Residue

by Steve Diamond

  “You’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what goes on under everyone’s noses. What would happen if Whyte could engineer even a dozen people like you and me? We would have a war on our hands, Jack. No joke.”

  “Let’s go get some food.”

  My suggestion managed to catch her off guard. “You can seriously think about food right now?”

  “I want some good Mexican food.” I stood. “I’ve seen the memories of murder victims, been inside the head of monster, watched you shoot a different monster to death, and ran three miles home. That was all today, Alex. Food is normal. I need normal right now.”

  “All right.” She smiled. “I can do normal. Let’s go get some Taco Bell or something, and then I’ll start giving you the basics on guns and stuff.”

  “Taco Bell?” I asked, confused. “Who said anything about Taco Bell?”

  “You said Mexican food.”

  “No…just…no.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The dream came more frequently now. Every time I closed my eyes to sleep, I was back in that forest. I’d wake up after not even close to rested.

  I relived it like I always did. From the dark of the forest, to the purple tracks I followed.

  I shot at the creature again, and then I spun around as I was attacked. Only this time I peered closer at the thing.

  How could I not have realized what I was dealing with? It all seemed so obvious to me now. The monster’s size. How when it bared its teeth, they were all pointed like a shark’s. It was the exact pattern of the wound I’d been able to see on Abby’s father. My grandfather’s memory wasn’t just some random one; it was of the Leech.

  Just like before, my hand came up glowing in purple light. I reached out and grabbed onto the Leech’s aura and squeezed. The creature squealed in pain, slammed my head against the tree again, then ran off into the forest.

  I went along for the ride as I staggered after the Leech. My grandfather was hurt, but he was also extremely determined. He wanted to catch this thing, and though I knew he eventually would, I was wondering how it would go down. I needed to know. I needed to know how I could do the same.

  But it wasn’t just that. The only other person that could possibly understand my situation was my grandfather, and he was dead. But he had been able to control his ability and hunt things like he was doing in this memory, so maybe by watching I would learn something.

  And then I wouldn’t feel so helpless.

  But nothing happened in the dream. I rode along in my grandfather’s body as he chased the monster through the forest. He stumbled frequently, but followed doggedly after the blood trail.

  I woke up in my bed, the clock reading 2:36am. I tossed and turned for an hour, but couldn’t get back to sleep. I finally turned on my light and pulled out my grandfather’s journals.

  It didn’t matter what I turned to, everything interested me. These writings were a window into the mind of a person I had never met, but with whom I had everything in common.

  Well, aside from the part about me freezing in a fight, and my grandfather going at it guns blazing. One passage grabbed my attention:

  Janison Whyte was finally fired today. It’s about time. Sure, the man is brilliant—we wouldn’t have been able to bond DNA at all without him. Sure he did us a lot of good. But he’s also reckless. I caught him injecting himself with DNA samples taken from one of those lizard men that live underground. He said it wouldn’t hurt him, that it was research. Said he could take that DNA and shift to resemble them. But I wasn’t having any of it. We don’t allow that kind of experimentation here.

  Weird. So Whyte used to work for Helix? And what did that whole ‘shifting’ thing mean?

  As interesting as everything was, I could find nothing about the Leech. I found theory on how to splice monsters together. Time-travel. Recipes for grilling steaks. But on the thing sucking out people’s souls? Nada.

  I sat back in my bed, frustrated. If nothing else, I could at least practice at putting up a wall in my mind. I closed my eyes and pictured a room. I shut the windows. The doors. Everything. Those were easy now. But every room has places where stuff can get in. A tiny gap where wall and window meet. Vents. Cracks in the walls. I filled them all as I found them, but for every one I closed, two more became noticeable.

  It was an annoying process, but no way was I going to quit. I’d already embarrassed myself enough the last little while. I didn’t know why, but I needed to show Alex I wasn’t sitting around doing nothing all day.

  I took a break—it was 7am now—and showered to try and wash away my exhaustion. I stood in front of the mirror wiping the layer of steam coating it. For a minute, I stared at the person gazing back at me in the reflection.

  Who was I?

  I certainly wasn’t the same kid my father had seen when he left that night to go investigate the trouble at Helix. That kid was gone. I had no interest in sitting down to play a video game. Reading? It would be nice, but I knew I’d only be thinking of the various journals I’d, well, liberated from Helix.

  I was stuck. Maybe I could watch a movie. Try and let my brain relax a bit. Old movies—all movies in general, really—were therapeutic. Maybe I’d be able to sit there, enjoying the dialog old movies are known for and just breathe.

  The movies triggered an idea.

  I finished drying off and pulled on a pair of flannel pants and a Foo Fighters t-shirt and went back to my room. From under my bed I pulled out the old duffle bag I’d used to take the journals and grabbed the two film-reels: “Field Tests” and “Discoveries”. I love my old movies, but I didn’t know jack about old reel-style movies.

  That’s what the internet is for.

  Browsing the interwebs told me I needed something to play the films. Obviously. It needed to have another reel to spool onto. Less obvious. The old diagrams didn’t help much without a projector. I did a quick Google search to see if there were any antique stores here in Calm Waters I’d somehow overlooked these past years. Nothin’.

  Maybe I could ask Alex to look at Helix for one. They had the film strips, so naturally they would have a machine to play one. I threw the thought out as soon as I had it. That would be suspicious if she was suddenly searching for a machine to play the type of film strips recently stolen. In fact, I had to be really careful who I asked at all. For all I knew Helix had people everywhere. And if what Alex had said about a blossoming corporate war between Helix and Whyte Genetics was true, Whyte could have people from Calm Waters in their pocket as well.

  This sucked. Unless my dad had a projector up in the attic…

  Huh. The attic. Probably the first place I should have looked. My dad was a pack-rat, never threw away anything.

  When I was a kid, I’d always been afraid of the attic. I think most kids have that irrational fear. Attics and basements. There’s just nothing good a kid can see in those two things. You’re either looking down some stairs into a dark and creepy basement, or you are looking up a pull-down ladder into a dark and creepy attic.

  Once you’ve seen Leech monsters, weird Hound-things and psychic visions of people’s corpses…well, an attic doesn’t hold much fear anymore. After all, what’s going to be up there? A bat? A raccoon?

  The last time I’d been up in the attic was years ago when I was searching for an old, vintage Star Wars Halloween costume my dad swore he had. Darth Vader, of course. I think I gave up looking after a few boxes. Again, attics used to be creepy.

  Sunlight peeked through the single window at the other end of the space. But morning sun and all, I could hardly see a thing. Too many boxes kept out too much light. My dad had at least installed some real lighting up here, so I flipped the switch on the wall right by the hatch.

  The boxes closest to me were the ones we used the most often. Our fake Christmas tree, lights, and ornaments. Tents and sleeping bags for camping in the summer months—no place better for camping than in Redwood National Park. I edged by and made my way towards the window where all t
he old boxes sat.

  An open box ahead blocked my way. It was marked “Mom”. Inside were photo albums and old VCR cassettes labeled with various old family gatherings from before I was born. The box didn’t have hardly any dust compared to the rest in this section of the attic. My dad must have been looking at these. He’d taken it harder than I when she left. She hadn’t given any reason I knew of. One day we’re having ice cream after a Little League game, the next she was out the door with a small suitcase. Hadn’t heard from her since. She hadn’t even really said goodbye to me.

  I was ten years old at the time. Old enough to understand, but young enough to get over it without serious mommy-issues. Her and my dad had been married for fifteen years. Fifteen. And she just leaves. I’d never even heard them argue. Not once. Crazy. I realized gazing into that box—not touching it—my dad hadn’t even attempted dating again. Maybe he still held out hope. Maybe that’s why he still came up here to reminisce.

  I held no illusions she would return. Honestly, I didn’t care much. It was her loss, not ours.

  I skirted around the box. I’d leave it for my dad to mess with when he got back. Seemed best to leave things as they were.

  I’d searched through half the boxes in the attic before uncovering a bulky object covered in a sheet. I yanked it off with a flourish, which in hindsight turned out to be a terrible decision. Dust flew into the air, choking me. I could hardly even see.

  When the air finally cleared, I was rewarded with an old but functional looking film projector. It took some doing, but I maneuvered it downstairs. Thankfully my aunt was still gone; otherwise this whole scenario would have been hard to explain. In the living room I pulled some pictures off one of the walls to give myself a clean, blank wall to use as a screen. The instructions I’d downloaded from the internet helped me get it going.

  So now the question was, which one did I watch first?

  “Field Tests” sounded more awesome than “Discoveries”, so I went that route.

  The picture flickered onto the wall. The first image on the screen was my grandfather’s giant face as he peered into the lens of the camera.

  “This thing on?” he asked. His voice was gruff, just like I expected from a guy named after Wyatt Earp. The sound was a little wobbly, but clear enough. “I swear we’ve been fiddling with it for the whole damn day. We’re an hour behi—what? It’s on? Swell.”

  He paced back in front of the camera, smoothed the front of his shirt and readjusted the holster around his waist. It made me wish I’d taken it from that Helix storage room.

  “Well. Today is the 18th of April, 1975. I’ve been instructed to begin recording the field tests of our sensitives.” He squinted at the camera. “Danny, are you sure this thing is working? I really don’t want to have to ask our people to work their magic twice. It’s taxing, and they need to be focusing on progress rather than showing off for whoever is going to see this blasted recording.”

  “It’s working, father,” came a voice from off camera. It was my dad’s voice, only younger. Just the sound of it made me smile. “You don’t need to worry.”

  “Anyway, as I was saying.” Wyatt quickly brushed at each side of his mustache with a knuckle. “We are going to field-test a few of our sensitives. The first will be pyrokinesis.”

  Huh. Pyrokinesis. This had a serious chance to be completely awesome. I leaned forward in anticipation.

  The camera shifted to a boy—at least twelve or thirteen from size alone—with hands shoved in his pockets. To his right, off in the distance was a series of straw people, each one a bit further than the prior one.

  “We found young Lawrence here after a fire storm in Nebraska,” my grandfather’s voice narrated. “He was curled up in a ball in the only part of the farm that hadn’t been reduced to ash. It was quite the mess, with the charred lumps we later identified as cows in the blast area surrounding his still form. When we measured, the burned area formed a perfect circle around him. Apparently his mother had just died after being kicked in the face by one of those cows. Lawrence here literally exploded into fire. For the record, he is seven years-old.”

  Big kid, I thought.

  “Lawrence,” Wyatt called, “go ahead and start with the closest.”

  The boy nodded, then snapped his fingers.

  The first straw person, nearly thirty feet away, burst instantly into flames. With each snap a figure was engulfed in orange fire, each further away than the last.

  I’ve seen these kind of videos before, and in fact when I went looking for information on ESP on the internet, I’d come across a number of videos showing how so-called psychics could game a video camera to make the viewer buy-in to the lie.

  As if reading my thoughts, I heard my grandfather yell, “OK, Lawrence. Give us the grand finale. We want to make sure people believe you.”

  Lawrence took a deep breath and held his hand out towards the flaming straw people. The fire instantly vanished from the dummies and appeared as a standing flame in his hand.

  Then he let the fire crawl up his arm. Then over his entire body. Soon Lawrence resembled the Human Torch. He began juggling fireballs.

  “Well-done Lawrence!” There was applause in the background. Obviously other people were in attendance. The boy clapped his hands together and the flames vanished.

  Of course, so had his clothes.

  “We need to develop some flame retardant clothes.” I heard my dad say. An aid of some sort ran out with a towel and covered the boy. Lawrence grinned like fool, and gave the camera a thumbs-up.

  My mouth hung open as they escorted the boy off-camera.

  A thirty-something year-old man wearing a faded-green Oakland Athletics baseball cap walked out to take his place. He was ridiculously tall, his dark hair sticking out from under the hat, and he sported a precise, black mustache.

  “Terry here was found at a circus,” Wyatt said. “He was their floating objects magic-act. Turns out his telekinesis was legitimate. Unfortunately, he is not able to levitate himself.”

  Terry appeared slightly bored as the still-smoldering dummies began to lift off the ground. They spun around his head faster and faster until they were a blur.

  “OK, Terry,” Wyatt shouted. “Three…two…one…go!”

  The dummies instantly froze in mid-air, then exploded in slow-motion. At first I thought something was wrong with the reel. But my dad commented on the film, and his speech normal speed. “He’s gained much more control these past few weeks.”

  The fragments of the straw dummies began slowly pulling together again, this time into the shape of a smiley face in the air. The crowd off-camera again clapped and laughed.

  “I think we are running out of film, Father,” my dad’s younger self said. “We maybe have a few more sec—”

  The film ended.

  Never before have I been so riveted by a film of any kind. It was insane. I got back to my feet and immediately pulled off the reel and followed my trusty internet instructions on how to rewind it so I could watch again. I was standing for the second watch-through, equally riveted.

  It’s one thing to know you have abilities most kids don’t. Heck, that most people don’t have. It’s amazing and terrifying at the same time. Suddenly a whole different world is visible, with new possibilities and infinitely more potential. But at the same time, with these new abilities came new horrors and a new pessimistic way of viewing things.

  I’m typically an optimistic person, but after everything I’d gone through these last few weeks, even I was having trouble keeping things light and fluffy.

  Part of me wanted to ponder the two examples of power I had witnessed and say, “Nice! I’m not alone. I should totally get together with these guys and make some real-life X-Men!” Then the other, more rapidly growing part of me, would scoff saying, “You think that hasn’t already been tried? Why do you think there is this growing conflict? Why do you think people are dying in your stupid, unimportant town? Control of these people, Jack. Con
trol. Money. Power. Imagine how things are going in bigger cities. Probably makes the death and number of lives destroyed here look like a joke.”

  It was brutal.

  As cool as the powers were these two people held, it was hard not to imagine the destruction they could cause.

  Of course, I wondered what kind of damage I could cause. As I’d found out with Barry, I could still read him like an open book. If things stayed this way, he would never be able to lie to me again. He’d never be able to hide his true intentions. While I’m a big believer in being honest, I understand sometimes people need to be able to keep things to themselves.

  I suppose that was the whole purpose of Helix making the Leech in the first place. In their paranoia they wanted to make sure they had someone—or something—that could tell with absolute certainty if a person spoke the truth. I shivered at the mental picture of the Leech’s teeth. Would I end up like that creature? Ruled by the hunger?

  The other question nagging at me was about this Project Sentinel the Insider had mentioned to me. I still hadn’t been able to find anything in the journals about it, but what would happen if Helix or Whyte Genetics found out about me? Or a more chilling thought:

  What if they already knew?

  There was no way to prove it short of walking up to Alex’s father, or to one of these Hounds saying, “Hey guys, you looking for me? Check out what I can do!” That didn’t seem like the most intelligent decision.

  But I couldn’t get the doubt out of my head.

  I glanced at the other film reel. After how crazy the first one had been, my expectations for the second one were insanely high. It was labeled “Discoveries” after all. How could it not be awesome?

  My stomach rumbled, so before starting the film, I heated up some left-over chicken my Aunt left in the fridge. I flipped a switch, and the movie began.

  I really hoped to see some more stuff like the two people showing off powers. But I wanted something different, as well.

  At first, that’s exactly what it looked like I was getting. It opened with the guy, Terry, sitting reclined in a chair. He was only wearing loose shorts—far shorter than they had any reason to be—while a doctor attached dozens of circular pads at various places on his body. Each pad had a thin wire running from it into a machine covered in hundreds of knobs and dozens of small screens.