A Perfect Machine(68)

He turned and ran for the phone, dialed as fast as his shaking hands would allow. Barked at a woman on the other end of the line over the soulcrushing sounds of his only daughter in horrendous pain: “She’s changing!” he yelled. “Get over here and help me. I don’t know what the fuck to do!”

Before she could answer him, he’d hung up.

Sandra Beiko, Palermo’s second-in-command at the time, arrived twenty minutes later. Palermo explained what he could as she came inside. By the time they got up the stairs, the first wave of Adelina’s change was complete. She was huddled in a far corner of the room, now roughly seventy-five percent metal and rock, and about twice her original size. Her breathing had regulated, and she appeared to be in – very understandable – shock.

Over the next ten hours, they watched her grow bigger and bigger. Watched her cycle through incoherent rage, pleading for it to stop, then sleep, then back to rage. Watched her body transform into something beautiful, something horrifying.

The three of them stood in awe, Beiko murmuring the closest thing she had to religious prayers, while Kendul just watched with rapt attention, perhaps the faintest glimpse of jealousy and envy in his eyes. More than faint, Palermo thought. He wishes he was her. He wants to be her, wants to go through this. That was the first time Palermo thought that maybe this was not a good thing, that maybe this was not something to aspire to. A certain blackness crept into his mind when he looked at Adelina. A bleak otherworldliness. Despair, desperation.

But there was something somehow worse than even that in Kendul’s eyes – something bordering on the predatory.

The only one of them without either of these reactions was Palermo, of course. This was his daughter, and he just felt sick to his stomach. He was the only one to immediately see the fundamental change in her personality. She was losing control of who she was.

When Adelina was nearly the size of her small bedroom, Palermo took Kendul aside, talked out in the hallway while Beiko stayed inside the bedroom.

“Kendul, we have to stop this.”

“Stop it, are you insane? This is what–”

“I know, and I don’t care. This is my daughter. Something’s… happening to her. She’s changing on the inside, as well. I can feel it. Even when she can’t speak, it’s in her eyes. It’s like there’s someone else inside her now. If we don’t stop it, I think she’s going to disappear. Maybe not physically, but mentally. Emotionally. I can’t…” Tears formed in Palermo’s eyes. He hung his head.

Kendul put a hand on Palermo’s shoulder. “I feel it, too. Something is… off. Corrupted. But we need to see this through. We need to see what she becomes. This is historic. I know you understand that.”

That’s when the screaming began. Not from Adelina this time.

Palermo flung the door to Adelina’s bedroom wide open, looked up to see Beiko flailing around in both of Adelina’s giant hands – his daughter whipping her back and forth like a rag doll.

Palermo stepped forward, yelled, “Adelina, stop! Stop it!”

Adelina turned toward the sound of her father’s voice. Like a dog, she tilted her massive head ever so slightly one way, then stopped shaking Beiko.

Palermo lowered his voice, said, “Now put her down, Adelina. Please, put her down.”

Adelina removed one hand from around Beiko’s torso, but kept the other one tight. She moved the fist holding Beiko’s limp body against the closest wall, pressed her knuckles flush to it, then slowly, slowly pushed the heel of the palm of her free hand against Beiko’s head.

Her skull cracked, crumpled in on itself entirely. Adelina smeared the resulting mess of blood and bone along the wall in an arc, like a shooting star.

Adelina dropped the body and reached out for Kendul, something monstrous burning in her eyes.

Palermo backed out into the hallway as quickly as his feet would take him. Kendul drew his gun, started firing at her. The bullets ricocheted off her solid steel frame, bounced around the room, thwipping into drywall. One bullet nearly drove into Palermo’s leg, but he moved in time to avoid it. He yelled for Kendul to stop and, after one of the bullets whizzed by Kendul’s ear, he was shocked enough at his brush with death to stop firing.

Kendul assumed that Palermo had screamed at him to stop firing because this was still, in some way, his daughter, but that was untrue; Palermo knew that his daughter – if she was still in there at all – was not the one who’d killed Sandra, was not the one trying to kill Kendul and himself now. He’d simply told him to cease fire for practical reasons – the bullets were bouncing off. They needed to try something else to stop her.

“It’s not working, Kendul! You’ll kill us both!” Palermo said. Kendul moved out of the room into the hallway, opened his mouth to speak, since it appeared that Adelina was backing off.

That’s when she lunged again.

An enormous metal hand burst out of the room, into the hallway where both men stood, cracking through the bedroom doorframe, splinters flying. Adelina roared once, and it was like no sound either man had ever heard in his life. Entirely inhuman.

With no time to think – and Adelina’s other hand moving to join the first, fingers almost the width of fence posts, her head dropped down to try to see them – both men opened fire. They backed away as far as they could and just emptied their weapons.