Doppelganger (part II)

Filliard Summit is the smallest neighborhood in Sproustown, and probably the most dangerous, due to the number of Deluxes users who rob and assault to support their addiction.

Its other function is playing the part of the ugliest place in town. Poorly lit, dirty, claustrophobic, full of holes in the tracks and sidewalks.

The vision of what should've been the Summit Community Center and that ended up as a mere abandoned building was terrifying. A big block with a dirty structure and falling to pieces, with the bushes now invading the street, because the building itself they had already dominated for a long time.

At least it was nighttime, so we didn't have much of a view of that mayor's disservice.

It was already half past ten at night -Yes, Jane was gonna yell at me again later when I got home- and we were all three in the car deciding what to do. The two suspects were supposed to be somewhere inside the building, as arranged, or at least as Chapman said they would.

In the photos I saw a guy with big, messed up hair with a dirty look, typical of a Deluxes' user and another older man, probably my age, with shorter hair and a better look. The latter was more full-bodied and in the photos he always wore a kind of jogging outfit or any other sport like that. Anyway I would recognize any of them when I saw them that night.

"Then it's settled: Joey and I will go in, and you," I told Ewalyn, "wait in the car if anything happens. If any of them run, it's your job to go after them, okay?"

"What a shame... I wanted to be part of the action so badly."

Joey raised his eyebrows complacently.

"Somebody's got to stay in the car on this kind of operation. Better not risk another escape. And the lieutenant and I have a little more experience working as partners. I'm glad we decided to come in a trio. Then there's no escape. Either the unsubs deal with the formidable duo or they get chased by you out here."

"Then... Let's go inside. A trap awaits us."

"Why trap? You're not gonna say you think Chapman set you up, huh, lieutenant?"

"I didn't say that!"

"Then why would there be a trap here?"

"Because they obviously saw the car from the window holes?"

"But it's not even a police car!" It was a black Utopia, new model. It was a secret investigation vehicle, with an adapter siren in the glove compartment. If we didn't use it, nothing would indicate it was a police car on the outside.

"But they work for trafficking. If three adults park in this remote area for more than three minutes, right at the time they're expecting a client, what are they gonna think?"

Joey shrugged, really didn't have much to think of on the outside except that we were a police car, so Joey gave in, repeating my sentence:

"In this case, lieutenant... Let's go inside. A trap awaits us."

We went down and came in through the main entrance. Although it was completely abandoned, the structure had not completely fallen yet. We climbed a staircase and arrived at a large area that seemed designed to be a reception.

The inside of the building was totally dark. I lit a cigarette inside, and then I told Joey:

"Turn on your flashlight. We're not splitting up until we find one of them."

There wasn't even time for him to obey me. A figure came from one of the rooms in the corridor to our right, moving at exorbitant speed in our direction. We were facing the other side, and were not expecting a surprise attack. Joey couldn't dodge the attack in time.

It was the little hairy man in the photo, he came running and hit with his shoulder, with a lateral position. A karateka attitude, maybe?

Joey, as expected, fell to the ground. I thought the long haired guy would take the opportunity to step hard on his face, take him out of the fight at once. If he had, I would've just used the opportunity to knock him down from behind. But he was aware of my intention and invested in me, aiming to finish me off before Joey got up.

He took a lateral position, to minimize his weak points, similar to a Krav Maga pose.

As fast as he could, he tried to start a sequence of blows as he needed to buy time before Joey got up. He threw a punch. I blocked it. Before the second he was on the ground.

When he knocked Joey down I got a grasp of his speed. It wasn't exactly a big deal. As versed as he was in his style, without the necessary speed I was able to intercept my attack easily while he alternated one punch for the other. I just had to use the indarra to get more momentum and 'bam,' he came down.

Meanwhile, Joey had gotten up.

Bushy boy, on the ground, tried to make a low move, but I stepped on his face, knocking him out.

"Arrest him."

Joey took out the handcuffs from his belt and arrested the suspect by first putting his arms behind him.

"What do we do? Take him to the car? What if the other one escapes through the roof or something?"

"Shh!"

We heard noises of footsteps from upstairs.

It was easy to go upstairs: there was a staircase about eight meters to my left, after the hole that should have been the door if the hospital had really been built. Judging by the noise he wasn't far away, all I had to do was climb the stairs and I'd come across him.

Ideally we'd take the bushy guy in the car together with us and then come back, but now he was too close. I signalled us to go.

Joey was about 40 feet away from me, basically on the other side of the room. It was a big room because as I said: probably in the original plant it was designed to be a reception room or something like that.

I turned around and started slowly climbing the stairs, I heard Joey coming up behind me, but keep in mind he was a little far away.

Then the guy we'd apparently knocked out slid the cuffs out of his arms, as if tweaking them until they came out, thickened his arms to the original state, and jumped up using great momentum, knocking Joey out from behind a second time. It all happened so sudden.

At the same time I heard a shot. It came from up the stairs.

There was no time to think. I ran upstairs. Joey screamed a few hundredths after I made the decision:

"Go! I'll take care of this one!"

It was supposed to be a suggestion to prevent me from deciding to help him. He did that because returning now would leave our rearguard vulnerable, which would be a very bad attitude, since the guy upstairs was armed and close by. However, his suggestion turned out to be only a mere incentive since I had already decided to leave bushy boy for him to begin with. I know he was facing the floor, but I still believed in Joey.

Once upstairs I saw the man in the jogging pants and a sports coat. He was a little fuller than I was, he was about the same size too. He shot at me, but I swerved in time.

Dodging a shot is not an easy task even for a man who spent nine years in the beta training. The speed of a bullet exceeds 1000 kilometers per hour, so if you try to dodge it while it's in the air it's already too late. There are two efficient methods: one is used by ordinary human specialists who cannot propel their body with indarra: to move all the time, avoiding being hit using the opponent's lack of skill as a basis. But this method, although efficient, is not one hundred percent reliable. More reliable is to know exactly the trajectory of the bullet and prepare to throw the body in the opposite direction at the right time. This method requires a lot of training and is only valid for someone who can move his body at an extreme speed with an indarra impulse: a paranormal being.

Basically what I do is analyze the trajectory of the bullet by comparing the direction of its barrel with the direction of my body and keep it turned sideways, minimizing the angle of hit, then I just move with indarra in accordance with deflecting the entire projectile as it is fired. The most difficult part is having the reaction the moment the capsule starts to backfire and not many milliseconds later, this requires a minimal reaction time in the eye of the person performing the maneuver. This method, although risky, once mastered is one hundred percent reliable, as long as there is only one shooter and as long as I am following the trajectory of the gun barrel with my gaze.

The term for dodging a bullet by the indarra method is 'diagonal'.

As soon as he saw me perform the "diagonal", instead of continuing shooting he preferred to leave the place and run at the maximum speed he could to the terrace, which made more sense than spending more bullets unnecessarily.

I knew he was going to the terrace, as in his view I'd be cornered, so I was in no hurry. My cigarette had been knocked over in the fight against the guy with long hair, so I decided to light one more. I exhaled smoke and then headed up there walking normally.

The stairs were almost all next to each other and there were only five floors to climb. When I got there I saw the guy holding a piece of wood. Of all the weapons from which he could choose to wait for me upstairs, he decided that a stick would be enough.

"What is it? Aren't you gonna jump down the rooftops? Just like your alien friend in Little Quarry?"

"I don't need to... Now you're trapped." He never made it clear if he really knew the alien from the Johnson's house, that was just my guess.

I threw my cigarette still lit on the floor, right in front of him.

I walked towards him at my normal speed, without rushing the pace, just as I did when facing Sprohic. The intensity of his ductu suggested he'd not let himself end up in a single blow as in the case of the zombie, however.

When I was at a safe distance we both moved with speed and exchanged blows. He was good. I managed to block his attacks, but they were still able to leave marks on my arms. His had little less speed than me, but the technique and the strength were superior.

When I saw the thing was gonna get ugly, I jumped back. We faced each other for a moment.

"Better turn yourself in. Your hairy friend is in the car by now."

The guy laughed in disdain. He held the stick up to his knee and crouched down in a kind of fighting pose. He hadn't shown yet why he would use that piece of wood.

I moved forward slowly and he moved accordingly, keeping his distance from me. He seemed to have something in mind. I let him back up until he was more or less at the starting point, where I had thrown the cigarette, and then I went forward again, risking another exchange of blows.

But he really had a trap prepared.

While I was in the air he threw - probably with all the strength of his indarra - the piece of stick into a column that was in the middle of the terrace. I think that column was supposed to be where the wiring would be if the hospital had ever been finished.

The column fell on me, and as I was in the air I couldn't swerve in time, and I came to the floor with my chest to my back, shamelessly twisting. It hadn't hurt because I am an altered human, but clearly he had the advantage now, standing while I was lying on my back.

Instead of finishing me off with the typical stomp – a stomp with the indarra knocks anyone out who's not defending the face - he took the gun out of his pocket again and loaded it, pointing at me.

"Now... You're trapped. Spit it out... Was the pothead a cop?"

Ha! The 'pothead'! He was referring to Chapman. I almost laughed at the term.

"What are you gonna do? Kill me here?"

"Let's trade. You for Pierre."

He should be referring to the long haired one.

"Then you admit he's gonna lose to Joey?"

"I don't need to be an expert on ductu to guess what's gonna happen... Pierre is not an expert in fights. I'm not a beginner. This column here?" He aimed at the stones under me, "we let it loose over a week ago, ready to capture any knuclehead. I'm glad it came in handy. Now, officer, hands behind your back, let's put your own handcuffs on you.

I heard a vibration from his pocket. He took out his phone and heard a voice on the other side of the line. He made an "uhum" and hung up. He was holding the gun pointed down while he was holding the phone. I was on my back, but with my head slightly to the side as to be able to get a vision of what he was doing. Obviously I couldn't turn around completely because if I did he'd take action. I had to stay in that position.

"Did you hear that? Pierre left your friend passed out there on the ground and went straight to the car. Looks like we hit the jackpot... Weird, huh? In one moment you're all out of luck and in the next one everything turns around. You know... I'm someone who's usually pretty lucky. I see myself as the hero of the story here... I start fighting, I get cornered by the police, my friend starts losing... But in an unexpected wave of luck I end up turning the game around."

"It seemed like the jogging aficionado loved to talk big when he had the upper hand. He pointed his gun again at me."

"Say goodbye, mr. cop."

"You gonna kill a cop!? You sure!? Sounds a bit... Dangerous."

"I'm sorry, but... It's not that I want to do this... But now you've seen our face... Therefore it's better to kill you and stay invisible. Even if this has a high repercussion."

"Even though everyone in the department has already seen your photos and they are all available in the archives?"

His expression changed, he was visibly becoming indecisive. I turned around slowly to try to get a less obstrusive position.

He kicked me in the chest. I let out a muffled roar. That bastard!

"Don't try to play the lone hero, officer. As you can see, life it's not like in the movies. Playing the hero is suicide. In real life the hero is the one who wins. Either you're strong or you're weak. Either you're lucky or you're unlucky. That's all." He came closer and aimed right at my face "I'm sorry, but... I'm not changing my mind. It still seems the best thing to do."

"I let out a big laugh."

"What's so funny, mr. cop?"

"You're right, I am not a damned hero... I'm a cop. And there's one little thing you forgot..."

He looked at me intriguingly.

"Cops work together, they're not 'lone'."

"If you're talking about your friend passed out there on the terr..."

There was a rupture of stones and the guy in the jogging clothes had no reaction time. It was the rocks below him that were falling, making him lose his balance. Even if he had fired the gun, since he had already lost his posture, the shot would have deflected and hit anywhere above my head. He never shooted, though.

The unsub fell and his body softened against the cement downstairs. Standing next to him was Ewalyn, pointing a gun at him and carrying more handcuffs on the other hand. She had broken the ceiling.

"Nice!" I said, "but I'd rather you to have been a little faster."

"He wasn't gonna shoot... I was waiting to see if he said anything more valuable. You know... They tend to say more when they're in advantage."

"Looks like your wave of luck is over. Hands behind your back."

"He obeyed and we put the handcuffs around his hands. He was legitimately strong. Physically stronger than Jeffrey Sprohic, but now that there were two paranormal policemen at his side pointing guns and his hands were literally tied he wouldn't try anything funny.

"As we descended the building on our way to the car, he was sometimes tagging along, sometimes we had to push him. I realized he was looking around a lot, looking for where his partner was. When we passed the terrace neither Joey nor Pierre were there anymore. That prompted the question of whether his friend had run away by car or whether he was still out there risking another ambush."

"Looks like your car is still there."

"The car the two of them had come in was a dirty white one which was about ten meters behind our Utopia. It was the only car outside the parking lot in the vicinity, so you could tell. They could've planned to run away by car when they realised we would be entering the building, but I think it'd have been a very risky action for them to think at the last minute, since the car we came in - the one where Ewalyn was supposed to be all the time - was there from the beginning.

"Did your friend abandon you?" I asked him.

"Where's Joey?" Ewalyn asked.

It was imperceptible, but her tone of concern was actually insincere.

Because we knew the answer to all those questions. Where Pierre was... Where Joey was... Only the man in handcuffs didn't know.

"We arrived at the car and surprised! Pierre was in the front seat with his face slightly bloody and his head down. Joey, in the driver's seat was unharmed and held a gun in his hand. The hairy alien was handcuffed.

"But how!? Didn't you run away?" The man in the jogging clothes asked.

That funny situation asked for a cigarette.

Allow me to explain what happened from the beginning. Apparently Joey won his fight in parallel and Ewalyn just guessed that I was in trouble and saved me at the last moment, like a kind of big convenient coincidence. But none of that really happened. Just like the two bad guys had a plan to capture us, which was the previously damaged column, we walked into that abandoned hospital with a series of plans to secure our victory.

First we waited in the car long enough to make sure the white car was really theirs, and only then did all three of us leave for the operation: me and Joey in front and Ewalyn would come back right after, while we were keeping both of them busy in there. It was never Ewalyn's plan to stay in the car until the end. Just until the fight started.

The other day, when Joey and I investigated the false Cooper's house, we found that that 'robbery' was the work of two paranormal beings: one of them was an alien, because the scanner detected it. As for the other, the fact that the papers in the drawer were all thrown at once left a hint of what his specialty would be.

He wasn't looking for anything special in that drawer, possibly because he already knew the invitation wouldn't be there. The reason is not clear, we would find out in the interrogation, but the fact is that he just spread the papers to make an impression. If he'd really been looking for something in the middle of them, he'd have taken them out little by little and not thrown it all in a pile and left all there like that.

Additionally we could draw one more conclusion from this detail: the being who took those papers had an intrinsic force, a force that did not depend on whether he wanted to use indarra or not. It was a living being who always used indarra, the enormous force being part of its existence. It couldn't be a parasite roach parasite or an altered human, who only uses indarra when necessary, for instance.

I say that because even if an ordinary human being possessed the strength to make the trivial movement of picking up a large pile of paper from a drawer and throwing it to the ground, he'd hardly do it deliberately because of the discomfort it would bring to the tendons. Someone who was making this movement without thinking would have unconsciously separated the pile from me smaller piles. This indicated the being who made that movement possessed the force as a natural property, that is, the force was great enough for it to be able to pick up a heavy object on a regular basis, without wasting energy or making much effort, without hurting the tendons. Another clue that led us to the same conclusion was the fact that they took Cooper's 49-inch TV even though they rushed out of the robbery

From this we deduce that the duo was an alien and a lout of some kind.

With this in mind, we came up with a plan to fight a couple of bad guys with this profile: the alien and the lout.

When we entered the abandoned hospital we came across one of them: we needed to decide which one it was, so I swapped some blows with him before beating him the first time. Since he wasn't very strong, I figured it was the alien. So we would use plan A: thinking about the situation where we'd fight the alien first and the burly guy would appear some time later.

We pretended to defeat the alien, knowing that it'd free himself from the cuffs using some disgusting property of its kind. If by any chance it couldn't free itself because it was a particular class of alien which had no elastic properties even better. But we were fighting with such a possibility in mind, and in fact that's what happened.

Joey pretended to be at a disadvantage by falling for the second attack and I set off for my part of the plan: to distract the burly guy and set up the special moment for Ewalyn to surprise him from behind.

Earlier Ewalyn told me she has the finesse of distinguishing smells from dozens of metres away. So the method we were communicating with was the smoke from my cigarette. I lit the communicator and went smoking, guiding her to where I was.

Once on the terrace, I threw the lit cigarette on the floor, in the exact part where I'd like her to break down from underneath to surprise the jogging aficionado. Note that throughout our struggle I took care that he always stayed aboved that original piece of cement..

Plan A assumed I couldn't beat him for some reason, so we would have to use some distraction for Ewalyn to make her appearance, which is what happened. It made more sense to think that way, not because I was bad at fighting, but because he might have something up his sleeve that we didn't anticipate when we looked at Cooper's house. After all, they had the advantage of be fighting at home and I knew nothing about him except about our assumption of the brute force. I don't fight that bad. If I had been more concerned about beating him than leaving him in a specific place I'd probably have gotten around it, but eh whatever.

The fact is that everything went according to plan, and Ewalyn and I successfully captured him.

Which brings us to the last part of the plan. Remember how I told you about the doppelgangers? You want an example of one? Well, detective Joey Meyers is one of them.

On paper, his 'brother' is also a SAD agent, however we never take them two together to an operation. It's risky in the matter of them being spotted by ordinary citizens, contradicting the common sense.

However, he was there that night. In our planning we considered the possibility of one of the two deciding to escape by car during - and not before or after - the chase. If Joey hadn't been able to beat the alien after we got separated, or if the alien had tried to escape, his doppel would have been waiting in the car.

This measure also had a number of other reasons: first both brothers would be aware of what was happening inside and outside the building, because their vision is shared. So the two Joeys would always be one step ahead had one of the two wrongdoers decided to escape.

But the main reason was the bluff we used to capture the hairy one more easily: the instant power drain. As I said before, one brother can take and return power to the other. When that happens in battle, if done at the right time, it makes it look like Joey in battle took damage during the fight and not for other reason. That's what happened there: after Joey told me that at the time the alien struck him with the indarra in his belly, his brother drained his energy, and he came to the ground. The suspect then called his buddy, saying something about how he had beaten the cop and was going to run. meanwhile Joey's brother waited for him behind his car, the white one.

Soon after he left the building, the power was returned to Joey and he got up, hoping to corner the bad guy from behind, which worked. After trapping him, he and his brother took the guy into the car - after taking a few blows to his face, of course. Fucking asshole.

Joey's doppelganger brother was in the back seat. He looked exactly like Joey. More like a twin brother. Anyone normal who saw the two would just think they were identical twins, but would have the (correct) impression that something was wrong.

Looking at doppelgangers did drain some energy from the brain, as in the legend. They were too homologous to be true.

Ewalyn sat the jogging man in the backseat between him and Joey's brother.

Hairy boy was in the front seat and Joey let me go in the driver's seat.

"Aren't you coming in? I think if you force it you fit."

"No need to, Lieutenant. We're not using energy anymore today, so I guess I'll 'merge.'"

That's another peculiarity of doppelgangers. Two of them can 'merge' with each other, as if they were the same person. Similarly, they can separate. This can be done at any time, one being in one part of the city and the other in the other. This is perhaps the most useful skill. If one of them is in danger, he can 'transport' himself to the other's place without leaving a trace, through the merger. However, after a fusion or separation, for approximately eighteen hours they have almost no energy left to use in any other paranormal function such as indarra, ductu, etc.

The evildoer in his sportswear was the first to notice:

"So it was all planned? How did you know about our skills? The pothead said?

"You practically wrote them on the floor the day Cooper was robbed. Let that be a lesson for next time. Well... Not that there's gonna be a next time."

"What's gonna happen to us?"

"If you cooperate in the interrogation... You can get a special case arrest around here. Otherwise... You'll be sent to Arena."

"Better spit everything out." Ewalyn completed.