That’s NOT to say boys have a fifty-fifty shot of having this Anger Gene, but, rather, that in the rare instance (2%) that we DO, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance of overcoming it.
Still meaning that half the world—the male half—is hereditarily predisposed to violence.
Guess you can say it’s in our blood.
• • •
80% of all suicides.
95% of all the people in prison.
95% of those who commit domestic violence. 95% of those who sexually abuse children.
99% of rapists. 99% of spree killers. 99% of family annihilators.
99% of Death Row inmates.
Males.
Sorry.
• • •
To study this XP11 gene, my father and his colleagues went straight to the top.
They got their DNA samples off well-known killers. The most violent ones they could find.
SERIAL KILLERS.
Those who kill and kill again. Not for money or power or revenge. But because they enjoy killing. Maybe the killer starts with someone they know but very quickly moves on to strangers. Safest that way. Some woman who catches their eye at the supermarket one evening or some kid they notice while driving around the neighborhood. They do this over the course of months or even decades sometimes. Five victims, a dozen, fifty. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the rush that comes when they feel the ultimate power over their helpless victims. That feeling of playing God.
DSTI mostly got this DNA from those killers who were still alive, but sometimes they collected it from guys who were long gone. Dead, executed.
DNA kinda hangs around for a long, long time, and you can get it from just about anything. A flake or two of skin, old blood samples, a hair follicle off a brush. Just like in Jurassic Park. But instead of raptors and T. rex, DSTI collected and built murderers.
The operation’s official name was C-XP11.
Everyone just called it “Project Cain.”
• • •
Some days, I would rather have been born a raptor.
• • •
It all probably sounds a little far-fetched. Stupid, even. Believe me, I know. But what if I told you an Air Force research lab in Ohio recently admitted to secretly working on bombs filled with synthetic pheromones/aphrodisiacs to make enemy troops “turn gay,” and also on methods to create giant swarms of bees? Or that the Navy spent twenty million dollars teaching bats to carry explosives? Or that over the past forty years, the United States military has publicly admitted to working on everything from invisibility and time travel to ghosts, weather control, mind control, LSD bombs, talking dolphins, sound weapons, and telekinesis? And that’s just what they’ve admitted to. Now imagine what they haven’t.
Project Cain was just another one of those.
• • •
The dead body in my father’s room had been dead for a long time.
You didn’t need some forensic expert to figure that out. It looked like something my father had dug up for its DNA, not someone he’d killed. (I would later find out this was exactly the situation.)
He’d just told me, hours before, that DSTI’s experiments had pretty much all been focused on famous serial killers, so I assumed this was simply one of them. WHO, however, I had no idea. There have been hundreds of serial killers. For all I knew it was the actual body of this Jeffrey Dahmer guy.
[Note: I did not yet know that Dahmer had requested to be immediately cremated upon his death. Or that his wishes had NOT been fully carried out. Because his brain and other tissues had been quietly saved and sent to the University of Wisconsin for analysis. I did not yet know that Dahmer’s father fought in court for years to have these destroyed also.]
Whoever this was, the decayed carcass was stuffed in a special box made of metal and tinted gray glass that was plugged into the wall and cold to the touch. The box hummed a little, just like our freezer in the garage. Instead of frozen steaks and chicken, though, this thing contained a dead guy. The legs all folded over the chest and face and stuff so that he would fit in the box. He looked like something a ventriloquist might pull out. Mummy old. Shrunken, brown. Alien. Strands of hair sprouting like gray weeds around its shoulders. Nasty, dirty, rotted cloth all intertwined in the bones. He wasn’t even all that scary-looking, I kept telling myself. Just weird. Just weird . . .
I walked fully into the small room. The space was like one of those side displays at a museum, the small dark exhibit rooms you always seem to walk into alone. There were several file cabinets, a couple of monitors and laptops. A small desk with a row of notebooks filled with my father’s writing. I didn’t read them then. There were some notes on my father’s desk about people named Bundy and Tumblety and Garavito. Maps of London and Central America. None of it made any sense.
I had to assume this body was one of those men. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know anything anymore. How long has this nasty thing been in our house? What has my father done to get this? The longer I stayed, the more I could feel the corpse’s sunken black eye sockets peering at me from beneath his folded-over legs. Eyes that might have joyfully planned and watched the brutal murder of dozens.
So I didn’t stay. I got out of that room as fast as I could go and pushed the secret door back into place, and locked it again. Stumbled away backward down the hall. Hearing things in my head I shouldn’t hear. Imagining the worst things.
That shriveled corpse on the other side maybe prying himself free from that cold box. Maybe now pushing slowly off the table, dragging himself across the floor and up against the other side of the door. The skeletal hand moving against the inside wall. Long brown nails clawing at the door to lift himself up fully. The rotted skin and filthy burial shroud hanging off cold dry bones. Those endless eye sockets glistening like imploding black stars in the dark room. Fingers now taking hold of the latch . . . I swear, I could hear it turning.
I put my hands to my ears. I think maybe I was screaming.
• • •
I slept in the house alone that night. Tired and furious and confused.
It would be the last night I ever spent there.
The next day, they came for me.
And I would have to be tired and furious and confused in other places.
CHAPTER THREE
The day started out with me simply waiting in my house. Waiting and more waiting.
I called my dad’s various phones again. Still nothing.
So, late afternoon, I decided to walk to Mr. Eble’s house.
Mr. Eble had been my Humanities tutor for almost two years. Three hours a day, three days a week. Writing, lit, art, history, etc. I had another tutor for math and science. Eble had the whole ponytail, sandals, PhD-from-Brown thing going. Other than my dad, he was probably the smartest guy I’d ever met. I figured he’d have an idea of what I should do.
He lived maybe fifteen minutes away by car. He always drove, or rode his bike, to our house for tutoring, but my dad had driven me out there a couple of times to drop stuff off. So I knew exactly where he lived.
It took nearly two hours to get there.
As I walked, I tried imagining what was going on in all the houses I passed.
What LIES were being told in them even now?
They looked like normal houses, normal families. But so had my house the day before. What were the fathers and mothers in these other houses up to? What big secrets had they not revealed? All those unseen lives and plans and thoughts. All those lies.
Still, it was during this time that I was holding on to the possibility that my father was just, you know, messing with me. This was some kind of test. Or he’d had, maybe, a slight nervous breakdown of some kind. He’d been doing nothing but work for months now, twenty hours a day lately. Or . . .
But there really was no “Or.” No matter how hard I tried to make some sense over what he’d told me, over his big vanishing act, I just couldn’t do it. The whole thing, from a logical viewpoint, made no sens
e. The entire previous night remained outside the realm of reality.
I was hoping Mr. Eble would help me think it all through. But when I finally arrived, he wouldn’t even answer the stupid door. I knocked and waited forever in the sweltering sun. (Probably wasn’t even all that hot, and it’d probably been ten minutes. But I was in a place now where each and every moment felt like my whole body was just gonna explode from rage and chaos.)
Eventually his voice came out through the front window and told me to go home.
He’d been inside the whole time.
I was too angry to cry.
He said he couldn’t talk to me and that I should leave. He told me to please go away.
I told him I was freaked out. Scared. I told him that something bad had happened and that I needed to find my dad.
He just said: I’m sorry, Jeff.
That’s it. Not another word.
I’m sorry, Jeff.
This coming from the second smartest guy in the world.
It took me three hours to get home.
When I passed the same houses again, I imagined everyone inside screaming. Crying.
I imagined houses filled with secret rooms and dead people.
• • •
Much later I would learn my dad had fired Mr. Eble the day before.
Gone to his house and accused him of molesting me. Claimed Eble’d shown me all this porn and other weird stuff. It was all total bullshit. But my dad had threatened lawsuits and jail time. Said he’d spend his whole fortune and use all his big contacts to ruin Eble if he ever contacted me again.
You have to admit. My father had a plan.
• • •
The scientists at DSTI also had a plan.
And I watched that one unfold from the Reimers’ bushes.
The Reimers being our closest neighbors, and me being a big fan of cutting through their backyard to get to ours. Good thing. If I’d come home any other way, DSTI would have had me.
As I started past the bushes and over the short stone wall separating our yards, I noticed the two vans parked at the top of our driveway. And then I noticed the guys. All dressed in black, just like in the movies. Ninja Jason Bourne stuff. I knew instinctively and indisputably: They were not there to help me. In this, it seems, my dad had told me the truth. The NEW TRUTH. The one I was starting to finally believe. How could I not?
I didn’t know 100% that they were from DSTI. But since my dad had warned me about them, I was a good 95%. I also wasn’t sure at first if they’d come for me or my dad. My first thought, honestly, was that they’d come for my dad. That he was in some kinda trouble with whoever these guys were (DSTI or not) and that’s why he’d left. Maybe I was just kidding myself. How to know for sure?
So I watched and waited. Hidden in the darkness between two bushes.
They used the basement door behind our house. Kept going in and out like a trail of ants. Emptying my whole house. Just straight up taking shit. I watched this for almost an hour.
It hadn’t occurred to me to set the house’s alarm system when I’d left. I now rationalized they would have just overridden it somehow anyway. They seemed like guys who knew exactly what they were doing. I thought I recognized one of them as one of the scientists from DSTI, but couldn’t be sure. It was dark and I kept far away.
When they finally left, I busted open the kitchen window to get back into my own home. Really pathetic. I was most definitely NOT a guy who knew exactly what he was doing. I knew only that I didn’t want to be too obvious and use one of the main doors or the garage. I knew I didn’t want to be seen. I used a two-by-four from behind the shed to pop the latch, and it worked just like I’d seen in a movie. That was less pathetic. Maybe there was some hope for me after all.
I figured I’d just wait it all out until Dad returned. (I still, falsely, believed this was a possibility.) What other options were there, really? Where was I gonna go?
Inside, I discovered they’d taken all the computers and all my dad’s office files. The ones from his MAIN office, not from the secret room. (Turns out they hadn’t found the secret room and didn’t even know it was there.) They took our answering machine and emptied some old file cabinets from downstairs too. That made sense. My dad was obviously up to something involving DSTI and his work there. DSTI would want to confiscate all of that.
They ALSO, however, found and took the envelope with a thousand bucks. SHIT! I’d left it just lying there in my room, like an idiot. That was now totally gone. So stupid.
But they’d taken other things too, things that had nothing to do with me being stupid. Things that didn’t make any sense at first. Framed photos off the wall. The pictures of ME. Only the ones of me. And they’d also removed all my clothes. Just MY clothes again. Cleared out the closet and drawers in my room. Even went through the hamper and laundry room. They’d taken all my books, my classwork. Soccer trophies. Bass guitar. Dark Knight movie poster. My PS3. Skateboard in the garage. My toothbrush and zit pads. My bottle of allergy medication. They even stole Zeus, my bearded dragon. His cage and lamp and food and everything.
So, that night, it was just me and the shriveled corpse in the house. It didn’t even feel like my own house anymore. It felt more like a movie set, a prop. As if I could push on one of those walls in just the right way and the whole house would come down and reveal itself for what it was. Another lie.
In the darkness I stared out the window and into the neighborhood.
Tried unsuccessfully to ignore the imagined urgent sound of slow and constant scratching behind the wall of my dad’s secret room. Tried to tell myself that companies don’t capture people. That American businesses don’t break into homes and kidnap children.
But an unfamiliar car now sat at the end of my street.
And inside the car I could see them. Shadowed forms. Sitting. Watching back.
Two men left behind to wait for me.
Because of who I was. Because of what I was.
First they’d made my stuff disappear.
And now they were waiting for me.
• • •
They didn’t wait long.
CHAPTER FOUR
I stood outside my father’s secret room again.
The tiny hidden panel pushed aside, tiny brass key in hand. Ready to go in and stay in this time. Because inside, I would find answers. Right? I would just get on his laptops in there or maybe read his little collection of handwritten journals, and everything would make perfect sense. Right? I would know everything I needed to know.
WHERE he was. And WHO he was.
And maybe a little more about WHAT and WHY I was.
Right?
Believe me. I stood outside that room a long, long time.
But this time, my hesitation was not from fear of some shrunken dirty corpse waiting for me in there perched just behind the door with dark claws gleaming in the dark. I knew it was safely in the refrigerated box (always had been) and I’d imagined the whole thing.
Now, I think mostly I just wanted to hold on to a handful of those lies a little longer.
• • •
If I am being totally honest, and that’s a goal here, I’ve always been just a little creeped out by my dad. There’s no better word for it. Most guys seem to think of their dads as mean or cool or pointless or funny or even scary in some way. Mine was always just a little creepy. He stared too much, too long. Was always way too interested in what I was saying or doing. For years I’d written this off to the fact that Mom had been killed and I was all that he had left. I was the only family he had anymore. Why wouldn’t he stare at me all the time? If my mom came back, I’d probably just stare at her too. But over the last year or so, it’d actually gotten worse. It’d gotten, well, more creepy. So when he came to my room that night and dumped all that weirdness on me, I’ll admit that maybe other things in our life, my dad’s and mine, started to make more sense.
Now, as to all the stuff after . . .
I susp
ected and feared even then that the rotting corpse was only the beginning.
And that my father was involved in much, much worse things than that.
• • •
That’s why I stood there, outside his secret room, for as long as I did.
I knew that the more I learned about what my father had really been up to all these months, years—the more I understood what he’d really been thinking—all of it would become TRUE. Everything. All the evidence I needed for the things he’d told me was just a foot away now. The intellectual proof I needed for what my heart and gut were already telling me—it was all here and now.
It didn’t matter. I never made it back into that room. Ever.
Someone was in my house again.
I heard them moving downstairs. The DSTI ninjas had returned.
I could hardly breathe, my heart going a zillion miles a minute. I slowly edged to the railing, snuck a peek. I wanted to puke. Just as I was starting to tell myself it was all in my head, I saw him.
It was real. Like he’d stomped right out of a nightmare. I wanted to scream and puke.
One of the guys from the car, I figured.
Now downstairs in our family room.
Looking for me.
One guy with a gun.
• • •
For the record, I feel kinda mean calling my dad “creepy” just now. I mean, regardless of the things he did. I want you to know that, until those last weeks, he was, by my understanding of the words, a “good father.” I never wanted for anything. He put a lot of effort into my schooling. He supported my every interest. We didn’t, like, toss the football around and stuff, but we talked a lot about history and science stuff. And we liked to go on hikes in the woods and go to cool museums, and sometimes we watched old movies together. He told terrible jokes and gave stiff hugs. But the hugs were still there all the same. And perhaps he was doing it all—raising me, I mean—for really terrible reasons. But at the time, I didn’t know that, and so I say it was good.
• • •
Everyone’s played hide-and-seek. (Even me, the weird only-child homeschooled kid. ) And you’ve probably hidden in closets, under beds, etc. Can you remember how loud your breathing was? Even when you tried to be super quiet and slow it down like a jedi or something? Just made it louder, right? Can you remember suddenly wanting to sneeze or cough? Or getting an itch that wasn’t there at all until you were lying perfectly still in the dark, hoping the person who was “IT” would just stay downstairs? Remember getting a little bored, or even a little afraid, because you hid so well that you were now completely by yourself, and in that unnatural quiet and dark, you started thinking a little about what was in the darkness with you? Maybe even called out, daring the person who was “IT” to come and find you.
Project Cain (Project Cain) Page 2