Mitosis: A Reckoners Story Read Free Page B

them.”
    “Good,” I said. “As long as they’re chasing me, they aren’t shooting anyone else.”
    “You can’t fight them all, you slontze,” Tia said.
    “Don’t intend to,” I said, grunting as I turned a corner. “You’re going to work out his weakness and figure out how to beat him, Tia. I’m just going to distract him.”
    “I’ve arrived,” Abraham said. “They’re already on alert at the government office. I’ll get the mayor and council to safety. But if I might suggest, this is probably a good time to activate the emergency message system.”
    “Yeah,” Tia said, “on it.”
    The mobiles of everyone in the city were connected, and Tia could dial them all up collectively to send instructions—in this case, an order to empty the streets and get indoors.
    I dodged around another corner and came almost face to face with one of Mitosis’s clones. We surprised each other. He got his gun out first and fired, a deafening crack, like he was shooting a sparking
cannon
.
    He also missed me. He wasn’t even close. Big handguns look impressive, and they have excellent knockdown force. Assuming you can hit your target.
    I lined up my rifle sights, ignored his next shot, and squeezed the trigger. Just as I did, he thrashed, and a duplicate of him stepped away. It was like he was suddenly made of dough and the other self
pushed
out of his side.
    It was nauseating. My shot took the first Mitosis, dropping him with a hole in the chest. He tried to duplicate again as he died, but the duplicate came out with a hole in its chest too, and fell forward, dying almost immediately.
    The other clone, though, was also duplicating. I cursed, shooting it, but not before another version came out, and that one was already trying to clone itself
again
. I brought this one down just before it split.
    I breathed in and out, my hands trembling as I lowered the rifle. Five corpses lay slumped on the ground. My rifle magazine held thirty rounds. I’d never considered that insufficient, but a minute of Mitosis cloning himself could run me out with ease.
    “David?” Tia asked in my ear. “You all right?” She’d have me on camera, using Steelheart’s surveillance network.
    “I’m all right,” I said, still shaking. “I just haven’t gotten used to people shooting at me.”
    I took a few deep breaths, forced down my anxiety, and walked up to the Mitosis clones. They’d begun to melt.
    I watched with disturbed fascination as the corpses decomposed, flesh turning to a pale tan goo. The bones melted after, and then the clothing. In seconds, each corpse was just a pile of colored gunk, and even that seemed to be evaporating.
    Where did the mass for each of these new bodies come from? It seemed impossible. But then, Epics have this habit of treating physics like something that happens to
other
people, like acne and debt.
    “David?” Tia said in my ear. “Why are you still standing there? Sparks, boy! The others are coming.”
    Right. Dozens of evil Epic clones. On a mission to kill me.
    I took off in a random direction; where I was going didn’t matter so much as staying ahead of the clones. “Do you have that music yet?” I asked Tia.
    “Working on it.”
    I dashed up onto the bridge, crossing the river. That river would have made a great natural barrier for sectioning off the downtown, except for the fact that Steelheart had turned the thing into steel—effectively making it into an enormous highway, though one with a rippled surface. The river that had once flowed here had diverted to the Calumet River channel.
    I reached the other side of the bridge and glanced over my shoulder. A scattering of figures in identical clothing had broken out of side streets and were running toward me, some pulling handguns from the small of their backs. They seemed to recognize me, and a few took shots.
    I cursed, ducking to the side, heading past an old hotel with steel windows and a trio of flagpoles extending into the sky,