2012

Sixteen floors underneath the sidewalk wound a staircase of steel, spiraling up to the surface like a double-helix, the zenith a white circle of light that promised life like the goodly dead were promised the light of heaven. Chester’s worn boots crunched on shards of glass and scraps of tin foil, waste that gathered on the cold floor from the population above, and grinned sardonically. How ironic such a comparison it was.

Chester knew for a fact that if there was a God, he would’ve stopped things from spiraling out of control long ago. How could he not? Humanity was nothing more now than the detritus left over from too long a struggle with powers beyond its control. Chester, like the rest of the few who were still free and fighting, was alone.

He had gotten used to the cold and isolated feeling years ago, but it still didn’t make things any easier. Every day he was tempted to climb up those stairs and surrender, to stop fighting and struggling and give himself over to a life where he didn’t have to think, where all the thinking would be done for him and he’d only feel a white void of calm. But he couldn’t, no matter how many times or hard he tried, he failed to make it up past the first few rungs of the staircase.

Secretly, he was grateful for the impediment.

He felt like a hollowed out husk, a corpse walking for the sole purpose of feeling alive again. Pretend was fifty percent of it. Hope seemed to be like that north star, pointing to him the way home, but he never could quite follow it, unsure if where he was going was true north because the universe was so vast and he was so incredibly alone and lost.

That’s why I’m fighting, he reminded himself, a twinge of anger needling him back to rational thinking and away from despair. Fighting for my freedom is the only true direction that I know to take.

Being down there, in the cold and the grit and the dank dark, was a decision that he had made and would not abandon. He hadn’t been fighting for years for nothing. Quitting was something he shied away from, but it was also such a sweet temptation. No more blood, no more dirt under his nails from crawling with his belly to the floor. But you’re not like the people up there, he thought, and it reined him back in again, brought oxygen back into his brain. You stopped considering yourself a part of humanity when the clones were first revealed nationwide. You couldn’t end up like the subjects; you refused to be used like a lab rat.

Besides, Chester thought, they took Mike. Isn’t that enough reason to fight?

Chester remembered the shock and immediate terror that had made bile rise in the back of his throat, meaty and thick and sour at the same time, when Mike’s clone had stared him in the eye and raised a gun to Chester’s head.

2008

It was smoke and mirrors – everything – and Chester had finally understood that Mike was a stranger to him. More like accepted. If he were honest with himself, he’d admit that he had known Mike was lost for some time already.

Rain pelted California’s sidewalks and smothered the buildings that had just exploded, leaving trails of black smoke to billow in the slight breeze. Chester had never seen anything like it, as if the whole world had caught on fire and the apocalypse had come, like Nostradamus was actually more than just far-fetched prophecies for the New Age.

In any other life, at any other time, Chester might’ve laughed at the absurdity of it all. It wasn’t too amusing at the moment, though. Not even on his wide-screen TV.

Then several things happened in rapid succession.

Helicopters flew in overhead, the whirring of their propellers entirely too loud, and Chester scrambled outside to catch a glimpse of the mayhem. At this point his thoughts weren’t anywhere near thinking about Mike, his mind faceted on the war that seemed to have erupted in front of his eyes. He ran down the street, zipping past local news vans already parked on the curb, dodging microphones and shoving foreign bodies out of his way, all the while feeling like he should be pleading insanity. What he hell was going on?

He stopped abruptly a safe distance away from the debris that used to be a bank and a small shopping outlet, and tried to catch his breath. His heart was pumping in sporadic little bursts, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up passing out, he was sure. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing as a sudden lurching of terror wrapped an icy grip around his stomach.

Before, the idea of mass destruction was just a thing he witnessed on television with third world countries, or epic war movies that were based on events that had happened way before his time.

Crumbling before him now were buildings razed from fire dropped out of the sky, but for what purpose, Chester had no clue.

He turned, only slightly, unaware that he had been followed, and Mike’s face stared back at him, entirely too close.

“Mike?”

Mike didn’t look pleased; Chester wasn’t sure how to describe his expression. Perhaps cold was the fitting word. Detached.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” Mike said, and Chester really did feel like he was in a Hitchcock film when his best friend raised a gun to his head, barrel aimed right between Chester’s eyes. In a fit of panic, he imagined the bullet shattering the bridge of his glasses, cracking the lenses into spider-like webs, and the clear, white void that would come after. He imagined it all too easily.

Maybe it was just dumb luck that the next bomb to hit smashed into the nearest news van. The van exploded into a fire-eaten carcass, flames and heat dancing dangerously close to Chester’s skin.

Chester took the advantage of a moment’s distraction and swung his fist blindly, taking Mike by surprise as his former friend went sprawling down into the ground. He was running on pure adrenaline, pumping through his veins like molten-hot lava, and it felt good. Liberating, almost, although he didn’t know why.

Chester shook off the sudden, throbbing pain in his hand – and vaguely somewhere in his chest – and ran like hell through the maze of cars, vans, and journalists’ voices that blurred into one constant pounding that reverberated inside his skull.

Get out, it said. Get away.

Continued in Chapter 2.