CANNON: I sent a discreet unit to check and we have no one in sight or responding in that locality. Unless you revoke this, I will have men combing the area for any signs of them in a few minutes. The subject appears to be at home, judging by sounds that one agent has heard, and her vehicle is in the garage. The only signal we can get is a weak one that corresponds to the bodycam and appears to be coming from the north-west. Sent men to find that.
Revoke? I’m not reversing what Cannon has decided to order done. I stare at the wall where a Renoir hides the opening of the safe. Replying to that is not necessary. North-west means the mountains above the town, means this could take a while because the area is rough, steep, all that crap. A chopper might help but we don’t want to draw attention to the search.
I rise and pad to the armchair to get my dressing gown from where I flung it, wrap it around me then head for mystudy. My sleep deprivation will be chalked up on Hailey’s debit column. What has she done? Nothing probably. It must be some accident. Have they driven off the road and crashed? There are almost no roads up there… Were they following her? If so, what was she doing up there at night?
We’re so close to cracking the research. This Hailey business needs to be finished. Simon Tarrant sent the research in a new direction, and the past six months have been turbocharged. A pity he turned traitor.
I may as well stay awake and wait for updates.
With the laptop fired up, I cannot resist the temptation to check the cryo room where the bodies wait for their revival. The glass lids of the cryo coffins makes for easy observation and ID. Some of the corpses are gruesome, even frozen in death, due to their missing limbs and various chunks taken out of their bodies.
Leisurely, I touch-scroll along the row the camera is pointing down. Twenty-four now, in total, since the latest shipment. War does tend to deliver copious death and ripped-apart corpses. These few we siphoned off will never be noticed. Ensuring no close relatives, getting those forms signed, and leaving few footprints in the system is the key. Once we’re done with them, once we have this perfected, their own mommies won’t recognize them, and we will have the most unique product to offer the military since the dawn of time.
The last one on this row is a female, and I know I’m smiling, but there is something arousing about seeing a woman I fucked and tortured to death lying there waiting for me to bring her back to life, so I can command her again.
Bend over. Cry. Suck. Open those legs.
And now?Kill those menmight be possible. The strength,resilience and healing of frankenstructs is likely to be beyond the maximum of normal humans. And killing them, again, that should be difficult.
22
HARD WORK
When I waken it’s dark outside, but the sky is growing paler. It’s early morning. I haul myself up the bed to sit against the headboard, with one hand above Hailey’s head where her hair is strewn over the pillow, and the other, my injured left, curled on my thigh.
She stirred when I moved but settles again. Her pretty mouth curves in a sleepy smile that breaks my heart. I’m unsure why it saddens me. I have her beside me. Do I feel the loss of the years when we weren’t together, even though I’m not sure we ever were? Or is it that I’m afraid for our future.
She has such dangerous plans. And the honesty she demands, that bothers me.
I don’t know if I can truly ever be honest with her. I don’t know what I will recall in an hour let alone tomorrow. I guess if I don’t remember it, yet, it’s still honest, but will she forgive me? What if I was a bad person when I was simply a man?
The sex was glorious. Felt right. Felt exciting to the point where something on me or in me might’ve ruptured if I didn’tdo what I did to her—tie her up, fuck her roughly, make her love what I did. She seemed fully into it…
Yet I do not know where any of that came from—the need for kink, the need for control and bondage, even how to make her come was a mystery that arrived from nowhere that first time. And those creepy, horror-like scenes of women hanging from the ceiling—did they spring from my memory, or is it possible they planted new ones in my head?
I am a mystery to myself.
On the floor lies the black backpack I pilfered from the dusty deserted house. Inside it is the handler’s phone, now dead, the charge expired. In there may lie more of my past—a file on whatever happened or was done to me, perhaps. But I do not have the skills to get those files open. Recharging it, though, that should be possible.
I slip out of bed and pad over. I recall what a charger looks like, and Hailey has one plugged into the wall, with her own phone connected, lying on top of an antique dresser.
I head for it, then jolt and stumble. How do I know what an antique looks like or what a charger is? Those are more random memories sneaking in.
One day, hopefully, my memory will have bled in and filled up my head with everything I used to know. Until that day I doubt I will feel a complete person. I’m a charcoal sketch, a half-drawn thing that needs coloring in.
Feelings, I have those in abundance.
In my world, Hailey and I may have been married or partners…which would make the mission they gave me the worst one possible. Did someone send me to obliterate her father knowing I was in love with his daughter?
That would be the zenith of evil.
I unplug her phone and check the end of the chargingcord, the part that must plug into my handler’s phone. Then I turn his phone over. The jack or port—I think it’s called that. The port looks wrong. Or the end of the charging cord does. One of them is wrong, or both. They won’t fit together. I close my eyes, and with hands wrapped on the edge of the waist-high dresser, I lean in and do a sort-of angled plank, tensing and rocking on my bare feet. I breathe slowly to keep myself calm. There are too many questions.
My duct-taped finger lies before me, doing its job and hanging onto the dresser edge. When I bend the finger, the tape slips and slides. The cut seam where I joined the new dead finger onto my stump still looks ragged and ugly, though it doesn’t bleed. I rarely seem to bleed for long.
All these things, these differences between me, the devices, the normal people, her dad being already dead—they’re proof that Hailey’s world is not mine.
I give up on charging the handler’s phone, place Hailey’s on her little bedside table, and sit on the bed, idly rotating the little black phone in my hand. My weight makes the mattress dip, and Hailey yawns, which makes me smile down at her. The sheet has slid off her back to reveal her body all the way to her cute round ass. One of my bites from last night left a perfect teeth-shaped bruise in the middle of the plumpest section of her left cheek. I twist and collapse onto my side on the bed with my arm wrapped over her hip, so I can kiss the bruise.
