The ambulance stopped on 25th Street and the body of Dominic was thrown out. His life ended because of Johanna and her family. He loved her and died because of her family. The street was deserted and it was on the way to Kat’s lab on the outskirts of Chicago. Johanna tried calling Dominic’s number to find out the hospital where they were taken, but he didn’t pick up. He tried Kat’s number, but it went straight to voicemail. Brandon tried the emergency line and they said none of their ambulances went to their neighborhood throughout the day. Brandon was worried, but not as much as Johanna. She cried her eyes out. Her daughter was missing. But how come the ambulance came with a police vehicle? Was the police car also a fraud? Who could be behind that and why? All these thoughts ran through the mind of the Baxter’s. Challis and Martino cuddled in their respective rooms, thinking of their sister. She was such a lovely person. She really cared for them. They didn’t even know she was adopted.
The telephone rang and Johanna, who had been anticipating a call from the police following the report they had filed in, ran to the phone to pick it up.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this Johanna Baxter?”
“Yes, how may I help you?”
“We found a body on the 25th street and we identified it to be that of Dominic Lesak.”
“What? What was he doing there?” she asked in a panic.
“We found him dead, and your number was on speed dial. He has been taken to the mortuary at Driftwood Hospital. I am assuming he worked there?”
“Yes. What about my daughter? He was with her.”
“We are sorry, we only found a male body.” The policeman hung the call. Johanna shouted in agony and Brandon ran downstairs.
“What’s wrong?” Brandon asked.
“Dominic is dead,” Johanna replied as she slowly fell to the ground.
“What? What happened? What about Nicola and Kat?” Brandon asked with tears in his eyes.
“We don’t know of their whereabouts,” she whimpered.
Brandon went over to his wife to comfort her, but she refused to be comforted. She wailed all night long. Johanna and Brandon went over to the hospital the following day. She was devastated to see the lifeless body of her friend. He was the only friend that was closer than any of her family members. He knew all about her. She told him everything. He comforted her when she was in pain and was there for her when Brandon was always hurting her. He was a brother. She couldn’t bear the loss, she saw the body and left to wail. She wailed so loud.
“Can you kindly take your wife outside?” Dr. Ben said. He was the doctor that handled the forensic activities of the hospital. He told them that he had suffered a major damage to his cervical vertebrae. Brandon took her out of the hospital asking her to stop crying, but he had only tried holding his tears back himself. He liked Dominic too. He knew he was in love with Johanna but was able to settle his feelings and become a very good friend of the household, always there in the days of their problems.
They got into the car and talked about the way forward for Nicola. The police had no clue as to where she could have been taken. They were oblivious to the truth. Either Nicola had been kidnapped alongside Kat or Kat had kidnapped Nicola.
When the policemen were in their house the previous day, the kids had confided in their father and they told him all they saw. Martino talked about how he saw Amanda’s cut heal immediately. The police found the body of the caterer in the bathtub, but before they could get him, the ambulance was nowhere to be found.
They got back home, moody as usual. The kids were with Teeba. Johanna went silently to the room, while Brandon decided to sit in the living room. He pondered on how Nicola had swung the clone into the wall with so much strength. He couldn’t have transferred any gene to her, as she wasn’t his biological daughter. He even was made a clone after she had been born. How on earth did she have the strength of a clone? He knew her all her life, and there was no time she had to be admitted to a hospital. From the look on her face, he knew she was surprised at even her own strength. She had his new nature. Could she be a clone too?
Johanna came back down looking dead; her hair was rough and her face also. “I am going out to look for her,” she said. She walked towards the door, but her legs staggered and she almost fell. Brandon ran to her by reflex and at great speed and grabbed her, preventing her from falling.
“Just let me go. You have to rest,” Brandon said.
Just then, Teeba came in with the kids.
“Afternoon,” she greeted.
“Oh! Thank God you came. Kindly help me stay with Johanna, I’m not comfortable leaving her by herself. I will go look for Nicola,” Brandon said.
He left the house and got into his car. He wasn’t sure if it was real or just a hunch, but he wanted to start searching for Kat’s place of work. He got an address after searching “Berkshire Affiliates” online. The office was located in the heart of Chicago.
Johanna went into the room and sobbed uncontrollably. Her body took ill and she started shivering. Teeba came into the room and met her seated at the edge of the bed and shaking profusely. She knew she went through a lot at that moment. She went over and got her some pills from the first aid box. She came back with a cup of water and the pills. Johanna took the pills and water, reluctantly. She had to be strong for her kids that are left.
“Nicola will be found and you need to be strong to welcome her, okay?” Teeba comforted her and gave her a hug. She can’t even have imagined herself in her shoes. She looked around the room and found a photo that had fallen to the ground. It had a sentence written on it, “My first baby’s picture.” She went over and picked it up. She showed it to Johanna, thinking it would comfort her. Johanna looked at the photo amazed. The writing on it wasn’t in her handwriting; she looked at it critically and saw that it was Kat’s. Nicola was gotten from a charity of an organization through an orphanage. She took her phone to call Brandon.
Brandon got to the front of Kat’s office in the middle of Chicago. The journey was a long one that took about two hours. He pulled the car over and parked in the parking lot. He sat still in the car and looked at the building, considering its height. Her office will surely be on one of the floors. All he needed to do was ask. He got out of the car and walked towards the office. He looked around the office and saw nothing strange. He got to the reception hall and asked of Ms. Katarina Calloway. The woman at the reception described her office to him in such a friendly manner.
“Go to the fifth floor, and turn to your left. Walk straight down the hallway; look to your right for room 546. Her name is on the door.” He got into the elevator and was beginning to doubt his hunch that Kat had actually kidnapped his daughter. The elevator bell sounded when he got to the fifth floor and he came out of it. As he walked through the hallway, he saw one of the drivers that usually came to pick up Kat from his home. He stopped the man to talk to him, “Excuse me, sir, do you know of Mrs. Calloway’s whereabouts?” he asked hoping he’d get a positive response. The man looked at him wondering who he was but thought it might be an official visitor, as only official visitors call her by that name. Everyone was fond of calling her Kat.
“She called this afternoon that she would be taking some time off,” he finally said.
“Where?” Brandon asked almost immediately. The man grew suspicious of him and Brandon noticed that and just let him leave when he didn’t answer him.
“They always leave a clue,” Brandon thought. Now he had confirmed that Kat was alive and was in a position to take permission from work. That simply meant she wasn’t kidnapped. Everyone carried files about, but his instincts told him there was more to the files. He followed his instincts and didn’t allow the sleeping dog lie. He located Kat’s office, and broke into it when he confirmed no one was approaching. The office was a large one and it had plenty of books, but little files on the table. From what he saw, the office was rarely used. Then where did Kat do her work when she claims she went to work? He opened the drawer that was left unlocked. He was surprised at what he saw, in the drawer, there were numerous pictures of Nicola, more than he and Johanna had.
He flipped through all of them and he noticed that there was a picture taken without the person’s consent. A spy took them. What does Katarina want from his daughter? “She must have kidnapped Nicola,” he said. He was returning the picture when he saw a code written on a sheet of paper: Reunion = N + K. “What does the code mean?” he thought. He switched on her computer but it was locked. He tried various words and numbers he thought could be her password, but none were correct. He looked down and saw the hint for the password and it read “Baby girl.” “Did she have a child?” he asked himself. He typed Challis, but it was the same negative result. He typed in Nicola and the system unlocked. He searched through it and found some e-mails, they were messages from Dr. Dinardo. “How did they know each other?” he thought. He sank into the chair to connect the dots. But didn’t find any correlation except the fact that he heard the news that Mr. Stan had survived assassination at the location he was to go and shoot someone at the same time he was there. Was there a relationship between Kat’s company and the company Dr. Simmons worked for? He got more confused as he thought about it. He went on to hack into certain encrypted files. He was a freak with computers. He searched through different files and saw there was a common location. He hadn’t heard of such an area throughout his stay in Chicago. He typed it on Google maps, and it displayed the location. He was about to leave the office when a man came in. He was lucky he had locked the door when he entered. He went over to the window blind and hid behind it. The man’s phone rang and he heard him speak with a woman on the phone. “Hello ma’am, I’m in your office right now. Okay.” Johanna asked him to help copy some files from the computer. The man copied the files and got out of the office. Brandon broke his way out of the office again. He followed the man and saw him go to the underground parking lot. He ran to his car and followed the man. He noticed that he went in the direction of the location he had searched on Google map. He followed the man from a far distance so as not to be noticed. He trailed the man and saw him make a turn to a street without lights. He turned off the headlights and followed silently. They came to a tall building at the end of the road. It was fully lighted. Brandon stopped some meters from where the man stopped and checked his wristwatch and it was already past eight in the evening. The man spent about thirty minutes in the building and then came back out. He slunk into the car when the man passed by him again. He got out of the car when the man was out of sight and walked as fast as he could towards the building.
A security man who had a gun accosted him on his way, but Brandon ran so fast at him that he broke his neck before he could pull his trigger. The man had a walkie-talkie with him and he took it so he could know if any other person was in the building. He sent a message to his wife, so she wouldn’t worry about him.
“Hey, babe I am still in search of our daughter. I am fine, but might be late.” He pointed the torch that was with him as the ground floor was dark and only the top floors were lit.
“Hello, men” the walkie-talkie suddenly sounded. The voice was a female’s voice. He listened to the voice carefully and noticed it was that of Kat. “Where is my daughter?” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Oh Brandon, you came earlier than I expected. Nicola would have woken up in a few minutes and I would have called you. Just try finding me,” she said, laughing loudly. Brandon lost his rationality and made his way up the stairs. He kept running up the stairs and couldn’t find her. He got to the 17th floor where he was startled, as he saw a dead body hanged by ropes in an incubator. He pointed his touch and found the switch to the lights. He turned the lights on and saw an array of bodies in tubes like an incubator. He got scared and realized Kat was involved in cloning too. He got scared for his daughter and continued running upstairs.
Brandon got to the 25th floor and was shot by a security man. Brandon looked back and saw the man coming his way. He ran towards the man with such great speed and hit his head against the wall.
He pressed the walkie-talkie and Kat responded. “If you want to see your daughter again, come to the roof.” He felt like he heard some people’s voices in the background. “She must be with people,” he thought. He ran up to the 31st floor when he heard gunshots. He got to the roof, panting. He saw Mrs. Dinardo in her pool of blood and a second doctor whom he didn’t seem to have seen before. He raised his head to see Kat pointing a gun at Nicola’s head. Nicola looked tired but was alive, “Dad!” she called out tiredly as she saw him run to the roof.
“What are you doing, Kat?” Brandon asked, surprised that Kat could point a gun at her niece’s head.
“Don’t worry. I won’t kill her. But stand there.”
“Why are you doing this then?”
She laughed mockingly and said, “You want to know why? I will tell you why.”
Kat stood some centimeters away from Brandon with Nicola in her front and pointed a gun at her head. She had just killed two people with the gun. Dr. Dinardo had come with another doctor to help treat Nicola. The other doctor was a general surgeon while Dr. Dinardo was a psychiatrist. She helped Nicola treat her head injuries and she healed very fast. Kat brought out her phone and called Johanna. “Hey little sis, I have your husband and daughter here. Do you want to hear their voices?” She put the phone on loudspeaker. Nicola called “Mom!” in a tone stronger than how she called for her father; she was getting her strength back. Brandon called out to his wife and told her that all will be okay. “Okay sis, I think you should listen to all that I have to say. I hope you like it though.”
She paused a bit and continued, “I am Nicola’s biological mother and Brandon is her biological father.” Johanna stood up from the bed she was sitting on and gasped. Brandon saw it coming but hoped it wasn’t true. She was hunting him for what he had done to her in the past. Nicola was now fully strengthened.
Kat continued, “It all happened during your miscarriage and you were still at the hospital. I went to your house and met Brandon depressed and crying. I pitied him and sat closer to console him. He was like a child that found a hiding place to break down and cry. I tried to comfort him and gave him alcohol to let his burden slip from his mind for some time. I got him drunk and seduced him. We had sex that night and I ended up getting pregnant. I went over to meet him in his office and told him I was pregnant, but he turned me away. I got angry and decided to go calm my nerves at the bar. I drank too much and while going home, I got into an accident; I was fatally injured and was rushed to the hospital. While in the hospital, the doctor told me that the baby I carried had died and that they needed to remove the baby from my womb. They removed the baby and kept in a tube. I couldn’t bear this, so I broke into where she was kept and brought her to this lab where I had initially been testing my cloning experiments. After seven months of trial and error, I finally revived her. I knew she was going to be different from every other kid and I wasn’t ready to cater to a child, so I gave her up for adoption. Fortunately, Brandon was able to convince you into adopting a child. When I heard, I investigated the orphanage you guys were going to make an enquiry and made the agency present the child to you through the orphanage. This way she could at least be with Brandon, her real father.” She then paused.
Nicola couldn’t believe all she had heard. Why did the orphanage say she was found at the door of their building?
Johanna couldn’t hear more, so she hung up the phone. A tragedy was just added to her woes. She had lost her friend, her daughter was in a dangerous situation and her only sister had shared a bed with her husband.
Kat had come back some years after she first left and met with Bryant. He newly inherited his father’s business. He was in his new office and his secretary called,
“Hello sir, a woman named Kat said she wants to see you, but she is without an appointment.”
“Kat? Okay. Just let her in,” he said since he wasn’t very busy. She came into his office and he was stunned at the way she looked. She proposed a business between her company and his, which he agreed to. She appeared different from the Kat he knew some years back. But he never knew that she was a person whose situation determined her character. After about three weeks of doing business, Kat came into his office and lured him to have sex with her. He got to love her and then married her.
“I did that just to get back at you,” she said.
After she got married to Bryant, Kat called Brandon and told him that Nicola was his child. She explained how it had come to be and gave evidence that she was Nicola’s biological mother. He was ecstatic about the news and almost went on to tell his wife. But on a second thought, he knew that would amount to exposing his relationship with Kat, so he decided to keep it a secret. He got to develop a soft spot for Nicola despite his wild attitude.
Kat waited for him to tell Johanna about their relationship and the truth of Nicola’s birth. But it was awaited all it in vain, he didn’t. She called him and threatened to reveal the secret about them to Johanna unless he left Johanna and came to her. She wanted him, but the man didn’t budge. He was confused about what to do that day. He went home angry and eventually got into a fight with Johanna, hoping to use that as an excuse to leave her honorably. While a fierce argument, he wanted to say things but couldn’t say them. He loved Johanna and couldn’t imagine a life without her, though he was cold to her. He decided to end things with Kat. He saw the red light turn green and moved when suddenly a big truck didn’t wait and hit him on the side of the car he sat, and got fatally injured. He couldn’t breathe in the incubator where Nicola’s body laid.
Nicola stood there dazed at all that she had heard. Brandon was her father. She was in shock. All the deceits and death had left her in shock.
Brandon tried to move forward to her, “No, stay there!” Kat thundered.
“Ok, fine. But who am I, and why was I created? Why did you go this far?” he asked her.
She turned to him and said, “You were made a clone to be a good father to the children and for you to fall out of love with Johanna and love me. In the course of the experiment, an error occurred. Which made you still retain a part of your human nature while complemented by the robotic loving nature. He was a clone that was able to make choices on his own and follow them through.
Brandon looked over to Nicola and said to her, “Hey dear, I know you have heard everything. I think it’s time you take a stand and decide, Kat or I. You are no longer a child; you are free to make your own choices.” He prayed she chose him over her. He wanted to have his daughter with Johanna. Kat knew Nicola was going to succumb to Brandon, so she motioned to hit her with the bottom of the gun but Nicola was fast. Nicola turned and took the gun from her, and pointed it to her. “I love you, Ma but you are not my Mom. At least, you are not a mother better than Johanna. Johanna is my real mom. She raised me for who I am and loved me equally as her other children. I am so sorry.”
She was stepping back when her leg got caught in a long rope that startled her, and she pulled the trigger by mistake. The gun went off and a bullet went into her forehead. Nicola got scared; she didn’t mean to kill her. She only wanted to injure her, so that she and her father could make a run for it. Kat’s eyes filled with blood and she fell to the ground slowly. She lied on the ground lifeless and blood gushed out of her body. Nicola ran over to stay beside her, crying. Her biological mother was dead, but that would assure her life could be lived safely with her real mother.
Brandon went over to her and hugged her. ”Hey kid, you did the right thing. If you didn’t do that she would’ve ended up hurting you. Drop the gun, it’s time to go home, your family awaits you.”