But Parker couldn’t crack the wall Mom had put up around herself, and it was killing him. Mom’s rejection wasn’t personal, though. At least, that was what I told myself. But she didn’t like people to get too close anymore. Every day she seemed to fold more tightly into herself, growing smaller and smaller, as though she were still being crushed under that fallen building.
“I’ll wait in the car.” Parker avoided my eyes as he walked past me, but I saw they were wet, and I felt emotion close my throat.
When he was gone, I went to Mom. I wanted to hug her, too, even though I knew she would be as rigid and unresponsive as a twist of wood. But more than that, I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her and demand she come back to us. We needed her.
My eyes strayed to the TV. On screen, the camera panned back, revealing the stage. Several identically dressed teenagers—the boys wearing crisp white shirts and white slacks, the girls in long white dresses—flanked Prophet on each side. Two of them were twins, a boy and a girl, with white-blond hair a shade more ivory than Prophet’s; both so tall and thin, they looked like they’d been stretched. Prophet’s entourage of adopted children. His Twelve Apostles, he called them, though I only counted eleven on stage with him.
Considering how Prophet had managed to brainwash millions of people into believing he was not just a man named Prophet, not just a prophet, but the prophet God had chosen to let us know the world was about over, I didn’t want to imagine the conditioning that went on in the privacy of the man’s home.
“He’s out there again…watching the house,” Mom said urgently. “The boy. Look.”
I bent to squint through the blinds into the bright sunlight. People passed by on the sidewalk, wandering aimlessly. The Displaced. Those whose homes had been destroyed by the earthquake. But I didn’t see any boy watching the house.
“What does he want?” Mom asked. Her hand fluttered to her face; fingers traced the knotted line of a jagged pink scar along her jaw.
“I don’t know,” I told her, hearing the despair in my voice, thick as an accent.
Her voice shook. “Everything is coming apart, and Prophet says things are only going to get worse. He knows what’s coming, Mia. God speaks to him.”
God. Oh, God, God, God. I was sick of hearing about God, maybe because I hadn’t heard much about him (or her, or it) since Mom’s mom—our fanatically God-fearing, Bible-thumping grandma—passed away a couple years ago. After that, Mom was free to stop pretending she bought into Grandma’s fire and brimstone theology. Grandma went to the grave thinking her daughter would someday join her in fluffy white-cloud heaven, instead of plummeting straight to hell, where my father was roasting on a spit with the rest of the unbelievers.
Mom always claimed she was firmly agnostic despite her extreme evangelical upbringing. She didn’t believe in anything in particular, and she was perfectly content to wait until she died to find out the real deal. I figured her obsession with Prophet was a phase born out of desperation, like people on an airplane who start praying when they go through a nasty bit of turbulence.
I touched Mom’s shoulder. It was a hard, protruding angle. She was nothing but bones under her bathrobe.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I told her, even though the words had lost their meaning from too frequent use. I was always saying them to someone now, to Mom, to Parker, or to myself.
“Be careful out there,” Mom said, touching me briefly on my gloved hand before pulling away. “Take care of your brother.”
“I will.” I turned to go, and Prophet whispered over my shoulder, like he was standing right behind me. “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”
“The time is coming,” Prophet said. “The end is coming.”
Was he going to throw up or would he be able to type? James Cutlass wasn’t quite sure.
TEST REPORT: MORS compound
January 14, 2024
Dr. James Cutlass, assistant to Dr. Elizabeth Massey
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Jesus Christ, he was quaking in his seat. His hands shaking. Just typing in the header put him back there in the steel-colored observation chamber, flooded with light from the bright, white test room.
James needed to write the report. They wanted it two Fridays ago. Hell, they wanted it the day after it all happened. But James had spent that day in his room with the covers pulled over his head like a four-year-old.
He needed to write the report and get it in by five o’clock and it was four o’clock now and to make it all worse Brayden and his friends were down in the rec room, shooting pool.
James wiped the back of his hand over his eyes. It wasn’t cool to cry, when your seventeen-year-old son was entertaining. Had some pretty girls down there too. It was never cool to cry in front of pretty girls.
All right, it was just a test report. Like one of the many, many he’d written up in the past. Except that this time a copy of his observations had been requested by the CIA. And this time, several of the test subjects were dead.
There, then, start at the beginning.
After extensive testing on other primates, Dr. Massey and department head Dr. Savic decided that testing on human subjects was a necessary step to demonstrate the strength of the compound to Colonel Davidson, General Green, and General Montez, in order to receive permission to begin experiments with storage and release mechanisms.
How could he type when the godforsaken music was so ever-loving loud? If music is even what you’d call it. Screaming to a beat? Grunting in time?
James crossed out into the hallway and opened the basement door. If it was beer he smelled, he ignored it.
“Bray!” James shouted. “Turn it down.”
“Sure, Pops!” his son called.
James cocked his head. The music didn’t go down. Not a bit.
“Now!” he hollered.
Then it dipped.
It had to be 100 percent rage now to get any response from his son at all. Brayden just lolled around, talking back and exuding attitude, until yelled at. They didn’t even bother talking to him in a low voice—it was yell or nothing with Brayden.
Susan had given herself nodes on her vocal chords and would need surgery eventually. Just from “communicating” with their son.
If he could do it again, no kid. And probably a different career. Why hadn’t he taken the gig at Merck? Anti-obesity was where the money was. Why wasn’t he where the money was? Why was he in Monument, Colorado?
Dr. Massey and Dr. Savic discussed the issue at length and decided that presenting all four subjects at the same time would make a more effective demonstration.
“It’ll knock their socks off,” Massey argued to Dr. Savic during the discussions leading up to the demonstration.
“I have no doubt about the strength of your presentation, Dr. Massey. But why risk any confusion by showing the reaction of all the blood types simultaneously. Why not show them one at a time?” Savic asked.
Dr. Janko Savic was a tall man—Serbian or Croatian, if there was a difference. He was cautious, humorless, and exacting. Just the qualities you’d expect to find in the head of USAMRIID, of course.
She waved his concern away.
“You separate them, it’s not nearly as effective a presentation. Not a tenth as impressive. What we want the brass to understand is how MORS affects a group of people. Not a series of individuals. All four at a time will really strike a graphic visual.”
“I have less concern for striking visuals than I have for the clarity of the demonstration.”
“Dr. Savic, with all due respect, do you want mass production funded or not?” Massey asked, her hands on her hips. She was notoriously combative and ambitious.
James had found it thrilling, at first, to be the assistant to a woman who cared not a shred about what people thought. She cared only for the success of M
ORS and her own rise in the lab. The thrill wore off a month or so later.
She went through a new assistant every four-point-eight months or so. James was a year and a half in, and he was going to stick it out until MORS was funded. There’d be a bonus then. And he deserved the bonus.
It had seemed like such a good idea at first—Monument. A small town in the foothills of a sunny, rocky forest preserve. Out of loud, ugly Manhattan where the snow turned gray the moment it hit the ground and even the moon hung smutty in the sky.
Brayden was flourishing here. Back in the city he’d been on the fringe—heavy into gaming and basically living online. Here he was on the football team and was with friends and girls at all times.
But every day James spent with Massey took something out of him. Some measurement of optimism and goodness, it felt like. Susan didn’t see or didn’t care. The move had not got him out of the doghouse. James would never be out of the doghouse with Susan. She liked being married to an a-hole and an a-hole he would forever be, in her mind. If he wasn’t an a-hole, then some of her misery was her own fault.
“I want MORS to be funded. However, we can’t risk a repeat of the leak in 2021,” Savic insisted.
April 2021. The biological-warfare compound MORS had accidentally leaked into a test room during a rival scientist’s presentation. Massey and Savic had both been there. The rival scientist had died and Massey had lost her husband, a doctor who had been the cocreator of MORS, in the leak.
James felt that loss must have been what fueled Massey’s determination to see MORS make it into production. She had to have some deep psychological attachment to the outcome. Otherwise…what was she?
“Of course not,” Massey said. “Least of all me. But that demonstration room was not properly prepared—”
And here Savic started to object, “Now just a moment—”
But Massey shouted over him, “For a class one biological-warfare compound and you know it!”
Her teeth were clenched. Dr. Savic’s knuckles were white on the handle of his cane. It was clear to James that she was going to win. It was also clear that neither of them had really recovered from the leak in 2021.
Massey took a deep breath and smiled her fakey smile. The one that was clearly an indicator of aggression and not affection.
“All I’m saying, Dr. Savic, is that the room was not sufficiently prepared to test MORS. If it had been, things might have gone more smoothly. Can we agree on that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
And so she put in her proposal for the demonstration to Colonel Davidson. It was highly unusual to test a warfare compound on human subjects. There were long months of paperwork and revised proposals and waiting. And planning.
Four test volunteers were recruited from the garrison at Fort Leavenworth. It is my understanding that each marine was offered a full pardon in return for his participation in the test.
He felt sick, thinking of her planning for the demonstration. The plans she shared with him with such excitement and flair—the bile was right there at the bottom of his throat.
They celebrated when they received permission to execute the demonstration. Massey sent Cha, her other assistant, out for a magnum of Dom Pérignon.
“The safety gel is what makes it safe,” she said, pacing with a glass of champagne. “At the first sign of trouble, we push a button and the gel floods the room, coating everyone—in three seconds, the compound is suspended and the air is clean. It will be fine. Of course, it will. We know the gel works on MORS. It’ll be fine.”
She was trying to convince James and Cha. Or trying to convince herself?
“We’ll aim for thirty seconds of exposure, but if there’s any trouble, I’ll signal you. If there’s any sign of trouble, we’ll kill the whole thing. Don’t you think it will be okay? I think it will be fine.”
“I think we might consider Dr. Savic’s suggestion to test the blood types separately,” James offered. “We still don’t know how fast we can expect to see a reaction from type AB.”
“Dr. Cutlass does raise a good point—” Dr. Cha interjected.
Massey started to pace, new ideas for the presentation streaming out. James got a notepad. He knew her well enough to reach for it automatically.
“We’ll have them strapped down, on those black padded testing beds, so they can’t move. Let’s put the subjects in white, too. It will look good against the dark padding.”
James wrote it all down.
“What if the O gets free?” he asked.
“From the restraints?”
“Dr. Massey, I think it could be possible. But then I’ve never seen the effect on a human subject.”
She had. In 2021. She and Savic and a retired general were the only ones who’d survived the leak.
“We’ll have an armed guard in the room. Just in case,” she conceded.
It would be safer to do them one at a time. Safer for the subjects, by far, and for whichever assistant she assigned to be in the test room. But he didn’t press it with Massey. It wasn’t that she didn’t welcome a good argument. It was that she hated cowards.
And he was afraid.
And if he hesitated, even for a second, she’d know it. And then she might make him be in there.
On the morning of the demonstration, I ran through a safety check with the head of the lab, Dr. Savic, and the lead lab engineer, Hans Longreman. Mr. Longreman assured us the test suite had been reinforced with silicone sealant and that the air filtration system was similarly reinforced.
We did a run-through of the release and gel spray down of the room. Mr. Longreman insisted that such a test was a waste of materials—that he had already tested it several times—but Dr. Savic insisted. He reminded Mr. Longreman that MORS is a substance of unknown strength and virulence. We ran the test and the foaming gel rained down and expanded almost immediately.
I was satisfied that the demonstration could be performed safely on the subjects.
Brayden and his music. It was back up again, shaking the floor. James took the baseball bat and pounded it down onto the carpet. He kept the bat by the door to the basement for this exact reason—to signal Brayden to turn down the noise.
When Massey picked the subjects from the files the warden at Leavenworth sent over, James helped. The warden had made the offer to all their lifers and all twelve of them volunteered. They all wanted out of The Castle, it seemed. But how could the inmates have known what they were getting themselves into?
Dr. Massey made the final decision, selecting them as if she were casting a play.
A giant brute for O. A guy who looked ethnic for AB—did she think he’d be more garrulous, somehow, because he looked like a gypsy? A regular-Joe-looking type B guy. For type A, a man whose skin was so white, he seemed like he might be an albino.
Dr. Savic looked over her selections. His sign-off was needed.
“This one,” he said, the type O brute on the screen of his tablet. “Why so big for the O?”
“I didn’t pick him for his size, per se,” Massey lied. “He just seemed more dignified, somehow, than the others. I thought it would provide a good contrast when he experiences the effects, that’s all.”
Savic grunted his assent, massaging the scar on his jaw with his good hand. James had noticed he did this often when discussing MORS.
“You don’t need to have a large man to show that type O becomes a monster,” Savic said. “MORS will do it to anyone.”
The way Savic looked at Massey made James’s scalp prickle.
James pushed away his coffee cup. The chalky film of cream shifted side to side in the cup, rocking back and forth. He didn’t need more coffee. Caffeine was the last thing he needed.
After an extensive briefing, Dr. Massey, Dr. Savic, Colonel Davidson, General Montez, General Green, and I entered the viewing room. Also in attendance were several aides.
Dr. Massey explained the goal of the presentation, and the test subjects were brought in by Dr. Cha.
Cha pleaded with Massey when she told him he was going to be the one in the room.
“You’ll wear full protective gear with an oxygen tank, for God’s sake,” Massey snapped.
“But why do you need me in there?” he asked. “I can bring the subjects in and strap them down and leave—”
“In case there’s some problem with the dispersal mechanism,” Massey insisted.
“Can you imagine how stupid we’d look if we get all the brass in the viewing room, the marines strapped down and pfffft—nothing happens?”
No, Cha had to be there, according to her.
James forced himself not to think of that photo pinned to Cha’s workstation. Wife. Twin sons. Toddlers with round faces and bashful smiles.
Cha, dressed in his suit, looking more like an astronaut than a person, led the marines in.
The four test subjects entered. They wore white medical scrubs. Short-sleeved. As Massey had requested.
Their hands were handcuffed but it wasn’t necessary for the demonstration.
Why were they cuffed? Why? Not because they were dangerous criminals who might escape at any moment—it was to trick the brass into thinking that the armed guard was there in case they tried to escape.
The armed guard, of course, was there to kill them in case the experiment spiraled out of control.
But Dr. Massey didn’t want to scare the brass into thinking that MORS was unsafe to even test, because she wanted them to fund it.
James felt anger rising in his chest. This would be the last time he would play the scene in his mind, he promised himself. Tomorrow he’d call the hypnotist from the commercial. His wife could scoff all she wanted. She hadn’t been there.
Against Cha in his suit and the guard in his suit, the marines looked very unprotected. Meek, even.
Well, not Gruin, the type O. He looked like Thor. A shaved-head Thor with SEMPER FI emblazoned on one arm.
Each subject wore their blood type in black paint stenciled on the chest of their medical scrubs. This was to aid the viewers in recognizing the effects of the compound.
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