Henry’s jaw dropped and his heart went into overdrive as he looked around desperately. He was in an enormous hardware store and he had somehow managed to end up against the back wall, empty-handed and unable to get to any of a thousand things he could use as a weapon.
Yeah, it was definitely time to retire. Except it didn’t look like he was going to live long enough—
His gaze fell on a fire extinguisher. Oh, great—that would be a big help. Just not for him.
But the thing next to it might be.
Or it might not, but he pushed the thought aside. This was what he had—a moment ago, he’d had nothing. He grabbed it and flattened himself against the wall. The gas canister had been a good gambit, clever as hell, and if they’d been fighting any other killer, it would have worked. Henry decided he was going to find out why it hadn’t, even if it killed him.
Oh, God, that smell, that fucking smell; his stomach twisted like a corkscrew and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. He had reached his limit for that fucking smell; if the killer didn’t get him, he might puke himself to death.
No, he didn’t smell anything, he told himself as he stepped away from the wall and swung the fire axe as hard as he could, burying it in the killer’s chest.
The guy’s legs flew out from under him and he crashed to the floor on his back. Somehow Danny was downstairs again, gliding over to Henry on her stool just as Junior appeared. That fucking smell was even stronger, even though the man on the floor was no longer burning. He was struggling to breathe, but bizarrely there was no moaning, no crying. He wasn’t even writhing in pain.
The indoor rain shower petered out. Henry looked from him to Junior. “I’ll say this for your old man. He knows how to train a soldier.” He crouched down and pulled off the guy’s mask.
Everything stopped.
The guy on the floor gazed up at them, his expression dazed, like he was seeing something beyond his understanding. There were probably lots of things he didn’t understand, Henry thought; concepts and realities that a person had to grow into, situations that only someone with many years of experience could make sense of. This guy was just too young. Danny and Junior were kids to Henry but this guy was a real kid—he couldn’t have been any older than eighteen. Only it was himself, Henry Brogan, at eighteen. Or Junior at eighteen. Or both.
Henry had been sure Verris wouldn’t stop at one clone but it gave him no pleasure to be right. Junior looked like he’d just taken a hard blow to the head with a sledgehammer. It was one thing to know something in the abstract but quite another to see the proof lying on the floor with a fucking axe in his chest.
Welcome to my world, Junior, Henry said silently. It only gets weirder from here.
Suddenly, an intense protectiveness toward Junior and Danny swept over him, followed by guilt for failing to keep them safe. Henry wondered if this was how parents felt when they were driving their kids to the emergency room after they’d fallen down and broken their arms.
Or maybe it was more like what his mother had been feeling when she’d jumped into the Philadelphia municipal pool to save him from drowning.
She hadn’t seen his father every time she looked at him, Henry realized suddenly—he had. And his mother hadn’t been able to save him from his own wrong-headed thinking like she’d saved him from drowning. That had always been up to him, and it still was.
All of this passed through his mind in a heartbeat. A shrink might have called it a great breakthrough but he wasn’t in a shrink’s office, he was in a shot-up hardware store with two clones, one of whom had burned alive and was now dying with an axe in his chest, and an agent about to go into shock from a gunshot wound.
Damn, this had to be some kind of record for the most simultaneous crises during the first week of retirement.
Danny was bent over the dying clone looking at all his injuries in horrified incredulity. Ms. First Aid, Henry thought; even if she’d still had her burn bag with her, she wouldn’t have found anything in it to help him.
“Don’t you feel pain?” she asked the clone.
The dying clone looked from Danny to Henry with a puzzled frown, and then to Junior. Obviously Verris hadn’t let him in on the family secret. Henry wondered what Verris had called him—Junior 2.0? The Next Big Thing?
And what had he called himself?
Well, they would never know. The clone’s eyes fell closed and his breathing simply stopped. As if he’d died peacefully at home in bed, not in the wreckage of a hardware store with burns all over his body and an axe in his chest.
For a long moment, they were all silent. He had to take care of them, Henry thought, looking at Danny and Junior’s shell-shocked faces. It was up to him to help them get through this and then put it behind them, although he had no idea how. Nowhere in any of his training, formal or informal, had there ever been anything about what to do when your clone tried to kill you but you killed him first.
“I don’t know why you’re so angry with me. You were the inspiration for all of this.”
Junior turned from the dead clone on the floor to see his dedicated, loving, present father ambling toward them in an easy, casual way. He looked like he had dropped in to pick up some tools for his latest project and he just happened to have a semi-automatic weapon with him.
“You okay, son?” Verris asked Junior.
Junior blinked at him. What the hell did Verris expect him to say to that—Sure, Dad, but I think I need a hug?
But Verris had already turned to Henry. “Know where I got the idea?” he said. “It was in Khafji.” Verris was actually smiling as he set his weapon down on a nearby shelf, one of the few that were still standing. “Watching you go house to house, wishing I had a whole division of soldiers as good as you, wondering if that could be possible. You should be flattered.”
Henry gave a single, humorless laugh. “You should be dead.”
Verris chuckled, as if Henry had said something witty. “You saw what I saw over there: friends being sent home in pine boxes or struggling with life-changing injuries. And the atrocities. Why should we accept that if there’s a better way?”
Keeping his eyes on Henry, he moved closer to Junior. “And look what we created.” He gestured at Junior, like a game-show host showing off the grand prize; it made Junior want to slap his face until his head fell off. “He’s got both of us in him. Don’t you think your country deserves a perfect version of you?”
“There is no perfect version of me,” Henry snapped. “Or him—” he nodded at Junior. “Or anybody.”
“No?” Verris looked down at the dead clone, his face sad. “He was on his way to Yemen—the perfect soldier for the job. Instead, thanks to you, his place will be taken by someone with parents. Someone who feels pain and fear—which we had edited out of this soldier—someone with just as many weaknesses as the terrorists we’re trying to kill. You’re going to tell me that’s better?”
Junior’s own words came back to him: You made a person out of another person.
Except a person had parents. A person felt pain and fear. If Verris had edited those things out of this soldier, what was left that made him a person?