The World Forgot (15 page)

Chloe looks at her feet and mumbles something.

“I can't hear you,” I snap.

“I said
all right
,” she mumbles more loudly. “Jeez.” She turns to Bok Choy. “If we're going to get them, let's get moving already.”

“This way,” Bok Choy says, and we all follow. I bring up the rear with my bratty-ass daughter.

“Someday you'll understand,” I tell her.

“Whatever,” she replies.

Teenagers.

Suddenly the floor rocks underneath us, and we find ourselves in complete darkness.

“Now what?” Ducky cries behind me.

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, backup lights illuminate the hallway in a dim, bluish hue. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, tingling.

“A trick of yours?” I ask Bok Choy.

“No,” he says.

“It's like before,” Chloe says. “When the other hybrid escaped. She sabotaged the security systems by overloading the power grid. It lasted only ten minutes or so, but that was all she needed. Crafty for a mule.”

“Don't call her that,” I say, spinning around on Chloe. “That's your grandmother you're talking about. She's not a mule; she's an Enosi. And so am I. And so are you. If you want to call the woman anything, call her ‘grandma.' Or ‘lying, double-­crossing bitch' works too. But never,
ever
‘mule.'”

“Sorry,” Chloe tells me, rolling her eyes.

I look around in the dim light. “So who do you think's trying to escape now?” I ask the group. “Besides us, I mean.”

“I don't know,” Chloe replies. “But if it puts the whole base on high alert, then we're in trouble.” She jerks her head toward Bok Choy. “Let's hurry up and grab the ditzes so we can get out of here already.”

With Bok Choy in the lead, we make our way to the next detention area over, identical to the one we just left. There are five cell doors along the wall, but only one has a red “locked” light on. I follow Bok Choy directly to the door.

“I thought you said there were girls,” I say. “As in plural.”

“There are,” Bok Choy tells me. “Marsden keeps them all in here.”

Bok Choy punches the key code into the wall console, but nothing happens.

“It's stuck,” he mutters. “The power, I guess.” He grips the door and starts trying to pull it, even though there's no edge to grab. Cole lays Marnie gently down on the ground and lends Bok Choy a hand. Between the two of them, with their otherworldly alien strength, they manage to move the door exactly zero millimeters.

“Boys,”
I say with a sigh. “Chloe, you have anything that could jimmy this panel loose?”

“Step back,” she says. And it's a good thing I do, because before the words are even out of her mouth, she has unslung her gun and fired off one precisely aimed shot to the immediate right of the console, sending sparks flying and blasting a clean hole through the metal plating. I pry the remaining fragments away to create a gap, giving me access to the wiring behind the panel.

“Okay. One second,” I say, fiddling blindly.

“Careful,” Chloe tells me. “You'll fry yourself.” She hands me a pair of thin rubbery gloves from the pocket of her uniform.

“Thanks.” I slip the gloves on and resume my work. Chloe slips in beside me, and together we piece through the wiring. I'm happy to learn that in addition to my smart mouth, Chloe has inherited at least a few of my other qualities.

“There,” I say as the light above the door surges with a
vwoop!
This time, rather than switching from red to blue, the light blinks out completely.

“Um, Elvie, the door is still locked,” Cole says.

“Wrong,” I inform him. “The door is still
closed
.”

Chloe and I exchange a glance and push against the door, much as Bok Choy and Cole did before—only, this time the dead door slides, with some resistance, into the wall.

“Voila,” I say. “Open sesame, and such.”

Inside, the room is completely dark. I peek inside.

“Hello?”

There is some low murmuring. Shadows flicker in the corners.

“It's all right,” I say softly. “It's me. It's Elvie. We've come to rescue you guys. One more time, with feeling.”

“Elvie?” comes a voice along the back left wall—but it's not said in recognition. It's as if the girl has never heard my name before.

Oh God,
I think.
What have they done to these girls?
Because the voice, it's one I know all too well. And the name attached to it is
certainly
not one I'd ever forget.

“It's me, Britta,” I say quietly. “We're going.” Shockingly, I don't even feel annoyed at the thought that Britta McVicker—world's most obnoxious cheerleader and Cole's former girlfriend—is alive and well. Score one for personal growth!

“Going?” says another voice from the other side of the room.

Another eerily familiar voice.

“Um, yeah,” I say. The hair on the back of my neck prickles once more, and I have not yet figured out why. “Come on, guys. Stop hiding back there. It's all right. We're getting you all out of here and going home.”

“Home?” says another voice straight ahead of me. Or was that Britta again? “What is home?”

“Give me a light,” I call to my friends behind me. The prickling has quickly morphed into nausea, creeping into my throat.

Behind me Bok Choy flashes a small LED lamp, chasing the shadows away with a harsh, cold light. And all at once I have an irrepressible need to puke my metaphysical guts out.

I am standing in a room, surrounded by more than a dozen girls.

And they're all Britta.

Chapter Ten

In Which It Seems Everyone Has Something to Say about our Heroine's Ex-Boyfriend's Butt

It's just a dream,
I tell myself, eyes shut as tightly as I can force them.
A bad dream. A really, really, really bad dream.

But when I open my eyes, they're all still here. It's not a dream, or a trick of the light, or some sort of stress-headache-­induced hallucination. I am surrounded on all sides by Brittas. At least twelve exact duplicates of my least favorite person-who's-not-actively-trying-to-kill-me in the world. This is a new low, even for a lunatic like Marsden. I mean, homicide? That's bad. Attempted genocide? Not good at all. Imprisoning and torturing innocent young women? Really frowned upon.

But an
army of Brittas
?

The man must be stopped.

“What's the matter, Elvie?” Ducky calls from the hall behind me. “Are you okay in there?”

“Who's that?” a Britta asks, taking a tentative step forward and craning her head to try to see into the hallway.

“Are you taking us for more tests?” another Britta joins in.

“I just had my test,” pouts a third Britta. “Please don't make me go back so soon.”

Another Britta feels the need to chime in. “Your hair . . . did you make it look that way on purpose?”

“Can't we gag them or something?” Chloe asks me seriously. “Before we get permanently dumber from listening to them?”

Looks like my daughter and I might have more in common than I feared.

“We need to go, Brit—er,
ladies
,” I say, trying to reassemble the toppled Jenga tower that is my brain. “We're getting you out of here.”

“What's a britterlady?” one asks.

“Why are we leaving?” asks another.

“Who are you?”

“What's wrong with your face? You look like you smelled something bad. Did you smell something bad?”

From there things turn into a cacophony of Britta babble, each of the identical hell beasts bombarding me with questions and accusations that weave in and out of one another so unintelligibly that soon I hear nothing but one long hum of shrill, entitled, and apparently amnesiac voices.

“Look, just shut up!” I finally shout. “We've got to go, like,
now
.” You'd think at this point I'd be more adept at explaining to a large group of imprisoned teenage girls why we need to get off a spaceship, but I find myself a tad flustered. And nothing I say stops them from whining at me.

That's when Cole decides to step into the room to see what all the fuss is about.

“Elvie?” he says. “What is going—
whoa
.”

“Cole,” I say. He's fallen into the same stupefied trance I just found myself in, but we really don't have the time to play out these reactions one at a time. There's still the matter of getting out of here un-murdered. I snap my fingers at him. “Cole!”

Suddenly I realize that the Britta Brigade has fallen silent. And it's not because of my authoritative tone.

“Cole?” one of the Britta's says, the question hanging in the air like a hopeful, half-remembered dream. Every girl is now staring intently at Cole, who manages to close his mouth just long enough for one comically perfect gulp.

“Um, hi,” he says awkwardly.

“Cole . . . ,”
another says with a sigh.

And then, in perfect, horrific unison, the Brigade bursts into terrifying, synchronized smiles.

“Cole-eeeeeeee!”

As the Brittas swarm around Cole, chattering like Brittas are wont to do, I am reminded of an old recording we once watched in history class of a band called the Beatles trying to escape a rabid crowd of young female fans, who were chasing and pawing at them with unbridled passion. This is exactly like that, only 300 percent more vomit-inducing.

The Brittas engulf Cole like a school of piranhas. I'm half afraid that when they finally swim off, there will be nothing left but Cole's head on top of a cleanly picked skeleton.

“Amazing,” Bok Choy says. I didn't even notice him stepping into the room. “They know him.”

“Well, he did date her back on Earth,” I say. “I mean, one of them, at least.” Then I ask the obvious question. “How are there so many of them? Of
her
?”

Bok Choy winces as the Brigade squeals en masse, having just (re?)discovered how cute Cole's butt is. “The doctor needed . . . a controlled environment,” he tells me. “To incubate his experiments. And he found himself with a limited number of hosts.”

That's when I notice that one of the Brittas, sporting a thin tank top, has a dark letter
K
tattooed on her right shoulder.

Another sports a
D
.

And yet another, an
H
.

Clones.

“He couldn't have cloned literally
anyone
else?” I ask. “Was Lizzie Borden not available?”

“We have to go,” Chloe reminds me, interrupting the shiver that is making its way down my spine. “Either you find some way to herd them, or we leave all their asses here. I won't bother telling you which option I prefer.”

As much as I hate to argue for a world in which we actively attempt to rescue a dozen photocopies of my least favorite cheerleader, after my little “Everyone is worth it” speech earlier I don't seem to have much choice.

“Excuse me!” I shout over the din. “Excuse me! Brittas? Hel-
lo
? Hey, dummies!”

But they clearly can't hear/see/smell anything but Cole.

“Cole, flex your butt again!”

“Can I touch your butt, Cole?”

“No, I get to touch it. Cole, let me touch it.”

“Cole?”

“Hey, Cole?”

“Cole?”

“Cole?”

Cole.

“Cole!” I call, adding to the din of voices shouting his name. But I guess I manage to break through. Cole whips his head around to face me, completely shell-shocked, and I give him an expectant look. “I think you're the shepherd we need for this particular herd of cats.”

It shouldn't surprise me that Cole has no idea what I'm talking about.

“Huh?” he says.

I point down the hallway, in the direction where our ship (pleasepleasehopefully) lies. “Run!” I tell him.

“Ah,” Cole replies, finally getting it. And bless his dumb, doofy heart, he makes a break for it, knowing full well that the gaggle of screaming Brittas will follow.

“We're right behind you!” I assure Cole—only to be elbowed in the stomach by a passing Britta.

“Hands off, lardo,” she snaps at me. “That butt is
mine
.”

I am too confounded and exhausted to even attempt a comeback.

“Okay,” I say to the others as the Britta Brigade pushes its way down the hall like a particularly unsavory hair ball down a drain. “Best get moving.”

And that's when I notice that one of the Brittas is still in our midst.

Haggard, harried, dirtier than I've ever seen her, she stands stock-still, staring at the group receding around the corner. And I am certain, without even checking her shoulder, that
this
is the Britta I've known and hated for so long.

She turns to me and rolls her eyes. “Tell me I'm not that annoying,” she says, gesturing toward the others.

I laugh, despite myself. And something escapes my mouth that I never would've expected in the presence of Britta McVicker. “It's nice to see you,” I tell her.

She regards me coolly. “Captivity's been
hell
on your complexion,” she replies.

•    •    •

So far we haven't passed a single Jin'Kai guard, but I'm not counting on our luck holding out. There's a lot more hallway in this space station than I ever would've anticipated. If you'd told me two months ago precisely how much of my time I was going to spend running for my life through various hallways, I would've asked to see if your medical hallucinogen card had expired.

At least this time the Brittas are keeping things interesting.

“Has your hair
always
been so dreamy?” one asks Cole as we dash past several locked doors.

“Can I touch your biceps again?”

“No, me!”

“It's my turn. You got to touch his butt.”

“It
is
a really nice butt.”

Chloe is clearly on her last nerve. “I have a blaster,” she reminds us.

“Go ahead,” says Original Britta, hustling to keep up beside me. “You didn't have to share a room with those chromers.”

“You do realize that's
you
you're talking about,” Ducky puts in. Then he hesitates. “Isn't it?”

All but the Brittas are silent for a few minutes, perhaps pondering this very question, when Marnie, in Bok Choy's arms, at last begins to stir.

“Oh, thank God,” Ducky says. “Cole!” he calls up ahead. “Cole, hold on one sec. Marnie's waking up. We have to make sure she's okay before we— Oh, Marnie, you're awake!”

Marnie blinks several times, as though testing her vision.

“How are you feeling?” Ducky asks her gently.

Marnie offers him a warm smile. “I'm fine, Donald, ye specky goose. I jes' had a bit a the—” Her gaze travels down the hall to the lot of identical blond cheerleaders, all staring directly at her. “I must've hit me head harder 'n I thought,” she says. And with that, she's out again.

The floor trembles beneath us, and the emergency runner lights flicker. Sirens start blaring.

And here I thought our luck would give out.

“Crap!” Ducky says. “They're onto us.”

“No,” Chloe replies, pausing to listen to the muted honking. “Something's . . . off. Those aren't Jin'Kai alarms.”

“What do you think it could be?” I ask.

Chloe tilts her head. “Those are station-wide alarms,” she says. “Whatever's going on, it's going big.”

Which is precisely when one of the Brittas up ahead shouts, “Someone's coming this way!”

“Get behind me!” instructs Bok Choy, passing the still-­unconscious Marnie off to Ducky and crouching in a defensive stance with his weapon drawn. Chloe slides into position next to him, her weapon out as well.

A band of Jin'Kai guards comes rushing up the adjoining corridor, large rifle-size ray guns slung down from shoulder straps in a let's-fuck-shit-up position. I count six of them. No way we survive this. No way.

Except they run right past us. Past all of us. All except the last one, who turns with a confused look on his face.

“What are you doing wasting your time with that lot?” he asks Bok Choy and Chloe, jerking his head toward the Brigade. “Get to your designated battle station. We're under attack!”

“Attack?” Chloe asks. “Almiri?”

“No, the fleet,” he says as he runs after his compatriots.
“They're here.”

Well, if that don't put the donkey on the carousel, or some other expression that actually makes sense. (Forgive me, but I'm way too terrified to string words into phrases right now.)

The fleet.

The Jin'Kai invasion force that Marsden warned about.

They're here.

If an armada of Devastators doesn't make you stain your undies, I don't know what in this world will.

Suddenly there's an explosion from up ahead. Screams and gunfire. I race to the front and peer around the corner to get a look. The bodies of five guards lie motionless on the ground, while the sixth is dangling two meters above, held at the throat in a vise grip by a Devastator. This particular Devastator is bigger than the one I tussled with in Antarctica, if that's possible, and wearing full battle armor, a gray, bug-shell-like muscle suit, complete with jagged metal edges at the joints. You know, because apparently its massive claws and spiky exoskeletal protrusions alone aren't enough to eviscerate its prey. Three more Devastators, similarly armed, stand behind the leader, seemingly unscathed by the firefight. The leader barks something at them, and the three giant uggos run off in another direction.

The remaining Devastator speaks menacingly to the Jin'Kai guard in his grip, in a language that sounds a lot like spoons in a garbage disposal. The Jin'Kai, meanwhile, still alive but wounded and defenseless, whimpers something in response. But I guess his particular mangled spoon response is not what the Devastator wanted to hear, because the creature unsheathes a long, serrated blade from its back and in one smooth motion skewers the helpless guard like a shish kebab. The guard dangles, twitching, on the hilt of the weapon, the blade jutting out of his back.

There's a shriek right in my ear. I turn to see Britta, white with fear, staring at the murder scene, still screaming.

“It's them! Them!” she screams. Like, guess who just arrived at the party.

My initial impulse is to clock her in the head, because
hello
, alerting the freaky monsters to our existence much? Of course, then I remember that Britta has been tortured for who knows how long, and prior to that she actually witnessed a Devastator decapitating her best friend (who was kind of a bitch, but
still
). So, with our own impending head-from-neck removals imminent, I decide, rather magnanimously, not to pile on.

When the monster looks up and roars, a chill of memory washes over me. I really need to start reevaluating my life decisions, I think, given the number of times lately I've found myself face-to-face with monsters who want to kill me.

Unable to quickly dislodge the dead Jin'Kai from his sword, the Devastator tosses his weapon away and charges at us, equipped only with four armored monster arms, endless rows of fang-like teeth, and about half a dozen enormous guns strapped across its heavily protected chest.

I pull Britta back around the bend of the hallway, and the other Brittas, perhaps instinctively, squeeze in to form a protective barrier around us. I'm afraid Ducky's going to go all noodle-boned on us again and collapse, but perhaps because he is holding Marnie, he remains upright, head held high.