Bone Music

by Christopher Rice

  “There were political reasons for the attack.”

  “There is never a political reason for mutilating anyone.”

  “The federal government was reducing the money they provided to ensure peace between merchants and the Natives, especially the Apache. The merchants were afraid they wouldn’t have the goods to pacify the tribes. It set the stage for the attack. I’m not saying it justifies it.”

  “Nonsense. Women and children scalped and mutilated in their beds. It was sexual sadism. No different from this Mask Maker in Los Angeles. They just didn’t have the word for it yet.”

  “Do you have other women?” Cole asks.

  Dylan cocks his head to one side, as if he’s waiting for Cole to finish this question.

  “Out in the field, I mean,” Cole adds, “enjoying your gift.”

  “Just one. The one you saw.”

  “Did you test it on any others?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “One.”

  “Not Charlotte Rowe, the girl I saw on the tape.”

  “No.”

  “Did you sleep with them?”

  “The first girl, yes. Not Charlotte.”

  Cole regrets asking the question as much as he regrets the blush Dylan’s answer brings to his cheeks.

  “I told you,” Dylan says. “I don’t adhere to popular labels in that area.”

  “There is no popular label for someone whose sexual identity is entirely professional ambition. Well, there is. But they don’t give them out at Harvard.”

  “What are you accusing me of, Cole?”

  “The first girl. The one it didn’t work on. Is she dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Cole feels his pulse beating in the side of his face. Amazing that this news, amid the rest of it, makes him feel like he’s breathing through a straw. Dylan’s expression is blank. He studies Cole as if whatever emotional reaction Cole will have to this information is a tiresome but necessary inconvenience. But Cole isn’t seeing Dylan anymore. He’s seeing video footage he long since destroyed; footage of a decorated war hero chewing on his right arm after he’d torn it from his body and beaten himself with it until one of his legs broke.

  My money, he thinks. My money funded all that bloodshed, all those scenes I can’t erase from my nightmares. All of it, thanks to my money. My father’s money.

  They’d come up with a phrase for it, for the swift orgy of relentless, cannibalistic self-destruction that consumed all four test subjects within minutes of their trigger events. Going lycan. If only they had truly become something else in those final moments, another creature, not a wide-eyed howling human suddenly programmed to quite literally tear itself apart in a frenzied rage.

  Did it matter that they were willing volunteers? That they knew the risks? That the last two had actually watched videos of what had happened to the first two and still agreed to take the drug? These facts had comforted him some back then. Back then he thought he’d put a stop to it by shutting the project down. He never thought Dylan capable of taking the nightmares they’d seen in that lab out into the world.

  “Do you need to sit?” Dylan asks.

  “Fuck you,” Cole whispers.

  Dylan nods and looks away, waiting, it seems, for Cole to collect himself.

  “So this first girl,” Cole asks, “she went lycan?”

  “She knew the risks. I told her I wouldn’t let her suffer. I kept my promise.”

  “So you were wrong. It had nothing to do with the gender of the subjects. And even though I forbade you to test it on women, you went out and did it anyway.”

  “You forbade me to test it on women because you’re a sexist and you have Mommy issues.”

  “I put a stop to it because I was tired of watching people tear themselves apart.”

  “I see, so it was just an excuse then. So you could fire me because you’d finally panicked. Give me a break. You didn’t care about those volunteers. You cared about exposure.”

  “I didn’t fire you. I cut the funding for a project that ended in disaster, and if you remember correctly, it wasn’t just my call to make.”

  “Don’t worry. I remember our partners quite well.”

  “You were one of our most brilliant scientists, Dylan. I could have put you on something else the next day.”

  “Oh, on what? Some antianxiety drug that’s just going to tranq people into functional oblivion? I was trying to create survivors, not blissed-out drones.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Until now.”

  “And you killed a woman to do it, which makes you a monster.”

  “And you, as always, are a revolutionary pretending to be a shill. The conflict will drive you mad, Cole. I guarantee it.”

  “Because I’m not willing to kill any more people in the name of your research?”

  “You don’t have to.” He extends his arms and gives Cole a bright smile. “You have a successful test subject.”

  “And she’s already killed someone.”

  “I’d say that’s an unfair reading of what happened on that video, wouldn’t you? She was protecting herself from two thugs who were probably going to rape her and leave her for dead in the middle of the desert. Forgive the absence of tears.”

  “Where is she, Dylan?”

  “She won’t be that hard for you to find if you reactivate The Consortium.”

  Cole’s barely been able to say this name aloud to himself in the two years since Project Bluebird ended. It’s easier to remember those horrifying videos of their test subjects than it is to recall the weight of responsibility these secret partners brought to bear on him. The idea that Dylan could so casually call for its reactivation is as offensive as everything else he’s said and done these past few days. Maybe even more so.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? You want me to call up five defense contractors, all of whom still lie awake at night worrying the results of your project will come back to haunt them, by the way, and . . . what? Invite them to brunch? Tell them you’ve set a successful test subject loose in the world with your drug? How exactly do you think they’ll respond?”

  “Managing The Consortium has always been your responsibility. I’d prefer to stick to the science. Our relationship works better that way.”

  “We are not in a relationship.”

  “I understand that you’re hurting, Cole. I understand that I caused some of that pain when I left so quickly. But deep down you know I truly don’t give a single red fuck. That I consider your pain to be an inconvenience and a distraction from a goal far more important than anything your heart might think it wants. And if there’s anyone who should know the importance of prioritizing objectives over feelings, it’s the head of Graydon Pharmaceuticals.”

  “If you think for one second that my contempt for you in this moment has anything to do with the fact that you got me to bottom in a couple of hotel rooms, you are even more of a delusional narcissist than I thought. What you have done is irresponsible and reprehensible, and it might bring a show of force down upon your head that not even I can stop.”

  “A show of force worse than this?” Dylan asks, gesturing to the phalanx of guns.

  “A lot worse.”

  Dylan nods sagely, as if Cole were offering up this information as part of a deal point, and not a warning, and he’s decided to accept.

  “Gender might not have anything to do with it,” Dylan begins, ignoring the bitter laughter that comes from Cole when he realizes Dylan has reverted to a scientific lecture. “With Charlotte, I pursued another theory, and it looks like it’s paid off.”

  Dylan checks to make sure Cole is still listening; then he slowly walks around behind him, turning his back to the security team. He’s making himself a better target, but he’s also concealing his hands and any weapon he might draw and blocking Cole from the strike team’s view while he does it. It’s a test, Cole’s sure, to see how willing he is to hear more about the science of
Dylan’s latest experiment. Cole turns.

  Dylan continues. “You see, with our male volunteers, what we thought was their strength turned out to be their liability. Their combat experience. The trauma of it reshaped their amygdalae in ways too subtle to detect on an MRI. That’s where the aggression, the self-destruction, came from. My first female subject, she had a similar trauma in her past and most likely similar amygdalar deformation.

  “But Charlotte’s different. Charlotte grew up in proximity to great physical trauma, but it was never directly inflicted upon her. Her wounds . . . they’re psychological. All of this will make more sense once you dig in to her past. Which I’m confident you’ll do despite your protests. But my point is that Charlotte Rowe is exactly the type of subject the current version of the drug works on. A vigilante spirit without the actual physical wounds that it usually takes to create a vigilante.

  “Her mind and her past set the stage for exactly what we’ve always been shooting for. A panic response from the primitive brain that doesn’t shut down the frontal cortex. You’ve seen the tape. She doesn’t tunnel. She doesn’t freeze or go into quiescence, but her fear is real. The drug’s done exactly what it’s supposed to do; it’s harnessed the power of her fear to almost perfect mental acuity, and the by-product is the same level of physical strength we saw in our old subjects, only without the self-destruction. Now the challenge is figuring out exactly how it works in her and duplicating the results in a wider variety of subjects.”

  “What about her blood? Are there traces of paradrenaline?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “You haven’t taken her blood?”

  “A lot’s happened very quickly.”

  Is he being coy, or has he lost access to this woman?

  Dylan had performed early animal tests himself, videos of which he’d brought to Cole to snare his interest. In those first nonhuman subjects, the ones who hadn’t torn themselves to shreds, the drug had somehow tricked the adrenal glands into making a variant of adrenaline never before documented in an organic life-form. It was the most astonishing and otherworldly aspect of Zypraxon; that its functioning in the brain somehow keyed the body into synthesizing an entirely new hormone, a hormone that produced bursts of superhuman strength, especially when you considered that unleashing superhuman strength in the body had never been Dylan’s intention. He’d set out to increase mental functioning during moments of extreme terror, and only as a means of preventing panic or paralysis. But in the end, it was like he’d created something akin to an antidepressant that had the unexpected side effect of allowing people who took it to grow wings and fly several miles.

  Paradrenaline was their name for this new, previously undocumented hormone, and while there’d been traces of it in the bodies of the human subjects who had torn themselves apart, the samples had degraded too rapidly after the subjects’ deaths to be preserved in a lab. Worse, the samples taken from animal test subjects had produced no effect in humans. The idea that there was someone out there now whose system might be flush with it made Cole’s head spin with genuine excitement for the first time since the helicopter had touched down.

  Zypraxon aside, there was no telling what paradrenaline might be able to do under the right circumstances—what it might be able to power, to heal.

  “On that tape, she’s running from you, isn’t she?” Cole asks.

  Dylan looks as if he’s been slapped. Cole tries to suppress a smile and fails.

  “That camera,” Cole continues, “it wasn’t yours. You stole it from those bikers on the tape, didn’t you? And my guess is she was running from you when she ran into them, wasn’t she?”

  Dylan swallows. Cole’s never seen the man so thrown off his game, and he allows himself a second or two to take pleasure in it.

  “The situation was more complex than that,” Dylan whispers.

  “This wasn’t your plan, to send her out into the world like this. You lost her, and now you want us to get her back.”

  “There were unexpected variables. But, no, I did not lose her. And I don’t need you to get her back. She won’t be that hard to find once you activate The Consortium. She needs to be constantly monitored to see what she’ll do. The results will be beneficial to us all.”

  “Why was she running?” Cole asks.

  “As I said, there were unexpected varia—”

  “Why was she running away from you, Dylan? What did you do? Lie to her? Trick her into taking the drug because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell her what had happened to your last subjects? What did you do to this woman?”

  “I put the power of gods in her hands.” Cole’s never seen the man’s passion take this angry a form. “That’s what I did to her. Charlotte Rowe is now patient zero for a benevolent virus that could wipe out sexual sadism, rape, and domestic violence, and if you don’t make every effort to watch everything she does with what I’ve given her, you will be missing out on the scientific breakthrough of the century.

  “You think that video is my endgame? I want this drug perfected, balanced, made available to the world. Just like I did when we started. And I can’t do that without you or Graydon or The Consortium. And you can’t come within an inch of matching your father’s legacy if you don’t make a breakthrough like this, and you know it. It’s why you’re here. But if you don’t help me, I’ll destroy every pill I have left. In fact, if you decide to keep me here now, all the pills I have left and all the documentation of every adjustment I’ve made to the formula since I left you will be incinerated before you can get to them—trust me.”

  If only I could read minds, Cole thinks, but even if I could, I’d still have trouble reading his. So many distractions. So many memories.

  Is he lying about making adjustments to the drug post–Project Bluebird?

  Maybe. Is he really capable of testing the same drug that had caused three subjects to go lycan on another human being without making at least some small adjustments to the formula? If the answer’s no, then there’s still some vestige of the man Cole gave his body to so recklessly and frequently.

  If the answer’s yes, then he’s a straight-up monster and Cole should have him shot down where he stands.

  Yeah, but Zypraxon, though. If it’s working now . . .

  “I don’t trust you,” is all Cole can manage.

  “On this particular matter, you should. I never would have asked for this meeting if I didn’t have something to hold over you, and you know it.”

  “When did you adjust the formula?”

  “After I left.”

  “And after you killed your first woman?”

  Dylan just stares at him.

  “You didn’t make any adjustments before you tested it on Charlotte Rowe?”

  “Like I said, I had a different theory.”

  “You were counting on her to have a different brain?”

  Dylan just stares at him.

  Shoot him, Cole thinks. Shoot him right now. Anyone who could give that pill to an unsuspecting person after watching someone tear themselves apart—

  “It works, Cole,” Dylan whispers, as if he can read Cole’s thoughts. “I was right. It works. And whether you can admit or not, you want to know why. You have to know. We both do.”

  After a deep but quiet breath, Dylan continues. “No amount of social progress will ever change the average difference in physical strength between the genders. It must be leveled with biochemistry. And until it is, the most persistent and insidious crimes in our society will continue day in and day out, across the globe.”

  “And your mother will still be dead,” Cole says.

  “Yes, and cheap pop psychology will still be incapable of distracting me from my goals.”

  “We’re in agreement there.”

  “Activate The Consortium, Cole. Enlist their surveillance technologies. Hell, they could use it as a chance to test something new of theirs. But if you tell them the truth, if you tell them everything I’ve told you and you show them
the video, they’ll see the potential. They’ll see we can’t miss a minute of this. This is everything we’ve been working toward.”

  Is this all aging is? Cole wonders. The discovery that a lapse in judgment like the one he showed with Dylan could have a lasting ripple effect?

  Or is he just blaming Dylan for the fact there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to give up on Project Bluebird, either?

  These are private thoughts. Not to be even mulled over in Dylan’s presence. God knows, the man’s smart enough to detect them and use them to his advantage, no matter how silent Cole remains.

  Cole starts to leave.

  “My guess is she’s in a town called Altamira,” Dylan says, “just south of Big Sur, west of the 101 freeway in the adjacent valley.”

  This news stops Cole in his tracks, which he’s pretty sure was Dylan’s intention. “So you don’t need us to find her.”

  “She’ll use Zypraxon again. Mark my words. And when she does, that’s when we convince her to come in for testing, and that’s when you get those vials of paradrenaline you’ve always been after.”

  “And if I just bring her in now and get whatever I want from her?”

  “You won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not me.”

  “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “She’s had one successful run. On the third or fourth, she could go lycan, just like the others. There’s no telling. Better to hang back and see how she performs. See if she’s worth tipping your hand to. Because if she’s not and you bring her in and reveal everything we’ve done, there’s only one way to be rid of her, and you’re not very good at letting people die.”

  “Some people call it murder.”

  Dylan doesn’t answer.

  Cole can feel surrender in his bones, can feel it relaxing his limbs and his posture, and possibly his face, before he can stop it, which gives him no choice but to continue past Dylan and start for the helicopter. The engine chugs as the rotary blades begin to spin.

  “Cole?”

  He turns.

  “It’s good to be working with you again,” Dylan says.