The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  My eyes dart back to Rossi as she takes another step to the side. I can feel Max tense up as he tracks her with his eyes. Then two other figures step into the light, both with raised assault rifles.

  Black tactical gear covers their bodies and they move with perfect precision—operators whose careers are spent in the field hunting far deadlier prey than me. They’ll drop me the moment I cut Max’s throat. Maybe even before, taking him down, too.

  Max’s hands flash upward and seize my wrists, snapping the knife away and yanking my forearm from his throat. Rossi is on me a second later, tackling me to the ground.

  A struggle of silhouettes, shadows that kick and drive fists and elbows into my body.

  Thirty-One

  No need for an ambulance or car back to the lab. The two operators hand off their assault rifles to Max and simply carry me the few dozen meters to the garage door of the facility, already open like the mouth of a waiting python. Strong, these men; I can feel their muscles even through their many-pocketed tactical clothing blistered with equipment. I should be flattered that two of America’s best were put on the case of little Gwendolyn Bloom.

  They carry me horizontally, one of them with an arm looped around my chest just under the armpits, squeezing hard, and the other holding me by the legs. The pressure on my chest is asphyxiating me, making my vision tunnel out as if I’m seeing my surroundings through a white tube. With everything I have, I fight back, bucking against them, screaming, trying to sink my fingers into someone’s flesh. But with a dwindling supply of oxygen, everything I have isn’t much.

  We’re in the elevator, going down. We’re in the corridor, going straight. There is no purposeful brutality in the way the operators carry me. It’s what they’ve been trained to do, all function, no cruelty intended.

  Then I land on the floor and gasp, inhaling to the point of bursting. My vision returns quickly, and I see we’re in the hospital room, bright lights above, the air heavy with disinfectant that stings my eyes. Apparently, the two operators dropped me by mistake, because they’re looming over me again, reaching for me to hoist me back into the air.

  My hands flash forward, grab the nearest of the two by the front of his many-pocketed shirt, and yank him toward me. My teeth spike into the soft flesh of his cheek and suddenly I’m deaf from the sound of his scream. His body wrenches in a seizure and I shove him away in time to fire a bare foot into the stomach of the second operator. It’s a weak stab on my part, improvised and sloppy, but he was throwing all his weight into the effort of grabbing me, so it hits him hard, exploding his breath from his mouth as his body wraps around my leg. I redirect his momentum to the side, where he crashes into a stainless steel medical cart and sends instruments flying.

  These are, I’m sure, the only freebies I’ll get. They’d underestimated sickly, barefooted me, maybe even felt something like sympathy as they’d trundled me back into the lab. But that’s all over now. The face of the first operator is a mask of blood, but he’s on his feet as soon as I am, lunging toward me, driving an expert jab toward my chin. I sidestep it, knock his arm out of the way, drive a knee hard into his groin. As he buckles, I catch his chin in the palm of my hand and snap his head back, pitching his body into the wall behind him.

  Steel forceps and scalpels and round-tipped probes scratch on the concrete floor beneath the second operator’s boots. He’s using the hospital bed to pull himself up while his free hand draws a pistol from an ankle holster. The training from Orphan Camp, pounded into me as deeply as the instinct to breathe, doesn’t flinch or hesitate. I cross the room in two long strides, snatching up a scalpel from the floor as I go. My hand seizes the pistol and twists it away before the operator even finishes raising it. The blade of the scalpel slashes cleanly across his throat and he buckles to his knees.

  I take up the pistol and wheel around, catching the first operator unholstering his own. I tell him to drop it. He hesitates. I shoot him just beneath the right eye. In the confines of the room, the gunshot’s echo is like the hollow clang of an enormous church bell.

  My bare feet slide through the blood on the floor as I approach the door and exit, pistol first. Max is standing against the wall five meters down the corridor, pistol raised uncertainly, his breathing fast and nervous.

  With my sights on his chest, and his sights on mine, we both freeze. Rossi and Dr. Simon and who knows how many others are still somewhere inside. But the two dead operators in the room were supposed to be enough to handle me, so it’s clear Max’s presence here, by himself, wasn’t planned.

  The corridor is dim, the lights maybe at one-quarter power, leaving the hallway with deep shadows in places the light doesn’t reach at all. A semicompetent marksman could hit me without my even being aware of their presence. Thus, I need insurance, or at least a shield.

  “Was it from the beginning, Max? The first chess game?” I shuffle to the right, then edge a few centimeters closer. “Or did they flip you later?”

  His eyebrows furrow. “Does it matter?”

  “Not really,” I say, taking another step. “Broke my heart a little, though. For the record.”

  “Yeah. Mine too,” he says. “Now put down the gun.”

  I take another step.

  “Put down the gun, Gwen.”

  Two strides, three, and the distance between us is closed. I catch his gun hand as my shoulder slams him back into the wall. His breath comes out in a baritone grunt. My fingers dig deep into his hair and gather a tight grip as I kick his pistol away.

  “Where is she?” I hiss, with the muzzle of my pistol pressed to his cheek.

  * * *

  In the ringing silence of the corridor I feel my body shaking with exhaustion. The nausea at the thought of LaBelle and the two operators swells like a seawater wave in my belly. Yet I know Dr. Simon is watching on the camera feed, so I hide it as best I can behind a stoic expression and straight back.

  I push Max forward by the shoulder, the muzzle of my pistol pressed into his back between his shoulder blades. “Who else is here?” I whisper.

  “Dr. Simon. Rossi. One other guy, tactical specialist.”

  “Who else? Tell me or I’ll kill you.”

  “That’s it,” he answers. “And you’re going to kill me anyway.”

  He says this so flatly I almost want to lift his spirits, tell him he’s wrong, but he’d never believe it, and it would just make me a liar. “Why’d you do this, Max?”

  “For America, Gwen. Cheap gas and pumpkin spice lattes and pants with elastic waistbands.” He turns his head and actually grins at me. Then he starts singing, loudly and terribly. From the gut. “Oh-oh say can you see…”

  “Shut up, Max.”

  “By the dawn’s early light…”

  I squeeze his shoulder and dig the muzzle of the gun deeper. “Shut the fuck up.”

  But the volume of his voice only increases. If it weren’t for the sarcasm gleaming from every off-key syllable, he’d sound like an embarrassingly drunk uncle at the start of a baseball game. “What so proudly we hail…”

  And that’s why I neither see nor hear the blow coming. The baton strikes me in the kidney, just below my ribs, and explodes in a searing white light through my torso. My knees buckle, then the baton catches me around the neck and pulls hard. I claw at my throat to get my fingers around the metal bar while I swing the pistol over my head, trying to point it at my attacker without blowing my own head off.

  From the shadows ahead of us, Dr. Simon steps forward, along with another operator in tactical clothes. There’s a professional sort of panic on her face, the fret of a manager very much displeased with her team’s performance today. She’s shouting something at the operator as he raises a pistol, the end of which mirrors every thrash of my body as it tracks me.

  The blackout is creeping closer, I can feel it. The baton is crushing my windpipe, and the blow to my side seems to have shattered some glass jar inside me filled with poison that is now seeping into my organs. The gun
drops from my hand and bounces on the floor. But I’m not so far gone that I can’t see Dr. Simon and the operator. She’s shouting again, pointing at me, and even without hearing it I know what’s coming out of her mouth. As for what happens next, I recognize it from ten thousand drills: the operator’s body tensing a certain way, his eyes narrowing a certain way. Just a fraction of a second before—

  With everything I have, I jerk down on the baton and arch forward, lifting my attacker’s body enough to wheel around. I feel the impact of bullets slamming into flesh travel through his body and into mine. There’s a pop behind my ear, and a spray of something wet and hot as candle wax blasts across my cheek. I push backward a few steps, the impacts still coming even as my attacker’s body tumbles to the ground. Then the baton is in my hand, arcing through the air. If I’m judging the distance and speed right, it should land—yes, just there, on the side of the operator’s head. It snaps sideways, and Dr. Simon screams. I swing the baton again, catching the operator’s head from the other side and sending him into the wall, where he bounces and rolls to the floor.

  Dr. Simon and Max are scrambling for the pistols the operator and I had dropped. My foot catches Dr. Simon under the chin just as she’s about to grab one, and I take it up instead. Max is already raising the other, but I land the baton hard on his wrist and send him sprawling. I pick up the second pistol, too.

  I scan up and down the corridor looking for others, but it’s empty, or seems to be. Only now do I recognize my attacker with the baton, the blood forming a widening pool beneath Rossi’s back where the operator had shot her.

  Peering between her shaking fingers, Dr. Simon’s eyes are wide with terror. Delight rolls through me, seeing her like this, powerful as a shot of fresh Theta, and glaring brighter than even the pain in my side. I point one pistol at Max, the other at Dr. Simon.

  * * *

  Max isn’t even trying anymore. There’s no straining at the duct tape fastening him to the chair. He doesn’t even ask for water. Dr. Simon, on the other hand, now clear of the initial shock, is very much in her zone. Despite being bound at wrists and ankles and chest, somehow she still manages prim smiles, and even tosses her blandly pretty hair now and then as she makes a point. This is, for her, a subject worth study, perhaps even a paper. Duct Tape and Its Impact on Therapeutic Modalities.

  I keep an eye on the monitors, looking for other operators or other Rossis and LaBelles, but there’s no one. The only sign of humanity is the bodies—two each in a hospital room and the corridor—and they remain where I left them, impossibly still.

  “Quite something, what you did out there,” Dr. Simon says, a tone of real admiration, as if I’d just scored the winning basket at the buzzer.

  “Should’ve hired more guys.” I open a metal cabinet and drag my finger over a row of external hard drives arranged like books.

  “There it is, the famous Gwendolyn Bloom arrogance,” she says. “Just performative, of course. But hey, fake it till you make it, right?”

  I slide one of the hard drives out. It’s a slim thing, the upward-facing edge covered in dust. Written on a piece of masking tape stuck to the front is a name, ABERNATHY, JEROME. I slide out another, that one marked RANDALL, OCTAVIA. There’s at least four dozen drives here, four dozen names. I look to Dr. Simon, tap the shelf with the muzzle of my pistol.

  “Copies of your predecessors’ therapy sessions,” she says. “You should give thanks to them, maybe make a little shrine. The version of Theta Compound they got wasn’t so refined as yours.”

  The words she’d first used to describe Theta play back through my head. Bullet ant venom: had to recalibrate the whole way we measured pain. I’m about to ask her what became of the other victims, but there’s a smug tightness to her mouth that gives me the answer.

  At the row of tables I see an open laptop with my own hard drive attached, BLOOM, GWENDOLYN. I sit down in the chair before it and mouse over to the drive. Folder after folder, sorted by date, each loaded with video files. I click one open, see a split frame of one of my early nights here. On the left side, me strapped to a bed, the VR headset buckled on, thrashing midseizure at the restraints. On the right, the images from the headset, throats being cut, bodies melting to dust.

  I open another file: me in a chair, slumped shoulders, knees together, a pile of tissues in my lap as I sob.

  And another: Me on the toilet in the cottage, body convulsing with chill.

  “You said these are copies?” I say.

  “What?”

  “The hard drives. You said they’re copies.” I swivel in the chair and face her, studying her face for any sign of guilt, or really, anything human. “Where are the originals? Washington?”

  “Oh, no. Washington wants no part of this,” she says. “Experimental protocols. Human testing. Strictly black book. Off the grid. All they care about is results, results, results—never process. God forbid they give a damn about the actual work.” She coughs, as if offended by the idea, then gives a little sniffle. “Do me a favor, Gwendolyn?”

  “A favor?”

  “Yes, a favor. A kindness,” she says. “After you kill me, show them. Show the world. We found what love is made from. And you helped.”

  The gun twitches in my hand as if it were alive, like one of her bullet ants, pissed and desperate for a target.

  She nods toward a laptop at the far end of the table, the nexus of a nest of cables and external drives. “The big one there, standing upright,” she says. “Six terabytes. From the first patient all the way to you.”

  I move the chair and wake the computer, then open the drive. There they are, just as she said: Abernathy, Jerome. Randall, Octavia. Bloom, Gwendolyn. My hand trembles as I scroll down past dozens and dozens of others. Americans. Latinos. Chinese. Russians. Arabs. Mostly they’re men, but there’s thirteen or fourteen women, too. A mad scientist’s collection of specimens, swapping glass jars and formaldehyde for ones and zeros.

  “I suggest you send a copy to the best psychiatry journals,” she says. “You can Google them. But to the press, too. I’m not under any illusions here, Gwendolyn. Political psychiatry is radical work. Radical.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say quietly, closing the laptop and detaching the drive. “I’ll make sure everyone knows all about it.”

  “Look, I’m not expecting a Nobel Prize. They’ll call me a monster. Everyone will.”

  “Because you are,” I say.

  The duct tape bunches up as she shrugs. “For now,” she says quietly. “But in a hundred years…”

  There’s a rush of blood to my head as I rise to my feet, and I have to grab hold of the back of the chair to stay upright. I raise the gun, aiming it carefully at Dr. Simon’s head, at the small spot just between her eyes. Then I lower it to my side.

  “Go on, Gwendolyn,” she says. “We’ve done enough work together.”

  “Have you—have you ever tried it?” I say.

  She gives a single shake of her head.

  “Would you like to?”

  Her cheeks expand into a smile, and her eyes suddenly glisten. “Oh, Gwendolyn,” she says.

  I look around the room, find her little black case on a shelf, and open it. A row of new syringes, still in plastic envelopes, and small bottles marked THETA 6.2.

  She watches as I unwrap a syringe and fill it halfway, then I look up and she nods for me to continue. I keep drawing more until the syringe is full.

  “My arm,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”

  But her arms are bound to her sides with duct tape, so I unbutton her blouse, tug the collar open until I see her shoulder. “Here okay?”

  “Oh, that’ll be just fine,” she says.

  Her eyes track the needle as I lower it to the fleshy part just beneath her shoulder bone. The impossibly narrow line puckers her skin, then breaks through. I push the plunger gently and see her body relax, as if collapsing in on itself, the last moments of her life the very best.

  I drop the empty syr
inge to the floor, take Dr. Simon’s hand, and give it a squeeze.

  Everyone deserves to die happy.

  * * *

  I wait until her breathing stops five minutes later. Then I take up the black leather case and turn to Max. His eyes are still wide with horror. “How about you?” I say. “Want some?”

  He shudders, a motion I interpret as no.

  “What do you think,” I say, picking up one of the vials. “Should we take it with us?”

  “Us?”

  The first word he’s spoken since I tied him to the chair. It comes out raspy and small.

  “I don’t even know where we are. So, yes, you’re coming with me.” I dig around through a drawer until I find a pair of scissors. “Do we bring the Theta, yes or no?”

  He clears his throat and swallows. “It could be—useful. For research. Given the right people.”

  I cut the duct tape, starting at his wrists and working up to his left shoulder. Then I place the scissors in his hand so he can do the rest.

  “Might be,” I say, picking up my pistol again. “Or maybe there are no more right people left.”

  He struggles to free himself with the scissors—his left wrist swollen and black where I’d struck him with the baton—while I study the vial of Theta in my hand, watching the light refract through it. Then I glance toward the body of Dr. Simon and feel jealousy. My veins stretch inside my arms, and my brain starts to itch.

  I drop the vial to the floor, dump the others there, too. Do it quick, I tell myself, before you change your mind. With the butt of my pistol, I smash each one, and grind them into the wet concrete.

  Thirty-Two

  The little red Volkswagen speeds west along the highway through fairy-tale forests and industrial towns, passing trucks loaded with enormous pieces of mining equipment that strain at the cables holding them onto flatbed trailers like captured giants trying to get free. The air is gray with smoke you can actually taste on the tongue, dirt and sulfur and diesel.