Double A's Face
Author's Note: Involves a character death. This was written as a response to a prompt.
It took Derek a long time to pick up the knife. It was long, carved. For slicing up ham, he was given to understand. The stabbing point was separated at the very edge. Side was serrated with an ample number of tiny, biting points. He idly touched his thumb upon the surface and hissed. An almost invisible trickle of blood rivulated down the digit and pooled on his open palm. He stared in dull fascination for a minute before turning the knife back in his hands, gripping the handle. He wouldn't need the serrated edges. All he needed was the edge.
He stood there and stared at it in the semi-darkness of the kitchen. A tiny light on the bottom of the microwave was all the light he needed. It was like peering into a mirror, really. Looking at the knife, that is. He was getting a bit gruff around the edges of his goatee, it lacked the crispness he usually enjoyed. He needed a shave. Staying with these people had desensitized him to these things. Reduced his drive, his organization. He was getting a belly on him, he realized. Gaining weight. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually gained pounds since...
Long time, anyway. He was growing distracted. It wasn't entirely their fault. He couldn't blame Sarah. He couldn't blame John. They'd made him complacent, sure. But it wasn't just complacency. It was the past, too. Demons from the past. He blamed the machine. Cameron. It was everywhere in his head. It was like a song he couldn't get out of his head. It was a song that couldn't get out of his head. Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor. 1830. He'd played it over and over and over and over and over and over in his head. He hummed it. La'd it. Eventually it became too much and he got on a computer. Google'd the notes and searched for hours until he found it. It was on some music page. He played it and unfolded like a cheap card table. Just fell to pieces, blubbering, babbling, weeping. The house was empty then, earlier that day. Much earlier. It scared him. Every note he heard, every tone and melody, he saw her bright red eyes digging into his body as she worked him. Broke him. It didn't bear thinking about. It was evil. Their keeping it in the house, around John, around him was an affront to all of his senses, all of his reason. She was the same model. Reprogrammed, likely. But they went bad. They had a tendency to go bad. How could he live with himself if he allowed something like that to happen, he couldn't, wouldn't. He'd be worse than a pile of shit if that happened. He may as well be one of them if that happened.
THEY WERE STUPID TO LET IT INTO THEIR LIVES. HE LOVED IT. HE COULD SEE THAT. THAT WAS FUCKED UP. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE FUCKING KID. She was a fucking siren, luring him, winking her secret winks, sharing her secret looks and John meeeeelted LIKE AN ICE-CREAM CONE.
It was set in stone, really. One of them had to go. Kyle had died protecting these people. They didn't need a machine to accomplish the same thing when they had him, John's uncle for chrissake. It just turned and turned and turned in his fucking head. They should have used it, and burned it. Destroyed it. Gotten rid of it. They'd had the chance when John removed its chip. They didn't destroy it. Then Sarkissian gave them a fried Cameron, free of charge. And they saved it. Derek was beginning to regret shooting that pale little fucker to begin with. Derek loved them. He loved Sarah, loved seeing her as both person and legend. He loved touching her and feeling her, feeling the texture of her mythos. Her hair, her smile. Her battle instinct. He loved John, loved being his uncle and his mentor. He loved seeing him as a child, not as that magnificent bastard everyone respected where Derek was from. His realness, his stupidly rebellious clothes. His leadership, hatching from its egg.
He loved them. If anything happened to them, it would be his fault. As their protector, he had to terminate all threats.
IT WAS A THREAT. A SIREN, A BITCH, A SHADOW WITH A POISONED DART. IT WAS A SMILE AND A SECRET GRIN. LAUGHING. HE HAD TO GET RID OF IT. HE HAAAATED IT.
In his left hand was a long, jet-black prod. Near the bottom of it was an adjustable cord that stretched into the backpack Derek was wearing. Within the backpack was a tiny power supply with all the energy he'd need. A little risky, obviously. Very risky. He could fry himself so bad. Kill himself, even. But he had to take the risk. At the top of the prod were dual electrodes.
He turned from the kitchen island and started toward the hall. He'd been there for about an hour, lost in thought. He'd spent about half of it standing in front of the knife. A good quarter of it fingering the knife. A lot of it in thought. For a lot of it, he'd whispered unidentifiable sounds to himself, stuff he was unaware of. Cameron, who had stood in the doorway for forty-five minutes, knew them to be mumblings associated with murderous impulses. Derek stared at her, a slight gasp escaping from his mouth.
They were the only ones awake, although she was always awake. She never slept. It was 4:00 in the morning. An hour before John and Sarah usually woke up. They stared at each other. She was leaning against the brick, impassive. Just staring. Analyzing, in her alien, inhuman way. In her horrific nature. She was like something slimy, something Derek could find on the back of his shoe in the park. She-IT deserved to be destroyed.
They stared at each other.
"Don't do it," she said. It was toneless, like a comment on...something mundane. Uninteresting. And yet it was a request. Cute. She was really a freak, yeah? Unlike anything else he'd seen before. She was like everything those machine fuckers wanted. She was in everything, was everything. Perfect...by their standards. Human was human. Imitators could be good, but they never came close to the real thing.
Derek didn't reply. He just stood there, shoulders slumped with the weight on his back. He didn't hide the knife. He didn't hide the prod. He just stood there and said nothing. They stared at each other, and she slinked off into the darkness. Why?
He started walking, going past the place she'd been. He could see her retreating, fleeing form, heading toward the screen door that led to the backyard. Why? He continued on and entered the machine's room. It was like a cruel mockery. She got a room, and Derek got a couch. Wasn't their fault. They accepted her. She'd tricked them. There was nothing in the room. A bed. Mirror. That was it. Why? He stalked forward and went into the tiny drawers underneath the mirror. It didn't take long to find what he wanted. Vick's chip was in the second drawer down. He plucked it up and left the room. Why had she left him?
He walked into the kitchen and grabbed the hammer that he'd left on the counter a few hours ago, when the idea first came into his mind a little after listening to the music. He laid Vick's chip on the counter and smashed it to pieces. A loud, reverberating crack echoed through-out the house, and then there was silence. A second later, one of the pieces of Vick's chip clattered to the floor, jagged and ruined. Useless. Vick was dead. They'd have no fail-safe on which to restore her.
Derek waited. He waited to hear bedsprings unsettling. Groans, or exclamations. He waited to hear yawns.
Nothing. The house slept on, in silence. Derek grunted softly and turned away, laying the hammer back down on the counter. Why did she run? He walked out of the kitchen and twirled the knife once in his right hand. It made a satisfying, amazing whish! sound. Laid his grip on it, solidified. He put a bit of pressure on the riot-prod button. A little zap, killed instantly before it could blossom into a strobe of electricity. He turned his eyes up and pushed the backdoor open.
She'd been waiting for him, standing in the center of the yard. A glock nine millimeter flashed in her hand, aimed. Derek fluidly jerked the silenced Beretta from his belt and raised his hands up (the knife was held against the clip chamber), placating. Cameron tightened her aim, making it perfect. Clinically, Derek hunched over slightly and threw the pistol up. He arrested the motion before his arm traveled too far and let off two shots. The first bullet disrupted her grip on the Glock, loosening it. The second bullet knocked it away. Derek dropped the pistol and started forward.
Cameron didn't even bother to stoop and pick up the pistol. She just walked over to meet him, her expression completely dead. So very much like her kind, her make, her line of products. She was like a Barbie doll designed to kill. Just plastic, when you get right down to it. Plastic with possible defects. Plastic that could suddenly jerk around, bite, thrash. Kill the people who enjoyed its company. Who depended on it. A siren. A deceit.
Derek stared at the side of her head. He'd studied them a lot. He could remember days where he spent hours examining their burnt corpses, their chrome and grinning countenances. The CPU power supply was centralized to the side-port of the endoskull. Enough electric force applied and the Terminator would drop.
They were rather close now. All she had to do was grip the side of his jaw and twist his neck until he was dead. She was raising her right hand to perform just that. Her left hung from her side, ready to do anything within a split second. Like a contingency. Going against them was suicide. He did it anyway.
She didn't want to do this. He realized that. She was going to kill him so she could survive and continue her mission. To do what? Only she knew, and that was the problem. That was the fucking problem. They were so trusting, so warm to her. Sarah could be like ice, and yet she allowed this thing around her. It shook Derek, disturbed him. Right now that was irrelevant to her. She realized he wanted her dead, and that simply wasn't going to happen if she had any power to stop it.
Derek had to do this. It was the only way to be sure. He didn't feel the slightest thing now. She wasn't a person. A piece of plastic surrounded by flesh. He'd survived so many of these things that they were just roaches in party masks, trying to blend in. Crush em'.
She gripped the side of his neck. Contorted her fist. Derek stabbed the knife into her hand and shook it around. Blood jetted from the wound for a brief moment before sparks began to fly. The wrists were brittle, only tubes, really. The knife stuck effortlessly and defeated the chrome plating of the wrist, and cracked, bent and destroyed. Her hand stopped squeezing. She cocked her head and stared over at knife. She could afford to, with the knowledge that she'd lost.
Derek shook the riot-prod from his left hand into his right. As though pulled by some dark magicians magic, it levitated in the air and hovered near her head. She removed two of his fingers in a final, useless maneuver. He was too fast. Cameron's eyes flittered over to him and she turned her head fully round. Her eyes were huge, like saucers, with fear. Her expression, a mask of fright, of anger. Helplessness. Her features just crinkled. Desperation. Want. Desire. Fear.
"Derek," she gasped, "Don-"
Derek was expressionless. The pain he felt may as well have been from another planet, another dimension. Something totally alien. He activated the prod and jammed it against her head, upping the voltage to full power. Cameron shook all over, her face jerking up and down, around, left and right all in a blur. Then she stopped. Like a pillar, she toppled. There was a wet settling sound as her body hit the grass.
Her face was as it had been. Terror. Abject, hateful terror. Derek stared, his eyes as huge as hers. The last thing she'd had was his face. His dead face, ashen. Murderous.
She looked very much like a girl then. Like a human. She'd been loved by John. Given attention to. She'd wowed people. Some kid from school expected her to come with him to prom night. The expression was stark, unrelenting. She'd pleaded, like a damsel. And he was gonna murder her, like a villain.
One hundred and twenty seconds. He had to do this. God help him. Derek shuddered and knelt next to her, pulling the knife free from her broken wrist. He cut her scalp off with little effort and stared at her chrome-plated skull. Had he been wrong?
Had he? If she woke up, would he be able to plead forgiveness? Admit that he was wrong? He'd seen the chip in her head as an abstract. Just a slab of plastic with tons of computing power on killin' and killin' and killin'. Now it was a brain. He felt like he was removing a brain. Removing a mind. Removing feelings.
They could go bad, though. Always, go bad. But why...why...? The face...? Bad? Face? Feelings? Why was he like this? It was the face. It was the face that made him a murderer instead of an exterminator. Drop the "ex" and what do you get?
He used the knife to pry open the fore-side port. There was a hiss of hermetically sealed air. He dropped the backpack and quickly unzipped it. Got out the pliers. Twist. Pull. He extracted the chip. It was kind of long. Slender. Sort of blue-ish, really. It looked like a cousin of Vick's chip rather than a brother. Or sister.
It was like removing a battery. Double A.
He snapped it in half.
--
He made himself eggs and bled all over the counters. He didn't fix his bleeding. Didn't want to. The microwave clock read" "5:00." The shell outside that had been known as Cameron Phillips just laid there. Sprinkled on her belly were the pieces of her chip. Her life. Brain. Her expression was about the same. Hadn't slackened. It was frozen, like a sculpture. The fear...
A creak from down the hall. Oh god. Oh god.
He ate the eggs in silence. His expression hadn't changed once since he killed her. He did it for them. Safeguarding them. He was...heh...their protector now...Dear god.
John walked out of his room and shuffled into the kitchen. He looked pretty well rested. He'd gotten a hair-cut yesterday. He looked...he looked wistful. He'd been dreaming. He was smiling. John turned his head over to Derek and the smile just brightened.
"Hey," he said softly.
Derek nodded. Oh god. Oh...god.
"Where's-?"
John saw the blood on the counter and he stopped talking. A moment later and he saw the remnants of Vick's chip. He pinched a small piece of plastic between his fingers and examined it, his eyes huge. He dropped it. Looked at the blood. There was so much, Derek realized. All for you, John, he thought.
John's breath came ragged, like it'd been knocked out. Then it went faster as realization kicked in. He looked at Derek. Derek stared at John, expressionless. Oh god.
The fear...a while ago Cameron's bright, hellish eyes had consumed his thoughts, his memories. All of him. Now it was her fear. Her very, all too human face. Her emotions. John let out a slight, horrified noise and sprinted from the kitchen. For some reason, maybe it was just coincidence, he went straight toward the backyard, for Derek heard the clatter of the screen door.
Exterminator. Drop the ex and what do you get? Terminator. Oh god. Oh god.
There was a grief-filled yell from outside. And silence. And then loud, unabashed sobbing.
Derek sat in silence for a minute before carefully, deliberately forking another bunch of scrambled eggs into his mouth. He chewed. Swallowed. And then he picked up the fork again to do the exact same thing, until all of the eggs were gone.
Gone, gone, gone.
Oh god.