Liquid Fear

by Nicholson, Scott

  “That’s the Christian’s burden. To carry the message and save people from the flames of hell.”

  Burchfield rolled one of the logs, and the sudden rush of oxygen caused the fire to roar. “Hell is right here, Wallace.”

  Forsyth rubbed the cold glass against his lips, relishing the numbness. How fortunate to be numbed. If Halcyon was half as good as liquor, then maybe there was hope for the world after all, especially as evil ideas crept toward the United States from every corner of the globe.

  “One in every eight American adults is on some kind of happy pill, Wallace,” Burchfield said. “Prozac, Xanax, Zoloft, so many drugs with the letters X and Z in them, all creating billions in drug profits.”

  “So Halcyon is a golden goose.”

  “It’s presented as a drug to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. I can already see the television ads, a grinning, all-American soldier returning home, sweeping up his kid in a slow-motion reunion. What doctor would have the balls to let even one vet walk out of a check-up without a prescription?”

  “You know how I feel about messing with people’s minds.”

  “Don’t play ‘holier than thou’ with me, Wallace. You’d like nothing more than to change people’s minds so they believe the right way. Hell, you’d practically consider it your sacred duty if you had the means.”

  Forsyth hadn’t considered the potential of influencing people’s emotional conditions so that they were more susceptible to God’s grace. He wasn’t sure if such manipulation would be sinful, but God surely wanted his servants battling for the greater good with whatever weapon was at hand. The Old Testament was a litany of war, genocide, and enslavement, violence and conquest made ethical and right. “You think Halcyon has that sort of widespread potential?”

  “This is a bait and switch,” Burchfield said. “Halcyon is a winner, to be sure, but it’s this rumored ‘fear drug’ I’m most interested in. But I can’t let anyone inside the Beltway know it. On the commercial front, imagine a low-level exposure to such a drug, one that left a certain population uneasy. Maybe something in the public water supply, or toward a targeted group like at a college or hospital. One would expect prescriptions of a drug like Halcyon to increase dramatically.”

  “And profits along with it.” The thought evoked the need for another sip of scotch.

  “But that’s only the beginning.” Burchfield spoke faster now, in that dynamic rhythm that kept members of both parties in line. “Think of the military applications. Can you imagine widespread exposure to a fear drug in a place already ripe for violence?”

  “What, you turn crazy-eyed terrorists another notch crazier? That doesn’t seem so smart.”

  “Fear and anger are the same thing when you get right down to it. If you can dose a sensitive area—say, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan—then the situation’s bound to escalate.”

  “So, while they’re busy killing each other, we send in the troops and play hero?” Forsyth said. “Another win for America?”

  “You’re too old-school, Wallace. You worry me sometimes. The real effect would be protracted war, because American troops would be among the victims exposed to the drug. Protracted war means conservative policies, a chance to consolidate power, and a good time for a hawk to run for the Oval Office.”

  “Damn, Daniel,” Forsyth said. “You’re more ambitious than I thought. And as ruthless as a rattlesnake in an Easter egg basket.”

  “This is good news for your people, too. Hit Muslim areas first, then we can start on Africa. It’s about time America discovered a moral imperative in all those countries where tribalism is leading to the slaughter of millions. Of course, Africa’s home to the next gold rush for natural resources. And after that, who knows? China’s booming but still vulnerable.”

  “And with so much war, trauma, and violence, Halcyon will become nearly universal,” Forsyth said. “I can see Halcyon doled out even before the trauma occurs. Just in case something bad happens. You owe it to your family to protect them from all the horrors of the world, right?”

  “It’s a world of possibilities, old friend. Christian relief agencies—government funded, of course—move in and help clean up the rubble, with a Bible in every box of rice, socks, and soap. Missionaries have been using that carrot-and-stick for centuries.”

  It wasn’t the way the Book of Revelations mapped out the final battle, but maybe it was metaphorically close enough. While Forsyth’s power in the capitol had declined, he was still a figure-head among fundamentalists and his support meant votes. But Forsyth needed a little more convincing, despite their long-time friendship. “But first you need to win the White House, or none of it matters.”

  “Right. And you know there’s a place for you in my administration. That’s why I want you as an ally in this.”

  Forsyth beamed. “I can side with Dr. Morgan and swing the bioethics council toward wider acceptance of mood-changing drugs.”

  “That would help lay some groundwork. The NSA and CIA are already snooping, but Halcyon will sail through the FDA hearings and go aboveboard. Protecting our vets is the right thing to do.”

  “More legislative tomfoolery’s been committed under the banner of ‘the right thing to do’ than every other reason put together.”

  “Because the right thing is never questioned or explained.”

  Forsyth was simultaneously intrigued and appalled. “And would you say inciting war is the right thing, Daniel? Using drugs to spread American ideals and influence?”

  “I’m a freedom fighter, Wallace. And I’ll use any weapon at hand.”

  Forsyth looked at his glass, wondering if Burchfield might have secured a liquid sample of the drug. He might right now be artificially subjected to deep forgetfulness. Or that other drug, which seemed to interest Burchfield even more.

  And what if I’m afraid? What if the Lord has called on me, and this is my test of faith? Do I take up the sword?

  All Forsyth could think was what he had thought before, that the devil was loose in the world and the forces of God were mightily outnumbered and had their backs against the wall.

  Burchfield waved the poker in the air like a conductor’s baton. “One other little detail about Millard Fillmore.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was raised a Presbyterian and married the daughter of a Baptist preacher. Yet later in life he became a Unitarian.”

  The Universalist Unitarian Church. The liberal mask of the anarchists, the ones who taught that every spiritual belief was valid and that individuality should be worshipped above all. A church that was actively eroding the country’s foundations and freedom.

  “I see what you mean,” Forsyth said. “Knowledge leads you away from God.”

  Burchfield leveled the poker, not in a threatening manner, but like an instructor drilling a point into a student. “And people with knowledge must be controlled or destroyed.”

  Forsyth smiled. Of course he’d join the battle. It was the right thing to do.

  He glanced at the crystal scotch decanter on the sideboard, wondering if he might have another before he left.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I’m not like that. Not anymore.

  Wendy’s hand shook. The pills rattled in the bottle.

  “It didn’t happen that way,” Alexis said. “Tell me it didn’t.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Wendy said. “We all remember it differently.”

  “Or not at all.”

  “Thank God you called me.”

  “Once I remembered, I had no choice.”

  Wendy looked around the confines of her off-campus apartment, still feeling vulnerable even with the doors locked. She’d learned that even inside—maybe especially inside—you still couldn’t escape yourself, your fears, your deepest impulses.

  Alexis was just as nervous. She leaned against Wendy’s drawing table and stared down at the drawing spread across it. Wendy had been working on charcoal sketch, a huddled human form suffocating in
shadows. She’d been driven, knowing a deeper message lurked beneath, but as always, art proved inadequate when it came to expressing the full breadth of human truth and lies.

  “Is it happening again?” Wendy asked.

  Alexis looked up with those ice-blue eyes that always projected a bright but cold intellect, but they both knew that blue was also the color of the hottest stars, the raging storm of a body consuming itself. They could hide their duplicity from the rest of the world, but the Monkey House survivors knew.

  “When did it kick in?” Wendy asked.

  “About an hour ago. I got dosed on the commons. It was in a crowd, when classes were changing, so I couldn’t tell who stuck me.”

  “And you found the pills waiting in your office?”

  “Whoever did it must have known my routine,” Alexis said.

  “You know who did it.”

  Wendy crossed the cluttered living room to check the locks again. After the separation, she’d taken a one-bedroom apartment within walking distance of campus. Neither she nor Roland had been able to afford the mortgage on their Chatham County farmhouse, and Wendy had always hated the half-hour commute to work. Now she longed for that remoteness and isolation.

  “I don’t think we have to worry about him getting in,” Alexis said. “He couldn’t be any more ‘in.’ He’s already got a back door to our brains.”

  “I’m at least a day ahead of you. So grant me a little extra paranoia.”

  “I know. I’m feeling it, too. I walked here because I didn’t trust myself to drive. It’s Briggs, all right.”

  Wendy paced, irritated by the stacks of framed canvases and the art screaming from the walls. She fought an urge to rip down the fruits of her dreams and talents, to stamp them on the floor.

  The works of colleagues also adorned her walls, ranging in style from surrealism and cubism to such postmodernist frenzy that it hadn’t yet acquired a label. Alexis’s arrival had originally comforted her, but now her friend was just another object fueling her claustrophobia and anxiety.

  “How long before we completely lose it?” Wendy asked.

  “How soon is now? How crazy is crazy?”

  “Jesus, Lex, you’re starting to freak me out, and I’m freaked out enough. You’re supposed to be the brains here. You know, that academic voice of reason?”

  Alexis sipped at the chamomile tea Wendy had made, a pitiful attempt at a calming antidote. “Sorry. In the trials, the window was eight hours, but it looks like Briggs has altered the formula.”

  “It’s time we called the cops. Or the attorney general. Somebody.”

  “Right. They take us in for observation and seize the Halcyon.” Alexis held up her own orange bottle, and Wendy realized they’d both been clutching their pills as if they were sacred talismans.

  “And we go all the way to the end of the cycle.”

  “An uninterrupted ride. And I don’t think we want to go there.”

  “Because you don’t come back.”

  “Just like Susan.”

  The name invoked a silence on the room that penetrated beyond the walls, as if the whole world were hushed and eavesdropping.

  “Besides,” Alexis continued, more quietly, though she, too, appeared to be trembling a little. “That might open the door to questions about what happened ten years ago, and none of us wants that.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Wendy said. “I’m an artist. I can do my thing just as well in prison or in an asylum.”

  “They take away your sharp things,” Alexis said, studying the drawing again. “You’ll be stuck finger painting with your own feces.”

  “Maybe Anita has the right idea. Take yourself out of the game before you lose.”

  Alexis crossed the room with such speed and ferocity that Wendy squealed in shock. Alexis gripped her wrists, right where the scars were, and squeezed hard enough to hurt. Alexis’s eyes were as mad and glittering as a lost, stormy sea.

  “Don’t you dare say that,” Alexis said. “Don’t you dare even think it.”

  Wendy nodded, unable to speak. Alexis had been the first to come up with the idea of dealing with Susan. In many ways, Alexis was a born leader, an Aries, with a forceful sense of justice and a practical approach that could border on pathological.

  But they all were sociopaths, each of the group members, and they would never know if they’d been born that way or made that way by Sebastian Briggs.

  It’s all her fault. She’s still jealous over Sebastian. Just like Roland.

  “Okay,” Wendy whispered, her pulse rate still elevated. “I’m back.”

  “How many pills do you have left?”

  “Three.”

  “Damn. I only have two left. Briggs started us all on different cycles. Do you recall getting bitten or stung, maybe a little pinch in a crowd?”

  “No, there was just the accident this morning I told you about.”

  “Maybe during the chaos somebody injected you.”

  Wendy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think that was to get the adrenalin going and kick-start the fear response.”

  “He must have synthesized a liquid form.” Alexis glanced out the window, where the solid brick buildings of academia in the distance suggested order and sanity. But the brick and ivy hid things that went on in the basements, where researchers sometimes took intellectual liberties in the interest of science.

  And other liberties as well, Wendy thought.

  “So we can’t go to the cops or the doctors,” Wendy said. “What about your Washington friends?”

  “You don’t have ‘friends’ in Washington. You have units of political capital.”

  “Your husband, then? Isn’t he in that business?”

  Alexis paused in her restless pacing. “I want to keep him out of it if I can. Something like this could ruin his career. Besides, he doesn’t know who he married, and I want to keep it that way.”

  “I think you’re a little more important to him than CRO.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “Lex, that’s the fear talking. It’s already getting to you. Don’t you see?”

  Alexis hugged herself. “You’re talking civilized logic, and this stuff is cooking away inside the lizard brain.”

  A buzzing sound erupted, and the noise was almost painful. Her anger flared. Taking a breath to focus, Wendy located her purse and pulled out her cell.

  “Who is it?” Alexis asked her.

  “I don’t recognize the number. Should I answer it?”

  Alexis shook her head. “We should limit outside stimuli as much as possible. If Briggs is playing with us, he’ll infect us any way he can. Because his fear drug needs triggers. Anger, trauma, fear, excitement. He’s learned our weaknesses and will hit us where it hurts.”

  Excitement. The way he touched me and inspired me…

  Wendy found that she couldn’t wait to see Briggs again. Maybe they’d finish what they had started.

  All of them. Everything.

  The phone quit buzzing after the seventh ring, and Wendy closed it. Alexis sat beside her on the couch, and they waited. For what, they didn’t know.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After Briggs withdrew the needle, the monkey man let out a final whimper and relaxed. Kleingarten also relaxed, although he was ready to pounce on the monkey man if he moved.

  But Kleingarten’s 210 pounds would smash the guy, who probably weighed 120 pounds soaking wet. His ribs showed and his hair was nearly solid white, which had helped fuel the illusion that he’d been an albino monkey.

  “Lot of strength for an old guy,” Kleingarten said, voice casual despite his hammering heart. He didn’t want the egghead to know he’d been rattled.

  “He’s not so old,” Briggs said. “He’s only thirty.”

  Kleingarten released the limp, shivering man and studied the doctor with a newfound interest. Briggs’s straight career had been derailed because he didn’t play by the rules, and Kleingarten could respect that.<
br />
  Hell, he himself had been a security guard making ten bucks an hour until he realized once they let you inside with the keys, the place was yours.

  CRO was another story. Corporations like that were nothing but smoke and mirrors, and on paper they looked legit, with their executives hanging around the White House and running charities to help ghetto kids buy shoes endorsed by basketball stars.

  But Kleingarten’s digging suggested they were in deep with the military and national security organizations, people not necessarily allied with the White House. One thing for sure, CRO probably didn’t want Briggs to make the front page for running some sort of Nazi funny farm.

  Which meant Kleingarten might have to double dip and see if CRO would pay him to keep an eye on Briggs as well as follow orders from Briggs.

  “Your bosses know about this?” he asked.

  “This is the part the bosses wouldn’t have the stomach for,” Briggs said. “And they wouldn’t understand it, anyway. Because they think they’re the bosses.”

  Kleingarten surveyed the far end of the building, where closets and storage units had been added sometime after the factory had closed. “How many other monkeys do you have back there?”

  “David is our only guest at the moment,” Briggs said. “But we hope to have more visitors soon.”

  “The ones I’ve been sending invitations to?”

  Briggs gave a distant smile. “We have plenty of room.”

  “You’re not one of those Looney Tunes types, are you?”

  “I work for a better tomorrow,” Briggs said. “Now, help me get him up.”

  Kleingarten hesitated. He’d already gone outside the job description to chase the thing he’d thought was a monkey, and here was the doc expecting him to haul cargo. What next, a shoeshine?

  Briggs must have read his mind. “Don’t worry, Mr. Drummond, there’s a bonus in it for you,” Briggs said, still using the false name Kleingarten had given him.

  Apparently the doc wasn’t as shrewd about background checks as he was about his research. Another reason to worry about him.