CHAPTER 86
WRUCK FROZE and so did I. Reid was still talking. “Let’s see, we have one, two, my goodness, seven of you. And look, Chuckles, your girlfriend’s here to save you, too.”
Reid thought Francine was me. Okay, the original hadn’t known me well, this was a clone, that was her job, after all, and she was dressed like me. Chuckie would know the difference, but there was no way he’d share that or react to let them know. The others wouldn’t, either.
Someone backed up to us. Mossy. Good. So we had the three of us not noticed. So far so not really good but at least we three were out. Was really glad we hadn’t told Jeff to roll.
“And won’t this be fun?” Reid went on. “We get to see the love triangle of the ages play out before us. We’ll let your lady love choose which one of you gets to die pleasantly and which one gets to be tortured first.”
“Leave my wife alone.” Dammit. That was Jeff’s voice. We’d taken too long and they must have figured we’d been captured, so had rolled their plan. Or else Kozlow was a lying sack. We’d find out shortly, of that I was sure. Was certain Jeff knew that was Francine not me, but he was selling it, so that gave us whatever tiny advantage we might be able to assume we had.
“Oh,” Reid said in the scary, lecherous way I still heard in my worst nightmares, “I can’t do that. She and I have so much . . . unfinished business.”
“Enough,” a woman said in a bored tone. LaRue, also sounding grown up. Fabulous. “We can play with the food later. Right now, we have to ensure that dear old Russell learns what happens to those who oppose us.”
So, Kozlow had tried, and failed. That wasn’t necessarily a mark against him. We were all failing right now.
“No, right now, we need to get the DNA for cloning.” This was Cliff. I was pretty sure. But he didn’t sound like he had the last time I’d heard his voice. He sounded kind of shaky.
“You already took mine,” Chuckie said. “Why do you need anyone else’s?”
Had to figure out how to see what was going on without being exposed. Mossy apparently had the same idea, because he took to the air and slowly flew back up the way we’d come. He returned shortly and beckoned to us. Followed him quietly and, for my part, very carefully.
My music changed to “Look At Me” by Sum 41. We were back by the elevator. There was a little alcove to the other side of it, and that’s where Mossy led us. It was a tight fit, and if Mossy had been human-sized all three of us couldn’t have done it. As it was, he had to light on my shoulder.
The rock went to chest height for me, but there was an overhang of rock right above us that made this a great little lookout spot. Because it was near the elevator, it meant that we could see the whole room, too, but someone in the room would have to look just right in order to see us. This was a sniper’s dream location.
My music changed to “Keep Looking” by Sade. Assumed this meant Algar felt it wasn’t sniper time yet and that I needed to examine the room. And what a room it was.
It was a long rectangle—we were at the corner, with a long side to our right—cut out of rock, so the acoustics were excellent. We were a story above the floor, and there were at least two stories’ worth of space above. The décor was typical Mad Scientist About To Take Over The World Chic, complete with lab tables at the usual 120-degree angle so popular with the crazed lunatic set. And, naturally, Chuckie was strapped to one of these. Still fully clothed, which was a rarity, but perhaps Cliff was holding off on stripping him to the waist for some reason.
That reason might have been that he had a bunch of other people strapped up to different lab tables throughout the room. Chuckie was at the far end from where we were, but the others were closer, on the middle of the opposite wall. Sadly, those others were indeed Jeff, Reader, Tim, and Buchanan. Didn’t see Siler and hoped he’d blended his way to some kind of safety.
Those four were strapped near something that looked a hell of a lot like the android-creation equipment we’d found in Stephanie’s lab during Operation Madhouse, complete with a wall of wires seemingly ready to go. But their tables also looked like the cloning bays we’d destroyed during Operation Infiltration. Had an extremely bad feeling about this, made worse by my music changing to Alice Cooper’s “Clones (We’re All).”
Chuckie was near a contraption that looked very like the death ray machine I’d seen in Bizarro World. Really hoped that’s not what it was, because this machine had far more than one nozzle on it. It was like four octopi had been attached to the cube within a cube within a cube, all attached by pipes at every corner. The arms were all thick and wide, like Doc Octopus’s, but, thankfully, without pincers on the end. They just had a wide-open hole, as if they were ordinary flexible pipes.
The Killer Octopus did not, thank all the Powers That Be, have a glowing Z’porrah power cube at the center, though, so it gave me a little hope that I wasn’t going to see everyone turned into little piles of dust.
Of course, the five guys strapped to the tables also had guns at their heads, which was, presumably, why Rahmi and Adriana hadn’t shot the place up the moment they were spotted. And the person holding the guns at the heads of my husband and friends was Leventhal Reid. As in, there were five Reids, and each one had a gun at the head of one of the five guys strapped down.
The others, including Kozlow, were surrounded by more Leventhal Reids. There were twenty more Reids encircling the newest captives. All of them brandishing semiautomatics. Had no idea which one was the real one, or, rather, the Original Clone, but, for me, it was like seeing my friends surrounded by twenty human vipers while five other vipers loomed over my husband and my other friends. Basically, this place was the worst kind of snake pit.
Everyone’s weapons had been taken away and were in a pile that no one was going to get to before they could be shot. Noted that Rahmi still looked like a G-Company thug. Had no idea if this was going to help us or just make her the first person Cliff had shot to teach everyone else “a lesson.”
There was only one LaRue, interestingly enough, and she looked as she always had to me, supercilious attitude and bleached blonde hair included. Or at least only one that we could see. Why ask why. And there was only one Cliff. But it definitely wasn’t the Cliff I knew. And another couple of reasons for Chuckie and the others not being stripped to the waist presented themselves—jealousy and comparison.
Cliff was in a white suit and sitting in a motorized wheelchair, which explained the wheel tracks I’d seen. He looked flat-out awful. He’d been a good-looking guy, always dressed well, always wearing a high and tight haircut, and though he was about ten years older than me and Chuckie, he’d always looked young and vibrant. He looked young and vibrant no more.
He was sort of shriveled, a bit hunched, and his hair wasn’t in a high and tight anymore. What there was of it was kind of long and stringy. His face was in profile to us and it was sunken in, as if he was a very old man.
He had a lizard on his lap, a large, fat Egyptian spiny-tailed lizard, if my memory of my natural sciences classes served. He was petting this lizard as if it was a cat.
To confirm my view that Cliff had chosen Blofeld as his new spirit animal, my music changed to the instrumental James Bond 007 theme. It would have been funny if everyone wasn’t captured and in mortal peril.
The entire thing was very reminiscent of Cliff’s lair in Bizarro World. What was missing, though, were banks of TV screens. Either they had no cameras set up anywhere or their reception here was next to nothing, because there was one TV screen and it was showing the Faradawn Treeship’s descent. And that was it. Had no idea if the bank of surveillance equipment was in another room that a hundred LaRues were monitoring or if Cliff just hadn’t had time to set that all up, but it was a lack that was working in our favor.
“Now that we’re all here,” Cliff said, rather pleasantly, ignoring Chuckie’s question, “I’m sure you’d like to know what I’m going to do with you.”
Sent up a fervent prayer that someone, anyone, would keep this guy monologuing. Had no idea if Francine could, would, or should. She looked like me, but didn’t sound like me.
“Oh, we’re, hah, dying to know,” Francine said. Sounding just like me. Troubadour talent was amazing and, right now, possibly all we had going for us.
“I figured you might. And you’re the center of it. Chain her up, we have something special planned for you.”
“I’ll bet.” Francine sounded bored. “You look as bad as Casey did.” She was damned good—clearly Serene’s training was topnotch. “You a clone, too?”
“You wish I was,” he growled.
“I wish you were dead,” Francine said conversationally. “But I’ve heard you can’t always get what you want.”
“I’m going to get what I want,” Reid said menacingly.
“Oh, blah, blah, blah.”
Wow. Hoped Jeff wasn’t having fantasies about a threesome with Francine right now, because she was doing an amazing impersonation of me. Then again, the only fantasies my team were probably having were of magnificent rescue.
Cliff cackled. Yeah, he was fully around the bend. “You put me in this chair! You’re going to suffer as I have. Slowly, though not as slowly as I’d like. We do have a timetable to keep to.”
Interesting. He thought Francine was me. The others mistaking us made sense. But I’d known Cliff for years and, epically good as she was, Francine shouldn’t have fooled him. Others, yes, but not Cliff.
“Leave her alone,” Chuckie growled. “You’ve got me. Why does anyone else have to suffer?”
“Because they love you,” Cliff said, as if it was obvious. “And no one should love you. Ever.” He rolled over to be closer to Chuckie while two of the Reids pulled Francine out of the pack and dragged her to a couple of iron rings on the floor. She struggled, but A-C or not, she wasn’t able to shake them off. Remembered that the Reid and LaRue teenagers we’d met had indicated that they had A-C DNA spliced into their genes. Meaning they’d be stronger than any human and probably stronger than any single A-C other than Jeff.
“This is all your fault,” Cliff said to Chuckie, sounding like a petulant child. “All of it. You’ve always thought you were better than me, and now, now I’m finally going to prove once and for all that you’re not. I’m going to torture and murder the only person you’ve had who’s always stood by you, your one true love, your best friend, and make you watch. Then I’m going to create androids out of those four,” he indicated Jeff and the others. “And then, then I’m going to do something I’m really going to enjoy.”
“What’s that?” Chuckie asked, managing to sound bored.
“I’m going to use my new baby,” he patted the Killer Octopus, “to turn you into a moron.”
“Come again?” Francine asked, as the Reids chained her ankles to the iron rings. My music changed to “Listen Like Thieves” by INXS.
Cliff turned his wheelchair to look at her. “I’m going to zap your beloved’s brain. We’ll take him down a few notches. He won’t get to be a gibbering idiot, because then he wouldn’t remember. He’ll just be too stupid to do anything about it. He’ll be my toy for the rest of his sad, stupid life.”
“That’s not possible,” Chuckie said. But I heard the fear, just a little.
“Anything’s possible,” Cliff said, turning back to him. “Other than her loving you more than the alien. That’s not possible in this or any other world.”
Patently untrue, as Bizarro World had shown. And I knew Chuckie knew it. But he looked frightened, hurt, and angry. So it was an act, and he was leading Cliff on to get more intel. At least, I hoped.
“You’re lying,” Chuckie said.
“I’m not. Trust me, I’m going to show you soon enough. Three hits and your IQ will be under a hundred. Far enough under that you won’t be able to figure out how to escape, not that we’ll ever give you the means or the opportunity. And you won’t be able to figure out how to kill yourself to escape, either. But you’ll remember that it’s your fault all your friends are dead.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Chuckie asked.
Cliff leaned closer to him. “Because I’ll remind you every, single hour of every, single day.”