Deception-- I

Rachel rolled her eyes, glaring at her twin brother in annoyance. “I’ve got it, Ri, I’m not deaf and you don’t stutter.”1

“It’s dangerous!” Riley replied defensively, “You have to have it exactly right!”2

Rachel rolled her eyes, flipping her sleek, raven-colored hair behind her shoulders. “It’s really not all that dangerous.”3

He looked at her uncertainly for a moment before he shrugged and walked on, glancing up at the sky through the canopy of trees. No moon. No light. There was no reason that they should be seen, but if a badly-timed spotlight should shine in their direction…4

Rachel looked at him with an irritated sort of disbelief on her youthful features before she turned to face him, stopping his brisk stride and placing her hands on his shoulders.5

“Riley, listen to me.”6

“What?” he asked, his deep blue eyes flicking over her shoulder anxiously, looking for observers. Rachel pointed first at his eyes with two fingers and then her own, demanding his eye contact.7

“What is your name?” she asked him.8

Riley huffed and rolled his eyes. “Ray, come on…“9

Rachel shook her head stubbornly. “No. What’s your name?”10

Riley raised his hands, palms out, in a giving-in gesture. “Riley Shay,” he replied, in a toneless drone that suggested they had had this particular exchange many times.11

“And mine?” Rachel asked, placing one of her gloved hands on each of his cheeks and turning his head back to face her as his gaze tried to stray again.12

“Rachel Shay, but Ray, we don’t have time-“13

She cut him off. “We’re on the wanted list?”14

“Yes.”15

“But we’re not in jail?”16

“Not yet.”17

She smiled deviously. “No, not yet. How come?”18

“Because nobody knows our faces,” he replied exasperatedly, nodding. “I know.”19

“And what’re we fighting for?”20

“Destruction, rebellion, and anarchy?” he asked, not for the first time.21

Rachel finally removed her hands from her brother’s shoulders, turning away and beginning to walk on once more. “Liberation, my dear brother. Liberation is the name of our game,” she replied, that same dark smile on her pale and freckled face. Her blue eyes glinted with determination. 22

He caught up with her slowly, groaning internally. “Cockiness gets people in trouble, you know.”23

“I’m not cocky,” she countered, “I’m confident. Besides, you’ve practiced. The range isn’t terribly long. You can snipe out the cameras, and then we’re in the clear.”24

“Ray, he’s the Chancellor, he’ll have security measures in place, don’t you think?”25

“Ri,” she replied, her voice carrying the edge of a razorblade, “It is masked as an abandoned home. Nobody knows that he's there, and as far as they know, we don’t know he’s there. That’s the point. He knows that we mean to take him out. They think they have it made. If you didn’t want to do it you shouldn’t have agreed,” she snapped. 26

They neared the tree that Riley was to be perched in. Rachel gestured upward impatiently, then pulled a headset with a tiny microphone attached to it from the depths of her leather trench coat. After donning this she tied her waist-length black hair into a long ponytail and stuck it inside of her coat. Lastly, she pulled on a black knitted facemask. Idiotic, yes, but serving the purpose. She yanked her gloves more tightly over her hands as her brother settled into his spot near the peak of the tree, setting the butt of his gun in the hollow of his shoulder and checking the sight. When he was satisfied, he waved her on and she crept until she was crouched behind the stone wall that surrounded the ‘abandoned’ old cottage. She brought her own pistol out of her jacket, checked the silencer, turned off the safety, and then smiled humorlessly.27

“Go,” she said, quietly but firmly.28

Riley heard her imperative in his headset and did as he was bid, silently shooting four shots in rapid succession.29

Rachel grinned as the four hidden security cameras burst in a flurry of shrapnel, seemingly simultaneously. She imagined the monitors in the house suddenly blinking out and showing nothing but static, one by one.30

[<|3]31

Lazlo’s grunt of surprise turned into a series of rattling coughs and as he stared at the blank screens with a growing sense of dread. 32

“Malfunction’s all it is,” he muttered, extracting a handkerchief from his pinstriped suit jacket and wiping his face with it, which was covered in feverish perspiration. He glanced ruefully at the inside of his right elbow, grimacing at the aggravated pain that emanated from the area. “Immunity, my ass,” he said in the same, muttering tone. He felt his fever rising by the moment and he was coughing and spluttering so much that he could hardly breathe.   33

As he was contemplating how to see to the situation of the downed cameras, he felt his heart seize painfully in his chest. Someone was in there with him. He heard the deadbolt of the front door turn, locking the outside world out with a malicious little snick. 34

[<|3]35

“Chancellor Lazlo,” Rachel said cheerfully, leaning against the door with a bemused smirk on her face. She had been fully prepared to deal with the Chancellor’s expected security entourage, and she was rather pleased to find that they didn’t exist. It made things much easier. 36

She gazed upon the middle-aged man with a species of pity as he groped the table beside him for his Magnum, hands shaking with the force of his coughing spasm. There were grotesque purple bags beneath his eyes, and against his abnormally pale skin, they looked almost black. He looked seventy rather than forty, and he was dying as surely as the city was decomposing around him. Rachel raised her gun deftly and shot to the sick man’s right, shuddering at his hoarse cry of surprise as his gun flew from his quivering fingertips and across the room in a melted ruin.37

“They told you it was the antidote, didn’t they, Your Excellency?” she asked, emphasizing the last two words with a vile sarcasm.38

“Stay away from me, Shay,” he coughed, for he knew who she was well enough. Nobody knew her face, nor her brother’s, for that matter, but he was willing to bet that many a victim had marked those bottomless blue eyes. 39

Rachel felt a pang of sympathy for the man once more as he rose to get away from her, wheezing horribly, and tripped over the leg of his chair, sending it and himself sprawling to the floor.40

Rachel sighed theatrically, moving towards him and depositing her gun on the table. She rolled the poor man onto his back and planted her knee in the middle of his laboring chest, pinning him to the floor. He looked up at her in cowardice and pure misery, saliva running from the corners of his grayish lips. 41

“They told you it was the antidote, didn’t they?” she asked in a voice that was very nearly seductive, stroking his sallow cheek sensually with one of her gloved fingertips. Unable to draw breath to speak, he simply nodded. 42

“Well, I have news for you,” Rachel said, and she moved so that she was straddling him, allowing her to lean down and stroke the Chancellor’s graying hair as he struggled weakly beneath her. She placed her lips against his ear and whispered to him. “You never should have hired those conniving, thieving bastards, Chancellor. You know that, don’t you? Look what they’ve done with your fucking ideals, you miserable excuse for a leader. The New Hitler, that’s what people are calling you. Did you know that?”43

His eyes followed her movements with increasing terror as she spoke to him in the lilting, poisonous voice. The hand that was not touching his hair had moved to his right sleeve, and she was rolling it up. 44

“And all because you wanted your ‘perfection’,” she spat, “Here you lay. I must say, Chancellor, you aren’t looking well at all. You didn’t think they’d ever deceive you, isn’t that right? No. Never you. And when they suggested exterminating us like vermin, Chancellor, did you protest?”45

When he stayed silent save for his hoarse panting, she dug her hand into his thinning hair and gripped it firmly before smashing his head brutally against the floor. 46

“Answer a lady when she speaks to you, Chancellor, did you?”47

He shook his head, eyes pleading with her. He had begun to whimper. 48

“No,” Rachel said, laughing now and reaching again into the depths of her long coat. “No, I didn’t think so. Well, I suppose it’s time I put you out of your misery, Chancellor, although I hate to do it. You deserve to die slowly like the citizens you’ve infected.”49

He was squirming more pronouncedly beneath her now, although his illness had weakened him. When Rachel’s hand came free clasping a syringe, he began to scream. 50

She placed her free hand over his mouth, muffling his cries, before she placed the needle of the empty syringe into the wound already caused by a similar tool days before. She emptied air into his veins, and then watched Bryan Lazlo, loathsome and discriminatory leader of the damned city in which she lived, died beneath her with his eyes bulging and his extremities twitching.51

When his final breath was drawn she lifted herself off of the man disgustedly, feeling as though she needed a shower. She scanned the single-floor cottage for any sign of another person. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see one of the Chancellor’s supposed colleagues lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting as she did what they had been doing more slowly themselves. The Chancellor, though it was he who had started all of this, had been taken easily by those he had hired to help carry out his desires. They had administered the plague willingly enough, now that fatal and ‘cureless’ illness was writhing its way through the city and flattening the population as a nuclear bomb leveling a mountain range. There was a cure, though. His associates had injected that cure into themselves and launched their ‘beloved’ leader out into shit creek without a paddle with a fake serum, all of this to get him out of their way and take his festering seed of a plan to their own extremes.52

When she was sure that she was alone, save for Lazlo’s corpse, she used her fingertips to push the microphone closer to her scarlet lips.53

“Ri? I’m finished in here. Are we clear?”54

There was no answer.55

“Riley? Are we clear?”56

She paused for a few moments, becoming scared but not yet panicked. She brought in a breath to try again when she heard a step behind her, and realized that whoever was there had to have been breathing nearly down her neck. She turned around far too late and was met with the butt of a government-issue rifle slamming into the center of her forehead, sending her down into blackness.57

[<|3]58

The man, wearing a black suit with a crisp, white, collared shirt beneath, dropped to one knee beside the woman and pulled off the mask hiding her face. He glanced at the dark bruise already surfacing on her brow before taking in the rest of her appearance. She was her father’s daughter without question, he had seen the wide expanse of her ocean-blue eyes as she had whirled toward him, and she had his round face and pale skin, dotted with freckles. The sleek black hair was that of her mother, as were the full, red lips. He paused to admire her elusive beauty for a moment before he lifted her into his arms, her coat hanging from her slim figure. He hesitated for a moment, then took her gun as well.59

As he stood there with his cargo, he couldn’t help but admire her handiwork. The gloves on her hands would prevent fingerprints, she would have taken the gun had he given her a chance, of that he was sure, and she had the syringe within her coat. Had she gotten out of that house, there would have been no sign of who had killed him, and with the hole already in place on his arm from previous injections, it wouldn’t even look like murder, just an untimely, unexpected brain legion. A smirk faintly touched the man’s hard features for the briefest second. They would probably even think it part of the illness.60

“Well done, my dear. Very well done, indeed,” he said, in a far-off tone of voice, before he exited the house, meeting his lieutenant just outside the door. Beyond him, two men were dragging her heavier twin brother along, and the man behind him was carrying Riley’s long-range rifle.61

The one in charge gestured with his head towards the two black vans and carried the girl in the direction of one as the boy was hauled in the direction of the other. He set her down roughly on the floor in the back, then made use of what was sitting readily on the seat. He secured her wrists tightly behind her with one set of cuffs before he bound her ankles with another. He then ripped the knit mask she’d been wearing into two pieces, balling up one, opening her mouth, and stuffing it in to serve as a gag and then placing the other over her eyes and tying it behind her head, blindfolding the assassin. The same was being done to her brother in the car behind. 62

Without a dying soul in the city to notice, doors deftly slammed and the twins were carried off into the night.63

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