Zombies, I said out loud. It’s all I could imagine.
Wasn’t that crazy, Ox said. The dead were dead. The old woman was just insane. Hollyman said he wanted to pull the trigger himself but the Defense Department agents wouldn’t let him. They took the woman away, lifted her out by one of the copters, and then started collecting samples. Air samples. Dirt. Water. Tissue and blood from the dead. You name it. Apparently they spent half the day collecting what they needed, then burned it all. The bodies, fields, livestock, dogs, everything.
What did Hollyman think it was? Castillo asked.
What do you think it was? Ox challenged. He knew he’d just revealed a heck of a lot more about what was going on than Castillo had. Still, Ox continued. Hollyman knew only that the Defense Department had tested something. Something biological had been used on these people. He didn’t know what it was, but he said he’d never seen nothing like it in his whole life. Said the crazy woman, the woman’s eyes . . . Not even in his nightmares. Hollyman was his detachment’s senior medical sergeant. He’d seen plenty to have nightmares about. Said he’d burned things that day. Not people. Things.
Castillo asked if he could get ahold of Hollyman, but then Ox said the guy killed himself with a shotgun two years ago.
Suicide? Castillo questioned suspiciously.
Ox agreed it was a shady death and then noted it’d been open season on scientists for years.
More than three hundred Iraqi scientists have been killed since the war began—in accidents, bombings, and suicides. More recently it’s been the Iranians. Check and see yourself which Iranian scientist was mysteriously blown up, misplaced, or poisoned this month.
But that’s our enemy, Castillo argued. If Hollyman’s death was somehow faked, now you’re talking about the United States government eliminating US civilians.
Civilians, Ox said, and laughed. Hollyman was ex-military, not a civilian. Then he asked: And, what’s that word even mean to a country that’s been at continual war for sixty years? You want dead Americans, dead ‘civilians,’ go to bioweapons. It’d been a decade of “DNA guys” dying mysteriously, and he found Castillo’s naïveté on all this almost funny. Or perhaps he was only trying to hide how terrified he really was by making light of it.
Just like the LSD guy who’d died so peculiarly. Ox was talking about the government actively killing American scientists to cover its tracks. American scientists who specialized in bioweapons and DNA research. American scientists like my own father.
• • •
• DNA expert Dr. David Schwartz stabbed to death in Virginia.
• DNA expert Dr. Don Wiley, a Harvard teacher, shows up floating in the Mississippi.
• DNA expert Dr. David Kelly worked for the Navy—found dead after somehow slashing his wrists and throat and then dragging himself a mile away from his home.
• DNA expert Dr. Franco Cerrina found dead in his lab at Boston University. Cause of death still unknown.
• DNA expert Dr. John Clark, the guy who ran the lab that made Dolly the sheep, and spoke out against cloning afterward, was found hanging in a remote cottage.
• Bioweapons expert Dr. John Wheeler found dead in a Delaware landfill.
• Bioweapons expert Dr. Robert Schwartz found murdered in his home in Virginia.
• Bioweapons expert Bruce Edwards Ivins, of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, found dead from an apparent overdose. Of TYLENOL! No autopsy was permitted.
• • •
Look these names up yourself. Until I did, I didn’t believe it either.
It’s an American egghead bloodbath.
• • •
For the record, DNA expert Dr. Gregory Jacobson, my father, is officially listed as the victim of a workplace shooting rampage.
For the record, this is a total lie.
He died another way.
• • •
Castillo thanked Ox and apologized for not being able give him any more information in return yet but hoped to someday.
Ox seemed cool with that and told Castillo to check in anytime. Then he asked Castillo about someone named Kristin, and Castillo got all weird. You could tell right away he didn’t like talking about her. Whoever she was. (I, of course, had not met her yet but soon would. Turns out she meant an awful lot to Castillo. To all of us, really.)
I was pretty damn curious about this girl now. This Kristin. I think at this point it was the only piece of personal information I had about Castillo. I’d just learned that he may or may not have once dated a girl named Kristin. Wow. The full extent of how close we now were.
Before I had time to learn anything more, Ox said something strange. Something about “GHOSTS.” Some kind of “exercise” that Kristin had taught the two of them. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and Castillo shut down the conversation pretty quick.
We’ll leave first, Castillo said, and stood to go. I followed him.
Ox tipped his red Senators hat at the two of us. Wished us well.
Castillo nodded. I kept quiet. When we were down the steps and about to vanish into the tunnels that led out of the stadium, I turned for a last look at Ox.
He, of course, was already gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We sat in the car in the middle of the ballpark’s parking lot. The sun had almost set, and the stadium lights were now on and shimmering like heaven or something above us. All the surrounding cars were empty because it was only, like, the fifth inning. Castillo hadn’t spoken a word yet. Hadn’t even put his key into the car. He just stared straight ahead, thinking, processing, hands on the wheel like we were actually driving somewhere. I sat perfectly still too, moronically looked ahead like I was enjoying the scenery.
Richard Guerrero’s face was now just the dimmest of shapes ghosted on the windshield. I almost had to concentrate and fight to keep it there at all. I wanted to tell Castillo about what I’d seen but decided it had no bearing on what he was doing. Did it really matter that I and maybe the other clones had some kind of weird retro-physiological link to our original selves? That this Dahmer guy’s victims had been burned forever genetically into my eyeballs somehow? Maybe. Maybe it mattered a whole lot and I was just too stupid to understand that yet. Regardless, Castillo already thought I was sickening enough, without adding any of this weirdness to the picture. So I kept quiet.
I thought about the last time I’d told anyone about seeing these faces. I mentioned her before: Amanda Klosterman. Met her at Summer Science, this two-week camp I went to once at McDaniel College in Maryland.
This camp was two weeks of experiments and lectures and games and group projects. Building robots or recording devices from scrap parts, erecting fish hatcheries, tests with lasers and solar power, etc. This was two years ago now. It was a pretty good camp. I was always a big fan of these things because I was off the radar again. At home, everyone (the students at Massey or my tutors) thought of me as the kid with the dead mom. The kid who’d been in a coma or something and talked a little funny. The boss’s kid. But at these camps, I was just Jeff Jacobson. I could be anything I wanted. Every new camp was another opportunity to reinvent myself. I could become the goth kid or the arty hipster kid or maybe even the jock if I wanted. (I do NOT exactly suck at soccer, I’ll have you know.) Of course, I never actually reinvented myself all that much. It was always a good idea the night before or on the drive to these places, but by the time I got there, I was still always just me. Too quiet, low-flying, and just sorta watching everyone else. The world already had enough legitimate goths and hipsters and skate rats and frat boys, etc., in the mix and didn’t need a two-week imposter.
So I was being my typical quiet unimposing self on the second day when we were given the task of making a paper airplane. First we’d all gotten an hour-long lecture and demonstration of how airplanes and flight worked. We studied models and watched videos with birds, bats, bugs, and airplanes, from the Wright brothers’ Flyer to modern stealth
jets. We had a half hour to craft a plane that was “mostly made of paper” and that flew the farthest using anything else we could find in the room. The only other rule was NO TEST FLIGHTS. Each plane could be flown only once, and that would be in front of everyone. It was pure chaos for the next thirty minutes as sixty kids fought for glue and balsa sticks and paper clips and string and just about anything else we could get our hands on.
There were some amazing planes built that day. Long dowel-enforced tails, or shaped like butterflies, double edged, double hulled, double winged, you name it. One kid made one about three feet long that looked exactly like an X-Wing Fighter . . . in thirty minutes. When time was up, they brought us all out into a long courtyard, and we took turns flying our inventions. There was a lot of crash and burn that day, planes making it only a couple of feet before nose-diving straight into the ground, but most people took it pretty good. Lots of cheers no matter what the planes did, really. Several took off about forty-plus feet, and one kid’s made it all the way to the end of the courtyard, like fifty yards. He looked as surprised as any of us. The rest of us were now fighting for second and third place.
My plane was this: I’d taken a couple of coins from my pocket and put them into the center of several pieces of paper, which I’d balled up and then taped with some masking tape. It was a ball of paper. When I stood up at the launch spot, I got some Ooohs and Ahhs from the crowd and one kid shook his head approvingly and smiled. “Nice.” I backed up and ran up to the line and tossed it. The thing went forty-two yards! Now I got a couple of “unfairs” and “stupids” mixed in with the cheers. I was feeling pretty good in second as the other designers took their turns.
Amanda Klosterman went a couple of people after me. Amanda Klosterman’s plane was the size of a nickel. She hadn’t even folded it or anything. It was just a normal little square piece of paper. A couple of kids were laughing. But others—me too—had crowded in for a better look. The instructors looked rather amused about the whole thing as Amanda Klosterman waited and waited. Waiting for wind. She hadn’t been the first to do that, but when a breeze finally swept again into that courtyard, she was the first to just lift her hand up and do nothing.
Her “plane” rose from her hand like a magic trick, swirled in two circles just above her hand, and then sprang up and over all our heads. The whole courtyard watched as the paper then glided down the courtyard, snaking and rippling this way and that along unseen currents. Sometimes lifting twenty feet into the air before drifting back down into the courtyard and skimming just feet from the ground. It floated and wandered freely in the air for minutes that seemed like hours, and then, as we’d all hoped it would/could, her paper finally lifted up out of the courtyard entirely and disappeared forever. The whole camp went nuts. We all spent days making reference to the fact that Amanda Klosterman’s plane was probably still flying around somewhere.
We got certificates for First, Second, and Third places and got special desserts at dinner that night that we could share with our smaller teams. Amanda was, like, the most popular girl in the whole camp now, so I was a bit shocked when she came up to me. She said she liked my design a lot and that we were both working on variations of the same idea: FREEDOM. She told me the only science she liked was the kind that proved we still didn’t know all that much and had a long way to go before we did. She told me the best kind of science was the kind that proved there was no such thing as a universal rule. Things like Time and Distance and Molecules were just words we used to try to explain the unexplainable. She told me that we would never understand the Truths of the Universe but that the search was “so totally worth it.”
We talked a lot that first night. I don’t even remember most of what I said. We mostly shared stories of scientific history and the silly things we’d done at other camps. The whole rest of the week, Amanda Klosterman would sit by me every chance she got and was always hugging me and stuff. Called me “Jeffy Bear,” which I absolutely hated, but I didn’t mind the massive random hug attacks. And she usually did them in front of other people, so within a couple of days I was almost as popular as Amanda. We continued to talk every night. Again, I don’t know about what. I didn’t really care. I just liked that someone liked being with me. Someone noticed when I came into the room. And not because I was the kid with the dead mom. Or the kid whose dad was in charge.
The night before camp ended, I finally told her about my mom and the accident.
And eventually I told her about the faces.
She smiled so big. And then told me I was lucky. Said I’d probably never know who these faces or people are and that meant they could be ANYTHING.
It was a logic that’d helped for two years. Until my father handed me that folder.
I got a kiss on the cheek that night, but mostly more hugging. I’m not sure how I felt about the kiss, but I liked being hugged.
Honestly, I think it’s the first time anyone had ever done it to me right.
• • •
Real hugs hadn’t been prescribed to me by DSTI yet.
• • •
My thoughts had turned to my father and got dark. Too dark. It got to where I couldn’t take another moment in that car’s silence. I looked over at Castillo.
I said: So . . . (Not really sure what to say next.)
At first I thought I might get from him nothing but more mute staring for another hour. But he echoed me and said, So . . . , his mind still wrestling with the next words. Like he’d gone to a place that was too dark also.
I tried the next words for him. I said: So the Army tested some kinda biotoxin at Shardhara.
He said, YES.
And all those people there died?
He said, YES.
I pictured the map found in my father’s secret office. The different-colored circles rippling out like someone had tossed a stone into the center of the village. A stone that had caused people to rip each other and themselves into pieces. How many white sheets had they needed, I wondered, in each of the colored circles?
I said: And DSTI made this stuff.
Maybe, he said. Probably.
Then maybe that’s what happened at the Massey school that night, I said excitedly. Excited because it freed my father and the others of all guilt. Right? I mean, if some poison gas that caused people to kill one another had somehow been set off, how could the students and my father be blamed for what had happened? It was the poison. It would have happened to anyone. I continued: Maybe some of this stuff got leaked and everyone went crazy, or . . .
He looked at me. Maybe, he said again.
You don’t think so, I said, and he just shrugged. I argued that maybe my dad was collecting information on DSTI to expose what they were really up to. Like a whistle-blower thing.
You should have seen Castillo’s face. I must have sounded so truly pathetic, clutching at straws and getting worse with every sentence I uttered. The guy actually looked like he felt sorry for me.
I don’t know, he said sympathetically. Maybe.
It didn’t matter. My whirling thoughts had already taken the next turn. One of the missing puzzle pieces I, then, only understood faintly.
Part of the WHY.
Why they made me.
• • •
They made this stuff from us, didn’t they? I asked. This biotoxin? The gas at Shardhara.
Castillo nodded.
My father had told me the serial-killer clones had been created to craft weapons for the military. I’d never really thought much about what that meant until now.
DSTI had explained it to Castillo as if each of us—the clones, I mean—was a little factory making billions of dollars of DNA, DNA they could use to make new military products. This killer-gas stuff was just one of their new products. I tried imagining others.
Factories? I repeated.
He said that’s the word one of the geneticists at DSTI had used.
I thought about that for a minute, and Castillo let the silence remain for me to do
so.
We’d been made so that they could harvest the evil growing inside.
Modify it, intensify it.
To kill more people.
This was, apparently, my life’s purpose.
• • •
Castillo concluded: None of this changes the main objective. To find those six guys and your dad.
But then he added: If Shardhara comes up again somewhere, at least now we know what we’re dealing with.
And Shardhara, of course, would come up again.
Big-time.
And even then we still only had the tiniest idea of what we were dealing with.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I’d taken my now customary spot in a new motel room and prepared to settle in for the night. Or the week. Who knew anymore? I was starting to get the sense that the next five years of my life could be spent entombed in dark smelly motel rooms with Castillo. Staring at the TV or water-stained carpet. Never really falling asleep. He’d already gotten his laptops up and laid the Murder Map out for an update. I watched him work for a long time, my eyes heavy, but I’d grown way too numb to sleep.
Castillo suggested I watch TV or something, and I told him I was kinda sick of TV and was more of a book guy anyway. He grunted and continued to work. So I lay back and gazed up at the ceiling. I imagined Amanda Klosterman’s tiny white paper airplane fluttering against the graying stucco ceiling. Trapped in the room like us.
Then I thought of something I could do. Maybe to answer some of the questions bouncing around my little clone brain. Maybe, at the very least, to help me kill some time.
I asked Castillo if I could use one of his laptops to look up stuff on the Internet.
Castillo seemed quite suspicious. Look up what? he asked.
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