"Recall" - Part Five

 

Part Five

            Cohaagen sat patiently in his high-backed executive chair, taking in the wall-sized window that overlooked the majestic Pyramid Mine. The city lights twinkled under a threatening violet sky. The doors to his office whooshed open. He swiveled in his chair, smiling as he looked on the collection of individuals that entered – Richter and his men, guarding the captive Douglas Quaid, Melina, and the trespassers from the reactor. There were two more people who Cohaagen had no awareness of – a snarky-looking man and a Latin woman, the latter of whom had to be carted in on a wheelchair, having been sedated beforehand.

            The dead body of George/Kuato was laid out on a conference table. “So, this is the great man,” Cohaagen examined the body. He half-opened George’s shirt to glimpse at his lifeless parasitic twin, grimacing. “No wonder he kept out of sight.”

            As Cohaagen examined the mutant body, Anais apologetically looked to her brothers. “I can’t believe I almost killed you guys,” she lamented. “I don’t know what came over me.”

            “Hey, there’s nothing to be sorry about, sis,” Gumball put her at ease.

            “Yeah, it was that Rekall place that messed with your head,” Darwin said. “We knew you weren’t really an egotistical queen of Mars.”

            “Shut up, you freaks!” Richter snapped at the children.

            “HEY!” Cara barked. “Don’t talk to my friends like that!”

            “Your friends,” Cohaagen scoffed, recovering his enthusiastic mood as he stared towards the Gladiator. “Only a rebel sympathizer would consider these little mutants ‘friends’.”

            “We’re not from your world, idiot,” Snake hissed.

            “Oh, I know all about that, my friend,” Cohaagen confessed. “A little bird told me the whole story, after I caught you bunch snooping around the reactor core.”

            Cara frowned at this. “Who’d even know enough about us to tell you that?”

            “The same person who warned me about this traitorous coward right here,” Cohaagen gestured to Quaid. He looked on him with great disdain. “We really could’ve been something, Carl. We were pals. And then you went behind my back and tried to stab me in it!”

            “Wait a sec,” Al uttered, surprised by this twist. “Hauser really did betray you?!”

            “You bet he did,” Cohaagen retorted. “Set the whole thing up – the suitcases, the masks, the money, the messages…he even roped these troublemakers in on it when he found them in the reactor!” He gestured over Cara, Snake, and the Watterson children.

            This news sparked intrigue in Cara, remembering what she had seen in her stolen memory. “Hauser…it was him the whole time…he was the one who had our memories wiped at Rekall!”

            “But why?” Anais asked.

            “To protect you, that’s why,” Cohaagen said. “A lot of good it did. It only brought you all right back to us.”

            “You still haven’t explained who it was that helped you, Cohaagen,” Cara pressed. “There’s no way you could’ve been two steps ahead of Hauser, unless you had someone on the outside. So…who is it?”

            Cohaagen smirked as if he hoped she would ask just that.

            He turned to the three Holovision video screens embedded along one of the walls in his office. Switching them on, the face of a black man with shoulder-length white hair and bright red eyes appeared. Cara had seen this man’s face before – in Kuato’s mind probe.

            “Who is this?” Quaid frowned on the recording.

            Cohaagen put one index finger against his lips, shushing Quaid. “Just shut up and listen, Doug.”

            “Hello, Cara,” the white-haired man greeted in the recording. “You’re probably wondering who I am and what I have to do with any of what’s going on right now. Well, first, allow me to properly introduce myself – my name is Ethos, someone you’ll come to fear in your future regenerations. In all honesty, I should thank you for my very existence. After all, cutting off your hand and discarding it into the Infinite DC was a wise decision.”

            Her eyes widening with revolting shock, Cara glimpsed at her right hand, a cybernetic replacement of the one she was forced to amputate, after it had been taken over by the ‘Thing from Another World’ in 1982 Antarctica.

            “Yep,” Ethos continued, “that same hand you’re probably looking at right now had enough regenerative energy to grow a new body…that ultimately formed me – the Twilight Phantom!”

            Cara gasped, stunned to her very core.

            “Much as I would’ve loved for us to meet face-to-face, I have other things to take care of – like making your other lives miserable,” Ethos cackled. “Cohaagen will take it from here, per our agreement. He’ll do a bit of reprogramming – your buddy Plissken will be one of Cohaagen’s men, with Richter as his second-in-command.”

            “What?!” Richter scowled in protest but kept silent after Cohaagen fired a stone-cold glare at him. Clearly, it was his punishment for failing to stop Quaid/Hauser.

            “Second,” Ethos proceeded, “your little friends – the Wattersons – will live as street urchins on Venusville, having no chance of ever returning home!”

            “What?!” Gumball, Darwin, and Anais cried out in fright.

            “Quaid will be restored with Hauser’s identity, with no memory or impulse of ever betraying Cohaagen,” Ethos stated. “And that sleazy, demure brunette of his dreams will be his loyal wife.”

            “Did he just call me ‘sleazy’?” Melina cringed.

            “Finally,” Ethos concluded, “you yourself, Cara, will be lobotomized, along with your two Protectorate friends.”

            “Lobotomized?!” Al reacted apprehensively. “Oh, I don’t think my two roommates upstairs will like that.”

            “So long, Gladiator,” Ethos brought his video message to an end. “We’ll be seeing each other a lot…either with these faces or completely different ones.”

--------------------------

            Norah snapped awake with a loud snort. A bit of saliva dribbled down from the right corner of her mouth. She attempted to wipe it off with her right hand, but she found herself unable to move it – or her left, for that matter. She then discovered that her legs and head were restrained as well. With the little mobility that she had, she saw that Al, Cara, Snake, the Wattersons, Quaid, and Melina were all strapped to implant chairs, just like the one she was in.

            Cohaagen, Richter, and a bunch of technicians gleefully hovered over them.

            “Ah, you’re awake!” She heard Al exclaim with off-putting delight. “You missed one of the best twists you can find only in the Infinite DC! Dare I say, better than the ones in our stories!”

            “I’ll bet,” Norah humored him, despite being scared out of her wits.

            “As it turns out, Hauser is…” Al stopped himself just as Cohaagen hovered near them. “Aw, heck. It sounds way better coming from the devil himself.” He then addressed Cohaagen and called out, “Hey, Dick! Drop that bombshell on my friend here, like you did to Robocop before blasting him with ED-209!”

            Cohaagen looked upon him with perplexing contempt. “I don’t know what the heck an ‘ED-209’ is, but I do know that I don’t like you…whoever you are!” As he walked away from Al, his attention was brought to a videophone just as a call came through. “What is it?”

            On the videophone screen was a nervous technician standing at an air pumping station, in front of a wall of dials and gauges. “Sir, the oxygen level is bottoming out in Sector G. What do you want me to do about it?”

            “Don’t do anything,” Cohaagen dismissively ordered.

            “They can’t last an hour, sir,” the technician informed.

            Cohaagen pressed a button on the videophone, switching between three quick views of people suffocating in Venusville, before finally returning to the phone call. “Forget ‘em. It’ll be a lesson to the others.” And just like that, he hung up.

            “You’re a jerk!” Anais screeched. “Give those people air!”

            “I won’t, Your Majesty,” Cohaagen derided. “And, in five minutes, your loyal subjects will be nothing but trash littered on the streets…and you won’t remember a single one of them.” Looking to the lead technician, he instructed, “Fire it up, Doc.”

            The doctor turned on the machine.

            Cara could hear it starting to whine.

            Cohaagen was heading for the door before stopping to signal Richter, who hovered uncomfortably close to Quaid. “Excuse me, Doctor,” he said, nodding to Quaid. “You mean he’s not going to remember any of this?”

            Al and Norah bit their tongues, knowing what was about to happen next.

            “Not a thing,” the doctor told Richter.

            “Oh, really?” Richter uttered, thinking for a moment. He cocked his arm back, about to slug Quaid square in the face, until…

            “HEY!!” Norah yelled from the top of her lungs.

            Her outburst prompted Richter to cease from his dastardly deed, moving away from Quaid and standing directly in front of Norah. He brought his face close to hers and whispered, “Ya got somethin’ you wanna say to me, sweetheart?”

            “Yeah,” Norah gritted. “Try not to lose your head over this.”

            Richter started to laugh, and the waiting Cohaagen along with him.

            And then…SLUGH!

            For a fleeting second, Richter felt a sharp sting come through his neck before he couldn’t feel anything at all. The smile on his face fell…and so did his head!

            Cohaagen stood in shock from what just transpired.

            In Norah’s shackled right hand was the scimitar, having manifested to decapitate Richter and set her free from her restraints with the mere flick of her wrists. Her eyes smoking and glowing, Norah commenced in terminating the lab technicians in the room. She saved Cohaagen for last, hurling her scimitar right at him. Unfortunately, Cohaagen escaped through the sliding doors, leaving the scimitar to be embedded into them.

            “To think, I was gonna let Richter punch Quaid, just like before,” Al confessed.

            “Before what?!” Quaid yelled, struggling under his restraints. Staring at Norah in bewilderment, he asked, “How did you do all of that? Who are you?!”

            “I’m the woman who’s saving your butt from that chair,” she told him, taking her scimitar from the door and freeing her compatriots from their implant chairs.

            “Her name’s Na’Riah, and she’s a very long story that we don’t have time to go into,” Al explained to their confused associates.

            Suddenly, alarms blared throughout the facility.

            “You’re right, we don’t,” Quaid told Al, prior to searching Richter’s headless body for the semiautomatic that he kept concealed under his jacket. Melina grabbed for an emergency fire axe, while Cara went for a long metal pole.

            Armed, the group bolted out of the room and for the elevator.

            A pair of soldiers suddenly emerged from the elevator, and Cara impaled the soldier to the left with her long metal pole, aiming for his chest. Melina axed the right soldier in the stomach, bringing him down. The two women grabbed the dead soldiers’ guns, with Cara tossing hers to Snake.

            They boarded the elevator afterwards. Along its back wall were a series of shelved flashlights. Cara, Al, Quaid, and Melina each took one for themselves.