Gemini Man: The Official Movie Novelization

CHAPTER 19

Danny was sobbing as she yanked at Henry’s arm, trying to get him farther away from the Jeep still burning in the middle of Main Street. “Henry, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry but please, please! We have to go!”

Henry pushed her hands away, twisted out of her grip. “It’s my fault, I brought him into this.” He wiped his eyes, stinging from the smoke. The stench of burning tires mixed with that smell turned his stomach. “I told you to go home, man—” He broke off as he heard the sound of another vehicle approaching.

“Henry!” Danny bellowed, practically in his ear. “We have to go now!”

The headlights of a Gemini vehicle cut through the fire and smoke. As it got closer, Henry could see there were several Gemini soldiers hanging off it ready for action; mounted in the center was an M134 Minigun.

But it was the sound of gunfire and glass breaking behind him that stirred him into action. Danny had shot out the front window of a liquor store and she was dragging him toward it. She managed to pull him inside just as the vehicle came to a stop. The soldiers jumped off and fanned out on the street, taking aim.

He and Danny dropped as everyone opened fire.

Bottles exploded, spraying glass and booze in all directions, shelves broke and collapsed, the doors of refrigerated cases cracked and shattered, their contents disintegrating.

Keeping their heads low, the two of them belly-crawled toward the back of the place so that they were practically wiping the floor with their faces. Machine-gun fire shredded the walls, punching out chunks of drywall and wood to mix with the booze and broken glass on the floor. If they kept this up, Henry thought, the Gemini team were actually going to cut the building in half sideways. He and Danny had to get out of here before the entire structure collapsed in on itself.

He looked at Danny, brushed a scrap of wet paper from her cheek. Maybe the alcohol would disinfect any cuts they got from broken bottles. Maybe he could think up some other absurdities to help him avoid wondering how he was going to live with himself after what had happened to Baron.

Henry wrapped his grief for Baron into a tight little package and stowed it away next to Jack Willis and Monroe. He had to concentrate on doing everything he could to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Danny Zakarewski, the exemplary agent who’d never gotten a demerit, recently undercover as a grad student in marine biology. She had signed up to serve her country and instead it was serving her up as toast. She hadn’t asked for any of this. Maybe she even wished she really was a grad student in marine biology; he certainly did.

She turned to look at him then and flashed him a grin as they continued to inch forward. He promised her silently that he absolutely would not let her buy it on the floor of a shot-up liquor store; he would get both of them out of there alive. Danny would go home and live a long and fulfilling life, while he was going to live long enough to shoot Clay fucking Verris in the fucking face.

They finally made it to the storeroom. The back door was heavy-duty metal. Yeah, this was a small town, all right—security door in the back, no shutters up front. Henry wondered if the owner was insured for damage due to domestic terrorism—probably not. Most insurance carriers wouldn’t cover war or so-called acts of God. No doubt Gemini would take care of all the damage and fix the new giant pothole in the road as well. It probably wouldn’t be the first time.

Henry heard more shelves collapsing out on the sales floor as well as the creak and groan of load-bearing walls that hadn’t been made to withstand heavy artillery and wouldn’t be able to bear their load much longer. He reached up for the door lever and a burst of machine-gun fire nearly took his hand off. He sneaked a quick look behind and saw it was only the Jeep out front now. The soldiers would have circled around to cover the back door. The bastards knew exactly where they were and wanted to keep them pinned down. If the building didn’t collapse and bury them alive, the soldiers would either ambush them when they came out or come in and finish them off.

Henry conveyed this to Danny in a combination of whispers and sign language, then reached for the lever a second time. Again he had to yank his hand back while bullets punched into the metal.

When he tried a third time, however, nothing happened. Henry couldn’t help grinning. Four thousand rounds per minute was lethal but it ate ammo fast. While the guys out front were reloading, he got the door open and he and Danny slipped out into the alley behind the store, still keeping low.

From where he stood on the gravel roof of the Masonic Hall in the very center of downtown Glennville, Clay Verris listened to status reports on his comm unit while he kept an eye on the action at street level. Using binoculars, he saw the soldiers had moved around to the back alley behind the liquor store, ready to greet Henry and Zakarewski if they managed to get out. He didn’t think they would, not without getting at least winged by the M134.

The back door of the liquor store swung open but Verris couldn’t see much else—Brogan and Zakarewski were crawling on their bellies. If they stood up, the soldiers would say hello. It would be a kind of Butch and Sundance moment, only not as cinematic—

His anticipated triumph cut off; underneath the four thousand rpm music of the M134, he heard the sound of police sirens. Glennville’s small-town police force was riding to the rescue. They took their police vehicles home with them; it was the sort of thing they did in small towns. After Glennville’s station house closed at nine, emergency calls were forwarded to Chief Mitchell’s home phone. It must have been ringing off the hook with panicky citizens reporting that World War III had broken out on Main Street.

Verris had intended to call the chief as soon as Henry Brogan’s plane had landed but Junior’s belated adolescent crisis had distracted him. It was crucial to keep Mitchell and the rest of his Barney Fifes from cluttering up his battlefield. If any of them got hurt, the county authorities would open an investigation and who knew where that would end. At the very least, it would be inconvenient.

Verris tapped a button on the comm set he was wearing. “Chief Mitchell? Clay Verris. I need your units to stand down. We’re engaging with a terror cell that has a weaponized biological capability.”

“Shit,” Mitchell said, in direct violation of FCC regulations governing acceptable language on police frequencies. Not that Verris was going to file a complaint.

“Federal authorities have been notified and are en route,” he told the chief.

“Affirmative. Keep me posted, Clay,” the chief said.

“Yes, sir,” Verris said in his best just-doing-my-job voice. “Will report back to you shortly. Thank you.”

He clicked off before Mitchell could enlarge on how grateful he was that Gemini was on the scene to save Glennville from evil terrorists, or to tell him to call if he and his men could help in any way, although the latter was highly unlikely. If you wanted to keep civilians out of your face, all you had to do was say weaponized biological capability and they vanished as if by magic. They wouldn’t even ask if they could observe. Nobody in their right mind wanted to be within sight of people infected with Ebola—what if they sneezed while you were downwind? Mitchell was probably hiding under his bed with a ten-gallon bottle of hand sanitizer and a twenty-gallon barrel of Savannah Bourbon.

Now, where the hell was Junior?

Henry and Danny lay on the ground amid some overturned trashcans while the Gemini soldiers fired on them, keeping them pinned down. Maybe Verris planned to come and finish them off personally since Junior wasn’t going to do the job. In any case, it allowed Henry to figure out the position of each shooter just by listening. When he had pinpointed each one’s location, he conveyed this to Danny in sign language and was gratified to see she knew what he wanted to do.

He and Danny mouthed the countdown together silently: Three, two, one.

Go.

They rose up back to back, and took out their targets. Three, two, one.

And that’s why a machine gun is no substitute for someone who can actually shoot, Henry told the Gemini soldiers silently as he and Danny ran down the alley to the next building. This one was a lot larger than the liquor store and more substantial, not as easy to destroy with an M134. Henry shot out the lock but just as he opened the door there was a second shot. Danny cried out in pain and fell to her knees with a ragged, bloody hole in one thigh.

Henry looked back toward the liquor store and saw one of the soldiers had dragged himself up on the side of a garbage can and was taking aim, about to fire again.

Henry let out a wordless yell of rage and put a round through the guy’s forehead before dragging Danny through the door.

Junior’s shoulder hurt like hell. Rolling out of the Jeep had partially reopened the gunshot wound. He could thank the ham-handed medic on the plane for that.

He’d told her to just get the goddam bullet out and close up the hole but she’d tried to insist he get undressed and put on scrubs. He’d had no intention of letting his father see him in scrubs. The medic had kept arguing with him about hygiene this and sterile that and he’d finally gotten so frustrated he’d removed the goddam bullet himself with his combat knife. Then he’d told her if she didn’t want to close the incision he could handle that, too, with a sewing needle and some dental floss.

For a moment, he thought she might go off on him; instead, she gave a resigned sigh and told him to take his shirt off—just his shirt, he could put it back on later—and lie down. Even though she used glue instead of stitches, she had injected his shoulder with lidocaine before he could tell her not to. She gave him a couple of other injections she claimed were antibiotics but Junior knew there was something extra in them; he could feel analgesics at work.

The medic had probably thought she was doing him a favor. In fact, the drugs had screwed up his sensory control. The painkillers were starting to wear off and his usual techniques for managing pain weren’t working as well as usual. And of course she hadn’t given him any extra pills for later, expecting him to march over to the infirmary and see the doctor right after they landed as if he were some delicate flower of a civilian who needed to be hospitalized for a mere flesh wound!

Still, he probably shouldn’t have parkoured his way up to the roof of the Masonic Hall with his shoulder in that condition. But he knew his father would be up there watching everything and it was the only way to get to him without some bodyguard tipping him off in advance.

It wasn’t really that the pain was too much—he had managed to get the better of it so it was now background noise rather than a blaring siren. But it had put him in a foul mood, too foul to tolerate his so-called father’s son-I-love-you horseshit. Especially not after that RPG.

Just the sight of Verris standing there looking down on Glennville like he was a heroic general overseeing a battle to decide the fate of the world made Junior want to kick his ass.

Fuck it, he thought and drew his sidearm. “Stand your men down, Pop,” he said. “Now.”

Verris turned, saw the gun in Junior’s hand, and looked positively delighted. “You did the right thing,” Verris told him happily. “Getting away from Brogan—”

“I did the cowardly thing!” Junior shouted at him. “And it makes me sick!”

His so-called father shook his head. “I was asking too much of you,” he said in a soothing, reasonable tone. His father was handling him again; it made Junior want to punch him. “I see that now. But that doesn’t mean you—”

“He deserved better than a missile fired at his car, Pop!” Junior said angrily. “They all did!”

“ It doesn’t matter what he deserves. He has to die,” said Verris, his voice still relentlessly reasonable but with an undertone that suggested Junior was starting to try his patience.

“Are you gonna call these clowns off?” Junior demanded. His shoulder was throbbing like a second heart, pumping angry pain all through him.

“No,” his father said. “But you can. All you have to do is fire that sidearm and take command.” He spread his arms; there was a radio in his left hand.

What. The. Fuck? Junior looked from Verris to the radio and back again. Was his father telling him to shoot him—kill him? Junior had thought he might have to fight Verris and subdue him. But kill him? Was this really what his father wanted? It didn’t make any sense.

Over the years, Verris had been harsh, rigid, immovable, domineering, tyrannical, and sometimes unforgiving, but everything had always made sense—granted, a very twisted kind of sense, like Verris wanting him to kill Henry. That was pretty demented—the whole clone thing was batshit—but he had always been able to follow his father’s thinking. Not now, though; he didn’t get this at all.

Verris spread his arms a little wider: I’m the target, shoot me. “Well?” he said.

Junior had never done anything that didn’t make sense to him and he wasn’t going to start now. He holstered his weapon.

Verris’s hopeful expression turned to disappointment. Junior decided he could live with that. If this was his idea of being a good father, God only knew what the man thought a bad one would do.

But he could show Verris that a good soldier could do the right thing without shooting his own CO. Junior approached him slowly and reached for the radio he was still holding out to one side.

Verris seemed to move impossibly fast as he reached around Junior, put his free hand inside the back of his shirt and yanked hard, pulling him down onto the gravel surface of the roof.

“I don’t think so,” he said, stepping back from him easily, lightly, almost as if he were dancing.

Junior pushed himself to his feet, trying to ignore his screaming shoulder and the feel of blood oozing from the wound, which had opened a little more.

“A loving, dedicated, present father,” Junior said, making it an accusation.

Verris darted forward and gave him a hard right that rattled his teeth. Junior staggered back a few steps but managed to stay on his feet. Before he could get his fists up, however, Verris pounced again and got both hands around his throat. Junior returned the favor.

It was like grabbing a handful of writhing snakes made of cartilage and muscle, all fighting to get away from him. The old man was in exceptional condition and crazy-strong—his fingers felt like steel bands. If he couldn’t break away, his dedicated, loving, present father was going to crush his throat, and then maybe pitch his body off the roof.

His vision started to dim. If he fell over, Verris would land on top and that would be the end. Fortunately, his sense of balance was still functioning—he let his hands fall away, then stamped hard on Verris’s instep while simultaneously punching both the man’s forearms upward, breaking his hold. His father staggered back and they locked eyes.

Felt that, didn’t you, Junior thought at him. Come at me again, you’ll feel worse.

But Verris didn’t come at him. He gave a short laugh and pointedly turned his back to look down at the street again, letting him know he was too busy to waste any more time teaching him a lesson he should have already learned.

Junior lowered his head and charged. The two of them went down hard, their bodies plowing a shallow trench in the gravel. Junior felt a hot spike of pain in his shoulder and clenched his teeth, refusing to cry out. Verris twisted around underneath him, grabbed him, and dug his thumb into the wound.

He flung himself away from Verris, who was on him immediately, trying to grab his shoulder again. Junior heaved him off, rolled away, and started to push himself to his feet when his side exploded in an agony that made the world disappear in a momentary whiteout. For a second, he thought his father had used a cattle prod on him, then realized it had actually been a hard punch to the kidney.

Junior fell over and Verris gouged his injured shoulder with his thumb again. Blood saturated the bandage and soaked through his shirt as the wound opened a little more but Junior still refused to cry out. He hit the back of Verris’s elbow, forcing him to straighten his arm and let go. Junior grabbed for him, intending to put his arm in a bone-breaker, but Verris’s other hand came up and threw a handful of gravel and dirt in his face.

Rubbing his eyes frantically, Junior kicked out with both feet at where he thought Verris was and connected only with air. Ignoring another bolt of pain in his shoulder, he rolled away and started to get up, only to have Verris horse-collar him again. His head hit the gravel, which broke the skin in several different places. Junior sat up, blood running down the back of his neck. Verris elbowed him in the face and everything went black as his jaw slid sideways.

When his vision cleared he was flat on his back and his dedicated, loving father was present on his chest, punching his face into mincemeat. “—trying—” punch “—to make you—” punch “—a man—”

Father of the year, Junior thought, and dug deep for the strength he needed to show Verris he’d already done that himself.

Junior brought his legs up, twisted the right one around Verris’s neck and torqued him away. Scrambling to his feet, Junior saw the assault rifle he’d dropped earlier. In one continuous motion, he swept it up, pivoted on the ball of his foot and met Verris’s lunge by planting the butt end squarely in the middle of his grinning face.

Verris staggered back, wobbled, but stayed upright. Junior flipped the rifle and pointed the business end at him.

“Well?” Verris said. “Go ahead. You’ve got your target in your crosshairs! Do it!”

He deserved it, Junior thought. Hell, Verris was literally asking for it—and yet he couldn’t.

Why the hell not? What the hell was stopping him?

Screw it. Junior flipped the rifle and slammed the butt into Verris’s face again. Verris crumpled to the gravel without a sound. Junior slung the rifle, sprinted for the edge of the roof and parkoured down to street level.

As soon as the kid was gone, Verris pushed himself to his feet. That last blow had stunned him a little but it hadn’t been full force. Right before impact, Junior pulled his punch. The kid couldn’t even hit him with all his strength, let alone shoot him. Obviously his duties as a father weren’t finished.

Verris turned to his left. Another Gemini soldier stood alone on a neighboring roof. He was dressed in a full-body suit made of next-generation Kevlar, his face covered by a more compact version of Junior’s night-vision gas mask. Here was the soldier that military commanders dreamed of but never imagined could actually exist—the perfect fighter. And this was the perfect time to turn him loose. Verris nodded, then jerked his head toward the street.

The masked soldier hopped over the edge of the roof and bounded down the wall as easily as an athlete might have sprinted along a road. He hit the street and kept going, his strides so long that he hardly seemed to touch the ground. When he came to the hardware store, he ran up the outside to the roof without breaking stride.

Verris smiled. Everybody was going to learn—or, in Junior’s case, relearn—a lesson tonight. It remained to be seen who would live through it.

For a small town, Glennville had one hell of a big hardware store, Henry thought as he finished Danny’s tourniquet. It was makeshift—a ripped-up apron with a screwdriver for a windlass, secured with a piece of rope. A store of this size probably had a first-aid kit with a commercially made tourniquet but there was no time to look for it.

He got Danny on her feet and helped her limp away from the exit and farther into the store. There was at least one more rear exit as well as a loading dock—more than the two of them could defend. They had to find a place to hole up until he could get Danny to a hospital. That was assuming they got out of here alive, of course, something Henry had categorized as extremely difficult but still possible. Then Danny had been shot in the thigh and that changed everything.

Henry sneaked a look at her; he knew from experience that a tourniquet hurt like hell but she didn’t make a sound except for an occasional short intake of breath.

At the end of a long shelf of flowerpots and bags of soil, Henry spotted a step stool on wheels. “Take a break,” Henry said. He eased her down onto it, then crouched low to peer left and right along the wide aisle running crosswise in front of them. The store seemed empty—he didn’t see or hear anything to indicate otherwise—but Henry was sure they weren’t alone. If he’d been in command, he’d have stationed a couple of guys here. He and Danny hadn’t exactly sneaked in without a sound so whoever was in here probably had a fairly good idea of their locations. Dammit.

Could he and Danny get to the firearms department before the Gemini guys caught up with them? There wouldn’t be any sophisticated military weapons but kneecapping someone with a shotgun was an effective defense, if rather messy. He might make it alone—

No. A much better idea was getting them both out of here. Danny was more likely to survive escaping than last stand at the Remington counter.

“We should keep moving,” Danny said and started to get up.

“Stay there,” Henry told her. “I walk, you roll.” He held her shoulders to steer her across the aisle.

“Maybe we should find a shopping cart,” she said with a small, trembly laugh.

“No way,” Henry replied. “I always get the one with the wobbly wheel. Drives me nuts.”

She gave another shaky laugh as they came to another cross-aisle and stopped again while Henry checked it out. Still nothing. They crossed the aisle into wiring and electricals. A plastic sign on the shelf showed a smiling cartoon light bulb with a word balloon that said: Always Stay Grounded!

“How zen,” Danny said between clenched teeth.

“If you say so.” Henry brought her to a stop in the middle of the row when they both heard a very faint squeak, the sound of a rubber sole on clean floor tiles.

Henry pushed Danny’s head down so she was bent double and fired through the shelf beside them. Plastic and rubber fragments flew in all directions as the shelving collapsed and he heard two bodies hit the floor. He peered through the wreckage of the shelves; they were gone. He’d gotten them before they could even fire a shot—that was the good news. The bad news: he had just let everyone in the immediate vicinity know where he and Danny were.

Danny tried to stand up but Henry pushed her down again, this time more gently. “Did you hear them come in?” she asked. He shook his head. “Maybe they were already here, waiting.”

“Then why didn’t they take us out sooner?” Henry said.

Danny shrugged. “Not enough of a challenge?”

Henry’s blood turned to ice water. That might not have been as absurd as Danny had meant it to sound. Nobody outside Gemini knew what Verris was really up to, what he was doing with the soldiers under his command. Making a better soldier was a lot different than making a better mousetrap, and how Verris was going to accomplish that wouldn’t be pretty.

“Henry?” Danny’s eyes were wide and worried, more concerned for him than the wound in her thigh. Her face was paler and she was sagging on the step stool. If she didn’t get medical attention soon, he was going to lose her, and she knew it as well as he did. She had to be pretty scared but she was still toughing it out, playing the badass.

He could have used a partner like her, Henry thought. Monroe was good—had been good, he corrected himself with a pang—but Danny Zakarewski was a WMD.

“How many rounds have you got left?” Henry asked her.

She looked apologetic. “Five or six.”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Henry said briskly, and rolled her to the end of the shelf, where she had a view of the next cross-aisle through a rack of fuses. “You hold here and watch the choke point. I’m going to find a way out for us—”

Danny caught his arm in a grip that was unexpectedly strong. “Sorry, but you’re not going anywhere unless I go, too.” She unslung her rifle, put it down on the floor, and drew her sidearm. “I’m not letting you die out there alone.”

Henry felt a rush of affection for her. She was really something—a fucking lion.

“But you can check my tourniquet again. That would be okay,” she added.

He did so. It was still secure. She wasn’t losing any more blood but it wouldn’t be getting any less painful. They had to get out of here before the pain became too much for her.

“Danny, I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.

“For what?” she asked him, surprised.

“For dragging you into all this.”

“I was the one surveilling you,” she said with a small shaky laugh.

If she hadn’t been injured, he would have pulled her into a bear hug. “Anyway, sorry,” he said, looking down at her wound.

“I don’t regret it,” she told him.

Now it was Henry’s turn to be surprised. “Seriously? Come on, if you had to do it over again and we were back on that dock, and I asked you to meet me at Pelican Point, you’d still say yes?”

“Hell no,” Danny said with another shaky laugh. “I’m not an idiot. I’m just not sorry that I did, that’s all.” She laughed again. “Now let’s shoot our way out of this so we can go get a drink.”

Henry’s grin was fleeting—he heard a door open at the rear of the store, although he wasn’t sure whether it was the one they’d come in through or another one, the one he might have found if Danny had let him go. He gave her hand a squeeze and she squeezed back. He listened closely and heard the very faint noise of four or five soldiers fanning out. Danny yanked hard on his arm and mouthed, Down, then rolled off the stool onto the floor just as they opened fire from three separate positions.

Merchandise exploded, shelves burst into fragments, collapsed, toppled over, caved in—today was definitely a bad day for retail in Glennville. Henry rolled Danny backwards with him; she was having trouble keeping her bad leg from dragging on the floor. There were five shooters and they kept coming, spraying everything in front of them with automatic weapons fire. The noise itself was punishing, beating his ears, his head, his whole body as the three shooters converged on him and Danny. He had to get her out of this, he thought desperately as they returned fire; he had to get her to a hospital before she passed out, before the goddam tourniquet wrecked her leg so bad they had to amputate.

Unfortunately, he had just fired his next-to-last bullet.

Suddenly one of the Gemini soldiers went down, blood spurting from his neck. Good one, Danny, he thought, and shifted to line up two of the remaining shooters in front of him. If he only had one bullet left, he was going to make it count double. Henry took aim; his last bullet went through the eye of one Gemini soldier and kept going through the eye of the one behind him. And now both his and Danny’s weapons were going click-click-click.

Henry took a breath. “You were a great partner, Danny.”

She nodded, then her face twisted in pain. Her hand found his and they held onto each other, watching the remaining two soldiers advancing on them. They had stopped firing for the moment but their rifles were up and ready. Were they just saving ammo now that he and Danny were out? Or were they supposed to hold them until Verris got there?

Danny deserved a lot better than this, Henry thought. If there was any justice in the world at all, her life wouldn’t be ending before it had even really begun—

Abruptly, there were two new bursts of machine-gun fire from behind the Gemini guys. Henry’s jaw fell open as they dropped to the ground so fast they probably didn’t know they were dead yet. But it was another couple of seconds before it registered on him that it was Junior who had taken the Gemini soldiers out, Junior coming over to him and Danny where they had just been waiting to die amidst hardware wreckage, handing them fresh ammunition.

Henry’s hands automatically reloaded his weapon with no help from his brain; good thing—he was too boggled to think. He’d watched his own death come at him and then veer away more than once, and it always left him shaken.

“Uh… thank you,” he told Junior after a bit.

“What he said,” Danny added, sounding equally blown out.

Junior grimaced. “Sorry I ran.”

“It’s been a tough night.” Henry laughed weakly. “Where’s—”

“You okay?” Junior asked Danny, looking at her leg.

“Still kickin’,” she said. “With my other foot.”

Henry felt his heart rate come down and his breathing slow. He had a job to do and someone to protect. “How many more are out there?”

“I don’t know,” Junior said.

“What about Verris?”

“Out of commission.”

“But alive?” Henry asked.

Junior nodded, looking ashamed.

“Okay,” Henry said. “There’ll be more coming. Help me get her up—”

Danny put up both hands and shook her head emphatically. “No. I can’t run any more. Can you?” She drew her combat knife from its ankle sheath.

Henry looked at Junior, who nodded. They picked up their rifles and got down on their bellies, Henry facing the back of the store, Junior watching their six, and Danny keeping an eye on their three and nine. In the brief moment of quiet, Henry tapped his rifle stock twice just as Junior tapped his own three times. Then they looked at each other, surprised.

Danny smacked both their backs and gestured at the store around them: Pay attention. Henry smiled briefly, bracing himself for whatever was coming up next.

As it turned out, the attack came down.

There was a crash followed by a shower of broken glass. Shielding his face with one hand, Henry looked up to see a dark figure descending on a line, firing as he did. Henry, Danny, and Junior scattered in three different directions; Henry glimpsed the soles of Danny’s boots as she dived behind a rack of tools but Junior had disappeared completely. Junior was most likely to come out of this alive, Henry thought. Danny might make it out with Junior’s help, but even if she did, the hole in her leg might kill her anyway.

Meanwhile, the new attacker was only going after him.

Bullets chased him up one aisle and around the end of a long set of shelves, where he stopped short, watching as the guy shot through the shelves in case Henry was panicky-stupid enough to run down the other side. Then the killer stomped over the wreckage, firing in a wide arc around himself. Henry took advantage of the noise to get behind him unnoticed and fired a short burst at his back.

The killer jerked slightly, whirled on Henry, and returned the favor several times over. Henry ran up the aisle, vaulted over the wreckage of another set of shelves; his feet came down on some plastic fragments and skidded out from under him. As he fell forward, Henry tucked and rolled head over heels in a series of rapid tumbles while bullets kicked up chips of concrete under the floor covering.

The weapons fire cut off and Henry heard him drop the rifle. In the brief pause before the shooter switched to a sidearm, Henry bounced to his feet and found himself in varnishes and paints. He grabbed up some small cans and hurled them at the guy as he ran. Despite the accuracy of Henry’s aim, however, it seemed as if his attacker barely noticed them bouncing off his shoulders, his chest, even his head.

Henry tried sweeping a whole lot of cans off a shelf hoping to trip him but the guy just tromped over them, kicking them aside.

I’m gonna need a bigger can, Henry thought as he reached a shelf of gallon containers. But they were a lot harder to throw and the guy kept firing as he batted them away. Abruptly, there was a different burst of machine-gun fire, coming from behind the shooter. He broke stride, staggered a bit, then turned to fire at Junior, trading bursts with him until they both ran out.

Okay, buddy, Henry thought, let’s see if your only talent is firing a weapon you don’t even have to aim.

He ran back to varnishes in time to see the guy had found Junior and was using his head to make a dent in a five-gallon can of weatherproofing. Henry took a running jump and launched himself at the guy feet first, the same move he’d used to steal the motorcycle in Cartagena. Except the guy bent his knees and leaned back at an angle that should have been impossible for anyone to maintain without falling over. But somehow he did. Henry sailed past him and landed on Junior.

Henry rolled away from him but not quickly enough. A hard kick missed his head but caught his shoulder blade; Henry winced, feeling something crack as he went sprawling on his belly. He scrambled up, rotated his shoulders to see if anything major was broken. Mobility wasn’t impaired but it hurt like hell. Everything hurt like hell hurt right now, but at least it all hurt the same, nothing worse than anything else. The good news was, it would all hurt a hell of a lot more tomorrow.

If he lasted that long.

Henry drew his knife, and in the corner of his eye he saw Junior do the same. The masked soldier made a quick motion and produced knives in both hands. That goddam mask; when you couldn’t see your opponent’s face, you were fighting half-blind. He had to get close enough to tear the fucker’s mask off. It looked like a more compact version of Junior’s night-vision gas mask. The night vision he could understand but had the guy really expected to get tear-gassed?

He feinted to one side, then the other, making little slashes in the air. Junior feigned a lunge, stamped his foot in an old fencing move meant to distract an opponent; their masked opponent didn’t fall for it. Facing two guys with knives didn’t seem to faze him at all—his posture showed no defensive tension, no stiffness. It was as if he were sure Henry and Junior were holding rubber knives. Henry decided to disabuse him of that notion.

He backed up, then took a few running steps forward. He could see the masked guy steady himself, still holding Junior off while he prepared to bury his knife in Henry’s throat. At the last moment, however, Henry dropped to his knees and slid under his arm. It was something he’d secretly wanted to try ever since he’d seen someone do it in a movie.

There was no tiling on the floor here, just cement treated with some kind of sealant—not an ideal surface for a flashy slide. Henry felt the cement scrape through his trousers and sand off some skin. But then, it wasn’t exactly classic fighting technique—a Krav Maga instructor probably wouldn’t have approved—but he managed to slash the masked killer’s thigh without getting slashed himself.

To Henry’s surprise, the guy didn’t make a sound as he looked down at the gash in his leg—no cry of pain, not so much as a gasp or a grunt; the injury could have been on someone else’s leg for all that it affected him. A chill ran down Henry’s spine, more intense than a mere goose walking over his grave. Who the hell had trained this guy, the Manchurian Candidate? The Terminator?

Junior took advantage of the attacker’s momentary lapse of attention to circle around behind him. Realizing what Junior was going to do, Henry pushed himself to a standing position and tried to keep the guy focused on himself while Junior vaulted the ruins of a shelf for a flying kick with both feet. But unbelievably, half a second before Junior would have hit him, the guy ducked. As Junior sailed over him, the guy’s leg shot out—his wounded leg—and kicked Junior hard in the lower back.

Henry shook his head slightly, unsure if he had really just seen that. Junior rolled over as the masked fighter came towards him, and somehow heaved himself into a backwards roll, barely escaping a driving punch to his crotch.

Oh, so it’s that kind of fight, Henry thought; as if there were any other kind. That slash to the thigh still wasn’t slowing the guy down. He’d also lost one of his knives, but Henry didn’t count on that giving him or Junior any sort of advantage. Junior sprang to his feet and immediately charged the guy with his tackling move. The guy raised one leg and instead of taking him down, Junior hit his knee face first.

Henry launched himself forward to slide again, this time baseball-style, intending to sweep the guy’s legs out from under him. But before Henry reached him, the guy flipped over his head, tumbling in midair in a way that somehow managed to be more casual than showy. He came down behind Henry and kicked his shoulder blade again.

For a few seconds, the world turned blinding white while the nerve in his upper back shrieked in a way that sounded a lot like a human voice. Shut the hell up, Henry ordered it and struggled to his feet. So much for paints, varnish, and weatherproofing, he thought; maybe he’d have better luck in power tools. If he could find them.

He pushed himself into a stumbling run. Up ahead, he saw a rack of circular saw blades. Let’s see if he can catch a Frisbee, Henry thought, as a nasty grin spread over his face.

Then something large and hard glanced off the top of his head and he was sprawling on the cement, scraping his palms and knees. What the fuck—

Henry twisted around to see the guy heaving another gallon of paint at him and rolled out of the way before it could smash his face in. And still the guy kept on coming at him, like killing Henry Brogan was the one and only thing he had been put on this earth to do.

Junior’s words came back to him: My orders are to kill you.

Did Clay Verris have a whole platoon of guys dedicated—no, programmed—to kill him? Then, as if things had to be even more absurd, he looked up and saw Danny almost directly above him on a mezzanine. He hadn’t even noticed there was an upstairs—and how the hell had she made it up there with her leg? Her face was shiny and paler than he’d ever seen. Was she crazy from blood loss? What the hell did she think she was doing?

As if on cue, she heaved a gas canister over the railing, straight at the killer. Just as it hit him, she fired. The canister exploded, engulfing the killer in flames.

That’s for Baron, you bastard, Henry thought as the sprinkler system went off.

But instead of falling down and dying like a normal assassin, the masked guy actually walked out of the flames, still hell-bent on killing anyone and everyone.

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?

“You’re talking about people, Clay,” Henry was saying. “Screwing with their humanity to make them into your idea of the perfect soldier.”

Verris nodded as if he thought Henry was finally getting it. “Why not? Think how many American families we could spare. Nobody’s son or daughter would ever have to die. Vets wouldn’t ever come home with PTSD and kill themselves. We could keep the whole world safe without any actual grief. So who would I be hurting?”

“You hurt him,” Henry said, gesturing at the dead man on the floor. “Like you hurt Junior. Like you hurt me. You can’t just use people and throw them away—suck them dry, take their humanity, leave them with nothing—”

“Henry…” Verris shook his head, looking disappointed that the source material for his magnificent clone project didn’t understand after all. “This is the most humane thing we’ve ever done.”

Junior had had enough. “How many more of me are running around out there?” he demanded.

“None.” Verris seemed surprised by the question. “There’s only one you, Junior.”

Junior and Henry looked at each other; he gave Henry a barely perceptible nod to let him know he wasn’t buying it and Henry did the same.

“He was just a weapon,” Verris made a dismissive gesture at the dead man. “You are my son—and I love you as much as any father ever loved any kid.”

Henry was right, Junior thought as he drew his Glock; Verris should be dead. “I didn’t have a father,” he told Verris. “Goodbye, Clay—”

Like that, Henry’s hand was on his, his touch gentle but strong, making him lower the gun. Junior stared at him in amazement. Henry shook his head.

“So what the hell do we do with him—turn him in?” Junior felt as if he were boiling with rage inside, on the verge of exploding. “You know they’re not going to try him and they sure won’t shut down his lab. We have to end this right now!”

“Look at me,” Henry said.

He didn’t want to, didn’t want to look at anything. The only thing he wanted to see was Clay Verris’s face when he pulled the trigger.

“Look at me.” Henry’s voice was calm, even tender, and Junior obeyed. “You pull that trigger and you’re going to break something inside of yourself that will never get fixed.”

Junior gazed into Henry’s eyes; they were so much like his own and yet Henry had seen so much more, knew so much more. He was only starting to understand how much he didn’t know. But one thing he knew for certain: Henry had never lied to him. Clay Verris, however, had lied about everything, even about who he really was.

“Don’t,” Henry said. “Let it go. Give it to me.”

Henry’s hand was still pressing down on his, steadily but gently, not trying to overpower him but to show him, help him. All the resistance drained out of Junior and he lowered the gun.

“You don’t want those ghosts,” Henry said as he took the Glock from him. “Trust me.”

Then he turned to Verris and shot him.

Verris dropped with a neat hole just above his eyebrows and a much larger, messier wound in the back of his head, where the bullet had exited with most of his brains and half his skull.

Junior gaped at Henry, wide-eyed, unable to move or speak.

But speaking wasn’t necessary. Henry jerked a thumb at the back door. Junior nodded and they carried Danny out between them.