Doubletake

7

I liked games. It was true few others liked the games I played, but I didn’t care what they liked. It was a waste of their breath. I had discarded my sunglasses as the rain continued to fall and the lightning flashed. It was good weather. The air sizzled and danced and it was dark enough for certain curiosities to travel roofs and not be seen by the mass of ignorant humans that clogged the sidewalks of this place, insects overrunning their anthill. I tossed down the binoculars and laughed. That thing, that metal thing, had come back and dropped through the roof where Caliban lived.

Little pig, little pig, let me come in. The first book I’d learned to read in my days of freedom. My teacher had been proud. I was a literate predator and that made me more dangerous than the first Auphe had been. When the prey was so many, you had to know them, truly know everything about them. My teacher said a mind was a terrible thing to waste. She was right, and when she taught me all she could, I ate hers. I thought it a compliment to her teachings. She thought differently.

That meant I taught her a lesson as well: You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.

Ah, but back to the good part, the now part. That wasn’t the best part, that metal thing, metal toy, showing up. It remained as interesting as I’d thought last night, but it wasn’t on my agenda now.

I was Auphe—the New Coming.

Toys could wait.

But Caliban…I couldn’t see him. The windows were too high, the angle wrong, but it didn’t matter. Blocks and blocks away, I had smelled the blood last night…Auphe blood—much more pungent and real than human blood. It would’ve been too far to smell him, whole, but the blood…its scent traveled…and traveled yet more. But then it had faded, disappeared this morning. Somehow he had put himself back together, all those pieces, and I wanted to know how. I would know how. He’d be happy…very happy to tell me. Or I’d be happy to force him to tell me. At times I mixed up the two—a mistake easy to make when you didn’t care one way or the other. I clicked the man-made metal claws that encased my one gloved hand against the dirt. It was an apartment building, and I hid in the greenery they had forced to grow there in pots against its will, choking on the fumes of this place. Such a minor evil that I felt disgust and rage. Humans—their wickedness was so dismal and feeble that I wanted to rip out the trees and bushes and throw them over the side of the roof.

What had I been thinking again?

What had I…

Yes, games. I’d watched Caliban for three months now in this place. I’d had twelve years of freedom, but I’d returned for three years to piss around the home of my former prison—Nevah’s Landing—because I knew Caliban would as well. Sidle told us so. Sidle, our warden…our torturer…Caliban’s victim without a single look…the bullet through his brain.

Not one glance as he pulled the trigger.

It was beautiful.

Games. Whether he’d admit it or not, I knew he liked games too. I’d followed him from Nevah’s Landing, a place he’d sooner not remember, living with cattle, picking up boring cattle emotion. He’d wiped out eight of our kind, useless kind, barely worth the carnage. But I might be wrong. Maybe he didn’t mind remembering what he had done—I wouldn’t. Maybe he had enjoyed it. Killing his brothers and sisters. I didn’t blame him. I’d have killed them too. They were weak. They couldn’t gate. Worthless maggots.

A fun game I’d wanted to play in the three years I’d been back, but I couldn’t. I’d especially wanted to play with Sidle. I would’ve dragged it out for weeks and weeks until his vocal cords ruptured from the screams. But no, no, no. I left them for Caliban.

The trap. The bait.

I’d watched him from the swamp, too far for him to sense me, and I’d learned about the last of our kind, or so he thought. I’d followed him back to this disgusting stench of a city and I’d learned more. He couldn’t gate. At first I assumed I just didn’t happen to be watching him at the right time. I had needs. I couldn’t watch him always. But then last night, he gave me nothing…which made him useless and not the Caliban I’d expected, the one whose name was snarled by all the nonhumans. Not the Caliban who the Auphe had tried to use to travel back and wipe out the humans before they infested the world like billions of locusts.

Caliban, but not the one they spoke of with fear and hatred. Not the one worth my time. I was on the verge of impossible-to-bear boredom, ready to kill him as he’d killed the others, if he didn’t die during the night. But not for revenge—he wasn’t worth revenge, but because he was the same as the ones he’d killed in my onetime prison:

Useless.

But now he wasn’t. He had gated.

I had felt it. Auphe could feel one another, sense the presence of the superior, from a certain distance, which had kept me farther than I wanted from my target. But a gate was different. One could feel a gate much farther. Sidle had told us so. He enjoyed telling us the murderous tales and lethal abilities of the true Auphe, and of the shameful shadows we were of the true Auphe race.

But there is true and then there is better.

I was better.

I would prove it to Caliban now that he was worth my time.

I would prove it to the memory of the first Auphe. The first race had gone and the second had come.

Evolution, bitches.