Clone: A Contemporary Young Adult SciFi/Fantasy (Swann Series Book 3) Read online

  “Yes?”

  “We’re not getting caught.”

  9

  At seven o’clock, the GPS locator has Demetrius at his office on Olympus. Before we leave the room, I throw up twice, then remind myself of all the girls I’ll be saving. All the ruined girls I’ll be avenging. When my face is wiped clean and my stomach is flat empty and hollow feeling, I grab the murder bag Brayden and I packed and head for the car. Brayden follows wordlessly.

  We take the 405 to West Sunset, then take a left on Stone Canyon Road. My stomach is up in my throat right now. It’s empty, but somehow it’s still there. Churning.

  “What about gate codes?” I ask in a moment of sheer panic.

  “I’ve come prepared,” he says, patting his jeans pocket. Thank God one of us assumed there were gate codes. His half-hearted smile reassures me.

  “No wonder the FBI’s terrified of you.”

  Across the ravine from Bel Air, Stone Canyon Road is probably one of the lushest drives I have ever taken through a residential neighborhood. Half the road is canopied by trees, and the landscape is so thick and gorgeous the drive seems impossible. Like a dream. Deep in, nearly to the road’s end, the Stone Canyon Reservoir appears on our right, but only barely because half the walls of greenery are a good ten feet tall.

  “There,” Brayden says, pointing to the house.

  I draw a filling breath, release it steadily and evenly, then brush my hair twenty-five times as instructed and pull it into a tight ponytail. No use leaving stray hairs behind. Brayden hands me the latex gloves. I slip them on, adjust them so they feel natural. He applies moisturizer to my face and arms to keep any dead skin cells in place, then gives me the look.

  “I’ll be fine,” I tell him.

  “I’ll be down the canyon, maybe a hundred feet at most. When he passes by me, I’ll ring the house phone once. That way you’ll know.”

  “But you’ll follow him in?”

  “At a safe distance.”

  “When it’s done,” I say, feeling my stomach coiling itself into knots, “I’ll meet you out front.” I wonder if I’m going to throw up again. I think it’s coming…

  With that, Brayden drives up to the gated entry, rolls down the window and with his own gloved hand, takes a piece of paper from his pocket and punches in the gate code. The massive iron gate opens. Splendor awaits.

  I’ve never seen such an ornate home, and that’s saying something. The architectural detail looks more befitting of a palace than a residence for two and it has me wondering how much publicity this murder is going to garner. For my own peace of mind, I let thoughts like these go. My focus is solely on what he did to my friend. To all those other girls.

  In the circular driveway, Brayden drops me off, then leaves the way he came. I ring the doorbell and an intercom speaker opens its connection.

  “How did you get in here?” the woman’s voice says. “This is a private home.”

  I stab the intercom button and say, “That’s not what’s most important, Mrs. Giardino. What’s most important is that you let me in.”

  “And why should I? You’re wearing latex gloves for heaven’s sake.”

  “Because I have a video in my possession. It’s got your husband on it. He’s forcing himself into an aspiring young singer as a precondition of signing her with his record label. I can show it to you or I can show the press and police. Your life will be over if you choose that option. You will be humiliated. Ostracized from the community. At least this way—”

  Right then the door opens and that’s when I see her: Bryn Giardino. Forty-three years old with a lifetime of emotional hardship in her expression. Her tired, dispassionate eyes tell me she suspected her husband of this or something like this eons ago. That she has lived with suspicion, loneliness and stress for entirely too long. Or I could be imagining things. That’s what I want her eyes and expression to say because it’ll make me showing her the video so much easier.

  “You don’t look surprised,” I say.

  “Come in,” she tells me. I’m glad she invited me because if not I would have come in anyway. Maybe of my own volition, maybe at gun point. Either way, I was going in.

  “I expected you a long time ago,” she said. She was dressed in charcoal yoga pants and a cute yellow and pumpkin-orange top. With her black hair pulled back, and evidence of perspiration on her lower back, she looked like she gave it her all in Pilates class. She turns and walks into the living room. Her butt looks fantastic, her shoulders are amazing, and when she turns, I can’t help thinking how tough it must have been to keep her stomach that flat for all these years. Her boobs, however, look painfully sad. Like she had children and they deflated. Yet Brayden specifically told me Demetrius and Bryn do not have children. Poor woman.

  “You expected me?” I ask.

  “Someone like you. One of Demetrius’s girls.”

  “So you know about the rapes?”

  That word hits her hard: rape. Her beautiful face—and she is lovely for her age—pales quickly. The horrified look she’s wearing, it makes me feel sad for what I’m about to show her. For what I am about to do. She turns from me, like she doesn’t want to hear any more. Like she can’t even stand the sight of me.

  Her hand goes to her mouth, the way it always is when older women hear really bad news. She turns around and fixes me with a stare. Her eyes look like diamonds the way they’re sparkling behind the tears.

  “Rapes?” she says in a strangled voice.

  The entry way is ginormous, with a circular staircase winding up to the second floor and twenty-five foot ceilings. The hardwood floors are wide planks with the perfect blend of dark grains. Off the entryway is a formal living room with a seven foot tall stone fireplace like you see at famous hotels or in huge houses just like this. I’m standing here, inside the living room, looking at her, and at the open pit containing the piled ashes of several fires. I step down into the living room, lay my murder bag on the glass coffee table and pull out Maggie’s cell phone.

  I scroll to the video Demetrius sent Maggie, play it for her.

  It’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever done. Right away her eyes start to swim. She’s either too modest or too wounded to wipe away the tears; they just drain onto the expensive carpet. After the video, if that is not enough, I show her the texts. The threats. I show her how diabolical her husband really is.

  “That’s not all,” I tell her. “This girl, in the video, she was one of my best friends—”

  “Was?”

  “She killed herself. Slit her wrist open and bled out in the bathtub in my guest bathroom this last week. We just buried her.”

  “And this was my husband’s fault?”

  “There are other details to her life, but the rape wasn’t exactly sunshine on a cloudy day.”

  The telephone rang once, then stopped. My heart hit a new gear. From the murder bag, I pull out the pistol, screw on the silencer and make sure it’s fully loaded. Bryn watches in stunned silence.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I’m going to kill your husband.”

  She doesn’t seem to know what to say, so she just sits down and cries. I feel bad for her, but right now my attention is on all the possible entry points to the house.

  “Where does he come in from, when he gets home?”

  She points to the front door.

  I wait.

  “Is it possible this is an isolated incident?” she says.

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because your husband’s hard drive on his personal computer contains more than twenty other videos of young girls like my friend Maggie. He deems this a ‘right of passage’ into the industry.”

  “A what?”

  “A right of passage. You hear so many singers these days saying they gave up their soul to the music industry. This is just one example. Your husband’s version of a singer’s right of passage.”

  That nagging feeling in the back of my
mind, it’s me realizing I’m probably going to have to kill Bryn, too. The one thing I learned from watching movies is you never leave witnesses.

  Shit. I’m not sure I can do that.

  The sound of the Benz’s big motor stiffens me. The engine falls silent. A door closes. I get the pistol ready, aim it at the front door and try not to crap my pants. Or puke. Gosh dammit, I’m so scared right now!

  “Get over there,” I tell Bryn, pointing into the foyer. “Right where I can see you.” I wheel the gun around, aim it point blank in her face; she does as she’s told, not because she’s scared, but because she’s gone numb. Now I have both her and the front door in sight.

  I can’t believe this is happening. I can run, I tell myself. I tell myself no one’s dead.

  Not yet.

  There’s still time.

  Ten seconds pass from the time the car door shuts to the time the key hits the lock on the front door. My heart is officially pounding nine times harder than normal. I feel myself blink eight times, really fast as I steady my hand and get my breathing under control. The lock turns and the front door opens and for seven beats of my heart, Demetrius and I stare at each other. I tell him I’m Maggie’s best friend, and he waits. Finally, briefcase in hand, he walks in the entryway like he doesn’t have a loaded pistol aimed at him and he shuts the door.

  “Your friend should never have killed herself,” he says. I hate the very sound of his voice. The slight trace of an Italian accent. The smugness of his tone.

  He is dressed in a dark suit that fits tight over his expanding belly and all I can think is that he doesn’t deserve his beautiful wife. Or the next breath out of his poisonous mouth.

  “You should never have raped her,” I say. “Or all those other girls.”

  He looks at his wife and says, “Are you okay?”

  She shakes her head six times, still crying. He looks at me and says, “What are you going to do?” He’s not even done with the question when he starts undoing his suit jacket. He folds it in half then drapes it over his briefcase.

  “I’m going to kill you, and when the cops come looking for you, I will make sure they find all those videos on your hard drive.”

  He drops his briefcase and—lightening fast—he charges me. I pop off five shots fast. Four hit the walls behind him. Then I see the punch of fabric. A blossom of red grows like a flower on his bone white dress shirt.

  Finally.

  For a second there I thought I would miss every shot.

  He barely notices though, and I panic. In three seconds he’s on me and with his giant fist he punches me in the face two brutal times. I stagger backwards, feeling dizzy and half conscious.

  His face is blistering with rage. He might not even know he’s been shot. I’m trying to stand. I’m thinking about my two front teeth loose from his gigantic fist pummeling them. With a swipe of my tongue, I feel the gaping split on my lip that runs right up to the base of my nose.

  My insides curl in horror.

  He’s a bull. A freaking maniac. He grabs me by my throat and my crotch, picks me up and hurls me into the cement fireplace wall. A rib breaks. The pain is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. There’s not enough air for me to scream, much less breathe. He’s on me fast, relentless.

  He’s kicking me, cursing, spitting, screaming. He kicks my breasts, my legs, my sides, my arms. It’s like the doctor at Gerhard’s lab, but ten times worse. I curl up; it doesn’t stop. Standing over me, he puts out a hand and steadies himself on the fireplace. He’s breathing heavy, like a fat guy who stayed on the treadmill too long. Then I see it in his face. He knows something’s wrong. The expanding red stain on his shirt, it’s a gut shot and those are lethal. I feel myself smile.

  “Got you, asshole,” I hear myself say.

  “I got you,” he tells me. Then he lifts his leg as high as it will go, and stomps down on my head. The world wobbles; everything hurts. Things goes grey, then black. But not before I hear the spit of a silenced pistol being fired at close range. Not before the front of Demetrius’s face blows outward in one gigantic punch of red all over the fireplace.

  10

  Brayden couldn’t stand it anymore. He drove into the gate, jumped out of the Dodge and raced in through the front door to a scene of grisly horror. There was blood everywhere. The first thing he saw was the woman in workout clothes standing over Demetrius. She had Abby’s gun in her hand at her side. Demetrius’s head was a blown out mess. The gun was still smoking.

  The woman slowly turned to face him. She didn’t look human. Shock gave her the kind of artificial look not even A-list actresses can mimic. Brayden’s eyes sunk to Abby. She looked worse than the dead rapist. Looking at all the blood pooling around her face, Brayden feared the worst.

  “Is she dead?” Brayden asked.

  “I don’t know,” the woman replied. “I think so.” The woman’s face looked like a zombie, no expression. Just blank.

  “Did you shoot her?”

  “No.”

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  “I need to look at her, can I do that?” She nodded, and just stood there, mortified. His hands still gloved, Brayden hurried to Abby, pushed Demetrius’s corpse off of her and inspected the damage. He had to turn away to keep his stomach down. Abby’s entire face was mangled. My God, he thought, this all went so very, very wrong!

  Brayden turned and looked up at Demetrius’s wife and said, “I need to get her to a hospital.” He hadn’t even checked for a pulse. She could be dead for all he knew, but he couldn’t risk puking on the scene of a murder and that was about to happen. He wasn’t good with gore. And, like Abby warned, his DNA was traceable. It was in the FBI database, which meant it was available everywhere.

  “He was a terrible man,” Bryn said. Her eyes were lost, a sort of resigned vacancy.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “I knew something was wrong,” she said. It was like she was saying it to no one. Like she would have said the same words aloud, even if everyone was dead.

  “You should have done something about it sooner,” Brayden said. He was angry and scared. He had to get Abby out of there, but he didn’t want to get shot in the process.

  She was looking at the gun now, turning it over in her hands.

  “What kind of a gun is this?” she said.

  “A .45.”

  “It put Demetrius’s face all over the fireplace.”

  Brayden looked up at the fireplace, turned away from the meat and gristle splattered all over the greyish cement cast. His stomach churned. He swallowed hard. More than anything, he needed to go.

  Like right now!

  He slid his arms underneath Abby’s back and knees and lifted her up. She was surprisingly light. When he turned and faced Bryn, he hoped she wouldn’t shoot him right then. He hoped to God she’d let him go.

  Instead, she tucked the gun up under her chin and pulled the trigger. He tried to look away, but it was too late. He saw it all. Horrified, Brayden hurried out of the house as fast as he could. He couldn’t stop seeing Bryn Giardino’s beautiful face go slack. Like someone shut the lights out and she was just gone. And the thumping of her dead body hitting the floor? He’d never forget that awful sound.

  He got Abby to the car, fought to get her into her seat, buckled her in. He wanted to barf on the front lawn, in the bushes, all over the gravel, but by some act of Jesus or God or whomever, he managed to hold his guts down.

  Halfway down Stone Canyon Road, the urge hit him again. Pulling over fast, he puked into one of the roadside garbage cans. He straight up purged his guts. Then he got in the car and that’s when he saw Abby coming around.

  Red Pudding

  1

  When I wake up, I feel myself in dreamland. My eyes don’t know what they’re focusing on. My brain cannot interpret the images. I feel my mouth mumble something unintelligible. My arm flops around. As I become more aware of myself, I also become more aware of the pain. And the furnace
of heat that seems to be roasting every cell in my body.

  All the angry little fire ants are officially marching again. Waving their fiery torches around. My skin, it’s sizzling. I feel myself needing to cry.

  “Holy shit,” Brayden says. “Your skin is like a squeezed sponge.”

  My brain is now almost aware of everything: the boy beside me, the car we’re in, the beating I suffered, Demetrius. My body hurts so bad the crying actually comes. All my skin is crying, too. I’m soaking wet. Like when I was first turned from the sloth into the swan, but more immediate, and with sharper, more lasting pains.

  I tear off my shirt, not caring about my bruised fingers and forearms, not caring about being in a car on a semi-public street wearing just a bra above the waist. But I’m still on fire. Still cooking in my own skin. I pull off my pants and underwear and Brayden avoids looking at me.

  “What are you doing?” he asks. Subconsciously, he brakes.

  Through a sobbing mouth, through loose teeth and a split lip, I say, “I’m so hot I can’t STAND IT!”

  I unhook my bra and shrug out of it. Brayden doesn’t know what to do. He looks down at me and I look down at me and the bruising is unbelievable. My whole body is varying degrees of black and blue. The violence is a horror story on my skin.

  “You need to get to a hospital,” he says. He’s freaking out still, trying to play it off but not doing good at all.

  “NO!”

  “We have to,” he says.

  Already I feel things inside me working. Gerhard’s special cocktail at work. The one he gave me for rapid healing during my transformation. I wonder if he knew what he’d done, how that particular cocktail just might have made me invincible. I pull down the vanity mirror and recoil at the sight of my face. My right eye is swollen shut, my top lip is split right down the gosh damn middle and one of my front two teeth is so loose it’s bent backwards. I straighten the tooth with my tongue, but that’s the least of my worries.

  The heat my body’s producing could start forest fires.