Breakaway

The killer and her spawn sat on my couch. My ex-wife and my son. Bright sunlight cast my waking nightmare in a warm glow.

            “What do you want?” I asked.

            “First I want you to sit down.” Jake aimed an open palm at the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. My black trousers brushed the padding on the edge of the table that was there to prevent my infant son, Jacob, from hurting himself.

            Cushions welcomed me as I sat on the matching black sofa. I looked over my shoulder at the door. Any moment my wife, my second wife, would return with Jacob.

            I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialled her number. Jake’s pocket rang. He reached into his jeans and pulled out Bethany’s phone with his spidery fingers.

            “I’m here now dad. If you want to talk, we can just talk. I switched your new wife’s phone this morning when she left the house. You’d think she’d know my face from the news but when I bumped into her, she apologised. So sweet.

            Does she know you’re a bigamist?”

            “What? No. She doesn’t know about my past.”

            Eliza, queen of my nightmares, raised her eyebrows as she smiled at me. Jake had inherited that smile. Either of them could give me goosebumps with that smile. 

            “That could be an awkward conversation. I’d love to see it.” Her brown eyes glowed with the venom of a woman scorned. “First, I’d like to know why you never visited me?”

            “Because people thought I was dead.” My fear retreated for a moment. “Dead men don’t visit their wives in prison.”

            “I’m still your wife? I thought I was your widow. I preferred being your widow.”

            “Are you wearing Bethany’s clothes?” I asked her. My fear was almost forgotten entirely. They were violating my home. To do it to me was one thing, to threaten my wife and son was reprehensible. They were dogs pissing on things they thought they owned.

            “They’re a little loose on me. Prison food was hideous.”

            “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

            Their sharkish smiles returned.

            “I wanted to see if there was anything left of the Jeremiah McCormack I married. Now I see him. The rage. Much better.” Eliza scratched her short hair with the skeletal digits she’d passed on to our son. “I also want an apology for you stealing my half of the Phoenix Project and lumping me with the life sentences.”

            All her joy had turned to ice and steel. Again, I felt the urge to run to the toilet.

            “You killed them,” I said. “I didn’t lump you with the murders. You killed eight people all by yourself.” I pointed to her with an accusing finger.

            My watch flashed with an update to my schedule. I looked at the screen on my wrist and read the update. 15:00-18:00 ARE YOU OK?

            Bethany was either at my work or had contacted my secretary to message me. Some of the tension in my shoulders eased. My old monstrous family would not collide with my sane, loving family.

            “Message from your assistant? Bethany is a clever one. Not as smart as mother though.” A smile passed from Jake to Eliza and back. He pulled the hood of his red hoodie over his scruffy brown hair and looked at me from the shadows.

            “How did you replicate the project?” I asked Jake. He’d cheated death. Smashing himself on a pavement after an impossible jump and blowing his brains out as well. Two lives used up.

            “I didn’t. I stole it.” He seemed to wait for a response that wasn’t coming. “Einstein doesn’t remember taking his son to the lockup? Are you getting forgetful in your old age?”

            “I never took you to the lockup,” I said. All the things I’d stolen from my work ended up in a private garage hidden away in the countryside. “Wait.”

            “That’s right.” He flashed pearly white teeth. “I was four. I’d been kicked out of school for stabbing a boy with a pencil. You made me wait in the car outside the garages, but I remembered the location. I didn’t take a genius to look there when you went missing. I found everything. Everything.”

            “When?” I asked. I had faked my death. How long had my son known I was alive?

            “The same day. I took a taxi there. I waited for you to come back.”

            I hung my head. “I never did.”

            “No shit.”

My doorbell rang. It wasn’t Bethany. A delivery? Doubtful.

            “It’s open,” Jake shouted.

            In walked a tattooed warrior princess in a red hoodie that matched my son’s and a man wearing armour that covered his chest and upper legs. He had a gun in his hand.

            Jake stood and hugged the girl who looked roughly his twenty-three years.

            “Mother, father, this is my wife.”

            “Hello,” she waved warmly to Eliza and glowered at me. “My name is Celine.” Jake’s mother and wife embraced. “I’ve heard everything about you both.” When she smiled her eyes were lost in red lashes. Her nails were the same red. The gun that glittered in the holster on her waist was red.

            She looked at the man with tattooed arms folded over his chest. “Introduce yourself.”

            “Hi, I’m Bruno.” My legs had never been as thick as that man’s arms.

            “He doesn’t like to talk,” Celine smiled. Her smile was warm and sweet. If it weren’t for the gun and the neck tattoos she would pass for wholesome.

            “That’s alright. We should get this show on the road anyway.” Jake waved a gun that had appeared from nowhere. “Follow Bruno.”

            I followed the armoured god of war from my fortified apartment down to a limousine that was parked outside. Bruno was the driver. I looked at Jake, confused.

            “Get in.”

            A black sack was thrown over my head. Someone bound my hands with zip ties. The family talked as if I wasn’t there.

            “We have everything from Jeremiah’s old laboratory. We also have some newer computers to synchronise with it. The technology he was using is antiquated now.” Celine’s accent was melodious, hints of Earth, Italy. We were all from Earth originally, but Shiva was a planet of diaspora that were making new blends from the old ethnicities and nationalities.

            “You haven’t touched any of the software, have you?” Eliza’s concern was clear. We had worked on the Phoenix Project before I received research grants for mind transfer technology.

            “All we’ve done so far is make copies of the programs as they were. I think adapting them to new hardware will be smoother than trying to run the old stuff that could break at any moment.”

            “You found yourself a good woman I see, Jake. Well done. How did you two meet?” Eliza sounded like a mother for the first time in a very long time. Just another mum curious to know about her daughter-in-law.

            “I saw her in the news years ago. Her father was arrested when one of their hitmen turned informant. She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw. I used to imagine what our life would be like, but it seemed ridiculous to get in touch with her.

The story came back to me when Jeremiah left. Jeremiah setting himself on fire to be reborn seemed more ridiculous than contacting a girl I’d seen in the news years before. I got in touch with her. That was three years ago.” Though his voice was the usual monotone he used when not enraged, Jake spoke with an unusually warm vocabulary.

            “How long have you been married?”

            “Four months,” Celine said. “At first it was a little strange. Being told someone had idolised you since they saw you once years ago was… odd. Then he dealt with a few of my problems. We were spending so much time together I accepted his invitation to dinner.”

            “Problems?”

            “The family business had been under pressure for a long time. Jake came up with a strategy to deal with it.”

            “What is your family business?”

            “Acquisitions, distribution, insurance, removal and security.” Celine’s answer was rehearsed.

            “And now you’ve acquired, removed and secured Project Phoenix.” Eliza’s tone was cold. Project Phoenix was her obsession, more than it had ever been mine. She had been studying to become a brain surgeon until we met in university. Our obsessions combined.

We were testing theories on dead bodies that were supposedly donated to science. Eliza tricked people who met our criteria into taking a sedative that they never woke up from. She never told me.

“You can think of it like that, or you could say that Project Phoenix acquired us. It will all be a joint venture now. You’ll get what you want. We’ll get what we want.” Celine’s voice suggested she was smiling. “We can fund your research and you can help us avoid unwanted police attention. If you need bodies, we can provide them.”

I bet they could.

“If things go as smoothly as you say, we will get along famously.” Eliza didn’t sound so sure. Infamously would have been apt.

The limousine stopped. The sack was whipped from my head. A grubby tower block I had never seen before looked as though it had recently been on fire. People wearing red hats or shoes or whatever were standing all around. All of them had guns.

            I was escorted into the lift by goons who lifted me by the armpits. On the top floor I found an entirely different scene. Plastic covered everything. There was a clean room inside the burnt-out husk of the building. My old equipment sat on folding tables.

            “Welcome to your humble abode,” Jake said. He pointed to a bed with a handcuff and chain. “Your en-suite is there.” He pointed to a portable toilet. “Room service is round the clock. You are permitted one hour of supervised exercise time outside per day.

            For now, set up the equipment. Try anything stupid and one of my friends will hurt you.”

            “You don’t have friends Jake.”

            “True. I’ll rephrase. Mess with me and you’ll regret it.”

            “Too late for that,” I muttered.

            “No, Jeremiah, it can always get worse.”

Since I had no other choice, I got to work. I hadn’t seen some of the equipment in years. Being reborn is unpleasant. I’d hoped never to see my old lab again. Plugging everything in was the easy bit.

            Despite my anxiety I was soothed by the familiar work. Science had been my life, my obsession. An old hunger awakened inside me.

            Dust coated the insides of the machines. I was given cleaning supplies and told to do what I had to. I vacuumed and dusted. I ate instant ramen from a microwave next to my creaking bed.

            My hour of exercise was at night. I realised Jake didn’t want me knowing exactly where I was. I walked around in circles in the overgrown car park. I memorised the graffiti on the walls. I waited for my chance.

            “Why do you need me? You clearly managed to get the equipment working by yourself.”

            “I was moving memories between bio-copies.” He was using the slang term for 3D printed people. “I want to be able to do what you did, to jump from one body to another.”

            “It’s more complicated than that.”

            “No shit.”

Another week passed. I took my time. Giving gangsters the gift of immortality was bad enough without making it possible for them to look completely different. Justice would never be done again.

My chance came after two weeks. Only one man watched me. It was exercise time which meant I was trudging around the car park while my guard looked at projections on his phone. I found half a brick on the ground and walked right up to him.

            “What d’you want?” He said in a drawl.

            I hit him in the head with the brick.

            He fell, limp.

            Not checking to see if he was ok, I took the gun from his belt. I didn’t want a weapon. I’m a man of science, not a soldier. I wanted the firing pin. The gun wasn’t fundamentally different to guns used before space travel. When I took it apart, I found the firing pin and bent it to use as a lockpick.

            Using a trick I’d passed on to Jake because I was a terrible father, I picked the lock on the cuffs and closed them around my guard’s wrists. I left the rest and climbed awkwardly over the fence, cutting my ankle on rusty wire.

            Thank the heavens for tetanus jabs.

            I ran limping through the night, into grassland.

When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I realised I was heading in the wrong direction, away from civilisation. Shiva is a big planet but there are only half a billion people. There’s very little beyond the halos of farmland around cities.

            I turned around and ran back at a tangent to my son’s secret resurrection laboratory. I ran until my throat was on fire and my feet were bleeding inside my trainers.

            I found an open road and waited in bushes for someone to come. It felt like hours, but I knew walking back wouldn’t be fast enough. I saw blinding light flying towards me. I stepped out into the road and prayed it wasn’t a member of Jake’s gang. I hoped the brakes were functional.

            The trick to getting a lift in the middle of the night as a man is to look pathetic. I made myself sob as I held up my hands to my saviour. I hugged the car as the door opened.

            “Thank you. Thank goodness you found me. I’ve been out here for days.” I didn’t want to mention gangs. Some people would have slammed the door and driven off, not wanting caught up in someone else’s nightmare. “Someone stole my car from a car park in the mountains. Can you help me get back to the city?”

            My saviour was an old woman with canyon creases on her face. Her dentures glittered as she smiled. “Of course you can my dear. Hop in. What an awful time you must have had.”

            “I lost my phone and my things in a river. I need to get to a police station to report the theft. Thank you.” I clambered into the car and sat heavily in the seat across from the woman who had been drinking chardonnay while the vehicle took her to a party. She had her glad rags on and the pearls out.

            Gladys dropped me off at the nearest police station. I thanked her and headed up concrete steps into the long arms of the law. I had avoided police for years. It was time to take responsibility. I had to look after Bethany and Jacob.

            A blue droid greeted me at the front desk. As I approached it adjusted its height to be at my exact eye level.

            “How may I help you sir?” Its accent was Earthly British RP. The head was an orb of reflective blue with a screen that displayed a passive cartoon face.

            “My family is in danger. My name is Alfred Frost. Jake McCormack kidnapped me and threatened my wife Bethany Frost and our son Jacob. I need them to be in police protection.”

            “Do you know why Jake McCormack might target you sir?”

            “Because he discussed helping his mother escape prison. And now he’s done it.”

            “Your response has been recorded and is being processed.” Instead of the face an arrow spun in a circle on the screen with the words Please Wait in the middle.

            “To authorise a facial recognition scan for your wife and child a palm scan is required.” The outline of a hand appeared on the screen. The droids neck extended towards me. I placed my hand on the droid’s face and waited as a red line travelled up and down.

            “Your wife will need to give consent to be placed in police protective custody.”

            “Beth is a smart woman. She’ll agree.”

            “You wish to be placed in protective custody together?”

            “No. I want them safe. Jake is targeting me. I need them to be somewhere else.”

            “I understand. Do you wish to record a message for your family?” I nodded. The screen an image of my face. “Hit the red button when you are ready to record your message.”

            Tearing up, I hit the button. “Hello Beth. I’m not sure how to say this.” I wiped my eyes. “I need you to take Jacob into protective custody. It’s the only way you can both be safe from Jake McCormack. He needs me for something he’s planning. I’m going to testify against him, but I can only do it if I know the two of you are safe.

Hopefully when he and Eliza are in prison, I can be with you again. I love you, Beth. I love you, Jacob. Be safe.”

I had to fill in a form by clicking on the droid’s touchscreen face. I should have confessed that I was really Jeremiah McCormack, but it would have been so laughable that the police would not take my testimony seriously. My hands were shaking as I entered my details.

“How quickly can you take Beth and Jacob into protective custody?”

“A car is already on its way sir.”

“What happens now?”

“Now you will be taken to a safe house sir.”

“Not with a hood over my head, I hope.”

“No sir.”