Prototype (50 page)

Bristling, Sarah appeared to have had about enough. "You're the last man on earth to lecture anyone on fantasy worlds," she told him. "You're the little man behind the curtain in Oz."

Against the near wall, Ellie stuttered into laughter, and the other man — Adrienne wasn't even sure which one this was — turned on her with alarm,
Shut up, shut UP!
in his taut features. Adrienne had almost made a similar observation, but to Sarah alone, discreetly. How ironic: All day Sarah had been the one to preach caution, to fret about Adrienne angering this Machiavellian tyrant.

"I'll take my chances," said Clay, and moved toward his coat.

Valentine nodded, muscles bunching in his jaw. "Chance is the stuff of life."

It happened very abruptly.

Clay was halfway to his coat when Valentine went kinetic, empty hand plunging beneath his sweater and emerging full, mighty as Thor with a hammer. He swung out the revolver's cylinder, and no one could have missed hearing the clicking metallic whir as he spun it. Pivoting then, slapping the cylinder back into place and raising his hand, he thrust the pistol forward as if he were launching a javelin, every motion so smooth and fluid that Adrienne was not so much frightened as insanely curious to know how often he had
practiced
this.

"Snake in the grass!" he shouted as the gun reached its apex, which made no sense to her at all. She met his eyes, and no one could have looked more surprised than Valentine when the gun blasted out a single devastating shot. At once he erupted with a triumphant whoop.

With every sense raw, unguarded, sensation became immense. The sound of bullet striking skin was orchestral; the blood that splashed her felt scalding. The hand clutching her arm was a fearsome claw, and she looked over, looked down, to see the side of Sarah's throat.

Gone. Just gone.

Together they fell, Sarah's weight dragging her down. Sarah began to choke before they hit the floor, her eyes gaping and glazed in disbelief. An anemic cry warbled past Adrienne's lips as her hands trembled, then groped in a frantic attempt to staunch the flood from Sarah's throat. It sprayed, it flowed. It pulsed and gushed.

Adrienne scrabbled to her knees beside Sarah, cradled her as the mad clawing desperation in Sarah's fingers resigned to a tender stroking. They could say nothing to each other now. Words took time, and were imprecise at best, never enough to hold everything that must be said when they are needed most.

A falling shadow: Adrienne looked up in reflex — to defend Sarah’s last ragged breath? — but it was Clay falling along her other side. Coming not to steal this terminal moment but to share it. He reached, an arm sliding beneath Sarah as he helped bear the weight that had grown so slack. With his other hand he touched her face. Through the chill of shock she was aware of it, aggrieved eyes crinkling for a moment, and with a blood-slicked hand she reached for Clay's cheekbone. He did not flinch.

He's touching,
Adrienne thought, the only lucid flicker in awareness that otherwise wailed. Then:
Why does it take a catastrophe before it happens…?

Adrienne embraced Sarah, clutched her, felt the blood wash down her front and tried to impart her will even though it never work:
Live, you, just another moment, just another lifetime, just long enough to hear me say I loved you. Live.

Adrienne raised her head, sacrificing a precious second to look about the room — could anything be done, could anyone
help
? — but there was nothing for her beyond the sight of three others, immobile, doppelgangers all, watching someone die.

A moment that came too soon. By decades.

The silence was total, its own world as she clung to Sarah's last bubbling breath, the final tremulous beat of her heart, the last pulse of blood. If anyone took these from her, she would show no mercy.

Ellie was first to break the silence, with a sickened cry that ripped free as if it had been trapped for minutes. She shook her head in denial, then lurched back to the bedroom, bathroom. It sounded as if she picked up speed as she went, and whether she retched or sobbed once there, it was not clear.

Like a broken appendage, her companion followed, backing out of the room while pulling off a pair of dark round lenses. Gone, then, and nothing else moved but Adrienne's lowering head.

So it had come to this.

Clay fell aside, sitting heavily on his rump with elbows on knees, head in hands. His breath came swift and shallow, about to hyperventilate.

Is this what it's like to be you?
she wondered.
With nothing left inside or out to go on?

How did he do it? How ever had he done it all these years?

Valentine had sat again, on the edge of his chair, so wholly absorbed in the moment that he appeared transported. His face bore the look of artists who have achieved the breakthrough to aesthetic perfection, who have transcended themselves and ride a moment that felt eternal. Adrienne knew that he would never again feel this alive.

Hate him? He was too alien to truly hate.

She fell inward again, the first real sob working its way up, scarcely aware that Clay had risen and walked from the room. He barely touched the floor, gliding, may have been gone a moment, maybe an hour, and when she glimpsed him again he had returned from the kitchen, flowing with smooth even purpose, a mongoose to the cobra.

She opened her mouth, mute, and what a mistake to think that she had no heart left to break.

His first slashing blow with the butcher knife caught Patrick Valentine across the forehead, opening a deep split that rained a sheet of blood across his eyes, blinding him. Two-handed, Clay plunged it down into the meat of one shoulder, then the other. The gun went thumping to the floor, and a moment later Valentine fell atop it, as Clay bore after him with a brutality primordial and relentless. His face was gone, replaced by the visage of carnivores that rolled in the spoor of their prey.

"No, no, stop, don't do that," she murmured, crawling over Sarah and slipping along on all fours until, midway there, her strength giving way to shock, she sprawled upon the floor while Clay swung the knife, and plunged it, and gouged it, and twisted it, never once looking up from the task at hand —

*

— until it was finished, forever and ever.

So here the journey ended. He could see it now, unspooled behind him. From Denver through the deserts to Tempe, then back again. To the brink of mountains and down once more, through the mounting losses, then across frozen wastes. To the savannahs within and, finally, north. All the while, sliding down the coil of the double helix, until here he was, a new being. No, not new —
complete
, the killer he had always been destined to be.

The inevitable quit trying so hard to impose itself, once it was accepted.

And if there were regrets, they were only for the innocent. For Sarah, and for Adrienne too, because she had dared believe he was redeemable. She had deserved better.

She had never had a chance.

Dripping, he rose from the corpse of Patrick Valentine, got as far as his knees before he saw Adrienne's eyes. In shock, she was, trembling and chilled. He knew the look, but had not realized just how horrible a creature he must truly be until he saw the judgment on her face.

He fetched a silken comforter from the sofa and draped it over her, so she might stay warmer. Stripped away his shirt, his pants and the rest, for he, conversely, was burning alive.

Knife in hand, he trod down the hall.

Their existence was intolerable, of course. He had known this all along, had tried to fight it, had tried to see it as another of nature's simple ways that were indifferent to the outcome. Much less deserving life forms than they had met with extinction; he would do his part.

Daniel Ironwood he found in the bathroom, trying with nervous hands to light more to smoke. He dropped his paraphernalia when he saw Clay, naked and bloodied, and the knife was swift to fall. They grappled down along a peach-hued wall, a towel bar coming free, with which Daniel managed to strike a bruising blow along Clay's collarbone. He sank the knife through Daniel's lower abdomen and hung on despite the sudden burst of fetid odor. Knife grated bone, and together they twitched, and Daniel wept as his struggles grew feeble. Then nonexistent.

Oh, how he had wanted to live.

Ellie he found in the bedroom, sitting on her bed and drawn into a tight ball. He'd thought she might be the fiercest of the three, yet here she had all but surrendered, and he supposed no one was really as tough as they let on.

And Ellie knew him, knew his heart as well as he did.

"I can't help what I am," she whispered, and would neither tremble nor cry. Nor beg.

"None of us can," he said, and proved to himself just how wrong Valentine had been last night on the balcony, on the theory and practice of killing.

The third one is by far the hardest.

*

He made his way back to the living room, where Adrienne had not moved. He was spent by now. All the days, all the miles, too little sleep and precious little food — he was consuming himself from the inside. He had glimpsed his body in a mirror back there and it had looked wasted.

He fell into Valentine's chair, one foot on the man himself, and used the remote to turn on the television. Flipped around but found nothing of redemption so he turned it off. The silence left a yawning void.

Adrienne was watching him from the floor, not so certain that her own turn wasn't coming next — or so her gaze struck him — and he knew he had done far worse than kill her already. The thought made him cry and he hurled the knife away, down the hall.

Clay slid to the floor, crawled to her, and from beneath the comforter one arm extended. She raised herself enough so that they were able to fit together, her head resting against his shoulder, sticky though it now was. An arm around him next, and a hand upon his knee.

But it was no good. Despite everything, the old sour repugnance had returned already, his skin crawling beneath her hands.
What is it,
he wondered,
they've got to be dead first?

Adrienne seemed to sense it, perhaps a stiffening across his shoulders, and she pulled away with a single downcast nod. Content to brush two fingertips against his chest, as much as he was able to tolerate.

"So many scars," she said. "It's too late. Isn't it?"

"We tried. So the scars won anyway. We tried." As if that were supposed to be some consolation.

He crawled away from her, rubbing the scar on his forehead, from early November. Twelve stitches, it had taken? What an amateur. He could do better than that, and crawled toward the marble table.

I want to live in a different world,
he had told Adrienne weeks ago, and if he had seen only the worst of worlds, it did not mean he had abandoned hope entirely.

There would be a better world, somewhere, there must be. He would find it, that world where he could touch Erin's face and whisper her name as many times as she wished to hear it, and know that he could love her without reservation. That world where she could touch him lavishly and his skin would not reject any hand that was not brutal enough to bruise. This place, it
had
to exist — this could not be all there was.

Anything but that.

He knelt before marble, its smooth rock edge become the ledge upon the precipice. Eyes gone blurry, he stared down until he was one with the stone, its mottled gray and black a universe. It beckoned.

He answered.

He whipped his head down, let his brow crack across marble, and the inside of his skull went white and vast. Skin split; he was as blind as Valentine at the end. Clay reeled, rising up onto both knees, face tipped to an unseen sky, Icarus flying too high. He whipped his head down again, harder than before, all his strength this time, and forever he fell … from the eye of the sun, from the pain of a frozen moon…

Falling from grace.

*

And she was alone.

Clay's head had twice hit with a sound like a bursting melon, and the second time he crumpled to the floor, bleeding from a forehead gone sickly concave. In his boneless heap he twitched with convulsive spasms until they shorted themselves out, then fell still but for shallow breaths.

Adrienne found a phone and punched out 911, let the receiver tumble to the floor when it became obvious she had no voice for the task. They would trace it; they would come.