Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  See, all the guys who went to Massey were there for various diagnosed depression, anxiety, addiction, or anger management issues. This, of course, was largely a lie. Some of the guys who went to Massey actually had these issues and were just normal kids born the regular way to regular parents. But some of the guys at Massey had only been told they were at Massey for these issues. They were really there because they were clones.

  As for me, they didn’t tell me I had any of the issues above but said I had to go to Massey because I still had physiological issues connected to my “car accident.” Just another version of the same lie.

  In any case, every so often I went in so my dad’s colleagues could give me tests, take scans of my brain, and so on. Like the stuff with the other kids. They made us do corny stuff like play Monopoly with uneven starting bankrolls or act out stories based on pictures of people they showed us. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Didn’t realize I was just some lab rat in jeans. I was usually just glad to get out of the house and see some other kids.

  Sometimes it was kids like Ted.

  I’d tried to explain to Castillo what it was about this guy. It was the way he looked at you. The arrogance. That damn phony smirk. Like you were just one of the mice, and he was the cat. Always toying with you. He’d call you a faggot or worse, and then ten seconds later throw an arm around you and say something like: “You know I’m just kidding, man. You’re cool.” Crap like that. All the time. PRETENDING to be nice in a way that always made me want to scream because I knew he wanted to hurt me in every possible way. But I didn’t scream or complain or tell on him, and not because I was afraid he’d kick my ass. I didn’t because I thought it would eventually stop.

  It never did.

  Hey, Jeffrey!

  I looked across the unrecognizable space between us. Terra-nothing.

  What? I asked.

  He stood in the dream with his arms crossed, nodded like we were pals. Equals. His hair was dark and neat. His T-shirt was stained. Blood-red.

  Guess what we’re doing right now, he said.

  I told him I didn’t care. Didn’t want to know.

  There’s this family in Maryland, he told me.

  I told him to go away. I thought: Please, please, please go away.

  The mom is real pretty, he said. But she’s with Henry now.

  I could see shadows moving behind him. I heard distant screams.

  Why don’t you come with us? he said.

  Why?

  To have fun, he said. Fun, fun, fun. He rubbed his crotch crudely.

  I told him to just leave me alone.

  Ted came closer.

  But the face wasn’t Ted’s anymore. It had become something else. Like a shadow. Another black face melding with his. Blurring the appearance I knew into something else. Something more skull-like, more monstrous. Its jaws protruding toward me, narrowing.

  Come on, Jeffrey, it said. You know what you are.

  I turned to run, but Ted, or the thing that had been Ted moments before, was still in front of me. Stop pretending to be Jeffrey Jacobson, it said. Cut off a dog’s tail, and it’s still a dog. I’ll say it again, man. You know what you are.

  Go away. Please go away.

  What’s bred in the blood will come out in the flesh.

  The last voice had not been Ted’s. It had been my dad’s.

  We’re going to find you, I said. I couldn’t look anymore.

  Something laughed. I don’t know who, so don’t even ask.

  What was that you said, Jeffrey?

  We’re going to find you, I shouted. Castillo is. We’re going to stop you.

  Now, why on Earth would you want to do that? the single voice (Ted’s, the dark thing’s, my dad’s) asked. You’re one of us, Jeffrey.

  I looked back. The face wasn’t Ted’s anymore, or the black thing’s, or even my dad’s.

  It was MY face. Jeffrey Dahmer’s face.

  Staring back at me in reflection.

  My face smiling. A thin trail of blood trickled slowly down my chin.

  • • •

  I jolted awake.

  Are you OK?

  I heard a new voice—Castillo’s—and I turned to it. He was still sitting at the desk.

  I realized only then that I was standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Staring at the mirror, in fact.

  Castillo said I’d zoned out or something, asked again if I was OK.

  I moved straight to his desk.

  Castillo tensed, unsure what I was doing. (I’m not sure if I really knew then either.)

  But I reached past him and picked up the red pen off his desk.

  Hey, Jacobson? Castillo’s voice still far away, like I was still dreaming.

  I moved to the map on the wall. Found Radnor again. DSTI/Massey.

  I made twelve red circles. One for each and every person killed at Massey that night. For each and every white blood-streaked lump. There was hardly any room. The map even ripped away some under all that red.

  We need to find these guys, I said.

  Yeah, Castillo said, and then turned back away from me.

  Now the only question was, what would I do when we did?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  You would think that the very next morning, we jumped into Castillo’s car and started zipping all over the country, kicking in doors and getting in car chases and shoot-outs and explosions and stuff. That’s certainly what I thought would happen. Instead it was just Castillo sitting at that desk again and staring at two laptops. As I’d tossed and turned the rest of the night before, that was also all he’d done.

  The next three hours of morning, too.

  Shouldn’t we be doing something? I finally asked.

  He said we were, and I just stared at him.

  Castillo turned to me. He told me there was this one guy they’d had to catch once, and it had taken almost two years. For one year and three hundred days, all they did was gather information about this guy. They chase-chased him for less than an hour. He said: Research. Doing your homework. That’s how you capture people. That’s how we’d find these guys too. Eventually he’d see something that made some sense, maybe a name or the way someone else was killed, an arrest maybe, whatever. Something. And then he would have a path to follow.

  I asked who was the guy he caught. The two-year guy.

  He chuckled. It was a scary sound. He told me not to worry about it.

  I’d walked carefully over to the desk to see what he was working on. I more than half expected him to slam the two laptops shut and deliver his best F-off look. But he didn’t. He glanced once at me and then kept on working.

  He was looking at the image of a map of some kind, a map covered in different-colored circles. It was one of the maps I remembered seeing in my father’s secret office. I inched closer for a better look.

  Castillo told me the map was probably of somewhere called Shardhara. The word he’d asked me about the first night. One of his very first questions, in fact. I told him I remembered him asking about it before, and he nodded. I’d go so far as to say he might have even looked a smidge impressed.

  Looking at the strange map, I asked what Shardhara was and what did it have to do with any of this.

  He didn’t know. He knew (suspected, really) only that it was “somewhere in the Middle East” and that neither one of us had ever heard of it. He shook his head. Castillo noted that this map had been lying front and center in my dad’s secret room. Right on top.

  My father had wanted people (me? DSTI?) to find it.

  From what Castillo could tell, some kind of experiment had been carried out there. The map had circles and numbers. Like a blast radius. Castillo figured DSTI was involved in something there with the military. A weapon of some kind.

  • • •

  Castillo figured right.

  He just didn’t know yet that the six guys we were chasing had this weapon.

  Or that my dad had given it to them.

  • • �
�

  Castillo’s bosses claimed not to have heard of Shardhara or any kinda weapon either. I asked Castillo if he thought they were lying to him. He ignored the question, and I took that as a YES answer. He asked me again if I’d ever heard of it. But except for seeing that map in my dad’s office, I hadn’t.

  I shook my head, and any small victory I’d felt the night before was fading quickly. I already felt pointless again, started back to my bed to make myself disappear.

  Castillo must have seen it in my face, slouch, something.

  Hey, he said.

  Yeah? I turned. Expected him to hand me another hundred to go away.

  He said: The list you gave me last night is good stuff.

  He said: It helps a lot.

  It was very nice of him to say, but I also totally thought he was lying.

  So I kinda wished he hadn’t said anything at all.

  • • •

  The real story of Cain is different from what I first thought. Get a Bible and check it out yourself. I grabbed one the next time Castillo stepped out of the motel room. He said he was going to get us some lunch, but I think it was just another phone call. I’d spent the whole rest of that morning pretending to read digital pics of my father’s journals, and now I needed something to help replace my father’s twisted writings in my memory. Television wouldn’t do. So in the small single drawer in the stand between our two beds, I found a Gideon’s Bible, just like in all the movies. They really are there. I couldn’t believe it. And I found the passage easily:

  And the LORD said whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

  • • •

  God’s mark wasn’t to humiliate Cain. It wasn’t to brand him as a MONSTER either. God’s mark was: “BACK OFF, PEOPLE. I’LL DEAL WITH THIS GUY LATER IN A MANNER OF MY OWN CHOOSING. FOR NOW, HOWEVER, HE BELONGS HERE JUST AS MUCH AS THE REST OF YOU CLOWNS.”

  It wasn’t exactly what my dad had told me. About embracing my “True Self” and all. But it was close enough. Sitting with that Bible open on my chest, I now half remembered my dad telling me about Cain before. Half remembered lots of things he’d said about the world’s first killer. I made a mental note to find out more about the biblical Cain if I ever got the chance. I hoped it would somehow help me better understand what my dad was doing. What he’d already done. What HIS “True Self” was, let alone mine.

  So in the Bible, Cain is sent to a place called Nod. My dad’s office at DSTI even had a needlepoint thing framed on the wall with something about Nod, and I now remembered my dad saying “Nod” means “wander” in Aramaic, the language of the Bible. He’d said that most faiths believe Cain eventually left Nod and walked the world forever. Cursed. Unable to die. Some Hebrew texts, the kind that churches and synagogues hide away from regular folk, say Cain eventually met Lilith, Adam’s first wife. And that she got him to drink blood for power, just like a vampire. That they had many children together. Demons and monsters. Some texts even claimed Cain was the bastard son of Satan and Eve. And I now remembered that my dad had said something about how during the Middle Ages people believed Cain had wandered around begging people to kill him and that no one would, so he now lived alone on the moon.

  Lying in some shitty motel room somewhere in Pennsylvania with a total stranger who hated me, I could totally picture this. I figured I wasn’t too far behind him.

  And, reading about Cain, I hadn’t replaced my terrible thoughts at all.

  All I’d done was add to them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I sat outside on the balcony of the motel’s second floor, legs slipped beneath the lowest railing and dangling over the dozen rooms below. My fingers wrapped around faded cobalt-blue paint, arms stretched out fully in the warm summer dusk. The motel’s parking lot was still completely empty except for three other cars, and I think one of those might have even belonged to the manager.

  Castillo was working in our room, just below. I had the sense he was getting kinda frustrated with the whole thing. He could talk about doing research for two years all he wanted, but it seemed like he was also ready to start kicking in some doors and finding some clones.

  It probably didn’t help that I’d been so pointless with my dad’s notes. I hadn’t been able to give Castillo any worthwhile information or feedback. How could I? I hadn’t really even read that much of them to tell the truth. Didn’t want to. When Castillo came back into the room with some food and I handed the laptop back, he’d asked me what I thought and if anything had come to mind, etc., etc. I just made faces like I was thinking really hard and said stuff like “Yeah, some of it did” and I’d have to think about it. I’m pretty sure he knew I was totally full of it. Worse, I had no idea what I was gonna say if he asked me again. I didn’t know anything about Jack the Ripper. And apparently I knew even less about my own father.

  I spent the whole rest of the afternoon lying on the bed, mostly staring up at the ceiling. Wishing myself asleep, away from my rambling gloomy thoughts. The room was clammy and getting smaller by the minute. I could feel its walls closing in on me. And it was cold. I don’t know how Castillo could stand it. My whole body was shaking at one point. I’d hoped Castillo might send me out for food again when it was dinnertime, but he’d bought stuff at lunch. Alas. Apparently bologna and bread, and water from the bathroom sink, was enough for lunch and dinner. So after my third bologna sandwich, I asked if I could get some fresh air.

  Castillo eyed me suspiciously. It was a look I was getting used to.

  I thought about saying something like “hey-just-think-of-it-as-another-great-opportunity-for-me-to-run-away-like-you-want-me-to” but didn’t. Instead I went with, “I’ve been in this room, like, all day.” I could tell he was trying to process this information, like he couldn’t understand why this might be an issue for someone. I was living with a robot. He said sure and told me to stick close. (Maybe he didn’t want me running off now, after all.)

  Still, I got out of the room as quickly as I could. Castillo’d suggested I buy a soda or something from the main office, but I didn’t feel like walking that way. I hadn’t liked the way that manager guy had looked at me when I’d asked about the phone, and I didn’t want to give him another chance of giving me any crap. So I just wandered along the walkways a couple of times and slowly passed the other rooms. Most every one of them was totally empty. As I passed, I turned a couple of doorknobs and peeked between some curtains into the rooms. They all proved locked, all dark and empty.

  But I hadn’t checked all the rooms on the second floor yet.

  Halfway through, I’d decided to park it awhile. Just rest my elbows and head against the railing while kicking my feet off the ledge. Beyond the hotel I could see my Subway shop and streets and even the main highway heading east and west through Pennsylvania. I thought again of just picking one of those two directions (didn’t matter which) and GOING, but the thought didn’t last very long. Instead I watched other people heading these directions. Their tiny indistinct shapes inside the cars moving by at seventy miles an hour. I imagined what they were heading away from or toward. The options now seemed almost limitless to me.

  I closed my eyes and really breathed fresh warm air into my lungs for the first time in what felt like years but had only been a couple of hours. Felt the warmth of the concrete beneath my butt and legs, the strange chill that had latched on to me in the motel room slowly thawing away.

  It was funny to think about the whole world just going on. I mean, when shitty things are going on in your life, everyone else just kinda carries on. Business as usual. All those people passing had no idea what was going on in the motel room below me. That some guy working for the government was trying to figure out where the teenage clones of serial killers had gotten to. That at a little-known technology lab in Radnor, Pennsylvania, walls were
being cleaned of blood. That bodies there had been removed in the middle of the night.

  A dozen people already murdered. Not that a dozen seemed all that much to me anymore.

  Castillo’s Murder Map showed that close to forty people were getting killed every single day. Not by cloned teenage serial killers, of course. But by regular killers. Your normal everyday kinda murderer types. And the amazing thing to me is that it doesn’t really slow anybody down. All that murder, I mean.

  Sure, if it was something local, you might see it on the news and think and even say, “Oh, that’s terrible.” But that wouldn’t mean you aren’t going to work the next day or going to a new movie that same weekend or whatever. It was just another “Oh, that’s terrible.”

  Forty people murdered every day, and everyone just kinda shrugs it off.

  I wondered how many bodies it would take to make people really notice.

  • • •

  I opened my eyes again. The declining sun had begun turning more red on the horizon, and a black pickup had just pulled into the motel’s lot under its crimson glow. I watched the truck coast across the empty parking lot. Looked like a guy and a girl, maybe college age. She glanced up at me for a second as they pulled in front of one of the rooms on the opposite side of the motel.

  I wanted to get back before Castillo got annoyed and came to look for me. Or before I had to admit he had NO intention of ever looking for me. Neither option was too appealing. So I pulled myself up, watching the girl lean on the back of the truck while the guy went into the office. I moved toward the stairwell to get a better look. She seemed pretty enough from afar. The guy, short hair with random tattoos spotted up both arms, opened up one of the rooms and yelled something I couldn’t hear at her.

  I suppose I was being nosey, because instead of going down the steps like I’d planned to, I just continued walking slowly along the second floor to the other side. I’d moved away from the railing some so they wouldn’t catch me spying. Below, they unloaded two cases of beer and a couple of backpacks. She asked where something was, and he cursed again, even called her a bitch. Up close she was still pretty, but now I wasn’t sure if she was college age or not. Sometimes she looked no older than I was, but then again there was something in her voice that made her sound like she was, like, thirty. However old she was, she sounded tired to me. She sounded defeated. I figured it’s what I would sound like soon. If I didn’t already. Maybe the Subway guy had heard the exact same thing in my voice.