by Keith Thomas
She began to cover the whiteboard with symbols.
Next to them she wrote numbers.
And then beside those she wrote another series of symbols.
“Incredible,” Dr. Song said.
• • •
Dr. Song was desperate to believe that this would be his absolution.
He had long dreamed of the moment he’d see the solution. Even more, he often lay awake at night imagining how he’d use the resulting code to program the LINAC and cure Terry, Alice, and Hugh. It was a video he had played and reversed over and over during decades of long nights in dozens of dank basements. Curing the Null would maybe erase his past crimes. Dr. Song imagined the hate, the bitterness, would be washed away like caked-on mud. Then, when Terry, Alice, and Hugh had been cured, he would find the others; he would walk every continent if he had to. And when that was accomplished, when the madness had finally vanished, then maybe, just maybe, he would feel good enough about himself to wish for a normal life. A life he didn’t think he’d ever deserve again. At sixty, he knew he still had time left to begin again, time enough to forge a new soul.
As Ashanique covered the whiteboard with symbols, letters, and numbers, Dr. Song was stunned to see she was using Dr. Theriault’s handwriting. Watching it in real time, he realized Ashanique wasn’t channeling the intellect of a dead woman; she was reaching into the depths of a mind that stretched into infinity. For all intents and purposes, Ashanique was Dr. Theriault, just as she was Janelle.
Alarms began to sound outside the room.
Dr. Song knew the guard’s body had likely been discovered. The doors to the lab would be kicked in within a few minutes’ time. Ashanique ignored the blare of the sirens and kept writing. She finished twenty seconds later and turned around.
“There it is,” she said.
Dr. Song pulled the photocopied journal pages from his back pocket. He unfolded them and began to translate the passages in his mind, scribbling with a pencil on the margins of the pages.
“Amazing,” he mumbled.
“Doctor,” Kojo said, eyeing the door. “We don’t have much time.”
Dr. Song looked up at the whiteboard. He knew this process might take an hour, possibly even longer. He was going to suggest they barricade themselves in, prepare to be overrun, but he didn’t, because Ashanique put her hands on the LINAC control panel and turned on the machine.
“You don’t need to decipher it now,” she said. “I can do this.”
“You remember it all?” Dr. Song asked, stunned.
“Yes.”
Matilda touched Ashanique’s arm. “Are you ready?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t want to lose them. I know what they knew, my mother, my grandmother. All those other lives. I— They’re a part of me. I don’t want to give them up. If I do, they’ll be gone forever. Silenced the same way as they are with . . . with everyone else.”
Behind them, the LINAC machine came online. It buzzed and rattled. Metal knocked against metal, loud enough that Dr. Song was surprised the comatose Nulls didn’t startle in their endless sleep.
“Put Terry beneath the machine,” Ashanique said.
Childers wheeled Terry under the LINAC and put the brakes on his wheelchair. She looked up into the dark eye of the machine.
Ashanique asked everyone to take a step back.
They did.
“I don’t want you to be accidentally exposed,” she said.
Just before the test was activated, the door to the room swung open.
Rade stepped inside and shot Terry in the chest.
Blood blossomed under Terry’s shirt. The force was enough to knock him out of the wheelchair. His head hit the linoleum floor with a sad, hollow sound. Rade turned to the other two comatose Nulls and shot them both as well. Alice and Hugh were blown backward and their locked wheelchairs overturned. The tiny front wheels turned in useless silence as the echoes of the gunshots faded.
“No one move,” Rade said.
• • •
That’s when Kojo saw the worst thing he’d seen in all his decades as a cop.
Every other horror, every awful act humankind was capable of, none of it compared to the sight of Rade holding a Sig Sauer P938 handgun to his son’s head. Brandon was beyond crying. His face was a sheet of pure terror. His eyes seemed enveloped in psychic pain.
“Drop the gun,” Rade said.
“Okay. Okay.”
Kojo carefully pulled his revolver from his belt and laid it on the floor. Then he kicked it over to Rade. Rade stepped on it with his left foot. Brandon squirmed and moaned. Rade looked over at Ashanique, then turned to Matilda and Childers.
“Empty your pockets,” Rade ordered.
Matilda, Childers, and Ashanique turned their pockets inside out.
Satisfied, Rade let go of Brandon and pushed the boy to Kojo. Brandon collapsed in his father’s arms. Kojo held him close as Rade walked across the room to the whiteboard. He looked over Ashanique’s work, studying it carefully.
With Rade briefly preoccupied, Childers looked around for a weapon. Any weapon. She saw a scalpel in a pocket of a lab coat on a hook two feet away. She plucked the scalpel from the coat and removed its protective plastic sheath.
Kojo noticed and shook his head.
Childers put a finger to her lips.
Shhhhh . . .
61
RADE TURNED THE Sig Sauer on Dr. Song.
“Does it work?”
“We— We were just readying the first test.”
“Hurry up.”
Rade stepped toward Dr. Song just as Childers ran at him with the scalpel. She’d had enough. Seeing the Nulls shot down so helpless broke something inside her. As she ran, Childers thought back to when she was in the ER after being jumped by some creeps near the train tracks. While they bandaged her up, she watched a junkie come in practically dead. But the doctor grabbed an AED and jolted the junkie’s chest. Her body danced before the junkie bolted upright, mouth wide-open and eyes bugging out like she’d just seen the Four Horsemen ride past her. Whatever the AED did, Childers felt its organic equivalent—an uncanny boost that turned her into a killing machine.
Rade clearly wasn’t expecting her to be so bold.
He swung toward Childers just in time to get a scalpel across the cheek. The narrow blade cut a thin line through the subcutaneous fat. It was deep enough that it tinged across Rade’s teeth. The sound was oddly pretty.
“Fuck!”
Rade spit blood onto the floor.
Childers, impressed with her own speed, slashed again.
This time, the scalpel didn’t clear the space, however, because Rade put a bullet in Childers’s gut. Childers stumbled backward into a row of file cabinets.
She was stunned, surprised to see the quickly spreading stain of gore soaking her T-shirt. The light in the room appeared to quickly fade, retreating like a film reel run in reverse. As everything darkened and the sounds of the room dampened to a fuzzy mush, Childers glanced at Dr. Song. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but she could tell he was panicked. Brandon was crying.
Childers’s last thought was simple:
It would be nice to see the sunrise right now.
• • •
Holding his bleeding cheek, Rade pointed the gun at Dr. Song.
“Does the fucking solution work?!”
Dr. Song nodded, before pointing to Ashanique.
“I don’t know how. Ask Dr. Theriault.”
Rade turned to Ashanique and narrowed his eyes.
Then he chuckled. “Okay, you tell me.”
“Put the gun away first.”
Rade walked up to Matilda and pressed the muzzle of the Sig Sauer against her forehead. “Tell me. Now.”
Ashanique said, “It restructures the suppression system in the hippocampus. The first tests, at Project Clarity, they activated cell regeneration on an expanded rate, one that led to increased neural connections along older, abandoned pathways. But t
he generation of these new networks didn’t stop there. With the Null, novel neural root systems appeared. Those are the source of the memories. I don’t know how exactly they are coded but they’re in the junk DNA. The process my grandmother developed clips the newly developed neural root system like yanking a weed from your lawn. When you undergo the process, it will remove all your genetic memories.”
“And new memories?”
“Shouldn’t be affected. This is targeted; that’s the brilliance of it.”
Rade dragged Matilda over to Ashanique.
“What if the HED gets this? Can they do what they want the first time?”
“Maybe,” Ashanique said. “With certain modifications, it could work. For those who aren’t Null, and we don’t actually know what percentage that could be, the revised procedure would likely suppress the hippocampus’s activity to the point that we could rewrite the memory there.”
“The answer is yes,” Rade says.
“With some qualifications, yes.”
“So Dr. Sykes lied to me.”
Rade pulled the gun away from Matilda’s head. He turned to look at the LINAC machine humming in the corner, then glanced over at Childers’s corpse. A pool of blood congealed under her chest, sticking her clothes to the floor.
“The police will be here soon, Nineteen,” Dr. Song said.
“My name is Rade. Nineteen doesn’t exist anymore. And there’s no one coming to save you here. We own the police.”
“You don’t own me,” Kojo said.
Rade shrugged. “You’re nobody.”
“Rade,” Ashanique said, “I know what was done to you was unconscionable. That the memories awakened were horrific. But you can be fixed. They can be erased. I want to show you, but first you need to let these people go. They don’t have anything to do with it anymore. Just you and me, we’ll fix you.”
Rade shifted his gaze to Kojo and Brandon. The boy was sobbing. Rade considered putting a hole in the boy’s stomach and watching his expression as the pain seized him. He decided against it.
“Everyone group together,” Rade said, motioning with the gun. “Knee to knee, arms intertwined. I see any of you move, I will shoot the children first. Understand?”
Rade let Matilda go. She walked over to Dr. Song and, together, they sat down beside Kojo. Matilda linked elbows with Ashanique and Kojo.
Kojo then wrapped his arms around Brandon.
“Keep your head down,” Kojo whispered to his son. “Just keep your eyes on the floor, okay? We’re going to stay real still and we’ll be fine.”
Moving the gun hand to hand, Rade took off his blood-soaked hoodie and the white tank top underneath. While the slice in his cheek had clotted, the red streaks of dribbled blood ran down his neck across his chest and ribs to his waist.
“Don’t fuck this up.”
Rade sat cross-legged on the floor beneath the LINAC. He trained the gun on Brandon. His hand was perfectly still, his eyes as sharp as acacia thorns.
“Go ahead, Doctor. . . .”
Rattling sounds pinged around the room as the LINAC started up; the racket sounded as though someone had dumped all their loose change into a dryer and run it on high. The clanging was thankfully short-lived, however, only seconds in duration. As the LINAC moved into position over Rade’s head, it angled downward in a smooth, silent motion.
The room filled with an anxious energy as the air pressure fell.
As the LINAC quieted, Ashanique said, “We tried to save you before, Rade. I’m sorry you’re still so scared and so hurt.”
The LINAC fired.
The Sig Sauer dropped to the floor as Rade fell forward, convulsing. . . .
62
5:25 P.M.
JANUARY 19, 1980
THREE SAINTS BAY
KODIAK ISLAND, ALASKA
A BLIZZARD ROARS over the Three Saints Bay facility.
Five inches have fallen in the past forty-seven minutes, and the lights inside the base flicker as the generators are strained. The hallways are empty. The staircases as well. The soldier manning the desk at the entrance doesn’t play cards. He doesn’t clean his gun or thumb through the stiff-paged girlie magazine that Morton stashed under the file folders in the desk’s bottom drawer. Instead, he sits and listens to the storm grinding its way across the invisible landscape beyond the walls. He thinks back to being a child in Louisiana and hearing the relentless reverberation of hurricanes.
In the central housing unit, the experimental subjects’ doors are all shut. They are silent inside their rooms. Some of the orphans sleep. Too drugged-out and delirious to hear the blizzard overhead. Others lie idly in their beds, staring at their nails or chewing on their hair. Waiting, always waiting. The Null, however, sit with their ears to the steel doors of their cells. Each and every one. They are ready. . . .
In the medical unit, Dr. Song and Dr. Sykes perform an autopsy. Thirty-Three died during one of the aerobic sessions on a treadmill. She was fifteen and appeared fit. The records indicate that she was taken from an orphanage in Taos, New Mexico. Thirty-Three was Latina and quite short. Dr. Sykes is convinced she had an underlying heart condition—one that Dr. Song should have picked up on right after they recruited her. As Dorothy removes Thirty-Three’s heart, she turns the bruised raw organ around in the antiseptic light. Nothing evident.
“Three treatment failures in three weeks,” Dr. Song says, his mouth hidden by his medical mask. He keeps his eyes on the corpse. “I’m worried we’re pushing—”
“More will die,” Dorothy says. “They will keep dying until we get what we want. Did Joe Curwen at Duke stop after he lost a couple subjects? Absolutely not. And he sure as hell got a lot closer than we have. If Dr. Theriault thought she was saving these wretches from suffering by tossing herself into the ocean, she was sorely mistaken.”
Dr. Song looks up to meet Dorothy’s gaze.
“Get Janelle ready.”
All of this is heard by subject Nineteen. He sits in his cell, ear to the door, just like the other Null. Nineteen is an eight-year-old boy, his thin frame lost in the bagginess of his boiler suit. His name is Rade Gavrilovic. Unlike most of the orphans, he remembers his parents. He vividly recalls the alcoholism and abuse. And he remembers the day he was taken. It was the first and only time his mother, high on methamphetamines and reeking of cheap liquor, had taken him to the playground in the park near their apartment. She dozed off on a bench while he played on the jungle gym. There were no other children. It was the middle of the day on a Wednesday. He played for only twenty minutes before the soldiers came. They gave his mother cash, he couldn’t see how much, and then led him to a waiting car. That was it.
When Rade hears the door to Janelle’s cell open, he is ready.
He digs at the thick callus on his left heel. The skin is white there, as hard and white as the snow pummeling the world above. Two days ago, as soldiers were escorting Rade from the medical center, he stepped on a hypodermic needle. He did not cry out. He did not even limp. Rade knew he needed to keep that needle in his flesh. It was a key. Though the pain is delicious and his bloodied fingers have trouble grasping the end of the needle, he manages to pull it from his heel.
Rade uses it to unlock his cell door.
Unlike some of the other Null, his past-life memories include many thieves. There was once a blacksmith. An African man who plied his trade in eighteenth-century Paris. He was good at locks, and Rade remembers exactly how they were constructed. The technology hasn’t really changed. Using the needle, it takes him thirty-seven seconds.
The door swings open. Outside, the main room is empty.
Ignoring his bleeding foot and knowing that it will only be a matter of seconds before the soldiers watching the closed-circuit televisions upstairs see him, Rade scrambles to the cell next to his. He unlocks it, opens the door, and slips inside.
A ten-year-old girl with bruised eyes sits on her cot.
She is Eighteen, and that is all that is known about her.<
br />
“Time to go,” Rade tells her.
Together they run out of the room, bare feet slapping the concrete floor. They run across the main floor to the hallway opposite just as a soldier comes barreling in. Rade is on him faster than he can pull his sidearm. The soldier, only ten years older than Rade, has a face blurred by acne. He screams when Rade plunges the hypodermic needle into his right ear. The drum bursts. Rade gets the soldier’s gun and shoots him in the chest. Then shoots him again in the back of the head.
“We have two minutes,” Rade says, handing the gun to Eighteen.
She gets into position: gun outstretched, both hands on the grip, as Rade makes his way to the other cells. He unlocks as many of the Null as he can. Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Thirty, then back to Fifteen and Ten. By the time the hallway just outside the main room fills with the tumbling crash of boots, Rade has freed twenty-four of the experimental subjects. They all have a role to play in what happens next.
“Hurry,” Eighteen shouts as the first soldier runs in.
Eighteen drops him with a shot to the forehead.
Rade wrenches a fire ax from the wall outside cell number 40. He uses it to gut a soldier as he stumbles down the stairs into the main room. Rade slides the ax to another Null and grabs the soldiers’ semiautomatic weapons. He opens fire as another two soldiers run into the room. Their blood sprays across the faces of the panicked scientists who scramble into the room behind them. One of the Null orphans smashes the butt of an assault rifle into a steam duct. The main room fills with a billowing miasma of steam as more soldiers and scientists rush inside, all of them screaming.
Everyone is engulfed in hot fog.
Rade’s memory of what happens next is piecemeal: As soldiers materialize from the team, he shoots them. Every adult face he sees, he blasts. They fall away, their blood spatter mingling with the mist. As he moves, he comes across numerous tableaux of violence—an orphan hacking off a scientist’s head here, a soldier shooting a Null subject in the face there. Rade finds Forty-Two in the fog. He has two access badges and hands one to Rade.
“This is it!” Forty-Two screams before a bullet severs his vocal cords.