She paused to untie the trash bag. Inside were the missing water bottles from the pallet in the kitchen. They were all bone dry. She sniffed one but didn’t smell anything. Had there been something in them besides water? Shivering, she unzipped the next two body bags—two more dead men, scrubbed and bleached. Violence was one thing, but this was somehow worse. It was all so clinical and detached. These men had been treated like packaged meat at a supermarket.
The last body bag, well, that was a different story, and it made Con suddenly afraid in a way that she hadn’t been before. This face she recognized immediately. It had been chasing her, haunting her, since the night she’d left Palingenesis. The pockmark-faced man was dead. Someone had murdered him and his team. She should have been relieved that she didn’t have to worry about him anymore, but she wasn’t. At least she’d known his face. Now she wouldn’t know who was coming after her.
She needed to get out of there. That her original had been coming here of her own free will frequently enough to be recognized by the house’s security was profoundly unnerving. These deaths proved just how involved she’d been before whatever was going on had gotten her killed. But first she needed to send pictures to Darius Clarke. Unless he could magically connect these murders to Levi Greer, currently in jail, then the case against him started to fall apart. At least that’s what she hoped it meant as she straddled the first body to take its picture.
The door to the house swung open behind her.
Slowly, Con glanced back to see a burly white man in a tank top that emphasized his rough, pig-iron shoulders and biceps. He filled the doorway like he’d been cut to order. Con turned to face him and stepped away from the bodies.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded but didn’t wait for an answer. Reaching out, he tapped the garage door button with surprising delicacy. For a crazy moment, Con thought he was opening the door to let her out. But as the retractable door rumbled up, she saw the tires of a pickup truck waiting to back into the garage.
He wasn’t letting her out, he was letting his friends in.
A second white man ducked under the door while it was still opening. He was big too, but it was hard to tell where the beer ended and the muscle began. He looked from his partner to Con and back to his partner. “Who’s that?”
The man in the doorway shrugged. “We ain’t been introduced.”
“Who’re you?” the second man asked her, then called over her shoulder. “John. You’re going to want to see this.”
The garage door finished its lazy climb. A third man climbed out of the pickup truck. He was white, too, and older, his black beard leavened with gray. He moved gingerly, favoring one leg. The other two men deferred to him, looking to him for answers. He was slow to offer them, and stood awhile gazing at Con and scratching at the back of his hand. It drew Con’s eye to the tattoo on his forearm—a black umbrella.
These men were Children of Adam.
Everything slowed to a panicked, syncopated drumbeat. She wanted to ask for a time-out so she could figure out how the Children of Adam knew about this town house. How they were connected to her original. Across the street, the gardener fired up a leaf blower and everything rushed back to full speed. She was going to die if she didn’t get out of here.
“Jesus, boys, don’t you know who that is?” John said with a hint of disappointment.
“Who?” the two men said in unison.
“That’s the clone that’s been all over the news.”
The two men looked at Con with renewed interest.
“Let’s just take it easy,” Con said, walking slowly toward the older man. His gimpy leg made him the best of her bad options.
“What’s she doing here?” the second man asked.
“Isn’t that a question?” John replied. He signaled the burly man by the door, who pressed the garage door button a second time. Overhead, the motor ground to life and the door began to lower.
Con broke for the street, screaming for help. She didn’t make it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Con came to stretched out on an orange leather couch that was as cracked and blistered as an old man’s foot. Gingerly, she eased herself into a sitting position and squeezed her eyes closed until the nausea passed. She didn’t remember the end of her failed escape attempt, only that the gardener never even glanced up from his leaf blower. She had no idea which of the Children of Adam goons had knocked her out, but the welt on the back of her head felt wet and soft and tender. A deep breath to clear her head succeeded only in filling her lungs with the stale, listless stench of ten thousand cigarettes. Stumbling into the bathroom, she cupped her hand under the faucet and drank until her headache began to recede. What she could use were the pills from her backpack, but for all she knew, it was still in the garage. And of course they’d taken her LFD.