Right
I didn't live that far from the Courthouse, but the forty-minute drive home always felt extra long after work. I made the last turn into a neighborhood of sand-colored walls and terracotta roofing - just like every other neighborhood in the state. With the first assistant out sick, I had received the grand job of going to the summit. It was a last-minute promotion of sorts, but there was so much to prepare beforehand. I pulled the car into the driveway of the third house on the right.
"Dr. Wexler, tell us what we need to watch out -" The news reported advances on both sides of the war every day, but the battle felt so far removed from here. Europe was thousands of miles away. I parked the car and turned off the engine. In a daily routine, I checked my pockets, confirming keys, glasses, wallet, when I noticed that the gate had been left open. Drew, my deadbeat little brother had to be responsible. No happy barks sounded before I reached the house, indicating that Pepper had run off. With the sun already down, it would be a nightmare to look for her at this hour. All I wanted was to get home and out of these shoes, but it seemed Drew was always making life harder.
Since I had to close the gate anyway, I walked through it, locking it behind me, with the intention of entering the house through the back door. When I reached the porch, I realized the door had been left unlocked too. Drew had bad habits, leftover from a time when dad was around to protect us. I had yelled at him about it plenty of times, and I couldn't believe Drew remained careless. I entered and locked the door behind me. "Drew, you left the gate op-" I yelled, stopping mid-sentence. I gaped.
No. At seventeen, Drew was already the spitting image of our father. The two boys in the living room were both Drew. Exactly the same. They were even wearing the same clothes: colors faded in the wash, jeans torn in the same places.
The mimics did what they did best. They mimicked their enemies, which at the moment were humans. They talked, walked, and bled like humans. They hid among us as living bombs, detonating in specified locations at the appropriate time. Their targets were often high-profile leaders, but thousands of innocents had been caught in the blasts. After enough casualties, scientists had finally found their weakness.
Mimics could easily be vetted with a shock of a high-voltage tazer. Soon, the weapon was in the hands of every civilian, and small and large-scale gatherings required a shock before admission. That didn't stop mimics from getting close enough to do the damage anyway, but civilians felt safer with it. I knew I had, before this.
My brother and his mimic stood in the living room. Drew had been born with a heart defect. A shock could kill him. I had never wished as hard as I did then for dad to be here. Why did they target Drew? He was just a kid.
"Wait," Drew, the left one, said and held up his hand. This one looked worried. The other one looked angry. Why were there two? The mimics had messed up. There had been a few cases like this on the news. I didn't know if I had time to call for help. The mimic could detonate at any moment if it realized it had failed to reach the target. Who was the target? I was a nobody.
I patted my pockets frantically. Keys, glasses, wallet, tazer. Belatedly, I realized that I had left my phone in the car. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I pulled out the weapon, brandishing it at one, then the other, and back again. I didn't know what to do. "Say something stupid, so I know it's you," I ordered without looking at either one directly.
Left Drew said, "I like turtles." Drew did like turtles, and it was totally a dumb thing he would say.
"Are you retarded? Ask something only I would know," Right Drew said.
Right... I had no idea what to ask. "What are mom and dad's names?" I blurted out.
Right Drew pointed out, "And you wanted me to say something stupid. Their names are still on the mailbox."
At the same time, Left Drew said, "Clara and Mateo." Without prompting, he continued his recitation, one that had been drilled into both of us at a young age. My brain echoed the words with him. "We live at Twenty-"
Right Drew cut him off. "Shut up. We are standing in the house," he said with annoyance. Turning to me, he said, "They've improved their memory capacity, duh." He shrugged.
I stared at him. "How do you know that?" I asked suspiciously. Right Drew hadn't answered the question though. He rolled his eyes at me. "It was on the news, dummy." Vaguely, I recalled something about that. Right Drew sounded like my brother... but so did Left Drew.
I looked at both of their faces, trying to tell them apart. Their faces, their eyes - they looked exactly the same. I wanted to cry. I was the idiot who couldn't tell her own brother apart from a mimic.
Right Drew looked me in the eye. "Stop freaking out. Hit me. I'll be fine."
I shook my head, refusing. There were complications. The chance was low, but the shock could kill him. He had been sent to the ER twice already. I needed a better test. Something only Drew could answer. Tentatively, I asked, "When you were five, why would you come into my room?" As a teenager, Drew had been so angry when I had teased him about it in front of his friends.
With no hesitation this time, Right Drew immediately answered, "Thunderstorms."
Left Drew froze. This one didn't have an answer. It didn't answer the question, because it couldn't. Mimics didn't have that kind of capacity. It couldn't be Drew. I aimed the tazer to my left. As much as I felt sure that it wasn't Drew, this thing still looked like him. Its lips moved. Wait, it mouthed as I pulled the trigger.
Too late, I felt only horror. I couldn't breathe. Why hadn't I waited? I was wrong, and I had killed my little brother. I pictured the ignoble headlines. Local mistakes brother for mimic - boy dies to heart failure. Only last week, Drew and I laughed about some of the articles. We couldn't understand how these people could make such a mistake. But now I knew. My conscience screamed at me that I was one of them. Worse... I was a murderer. The word echoed in my head over and over.
In moments, Fake Drew fell into an unsightly heap of sparks, quite obviously not human. I was... right. My fingers, suddenly weak, dropped the taser as my arm fell to my side. The horror evaporated, and I saw Drew breathe a sigh of relief. I tripped over my own feet - a reminder that I had never taken off the damn shoes. Having reached him, I enveloped my brother in a warm hug, and he returned it.
Giddy with excitement, I babbled. "It's you, it's really you. You left the gate open. We have to get Pepper." I cried now, leaving wet spots on his shirt. I tightened my arms around my baby brother.
Drew stiffened. He felt different. It had been a long time since we had last touched. "Sissy, can you let go of me now? It's kind of awkward."
Sissy, he said. The same way he used to when he had seen lightning and counted the seconds before barging into my room wide-eyed with terror in the same instant as the thunderclap. Sissy, he called me, like he had when he was little.
I pulled away. "When was the last time you called me that?" I asked, eying him carefully.
Drew shrugged. "I don't know," he said with all the indifference of a teenager. He looked at the remains of the mimic and snorted. "I like turtles," he mimicked.
For Andrew and Sissy.
Sept 2015
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