by Tom Abrahams
But when he slept, the jagged edges of his life before VX-99, before the war, poked at his psyche. In his dreams, Lieutenant Trevor Brett was a man again. He was kind. He was generous. He had a future.
As he slept in the dry riverbed on the eastern edge of the Da River, his past haunted him. It revealed what might have been if it weren’t for Vietnam, if it weren’t for the experimental drug he’d willingly injected into his body.
Brett’s dream landed him in the red clay of Athens, Georgia. He was fourteen years old on his newspaper delivery route. He was pedaling his ten-speed royal blue Schwinn bicycle through his neighborhood. He rocked the bike back and forth as he worked his way up a hill. His heavy newspaper bag was strapped across his back and made it tough to maintain his speed on an incline.
Brett could smell the magnolias blooming, their scent mixing with the sweet honeysuckle that grew in clumps along the fences that separated the wide green lawns of his hometown. He reached into the wide mouth of the bag, fished out a rolled paper in one hand, and flicked it up onto the brick path that led to Stacey Arbuckle’s house. Stacey Arbuckle. She was the Bo Derek of eighth grade but without the cornrows.
Brett craned his neck toward the Arbuckles’ house as he passed it. He searched the windows for a glimpse of Stacey. He finally turned forward in time to see her headed straight for him on her bike. They were feet from colliding. She screamed to Brett and he swerved to avoid her. Their bikes missed, but Brett wobbled and couldn’t regain control. The heavy newspaper bag swung wildly to one side and pulled Brett down with it.
His bike tumbled on top of him as he bounced and skidded on the asphalt. He came to a stop on his back against the raised concrete curb that separated the street from the sidewalk.
Before the pain of his skinned knees and shoulder consumed him, he looked up to see Stacey standing over him. She was straddling her bike and leaning forward on the handlebars.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need help?”
Brett clenched his jaw against the first wave of stinging pain from his injuries. He felt tears welling in his eyes, but he fought them. He refused to cry in front of Stacey.
“I’m okay,” he said through his teeth. “Just some scrapes. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. You look hurt. You should come inside. I can clean up your knees for you at least.”
Brett started to refuse but thought better of it. Stacey had invited him into her house. Of course he’d take her help.
The door to Stacey’s home opened and Trevor Brett limped into another place altogether. His dream had taken him three years down the road. His hands were on Stacey’s hips. Her arms were looped around his neck. Her face was buried in his neck as they swayed slowly back and forth on the dance floor.
“I love Dionne Warwick,” Stacey whispered as she lifted her lips to his ear, “but this song is so sad.”
“What do you mean?” Brett asked.
“She’s singing about a lost love,” Stacey said. “How she and her former lover pass each other on the street. He left her. She’s still hurting, so she doesn’t want him to see her.”
Brett laughed and slipped one hand from her hip and into his tuxedo pants pocket. “You get that from the song?”
“Trevor”—she ran her hand up the back of his neck, sending a chill down his spine—“of course I do. That’s what the lyrics say. It’s not a secret.”
“I just listen to the rhythm,” he said and pulled her closer to his body.
Stacey lifted her head from his neck and looked him in the eyes. “Promise me something, Trevor.”
“Anything.”
“We’ll never be like that.”
He leaned in and kissed her forehead. “Like what?”
“After high school, when we’re at college,” she said, “that we don’t drift apart. That we don’t break up and then ignore each other. Promise me.”
Brett laughed at the absurdity of it. He knew she was the best thing in his life, would be the finest girl he could ever hope to meet. He’d never drift from her. Never.
“I promise,” he said.
She smiled, her eyes glistening before she closed them, and she opened her lips to kiss him. It was a long, soft kiss. Stacey was a good kisser. Brett drew his hands to her cheeks and gently held her face until he felt a strong thump on his shoulder.
It was one of the dance monitors. “No public displays of affection, young man.”
Brett turned back to look at Stacey, but she wasn’t in chiffon anymore. Her eyes weren’t inviting. She had stepped back from him. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest.
They weren’t in the dance hall either. This was a college campus. Brett recognized it as the University of Georgia. He was standing outside Stacey’s dormitory.
“The truth is,” she said, “I can’t wait for you.”
Brett’s heart was pounding against his chest. He balled his sweating hands into fists. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Everything was fine.”
He stepped toward her. She stepped back.
“You’re going off to war,” she said. “You know I don’t agree with that. I don’t—”
Brett felt his pulse quicken. “I don’t have a choice,” he said, straining not to explode in a burst of confused anger. “I was drafted, Stacey. I ran out of student deferments. What was I supposed to do?”
“I love you, Trevor,” she said, her voice beginning to warble. “But I can’t be here while you’re there, wondering if you’ll come back alive or if…”
“If I’ll die?”
Pooling tears in her eyes ran down her cheeks. She took another step away from him.
Brett raised his voice. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Stacey’s eyes darted from side to side. “Keep your voice down, Trevor.”
He took another step toward her as if ready to pounce. “We’ve been together since we were in middle school,” he snarled. “You think that because we’re not going steady anymore, you’ll stop caring whether I live or die?”
“I-I-I don’t know what to think,” she stammered. “I just know I can’t have my heart broken more than it already is.”
Brett exploded. “Your heart?” he spat. “Your heart? What heart? You’re heartless, Stacey Arbuckle. It’s a good thing I never loved you.”
The words spilled from his lips without Brett thinking about what they meant. As soon as he’d said them, he wanted to take them back. He couldn’t. His rage wouldn’t allow it. It was too late regardless. The damage was done.
Stacey took a step forward. She pointed a shaky finger at Brett. “You’re the monster,” she snarled. “You’re the one who killed us. Not me. You’re the monster. You’re the killer.”
She glared silently at him for a moment, her eyes searing a final image into his memory. Then his first and only love turned away and marched back to her dorm. A pair of friends held the door open for her, and she disappeared from his life forever.
Her voice, that unearthly, guttural voice, didn’t spew venom from the Stacey he knew. It was laced with a poisonous vitriol he’d never heard from her before. And it was the last time he heard her voice before he left for basic training and a one-way ticket to the rotting Southeast Asian jungle.
“You’re the monster,” she’d said to him. “You’re the killer.” The words rang in his ears for weeks. They stuck with him. They tortured him. They spoiled every good memory of the woman he’d intended to marry.
She was the one with whom he planned on sharing a life. He’d graduate with his degree in finance and get a job working in banking. They’d buy a house, maybe in Atlanta or Charleston, and they’d settle down. They’d have children and grow old together. Each was the other’s better half.
But the war ruined that. The war and the draft destroyed their dreams. They sent him to war. They led her to walk away. They led him to lie and tell her he’d never loved her. They forced her to call him a monster. “A monster,” she’d said in that feral-sound
ing voice he’d hoped to never hear again.
Of course, he did hear it again. It was the voice in his head after he slipped the VX-99 into his veins. It was the woman’s voice who first commanded him to kill. It was the voice that ground through his thoughts every waking moment of every day as he hunted and fed. Trevor Brett had promised Stacey Arbuckle he’d never leave her. Instead, she’d never left him.
Get up, she ordered. Enough sleep. You need to kill, she said, awaking him from one nightmare and dunking him into another. It’s getting late. You need to find food.
Brett’s eyes snapped open and adjusted quickly to the midday sun beating down on the dirt of the dry bed. He was curled into a fetal position, hidden by the tall grass and trees that lined the snaking dirt path that led from the hills to the river.
For a moment, he could see an afterimage of Stacey in his mind. Then it was gone.
Brett rolled onto his knuckles and crouched on his heels. He blinked the dream from his head and drew a deep breath into his lungs. The smell of fish and fresh fertilizer filled his nostrils as they flared. He exhaled and filled his lungs again before throwing his head back to wail. The screech was earsplitting and vocalized the pain of a dissatisfied inhuman monster.
Stop crying, said the voice. Hunt.
— 10 —
Frederick, Maryland
April 18, 1980
Dr. Justin Starling was standing in the doorway of Major Rick Gibson’s office. He rapped on the open door. “Can I turn on the lights?”
Gibson, sitting behind his desk with his back to the door, wheeled around to face Starling. “I don’t know,” he said, glowering. “Can you?”
Starling ignored the sarcasm and flipped the switch. The overhead fluorescent clinked and flickered to life. It cast a sterile glow across the large sparsely decorated space. “I have something to show you.”
Gibson narrowed his eyes against the light. “What?”
“I think we’ve made some progress. It’s not a breakthrough per se, but it’s significant.”
The major ran his hand across his mouth. He grunted. “What?”
Starling took a step farther into the office, his hands dipped into his lab coat pockets. “I understand we have little time left, Major. Even an incremental advance could be enough to change—”
“You’re wrong,” blurted Gibson. In one seamless move, he pushed back the chair and stood, leaning on the desk with his elbows locked. The overhead lights aged him and gave him the appearance of a man who hadn’t slept in a week. In truth, he hadn’t slept in three days.
He stepped around the desk and quickly closed the distance to Dr. Starling. “This is it. We’re out of time. Unless we find a human subject without command’s help, we’re terminated. It’s crystal clear.”
Starling pulled his hands from his pockets and used them to advocate for his argument as he spoke. “I respectfully disagree. They didn’t terminate us effective immediately. They gave us three days. That means there is a window. Now, if you’re not willing to crawl through that opening and—”
Gibson raised his hand to stop the scientist. “Don’t patronize me, Starling. You’re a hired hand. Nothing more. You don’t get how it works. I can’t blame you for that. Your naiveté, however, is taxing. Have you figured out how to stabilize the cocktail without a human subj—”
“Close,” said Starling. “Very close. I’ve tried an entirely new approach. I started from square one.”
Gibson’s frown relaxed. He tugged on the bottom of his uniform to even out the creases. “What did you do?”
“You need to come with me.”
Gibson sighed and extended his arm, telling Starling to lead the way. Starling nodded and turned, stuffing his hands back into his pockets as he moved into the corridor outside the office. At each secure entry, he scanned his card and held the door for Gibson. The two of them wound through the maze back to the secure corridor leading to Starling’s primary laboratory.
Starling ran his identification card and then entered a numeric password into a keypad that resembled the face of a telephone. There was a hiss and a metallic click that signaled the door was unlocked.
The men entered a locker room and removed their clothes. Both stripped to their undergarments and slipped into hospital scrubs. Starling entered another code and the men stepped into the exterior lab classified as BSL-3.
Biosafety laboratories were designed to isolate potentially dangerous biological agents. They were one of four levels. BSL-1 was the lowest level of biosecurity. BSL-4 was the highest.
Once in the BSL-3 lab, Starling entered a code to lock the door through which they’d entered. There were two technicians working in that lab. Neither of them paid attention to Starling or Gibson as the men stepped past them and through another secure doorway that resembled the type of throughway one would find on a military ship.
Once that door was closed and locked, the men were in the secured suit room. Inside the room, waiting for them, was a pair of lab assistants whose job it was to help researchers don a new type of biohazard suit.
The heat-sealed positive-pressure suits were called demilitarization protective ensembles. The DPEs had been designed only a year earlier for maintenance workers at chemical weapons sites. Gibson, with help from some higher-ups, was able to procure dozens of the single-use suits for his clandestine purposes.
The only catch was that the suits, while state of the art, weighed fifty pounds and required help from dressers. The cumbersome process took at least a half hour. The last step was putting on the three-layered rubber gloves.
Once suited up, the suit’s purified air came from long hoses that would connect inside the BSL-4 as soon as the men secured the lab. Until then, and during transition from the BSL-4 back to the changing room, the suits offered a self-contained breathing apparatus with up to ten minutes of breathable air.
The dressers checked the suits’ heart monitors before giving the okay. They activated the air, the suits filled and puffed like balloons, and the men moved into the secure shower area.
Starling entered another series of codes and the men moved into the final room, the BSL-4 laboratory, where the bulk of the VX-99 Berserkr work took place. The men connected their hoses and slowly moved to an encased bench on the far side of the twenty-by-twenty lab.
Gibson keyed the radio transceiver in his suit. “This had better be worth it.”
Starling offered a weak smile. “You told me I hadn’t thought of everything. You were right. I hadn’t tried hormones.”
“Hormones?”
Starling moved to the bench and slid his gloved hands into work holes in the protective glass wall. “We’re trying to take VX-99 and modify it. We still want the genetic changes that make for the perfect soldier, but not to the degree that we activate the primal, reptilian urges you unwittingly unlocked the first time around. All of the good parts about being a monster without the bad.”
“I already know this, Starling,” said Gibson. “What’s new?”
“Our problem was taking some of the mitigating attributes of the cocktail we engineered and finding a way to make them stick to the VX-99 at a cellular level.”
“Get to the point.”
“Hormones may be the answer,” said Starling, his excitement leaking through the DPE. “Hormones are essentially chemical messengers. They’re secreted into either the blood or extracellular fluid. Both travel through the body in search of cells. When they reach those cells, the hormones affect how they function.”
Starling turned to the glass and used a remote system to adjust a large microscope on the work desk. Then he stepped back and offered the spot to Gibson, telling him to take a look.
“Each hormone targets a cell that has a receptor for that hormone,” Starling explained. “It’s like a lock and key, except it’s not.”
“Explain,” said Gibson.
“While hormones target their receptor cells, they can affect neighboring cells too, cells that aren’t intended to
receive whatever it is that hormone is carrying,” said Starling. “Not only that, but there are ways we can impact the cells at a molecular level. They’re actually molecules themselves. One is called an agonist. The other is an antagonist.”
Gibson moved to look at the microscope’s display. “So what am I looking at?”
“You’re looking at the modified VX-99 structure adhering to an endocrine cell. It’s sticking.”
Gibson turned to Starling, his eyes wide. “What does that mean?”
“It means we have a potential delivery system. The VX-99 wouldn’t hold our modifications before. That was the problem. We couldn’t alter the original compound at its basic level. If we attach it to a hormone and then adhere the cocktail, which I’ve successfully done, we could theoretically induce the best of VX-99 without suffering the worst of it.”
“So the hormones act like glue?”
Starling’s face lit up. “Exactly, sir. Exactly.”
“What’s the catch?”
“We still need a human,” Starling admitted. “I can test it in primates or other mammals, but I can’t be certain the naturally occurring hormones would act identically in other species. I can hypothesize. I can’t be certain.”
Gibson frowned, his jaw set. “So we’re no better off than we were?”
Starling shifted in his suit and looked down. He shook his head. “I disagree. We have new information to give the decision makers. This is a big deal.”
Gibson pointed his gloved finger at Starling’s chest. “You yourself said this wasn’t a breakthrough, Doctor. How can I sell this to the decision makers if the man who made the discovery doesn’t think it’s a breakthrough or a game changer?”
Starling leaned in to Gibson’s finger and eyed him in a way a civilian shouldn’t eye an officer. “It’s significant, Major. It’s significant enough I dragged you through BSL-4 protocol to show it to you on a microscope. It’s not a breakthrough, though. That can only take place in a human. I’m convinced of that. They said you needed actionable information to change their minds. This is actionable.”