When the Villian Comes Home Read online

  Khloii’s body spasmed as autonomic reflexes fired, thrummed, and failed. A thread of urine darkened her butterfly gown. Her eyes gazed sightlessly up.

  Sabin stared. He had seen much death; he knew what it looked like. But he hadn’t intended to kill her. He wanted to punish, to destroy, to twist her mind until she was utterly his creature as she had made him hers. But she had flown, escaped out the last door, and now was gone.

  He screamed his frustration. Or rather, he wanted to. His will sent the message, but his ears registered no outcry, his throat no strain.

  Instead he heard: “Hello, dear Brother.” The voice was Khloii’s, but it hadn’t issued from her slack mouth.

  He spun around, trying to locate the source. He heard her manic, crystal-edged laughter around him.

  Her voice was there, inside his skull. “You may have had upgrades and eight years of practice, twin.” Her voice was mocking. “But I have had eight years of restlessness. I was so looking forward to your homecoming. You surprised me with all your fancy military tech, but you didn’t expect me to be so ready to discard my body, did you?”

  Sabin began to hum.

  “But why not, when I’ve got such a fine one to go into?” she finished.

  It was a song from their childhood. He hadn’t remembered it, nor was he trying to produce it now, but the notes issued from his lips. Except they were no longer his lips. They were hers. Her will, her actions, her body—all hers.

  EUGIE FOSTER calls home a mildly haunted, fey-infested house in metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew. Eugie received the 2009 Nebula Award for her novelette, “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” and her fiction has also received the 2002 Phobos Award, been translated into eight languages, and been a finalist for the Hugo and British Science Fiction Association awards. Her short story collection, Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, has been used as a textbook at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of California-Davis. Visit her online at EugieFoster.com.

  PROMETHEUS FOUND

  David Sakmyster

  1. Ellison, Arctic Circle, November, 2023

  They wanted to bring me home.

  It was the only explanation as to why they had ventured this far north, and why they were firing at me. The bullets exploded into the ice around my legs, and I knew they weren’t deliberate misses. They were aiming to incapacitate me.

  So they knew what I was.

  The mountainside shook as they arrived in strange crafts outfitted with blazing lanterns. Traversing the snowdrifts with ease, they were upon me in moments, and just ahead of the flying machines, coming fast, full of a thunderous fury to rival the arctic gales.

  They came at me from all angles, herding me toward the cliff and the sheer drop of several hundred feet to the jagged precipice below. I had no desire to repeat such a fall, as my four previous attempts over the edge had failed to provide the desired outcome. Only pain, cold and more misery heaped upon what I already suffered these long centuries.

  More loud thunderclaps, and this time my left thigh exploded in agony. It produced the effect that they wanted. Without the sinew attached to the bone, and before the electrical impulses could respond and restore my anatomy, I went down hard. Barely able to crawl, flight no longer an option, I turned and warded off the bright lights piercing me from above.

  In these past two centuries I had sought out death on more occasions than I could count, had welcomed its baited promise even as hope—that elusive treasure—deteriorated, eroding away to nothing. I had begun with hope, stubbornly clinging to it like a shy child to its parent’s leg. I had hoped, attempt after attempt, that I would succeed. For, made in my creator’s image, I strove to be his equal, expecting one day to mirror his fate, to be granted the cruelly-forbidden gift of oblivion. But it was not to be, and I had all but given up, turned my back on hope as it had turned from me.

  My ragged bear-skin hood fell back as my face now met the light directly, revealing all its patchwork flesh with old scars on display beside new savagery. For a moment I wondered if, despite their obvious attempt to capture and not kill, perhaps I could force their hand and end this agony on my own terms.

  I closed my eyes and for a moment, saw an image centuries-lost to me: The castle silhouetted against the smoke-filled twilight over the Alps. Stars hovering impassively as the ragged mob shambled up the hillside path. The brandished pitchforks, the angrily-swaying torches…

  Although I knew nothing of the world I had left behind, I often imagined how it might have changed; and I arrogantly assumed that perhaps, being a modern-day Prometheus, the first being brought to life by man himself, I might have attained some level of notoriety in the evolving culture of the times. Perhaps my existence had spurned stories and speculation, if not outright myth and legend. Perhaps some foolish adventurers among them still sought the truth, sought out my path and had now come to finish what that impotent crowd had started.

  So I turned, rose up on my good leg, and flung the hunk of sharp ice I had pried loose from the plateau. It sailed in a direct arc toward the hooded figure approaching me, but my attacker was smaller than I anticipated. Instead of decapitating the intruder, the missile sailed harmlessly over its head.

  I let my shoulders sag and I fell sideways into the frozen field, gaping at the strange metallic bird silhouetted behind my approaching captor.

  The figure trudged through the snow and stopped just outside of my reach.

  I moaned and tried to dig up another shard, but my fingers were numbed and blistered with frostbite. When I looked back at the silent figure, a slender gloved hand emerged, holding some sort of metallic flat tablet. It had a blinking red light on its front screen. The hand pulled back a parka and revealed an astonishingly beautiful face: jet black hair and a piercing green eyes stared at me in disbelief.

  “It’s you,” the woman said. “It’s really you.”

  Then, as if realizing her predicament, she took a step back toward the safety of her flying carriage. “We didn’t think...a lot of us felt you were dead.”

  I cocked my head and my mouth opened, steam spilling out. I hadn’t talked in over fifty years, and now I debated whether to even give it the effort. In another several minutes, my wounded leg would be completely healed, the muscles repaired, the flesh restored; and then I could snap this woman’s neck in a heartbeat and toss her corpse over the cliff into the icy abyss.

  But that face! Her skin, those full lips and ruddy cheeks...she stirred something in me, eliciting crushing feelings of pain and loss. I saw again in my mind, and in her eyes: Elizabeth! The one once promised to me by my creator.

  We thought you were dead.

  I gave her the only response I could. “It seems…death will not have me.”

  She blinked at me. Then, holding out her hand in a cautiously-warding gesture, she stepped forward again. Her eyes never left mine, and try as I might, they were like fierce magnetic pools and I couldn’t break the attraction.

  “I knew it, knew you couldn’t truly die out here.” Her voice was gaining confidence. “The electrical-infused nanoparticles would keep reanimating your flesh, powering your cellular replication, and your brain’s neuro-chemical...” She smiled and checked herself. “But you don’t need me to tell you all this.” She stepped closer, bent within reach of my powerful arms, and tentatively opened my parka to trace the suicidal remnants of my self-inflicted body art across my enormous chest.

  Her touch warmed flesh that had been near-frozen for ages, and when her inquisitive fingertips probed the area over my heart, it was all I could do not to stagger back, to crawl to the edge and hurl myself over once more. I couldn’t…not here…not again. Certain things were denied me, yet my cursed emotions were too powerful, supercharged along with my flesh. But as if reading my mind, she flattened
her palm against my chest, directly over my rapidly-thudding heart. Her touch was delicate, yet still so powerful I felt she would draw the beating organ right from its bony prison and into her grasp.

  “We’re out of time,” she said. “And out of options. We need you.”

  I think I laughed, or maybe it was the wind, or just her touch on the borderline between pain and pleasure. “You need…me?”

  Taking her hand away, she reached into her coat and pulled out that little flat rectangular thing again, tapped something, then showed it to me. A map. The familiar landmasses of the world, portions colored red, some blue.

  “It’s spreading. At the latest CDC projections, we have maybe sixty days left.”

  I looked at her and now I did laugh, although I had no idea, nor did I care, what a CDC was. “And what do you need the creation of my father for, this impure monstrosity, worthy of nothing but scorn?”

  She lowered her eyes. “Victor Von Frankenstein’s great great grandson... Ten years ago, he tried again to recreate what was done with you, only this time...he amplified it. Modern technology, an enormous lab. A thousand assistants and billion dollar grants. Not only did he get the experiment to work, but this time his creation…? It replicated.”

  I perked up at this. “Replicated? It was capable of procreation?” The thought was astounding, and I again envisioned a white-robed beauty, promised only for me. Her first touch, the look in the depths of those eyes. A spiraling of possibilities, an infinite lifetime of joy...and then—the possibility of a family, of a truer form of immortality?

  “Not procreation,” she said, crushing my daydreams. She violently shook her head at the thought, as if it were some ridiculous violation of nature. “Replication.” She all but whispered the word. “A virus. It spread all over the world. Reanimating...”

  I choked back a laugh, but she was serious. “Reanimating what?”

  The wind howled and the chill cut between us.

  “Not what. Who.” She stared at me and repeated what the screeching wind at first drowned out.

  But then it came back, louder and just as gripping.

  “The dead.”

  5

  “They’re everywhere, and these aren’t your typical Romero clones.”

  “Your what?” The word meant nothing to me.

  “I’m just saying, no bullet in the brain puts them down.” She made eye contact again, and the depth of those blue orbs burned away all the frost over my thoughts. “But you already know that, of course. Nothing short of fire will work. Intense chemical fire, destroying all the bits.”

  I licked my lips at the imagery. “And did you bring some of this fire?”

  She gave me a cautious look. “No. If you really want that, you’ll need to come with me.”

  I turned my back to her and set my forehead against the unforgiving ice. “You’ve wasted your time.”

  “Please. You’re the Prototype. Your blood contains the First Strain, and our geneticists have a theory...”

  “Oh, lovely. A theory.” I scratched at the left side of my head, feeling the old depression where the metallic bolt, long since rusted and plucked free, had once driven a thousand volts into my skull. “Just as my father-creator once had a theory, a belief that I could coexist with you, that I could live and even...love?” I shook my head, gritting my teeth.

  “Please,” she said. “You’re our one chance. Your blood, if we can isolate the strain, create antibodies and disperse it over these others, these reanimated husks... They’ll turn on each other, eradicating themselves like an infection.”

  I thought about it, for the briefest of moments. “You realize you are asking me to destroy my own kind? To commit genocide?”

  She lowered her head. “They’re not really alive.”

  I let out a chuckle. “Then I suppose neither am I.”

  She clasped her hands together. “You’re different, but you are...correct. I am asking for something that should not be chosen lightly.”

  “And is it my choice?” I glanced around at the hovering metal birds, spotlights trained on me. “Or will you take my blood regardless?”

  She held out a hand. “Just come with me. Come home. We’ve set up a base in your father’s ancestral castle. Cordoned off the town, but these things...they’re smart. Devious and cunning. They work together, and they...have resources.”

  “But you have the fire, no? Use it, and be done with them.”

  “There’s not enough, not against the hordes they throw at us. We can only survive for a few days in each stronghold before we’re overrun and have to take to the air and try to find the next safe haven.” Her eyes fell. “And those are becoming preciously fewer and fewer.”

  I frowned and let the sharp ice tear into my forehead, and I wished for a moment I could go deeper and let it pierce my eyes and expunge my vision. I did not wish to see her again. Not now, not when I couldn’t control myself.

  “Please.” The wind carried her voice, directing it into and through my spine, it seemed, and straight into my heart. I moaned, turned and was about to agree, when the choice was taken from me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said grimly. “I wanted you to make the choice, but you’re right, we can’t wait.” She raised some kind of pistol and fired an electrically-charged bolt into my heart. I cannot describe the feeling—one that goes far beyond excruciating—but I lost all control of my flesh, as if it rebelled against my commands, overloaded itself—and then promptly shut down my brain.

  2. Hapsburg, Austria

  It was a dream. A memory more like. But how many people can recall the moment of their birth?

  I woke, strapped to a table with leather bonds all too-familiar. I had a moment’s hope—it had all been a dream. Everything from the moment of Elizabeth’s death to my exile, to my creator following me across the ice, tracking me but only coming to his eventual frozen end while I…I continued in grief and guilt. But it was no dream. And I was not in the upper wing of our castle. I was—

  —in flight? I felt it in the pit of my distended stomach: we were dipping and rising on air currents. I willed my eyes to focus through the gloom, and the blurry shadows took shape. I was upright, tethered securely to a monolithic slab. I sensed a space behind me where people were, but straight ahead, I was presented with a falcon’s-eye view of the familiar hills and forests of my native land.

  Little changed in all these years. The same thatched rooftops, the same church steeples; and yet it looked as if a massive festival had begun. In the dawn’s first light I could make out veritable armies shifting across the hills, overrunning the town. Shuffling, scrambling things that moved as if they were but automatons, wound up and released for a singular diabolical purpose.

  Our craft tilted and I got my first view of the castle.

  Home.

  The ivy-entwined towers were circled by other great birds strapped with lights blazing into the dark clouds. And below the familiar ramparts and gargoyle-decorated walls, at the stone-walled portcullis I glimpsed a reinforced metallic-wire fence, and before that—a moat of pure, raging fire—into which the first waves of the reanimated ones charged.

  I watched it all with utter detachment, with none of the sense of awe and wonder I would have expected.

  “Now you see.”

  I tried to crane my neck, but my bonds were too tightly secured. No matter though, for she appeared moments later, dressed all in tight-fitting leather, black as the sky outside. Her hair cascaded about her shoulders. “You see what has become of your father’s creation? It is like this, all over the globe. The dead overrunning the living. The living becoming like them.”

  I took my eyes away from hers and gazed back outside as we dipped and circled, heading over the flames, toward the back courtyard. I licked my lips and realized that I no longer felt cold. That my flesh...itched and prickled. And I missed
the arctic home, where at least my flesh, if not my memories, could be numbed.

  “You see it as a disease,” I said. “But my guess is that they see it as...evolution.”

  Her eyes fell. Then she held up that tablet-thing again, pressing the screen. Immediately images appeared there: violent, brutal scenes of crazed-eyed ghouls tearing young women and children apart and feasting on their flesh; scenes of towns and cities swept away by fire, explosions and rivers of blood. Familiar landmarks crumbled before my eyes: great centers of learning, architectural wonders and grand human accomplishments. All torn down and attacked with the same savagery of these not-so-mindless demons toward their human creators.

  The screen went dark and her face leaned in toward mine. Her hair tickled my skin and her breath sent my flesh to quivering. I closed my eyes.

  She touched my face, a gentle caress, and when I opened my eyes she looked upon me with such pity, such sympathy, I would have done anything she had asked in that moment. Even turn against my own kind, aiding those who had heartlessly sent me into exile. But in the next instant, she was torn from my sight.

  The great bird rocked to the side, and someone shouted, “Catapault! The sonofabitches made a—” A scream, and the wind tore inside and nearly plucked the woman away. She reached for me and with a cry, caught my wrist. But so strapped down, I was helpless to grab her. Outside, I saw the landscape and the clouds merge in a swirling kaleidoscope as we fell. But I was rooted to the floor, unable to move, unable to even flinch as we plummeted toward the rabid mob below.

  The girl—the one who looked and talked so like my Elizabeth—cried out and the moment before she let go and was lost to my sight, the moment before we crashed into the mass of attacking undead, she shouted, “Don’t listen to me when I come back! They’ll try to use me, it’s what they do. But do not—”

  The impact was much, much more painful than I would have expected.

  3.

  A sense of motion amid the chaos. Agony, even as regeneration began, even as I felt the electrical impulses charge through my cells. I was in the air again, only this time I felt hands on my legs and arms, hands lifting me high. Spread-eagled, carried by the mob. I glimpsed behind me and saw the wreckage of the flying bird. Twisted, burning metal and molten glass. Two bodies. One burned and missing limbs. The other, more slender... rising.