Unhaunting The Hours (6 page)

“
Hey!” he
shouted.

I slammed my back into a rack of
tortilla chips, keeling and pressing my temples. I spun and grabbed
a jar of salsa and flung it at the kid. But I lobbed it short, and
it shattered at the kid’s feet, painting his pants with chunks of
tomato. He looked surprised, but undaunted, so I hauled more jars
off the shelf and heaved them in any direction, like some kind of
demented bowler. The clerk ran back down the aisle, and grabbed a
red phone that was hanging on a post. I made it out of the isle,
and heard the security call on the PA moments later.

I tumbled forward, making good speed
now that the adrenaline had kicked in. I saw a flower shop at the
end of the isle. I made it there before anyone saw me, and I
grabbed the door. It hissed, and a blast of moist air hit me. When
the door resealed its air lock, the room was silent. I was alone
inside, among giant pots shrouded in gold foil. I gasped and leaned
on the counter. I half expected the clone to emerge from the
seedling incubator, wrapped in a bloody smock and wielding a
monstrous pair of gardener’s shears, and intoning in a low voice:
“Can I help you?” But that’s not how it happened.

I felt breathing on my neck. I raised
my head and saw him staring down at me. He was wearing the smock,
but it was covered in dirt rather than blood. And instead of a
murder weapon, he carried a tiny clay pot with green sprouts. He’d
concealed the lower part of his face in bandages. The light glinted
off a tiny ring behind his ear, a Cipher port like my own. Then he
spoke.

“
You are him, aren’t
you?”

His voice was almost a cough. He
sounded very old now, perhaps decades older than me. He was dying
of old age. But his eyes considered me with a sort of lost wonder.
At first I thought he might’ve been hopped up on Spectrum, but then
I realized that his mind was probably frozen in a sort of demented
childhood. He’d probably dreamed of the moment he’d finally get his
hands on me, and now he wasn’t quite sure if it was real. I knew
that feeling.

I looked over the wall, where I saw a
lever attached to a box. I pointed at it.

“
The alarm?” I
said.

“
Huh?”

I leaped halfway onto the counter; just
enough to grasp the handle. Fire suppressant rained down on us.
Outside, it drenched every inch of the store in great white sheets.
People rushed from all directions while the kid with the
salsa-covered pants, and about a dozen other employees, attempted
to organize the evacuation. Beyond the windows, I saw cop
flashers.

“
The flowers!” shouted my
twin.

He gathered the pots and secured them
in the incubator. Then he froze, as if I’d pressed some hidden
pause button. He held a pot in one crooked arm, the flowers and his
crazy hair wilting and dripping with the acrid-smelling suppressant
fluid. His eyes were fixed on a spot out there, and when I looked I
saw it was Molly, pressing into the crowd. I inhaled and braced
myself, and lunged at him. Then he flipped me over – he was
stronger than I would’ve guessed – and he put a boot on my chest,
right where I’d gotten it before. That made three times this week.
I decided that this time I wouldn’t struggle, and I’d just watch
for the right moment. I couldn’t fight this guy, but I knew I could
fool him. I tilted my head to the side and closed my eyes to a
slit.

He dragged me across the floor, the
fire suppressant spurting in my face. He pulled me into the
incubator, where it wasn’t raining. He released me and put his foot
on my neck, and rattled a box attached to the wall. A rack of
plants jumped and came loose from the rest. The butcher grabbed it
and pulled it aside and dragged me through the opening that it had
covered.

I opened my eyes fully. The room inside
was dark, but I could see a computer rack blinking in a corner.
Neural connector cables hung off it, and I knew it was a client
machine for the Cipher. Then there was a blinding light ahead, and
plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling. I could turn my head just
enough to see a large metal table and racks of knives. The butcher
heaved me up and dropped me on the table; the cold metal hurt like
hell. I closed my eyes again. I moved my fingers just enough to
feel the table’s surface. There were grooves on the side. I
realized that the butcher wasn’t a surgeon at all. The mob had made
him into a coroner, and I was lying on an autopsy table. The
grooves were there to catch my bodily fluids when he opened me. But
this was good, I thought. There was a bright side to all
this.

I risked opening my eyes to a slit
again. His back was turned to me. He took a syringe off a cart, and
he poked it through the top of a glass jar. It was too far away to
read, but I didn’t need too. When he turned around, I swung my feet
and hit him square in the nuts. He keeled and I propelled myself
off the table with just enough force to knock him over. His tray
fell over, spilling utensils on the floor. I ignored the pain
shooting up and down my spine, and I grabbed the butcher’s hand,
the one that held the syringe. In the struggle, it stuck in him in
the neck and I tried to push the plunger. But he knocked it from my
hands. He reached his arm around, but now he couldn’t move his head
to see me. So I lurched forward and put my knees on his arms and
grabbed his red hair and banged his head into the ground. That
dazed him just long enough for me to grab a surgical knife from the
floor and slit his shirt from the neck down. I couldn’t make it all
the way down without getting off his arms, but what I cut away was
just enough to reveal the IV nub. I leaned over and grabbed the
syringe and pushed the plunger all the way down. I stood up,
falling backwards and crashing into the table. I propped myself up
on it.

The butcher’s eyes were still open, his
body twisted into an unnatural shape. He was still breathing. His
stuff was the usual stuff, and not the juice Healing had put in me.
My clone had meant to cut me open alive, paralyzed and without
anesthetic. His eyes looked terrified.

I said, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’m not
the same as you.”

Then I remembered the paper bag in my
pocket. I pulled it out, unraveled it, and dropped the little
memory chip in my hand. I knelt down and stuck it in the butcher’s
socket. I had a feeling I knew exactly what that figure had been,
the one I’d seen moving through the static in those moments before
my dreams recalled my own memories back to me. It had looked like a
phantom because it hadn’t belonged to me; it had belonged to him.
Healing had attempted to retrieve my memories from the Cipher, and
there were some parts of our identities that it couldn’t untangle.
In that moment where I watched my clone’s eyes close, as his mind
merged with the chip, I had to wonder how long he’d been out there
in the ether. How many times had we both been plugged into the
Abdera network? How many times did we each think we were alone, but
couldn’t shake the feeling of another’s presence? I watched him for
a while. I heard Balder’s voice in the distance. I thought about
what Balder had said, about how “our mutual friend” must have quite
a story to tell. The image I’d seen, only darkly, was frightening
enough. I couldn’t image what my clone was now reliving.

* * * *

They put me in Halestead, an
institution for the criminally insane. It was only a few blocks
from my home. After a week, they called me into the interview room.
I sat there for ten minutes, in a plastic chair that resembled the
ones in the lecture rooms back at the university. Outside I heard
the water behind the Berm, rushing and unrelenting. Then Balder
entered; the evening sun behind the blinds painted stripes across
his face. He sat at the little table, across from me.

“
I’m sorry I didn’t come
sooner.” He said. “I got the judge to put you in here.”

I said nothing.

He said, “What did you want? To go to
trial? I don’t think that would work out in your favor. Now that
you’re in here, we have a chance of getting you out
again.”

“
What are you
after?”

“
I thought you might like to
know that we caught Healing. He was working in an animal shelter in
Miami. He always liked animals; they calmed him down. Anyway, you
probably already guessed that he’d been monitoring you through the
surveillance network and the investigative database. That’s how he
was able to follow you, and that’s how he knew the details of my
investigation. That’s how he knew you had a clone. I want you to
know that his activities were illegal, and that I didn’t know of
them.”

“
You want to clear your
conscience?”

He didn’t say anything, and I let him
stew in it. In the time I’d been in here, I’d figured some things
out. First thing was, Balder had been using me and still intended
to use me. Second, Healing had used me too, but for a different
reason. The butcher had been a part of Abdera. Healing needed to
believe that I was a killer, just like my clone. Of course, now I
knew that it was never so simple as pointing to genes or Abdera or
childhood trauma and saying that was the thing that turned a man
into a killer. But they each played a part in how I and my clone
turned out. Like I said, damn the police psych profilers. I could
figure this out on my own. But it’s funny how, after swallowing all
the Abdera doctrine on finding one’s inner self and liberating it
from the confines of the physical body, Healing had reverted to
believing that my genes made me a killer. He did what it took to
save his faith, and what a sacrifice that must have
been.

Balder said, “We’ve opened a file on
Abdera. This is a dangerous business, because it’s a recognized
religion, do you follow? And most of the colonies are probably
legit.”

“
What are you trying to
say?”

“
We think the mob’s been
setting up its own colonies. It’s been using the Cipher for mind
control.”

I nodded. Well, gosh.

Balder said, “I’d figured you’d be a
key asset, or you would’ve been had you let me handle things. You
see, I hear that few people can resist the Cipher’s song when they
plug in – but like you said, you’re immune now.”

“
Don’t ask me to go back
inside.”

He pursed his lips, and said, “When the
time comes, I won’t be asking.”

He was quiet, and then he said, “I’ve
got a confession. You were right about me. I have access to this
city’s entire surveillance network. And sometimes, I look a little
longer than I have to. I don’t know why; I’m just a dirty voyeur I
guess. But I tell myself – maybe I lie to myself - that it connects
me to people. I do good work, George. I’ve got a wife and two kids.
My buddies call me the boy scout, because I take the police motto
seriously – to serve and to protect. And I’ve got the scars to
prove it. Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe when I watch the
surveillance feeds on my personal time, I’m a different person than
the guy who puts his neck on the line for folks who could care
less. But that other guy still matters.”

I said, “Are you trying to tell me
something about myself?”

“
I’m sure you don’t need me
to tell you, but you’re not the Berm Butcher.”

“
I know.” I paused. “I’d
like to help your investigation. Someday, I’d like to trust
you.”

Balder nodded, and stood up.

As he left, he said, “I guess that’s
all I can ask for.”