens to
my
business, let alone everyone else’s.”

Danato didn’t say anything, but an amused smirk perched on his lips. He didn’t often wear a smile, but this particular smirk was even rarer. She couldn’t pinpoint if it was the grin of an evil madman plotting his revenge or him just being coy.

Danato pushed through plastic straps to the next room. She felt the wave of heat and humidity that he had promised. The manure smell, although still there, was accented by a familiar fragrance. Dirt. She followed with only the slightest suspicion of what lay beyond the curtain.

On the other side, the electrical hum was louder. It was coming from fans that lined the upper walls of the structure. The ceiling was gridded glass. The remaining space aside from its contents was relatively open. As for the contents, from floor to ceiling, plants crawled, climbed, towered, and overflowed into the space.

“Welcome to the greenhouse,” Danato said.

Cori breathed in the sweet smell of floral beauty: part dirt, part grassy green, with just a hint of manure. She was very familiar with these smells. She had spent a good part of her life in a greenhouse and, until right now, she hadn’t thought she ever would again.

An uncontainable smile spread across her face. If Danato had thought slaving away amidst this beautiful flora would be a punishment, he was mistaken.

61

Ethan arrived after dinner for the fourth time that week. So late that the dinner dishes were done and Cori had retreated to her room. Danato was still up, sitting at the table looking through endless amounts of red-tape paperwork.

Ethan hung up his coat and gave him a nod before heading to the fridge. He grabbed the milk carton from the top shelf and started chugging straight from the cardboard opening.

“You better be finishing that?” Danato muttered, not looking up from his papers.

Ethan tucked the carton under his arm and pulled out a bowl of now lukewarm leftovers. “What is it?” he asked, staring at the aluminum foil top.

“Chili,” Danato answered.

“Again,” he mumbled, shaking his head. He grabbed a spoon from the dish rack and headed to the living room.

“I don’t think so,” Danato said as he neared the couch.

“You’re doing paperwork. I don’t want to spill on it.”

“Better my papers than my sofa.”

Ethan had always been surprised that Danato was so anal about the furniture. He understood the ramifications of a messy home thanks to Cori. Yet he was still treated like a ten-year-old trying to sneak grape juice onto the white carpet.

He sat down at the table and shoveled in his chili, guzzling milk between bites. The sweet taste was always a surprise to him. Danato wasn’t the best cook, but he did have a few dishes that he did well. His chili was the perfect combination of hot and sweet.