The Hallucigenia Project

by Darren Kasenkow

  “I have a confession to make,” she said. “On my way to the hotel I told myself I was coming to let off some steam and see if you’ve found out anything, maybe talk about the weather or something to help forget about work, but I was just fooling myself.” She lifted her eyes and, for the first time since she’d stepped into the room, appeared vulnerable. “I know we’ve only just met and this is all supposed to be professional, and God knows you must think me and this whole damn city is totally insane, but I like you John. I liked you the first time we met.”

  There, I said it, Candice thought as she felt the skin of her face turn red and watched for any kind of reaction. She knew she well on her way to being drunk, and had probably said more than she should have, but the attraction to the man across the table had well and truly locked onto the part of her stomach that produced butterflies.

  For John the sudden admission brought with it a surge of adrenaline and a quickening of the heart. He studied the way her hair curled against the edges of her chin and the way she blinked in short little bursts, and loved the way she curled her lips after every sip. His eyes were drawn to the soft pink of her scars, to the smooth of her neck and hints of flesh revealed by her shirt, and now more than anything he desperately wanted to know what holding her tight would feel like.

  “You’re right,” he finally offered, “this city is insane, but if going crazy means this right here, I’m happy to be certified. Besides, other than payback I don’t think I’ve got anything left to go home to.”

  “So what do we do know?” she asked.

  “Well, we’ve got FBI agents and a missing doctor, an end of the world cult who, by the looks of things, is right, and a Russian mobster that wants me to help him collect a debt.”

  “A what?”

  “I’ll explain later,” he said with a sly smile. “So considering we’ve skipped dinner and are apparently toasting the end of the world, I wouldn’t mind getting to know a little more about you.”

  “But then you might ask me to leave.”

  “I don’t think that’s a risk that carries any weight.”

  “So what would you like to know?”

  “Maybe you could tell me about those scars on your cheek.”

  And things were going so good, she thought as she lifted a finger to the markings. “Usually when people ask I tell them I was attacked by a wild cat in Africa, but I’ve never even been there. Truth is my husband did this. Love cuts deep right?” She reached for the bottle and poured another shot with a slightly shaking hand. “We’d only been married a year or so, but it didn’t take that long to realise things weren’t going very well. His family were bible fanatic lawyers, I knew that already, but when we were dating the only time he showed any signs of religious beliefs was when he joined them for services at Christmas. As far as I knew he was an atheist just like me.”

  “You don’t believe in anything?” John asked tentatively.

  “Right now I don’t know what to believe. And neither did Calvin, my husband, because as soon as the honeymoon was over he started to change. One minute he hated the church, and the next he was reading through the bible and sneaking off to late night services. Before I knew it he told me he’d been born again and it was my duty to follow him.” She shook her head with disgust. “I couldn’t fucking believe it. At first there wasn’t too much pressure, and we played along like a happy married couple struggling to find our feet, but his religious shit kept getting more and more in the way. To put it simply, it didn’t go down very well.”

  “No,” John whispered, “I don’t suppose it did.”

  “So one night my dad was helping me move my stuff out of the apartment and he confronted me. The way he looked at me, I just didn’t know who he was anymore. He had a knife and, no doubt about it, was ready to kill me. My dad, he grabbed his gun from the car and took a shot but it didn’t hit him. The prick got into his car and ploughed through my dad, shattering his legs.” She rubbed at the scars as though she could somehow make them disappear. “So no, it wasn’t an exotic cat that did this.”

  John knew better than most how volatile men could be when they thought they were about to lose something they considered property, but that didn’t mean he understood why someone would want to hurt, or for that matter want to kill, the woman sitting at the table. He would never, it seemed, understand the world.

  “So he’s in prison?” he asked, aware he was probably stating the obvious.

  “Nope,” she said sharply. “Things were a little more complicated than that. Let’s just say I was forced to choose between seeing that son of a bitch sent away or keeping what I thought was going to be a dream job. Funny how life works out sometimes isn’t it? My job turns out to be fucking terrifying, he’s free to pray to Jesus and sharpen his knives and dream about having a second shot at me, and all it left me with is these scars to remind me every single fucking day.”

  “Personally I think those scars help to bring out your eyes,” he suggested with the hope of lighting things up a little.

  “They aren’t the only souvenir he left me with.”

  Candice gently lifted Bobbie from her lap and placed him on the chair beside her, then stood and undid the bottom button of her shirt as John quietly watched and wondered what she was doing. She took a step closer to him and, with obvious hesitation, lifted the material to reveal a large red scar that stained the otherwise smooth skin of her stomach.

  “That looks like it would’ve hurt,” he said as he stood and stepped close to her, the sweet scent of nervous sweat teasing his senses. He unlooped the buttons of his shirt and traced a finger across the bullet hole and fragment scars. “I guess we’ve got more in common than we thought.”

  “I guess we do…”

  He knew they had just stepped up to the line, and now there was only the option of quietly retreating or crossing over, and crossing over was a one way street of no return. His heart was beginning to race and he could feel her breath gently caressing his stomach.

  “It’s important to know if you have any other scars,” he said ever so quietly as he reached forward and slowly began to unbutton the rest of her shirt, each brush of his finger causing her to audibly exhale. From his vantage point on the chair Bobbie watched as Candice’s shirt dropped to the floor.

  John leaned forward and gently caressed her lips with his, the hint of her taste sending electricity through his body and drawing his hands to the soft skin beneath her ears. There was the slightest hesitation in her response, but it was quick to melt away as she leaned into his mouth with growing desire.

  She ran her finger nails along his chest and shuddered as his hands caressed hers, and then stripped the shirt from his shoulders before pressing against his warmth and exploring his mouth with increased confidence. When he dropped to his knees and pulled down her pants to reveal the faded blue panties she suddenly wished she hadn’t worn, tracing the inside of her thighs with the tip of his tongue as his hands locked with hers, all she could do was throw her head back and close her eyes with blood rushing bliss.

  “I haven’t showered…” she whispered in short breaths.

  “I don’t care,” John whispered back as he tasted the delicious curves beneath the faded blue cotton before carrying her, with shoes still on and pants bunched around her ankles, across the floor and onto the bed.

  Any sense of nervousness quickly dissolved as they explored every inch of each other’s bodies with frantic passion and deep wanting. Tropical sweat poured from their skin and drenched the sheets, and when Candice wrapped her legs around his waist and he felt her dripping warmth of desire he bit down on her bottom lip and eased his way inside.

  A soft moan blew across his ears and fell down his neck, and together they knew no bounds as they shook the bed with their entangled and animalistic throes. When the ecstasy was almost more than they could handle, she rolled him onto his back and quickly forced him back inside of her, hips beginning to thrash and hair pasted to her face and neck as she b
ucked harder and harder, the inside of her wet thighs sliding up and down as though driven by a redlining engine. Her fingers dug into his stomach and finally, with a shared cry broken with desperate gasps of breath, together they shook with an orgasmic peak that left them exhausted and curled in each other’s arms.

  Now that their cries and moans had dampened and a quiet had returned as they caught their breath, Bobbie braved the journey from the dining room and, even with his compromised vision, reached the bed and clawed his way up. John was surprised to see him nuzzle the back of Candice’s neck before snuggling down on the pillow by her head with a lone fluffy paw resting on her shoulder.

  “You sure have cast some sort of spell on him,” he smirked. “Hand on heart I’ve never seen him do that before.”

  “If I move I’ll disturb him, so doing a runner might be out of the question for the moment.”

  “You’d seriously do a runner and leave me lying here?” he asked with a touch of mock worry.

  “You want me to be honest?” she asked coyly.

  “All things considered, that might be the better option.”

  Candice traced the tip of her finger around the jagged edges of the bullet scar on his chest. “To be totally honest then, there’s nothing in the world I want more right now than to stay here with you.” The statement hung in the air and she couldn’t believe she’d just said it, but it was the truth. Pressed up against him with Bobbie’s soft paw resting on her shoulder, she felt a joy deep inside she didn’t think was possible, even if it was bittersweet and came with a twinge of guilt. As far as she was concerned, the world could go to hell if it was wrong to give in to the desire he had ignited in her, even if it did mean she was vulnerable. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable or anything.”

  John wasn’t exactly sure what to say, but he knew what he felt and that was all that mattered as he wiped away the small tear that had pooled in the corner of her eye.

  “Well seeming how we’re being honest and everything you should probably know you have one hundred percent taken my breath away, and if I had my way we’d stay right here.” He closed his eyes as the smell of her skin washed over him. “I guess my choice of shirts isn’t so bad after all.”

  “Believe me,” Candice laughed as another tear formed, “the shirts weren’t the key to any of this.”

  For a while they just lay there and enjoyed the soft warmth of each other’s bodies as the air conditioner hummed in the background. It hadn’t been verbalised, but there was a sense of change in the air like the kind that accompanied sudden detours to unknown destinations that lay hidden in wait amongst dangerous storm clouds.

  John closed his eyes and contemplated the strange path that he did know of, the path that had plucked him from a life that suddenly seemed so very distant and dropped him into a new world of swirling emotions, and couldn’t help but wonder if destiny had any part to play. As Candice pushed closer into his chest the idea that all of this was some kind of cosmic accident, that it was nothing more than a chain of events pushed forward on the steam of chaos and chance, was slowly seeming less likely.

  “So what happens from here?” he asked with quiet apprehension at what the reply might be.

  “What I want and what will happen are two very different answers,” she whispered. “Besides, I have to face up to the fact that you and Bobbie might still want to head back home.”

  “Here’s the way I see it. There’s nothing I really want back home, but there’s something I want that’s right here.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “I may have bad taste when it comes to shirts but I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that.” He traced his fingers along the skin below her scars. “If you ask me we’ve both been caught in the same storm, and if staying here means we’re going to be whipped by the same winds I’d feel a lot better if I knew what was really going on.”

  For a moment she was hesitant to respond. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to tell him all that she knew, after all he already had a pretty good idea about the dire event prediction so it wasn’t as if she’d be revealing the mother of all secrets, but at the same time there was the reality that learning what was in the heart of the lab might fracture his thoughts about her. Sure, she was only doing her job, and if successful could bring hope to a situation that was quickly running out, but that didn’t change the fact that the research had now began to feel…wrong.

  “I’m not so sure that feeling better is what comes with the truth in all this,” she stammered while wrapping her leg across his waist.

  “You’re probably right, but I sure wouldn’t mind knowing what’s behind the curtain considering I’ve been thrown onto centre stage.”

  She reached down to discover the sliding of her thigh had ignited his passion from its brief moment of exhaustion so, with a soft sorry whisper into Bobbie’s ear, she eased up to her knees, pressed her hands gently onto his chest, and slowly lowered her waist to bring him back deep inside. His mouth opened slightly but before he could say a word she lowered a finger to keep his lips from moving.

  “Telling you this won’t just cost me my job,” she said through long, steady breaths, “but will probably get me locked up for the rest of my life, or what’s left on Earth’s clock anyway.”

  John edged his hips up and pushed even deeper inside her. “Unless the government can read my mind I think you’re secret’s safe with me.”

  “That’s an interesting way to put it.” She pushed back and clamped down, a wet warmth sliding across her skin. “Hendrix was there way before I was. The word genius gets thrown around a lot but it’s a pretty accurate description considering what he was trying to achieve.”

  “You mean like computer stuff?”

  “That’d be an understatement. He was leading a team of specialists that were trying to integrate nano technology to disrupt compromised cell reproduction, and they figured the best place to target was the very structure of DNA itself. It was a pretty ambitious idea that’s for sure, to design a microscopic robot that would infiltrate damaged genetic code and either rewrite it or neutralise it.”

  “Is that even possible?” John asked as he leaned forward to lick the soft skin of her chest.

  “Hendrix seemed to think so, but when he got deep into the structure to try to work out the method of communication on a cellular level that could somehow be programmed he stumbled across the binary code.”

  “And this code gets put into a processor and somehow spits out a date for the end of the world…”

  “More like the end of the world as we know it,” Candice corrected him with a quick grind of her hips. “The thing is, there was more than just a message. When the ones and zeros latched onto the processor a set of schematics lit up the screen. It was a manual, and after a whole heap of trial and error the device the build instructions were for became a reality. That’s where I come into the picture.”

  John grabbed her hands and drew her face close to his. “I almost don’t wanna know anymore…”

  “You want me to stop?”

  “No, keep doing exactly what you’re doing.”

  Candice bent down and licked the edges of his lips. “The device is an NFJ, or neural feedback junction. This thing came with instructions on how to build it but there was nothing to give us any idea of how to use it, so that’s what they called me in for. My job is to find out what the hell it does.”

  “I’m not sure if I follow.”

  “As far as we can tell the NFJ is supposed to connect to the brain, but so far the tests haven’t exactly bore much fruit.” She flicked back her hair and continued the slow rhythm of her hips. “Actually that’s not totally true. Some of our test subjects successfully managed to terminate their own lives after being connected to the device, so something’s going on once they enter whatever it is they enter, something bad enough to make death the better alternative. And if that isn’t enough to send you packing, there’s another small det
ail that deserves a mention.”

  “We’ve come this far so there’s no point in pulling back now.”

  The grinding was getting quicker, and so too were Candice’s breaths as she scratched at his shoulders and shuddered at the electricity that was building between her legs.

  “You know about the asteroids that are supposedly on the way, and now you know about the device that was built from instructions hidden in our DNA and that wearing it carries the risk of self termination, but what you don’t know is that buried within the message is confirmation that someone or something will be docking into Earth’s orbit just after impact.” She closed her eyes and could hear her heart beating deep inside her skull. “We’re walking around with a message buried deep inside our cells, and it looks like whoever put it there is coming back.”

  John knew what he’d just been told was surely impossible but then impossible had simply become another word for his reality, and the shock of what Candice had just revealed was yet to break free and shut down all of his thoughts.

  “I’m trying to follow,” he said, “but what I don’t get is why Hendrix walks out, or how the hell he managed to become part of the Hallucigenia Project, if he’s there.”

  “Oh he’s part of their circle, I can almost guarantee it. Hand on heart I don’t know why he chose not to show up to work one day, but as for how he got caught up in a cult I can shed a little light but I don’t know too much.” She paused to savour her every sense. “Around the time it started The Hallucigenia Project sent out a bunch of letters to scientists across the country. They were looking to send up a number of satellites and needed high end expertise. Anyway, Hendrix apparently received one of the letters but nobody knows what was in it. We don’t even know if it was the first contact. Anyway, rumour has it a little girl had a premonition and came up with the date, and the Project began to build everything around her. They didn’t mention anything about this little girl?”

  “Can’t say they did.”

  “Then they probably will soon enough. As far as Henrix goes though, he delved in deeper and then poof, gone. Now we need to find him. We need to know what that machine does, and there’s a good chance he’s worked it out.”