CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
A memory.
On some Sunday morning. Early. We’d stopped at this little deli on the way and bought hoagies for lunch and some jelly doughnuts for the drive. The car smelled like coffee and fresh aftershave. The office was empty, and I’d wandered the rec room while my dad took care of some work in his office. Played Xbox on the big TV. Tried playing myself in foosball. Motionless and quiet for miles in every direction, like the whole world was still asleep, or had disappeared, except for the two of us. What’s this? I asked. Security system, my dad replied. How’s it work? My dad smiled, checked his watch. I’ll show you, he’d said. He put my hand on a special scanner and took images of my hand. Said I could go anywhere now. Anywhere at all.
This memory was one of the few real ones.
• • •
It was like the spare key to his secret room back at our house. For whatever reason, he’d wanted me to discover what was really going on.
• • •
When I think of my father, or of his death, these are the kinds of memories I think of. Watching movies together or taking a hike. Eating a pizza while he talked about history and science and stuff. So maybe he wanted me for all the wrong reasons. And maybe I was just another specimen to him. Another lab rat. Maybe he was a terrible, terrible monster. A murderer. But he was also my dad.
• • •
I’d been gone for only two weeks. But now DSTI already seemed like a faded memory from some other guy’s past. Like something I’d only imagined. But it was real, and I was back.
I held my hand to a security touch pad. The back gate opened.
Ox’s van rolled slowly down the tree-lined pathway.
Castillo drove. Everyone else, including me, hid in the back.
We’d all spent the night at some remote farm somewhere in West Virginia. The original rendezvous spot. Ox had already been there with four guys when we’d arrived. Two from the night before. Castillo and I had gotten there in a stolen car. I’d driven. Castillo had bled, had tried not to die. Somehow, we’d both made it to West Virginia. Some woman named Yvette, a friend of Ox’s, had made us all food and stitched up Castillo. I’d stayed at his bedside the whole rest of the day. Watched his feverish nightmares. Watched Yvette’s medicines eventually do their thing. I was there when he called his boss—Colonel Stanforth. Told him it was time to “settle accounts.” End things once and for all.
Now here we were.
In the distance loomed the Massey Institute, the school menacing and dark. Watching the slowly approaching van. Closed post-tragedy for the summer but still filled with the ghosts of foul secrets and unknowable grief and pain. I imagined a woman in a long black dress walking its empty halls. Awaiting the return of students that would, now, hopefully never come again.
We stepped free from the van. Ox and the others all had guns again.
I held my hand to another touch pad. Another door opened.
Castillo joined me in the doorway. Ox and two of the other men waited behind.
Castillo told me to stay with Ox this time. To use my security-thumping hand to free as many of the kids as we could. If there were any still alive.
I told Castillo we were gonna try to find ALL of the kids. The “Good” ones and the “Bad.”
He nodded in agreement. Then started to go.
I grabbed his arm. Asked where he was going.
He told me he was taking the front door and that they were expecting him. He’d put his hand on my shoulder. Stopped whatever next words I might have gotten out.
He told me everything was OK now, everything was “good” again.
I didn’t understand what he meant.
He grabbed me. Gave me this awkward bear hug.
My whole body was shaking.
With fear. And regret.
And love.
I tried to say his name . . . to say anything. It all came out funny.
He pulled back, held me at arm’s length. His eyes were glassy with tears also.
He told me to just focus on the job, focus on the others.
He meant the rest of the guys from my father’s list. Those adopted out by DSTI or the ones my father had snuck out himself. The other names and squiggles. Guys we hadn’t found yet. Guys who might still be out there. Guys maybe still being tortured in the name of an experiment that’d been canceled. Or guys and families who had no idea what they were and who’d eventually be targeted by the government looking to erase the whole thing.
Castillo told me a friend of his had all the files now. Everything. And that I’d get it all soon. I knew right away he meant Kristin.
And I also knew now that he was planning never to see me again.
Any of us.
He’d come here to die.
• • •
I couldn’t breathe.
This guy who’d terrified me for weeks. Hated me. Feared me.
Saved me. Cared for me.
The thought of never seeing him again . . .
I swear I couldn’t breathe.
I said: We’ll find them together.
Castillo just smiled.
He said: I hope so.
He said: I’m not sure what happens next and don’t really understand everything we’ve been through. But I know one thing, and I don’t need these scientist assholes or any of their damned tests to prove it either.
He said: There are Good Guys and Bad Guys.
His next words wouldn’t come out. He squeezed my shoulder instead.
I tried to say something too. Couldn’t either.
Go, he said, and then he left me.
• • •
I watched him disappear around the corner.
My whole body was trembling.
Jeff? I heard Ox behind me. I turned slowly.
He smiled. As genuine and open as if we were sitting at a baseball game.
He said: Let’s do this thing, little man.
I looked to where Castillo had just been. The image of his exit already fading in my mind.
Then I turned to Ox and said: OK.
• • •
Inside, I held my hand to another touch pad. And another door opened.
Ox stepped through first, tugged me along. The two other men followed.
We’d been inside the building for maybe ten minutes. Small lights were flashing different colors in each of the halls. But the place looked pretty abandoned. Hallways totally dark and empty. Didn’t look like anyone even worked there anymore.
My father’s office was just down the next hall. I thought of leading Ox and the other two there. Why? I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to see it again. To fully remember being there with him. To maybe touch something of his. Take something. Remember how things were just two weeks before. When everything was “normal.” When everything was a wonderful lie.
But I didn’t. This wasn’t about him anymore. Or me either, I guess.
I suppose that’s what Castillo had decided also.
I led them away from his office to another section of the building. One I remembered being in only once before.
The hallway that led to the room filled with tanks.
The room filled with monsters.
• • •
We found the room. I remembered the long hallway as clearly as if I’d walked it just the day before. As if I’d walked it a hundred times. Inside the room the tanks looked exactly as I remembered. Two rows of a dozen each. Except now the cylindrical tanks were completely empty. No men floating inside. No liquid even. DSTI was cleaning up their mess.
Still, I could feel that familiar chill surging through my blood. The sound of pulsing hearts and rushing blood. One of them—one of the beings from one of these tanks—was close.
But it wasn’t interested in me. Wasn’t looking for me. Not here.
Come on, I said.
• • •
My handprint opened the next room just like all the others, but inside THIS room were five boys lyi
ng on cots. IVs dripping into their arms. They were all half-awake and all looked totally drugged out of their minds.
Ox and another man moved to free and wake them.
I tried waking the fifth boy, noticed the tag on his wrist.
It said only EDWARD.
I leaned into the boy’s face. His eyes totally empty. Lost.
I don’t think he even knew I was there.
Albaum? I asked. Bryce Albaum?
The kid’s eyes fluttered. Drool bubbled over his lower lip.
I told Ox this was one of the kids Castillo and I had found. (I didn’t know this 100%, but I felt it completely.) I said I think they’ve “done something” to him. (DSTI had, we would learn later, given several of the boys chemical lobotomies.)
Ox shook his head. Sighed deeply.
This is bad, he said.
Ox should have waited to say that.
The next room was more bad.
• • •
My hand wouldn’t work. I kept trying the security panel, but the door wouldn’t open.
So Ox smashed the screen with his gun and then did something with the tiny wires inside.
It took a couple of minutes, but it worked.
Inside there were three boys propped up in chairs.
Metal held their arms and heads in place.
Tubes fed them. Wires connected computers directly to their heads. Each skull opened at the top with a section the size of a credit card so that the dozen or so wires coupled to devices implanted into their exposed brains.
These boys were awake, cognizant.
One of them looked exactly like me.
• • •
It’s OK, I told them all.
You’re safe now.
• • •
The kids from the first room shambled like dead things down the hall around us.
I had a hand on the arm of the boy named (per his tag) Albert, and another hand on the boy called Theodore, who was only maybe ten years old.
The ones from the second room, those from the chairs, couldn’t walk at all. So Ox carried one on his shoulder. Another man carried the other two.
As we all moved down the hallways back toward the van, I kept an eye on the man just in front of me. He carried the boy from the chair who looked just like me.
His tag read JEFF.
(This “little piggy was set aside for lab work,” according to our “brother” Jeff Williford.)
He hung over the man’s shoulder. Head tilted, his eyes never leaving mine either.
He knew too.
That he and I were, well, “related.”
Gunfire popped several hallways away.
Screams.
I turned to look back at Ox, who shook his head.
Just go, he said.
• • •
I waited with Ox outside the van.
There were ten kids in the van with us. We’d found two more, boys no older than ten, sleeping in another room at the end of the hall. All of them now sprawled out in the back like bodies in a crypt.
Also, one of Ox’s men had filled two duffel bags with medications. Bottles he’d found by the hundreds in one of the rooms. Thousands of blue unmarked pills. Pills that looked exactly like my “allergy medication.”
Ox and the other guy now stood outside the van, an automatic rifle aimed at DSTI as if they would shoot down the whole building. A third man was still inside the building, downloading what files he could off the DSTI computers.
And I was still waiting for Castillo. Frantically wondering what was going on inside that building. Who he was meeting with and what they were doing. Why he’d had that strange look in his eyes when we’d parted.
A couple of minutes later the man who’d been downloading files came bursting out the back door.
Still no Castillo.
Ox checked his watch. Five minutes, he told me.
I got him to wait ten.
• • •
That’s not to say we just left then.
I mean, I suppose that was Ox’s intention. Or Castillo’s plan or whatnot.
But it wasn’t mine.
And this is exactly when all the alarms went off.
The whole building lit up. Flashing lights and piercing electric sirens.
I jumped out the van door and dashed back into DSTI.
I was not going to leave Castillo.
Ox jumped out of the van too and made to stop me, but I was already scanning my hand and in the door before he’d gotten halfway to me.
Behind me he shouted for me to stop. I let the door shut in his face.
He could do his smash-wire thing if he wanted, but I knew it’d take a while.
I was alone in DSTI now. And I needed to find Castillo.
• • •
Inside, the hallways flashed. Emergency lights blinking in every corner.
The walls blushed red like they were covered in blood.
A detached electronic voice neither male nor female came over the building loudspeakers.
“WARNING. EMERGENCY. LEVEL THREE. EMERGENCY. PLEASE REPORT TO SAFETY STATIONS IMMEDIATELY. WARNING. EMERGENCY. LEVEL THREE . . .”
And so on.
As if all of DSTI were under some giant microscope and were being watched by some other person as part of a cosmic experiment. Like we were ALL part of the experiment.
An experiment of Good and Evil.
If so, I wonder what they’d have concluded.
• • •
I dashed through the dark flickering hallways.
I already knew where he wasn’t and so tried the other part of the building.
I found Castillo in the Command Center.
It was the building’s largest room. Oversaw half a dozen different laboratories and housed a hundred large monitors and a table large enough for fifty people.
The whole room was encased in special floor-to-ceiling glass.
Soundproof. Bulletproof.
Secret-proof.
And the entire room was also filled with billowing puffs of purple smoke.
Through the glass I saw the thick vapors curling and rolling in every direction. I couldn’t even see fully into the room. Just these shapes moving within the smoke. Maybe half a dozen bodies. WHO, I yet had no idea. Those people who’d agreed to meet Castillo, I supposed. People from the Army, from DSTI.
My hand couldn’t open the door. Its scanner light wasn’t even working. (I found out later that Castillo had shot it from the inside, locking everyone in.)
I raced the perimeter of the whole room, turned the corners. Hit another hallway. There was no other way in. I moved along the side of the thick Plexiglas again. Ran my hand along it. Trying to figure out what was going on inside.
Castillo appeared then. Stepping from out of the mist to stand against the glass.
He looked strange. Lost.
He collapsed. Put one hand against the translucent wall.
In the other hand he held a canister. No bigger than a soda can.
One I recognized. One that another Jeff had shown me.
Castillo let it roll out onto the floor and into the room.
His eyes were red and something else.
Something horribly wrong.
Something Evil.
I pictured the people in Shardhara ripping one another and themselves into pieces.
And I was glad I could not really see the dark shapes moving in the mist behind Castillo.
I crouched down next to the glass to be closer to him. Put my hand up against his. The glass was cold to the touch.
He turned, his back against the glass, his fingers still up against mine.
Then that purple smoke covered him completely and his hand slowly pulled away.
I couldn’t see at all anymore what was happening within all that smoke. I thought about just sitting there, waiting for the police or government or whoever to show up and arrest me. But it wasn’t just about me anymore.
There were ten kids waiting
just outside who needed to get as far away from police and government and whoever as quickly and completely as possible.
Castillo had sacrificed himself for us.
Buying time, I guess. Or maybe just taking out all the major “Bad Guys” at once with, ironically, a weapon of their own creation.
The least I could do was get up.
I pulled myself to my feet.
And walked out of DSTI forever.
• • •
As to WHY Castillo opened up that canister in the room, you’d have to ask him.
That’s his story to tell.
I know the stuff he released is called IRAX11 and that it was developed at DSTI by my father and his colleagues.
I know the people in that room included Castillo’s boss, a couple of mercenaries, and several scientists who’d worked at DSTI. I know that most of them had been involved with Project Cain from the beginning and that it was not the most innocent group of people in the world.
I know that Castillo probably found the irony of their end fitting.
Testing their own experiment on them and all, I mean.
I know that, partially, Castillo wanted to find out what HE was really made of.
Like we all do.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
O x is convinced the world is going to collapse on itself pretty soon and that we’ll go back to the Stone Age or something. Part of me kinda hopes he’s right. He and some other folk live on a hundred acres. Somewhere secret. Another property tucked away for special needs and even more remote than the first. They had more than enough room and supplies for a dozen kids, including me. And whenever we find another kid, they’ll have room for him, too.
It’s good here. Not a single scientist for a hundred miles in any direction.
• • •
For a week all the news channels reported how Captain Shawn Castillo, a decorated vet suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, had taken his paranoia and delusions out in a killing spree at a small research facility in Pennsylvania.
The dead list was all scientists and “consultants.”
Castillo hadn’t really killed any of them.
They’d done that all themselves. To each other.
Thanks to the IRAX11 poison.
Still, Captain Kristin Romano, the doctor who’d once treated Castillo, was interviewed by several stations. “Terrible delusions,” she told them. “A tragic reminder for this country to remain committed to advancing the clinical care and social welfare of its veterans.”
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