Project Pandora

by Aden Polydoros

  (Slight fluctuation in blood pressure and heart rate. No notable signs of sexual arousal.)

  DK: Well, this is new. This picture does nothing for you? What about this next one?

  A-02: Dead. (:04 pause) I’m dead, aren’t I?

  DK: Please elaborate.

  A-02: I don’t feel. I don’t feel anything. What’s happening to me?

  (Increased function in amygdala, heart rate is 60 BPM, blood pressure at 118/80. Let the record show that the subject has begun to strain against his restraints.)

  DK: Calm down, Hades.

  A-02: What did you do to me?

  DK: Let’s look at the next photo, shall we?

  A-02: You’ve killed me, you bastard.

  DK: No, Hades, I’m afraid you’re still alive.

  A-02: I hate you.

  DK: I know.

  A-02: I hate you so much. I will kill you. Someday, I’ll kill you.

  DK: Someday, you’ll feel differently, Hades. Over the next few months, I think you’ll find yourself changing in ways you’ve never imagined.

  Final verdict: no sign of deterioration in his tactical training or motor skills from ECT. Treatment has proved successful in repressing his memories of Persephone, but his memory of the Academy remains intact, more or less. He has forgotten some of his Russian and Mandarin, but it is too soon to say whether this memory loss is permanent or temporary. It’s unfortunate, because his language skills would have come in handy for espionage. But for the time being, his rebellious attitude is my main concern. I must destroy his pride and dignity. Hades must be taught that he is a weapon, not a person.

  I look forward to the day when he is broken completely.

  Case Notes 19:

  Hades

  Hades tore through the night like a falling star, shooting in and out of traffic at eighty miles per hour with little regard for his own safety.

  After leaving the school, he had changed into the clothing stashed in his motorcycle’s top case, but his shirt and field jacket did little to protect him from the elements. The blustering wind gnawed through the layers of fabric and settled deep inside him as a cold, destructive rage he couldn’t seem to shake.

  He passed warmly lit houses and wished they would burn to the ground. He wanted to see the whole world collapse until he and Elizabeth were the only ones left standing. Everyone but her could die.

  Even as he left affluent suburbia behind for untamed forest, he was unable to escape from the hatred and anguish that roared around inside him. Like a natural disaster, it was only a matter of time before the emotions tore him apart entirely, leaving him devastated and utterly alone once again.

  When the resentment became unbearable, he found himself grinding down on the throttle, accelerating from eighty to one hundred and twenty miles per hour in seconds, then climbing even higher still. The forest on either side of him faded into a black blur, and he had the strangest notion that this was what the world truly looked like. This formless, dark, howling chaos was what life really was, but nobody ever saw it.

  Even as he sped down the highway, he couldn’t get Elizabeth’s face out of his head or forget about the way she had screamed at the sight of his back. An overwhelming déjà vu descended on him, which only further stoked the rage inside him.

  I know her. I don’t know her. I know her. I don’t know her.

  His memories were gouged out and shattered. Only fragments remained. As for the first fifteen years of his life, there was almost nothing left at all. It was as if he had been born as an adolescent instead of an infant. And yet…

  I’ve heard her scream before.

  The scars on his back throbbed and burned. The deadened tissue ripped into the surrounding skin like a net of barbed wire, tearing him open from the inside out.

  His fingers curled around the handlebar. At first, it felt like chrome and rubber. Then it felt like an unyielding steel pole, and suddenly he had the impression of a vast, terrible presence looming over him, bearing down on him. The wind snapped against his back like the crack of a belt, and no matter how fast he went, he could not outrun it.

  “I need you, Nine,” a voice whispered. “Where are you?”

  With a jolt, Hades realized the voice was his own. He loosened his hold on the throttle, slowed, and pulled to a stop along the side of the road.

  “Nine,” he said aloud. The word sounded strange.

  There was no mental image to accompany the number. Just a deep black hole. That was all Nine represented: complete emptiness.

  He climbed off his bike and took off his helmet, staring into the dark forest. His phone rang in the motorcycle’s top case, but he ignored it. Wind rustled leaves, and tree branches swayed toward him as though beckoning.

  Sometimes, Hades wondered if he belonged in the wilderness, away from everyone else. He didn’t feel like a human anymore, and there were days he wondered if he had ever been human to begin with.

  He would have liked to undress and walk into the woods naked. He wanted the bramble to tear apart his skin and the stones to puncture his feet, turning the rage inside him into something physical. And if he couldn’t bleed, then someone else needed to bleed for him.

  Someone needed to suffer.

  His thoughts returned to what had occurred at the school and how Elizabeth had fainted at the sight of his back. He had caught her before she could hit the floor, and he’d tried to wake her as the other boy ran off. When that failed, he had carried her into the gymnasium and took her to a perplexed chaperone. He told the woman to call an ambulance for her and left before the woman could stop him.

  It had been the most rational decision, but still, he wanted to stay by her side as she slept. He wanted to see if she would look upon him with fear or love once she opened her eyes.

  “Elizabeth Hawthorne,” he whispered to himself. Normally, the sound of her full name pleased him, but tonight it struck him as wrong somehow, like a nickname he hadn’t grown accustomed to using. Or as if it weren’t a name at all.

  Why had he felt such a connection to her when he had seen her photograph in the newspaper? It went beyond the old adage of love at first sight, and instead was more like destiny, or something far stronger than that. Just being in her presence dredged up feelings he thought he didn’t possess.

  “Elizabeth,” he repeated, focusing on a slender birch. In the gloom, obscured as it was by moss and shrubbery, he could almost pretend the white trunk was a nude female figure. Elizabeth Hawthorne, waiting for him.

  He couldn’t tolerate the thought of losing her. They were meant to be together. They must be together. He was supposed to protect her.

  For so long, he had felt dead inside. She had awakened something inside him and brought it back. Maybe A-02. Maybe another ghost living inside him. He didn’t know. When the anger left, there was only emptiness that ached like an open wound. A hole that demanded to be filled.

  This isn’t real anyway, he thought, staring into the night. None of this is real, except for Elizabeth.

  But it still hurt so much, and the pain never went away. The only thing he could do was transfer it to someone else.

  A branch snapped deeper in the forest, drawing his attention. In the pale glow of his headlight, he saw a large amorphous shape free itself from the outer darkness.

  As the hulking black form lurched toward him, his heartbeat accelerated, not in fear but in exhilaration. He felt in the presence of a pagan god of the wilderness, a feral entity ready to initiate him into its midnight court.

  The shape drew closer. The motorcycle’s headlight gleamed off coarse black hair and an elongated muzzle, and stoked a fire in the creature’s beady eyes.

  A black bear. Or maybe just the shape of a black bear, the same way he was just the shape of a person.

  What lurked beneath its pelt?

  It wasn’t the first time he had seen a black bear in the wild, but he had never been so close to one before. And yet, he felt no terror, only awe and excitement.

  The
animal stopped, rose onto its hind legs, and regarded him. It was large, three hundred pounds easily. Its claws could rend his flesh better than any thorns the forest had to offer, tear him apart, spill him out, and leave him open to receive.

  This was fate.

  “Devour me,” Hades whispered, dropping his helmet. He took one step toward the bear, then another, staring into the beast’s eyes. His heart raced, and a hot, throbbing tension swelled in his core.

  He had killed others. What would it be like to be killed himself?

  If he died here, it would be fate. If he lived, it would be proof of everything he was destined to become.

  The bear uttered an odd, blustery sound like the wind. Maybe the bear was the wind.

  “Devour me!” he shouted as loudly as he could, spreading his arms to welcome the bear-that-was-not-a-bear. “Devour me! What are you waiting for? Devour me!”

  The beast dropped onto all fours and retreated, leaving a trail of crushed leaves and flattened shrubbery in its wake. Hades watched it go, trembling in excitement and an overwhelming sense of power.

  This was only confirmation: he was not a person. He was evolving into something more than that, exceeding humanity at the top of the apex.

  Seized by a rapturous ecstasy, he laughed aloud and wrapped his arms around himself. He reached under his shirt to touch his scars.

  They were his mark. His proof.

  As he stroked the cool, waxy lines of scar tissue, his muscles flexed beneath his palms.

  He was powerful.

  He was evolving, and each kill took him one step closer to being.

  “I am Hell,” he said and took the night’s silence as confirmation. “I am Hell, and she is mine.”

  Case Notes 20:

  Apollo

  Tyler didn’t head for the state border, as he’d thought he might, but instead found himself on a residential street lined with old but attractive houses. Even though the neighborhood was more than an hour’s drive from his house, and even though he couldn’t remember ever having come here, he recognized the area. He had been here before. Recently. With someone else.

  But who?

  He parked under a tree and just sat there.

  “How will it end?” he wondered, staring at the street ahead. Unlit houses. Inky expanses of grass and blacktop. It was hardly past ten, but there were so many dark, staring windows. The homes didn’t even feel like actual homes, just replicas on an abandoned movie set.

  There was a flashlight in a canvas tool kit stored in the glove box. He took it out.

  “How will it end?” Tyler whispered to himself.

  He got out of the car and walked down the sidewalk, through the amber pools of light cast by the streetlamps. He didn’t turn on the flashlight, didn’t need to. Darkness, for once, was his friend.

  He passed over a hopscotch pattern as faded and ghostly as prehistoric pictographs on cave walls. Dead leaves crunched under his sneakers as he passed through shadows that puddled like ink on the sidewalk. He walked past numerous homes. He didn’t know which house he was gravitating toward until he stopped in front of it.

  One story, coral-red walls. A ceramic giraffe kept vigil on the stoop.

  No cars were in the driveway and the windows were black. When he reached the concrete walkway, he hurried up it. He tried the front door and found it locked.

  Tyler ducked to the right. Keeping close to the wall, he crept around the side of the home, testing windows. He felt like a thief, although he had no intention of stealing anything. He had no intentions at all. Just vague intuitions.

  He wasn’t sure what waited for him inside the house. He didn’t know and didn’t really want to find out. But he was as much a victim to the apprehension that seized him as he was to the pull of fate or gravity. The weird feeling dragged him along the side of the house, past tulip beds and rosebushes.

  From its perch among the stars, the crescent moon grinned down at him like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, urging him forward. Trapped in the rose bramble, a scrap of crime scene tape fluttered loosely as he passed it.

  The backyard was fenced in by a six-foot-tall stucco wall. In the moonlight, it glowed like an ice sculpture. A padlock hung from the latch of the wrought-iron gate, but its bolt was disengaged. He removed the lock, opened the gate, and followed the gravel path along the side of the building.

  When he finished a complete circuit of the house and had still found no unlocked windows, he returned to the back door. He picked up a river rock from the irrigation border around the bushes.

  A part of him realized what he was doing was crazy, dangerous, illegal. He had to get away, to be anywhere but here.

  He ignored that inner voice in favor of a deeper intuition and smashed the rock into the French door. The rock shattered the night as quietly as it did the glass, with a soft, silvery clatter. No alarm went off. No voice called out from within.

  He stood and listened, just in case. Once he’d assured himself that nobody had heard him, he stuck his hand through the gaping glass hole, careful not to cut himself on the jagged edges. He fumbled with the latch until he heard a rewarding click, then pulled his hand back through the hole and opened the door.

  “We went through the door,” he whispered as he stepped inside. The house was as deserted as a mausoleum and seemed to demand the same respectful silence that one should observe when walking among the dead. He held his hand over the flashlight beam, softening its glow as he strode through the kitchen and into the hall.

  “We went through the front door because we had been given a key.”

  No, not we. He. He had been given instructions over the phone. A backpack had been left for him, and he picked it up at the specified dead drop. He hadn’t seen the man who dropped it off, if it had even been a man.

  Tyler entered the living room. “We went inside and waited. And when she came home…”

  Who was she? The woman. The woman whose influence he saw in the walls all around him. An heirloom quilt draped over the back of the sofa. Paintings of sunflowers and beech trees in winter. Little details she had selected mindfully that must have pleased her to look at.

  “When she came home, I pointed a gun at her, but I didn’t pull the trigger.”

  Who had come here with him?

  Tyler took a deep breath, struggling to resurrect a face from his memory. But the person’s features were just a blur. Blank. He was pretty sure his companion had dark hair. Brown or auburn, maybe darker.

  He left the living room and continued down the hall. There was something he needed to do here, and it was more than just to remember what he had done. But what?

  Feeling like a voyeur, he swept the flashlight over the books in the small study. The yellow beam stroked the stiff leather spines of medical tomes with names like Understanding the Effects of Sensory Deprivation, The Unconscious Mind, and Martin Young’s Guide to Psychiatric Medicine. The shelves were tightly packed, except for the third one. Like a row of posed dominos, the books had collapsed onto their sides.

  Something had been there. Leather-bound journals with inscriptions in blue ballpoint. Neat handwriting. Dates. Numbers. Jotted abbreviations.

  Before he had taken care of the woman, he had come here and retrieved them. But what had been inside them?

  He put a hand to his face, trying to recall something more substantial than just disjointed memories. “Come on,” he whispered, rubbing his eyes then his mouth. “What did they say?”

  Tyler sighed and leaned against the edge of the desk, set down the flashlight. He pressed his hands against his face. “Think. Come on. Think. Remember.”

  Just as he was about to scream in frustration, he heard a creak from outside and the rustling of bushes.

  He picked up the flashlight, turned it off, and eased away from the desk. He retreated to the bookshelves, taking care not to trip into anything. His heart pounded so hard he almost believed it could be heard through six inches of drywall and insulation.

  As the presen
ce passed along the side of the house, he lowered his hand to his waist. His fingers touched empty space. He hadn’t thought to bring the gun inside with him.

  How had Zeus found him? Was it possible that he was microchipped somehow or that a tracker had been hidden inside one of his belongings?

  No, it was too soon to say whether the person outside was a threat to him. For all he knew, the footsteps could belong to a concerned neighbor or a police officer.

  A door opened then closed. At the back of the house, floorboards groaned.

  Sweating profusely, heart racing, he stepped out of the room. He didn’t turn the flashlight on as he entered the hallway but relied on his adjusting vision to find his way.

  The person had entered from the back door, but now Tyler could hear them move around in other corners of the house. Another door creaked open, ever so softly, then eased shut.

  He hurried down the hall, heading toward the back door. Just as his hand closed around the handle, he heard footsteps behind him.

  As he threw open the door, a bullet tore through the drywall inches to his right. He leaped down the back steps and took off running, certain he would be shot at any moment.

  Footsteps pounded after him. In his panic, they seemed to duplicate, amplify, until he thought he was being chased by a crowd instead of a single person.

  As he neared the wall, Tyler dropped the flashlight, took a running jump, grabbed the edge of the wall with both hands, and then threw himself over. Seconds after he landed on the other side, gunshots exploded overhead. Three feet to his left, a slender pine tree shuddered, raining down needles, pulverized wood, and splintered bark.

  Gasping more out of terror than exertion, he made a sharp turn to the left. He had read somewhere that people tended to follow the direction of their dominant hands when they didn’t have a destination. He was surprised he was even able to strategize in such dire circumstances. If not for the immediate danger he was in, he might have patted himself on the back.

  As Tyler ran, he focused on his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The air whistled through his lungs, as sharp and cold as the blade of a scalpel. His heart pounded so loudly he could barely hear his labored breathing. The chasing footsteps were all but drowned out by the rush of blood in his ears.