Chapter 2 - Burning Down The House

Hey everyone! Thanks for all your feedback on Chapter 1, I LOVED IT. Lots of great guesses about what's going on. Keep it coming!

Our story so far

Jane & Cooper, retired agents, have their peaceful dinner interrupted when a duplicate of Cooper attacks Cooper. Believing themselves found, they prepare to flee their home.

Chapter 2

She kept stuff for running away and starting a new life in a medium-sized, purple and black gym bag hidden behind the TV in the basement, in a compartment built into the wall. She grunted as she hoisted it from its spot and threw it on the couch. Unzipping the top, she looked inside.

Guns, obviously. The aforementioned fifty thousand in tight stacks of hundreds. Passports and burner phones and a bag filled with sim cards. Zip ties, a multi-tool, flash drives, a clean laptop, penicillin, a very well-stocked first aid kit, and binoculars. Cooper’s bag very likely contained similar things, although they intentionally didn’t compare notes. They’d have more unique equipment if they didn’t try to synch up.

She slung it over her shoulder and made her way upstairs into the living room. Cooper had already packed a few suitcases and between those and the go bags, they had a fairly sizeable amount of luggage.

“It’s going to be hard to fit both a corpse and all these bags into the car,” she said.

“We’ll take the Kia.”

“The stereo sucks in that.”

“You’re going to fall asleep the second we hit the highway. What does it matter?”

She crossed her arms. “Did you pack the laptop? I want to run the kill program.”

“The what now?”

“It’s nothing. I wrote a program that will burn our identities. It uses python scripts integrated with AI decisioning to close our accounts, submit death registries, the whole deal. Any outstanding assets are transferred to offshore accounts under one of our several dozen identities. In about three days, Jane and Cooper no longer exist.” She paused. “Again.”

“Uh-huh.” Cooper didn’t look impressed, which was weird because it was honestly a very cool piece of software, and he was normally more interested in things like that. “When did you do this?”

“During season three of Stranger Things. I didn’t love it, so I needed something to do.”

“Not half an hour ago you gave me shit for wiring the house with explosives.”

“Those are not the same things, at all.”

“Aren’t they?”

She opened her mouth to argue, but snapped it closed. He sort of had a point. A little. While she felt that writing a fun, straightforward program to eliminate your life was not really in the same category as blowing up your home, they were certainly part of the same sport. Rather than continue talking and potentially escalate, she reached out to gather him in a hug.

He rested his cheek on the top of her head. “We were both preparing for the worst, Jane.”

“I guess we were,” she said, nuzzling into his chest. “Did either of us really think this was going to work?”

“We think everything is going to work.” He stepped away from her and held her by the arms. “To be fair to us, we’re right an insane amount of the time. The problem is neither of have an off switch, we’re not built like that. We can’t help it. Neither of us know how to rest. Look, in the time we’ve been here, you’ve written a kill program, learned to crochet and infiltrated the neighbourhood watch.”

“I have not ‘infiltrated’ them,” she made air quotes around the word. “I assumed the seat I’m legally entitled due as per bylaw eighty-six C-dash-four of the town’s charter which states any landowning resident within city lines—”

“It has nothing to do with Christina McDonald?”

“Oh my god, that bitch,” Jane clenched her fist. “Cooper, I swear, she’s going to ruin this neighborhood. She’s advocating to move recycling pick up to Tuesday. Tuesday, Cooper.”

“My point is,” Cooper said, laughing. “While everyone else is sitting around thinking about the things they should maybe do, and debating how to do them, we’re already finished. How many other backup plans did you have in case we had to run?”

She sighed. “A few.”

It made her sad, the realization that neither of them believed in this. It’s like the few months were spent playing house, but it was all make-believe. Everything they’d tried to build, it was all gone. Poof. And just like that, they were back in the game. And god, how easily they slipped back into old habits. Part of her even liked it. That was the worst part. How her heart was racing. How alive she felt. After that last disaster where they’d lost a month of their memories, she really thought she’d had enough of this. How disappointing.

“I’m going to miss this place,” she said. “It was a good house.”

He nodded. “It really was. I am beyond excited to burn it down.”

She laughed and gave him a pat on the cheek. “I know.”

The streets outside were peaceful, the quiet songs of cicadas and crickets mixing with the hum of cars from the highway a mile north of them. Each house on their block was well lit, and cozy light poured out the windows and illuminated the street. It was so quaint and normal.

Cooper hoisted the bags in the back seat. “We’ll put the body in the trunk, but we should cover it. Can you grab the tarp from the basement?”

“On it.” She spun to head back in the house, when a rustle from the tall hedges that divided their property from the Glover’s drew her attention. A person, dressed all in back and wearing a ski mask, emerged out of the darkness and charged towards her, brandishing another of those thick stun rods.

Jane moved on pure instinct. Dodge the thrust. Pivot on left foot. Swing and strike. She let their clumsy attack breeze past her and chopped the assailant’s neck with the flat of her hand. They stumbled past her, clutching frantically at their neck. Coughing and choking, the figure slammed into the back fender of the car with a deep thump, breaking the rear headlight with the impact. They bounced off and fell to the ground, writhing. In another moment, they went still. The whole thing had taken maybe four seconds. Jane was breathing harder than the exertion of the movement would warrant. The side of her palm throbbed from where she’d hit the person.

“Holy shit!” Cooper hurried to her side. “Did they get you? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” Jane waved him away. With a weariness that she’d forgotten the weight of, said, “check the body.”

Cooper did his thing and looked for a pulse. Nothing.

“They came at me too fast,” Jane said. “I didn’t have time to think. I should have pulled my punch.” She thought a moment. “I actually did sort of pull my punch.”

“You did what you had to do,” Cooper said, now frantic. “We have to leave now, though. If there’s two, there might be ten. This isn’t a one-off. This is an attack.”

“Lift up the mask.”

“No time. I’m sure it’s just me again.”

Jane shook her head. Something about the body was off. It wasn’t Cooper’s, a body she’d examined in enough intimate detail that she knew it as well as her own.

“Do it.”

With a frustrated shrug, he pulled the mask off while her stomach did backflips.

It was her.

If the vertigo that came over her when she saw Cooper’s double was bad, this was somehow worse. Despite spending her entire adult life around death, this was the closest she’d ever come to her own mortality. Even in the worst that she and Cooper had faced, somehow she’d been able to compartmentalize the concept of her death. But this thing on the ground left her careful rationalizations nowhere to hide.

Just like the other Cooper wasn’t a perfect replicate of the real one, this wasn’t perfectly her. This Jane had shaved her dark black hair down to the scalp. She also carried more weight than Jane herself did, and this one had star tattoos on her knuckles.

“God damn it,” she whispered.

“This is deranged,” Cooper said. “Why attack at close range? Why not snipe us? If they know where we are, there have a thousand ways to kill us before we’d suspect anything.” He looked up with wild eyes. “Seriously, Jane. None of this makes any sense. What’s going on?”

If there was one thing Cooper hated, it was things that didn’t fit. He truly believed everything could be planned for, given enough time, and she could tell how much this bothered him. He was right, too. None of it made any sense. It seemed overly elaborate if the sole purpose was to kill them. Whoever planned this, they’d have needed to find two people the same approximate size, convince those people to get reconstructive surgery so advanced that it left no trace behind and then convince them to attack two ex-special operatives with stun rods. Lunacy didn’t begin to describe it.

“We’re going. Now,” he said as he dusted off his pants. He bent to inspect the rear brake light. “Let me just grab duct tape for this. I hope it doesn’t get us pulled over.”

“I’ll get the tarp,” she said. "We're fitting two corpses in the trunk, I guess."

Once they had everything packed, Cooper drove them to the end of the street and parked.

“Goodbye house,” he said as he took his phone out. “You were a good place to live. Should we drum roll or something? It feels like we should make this more momentous.”

Shrugging, she tapped at her phone and held it up for Cooper to hear. Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played through the speakers.

“How’s this?”

“Why wouldn’t you pick Burning Down the House by Talking Heads? I mean, it was right there.”

She gave his arm a swat. “Just set fire to our home, already.”

With a dramatic stab, he activated the detonator app.

Nothing happened.

Jane played with the ends of her hair while Cooper fiddled with app settings. She heard him mutter, “there’s an update?”  Down the street, their house continued to exist, happily unburnt by high-burn phosphorus.

“Seems like you should leave a bad review,” she said.

“The type of people who create apps that allow people to remotely detonate explosives are the exact same sort of people who don’t put their stuff on the app store to be reviewed.”

He fiddled with it some more. “Oh wait, here we go. I had to connect to Bluetooth.”

He thumbed the screen, and they once again waited. This time there was a slight thump she felt through the seat of the car and then a glow appeared at the end of their street. She turned to watch their house burn to the ground.

It would seem like she should feel more emotion watching all her things be destroyed, but the truth is, her and Cooper lived light and both viewed possessions as exhausting anchors. Who had the mental space to keep track of plants or ceramic figurines or kitchen gadgets? Both of them were perfectly suited to this modern iteration of capitalism where everything was a subscription service and corporations owned everything and no one noticed it happen because ice cream was so cheap.

Anyway, she much preferred renting an easily-disposable collection of ones and zeros to physical things. And while the immolation of their house represented a step towards a dangerous future, she didn’t find herself worrying overmuch about the concept of home. Home was Cooper and he was sitting right beside her. Who cared about a house, compared to him?

“Look Jane. It’s collapsing inward. Just like they said.” Cooper’s eyes were wide and excited, and she smiled inwardly. Despite the insanity of their lives, he retained a sort of innocent wonder about everything.

“You wired our house wonderfully, love. Let’s get going.”

He nodded, started the car and they drove off into the night.

***

This is getting nuts! Another duplicate? Hopefully the mysterious Richards will have some answers. Join us next week when Jane and Cooper hit the road.

CHAPTER THREE