Project Pandora

by Aden Polydoros

  Then he shut the door.

  Sobbing, Elizabeth turned her head and pressed the side of her face against her pillow. She felt lost and betrayed by everyone around her, including the boy she had thought she loved.

  As she blinked stinging tears from her eyes, she noticed an object on the nightstand. The stuffed panther regarded her with dead, plastic eyes.

  She remembered how he had let her borrow his jacket and shared cheesecake with her. That day at the National Zoo seemed like a lifetime ago. How could things have gone wrong so fast?

  Case Notes 30:

  Apollo

  The phone rang.

  As Shannon looked toward the dresser and lurched to her feet, Tyler was already rushing forward. He snatched the cell phone up and opened it.

  Instead of answering the call, he gripped the phone with both hands and snapped it at the hinge. In spite of the device’s cheap design, it resisted. He gave a twisting jerk to break the plastic.

  Even with the screen completely separated from the keyboard and the halves connected only by a thin green wire, he wasn’t finished yet. He yanked until the wire snapped then threw the pieces to the floor.

  As he stomped on the phone, Shannon eased into a sitting position. It made him feel a little better to destroy the phone and imagine rearranging Zeus’s face in the same brutal fashion with which he’d scrambled the device’s plastic and metal guts. Breaking bone. Busting teeth in. Tearing out the tongue that had blasphemed human dignity and morality. Completely reshaping the facial features and scrambling the brain, crushing the brain, crushing the skull in with his foot.

  He had never been a violent boy, even with his dreams of one day joining the armed forces. He had never relished the thought of fighting another simply for the sake of hurting them. Maybe that was the reason he was so drawn to the military and all that it represented: order, brotherhood, protecting the defenseless.

  Yet even so, he enjoyed the thought of hurting Zeus. At that very moment, if Tyler could’ve killed him, he would’ve done it in an instant.

  Finally, satisfied with the pile of broken machinery, he said, “That wasn’t your actual phone, right?” He didn’t know anyone who still carried a phone like that, but there was a first for everything.

  “No.” Shannon shook her head and brushed her hair out of her face. She gathered it over her shoulder in a long auburn rope and began plaiting it.

  “Good.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking. “Do you remember Zeus?”

  “No, I’ve never met him. I mean, I don’t think I have. I only know his voice.” As she reached the end of the braid, she untwined the loose strands and continued from the beginning. Knitting then unwinding, over and over.

  Tyler understood her need to distract herself. He felt just about ready to jump out of his skin. If the dimensions of the room had permitted it, he would have paced. Instead, he just shifted his weight from foot to foot, thinking.

  “Do you have any idea who he is or where he could be?” he asked.

  Again, Shannon shook her head, looking dismayed. Looking more than dismayed, actually, now that Tyler took another glance at her. Her clouded eyes stared right through him. Her lips were slightly parted, her face slack and pale.

  “Let it go,” he murmured again. Like before, the words were spoken as much for his own benefit as for hers. He knew she would never be able to put what she had done behind her, and neither would he. It would be a blight that hung over them for the rest of their lives, however long that might be. All things considered, if they didn’t stop Zeus, they probably wouldn’t last the week.

  She shook her head for a third time, not as a response but in vague disbelief. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” It was a denial repeated ad nauseam, as much a coping mechanism as the smooth, deft motion of her fingers through her hair.

  Tyler knew it was unfair to expect her to adjust so quickly to such bleak circumstances. He had also resisted the thought that someone, whose face and name he either didn’t know or couldn’t remember, was controlling him.

  As she stopped braiding her hair and pressed her hands against her face, he walked over to her bed. He sat down beside her, the bedsprings squealing.

  He detested feeling so imprisoned by circumstance, like a rat in a trap. His cage wasn’t one of wire or steel; although just as confining as those, it was a prison of bone, blood, and brain matter. No matter what he did, no matter how far he went, he couldn’t escape from himself.

  “It’s okay,” he murmured, placing a hand upon her upper back. She stiffened under his touch, and for a moment he considered pulling away. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. Just as he began to withdraw his arm, she leaned into him, as timid as a deer, as though afraid that he might hurt her. Or that she might hurt him.

  It stunned him how they both had the capacity for violence. The capacity for murder. Like a virus or a weed, homicidal urges could grow when given the proper conditions to prosper.

  For the first time, Tyler wondered if it had always been this way, in everyone. Was the will to kill a natural part of being human? Was any hope for peace unobtainable?

  “It’ll be okay,” Tyler said, entwining his arm around her in a gentle hug. “We’ll deal with this together. We’re going to be okay.”

  Underneath her clothes, she was all heat and hard edges. Her sinewy muscles were as tight and rigid as steel cords under taut silk.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Shannon mumbled, pressing her face against his shoulder. “I just… I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not alone. We’ll get through this together.”

  His words seemed to open the floodgates for her. She began to sob. The sounds came from deep inside of her and tore away at him.

  They sat like that for minutes, holding each other.

  Tyler wanted to cry for the death of innocence and the knowledge that no matter the outcome, life would never be the same for the people whose lives he had ended and for himself. His eyes ached with tension behind the sockets and his brain throbbed sickeningly against the confines of his skull, and still, the tears just wouldn’t come.

  He felt numb inside. Dead, even.

  There was no going back. He had already passed the threshold. That door was closed. Sooner or later, he would be swept away by the tide of fate, that tsunami called Zeus. Whether he would drown in it or resurface, triumphant, only time would tell.

  “I feel better now,” Shannon said after pulling away from him. She kept wiping her eyes and nose with the front of her shirt, but the tears had slowed to a trickle. Her voice was hoarse and oddly keyed, with stress placed on the wrong syllables. She smiled, but barely. “Thanks for…for that.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Looking at her, he wondered if she would have preferred not to escape from her programming. Would he have, if given the choice?

  Thinking back to the events of the last twenty-four hours, he couldn’t decide. Was it better to dream of killing someone than to find out you actually did murder them? Was it better to keep murdering than to face the consequences and reality of your actions?

  “How could this happen?” Shannon muttered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, how could we just be so…so manipulated?”

  He wished he had an answer for her. He also wished she would stop asking him so many questions.

  “What are we going to do?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Right up there along with why did bad things happen? Why did God taint the gift of life with the curses of pestilence, war, famine, and death? How could there be a God in the first place when things like this happened and kept on happening?

  He just didn’t know.

  Case Notes 31:

  Hades

  After leaving Elizabeth’s room, Hades returned to the basement. He took the stairs this time instead of the elevator, preferring the steep descent to that confining box. He paused at the roo
m of the boy he had seen the night before, who had reminded him of himself.

  The boy lay motionless on the mattress, restrained by the same kind of canvas straps that bound Elizabeth’s arms and legs. A sack of saline solution hung from a rack next to his bed. The only sounds were a heart monitor’s steady beeping and the death rattle of an aging air conditioner.

  “Are you awake?” Hades asked, stepping into the room.

  The boy’s entire head was engulfed by what resembled a motorcycle helmet. As Hades took a closer look, he saw the visor had been covered in matte paint, blocking out all light. A temporary alternative to the deprivation tank.

  He approached the bed and lifted the helmet from the boy’s face. Black foam inserts allowed for a tighter fit. A deep voice whispered from tiny speakers nestled inside the foam shell. The volume was too low for Hades to discern the individual words, but he had a good idea of what was being said.

  The boy had brown hair that in the dimness might have been mistaken for black. He looked young, maybe thirteen at the oldest. His eyes were just slits, the pupils so dilated that Hades couldn’t tell what his eye color was. Drool oozed from a corner of his mouth.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The boy was too doped up to respond. His face was thin and androgynous. Frail. Innocent.

  “What subset were you in at the Academy?”

  Silence.

  Was he a failure or a success?

  Staring at the boy’s delicate features, Hades felt a sudden irrational urge to tear out the microphones in the helmet, remove the IV, and loosen the bonds from around the boy’s arms and legs.

  As he reached for the buckle, he regained himself and lowered his hand.

  Why should he be the one to help this boy? Whoever the kid was, he deserved to suffer just as Hades had suffered. It wasn’t fair otherwise. Hades had been meant for greatness, but this boy was probably just a failure, deserving of his fate.

  Why should I save him when nobody saved me?

  He slid the helmet back over the boy’s head and left him there. He returned to the room that contained the sensory deprivation tank and this time shut the door behind him.

  Although he felt no compulsion to save the nameless boy in the other room, Elizabeth was a different story entirely. She belonged to him, always had. He would die before he allowed her to be taken from him once again.

  His gaze lifted to the medical cabinet where Dimitri kept drugs. It was only a matter of time before Elizabeth was brought to this room and pumped full of the same pharmaceutical cocktail that he had been administered. Maybe she would lose herself to the darkness. Maybe the thing inside the tank would devour her, just as it had gnawed away at him all these years.

  He stood and went to the cabinet. There was a combination lock on the door, but the bolt had been left disengaged. He opened the cabinet and stared at the wide array of ampoules and tiny glass bottles, wondering which drug Dimitri would use on her. There were so many.

  He started with the dissociative drugs. He drew the liquid from the bottles using a syringe, emptied it into the sink, and replaced it with saline solution. By using a large bore needle, the entire process took forty seconds per bottle. Between drugs, he cleaned the syringe’s chamber with saline from a different container to prevent contamination. As he worked, he periodically glanced at the clock and the door, listening for approaching footsteps.

  He didn’t tamper with the anesthetics or muscle relaxants. Dimitri used those drugs for electroconvulsive therapy, and the last thing Hades wanted was for Elizabeth to be conscious during that. Maybe he could break the machine later.

  After confiscating Dimitri’s entire stockpile of psychotropic substances, Hades returned the bottles to their rightful positions. He buried the empty saline containers and needle wrappers at the bottom of the wastebasket and tossed the used syringe into the sharps bin. Just as he stepped away from the cabinet, the door to the room opened and Dimitri walked in, grinding his teeth in ill-concealed anger.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Dimitri growled. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I was looking for my phone,” he said.

  Dimitri narrowed his eyes as if he thought the eight hours in the tank had waterlogged Hades’s brain. “I disposed of your old phone. Your new one’s in your room. But first come with me. There’s something I need you to do.”

  Hades followed him upstairs and into the study on the first floor. As soon as he stepped inside, Dimitri locked the door behind them. Then he went to the windows and shut the drapes, yanking at the cloth so hard the rings rattled along the drapery rod.

  “Artemis isn’t picking up her cell phone,” Dimitri said, turning around again.

  Hades never really understood why Dimitri had given them all code names. He had always figured it would be so much easier just to refer to them by their numbers.

  “I need you to check on her,” Dimitri said and went to his desk.

  “Why can’t her placements?”

  “They’re not home,” he said, rummaging through the desk drawers. “Besides, if she has begun deviating from the program, I want you to take care of her.”

  Take care of her. The meaning of those four words became clear as Dimitri pulled out a holster designed to be worn inside the waistband, a suppressor, and a loaded pistol.

  “These will do,” he said, laying them on the blotter pad.

  Hades stared at the gun. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about killing Artemis. He had fun when they went on missions together, but it wasn’t like they were friends or anything. Besides, it was her fault he had gotten punished. If she hadn’t been such a lousy shot and let Apollo escape, he never would have gone back into the tank.

  “Well?” Dimitri asked and lifted his eyebrows. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t think I’m able to drive yet,” he said, and that was the truth. His coordination was still a bit off, and he didn’t feel entirely like himself anymore. “You should send one of Mr. Warren’s men.”

  “I can’t!” Dimitri snarled, slamming his hands on the desk. “Charles can’t find out about this, Hades, do you understand? Not a word of it! He thinks there’s a conspiracy against him, that the Project’s being sabotaged! He’s already started cleaning house, and if he suspects any modicum of dissidence or incompetence, I’ll end up like John. Now go, hurry, there’s a meeting tonight that you’ll need to be present at.”

  “Another demonstration of my obedience?” he asked dully, picking up the handgun. Out of habit, he ejected the magazine and checked that it was loaded.

  As Hades attached the holster to his belt, Dimitri paced about, muttering to himself. “This can’t be happening. Charles knows I’m loyal to the cause. Does that imbecile even realize how hard it is to wipe a person’s personality? Can he even fathom how much work I’ve put into this? John was right. Charles needs to go. He’s the one who’s incompetent.”

  He tuned Dimitri out after that. He didn’t care much about Dimitri’s little crisis or what happened to the man. He felt nothing toward him now, just numbness.

  As Hades stepped out of the study, Dimitri turned to the window, shaking his head in dismay. “I can’t believe this. Damn him. Good Lord, this just can’t be happening. Brazil. Maybe I should go to Brazil.”

  Before going to his bedroom, Hades stopped at Elizabeth’s room. She glowered at him as he entered.

  “Let me—”

  He cut her off before she could finish. “I don’t have a lot of time, so you’re going to have to be quiet and listen very carefully to what I’m about to say, because I’m not going to repeat myself.”

  “Don’t tell me to be quiet.”

  “He’s going to take you to the tank soon.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The what?”

  “The place you probably dream about,” he said, “where there’s just darkness crushing you. He’ll drug you. He’ll make you forget me again, and I can’t have that. Now, I’ve replaced most of the d
rugs with saline, but I don’t know for sure if he’ll use those or other ones. If he does use the saline, you’ll need to act…”

  How the hell was he supposed to explain how she should act? He wasn’t even sure how he acted when drugged.

  “You’ll need to pretend to be a zombie,” he said. “Don’t fight him, no matter what he does. If he tries to undress you or help you into the tank, let him. I think this will be a shorter session, just a preliminary, so you won’t be catheterized. There won’t be any pre-op. And don’t run away. The dogs will still attack you if he orders them to.”

  “Hades, just untie me,” she said softly. “We can run away. I didn’t mean what I said earlier. I don’t hate you.”

  “Two.” Hades tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t fake it for her. “If you had called me Two just now, I might have believed you. But you didn’t, and so I can’t. We’ll talk more later, when I get back. I need to go now.”

  “Two, don’t go!”

  “Good-bye,” he said and walked out. She called his name once more, but he closed the door, cutting her off mid-shout.

  He lingered at the safe house only long enough to retrieve his new cell phone and change into his jacket and boots. As he secured his ankle sheath and slipped a knife inside it, he thought about Elizabeth’s plea. We can run away. As if he didn’t know he was one of the people she wanted to run away from. She would betray him the moment he let her out of his grasp. He needed her to remember, then they could run away together.

  Except you’ll never be able to run away from them, a mocking voice inside of him said. You’ll belong to them forever. Their dog.

  Even when he stepped into the downpour, he couldn’t drown out that lingering voice. It wasn’t his. It was his. It was the voice of the boy who had died two years ago so Hades could be born.

  A-02.

  As he maneuvered the motorcycle through sheets of pounding rain, he struggled to shake off his remnant confusion. Enough time had passed that the drugs had left his system, but he still felt disoriented and slightly detached from himself.