72

And so we began our journey into the woods.

Except for occasional orders from Lyle-2 to move faster and some grunting as Evelyn or I slipped or scratched ourselves through the steeper and more overgrown areas, the journey was a silent one. And it was dark – not the lustrous full moon so often seen in my nightmare. The moon was but a tiny sliver as it neared its new moon stage. The stars, so vivid and alive in the dark, clear skies of Sequoia National Park, provided most of the feeble natural light, while our captors led the way with flashlights. Still, I knew the mountains well, and I could see enough to know where we were. They were taking us to an area far from where typical backpackers were likely to go. Only the native wildlife would ever discover us.

My load was a weight on my arms and my soul. Most of the time I walked backwards, holding Cain up under his armpits while his feet dragged shallow grooves through the snow. Sometimes on the flatter stretches I would put him over my shoulder or cradle him in my arms like I had when he was born. It was during the latter when the pain was most acute. Then I could see his quiet face dimly lit by the starlight. I wondered if he now knew the answers to the questions that dogged the astrophysicists. Did he now know the true nature of reality and of the multiverse, and humanity’s purpose in it all? Or was there nothing – either because there was nothing there, or because clones truly had no soul with which to see what lies beyond?

“What did you see?” I asked Adam, who was walking ahead of me.

“What do you mean?”

“When you were dead.” I slipped on some snow and fell to my knees.

He backtracked to help me, holding Cain as I got to my feet.

“Tell me,” I said as he eased my son back into my arms.

“It’s cold. It’s dark. Suffocating,” he said, walking beside me, his eyes focused straight ahead and at nothing, as if reliving his death. “You’re naked and vulnerable and feel like a million creatures are watching you, but you’re all alone. You can’t talk or even scream, but you wish you could scream because of the pain, pressure that feels like it’ll crush your skull. The loneliness. Visions that flash insanely in your mind, driving you mad.

“That’s what the afterlife is – a pained and confused insanity that lasts forever, existing only for the amusement of a merciless God.”

“What visions?” I asked.

“Nightmares you never wake from. Some that haunted you in life, some new. The Grim Reaper grabbing me and forcing me into a bus filled with stinking, rotting corpses – one of them my mother. Being buried alive again and again. Holding my daughter as she died frightened and alone, but she couldn’t see me holding her and looking into her eyes.”

I searched my clone-father’s face. Had he seen visions of my dreams and my life?

“I’m never going back to that,” Adam-1 said, but with a slight tremor in his voice. “You’re taking my place.”

I stopped, and he kept going. Cain’s face looked so serene. Those weren’t the visions my son was seeing. Or that my mom and Evelyn were experiencing. Or that I would soon experience.

I set Cain down, turned around, and began walking backwards, dragging Cain by the armpits. I wanted to see how Evelyn was doing. Near the beginning of our march she kept her eyes downcast. She stumbled more and more as time wore on, taking longer to get up each time, but she also began looking more intense and determined, sometimes focusing on Cain’s body with a quiet resolve. Or perhaps I was imagining it. In any case, it gave me hope. There was nothing we could do at the moment. If we ran, they would shoot us. But I kept alive a hope that something would present itself when we reached our destination. Whatever that was.

At least an hour passed. My legs didn’t hurt, but the cold and the ache of my natural muscles consumed my mind, which drifted in and out of awareness as we marched. Evelyn was walking just behind Cain’s feet. She lifted her eyes from Cain to focus on something behind my back in the direction we were heading. I didn’t turn around, but could see the shadows of the trees and the people walking ahead of us begin to sharpen as we went along. There was a light ahead.

A few minutes later we reached the site. A lantern burned. Lyle-2 had either left it burning, or someone not yet seen had lit it. Someone, like my clone-father, who had once been dead.

I carefully laid Cain’s body down on the ground and gave my muscles a rest. My legs stood me back up, and I rubbed my arms. Evelyn’s pallid face was fixed at a spot behind me.

“Mommy!” she cried and ran toward the grave.

I turned looking for Hannah. One of the taller giant redwoods towering up far beyond the reach of the lantern would be our headstone. The dark pit below it had coarse edges and roots jutting from its walls. To the side of the pit, the light of the lantern glinted off four large cans of kerosene and several containers of concentrated hydrofluoric acid. In case our bodies were later found, they wanted to destroy as much of our DNA as possible. They didn’t want us coming back.

Hannah wasn’t there. Instead I watched Evelyn-2 get the hug of which she’d dreamed. I saw Evelyn-2 hand the backpack to the person. And then her c-mother was looking at me. As Evelyn-1 embraced her c-daughter and eased her down into the pit, I staggered forward, stopping a couple feet away.

Evelyn was the one to break our long silence. She looked at me, smiled, and said, “It’s good to see you.”

I couldn’t respond verbally. I felt my head wobbling as an irrepressible grin grew on my lips that must have looked completely out of place.

“Get in,” Lyle said, motioning to the grave.

I found a voice. “You’re alive.”

She raised both her hands out of the grave to me, and I knelt down to grasp them and kiss them, and then her lips and face and hair, breathing her in. Our situation suddenly seemed trivial. A nuisance.

“Get in the grave,” Lyle repeated.

I held Evelyn as best I could from the edge of the grave. “You didn’t kill her.”

Lyle hesitated. “Just get in.”

I turned to see the barrel of his gun aimed at my forehead, forcing some fear and doubt to begin crawling back into my mind. “You can’t kill us,” I said. “We’d just come back.”

“No, you won’t,” he responded. “It ends tonight.” He waved his gun at Evelyn, Evelyn-2, and Cain. “All their medical records and DNA backups in La Jolla and Atlanta have been replaced with the DNA of others. They’ll be gone forever.”

“And me?” I asked.

“Adam-1 will take over everything you had in life. He’ll marry Lily, join the GC Board, help us undermine Barebots, and together our family will hold the immortality of the human race.”

It sounded too extraordinary and perverse and grandiose to be real. It must all be a death vision from the day my mother died. Perhaps it was more than a vision. Perhaps I was in my own purgatory, a special one that God invented for the first human clone. Make him lose his mother, and then send him to a private hell where he can lose everyone else, eventually to perish himself at the hands of the one true Adam – the one God had created, not humans.

I met my clone-father’s stare. He was as grim as in my dreams.

“Did you see Lyle in her eyes?” I asked him.

“What?”

“When you held your dead daughter in your arms and looked in her eyes. Did you see Lyle holding a gun to your head?”

His eyes told me as much as my mother’s eyes had shown me so long ago. At first they widened, asking me how I knew. Then they understood.

“Put Cain in the grave,” Lyle-2 said.

I heard a cry and turned to see my wife covering her mouth and tears sliding down her cheeks as she saw her son was dead.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She looked up at me, sharing our grief, and then turned to Lyle. “You did this?”

Lyle avoided her gaze, looking instead at the man he’d killed.

I tried to read my clone-father. Would he really shoot me, or was he only bluffing for the sake of Lyle, believing he would die if he crossed his old master? I looked down at Evelyn. She was now watching me, as if expecting I might do something, pulling her old backpack’s zipper back and forth while protectively standing in front of her c-daughter. I could grab the gun from Lily and try to shoot the distracted and newly left-handed Lyle before he shot me. It was a chance, if a slim one. But it was possibly the only chance I’d have.

As I steeled myself to reach for Lily’s gun, my clone-father waved his gun at me to put my son in the pit.

I frowned at him. “Sarah lost her life fulfilling your dream of immortality, and now you’re siding with her murderer. You never loved her at all. She was just a tool to you. A disposable vessel for your new body.”

Adam-1 shook his head. “You’re lying about how she died.”

“You think I could have lied in the dream?”

Lyle aimed his gun at my head. “Put Cain in the grave now.”

I inspected the hole next to me. The bottom was a shadow about five feet down – certainly not a shallow grave. I was giddily surprised not to see myself staring up from a mirrored surface at the bottom.

Evelyn put the backpack down briefly to help me down next to her, with me half expecting my foot to crack the surface below and for hands to ensnare my ankles. But there was nothing down there but dirt. My clone-father who dragged me down in the dream was already out of the grave. I wondered if he had told Lyle of the dream, and Lyle had planned my death based on it.

“You know it’s true,” I said, turning to face Adam from inside the grave as I reached out to drag my son’s body towards me, then slowly backed up, easing him down into the pit. “You’re so scared of death that you’d forsake Sarah to save yourself. She was stronger than you. Mom knew she was risking her life by standing up to Lyle, but she did it anyway. She did it for your life and mine.”

“Unlike you, I’ll bring Sarah back.”

“She didn’t want to be cloned. She was afraid Lyle would molest her again.”

Adam-1 studied me, then stared off into the darkness. Toward Lyle-1? Lily-3 glanced back as well.

“You’re lying. She would have…” he trailed off, wagging his gun back and forth, but no longer pointed at me. “She would have told me.”

“She wrote it in her diary,” I whispered. “Lyle said he’d kill you if she ever told you about it.”

Adam dropped the gun to his side and tapped his thigh with it several times, then he motioned for me to finish pulling Cain into the grave. I felt the giddiness build to an almost shaking in my chest and throat.

“He killed your daughter!”

My clone-father looked deep in thought. Like Evelyn had looked when I proposed.

“It doesn’t matter if he did or didn’t,” he said. “I’m not willing to die.”

“You don’t have to die,” I said as Evelyn leaned up against me, keeping hold of one of my hands. Then she squeezed it, just as she had on a Christmas Eve twenty-five years before.

I stared at our hands as it dawned on me. She hadn’t squeezed my hand out of fear. She squeezed my hand to liberate me. Because somehow she’d known how much it had tormented me.

That was the moment I finally understood. An understanding about life that Mom, Evelyn, and Jack had known all along. The beauty of love that made death less frightening. Though, in some way, even more tragic.

I squeezed her hand back, and smiled at her in spite of everything. She smiled back, and I again saw her as Evelyn in second grade, returning my smile as Jimmy Preston tried his best to destroy us. Something that Evelyn would never let happen. What a beautiful person. Once again I’d be unable to protect her.

Our foreheads touched each other lightly, and I kissed her, tenderly drinking in the feel of her lips and of her love, wishing I could teach my c-father what had taken so much to teach me. What his mom had surely known as she tried to console him in her hospital room while the cancer took her, and what my mom knew as she cradled my newborn body in her arms while her killer stood outside the window in the rain.

Squeezing her hand once more, I turned back up to face my grandfather. But I was out of options. Prayers to God would fall on deaf ears, as they had when I ran into the house praying for my mother’s life. But I found myself praying anyway. To Jack’s God, Evelyn’s God, and the God that my mother had believed in and that Cain had yearned for. I prayed to God, to anyone or anything that had the power. I prayed for the same thing that I’d wished for at my last birthday, and the same thing that my clone-father had wished for at his mother’s funeral.

A wish that I didn’t have the power to grant. But he did.

“You don’t owe anything more to Sarah’s killer. You can reclaim your life and avenge your daughter. You can do what you promised at your mom’s funeral.”

His eyes met mine.

“You promised,” I said. “No more Sarahs will die.”

The sound of my voice was muted and dead in the dirt walls. But he heard me.

Lily and Lyle had their guns trained on Evelyn and me, Lily holding her gun with both hands and Lyle with his left hand. He was glancing at Adam-1 with some caution.

“I was wrong,” my clone-father replied.

“Lily,” Lyle said, again listening to the speaker in his ear. “Kill Evelyn.”

Lily’s chin shook. Her hands raised and lowered her gun a couple times.

“Adam abandoned you for her,” Lyle said. “You have to do it.”

Instead she pointed the gun at me. “Why didn’t you help me?”

My mouth hung open for a moment, about to defend myself. But then I nodded, thinking of all I had done by doing nothing. “I’m sorry, Lily. Go ahead.”

Her neck and face tensed as she shook her head at me, and then at Cain’s body lying at my feet. She turned to face Lyle.

“What?” he asked, his face reddening.

She placed the gun to her temple. She fired.

None of us moved as her body appeared to waver before it collapsed to the ground. I saw a young Lily watching me as I closed her in behind Lyle’s car door. Lily desperately forcing my hand to her breast. Lily holding a gold locket up to me on Christmas morning, eyes shining with expectation.

Lily splayed dead on the ground in front of me.

Evelyn broke the spell by reaching up for the gun that had fallen from Lily’s hand. Lyle-2 stepped on it before she got there. She looked up at him as he pointed his gun at her head, his lips contorted into a warped grin. I pushed her to the floor of the grave against a huddling Evelyn-2 and my son’s body, trying to shield them.

The sound of the shot hammered my ears. Feeling nothing, I was sure Evelyn had been hit. But she was staring intensely behind my shoulder. I looked back to see Lyle-2 staggering, his right shoulder wounded. Adam-1’s gun was aimed at him.

Before I’d taken it all in, a second shot was fired. This one from the darkness of the surrounding woods. My clone-father collapsed onto his back a couple feet from the pit, still alive but panting hard. He raised his gun to fire again.

“Put it down,” Lyle-2 said breathlessly. He had recovered enough to rest his awkward gun hand on his right forearm for a steadier aim. “Drop it, and we’ll clone you after we kill you. Don’t do it, and we’ll kill you now and throw you in there with them.”

Evelyn and I stood up in our grave. From the corner of my eye I saw her taking it all in – my c-father, Lyle, Lily, the darkness from which the last shot had come. I fixed on my grandpa. He looked terrified and defeated. Not the self-assured man in the holovideos, or the brave man who rescued me in my early dreams. But he had tried. And that was enough. Enough for me to see him as my mom had. Enough not to hate him. Enough to love him.

He dropped the gun and raised his other hand in submission.

Lyle-2 nodded. He bent down to caress Lily’s cheek with the back of his injured hand. “Lily,” he whispered. Then he straightened himself up, listening again to his earpiece as he stepped over Lily so that he could tower over my clone-father. His eyes seemed glazed with fury. He looked down at Adam’s pants. “Adam, did you just wet yourself again? Your uncle said you did that when your mother died. That’s how we knew you so well. After all these years, and you’re still nothing but a scared little boy in your mother’s hospital room.” Lyle-2 glanced over at me. “Must run in the family. Sarah peed when we told her she was about to die. And that her son would be next.”

I was dimly aware of rocks cutting into my hands as I forced them harder against the edge of the grave. My grandpa’s face went from pale to flush.

“You remember Sarah,” Lyle-2 said to my grandfather. “The daughter you let us rape so you could live forever.”

“No,” Adam whimpered.

“You knew it, Adam. You could tell. The way she suddenly got nervous whenever her Grandpa Lyle was around. You just didn’t want to admit it. Better to live in ignorance than die, right?”

Adam began slowly shaking his head. “Sarah.”

Lyle-2 looked back again at Lily. The last glimmer of sanity seemed to have left him. “I must admit,” he said, “your family line did improve somewhat with Adam-2. He was both braver and smarter than you. At least I never saw him piss his pants. And at least he was never stupid enough to kill himself in an attempt to live forever.”

Adam-1 held his breath. Although his face was like mine, I couldn’t read my clone-father’s expression.

Lyle wagged the gun at my c-father’s head. “How could you be that stupid? I faked the stroke knowing you’d think you had to die right away if you ever wanted to be cloned. I wanted you dead because I knew you treated my daughter like shit. And mull that over, Adam,” Lyle continued. “Think about it. You would have surely still been alive to benefit from your company’s AIS, and there’s a good chance that would have kept you alive till today at 110 years old, all ready for your brain to be put into a new, young body. You see? Neither you, nor your daughter, ever had to die at all. But now, because of you, you’ll both be gone.” He took a step back. “And no, I’m not cloning you. Adam Elwell is dead.”

Lyle clenched his teeth and aimed at Adam-1’s head as Adam rolled towards me, grabbing his gun. Lyle fired, but Adam’s sudden movement caused Lyle to miss his aim, and he hit Adam in the side of the chest. Instantaneously, Lyle-2 cursed and ducked – a rain of small rocks pelting him. It appeared that Evelyn-2 had been busy during all of her stumbles, grabbing stones and slipping them into her backpack, which Evelyn-1 was now flinging at Lyle-2.

My clone-father was dazed but lucid enough to push the gun towards the edge of the pit where I could grab it. Lyle-2 finally got off another shot that whizzed by my head and hit the ground nearby. Thank you Evelyn and Pierre. I slunk down into the cover of the grave as I swung my arm around to fire. The movement seemed to take forever during which Lyle-2 had his gun aimed at my head. I was sure he’d fire long before I could aim in his direction. It was only after I felt myself squeezing the trigger that I saw his eyes were not locked on me, but on Lily. The more I replay that moment, a moment I relive often, the more I believe he was waiting for me.

My bullet struck his forehead. Bits of skull and brain sprayed out the back of his head. Like both Lyles, I too knew what it was to kill a person.

“Are you okay?” Evelyn asked.

Before I could answer, I was slammed backwards against the wall of the grave as a shot rang out, knocking the wind out of me. My right shoulder felt like it was on fire. Evelyn’s hand grabbed my other shoulder and forced me to crouch deeper into the pit. She put down her backpack and pressed her other hand to my right shoulder.

“You’re hit,” she whispered, choking back a cry.

“I’m fine,” I said. Although I couldn’t raise my arm, it felt like the AIS was already deadening the pain and staunching the blood loss. “Really,” I insisted over Evelyn’s doubtful stare.

My eyes pointed above us, and she nodded, turning in the direction of the shot. We could see nothing outside the circle of light emanating from the lantern. I tried to raise my arm enough to aim at the lantern, but my shoulder injury prevented me. Evelyn took my gun and fired. On her second shot, the light went out with a loud pop and shattering of glass. In darkness, the odds were more even.

It was Lyle-1 out there. I knew it was. And I was hungry to kill him. In the cover of darkness, I began to clumsily scramble out of the pit to reach Lyle-2’s gun with my left hand. And it’s loaded. That’s the way this was destined to end. But Evelyn tugged me back and flashed me a look that said, “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

For a moment I was livid, primal instincts driving me in single-minded intensity. Someone was standing between me and avenging my mother by murdering the man I’d long since given up all hope of killing, and Lyle’s description of my mother’s death had stoked my rage beyond imagining.

“It’s Lyle,” I forced out in a strained whisper.

Evelyn’s stern nod and glare slowly calmed my blind, animalistic fury. I managed to stay put and stay quiet as she felt along the rim of the pit and handed me the gun that Lily had dropped. Actually, she sort of shoved it into my chest.

I took it, and we waited in the darkness. There was a rustling sound a little ways off, and I fired towards it three times. But the rustling continued, growing fainter and further away. He knew we had the advantage from the pit he had dug for us, and he wasn’t taking any chances. It was his turn to run. 

* 

When the sounds had completely faded into the distance, I helped Evelyn and Evelyn-2 out of the grave and then they helped me climb up beside my grandfather. I rested his head to my chest, comforting him as I once hoped he would comfort me. Evelyn crawled over next to us while holding her clone-daughter to her side.

“Not again,” he mumbled, shaking. “Not the dark…”

“No, you’re alive,” I assured him. “It’s just the darkness of night. Look, you can see my face. And there are the stars,” I said, pointing skywards without looking up myself.

His eyes looked unfocused into mine, and then beyond me to the stars.

“I don’t want to go back,” he pleaded. “Don’t let me go back.”

“This time it’ll be a different place,” I insisted.

He gripped me tighter like he was clinging to life. Then he examined my face with an anguished, childlike expression. The expression his mother might have seen on her deathbed.

“Please don’t die.”

I imagined Great-Grandma Sarah trying to comfort her son as she felt Death stealing her away from him, and nothing she could do. I lightly touched my grandpa’s face. Or was it mine.

I knew one day I would die. But I nodded anyway.

Evelyn touched his hand. He turned to see her. I could see his eyes glistening in the starlight. He shook his head, apologizing, knowing words were useless with Cain lying there in the grave.

“Your son,” he managed.

“It’s okay,” she responded, gripping his hand.

Adam-1 held her hand to his cheek, shaking his head at her kindness. Then he looked off into the woods as if something had caught his eye.

“Sarah?” he whispered. “Sarah.”

I glanced up as well, a fleeting hope that my mother would be standing there. I strained to see anything. Anything. But my eyes could see nothing. His body stiffened in my embrace, and I cried out in vain as his life slipped away from his body.

My grandpa, my father, and a part of myself were dead.

Evelyn put her arm around me, and we sat silently in the forest for a long time.

EPILOGUE