Dome War

It was clear to Grant that he couldn’t do them a favour by giving them actual lives and they had gotten comfortable with not having actual dreams, hopes and the fears of failure that come with being their own people- especially if they were ravishing the perks of mimicking silver spooned brats, philanthropists and everyone capable of making healthy life choices. They died with their blindfolds and those that could have saved themselves didn’t; they couldn’t if they wanted to since they were too busy piggybacking someone else’s successes and failures without knowing their real world had turned into a shooting range. Chuck wheezed with the terror of watching billions be exterminated for not choosing the life that Grant wanted for them i.e. an actual life. ‘There’s copies of them anyway. Ones that weren’t taught to discriminate because of colour, sexual orientation and denomination, ones that weren’t built to pollute the world with gases, CFCs, oil, poaching and drugs for their own selfish income and certainly not ones that define one’s worth in society with money and arbitrary beauty standards that are harrowing for those that do not fit in that norm. They will take over for Hollow-E with Eon as their compass and I will watch the sun, the embodiment of the surface world’s cue for another round of the corruption, hypocrisy and snobby aristocracy they confuse for the jealousy of all worlds beneath their feet that they will never know off, set on them one… last… time.’ Chuck then reached for his pocket and held out the only thing that could even his playing field for the dying souls. ‘Let them go or I detonate’, he said while holding the thing Lenny was spooked by in court. Grant paused and dauntingly stared into Chuck’s bluffing eyes who knew that a second longer in that staring contest was worth a hundred rounds of ammunition. He opened it hoping it would send Lenny’s missile to his location just like his notes suggested alas, the roaring fireball he wanted turned out to be a tiny spark dancing at the tip of Lenny’s favourite cigarette lighter. ‘I called that my night light. You might need it more.’ Lenny had killed a man and sacrificed everything thinking he was holding a detonator, while in actuality he was holding a cigarette lighter! Meanwhile in some correctional facility last requests were being made and lethal injections were being sterilized. Lenny had chosen to use his dying blank check with lungs full of nicotine so the guards had taken the closest thing to a lighter in the evidence inventory and had given him. If Chuck had the lighter what was Lenny about to open? The answer came flying from where Lenny had built his missile and since Chuck had mimicked him into making a duplicate of that weapon, his came pulling the rug from under Chuck and Grant since the Harrison Enterprises in Hollow-E where it had been made was directly under the one on the surface! A massive tremor from the missile burrowing through the building shook and debris from the roof began acting on theme and started falling as the missile flew out of the building through the ceiling. It looked as if it was the kind of missile that could not blow up before reaching its destination and was going to drill through anything that wasn’t as sophisticated as itself to get to the intended location. Susan, Chuck and Grant all collapsed to the floor but Chuck however was keener on saving Lenny’s only legacy and thereby rushed to tackle Grant out of the crash course of a ceiling fan. He knew the wrath of forty floors was coming but before he could navigate the situation the floor they were standing on collapsed and landed after falling three feat, cracking the lobby right in half and the building started separating from the fracture. More debris was piling in and Chuck grabbed Grant with the ambition of throwing him into a more secure corner but Grant slapped the hand off his imported Italian shirt and ran to the other half of the floor that seemed to be rising while dodging the falling wreckage and he scaled the floor that kept on rising. The space between them was then sealed off by the destruction and Chuck was enclosed in a corner. By now half the building had collapsed and was still piling up but Chuck’s position was strategic as he couldn’t get crushed. Grant on the other hand was in deeper trouble judging by the screams and shrieks he was making. This agitated Chuck on top of the fact that he was trapped and he could practically hear his ‘son’ losing blood. ‘I- I’m coming! Please don’t- don’t move! Argh!’ he yelled as he got one boulder loose. Grant moaned with pain and yelled, ‘I can’t move’, a call back to Sebastian’s last words but Chuck wasn’t going to let the same fate befall his son.

Meanwhile Lenny wasn’t keen on proving the people that were justified to hate him any more right and shut the lid; not that it changed anything. One guard was alarmed that it was still beeping and yanked it from his hand. Lenny begged them to let him so he could reroute its crash course before it got too close but they refused. Three minutes later they opened the door to yearn for help but it was too late. The doomsday device would have nosedived into the building if it hadn’t collided with the other one that had flown out of Harrison Enterprises, making an inferno that lit up the sky. The explosion struck one of the top corners of the building, making all the floors slant toward it. This made the guards by the entrance of Lenny’s cell slip and crash to the wall while Lenny took the chance to make a break for it. He wasn’t better than anyone slipping and sliding across the declined floor for he too was taken by gravity and fell out of the building like everything else that was in that corridor. The smoke and dust made him unsure where he was landing until the pain receptors of his back did. He was half conscious when he saw more clatter come his way and then everything went white when his loss of situation control kicked in- and it felt like a large pipe hit his head. ‘Grant? Grant- oh yes! Yes I’m free… Grant I’m coming! Where are you?’ Chuck breathlessly called but the eerie silence that answered back had his heart feel like it was shrinking. It shrunk further down tenfold when he heard a wet cough coming from behind a pile of crumbling rubble. It wasn’t a good look for the liberator of Hollow-E. His right leg was bent the wrong way and a third degree cut dominating his torso was oozing thick red blood but what Chuck could see that was most unsettling was a pile of half fulfilled dreams and a haunted past that never got closure. He was strong enough to make eye contact with Chuck while gagging from his own blood and for the first time since Chuck started knowing him Grant did not have a monologue at the top of his head. He picked up the fragments of his broken face and put them together to resemble the closest thing he remembered to be the smile he had before aching for a mom and missing a dad became pathetic and useless. ‘What was she like?’ he asked accompanied by a tear streaking down his mucky face. Chuck had been subconsciously begging for a son ever since he found out he had one, only he was going to witness him die again. ‘She was a pain. One that was my addiction and my strength. Her beauty was my only weakness and her smile was a testimony of the only thing I had gotten right in my life and you look like her so… that means something.’ Grant gave a slight nod while trying to hold back the tears that were obviously welling up in his eyes. ’What was Grant Harrison like?’ Chuck asked, his throat swelling with overwhelming emotions. Grant chuckled through the wheezing and breathed in before saying, ‘Spoilt. He loved pizza. He liked toys, math and going on walks with Lenny. Oh and he hated anime despite popular opinions, the only things I don’t do well- you’ve probably guessed by now. Not that any of that matters anyway. You killed me.’ Then he started crying uncontrollably, leaving Chuck with not a lot of room for stolidity. Grant then reached for the canister of the contagious airborne virus and pulled the plug before his body succumbed to his dream. And the two synchronised heartbeats left were to be only one.

No. Everyone’s least favourite answer. That depends of course on which side of the negation you are on. When you want to die alone and gorily to pander to the metaphor of being born into bloodshed that you hesitantly lived with, resisted and ultimately came to terms with prompting you to poison the very air the people you want gone are breathing, ‘no’ can be quite the nuisance. But if you grew a soft spot for the clone that put you through a harrowing sci-fi ordeal and stole your livelihood by literally destroying your company with a drill missile and want him to have the dignity of saying the good bye he didn’t get the chance to say even to the corpse his late wife to the corpse of his son, you will go against the son’s dying wishes, find a gas mask, carry his cadaver out of the diseased atmosphere and go over yonder and hope his father is conscious for this bomb drop. Fortunately he was and so were his car hotwiring skills when he saw an old truck unlocked and just waiting for his escape with a quarter demolished Alcatraz knockoff as cover. He was on a direct path of coincidentally meeting Chuck who in twenty minutes would be standing in front of a building sinking into the Earth and sure enough that time came to pass. When Lenny saw the last thing he was living for no longer living the walls around his heart crumbled and the few passers-by there could almost see it. How could someone so young die like this? The same question he asked himself fifteen years before and both these adversities were his fault. Chuck knew Grant was lucky to have kicked the bucket with a person he always resented but deep-down loved as his freshest memory, something Chuck and Lenny’s relationship going full circle had taught him. The unspoken but never forgotten, newly realised love was a shy too late and a careless distribution of hurtful words, an anthology of memories of pizza and going on walks were their legacy in that moment and probably forever. Lenny was craving and savouring the punishment of neglecting his son by just apathetically staring at the focus of the collapsing ground. With only a look from Lenny, Chuck knew he had to get away from the scene in the truck and leave his doppelganger to his long desired death. Despite goodbyes never being a Chuck specialty, coming from another Chuck about to willingly go down a blaze of glory by letting the Earth beneath him make way, a red-eyed stare, a ‘see you on the other side’ smile and a final tear were a tad underwhelming. And like that the most iconic image in Chuck’s mind had been captured and his heart was bursting with emotion. He jumped into the truck started the engine and left with the sound of the Earth giving way. Lenny’s story would then end. And the hidden bombs in international historical monuments; the last phase of the project would never be fulfilled because of a self-destruction protocol standard for any mimic without a master had destroyed Eon when Grant died, but Dome was not yet vanquished. As for now, he stood by the edge of the room, so close to the dirty pane he could see his loss manifest into a condensed sigh right under his slender nose and in the true art of a paladin, watched the catastrophized city’s ecosystem from the window of the coffee shop where everything began through the transparent manifestation of himself in the glass he now knew fondly. Acceptance; the final stage of grief- grief for Sebastian, Lenny, Grant, Susan and so much more was closer to Chuck’s fulfilment than getting even with a MIA Dome; one he would personally deliver the sequel of the Dome War to.