Prototype

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