Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4) (3 page)

“Sure.  I’m going to relieve Yoshi in about an hour.”

“You know, you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, right?”

“I am here to make sure nothing else happens to you,” he said levelly.

“Gabriel, nothing’s going to happen to me in broad daylight in a crowded, public place,” she assured him but remained unconvinced of her own statement.

“I’m not taking any chances.  You were taken once before.  I won’t let you be taken again.”

Gabriel had come to Lake Foster each day that she worked and sat sentinel through her shift.  At any other job, she would have been fired for having her boyfriend stand watch over her, or her boss would have had him removed from the property.  But at Lake Foster, he was one of many guests who visited on predictable days; regulars were a common sight.  He became part of the expected scenery to her director and coworkers.   All of the girls on staff enjoyed seeing him as part of the lakeside setting.  They flirted and joked with him whenever opportunity arose to do so. 

“I’m sure I’m safe here, but I never mind having you close by,” she said trying to sound teasing.

Melissa was not the kind of girl who teased or flirted with boys openly or otherwise.  She did not twirl her hair, puff out her bosom, or show off by squealing and giggling. Telling Gabriel, her impossibly handsome boyfriend, that she enjoyed having him close by with a smile was the closest she’d ever come to flirtation.  Her words were honest.  She had blurted them out in an attempt to tell him how she felt
and
take a stab at the whole flirtation game.  She expected him to say something like,
“It’s nice to be close to you,”
or
“Any excuse to see you in a bathing suit,”
but her attempt fell flat.  She was sure she would have blushed at any response that bordered on frisky.  She was blushing from her original admission, and would have liked to hear him playfully confirm his attraction to her.  He was, after all, genetically altered.  And while he had transcended the original blueprint of his existence, she wondered whether he had the same
needs
as other boys his age.  He was always kind, polite and affectionate.  He had consistently expressed his feeling for her in a gentlemanly manner, and acted honorably, respectfully.  She knew he loved her, but did not know whether his feeling went beyond that, whether he
wanted
her as other boys her age wanted girls.  He had never tried anything beyond kissing and hugging her.  His gestures were always chaste.  Seeing him each day shirtless and muscular was testing the boundaries of their chaste relationship, for her at least.  She had never taken a relationship to the level she wanted to go to with him, she had never felt desire press her as it did now.

“You are safe with me here, Melissa.  You have nothing to worry about.”

He did not return her smile or volley back a playful response.  Instead, he looked at her solemnly with his features carved in stone, and vowed to protect her.  Clearly, he had misinterpreted her highly colored cheeks as embarrassment; as shame for being terrified of another of Dr. Terzini’s boogeymen appearing and abducting her.  Naturally, she
was
terrified of the maniacal geneticist and the bottomless bag of horrific tricks he boasted, but had very strong feelings for Gabriel and wondered if they were reciprocated.

“I’ll meet you in ten minutes by the concession stand.  I’ll get you a sandwich and we can talk,” he said then returned to his blanket.

She was tempted to watch him gather his belongings, watch as he bent, twisted and reached, all the while showcasing different but equally developed muscles, each glistening with the sheen of sunblock.  But her job was to keep her eyes on the swimmers in her section until Lily, a fellow lifeguard, came to relieve her for her lunch break.

After ten minutes that felt like twenty, Lily scaled the tall wooden ladder and sat beside her to take her post.  Melissa climbed down and walked quickly to the concession stand.

A small, all-female crowd had formed around Gabriel as it almost always did wherever they went.  A number of available tables sat empty, yet the four surrounding the one he waited at had packed to capacity.  Picnic benches were lined with bikini-clad girls who filled their suits far better than she did.  She looked down are her uniform, a full-coverage one-piece bathing suit in navy blue, and felt a sudden pang of inadequacy.   She worried that perhaps he did not make advances toward her because along with his newfound feelings came newfound awareness that he could do much better than her, maybe he didn’t want
her
.  She felt heat behind her eyes.  Tears smarted and threatened behind her eyelids.  They were based upon nothing concrete.  He did not so much as glance at the other girls; he paid them no mind.  Her worries were a result of her insecurities.  She knew that much.  But awareness did little to stop them, nevertheless.

She sat down across from him and took off her sunglasses.  He had bought a turkey sandwich for her with extra pickles, her favorite, and a bag of chips.  She smiled and he seemed to delight in her happiness.  The burning behind her eyes subsided.

“It’s a little less nasty today, the weather I mean,” Melissa fumbled.

“Yeah, it is much less humid,” Gabriel agreed then took a bite of his sandwich.

She checked her watch and began eating her food as well, all the while contemplating a tactful way to gauge his desire for her, if any.  Any possibilities that she considered seemed idiotic and humiliating.  Tempting him with a low-cut blouse would be futile; she simply did not have the equipment for such an endeavor.  Besides, luring her boyfriend with scant clothing was not conducive to her personality.  She would like to ask him flat out.  Directness was more appealing than degrading herself.  Both posed the threat of rejection.  Only one offered her the security of being completely covered, of retaining the slightest modicum of dignity if rejected.  Parading around half naked and getting turned down would be more than she could bear.

He looked up from his food, stared at her knowingly, as if her thoughts had risen from her mind and lingered in the air, like a ghostly cloud, blurred and indistinct and he was somehow decoding a fragment of them.

“You look beautiful today,” he said and rubbed her arm lightly.

She couldn’t decipher whether his gesture was platonic, didn’t care at the moment; she was enjoying the sensation his touch caused entirely too much to ruin it with speculation.  His touch made the tiny hairs on her arms rise and goose bumps followed immediately after. 

“Thanks,” she replied.  “I feel like a mess.  The hat, the awful bathing suit and the fact that it’s, like, ninety-five degrees today makes me feel pretty gross.  I can’t wait to take a shower.”

“You’re definitely
not
gross,” he said and looked through her with his cerulean eyes.  “But I can understand wanting a shower on a day like today.  Even without the humidity, it’s oppressive.  What time are you out of here?”

Although she thought he had memorized her schedule by now, she answered him. “Five o’clock.”

“I was thinking we could go out tonight, do something special, you know?”

“Umm, yeah, that sounds great.  What did you have in mind?”

She was sure he would suggest dinner and a movie. 

“I was thinking that I would get rid of Yoshi for the night, that maybe you would come over.  I’ll make dinner and we can watch a movie or, whatever.”

His voice trailed off with the last word he spoke.  She was uncertain of the implication.  If it were any other guy her age, she would know exactly what it implied, but with Gabriel,  interpreting his statements was another ball game entirely; he often meant
exactly
what he said, no innuendos, no insinuations.  Therefore, she assumed that the “whatever” meant that he hadn’t thought that far ahead.  Regardless, it would be nice to be alone for a change.  They had not been alone since their last date at his house eight months earlier, and that evening had not ended well.

“Great.  That would be great,” she said and couldn’t hide the excitement in her voice.

“Okay.  How does seven thirty sound?  Does that give you enough time to shower and get ready?”

“Plenty of time,” she answered.

“Awesome.  I’ll pick you up then,” he smiled.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said.

His eyes held hers briefly.  He seemed to be trying to communicate something to her but she was unsure exactly what.  She hoped he did not plan to reveal another momentous piece of information to her as he did eight months ago.  She feared she could not handle more that she was already handling.  With Gabriel, she never knew what to expect next.

Dr. Franklin Terzini swiped a transducer probe over his subject’s swollen belly.  While most ultrasound machines in medical offices generated only a grainy black-and-white image on the display monitor, his offered a three-dimensional representation in a variety of shades.  He depressed several keys on the keyboard and the central processing unit responded to his command and zoomed in on the chest cavity of the developing fetus.  He adjusted the transducer, pressing and positioning it until it produced a crystal-clear view of the fetus’s heart.  He studied the picture before him carefully, though there wasn’t anything of significance to study.  He quickly retracted the transducer and replaced it in its sleeve then printed out the image he’d just seen along with the necessary information gathered from the scan.  He held the paper in his hand then looked at his subject impassively.  She was harnessed to a gurney.  Leather straps held her torso in place while cuffs of the same material bound her wrist and ankles.  A Foley catheter, a long, thin tube, had been inserted into her urethra and extended to her bladder to empty it so that urinating did not require movement of any kind.  Her output was monitored regularly to make sure that she was properly hydrated, as were her bowel movements.  When she needed to make a bowel movement, she would depress a button on the railing of her bed that would summon him.  He would go to her with a bedpan and wait until she finished then calculate her production to confirm her diet was both varied and sufficient.  But her bodily functions were no longer his concern.  He would be relieved of his bedpan detail, with her at least.  He looked down at the pregnant woman one last time.  He did not bother to wipe the water-based ultrasound gel from her stomach or pull her gown down over her abdomen; there was no need to perform either task.  He wheeled his equipment away from her bed, stepped through a motion-activated sliding glass door and left her.  The door closed behind him and he engaged the locking mechanism.

After pushing his machine to a far corner of his laboratory, Dr. Terzini returned to the glass door and looked at the printout from the scan.  The fetus was dead.  It did not have a heartbeat.  The scan was a formality, of course.  Blood taken and tested earlier in the week had revealed discouraging results, results that had invariably signified its demise.  The fetus had been diseased and dying.  It had not accepted the alterations he’d made and had had no hope of survival.  Still, for the purpose of his research, he scanned her lifeless but enlarged belly and recorded his findings.  This had been his fourth attempt at alterations made in utero on a developing fetus.  He knew the only way to make strides with this breakthrough technique was to continue trying at different times during gestation, that trial and error was part of the scientific process.  Error was not a phenomenon readily acknowledged by Terzini.  He was not a man who made mistakes.  Mistakes were pedestrian occurrences carried out by those with inferior intelligence.  His experiments that did not yield the empirical evidence he desired were neither errors nor mistakes; they were a mark of progress, a sign that he was drawing closer to his goal.  At least, that is what he told himself on days where frustration railed at him as it did when his subject’s blood test revealed underwhelming findings.

Each time his testing showed disappointing results, he felt farther from, rather than closer to, his objective.   He knew it was merely his impatient nature getting the best of him.  He was a perfectionist who demanded excellence of himself, and those he created.  Much to his chagrin, disappointment had abounded in recent months and he was determined to put those setbacks behind him, to move forward.  And he had.  But improving a developing fetus had been at the core of his research and development ever since he had successfully created Eugene and Gabriel.  He had mastered the processes required to harvest a superior human being from scratch.  The challenge now was in utero fetal augmentation.  With the ability to supplement fetal genetic material as it matured, his vision of dramatic societal transformation would be a reality.  Future births would be devoid of defect.  All would be born free of heritable hindrances.  Instead, they would each be part of the new perfected race, his perfected race.  The dawn of a new era in human history would begin, and
he
would be singularly responsible for it.

Small-scale changes had already taken place.  He had been cultivating his renewed mankind.  Sixty members had been birthed, released from their tanks and introduced to society.  The integration thus far had been seamless.  Unknown to its residents, Santa Ynez now counted five dozen augmented humans among its citizens.  They blended impeccably, no doubt a result of the many precautions he’d undertaken.  He had been very careful when educating and preparing them.  Their release had been orchestrated so that they possessed limited freedom within society.  They were constantly monitored, their behaviors charted and recorded within his longitudinal case study.  His creations knew of him, knew that they were part of a momentous event that would change the course of history.  Yet despite their knowledge of him, he did not fret over the risk of exposure, of them alerting any branch of the authorities to his activity.  They had received the same indoctrination as Eugene and Gabriel, a form of conditioned response that made rebellion physically impossible.  To this programming, he had added additional, more pervasive, elements of punishment.  To any unfamiliar with the unique challenges he faced as the sole producer of a new human race, his tactics could have easily been labeled as torturous or cruel, but he deemed them necessary.  Luckily, no one monitored his methods, and the bonus components of severe punishment fostered the loyalty of his creations, and reminded them of who was ultimately in control of their destiny.  Their lives belonged to him.  And he would end them at will if need be.