Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4) (29 page)

“It’s show time,” Yoshi said solemnly then returned to his backpack to retrieve a clipboard.  With his clipboard in hand, he began recording the number of creations as they arrived.  Once he had reached the final number that included all but six members, he turned to Gabriel and said, “They’re all there.”

Melissa knew that the time had come to detonate the explosives they had rigged the modest building with.  All of Terzini’s creations were inside, along with Terzini himself.  All that remained was for one of them to depress a single button on a remote detonator.  Yoshi carefully removed it from his pack.

“Here we go,” he said and was about to press the button when Alexandra unexpectedly stopped him.

“Wait,” she said.

Melissa wondered whether Alexandra was having second thoughts about detonating the bombs.

“Are you okay?” Yoshi asked Alexandra.

“Yes, I’m fine. But I would like to be the one to pull the trigger on this,” Alexandra said.  “Ridding the world of these monsters will make me feel, I don’t know,
better
somehow, to know they won’t be able to do to anyone else what they almost did to me.  Does that make any sense at all?”

Melissa knew exactly what her friend meant, knew of the relief she’d felt fleetingly when had seen that Eugene had been killed.  But this was far different, far more significant.  With the press of a button, the nightmare would end.  Alexandra would sleep easier knowing that each member was dead, not just Jarrod.

“Take it,” Yoshi said and handed the small device to her.

Alexandra took a deep breath and placed her finger on the button.

Dr. Terzini stood with his hands bound behind his back.  A drainpipe stood between his body and his manacled wrists.  The pain and indignation of his predicament was of little consequence to him, however.  He was in an utter state of shock.  Gabriel’s behavior had been the catalyst for his confounded state.  That Gabriel could simply turn his back on his maker, on each of the principles engrained within him, was wholly baffling.  He had known that Gabriel was a failure the moment he had learned of his tryst with a human, that he possessed affection for her.  But he had not been prepared for the complete collapse of what he had once believed to be his most prized
invention.  Not long ago, the very tenets of his cause had rested on Gabriel shoulders.  And Gabriel had proven himself to be an absolute failure. 

Bile burned in the back of his throat as his dinner threatened to spew from his stomach.  He felt sickened, physically nauseated, to know that
his
handiwork, a project that had expended his genius, time and attention, had resulted in outright disappointment.  Gabriel would be held accountable for each of his offenses; Terzini would make certain of it.  He just needed to figure out how he was going to extract himself from the handcuffs.  He had grown human beings, solved the flaws of mankind.  Handcuffs would be child’s play compared to the challenges he’d overcome thus far.  He began to recall his studies in physics and began to explore how he could free himself.  Voices echoed through the empty building and distracted him from his thoughts; Voices and footsteps.  It sounded as though the brewery was filling with people.  But such an occurrence seemed impossible.  The plant had been defunct for many years now.  Tours had ended long before its closing.  The building existed as an eyesore on an otherwise picturesque landscape.   He wondered why anyone would be arriving, much less a group.  Furthermore, the building had been fitted with explosives.  Surely, they did not intend to kill him along with a collection of random people.  But whether the assembly lived or died was not his concern.  He was, however, very concerned with preserving his own life.  He began to call out to anyone who could possibly hear him.

“Help me!  I’m trapped down here!  Someone, please help me!” he screamed as loudly as he could.

After several agonizing moments, footfalls resounded from the corridor beyond the office.  The door creaked open and a familiar face regarded him curiously.

“Dr. Terzini?” Jacob Stone asked quizzically.

Jacob was one of the sixty members in his legion that he’d designed in his Santa Ynez laboratory.  Startlingly handsome, as all of his creations were, Jacob stared at him curiously.

“Jacob, what on earth are you doing here?” Terzini demanded.

“I received a message from Jarrod.  We were to meet here so that you could address us all together without drawing unwanted attention,” Jacob replied.

“Wait, what? 
Jarrod
ordered you here?” Terzini asked and could not mask his worry.

“Yes sir.”

“And you’re all here?”

“Well, just about all of us are here.  Only five members are missing.  And Jarrod hasn’t arrived yet.”

Suddenly, the realization of what was happening dawned on Dr. Franklin Terzini. 

“Get my phone Jacob, quickly. Get it from my pocket and put it in my hands, now!”

Jacob dutifully obliged his maker and pulled the phone from his pocket.  Once the phone was in his hand, Terzini knew he had one remaining task to perform before his life was taken from him.  He fingered in a twelve digit code as quickly as he could then let out a sigh of relief as he depressed the ‘send’ button.

Seconds after Alexandra pressed the single red button on the detonation device, the entire warehouse, filled with Dr. Terzini and all of his creations, tumbled.  The world was still in the first seconds after the control was employed.  The silence was followed by an unnerving whoosh unlike Gabriel had ever heard.  And the whoosh initiated the toppling of cinderblock, concrete and glass.  The earth shook and rumbled beneath his feet.  Thunderous roars and earsplitting shrieks boomed and wailed as the buildings structure yielded.  Metal girders gave way to the tremendous weight of upper floors collapsing on one another, sagging and straining until they could no longer bear the load.  An immense cloud of dust formed and fanned out in every direction, encompassing the surrounding land, until the area was enveloped in a veil of gray.  Though he had observed Alexandra force her finger down on the switch, the sight and sound of the destruction came as a surprise to him, nevertheless.  Within minutes, an entire brewery had been destroyed, reduced to rubble, and his maker had been fallen with it.  Gabriel breathed deeply despite the filth in the air that filled his lungs, and felt free for the first time in his existence. 

“It’s over,” he breathed but no one heard him.

His ears rang from the deafening sound of the collapse.   He assumed the same was true of his friends.  He looked around at them.  Each stood in awe of what had just transpired, and its significance.  Melissa turned to him, as if she sensed his eyes on her.

“Is it really over?” she asked and a tear rolled down her cheek.

“Yes.  It’s over,” he said loudly and Yoshi and Alexandra turned around.

“Whoohoo!” Alexandra shouted.

“Yes!” Yoshi agreed and pumped his fists.

A feeling of exuberance settled over Gabriel and he hugged everyone tightly.  Tears of pure joy, of freedom, flowed freely from his eyes.  And he noticed he was not alone in his emotion-filled excitement. Alexandra and Melissa wept openly, and smiled as they did, as well as Yoshi.  All Gabriel had known, all he’d experienced in his existence, had been tainted by fear; fear of what lurked on the horizon, fear of his past, fear of the future.  With Terzini and his creations dead, his fear was over.  He would finally be able to begin his life.  In the years to come, he would marry Melissa, and start a family.  Standing with the woman he loved in his arms, surrounded by friends, the future, for once, looked promising.  In fact, it looked perfect.

Dr. Franklin Terzini waited patiently as the first of two electronic drones sounded before the unbreakable, sound-proof glass partition lowered into its paneling.  He felt an immense satisfaction as the divider disappeared.  With it gone, he would no longer need to communicate through a speaker grate when his creator and identical twin required his counsel.  Both his twin and the partition had confined him.  Now both were gone, forever.

A smile spread across his otherwise stoic features.  He felt it end at his lips for he felt no mirth whatsoever.  Joy at his liberation escaped him.  Too big a task awaited him.  The first Dr. Terzini had led his mission ineffectively, and had left behind a legacy of failure.  He sought to rectify past failures.  He would do as his maker never had.  He would succeed.  He would destroy mankind.

He rose from his seat then walked slowly, reveling in each moment of his journey across the cell that had confined him since his birth.  He raised his knee and stretched it over the lower half of the wall that housed the defunct partition and sat for a moment before dragging his other leg across the threshold.  He stood and took a deep breath, savoring the interesting scents that intermingled in the space beyond his cell, ones he’d never had the luxury of experiencing before.  When his sense of smell had been sufficiently satiated, he looked over his shoulder at his former home, the only one he’d ever known, then moved immediately to a door across the room.  Beyond the door was a darkened corridor.  He strode down it quickly, eager to escape any reminder of his past, of his imprisonment, until he reached a black door.

Ordinarily, the door would have been locked from the outside, a precautionary security step the late Dr. Terzini had taken to ensure his confinement in the event of a breach in the partition.  His maker had been the only person to possess a key card to unlock the door as well as a remote code that could be activated from any location in the world.  That same code had applied to the glass partition.  He reached out his hand and a fleeting feeling crossed his mind as he turned the knob.  He briefly worried that the door would remain locked, and his freedom would end not much farther from where it began.  Fortunately for him though, the door opened.  No more barriers stood between him and his mission. 

Excitement unlike any he’d ever experienced stirred inside him.  It teemed inside of him like a live entity, frenziedly seeking a way out.  The laboratory, illuminated by overhead fluorescent fixtures, was immaculately clean and organized.  Each piece of equipment had been methodically arranged.  Shelving units, stainless-steel tables and development tanks had all been painstakingly maintained and positioned so that each step in his maker’s tedious procedure could be performed as it was needed.  He thought it a shame that all of it would be destroyed.  He would incinerate it all in a towering inferno so that the slightest trace of what had occurred within the walls of the structure would be identifiable.  All evidence would be destroyed, including Dawn Downing. 

Dawn Downing.

He did not know why the mere thought of her name sent a shiver through his core, why he felt a sudden and irrepressible urge to see her before she perished.  He tried to push the urge down, to suppress it long enough to collect the chemicals needed to create the exquisite fire he would set.  But as he gathered the canisters, the urge beckoned him.  And he felt, for reasons that were unclear to him, powerless to deny it.  So he yielded. He placed his containers atop a stainless-steel table and set out to find her.

He moved through a labyrinth of equipment until he arrived at a cell not entirely unlike the one that had held him.  The only differences were that her partition spanned from the floor to the ceiling, and hers had a motion-activated door.  He gazed at her for several moments.  She was strapped to a hospital gurney, small and fragile looking, save for her swollen belly.  But she did not assume the sickly pallor others had had under the harsh lighting of the laboratory.  He had seen streaming video feed of previous subjects, and none had looked as hearty as she did.  She did not look weak or unhealthy.  To the contrary, she looked vibrant, and seemed to radiate vigor.  Her golden hair looked like a halo of radiance around her milky complexion, and plump, pink lips glowed with vitality.  But the most arresting quality about her was neither her flaxen hair nor her rosy mouth.  It was her eyes.  Her eyes were the palest blue he’d ever seen.  No other woman–not in a magazine, movie or book–had had similar iris coloring to Dawn Downing.  Even more anomalous was that she, a natural blonde, had unusually dark eyelashes that framed her pastel eyes.  If her midsection did not protrude, he would have assumed she was his maker’s handiwork, and not a loathsome human being.

She looked up at him, as if she’d sensed his thought, read them even, and stared at him, her eyes glacial not only in color but in countenance as well.  He had never seen a woman in person before, and wanted very much to see her up close; to touch her.  Though it was not at all part of his plan, he impulsively stepped forward and stood on the motion-activated sensor.  The door immediately slid open.  Dawn’s eyes followed him, her glorious eyes the color of the sky reflected in a frozen landscape.  He sidled up next to her gurney and stared at the variety of wires, tubes and electrodes that flowed from her.  He felt it such a pity that a creature as beautiful as her had to be affixed to so much equipment, so he began detaching each of them.  One by one, he disconnected all of the leads until just the nylon straps held her in place.  All the while, her eyes never left him.  He felt them on him.  The coolness of their color burned in him, smoldered.  Outwardly, she appeared as cool as her gaze.  But her carotid artery betrayed her calm veneer.  It drummed dangerously against the tender flesh of her throat.  He reached his hand out to touch what he guessed would be the silkiest skin he’d ever felt, the only skin, other than his own, he’d ever felt.  As he did so, she recoiled almost imperceptibly, and he saw a look of horror flash brie
fly in her eyes.  Undaunted, he stroked the delicate skin of her neck, and it was every bit as inviting as he’d thought it would be.  He felt the rhythm of her heart pounding in her carotid artery, rushing blood to every part of her as her body prepared itself for fight or flight.  Of course, she could do neither.  Her body’s response was futile.  But he enjoyed it, nevertheless, enjoyed the scent of her stress, of her fear.  She watched him with intense concentration.  He was mesmerized by her intent look, by the reactions storming inside of her.  He raised his other hand to her throat and felt with both hands, applied just slightly more pressure.  She glowered at him and he squeezed even harder, until she glared with a hate so concentrated he could almost feel it.  Incited, he clamped down even harder, gripping her slender neck until his hands ached.  Her porcelain complexion deepened in color and turned crimson first, then nearly purple.   Veins in her eyes reddened as well as her eyes bulged and strained in their sockets.  But he did not stop squeezing, not until the fitful drumming in her throat ceased.