We follow a bend in the river, the towers of Canary Wharf standing tall and proud above us, looking like they’ve been moved here from New York or Tokyo. There was an underground shopping center beneath the skyscrapers. I bet it’s now packed with zombie bankers and stockbrokers, nearly as ghoulish and harmful in death as they were in life.
Owl Man catches my smile and cocks his head. “Something amuses you?”
“Lots of things amuse me,” I tell him, letting the smile spread. “The thought of your head on a pole, or seeing an asteroid land on Rage and squash him like an ant.”
“It’s good that you have not lost your sense of humor,” he says.
“That’ll be the last thing I lose,” I boast. “When you’ve stripped everything else away, I’ll still be chuckling. I’ll take this grin to the grave.”
“I hope so,” he says earnestly. “I’ve grown surprisingly fond of you, Becky Smith. I would like to think that when you pass you do so on your own terms, with no regrets. Really, in the end, that is the most any of us can hope for.”
“You’re wrong,” I tell him.
“Oh?”
“We can hope to take some others down with us.” I smirk.
Owl Man giggles, sounding for a moment like Dan-Dan. I stare at the weird-looking man more closely.
“Where were you when all this was going on?” I ask.
“When my father was fighting with my uncle?” He sighs. “I was at work in another part of the lab.”
“I mean afterwards, when Mr. Dowling ran away. I’m guessing he ran?”
“Oh yes,” Owl Man says glumly. “As his mind caved in on itself, he ran as if he was on fire. In a way, he has never stopped running.”
Owl Man crosses his legs. Sakarias looks up to make sure its master is comfortable, then relaxes again.
“Forgive the cliché, but I found myself on the horns of a dilemma,” he says. “I loved and admired both men. I was distraught when my father severed all ties with us and set off down his own mad path. Oystein did not share all of the details with me. I think it would be fair to say that you massaged the facts to suit your story?”
He throws the question to Dr. Oystein, but the doc ignores it, submerged in his own lonely little world. Owl Man grunts and continues.
“I guessed there was more to it than I had been told. I carried on working for my uncle, but tracked down my father on the sly. He was a mess, even more out of control than he is today, but determined to strike back. He had lost interest in the living. In his crazed state, he craved chaos.”
Albrecht had bounced back swiftly from his total mental collapse. He hadn’t found his new persona yet–the clown costume was many years away–but he’d regained his basic faculties and set his sights on pitching the world into a crazy mess, to mirror the rocky realm of his troubled mind.
The deranged Dowling brother decided to let Oystein unleash the hounds of Hell, but he was determined to keep the living around too. He longed for war, an eternal struggle between the living and the undead, so that he could cavort at the center with his army of mutants.
“Obviously I knew that Albrecht was insane,” Owl Man says, “but he was the only person who had the power to stop Oystein from wiping out the human race.”
“You cared about the living?” I ask skeptically.
Owl Man chews at his inner cheek. “Honestly? No. I never truly did, even when I was one of them. I always felt detached from ordinary people. But I relished the extraordinary. The minds of rare individuals like Albrecht and Oystein were magnificent jewels. I was worried that we might lose them forever, that my uncle would produce a race of drab, unimaginative, soulless clones.”
Owl Man decided to tread a dangerous line, to serve two masters at once, and work for both of the brothers as they continued with their experiments. He helped where he could, as he had before, but also served as spy and censor.
“If I felt that one of them was heading down a damaging route, I tinkered with results and spoiled their experiments,” he explains. “For instance, when Oystein was close to perfecting a virus that would wipe out humanity, I subtly interfered and distracted him.”
But Owl Man knew that the doc would make the breakthrough in the end and produce the virus that would rid the world of its human stain. He wouldn’t dare release it until Albrecht had made progress with his babies–Oystein was afraid to remove all evidence of Homo sapiens from the history books before his brother had lined up their replacements–but time was running out.
“Hold on,” I stop Owl Man. “If that’s true, then if Mr. Dowling had stopped trying to clone babies, Dr. Oystein would never have released the virus. Why didn’t you convince him to stop?”
“I suggested that,” Owl Man says, “but the babies fascinated him, and by that stage he lived only to satisfy his own interests. He didn’t want to stop Oystein totally, merely halt him at a certain point and hold him there.”
As Mr. Dowling got close to cloning a crop of mutant babies, Owl Man knew it was time to make a decision. He could no longer walk a tightrope between his father and his uncle. He had to choose.
“As much as it pained me, I betrayed Oystein,” Owl Man says. “My plan was to dispose of him and take his place. I hoped to then keep Albrecht in check by convincing him of the merits of a different strategy. He was hell-bent on chaos, but I felt that he could achieve that without creating an army of the undead. If he built up his mutant forces, and added scores of cloned babies to the mix, they could start a war with humanity and keep it running as long as he wished.”
“Hardly paradise on Earth,” I growl.
“Not an ideal situation,” Owl Man agrees, “but it would have been better than what we have now, billions killed, the living dead run wild across the globe. Sometimes the lesser of two evils is the most that we can aim for.
“My attempt on Oystein’s life failed,” he continues, “but I managed to make off with a sample of Schlesinger-10, which I found hidden away. I handed the vial over to my father, acting as if that had been my goal all along—he didn’t know that I had meant to thwart him. The gift pleased him at the time, then utterly delighted him later, when we came to realize how unique the sample was.”
“What do you mean?” I frown. “Schlesinger-10 isn’t unique. The doc must have loads of the stuff knocking around.” I stare at Owl Man, feeling a sudden sinking feeling in the pit where my stomach used to be. “Doesn’t he?”
Owl Man shakes his head. “It was a one-off success, a chance quirk that he was unable to repeat, no matter how many times he tried.”
“Bullshit,” Rage snorts. “You’re telling me he came up with the formula and then forgot it?”
“Certain chemicals reacted in a way that they never have again,” Owl Man says. “There must have been something mixed in with one of the solutions. He was never able to figure out what that was.”
“That’s why he was so desperate to retrieve it,” I groan. “He didn’t have any of the virus himself.”
Owl Man looks confused for a moment. Then he smiles. “Oh, that’s right, you think–”
“Enough,” Dr. Oystein snaps, and Owl Man winces and falls silent. I guess the doc has had his fill of listening about his one great failure.
“Let me get this straight,” Rage mutters. “There’s only one vial of Schlesinger-10 in the world, and Becky has delivered it to the one person whose goal is to release it.” He catches my eye and laughs. “Good going, girl. You couldn’t have made more of a balls-up of this if you’d tried. This is the end of humanity, and it’s all Becky Smith’s fault.
“You know what?” a beaming Rage adds as I glower at him. “It’s days like this that make it worth getting out of bed!”