Project LOSS

Chapter 9

Kai was almost asleep when the doorbell rang, rousing him from the pleasantly vacant state between waking and sleep. Sitting up slowly, he stretched his shoulders and yawned before running to the door.

            Girl from the bar... What are you doing here?

Kai frowned as he watched the beautiful woman shifting from foot to foot. She attempted to look through the peephole while using a perfectly manicured nail to clean her teeth.

She quickly composed herself as Kai opened the door a crack, latch still in place.

“Hi, it’s Miaka, from the bar earlier,” she phrased the statement as though it were a question, maybe questioning whether he remembered her, which was stupid; of course he did. Their meeting had occurred literally a few hours before. He distinctly remembered telling her to pop over in the morning.

“It’s not morning,” said Kai. He realized how stupid the comment sounded as soon as the words left his lips.

She laughed, not unkindly. “I know. I was at a loss for a place to stay and thought you might still be up,” she again posed the statement as a question.

“Hmm, yeah sure, come in.” Kai did not have to try too hard to appear casual, yawning with genuine exhaustion as he guided her up the three flights of stairs. She followed him into the lounge; a minimalistic and modern room featuring black leather sofas arranged around a plush fur rug and the black marble fireplace. Her attention turned straight to the music player in the corner.

“Oh my god, you’ve got a CD player!” she exclaimed. “Do you have CDs?”

Kai frowned, “Why would we own a music player without the disks?”

“Well, they are rare. Most of the ones you find now are broken or too scratched up to play. It’s not as if they’ve produced any since the event,” Miaka explained, an air too defensively. “And it isn’t as though people don’t just gather expensive junk to show off.”

“People always talk about this big event, but I don’t get what they’re talking about,” Kai revealed, ignoring her pouting. “Me and Vreth were born way after it happened, and everyone tells such different stories.”

“Oh, I was there for it all,” said Miaka, sitting cross-legged in front of Kai, preparing to unravel her story.

“It started like any other day. The only really odd thing was the sky; it turned a creepy, unnatural shade of grey. It felt like something drained the colour out of the world. One second everything was normal; people going about their ordinary boring lives… then BOOM! They were everywhere. The man who, just a second before, rode past you on his way to work, suddenly appeared like something out of a horror movie, all teeth and blood. People you thought you knew transformed right in front of your eyes. Around half the population had changed without anyone noticing, but the second they realised we could see them, all hell broke loose. People tried to fight, but they were stronger, and they had infiltrated all our defences; the police, army, world leaders. So many died that day.” She stopped for a second, tear-filled eyes looking down.

“It was like… a veil of ignorance got yanked away and we could finally see what was happening. I couldn’t say what caused it, some mass mind control that just… broke. I think if it hadn’t, humanity would have just died out without so much as a scream.”

She looked up at Kai, who had never heard the tale recounted with such haunting eloquence. This coming from the woman who Vrethie claimed to be all but brain-dead made Kai a little suspicious. The suspicion tapered, however, when she bounced up, pressed the play button on the music player and started dancing.

Reverberations pulsed, hitting Kai’s eardrums as the room filled with loud rock music. It’s probably not the easiest thing to dance to, Kai thought. He couldn’t help but notice she managed it well, swinging her supple hips and throwing her hair about in a way Kai had only witnessed inside the strip clubs in the Northern sector.

Miaka fell to the floor, and on all fours crawled in his direction until she was practically in his lap. Kai knew she intended the act to be sexy, but something about the animalistic twisting of her body made the hairs on his forearm stand up.

Kai gulped and jumped backwards off the sofa just as she was about to initiate physical contact. He continued backing towards the kitchen. “I just realised I forgot to offer you a drink,” he blurted, raising his hands with an imaginary cup.

“I’m fine.” She smiled sympathetically.

Yes, you are, Kai thought, but instead declared, “Great! More beer for me.”

He returned, beer in hand, to find her sitting on his sofa wearing nothing but a seductive smile.

For the first time, Kai felt out of place in his own home. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me. His hand made a move towards her arm, twitched, then made a fist. He pulled away, looking down.

“You don’t have to do that,” he revealed, “I’ll help you either way.”

“I want to do this,” Miaka declared, placing a hand on his shoulder. She leaned forward as though to kiss him, but he denied her, turning away and shifting down the sofa. This girl was not giving off any of the involuntary signals of s****l attraction. She wasn’t even slightly attracted to Kai. Oddly, Meredith did give off those signals, yet despite having a clear attraction continued to treat him like enemy number one.

“Why?” Kai asked. He didn’t want her to give herself to him out of gratitude alone; it was tantamount to rape.

“Because I like you, silly,” she said, still smiling.

Kai could smell the adrenaline that burst into her bloodstream and see the tiny bubbles of sweat pop up over her forehead and nose, but it was fear, not lust.

“Why are you lying?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“I’m not lying,” she stated and blinked.

The familiar warmth of rage rose within Kai‘s chest. The pounding heart. The itching inside his eyes. He tried to force it back. Rubbing his forehead, he cleared his throat and paced in a small circle. He stopped, giving her a final chance to confide the truth.

“You literally have one minute to explain yourself before I make you talk,” he warned, raising a finger that was already half curled into a fist.

“I am not lying! How can you possibly know? You can’t read minds! You’re not supposed to be psychic!” she blurted.

“Not supposed to be psychic?” Kai repeated.

With lightning speed, he picked the woman up by her throat and slammed her into the wall, hard enough to damage a human woman, but without enough force to hurt an agent of PAVE.

She struggled and choked but was otherwise unharmed, wriggling like a worm on a fisherman’s hook inside Kai’s iron grip. He squeezed, watching the blood vessels in her bulging eyes explode into crimson fireworks with detached fascination.     

He slowly increased the pressure on her throat until Vrethie appeared at his side, looked the pair over with eyebrows raised, and commented “kinky.”

Kai turned to his brother, dropping the woman in a manner one might relinquish a dirty sock into a laundry basket. He cared little about the cracking sound of her behind connecting with the hardwood floor.

“Why do you always have to make things weird?” whined Kai.

Looking down at the beautiful Miaka, now naked, vulnerable and tear-stained, it became evident she went to great lengths to enhance her already considerable beauty. The evidence mingled with tears and sweat, dripping down her face. She looked like a child’s painting that had been left out in the rain.

“Sorry.” Vrethie laughed. “What’s going on?”

“She’s a PAVE spy or something,” Kai replied, although he wasn’t exactly sure who she was or what her intentions were. He had crushed her larynx before bothering to find out, anger taking him over yet again. He explained as much to his brother, whose primary concern seemed to be keeping the freshly waxed wood floor from becoming the site of a bloody murder.

Miaka sat uselessly on the floor as the brothers stood over her, deliberating over what to do. She seemed to have given up on life; her face a colourfully painted but expressionless mask of despair as she rocked gently back and forth.

“Why do people do that? The rocking thing I mean,” Kai asked his brother. Vrethie shrugged the question away as he often did on the rare times he didn’t have an answer or when he considered something too unimportant to waste his breath on.

“It’s comforting because mothers used to rock their babies to sleep,” whispered Miaka hoarsely. “When mothers had babies and people had time for comfort.”

Kai hadn’t known a mother; never been held tight and rocked to sleep with unlimited patience and unconditional love. His sleep was induced and permanent until the day his creators decided he was worth more to them dead than alive. If one of the researchers hadn’t broken him out, Kai’s body would have been dissected and analysed, maybe creating a cure for the infected. Perhaps if he had died, all the infected could be cured, and the rest of humanity could live without fear. Kai had turned it over in his mind many times and eventually come to the conclusion he didn’t care. He didn’t feel that he was in any way responsible for rectifying their mistakes. Having made their bed, they were free to lay in it for the rest of time.

Since their escape, the organisation that created them, PAVE, had become increasingly more frequent in their attempts to reacquire the pair. Sending this beautiful woman to seduce him, was, however, a little out of character and somewhat of an odd move on their part.

  “Seriously, what is PAVE playing at? Why send you?” he asked Miaka, who had ceased to be a source of awe-inspiring beauty or murder-inducing rage.

“I can’t tell you. I’m not trying to be difficult. My programming simply conflicts with the request,” the girl replied, staring at her hands.

“Programming? What do you mean? You aren’t a robot,” probed Vrethie.

“PAVE places a chip in your brain as part of the first standard upgrade,” she stated matter-of-factly. “The farther I move from PAVE headquarters, the more room I have within my own mind to think, but I still can’t do anything that conflicts with a direct order,” she explained.

“Can we remove it?” Vrethie wondered aloud.

“They designed us to heal from all wounds within reason, with the exception of the wound left by the removal of the chip. If I survive, I will be brain dead.”

“Well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take,” said Vrethie, much to the surprise of both Kai and Miaka, who attempted to protest.

“I’m not,” Miaka whispered.

“Well… you don’t get a say,” was all Vrethie had to opine on the matter before instructing Kai to fetch Milo and a very sharp weapon.

Kai had weapons of all descriptions hidden in a case behind a dull painting comprising parallel black and blue lines painted on a white canvas. The modern art piece was not to any of the inhabitants’ particular taste but was fitting with the contemporary décor, and it was large enough to entirely conceal the safe.

After a brief deliberation, Kai decided on a machete. Anything with a blade would suffice in place of a brain surgeon’s tools. Pausing for a second, he admired his prized collection of guns. A gun would also be capable of removing the back of her skull, albeit with considerably more mess. Knowing Vrethie would scold him if he came back with a gun, Kai stuck with his first choice.

Milo was sleeping when Kai burst into his room and tore him from the comfort of his bed. Pushing sweat-drenched curls aside, the boy yawned and shuffled next to Kai as he explained the situation as best he could to a half-asleep thirteen-year-old.

“Reckon you can heal her if I rip a piece of her brain out?” Vrethie asked a red-faced Milo.

“I’m not sure really… sorry.” He turned to Miaka, asking, “Are you okay with this?”

Miaka looked up at Milo. “Well aren’t you a cutie?” she observed, ignoring his question. When he refused to look away, she threw up her arms in a gesture of defeat. “No matter what happens now, I’m screwed. I failed. I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

“Is this absolutely necessary?” Milo aimed the question at Vrethie, apparently deciding, as usual, that the more sensible teen had taken charge of the situation. “Can we not just let her go? It seems… mean.” Kai had always thought Milo was too soft; it was probably why he liked him so much.

Kai thrust the carefully selected blade, handle first, toward an unimpressed looking Vrethie.

“You know I don’t have your super strength, right?” Vrethie asked, running a finger along the blade.

“Well, I can’t do it. She’ll probably die instantly, and you can’t heal the dead,” Kai told him with a shrug.

“Oh no! Don’t look at me,” Milo said, backing away from the group with his hands up in a surrendering pose.

Still inspecting the blade, Vrethie smirked and said, “You should have brought one of your guns,” to Kai before c*****g his head and swinging the Machete into Miaka’s skull.