Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  The hands I was seeing weren’t mine, however.

  They were dark. Or gray, maybe. Long and gnarled.

  Hands with claws.

  And suddenly I couldn’t even quite make out which direction they were facing. Meaning, if they were MY monstrous hands and I’d turned them to study the palms or they were some OTHER hands pressed against the glass. The hands pressed—

  I startled fully awake.

  It’d been a dream, maybe, or some half-formed memory.

  I didn’t know then. (Later, I would realize it had been a little bit of both.)

  The room was half-dark. Castillo had turned off the TV and worked only with the small desk lamp and the light from his two laptops. I didn’t know what time it was. If I’d slept all night or just a few minutes. I watched this guy work for a minute and stared, blurry-eyed, at that dim light. God only knew what he was looking for or at. So I closed my eyes again to the constant tapping of the two keyboards. Like rain almost, or maybe thousand-legged bugs running around in the walls.

  As I drifted off again, I was—despite all my previous efforts—only, you guessed it, wondering again what my father was doing. And maybe “wondering” isn’t the best word.

  Maybe the better word is “fearing.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I awoke next to the sound of Castillo’s deep voice talking on the phone. Couldn’t get much out of what he was saying. Something about money and monsters and some guy named Pete.

  Any hope I’d had of waking up to discover the previous forty-eight hours had been “all just a dream” ended right then and forever. It was real—all of it—and I woke as confused as I’d ever been.

  I pretended to remain asleep and stayed just like that until he left the room. When the door shut, I sat up and looked around.

  Castillo’d taped a map up onto one of the walls, and I climbed out of bed to look at it. He’d made little marks all over it. Black dots and blue and red dots, with names and dates beside each. They were all over the whole country.

  I moved slowly about the room. The desk was covered in notes he’d taken. He’d closed his two laptops. I ran my fingers across each and snuck a look at the written notes he’d left, but it was just more names and dates. Scribbles no better than the ones my dad had left. Besides, I didn’t want to look too closely. Castillo could come back into the room at any second.

  His lone duffel bag was closed. I imagined what might be inside this black canvas treasure chest. Spy stuff of some kind, right? Special cameras and recording equipment. Secret truth serums, poisons, and whatnot. Or just maybe more evidence he hadn’t yet shown me.

  I wondered if he’d left any of his guns in the room. In the bag.

  Maybe, to tell the truth, I even wondered some what I would do if I found one.

  I cautiously eased down into the chair he’d used all night and just looked about the room again. Pressed my fingers against the table. Then I spun the chair to look at my side of the room. I tried visualizing what he was seeing whenever he looked over my way. The worthless little kid sniveling in the corner. The clone monster watching TV, taking a nap, as if nothing had happened. As if he weren’t some monster.

  I looked away.

  Couldn’t even imagine looking at myself.

  • • •

  I was standing at the map again when he came back into the room.

  He seemed tense. Surprised to find me awake, I guess.

  I think the guy might even have actually reached for a gun or something behind his back.

  Since I’d been busted, I just started yapping. I quickly asked about the map. The dots.

  Anything to make the whole scene a little less awkward.

  He told me the map was to keep track of DEAD PEOPLE.

  He called it the MURDER MAP.

  • • •

  The red dots were murders.

  The black ones were disappearances. Blue was rape.

  Castillo told me they were all the crimes that’d been reported in the last twenty-four hours.

  One single day.

  I looked at the map again.

  There were sixty dots all over the country.

  Most were red.

  • • •

  I turned and said that was impossible. I mean, there was no way that many people—

  He looked at me like I was stupid.

  Told me that in the US at least forty people are murdered every single day.

  I did the math in my head.

  That was about three hundred people a week. Fourteen thousand a year. Every year.

  Half go unsolved, he said. And those were the ones he was interested in. Because maybe/probably these six students hadn’t finished killing yet.

  I’d found Radnor, Pennsylvania, on the map. The town where DSTI and the Massey Institute are. Castillo hadn’t placed any dots there, but I imagined them all the same. Twelve red ones all piled on top of each other.

  I asked Castillo if he really thought those six guys had something to do with the . . . with the murders at Massey. White lumps came to mind. Red dots covered with white sheets.

  Castillo assured me that that’s definitely what it looked like.

  And do you really think my dad helped them?

  I did not ask this out loud. I was afraid of his answer.

  So instead I just asked WHY. Why would anyone do something like that?

  Castillo said he didn’t know. Said these aren’t—

  But he stopped himself from finishing the thought/sentence.

  Aren’t what? I pressed. Aren’t “normal people” is what he’d meant to say.

  He looked away.

  Then I got curious and asked HOW they’d done it. How specifically they’d killed at Massey.

  Castillo asked if that mattered.

  Did it? I wondered. I said: Maybe.

  He nodded. Agreed it might.

  Some had been bludgeoned, beaten, to death. Some had been strangled. Some cut. Two boys, clones of the two kids who’d shot up Columbine High School, had been, Castillo said, “skinned alive.” I wasn’t entirely sure what this meant. Two of the victims had been women. The first had been raped before she was killed. The other woman, a Language Arts teacher named Gallagher, whom I’d met, had apparently been gutted in my father’s office.

  I just stared at Castillo.

  You mind? he said. I kinda got a lot of work to do.

  And that was it for the next three hours. He went back to his laptops. Every once in a while he put a new dot on the map. I watched TV with the sound down. Tried not to think about words like “SKINNED” or “RAPED” or “GUTTED.” Wished there was something to read.

  Wished I was somewhere else.

  Wished mostly I was someone else.

  • • •

  So then, out of basically nowhere, Castillo told me to grab us some food.

  I looked over dreamily, shaken from my dim and unhappy musings.

  He reached into his pocket to get some cash and said neither one of us had eaten since never and there was a Subway right next door and an Arby’s a little down and that I should pick one and get us something.

  I stood confused. Why would he do this? Why . . . He’d earlier gotten so worried about my taking off. Getting seen. Now I was being sent into public on an errand.

  He handed me the money. A hundred-dollar bill!

  And he’d totally passed up several twenties and tens to give me it.

  Then I knew.

  He wasn’t giving me money for dinner. He was giving me money to get out of his life.

  It was my father all over again. It was I-never-want-to-see-you-again money.

  A hundred whole dollars’ worth.

  At least my dad had the decency to give me a thousand.

  I couldn’t decide if I should be insulted or applaud Castillo for at least trying to be a little subtle about the whole thing. That same morning he’d said he’d give me some money and a week’s head start if it looked like DSTI ever got around to a
dmitting I existed and wanted him to find me.

  He clearly didn’t want/need my help and also didn’t want/need me as a prisoner anymore.

  Looked like my week had officially started.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I shut the door behind me and just stood outside our room awhile. It was close to midnight. The motel parking lot was empty, quiet.

  I tried to tell myself this was all just some kind of a test for Castillo to see what I would do if given a chance to escape. But it wasn’t. Just like my father’s desertion hadn’t been a test. Maybe all that time spent around counselors and therapists and scientists and stuff, I’d started seeing everything in my life as some kind of big test. And maybe it was. I mean, I had been little more than a lab rat to these people. To DSTI, to my father. I had been secretly tested on a regular basis. I’d even seen the folder to prove it.

  But not anymore. I wasn’t being observed or recorded or analyzed. Quite the opposite.

  Not one person on Earth gave a damn where I was or what I was doing.

  If you’ve ever known this feeling, I’m very sorry.

  • • •

  So, NOT a test. Castillo’d given me a hundred-dollar pass and an opened cage door. He wasn’t gonna send me back to DSTI or call the cops or anything. He was just gonna let me, by my own doing, vanish. Because he knew I couldn’t help him at all. Because he knew I was completely POINTLESS. And, so, now I was also completely free.

  • • •

  I got completely free all the way to Subway. (Really, what else was I gonna do?)

  I looked around the motel first and tried to get my bearings. I’d been more out of it when we’d first arrived, kind of emotionally/physically/mentally wiped out, stumbling behind Castillo like some kind of half-wit zombie. Now I gave the place a better look. Didn’t see anywhere with a pay phone. I wanted to call my dad. Maybe he’d pick up this time. Tell me what was really going on. Tell me what to do. Tell me it was all a stupid joke. A misunderstanding. Come and get me.

  So I wandered toward the main office to see if they had a phone I could use. The guy at the desk was some skinny old guy, and when I told him I was looking for the phone, his face scrunched up like he’d eaten something bad and he told me there was a phone in my room.

  So I just kept going to Subway. They didn’t have a phone either.

  I ended up ordering two sandwiches. I don’t know why. At this point I had no intention of ever going back to that room, of ever seeing Castillo again. I guess I was just on autopilot. Practically sleepwalking. Nightmarewalking. I pointed at food and picked bread and grunted out answers about whether or not I wanted stuff toasted or not. I wasn’t even sure what I had just ordered.

  The guy making the sandwiches kept looking at me all weird. He probably knew my hair was dyed. He probably thought I was the spitting image of that “one-guy-you-know-the-one-sure-you-do-that-serial-killer-guy.”

  I wondered how many people even knew what Jeffrey Dahmer looks—looked—like. I mean, was it just a name that people knew and used? Or did everyone in the country know what this freak looked like? And, if so, how much did I really look like him?

  • • •

  I’ve since read that only 22% of American adults identified “Gerald Ford” as the name of a recent US President, but 98% could, on the very first try, identify the name “Jeffrey Dahmer” as a serial killer.

  • • •

  I handed the Subway guy the money, and he looked at me all weird again. Maybe because it was a hundred. Probably because I looked exactly like someone who’d murdered seventeen people.

  He asked if I needed anything to drink. I’m not sure if I answered him. I took the two subs to the far end of the empty store and sat at a table with my back to the guy. I ate in the same haze with which I’d ordered. Trying to decide what to do next. I had ninety dollars now.

  Where and how far was I gonna get with ninety dollars?

  I sat there for a long time. Started thinking about my dad again. If I could just get ahold of him, he’d . . . He’d what? Who knew anymore?

  Castillo had told me a little about the experiments conducted on some of the boys who were missing. Maybe “experiments” isn’t the best word. “Prescriptions”? “Treatments”?

  Maybe “TORTURE” was the best word.

  Torture orchestrated by DSTI.

  By my father.

  • • •

  Some of the clone boys had been beaten. Even molested. By their “adoptive parents.” Some of the boys had just been verbally abused. Told they were worthless, stupid, gay, whatever. Some had been given drugs and alcohol. Or forced to kill animals. Or to watch porn. Or . . . All kinds of things just to replicate some of the bad life things that had happened to the original killers.

  (THIS is the man I was supposed to call? The man who would save me?)

  But some clones were completely, unreservedly, utterly left alone. I don’t mean alone alone. They had parents and all that, but there was none of that bad stuff going on. Nothing pervy or twisted. You know, raised like “normal” kids. Soccer teams and swim lessons and Subway sandwiches. And, quite honestly, that’s exactly how I’d been raised. Normal. My father had never laid a hand on me. Never called me names or gotten me high. Never put me in dangerous or confusing situations. The man took me to museums and parks and talked to me about science and history. Signed me up for soccer camps and piano lessons. Found me the best tutors and speech therapists money could buy.

  But WHY    ? Why did I get piano lessons and another guy, maybe even another Jeff, had gotten molested by guys HIS fake dad had met on Craigslist?

  I knew enough basic science to understand test groups and controlled experiments. DSTI had created us all to harness the XP11 violence gene. Guess they wanted to determine precisely how much of the violence was directly related to the gene and how much was connected to environment.

  If Ted #1 had x level of violence in his system, how much would Ted #2 have if we just added a little physical violence? Mild routine spankings, say. And how much would Ted #3 develop if the spankings were actual beatings? And what if Ted #4’s beatings include molestation? And Ted #5 . . .

  These are the games DSTI was playing. The tests they were running for almost twenty years. And my . . . my own father had been head of the entire operation.

  WHY? I screamed inside my head again. Why would he do something like that?

  A distant voice said something, saved me from my thoughts.

  I turned to the Subway guy, who asked me again if I was OK, said I looked a little zoned out.

  I told him I was just tired.

  Then I asked if he had a pen and some paper I could use.

  He eyed me curiously, then nodded.

  I pushed my half-eaten sub aside and worked for the next twenty minutes.

  I’d never worked so hard at anything in my whole life.

  • • •

  So there’s no confusion here, I 100% still knew Castillo wanted me to go away. I just didn’t care. I wanted to prove to him he was wrong. I was worth keeping around. I could help.

  Find the other guys. Find my father.

  And if I couldn’t, well, then I guess Castillo was just gonna have to shoot me and dump me in the woods.

  Or give me more than a hundred dollars.

  • • •

  What’s this? Castillo asked when I returned to the motel room.

  If he was upset about my return, I didn’t notice. I was too excited.

  I presented Castillo with my list of everywhere my father had ever taken me. Every city, store, restaurant, resort, museum, park . . . everywhere. Another list of every city I could remember he ever went to. Conferences and guest lectures and stuff. Places he said he was going. I’d even made little stars where he’d brought me back a souvenir or something.

  Castillo read the whole list. Both sides of the paper were completely full.

  I asked if it was good.

  He nodded. It’s a start, he said.<
br />
  And for the first time, I felt that too.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  That same night, Ted found me in a dream.

  I don’t know how he did it. I don’t even know now if it was a dream, but I also wouldn’t know what else to call it. Any other possibility—whether more supernatural or even scientific—would be even more terrifying. In any case, I knew it was him right away.

  Ted Thompson was the most awful boy I’d ever met.

  But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?

  Ted Thompson had been made from the DNA of Ted Bundy.

  One of the biggies. First-ballot Hall of Fame for Serial Killers.

  In the 1970s, Bundy raped and murdered thirty women in just four years. He’s infamous now for being kinda good-looking and would just walk up to women and ask for help, pretend to be hurt, or lost, or . . . And they’d take one look at his big blue eyes and shaggy hair and crooked smile, and that was that. And then he’d rape and kill them.

  Sometimes (a dozen times) he decapitated his victims and kept their heads as souvenirs. Sometimes he went back to where the dead bodies were hidden and did sex stuff. Sometimes he’d just randomly break into girls’ houses and beat them to death while he masturbated. He escaped from prison twice, and the second time invaded a whole college sorority, successfully attacking four different women.

  He was finally electrocuted in 1989. He wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else ever again. All those sisters and mothers and wives and daughters would be a little safer again. Or not.

  Thanks to cloning, his DNA was still alive and well. Eyes. Skin. Brain. Bones. Blood.

  Every cell. Copy, Paste.

  Ted Thompson.

  We’d met at the Massey Institute more than a dozen times. We’d been forced together to play group games and share in group talks together that my dad supervised with some of the shrinks from Massey.