Chapter 5 - Abomination…
“Dispatch to all Registrars in the Upton District. Reports of an 14-14 on Westbrook and 9th.”
Lester Ferris cringed. He was only another half-hour from a warm meal and his comfortable bed at the end of a long day of appointments and paperwork. However he might wish to keep driving onward towards home, he could not ignore a 14-14 called in by the dispatcher.
“Register Ferris to dispatch. Any injuries?”
“None reported. But you better get there quick. Sounds like a nasty one.”
“Send for Registrar Franklin,” Lester wailed his siren and accelerated through the streets. “I want the dogs on scene as soon as possible.”
The day would not end pleasantly for Registrar Ferris. “14-14” was Registrar code for an undocumented clone creation. Only the Company held the right to introduce clones into the world. No lobby exerted more sway upon legislators than did the Company, and the Company employed a brigade of attorneys to secure the firm’s position as the world’s single provider of clones. Most importantly to Registrar Ferris, only the Company possessed the knowledge and skill required to give birth to clones. There remained none but the Company capable of creating a healthy and stable clone. The attempts of all other makers resulted in terrible abominations, in suffering, and often violent, mockeries of man.
Undocumented clone creations surfaced in alarmingly increasing numbers since the Company suspended its creation of Gus clones following Mr. Moon’s self-immolation. Rumors swirled that Mr. Moon’s suicide had rattled the Company board, that those who guided the Company suddenly paused to consider the implications of creating clones which the consumer transformed into gods. The Company had not birthed another Gus clone for nearly six months. Basement workshops and mobile-home laboratories appeared almost overnight, desperate to fulfill the demand for the Gus clone the Company left behind.
Thus far, none of those undocumented attempts had yet succeeded in duplicating another Gus clone. Failed, writhing flesh was often discarded in the street, left to ruin in pain, left to anguish and wail. Too often, those shambling clones of gristle and bone clawed against the living, created murder in their desperation. Monsters in the street became ever more common, until Registrar Ferris feared that the natural balance between creator, man and clone had devolved too far to ever again be reclaimed.
Traffic had already congested for several blocks before Westbrook and 9th. Lester shrilled his horn, but the onlookers gathered on either side of the streets stubbornly refused to clear a wide enough swath for Registrar Ferris’s cruiser to near the scene of everyone’s interest. Lester’s hand again trembled as he reached into his glove compartment and grabbed his snub-nosed, black gun. He took a breath as he slid the sidearm into the holster hidden beneath his jacket, the gun still failing to give him any courage.
The shriek hit Lester Ferris the moment he opened his cruiser’s door, standing the fine hair on his arms, scraping a shudder down his spine.
Lester’s knuckles turned white as he gripped his megaphone. “Everyone step back! These things are unpredictable and dangerous! No one get close!”
A second wail screamed against the night, and the crowd retreated and shifted so that Lester was provided an avenue through which to look upon the thing writhing in the street.
“Maker pity the creature,” Lester’s knees buckled.
The undocumented failure of a clone was a terrible contortion of twisted limbs and naked, bulbous flesh. Though three legs sprouted from a contorted torso, the creature depended upon a single, stunted arm for locomotion, the crowded fingers of its hand pulling at the asphalt to drag the swollen body forward along the street. A visage of two faces crowded upon a single face looked upward as Lester stepped forward from the crowd, and two mouths shrieked and hissed at the Registrar. A trio of white, milky eyes, set without apparent symmetry in the face, blinked, and Lester wondered if the clone was blind, or if those clouded eyes could gauge the faces that gathered to stare upon its suffering form.
The sight and the stench of the clone was enough to turn any hardened Registrar’s stomach. But the wailing was the worst of it. The clone screamed over and over again, a chilling, scraping howl bellowed from whatever set of knotted lungs and heart festered within a twisted skeleton’s cage.
“Everyone step back! Give it plenty of space!”
Lester carefully stepped closer to the abomination. The broken clone appeared to smell the Registrar’s approach, rearing its spindle-thin neck as far back as its muscles allowed before bellowing another wail. It shrieked as it twisted its limbs to face Lester, whose heart cracked to look upon the pained clone. He could not recount how many abominations he had seen since the Company ceased its production of Gus clones. He was sure he had seen too many. Lester had looked upon abominations with skin too thin to conceal underlying, pumping organs. He had looked upon the carnage a mad abomination wrought through a subsidized, housing apartment, had swooned to see how that abomination had torn children asunder. He had looked upon abominations that were little more than pulsating piles of muscle and bone. And each abomination he looked upon cracked his heart. Lester had never felt empathy towards those handsome Gus clones with the Company’s brand circling their right eyes, but he pitied those failed attempts to recreate the divine clone the Company refused to produce.
The clone suddenly ceased shrieking. It’s wide nostrils sniffed at the air. It feared whatever it smelled, for the clone whimpered as it’s lone, good arm frantically pulled its girth away from Lester.
A voice shouted amid the crowd. “Don’t approach the dogs! Move out of their way!”
The crowd had not given Registrar Ferris and his megaphone much space when he had arrived at the street corner, but that crowd quickly retreated to give a wide berth for the approach of a barking and yelping pack of dogs. Registrar Franklin hustled behind his hounds, straining to keep grip of the pack leashes clutched in his hand. The dogs were little less terrible than the undocumented clone whose shrieking renewed with new fervor at sight of the pack. Bred by the Company through a process not unlike its creation of clones, the dogs were birthed for only one purpose - to sniff and track prey. The dogs had no soft, brown coats a child might stroke. The dogs had no ears to scratch. They had not even the eyes with which to plead for another toss of a ball. They were furless dogs, with short, thick legs that kept their oversized maw and nose close to the ground. Once given a scent, Registrar Franklin’s ugly pack could not be thrown from the trail.
The pack of dog’s snapped at the end of their leashes when they neared the anguished clone. The abomination turned wild with shrieking and hissing. Its lone hand clawed at the air in front of it. Its milky eyes widened in fear and panic.
“Better take care of that thing fast!” Registrar Franklin shouted above his barking pack. “The dogs want at that clone!”
Lester strained to slow his breathing before pulling that snub-nosed, black gun out from the holster hidden within his jacket. He held the gun with both hands as he pointed the barrel upon the shrieking abomination. He had never fired his gun outside of the bureau’s basement shooting range. He had become a Registrar to notarize paperwork, to check titles and to scan Company brands. He had never wanted to chase through the city. He had never wished to fire a gun. It was not natural for a man such as himself to be asked to do such a thing.
Lester’s gun blared until the shrieking ceased.
Lester holstered his gun back beneath his jacket, and a bureau forensic team stepped out of the crowd to remove the corpse of an undocumented clone from the street.
“You ready, Lester?” Registrar Franklin shouted above his dogs. “The pack’s already got the scent. Shouldn’t be hard to follow. That clone was one hell of a shrieking shambler. Sure to have left its scent everywhere.”
Lester accepted a pair of dog leashes and strained against the dogs. “I hope the clone wasn’t just dumped out of a moving vehicle. I want to find the source, and I want to know if anyone was hurt in that thin
g’s path. I won’t be able to sleep until I know that.”
“It’’ll take longer if the clone was just thrown on the road, but we’ll find the source if we’re just stay patient. These dogs will sniff that path out no matter how someone’s tried covering it.”
Registrar Franklin shouted a command, and the dogs surged along the scent trail, pulling the Registrars forward, taxing the breath of their handlers who grunted to keep the dogs in check. The pack pushed across roadways and snorted down narrow alleys. Stray dogs and feral cats bolted as the hounds disturbed their hiding places, but the sniffing dogs never lost their focus on the scent left by the abomination found in the street. Lester felt thankful that the dogs followed a scent trail so confined to darkness and to shadow, a path distant from sidewalks and streetlights. They were fortunate not to come across bodies in that trail’s wake.
“You smelling it too, now?” Registrar Franklin pulled back on his dogs and slowed the hounds as they crossed a street and stepped upon a housing settlement’s block.
Lester nodded. “It’s mudder stew. That’s a Company tower ahead.”
One of the Company's black and windowless towers rose in front of the Registrars, another of the residential towers the Company constructed throughout the city to provide shelter and sustenance for their clones following a day of their labors. The Company considered those concrete towers, sweltering in the summer and frozen during winter, as fine investments to encourage clone sales; for by providing a place for a clone to sleep and to eat, the Company relieved a great burden shouldered by the consumer who, without the tall, black towers, would have to struggle on his or her own to feed and shelter their purchased products. The tower was simple, but it was also clean. Graffiti vandalized none of its walls. Clones did not smoke and toss spent cigarette butts in the courtyard. Nary a sound drifted from the windowless levels of clone housing, in which clone models took the sleep law mandated them to take before returning to their work as highway construction men or warehouse laborers.
"I never get used to the smell," whispered Registrar Franklin. "Been doing this job as long as you have, Lester, and my nose still wrinkles at the smell of it."
"We're just so close to that mudder stew the Company cooks up to feed that tower's clone population. I've often wondered if it could taste as terrible as it smells. Amazes me the dogs can smell anything under the stench of that mudder stew."
"Oh, they sure smell something.” Registrar Franklin whispered.
Registrar Franklin barked another command, and the blind pack of hounds circled the tower before discovering a dark hole torn in the ground. The hounds pawed at the hole's edges, snarling as their claws worked to expand the opening, their mouths drooling from the scent as their teeth clacked for the anticipation of discovering the source of their trail's scent.
"Let them go, Franklin, and I suppose we're obligated to do our best to follow."
The hounds tore into the tunnel bored out of the ground. Registrars Ferris and Franklin followed head-first, shuffling through the dank and dark ground, forcing their breath to calm regardless of the claustrophobia that haunted them in the tightest bends in the subterranean passage. Though the tunnel did not stretch so far, progress was slow for the Registrars, and Lester once more thought the natural order of the world turned topsy-turvy, as if he worked to dig himself downward into a grave rather than upward towards an escape. Finally, a last twist revealed a soft blue light ahead. Barks of hounds echoed in their ears as the pack's din rose into an uproar. Screams sounded from beyond that light, and the Registrars' fingers clawed and pulled to cover the tunnel's remaining distance.
Lester was the first to drop into the chamber bathed in blue light, and he turned to pull his partner's arms through the earth.
"Think we found the source of that undocumented clone."
Registrar Franklin snorted. "Yeah, I think so too."
Stepping out of a hole ripped out of the mason wall, the Registrars stood against the curving wall of a large, circular chamber several floors beneath the black housing tower's ground level. Two dozen tall, cylindrical tanks stood along the outer wall, their inner fluids illuminating the chamber in glowing bubbles of purples and blues. The hounds barked madly as they darted from one tank to the next, snapping their teeth against the thick glass that separated them from they judged to be the source of their trail's scent. The shapes suspended in the tanks' fluids responded to the hounds with fearful, shrilling screams. The resulting cacophony, a noise of wild hate and savage fear, rattled in Lester's skull and led him to stammer before proceeding.
Lester shook his head and forced himself to look into the vats as he took his first steps toward the chamber's heart. The creatures suspended in those fluids blinked back at Lester, and the Registrar couldn't shake the impression that those faces filled with too many eyes and too many mouths pleaded with him to release them from their glass confines. The skulls on the other side of those tanks' glass were too narrow or too wide. Hands upon those creatures' arms looked too crowded with fingers to function. A half of a dozen limbs sprouted from the torsos of some, while other creatures behind the glass possessed no limbs at all. Lester stared at them all and realized those undocumented clones contained in those unregistered birthing vats were brothers to the clone he had executed in the street, all of them shrieking and hissing in response to the barking hounds that terrified them.
Lester looked upon those tanks and realized each one was one more failed attempt to create what so many believed wad divine.
"You'll be forced to burn them all now," a weeping voice drifted from the center of the chamber. "You've found them, and I know you have to destroy them."
A dark-haired, middle-aged woman stood in front of a wall of monitors, all streaming letters and numbers that Lester's training allowed him to recognize as a language of genetic coding and molecular bondings. She did not lift her gaze from the ground to meet Lester's eyes as had the undocumented clones. Lester saw how the woman trembled, how her knees wavered, how she looked on the verge of a collapse.
"Did you find him then? He's been missing since last night. I came in this morning to find that hole he tore out of the concrete wall. I can't even bring myself to pick up the pieces of his glass vat."
Lester nodded. "We found it out in the street."
"Did he hurt anyone?"
"Not this time," answered Lester. "He only wailed and screamed."
The woman released a long, tired sigh and collapsed into a folding chair. "Did you kill him?"
"I put it out of its misery."
The woman sobbed. "Thank the Maker."
Lester draped his muddy jacket over the shivering woman's shoulders. "Are there any more of them?"
"Only the ones in the vats remain."
Franklin issued his pack a new command, and the dogs returned to their master's side. "Are there any other labs in this district?"
"I only know about mine," answered the woman. "Labs don't share information with one another. This was my lab. Those were my children. I don't know anything about the others."
"A lab like this must cost a fortune," Franklin whistled. "Who finances your work?"
The woman looked up from her shoes, her eyes shadowed for the tired bags that swelled beneath them. "There's nothing illegal about funding a laboratory."
"There's plenty illegal about birthing undocumented clones," returned Franklin.
"And I am prepared to face the consequences of my work," the woman didn't hesitate to answer. "Law, and money, isn't much to worry about, not when you consider what we're doing here."
Franklin snarled. "And what's that?"
Lester knew. “She’s creating gods.”
A shimmer of fire blazed in the woman’s hazel eyes. “No one has any right to deny us our divine vessels. You’re the Registrar who wears the pink tie. You witnessed that leap across the divide. You should understand. You should know why I keep trying no matter my suffering failures. The ends justify the means.”
&nb
sp; “You’re just another religious nut.” Franklin snorted.
“You just don’t have a hole in your heart like I do. Like he does,” and the woman pointed to Lester. “Registrar Ferris understands my motivation. Don’t you?”
Lester shook his head. “My loss has nothing to do with this. You keep her out of it.”
“What’s she talking about?” Agent Franklin squinted at his fellow Registrar.
“His wife,” whispered the woman. “His lost wife. We know all about you, Registrar Ferris. We know you wear that tie for her. We know how the cancer consumed her. We know how your heart suffered. We know how you’re broken. It’s why you have to taste the memory. You have to know she’s waiting for you on the other side. You have to taste the memory to know that the Gus clones only remind us of that. How can the Risen Moon, how can anyone, be denied such proof? How can the Company and the law deny the knowledge, the certainty everyone so badly needs?”
“My wife has nothing to do with this.”
The woman smiled softly, sadly. “The day will come when you’ll realize she has everything to do with this.”
The woman’s words rattled Lester, and the way Registrar Franklin glanced at him made him angry. Lester lifted his snub-nosed gun and strode to the nearest, bubbling vat. For a moment, he glanced into the eyes of the creature floating within those blue and purple fluids. But he broke his stare before his heart might hesitate, and Lester discharged his weapon into the shattering vat. The eyeless pack of hounds strained against their leashes to snap and bite at the abomination that squirmed upon the wet floor. Lester’s gun roared two more times and brought darkness to the suffering abomination before any canine might bite upon its bone.
Lester emptied his gun’s clip several times before he was finished at each vat. No matter that they were unnatural, no matter that they were no children of men, Lester’s heart pitied those creatures he executed with that snub-nosed gun.
Franklin’s knees trembled by the time it was over. His face was pale. “The howling was terrible. I never heard them shriek like that before. They’re terrible.”
“They don’t have to be,” spoke the woman. “We only need more data. We only need the complete recipe. A Registrar could give us that. A Registrar’s tools would allow us to fill in the missing pieces. We only need to convince one registrar to teach us how to read those hashes circling each clone’s eye.”
“What you’re doing isn’t natural,” Franklin growled.
“Who are you to say? We would worship those vessels we create. The Company burns them with the brand and treats them as slaves before simply tossing them away.” The woman turned to face Lester. “But you could show us what we’re missing. Only taste the divine memory. Discover that she’s waiting for you, and then you’ll see. Then you’ll understand why we need more vessels.”
Franklin grunted as he gathered up all his blind hounds and left the subterranean chamber by means of narrow stairs rising upward into the tall, windowless housing tower. Lester waited for the forensic team’s arrival before escorting the handcuffed woman to his cruiser. The crowd cursed, and some threw stones. But Lester heard many among the throng’s murmuring noise bless her for doing what she could to usher one more divine vessel into the world.
* * * * *