Chapter Seventeen. 04:10pm
SHOWDOWN WITH MOTHER DEAREST.
The Nelsons acted as confused by her words as I was, but luckily I had a quick-thinking Stuart on my team. Barely a second passed between the end of her sentence and him snatching a shocking tool from a clammy hand. He wrenched it from the distracted Nelson who had threatened him with it earlier and swung the thick handle into the clone's face. I turned in time to see it connect with the bewildered being's skull.
It made a right mess.
Like the zombies up top, the clones were as brittle as the surface of a lightly frozen lake. With only one hit, solid though it was, Stuart bashed the poor mite's head in and left a sizeable dent where the forehead had been. The damage forced nondescript brown sludge to dribble out of its ear-holes. It would have been a very confusing time for the thing's brain, dealing with information from eyeballs staring only at each other, if it hadn't been crushed by splintered skull.
In the aftermath of Stuart's violence I managed to land a surprise smack to the chin of the foe nearest me, almost knocking his jaw clean off. I caught him with a left hook, one of the few decent punches I've thrown in my life. The lower part of his mouth dislocated, tearing the skin like wrapping paper and leaving his mandible hanging from a sinewy bit of jowl. It didn't kill the guy, but he wasn't left in any state to attack me. Snatching the stick was like taking candy from a thalidomide infant with bandaged hands. I jabbed the sparkly end into his damaged face and it skewered right through, dropping him to the floor and leaving me to twist the weapon back out.
Susan was the only one of us to not react quickly enough and she paid the price. One snappy copy of Nelson jabbed an electric stick into her left boob whilst Stuart was busy zapping another of the guards. She dropped to the floor and convulsed, her voice escaping as strained, indecipherable croaks. I landed a kick on her attacker, snapping his leg just below the knee like his bones were breadsticks.
"Oh," he said, not displaying the screaming anger I'd expected. Instead he collapsed, his head tilted to stare benignly at the bone spiking from his knee. This position left the guy open to a two-footed chest-stomp attack from Stuart. It made a splash like he'd jumped into a paddling pool filled with chunky tomato soup, spraying everyone with sloppy innards.
Nelson was still debilitated by his mother's ear-based death grip, simultaneously horrified and useless, like it hadn't even crossed his mind to break free or help us. His mother barked frantic orders to the two Nelsons manning the computers. One hunched over and hammered at a keyboard, the other crossed the platform on his wheeled chair and flung open the doors of a metal locker.
The remaining guard, the last of the original five, backed off and contorted his body into a defensive stance. Utterly ridiculous. Both arms splayed out, crouched like a sumo wrestler, wand in his left hand. The fingers of his right flexed in anticipation. I gave him a light zap to the wrist whilst Stuart helped Susan up from the floor, balancing her against him. As the clone distractedly dropped his wand and pawed his tender forearm, I lunged in closer with the trigger firmly pressed. I'm quite sure that whatever the clone used for a heart simply burst inside his chest. I heard a pop then he dropped into a lifeless lump. Switched off like a bedside lamp.
I waved the spare stick at Susan but she pushed it away with a garbled response.
"Behind you!" Stuart said.
He wasn't wrong. That exclamation point was entirely justified. I turned to meet a charging clone head on, jamming a metal prong straight through the bridge of his nose, basically destroying the structural integrity of the cartilage that held his eyes. A second shove put it a few inches deeper, embedding the flickering electricity somewhere in his brain. He dropped to his knees, which themselves seemed to crack and ruin from the impact.
I kept the stick in his head, the trigger still engaged. His arms twitched and slapped his sides. He wasn't dead yet.
I wanted smoke to billow from his ears, a product of a BBQ'd brain, but only thin streams of bloody goo seeped out. I got a mild, warped kick seeing his eyes cross in a bid to get a better look at the tool that had destroyed his face; I couldn't tell if it was voluntary or not, but it was satisfying in a morally bankrupt, sadistic way. Then one of his eyes deflated and my guts almost staged a dirty protest.
It shouldn't be so effortless to kill a man, clone or not. The ease with which they died endowed them with a flimsy, threadbare base of existence, suggesting they weren't quite real, stealing away their humanity. They were like video game foes that would respawn elsewhere as soon as you took them down, but frail and useless as if the game was set to 'easy mode' and the AI reduced to simple dash-and-die commands.
They were china doll figurines and I was the bull storming around the shop.
I removed the stick but found it useless, a dud. The button no longer created sparks. A red LED flashed on the handle next to a microscopic picture of a battery. I stuck it deep into the downed clone's stomach, piercing the white suit and skin. The final guard came at me with no weapon, perhaps hoping to drown me in his guts or make me surrender out of pity.
He had his tongue poking out of his mouth, to show how much he was concentrating. I readied my spare stick like a swash-buckling pirate.
He didn't make it within my arms reach.
I didn't even have to kill him. A rogue spillage of blood stole his footing, and he landed in a motionless heap. One leg detached at the hip and his own foot rested on his lifeless face. He split his legs in mid-air and snapped like a lucky wishbone.
I almost felt bad for their chronic ineptitude. Being bridled with Nelson's body would be woeful enough, so also having the fragility of a dandelion with leprosy couldn't help. They must be unable to even brush their teeth for fear of stabbing through a cheek or dislodging a bunch of molars. Masturbation would be impossible. Even blinking was probably risky, lest the collision of eyelids do irreparable damage.
Presumably they suffered a shorter existence than cheap cider in a tramp's hand.
-
Nelson's mother returned ear privileges to her bewildered son and made a dash up the stairs to the main computer. She reached for a wired, chunky phone handset as I caught up and jolted her, slightly, and told her to leave it alone.
"Don't touch that phone. I can't cope with you calling another moronic herd of those creepy things in here. We'll only kill them anyway."
Stuart moved to our Nelson's side and pointed his zapping wand directly at his big dumb face. Susan took a seat and stared at her knees with a hand shoved down her top, comforting the damaged, electrocuted breast.
"Right then. Tell us what the fuck is going on here," I said, "or Stuart cooks your son."