CHAPTER 9
Stanton McCaffery
Carlos kept up the back-end as they ran, pulled out his burner phone and texted something.
Santino stopped. Desert dust and sand clouded around his feet. “Fuck you doing?”
Carlos looked over his shoulder as if Santino was talking to someone else.
Alejandro ran over. “We don’t have time for this shit. Let’s go.”
Santino shook his head. He rushed Carlos and pushed his chest. “Who the fuck you texting?” He turned to Alejandro. “Yo, check your cousin’s pockets.”
Alejandro stared at his cousin, the glaring sun stabbed his eyes. He didn’t want to know. All he wanted was to get out alive. “Whatever he’s doing,” he said to Santino, “We’ll figure it out later.”
They began to run again, all of them in lockstep, until the women in front froze. “Fuck,” screamed Lizette as she pointed at something in the distance blurred by rays of heat.
Alejandro squinted, couldn’t make out whatever it was the woman was panicking over. What he did notice, however, was how much Lizette resembled Ignacia. Were they sisters? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything, not anymore.
“I fuckin’ knew it,” Santino screamed. He took a compact Glock from the back of his pants. Before Alejandro could protest, he pointed it at Carlos and decorated the desert ground with his brain matter.
Alejandro, face bloodied, was unable to move or think. Ignacia bellowed and fell to the ground.
From the horizon approached Humvees mounted with machine guns. Lizette put her hand over Santino’s Glock. “Don’t bother, tough guy. You’ll get us all killed.”
The ground vibrated. Santino looked at the moving pebbles beneath his boots. “Those are some heavy fuckin’ jeeps.”
As the ground opened before them and swallowed one of the approaching Humvees, Lizette ran in the opposite direction. “It’s not from the jeeps.”
She had heard the MPs talk about it before. They kept the local folklore alive. Every so often someone disappeared, one of the other clones. She always chalked it up to a flaw in the copied DNA, something mutated and their minds soured, causing them to wander in the desert and disappear.
The ground in front of Santino opened. He fired into the abyss. Emerging from the earth’s crust was an ancient-looking head – that of a raptor-like mythic beast with a serpentine body.
“Ay dios mio!” Alejandro screamed as he watched the beast devour Santino, it’s gargantuan teeth sinking into the man’s abdomen as he cried and spat blood.
Another identical beast crunched soldiers in its teeth as they fired into its face, in vain. Alejandro searched his cousin’s corpse, grabbed the burner phone from his back pocket, and ran to a gore-splattered humvee. He opened the phone and saw the text Carlos had been shot over. “Te amo,” it read. The message had been sent to an unnamed number.
Alejandro shook his head, cursed, and dialed. When Perez answered at the other end, he screamed. “Fucking helicopter. Send a fucking helicopter!”
Not understanding the severity of the situation, Perez laughed. “Over a U.S. military base? Estupido.”
An underground beast cracked it’s head on the humvee’s undercarriage. The impact jolted Alejandro and sent the cellphone flying. Lizette hopped into the passenger seat next to Alejandro. “Drive!”
“No fucking keys! Why you think I haven’t left yet?!”
Lizette stood, pointed at a fatigue-clad corpse and shouted to Ignacia. “Search him for keys!”
Alejandro grasped the machine gun and fired, catching one of the creatures in the eye. Blood burst and the creature writhed. It bared its teeth and snapped its jaw. He watched as Igancia searched the corpse for keys. When she turned the body over, his heart stopped.
“What?!”
Ignacia found the keys and tossed them just as one of the desert serpents lunged for her. She shouted in agony as it bit into her legs. She flailed her arms as it lifted her above the humvee and then dragged her beneath the ground. Alejandro clutched the keys as he heard bone crunching.
Lizette slapped him. “You’re either going to drive that thing or I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head.”
He sat and punched the vehicle into drive. Looking at Lizette, he noticed her shirt was bloodsoaked. “You were shot?”
She nodded. “It’s fatal. You’ll have to be the one who tells the truth to the world about Project Greycat.”
The creatures were in the rearview but Alejandro kept the pedal to the ground. “That soldier. He was me. He had my face.” He paused and wiped his face. He was crying. “Ignacia. You’re Ignacia.”
She shook her head. Her complexion had grown pale and sickly, her skin clammy. “Clone.”
Alejandro thought. All the soldiers he’d seen, they resembled his comrades. There was one for Santino and one for Carlos.
“The fuck?”
All of Lizette’s breaths were shallow. “Yankee imperialism. It doesn’t stop, just advances with technology. They were cloning cartel mules. Eventually, they’d capture the originals and send back the clones. Over time, they would infiltrate enough institutions of power with clones. They’d be in like a Trojan horse.”
Alejandro wished it was an episode of the Twilight Zone. “And the things from the ground?”
Lizette shrugged. “Monsters.”
Alejandro looked in a side view mirror and saw the ground cracking. He leaned forward as if that would make the vehicle go faster. “Who was the rat?!”
Lizette was almost gone. “None of you...all of you, really. Clones, we can read your thoughts...see through your eyes.”
A beast hit the humvee and sent it into the air. Everything for Alejandro went black. When he woke, he blinked the double vision from his eyes and stared down at the half-eaten corpse of the mysterious woman named Lizette who said she was a clone.
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End