Nadya’s Nights: Road to Vengeance
Night Four: Revelations
Chapter Forty-Three: Cloning Technology
by Indy McDaniel
Copyright © 2009 Indy McDaniel
Another brief trip down another long hall led them to a set of high-tech double doors. Nadya thought they looked a bit like something you’d use to keep people out of a vault. “This must be where you keep the good China…” she muttered.
Xenia giggled. “Not quite.” She tapped in a code at the keypad beside the doors and then, in a very flashy show, the locks shifted and the doors slid apart, revealing the room beyond.
Nadya had thought the room she’d woken up in originally had looked like a lab, and it had. What she saw beyond the fancy doors was like an uber-lab.
Since when did I stumble into a bad sci-fi movie? she thought. She then realized that she was actually gaping a bit at the scene and promptly shut her mouth.
Halfway into the room, a long desk with computers built into it stretched the length of the room. Four lab techs were seated at the long desk, each working at their own terminal. They wore white lab coats and all of them had thick-rimmed glasses, even the one female lab tech.
It was like walking into a meeting for Stereotypical Nerds Anonymous.
The computer screens had all sorts of highly technical information on them. Nadya knew this because she didn’t understand a single thing she saw, with the exception of one, which showed the silhouette of a female body. At first, she assumed it was some kind of Stereotypical Nerd porn until she looked up past the bank of terminals to the rest of the room.
The far wall had a series of tube-like capsules which stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Five of them total, and all but one was empty. The center capsule was filled with a golden liquid, not unlike the stuff that had been IV fed into her earlier. It wasn’t the strange liquid that had Nadya’s mouth gaping open once again.
Floating inside the liquid-filled capsule was a nude woman that she’d seen before. Granted, it seemed like eons ago after all she’d been through but really it had only been a couple nights earlier.
The last time Nadya had seen the woman, her head had been lying in a gutter. Her body hadn’t been attached at the time.
That wasn’t the case now.
There was a pretty nasty scar along her neck where it had been severed but her head was now firmly re-attached. Nadya couldn’t tell if the woman, she remembered her name was Samantha, was alive or not but judging by what she’d already seen, she suspected so. After all, why would you grow a head back onto a dead body?
Nadya turned to look at Xenia. “You’re part of the Hunters Guild?”
Xenia laughed. “Fuck, no… They’re just one of our customers. Quite well paying customers, really. You’d think, with a job description like theirs, that they’d train their people better. It’s gotta be cheaper to do that than what we charge for every re-boot we do.” Xenia shrugged. “Maybe they’re just a buncha lazy asses…”
“You bring people back from the dead?”
“Hello, Lazarus Serum,” Xenia replied, reaching forward to tap Nadya on the forehead in the approximate spot she’d recently put a bullet. “Your brains still a bit scrambled in there?”
Nadya slapped Xenia’s hand aside and gave her a glare. “Enough bullshit. Tell me what the fuck it is you do here. What you did to me.”
Xenia sighed. “Alright, fine. Act like a three-year-old.” She moved further into the lab, rounding the computer terminals and diligently working techs to approach the tube that held Samantha. Nadya followed along.
Xenia tapped a finger on the capsule, indicating the golden fluid. “This stuff… is Lazarus Serum. You know about werewolves, right? And vampires?”
“You picked me up coming out of a werewolf hideout after just slicing up a vampire,” Nadya replied. “Gee, I might know a thing or two…”
“How they heal, smarty,” Xenia shot back. “They heal really fucking fast, yea? Even shit that’d normally kill a person, they just shake it off and regenerate. Well, what we did is find a way to extract the regenerative abilities of werewolves and apply them to pretty much anything, without becoming infected with the werewolf disease.” Xenia turned and gave Nadya a smirk. “Pretty cool, huh?”
Nadya stared back at her sister blankly. “No.”
“Your lips say no,” Xenia said with a playful smirk on her face. “The gaping wound that’s currently not in your forehead says, fuck yea, that’s wicked awesome.” She turned back to the capsule. “Now, see, it becomes a bit trickier depending on the amount of damage done to the subject. Any kind of brain damage becomes relatively difficult to repair properly. Memories get scrambled. Poor, old Sammie here had her head knocked clean off. Bet that was awesome to watch, huh? Unfortunately, it took us a while to collect the body. Brain went without blood or oxygen for too long, so when she wakes up, she’s gonna be pretty blank minded.”
“So what fucking good is she?” Nadya asked.
At least that explained why her mind had pulled up memories of the orphanage. Since leaving, she’d attempted to block out her time there. Figures, her asshole sister would bring it crashing back with a bullet to the brain.
“Well, see, the Hunters Guild, thankfully, don’t give too much of a shit about their hunters’ memories. First crushes, first kisses, first embarrassing sexual encounters. Not so important when you’re trying to kill monsters. Which is great, because that’s the type of shit that’s hard to re-create. The other stuff, the training and all that, is actually pretty easy to re-program into their brains once they’re out of the tank.” She spun around and leaned back against the tank, crossing her arms. “So, that’s what we do. Pump their heads full of all the interesting little tidbits of information they need to know to kill some fucking bad guys and send them on their way. Once the paycheck clears, that is.”
“How many times?” Nadya asked, unsure why she really cared, but it seemed an important question for some reason.
“How many times what?”
“Her,” Nadya pointed to the floating woman in the tank. “How many times have you done this to her?”
Xenia shrugged. “Eh, four or five… I don’t really keep track of who comes in for re-animation. Frankly, it’s a boring procedure to watch. Granted, the free peep show is always fun…” She glanced behind her at the nude female form then back to Nadya. “But even that gets old after a while. I mean, you can only stare at a pair of delicious tits for so long, right?”
Nadya lifted an eyebrow. “If you say so. How long till she gets out?”
“Oh, shouldn’t be too much longer,” Xenia replied. “Then a couple hours of re-programming and she’ll be good as new. Well, mostly.” She pushed herself off from the tank and back fully onto her feet again. “So… in the meantime, what do you say we go have some real fun?”
“I’m frankly terrified as to what you’d think real fun is,” Nadya said, looking up at Samantha’s floating body. If she was lucky, she could convince the woman to help her get out of this place. It wouldn’t be very easy, if her memory was blanked out, but it was worth a try.
Laughing at the comment, Xenia gave Nadya a slap on the shoulder. “Nice to see the bullet didn’t scramble your sense of humor.” She guided Nadya back towards the entrance of the room. “No, seriously, though. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while. You kick quite a bit of ass, sis. I just figured I’d give you a chance to show me what you got, first hand.”
It sounded too good to be true, but if Xenia was giving her an open invitation to kick her ass, that worked for Nadya. It also might mean she’d get to have the shock collar removed, which would make escape quite a bit easier.
She smirked. “Lead the way.”
