Cain's Blood: A Novel

by Girard, Geoffrey

  Jeff and Castillo shared a knowing look.

  “Still is,” Jeff said.

  Ox winked. “Still is, baby. Still is.” He turned and watched the next batter. “Let me tell you two a story. Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, American scientist, puts cancer cells into a bunch of people, who, surprise, die. His subjects are dirt-poor Puerto Ricans, so no one gives a shit, right? Sorry,” he added, “just being honest. Uncle Sammy invaded Puerto Rico in 1898. It’s now 1931. A Puerto Rican politician named, ahhh, Pedro Campos gets hold of some letters in which Rhoads brags about killing these people, and ol’ Pedro goes to the press. Puerto Rican and American. Guess what they do. Nada, baby. Instead, our Pedro is promptly arrested for being a ‘terrorist’ and spends the next twenty years in a Puerto Rican jail, where he’s declared insane and this country now uses him as a subject for radiation experiments. Irony squared, yes? Want more? During this exact same time, Rhoads, the fine doctor who’d purposely killed a dozen people and then bragged about it, is promoted to run the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Department. The American Association for Cancer Research even names an award on his behalf. That’s the punishment for a dozen murders. More? Dr. Rhoads personally arranged for the radiation experiments to be conducted on Pedro Campos. Rhoads later wrote, ‘All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of their unfortunate subjects.’ Research it yourself sometime online. Some days it’s almost funny. See, before you can truly appreciate SharDhara, you gotta know your history, gentlemen.”

  “Why I contacted you,” Castillo said.

  Ox sighed, shook his head. “All right, look, man. . . . The Department of Defense recently admitted, despite a dozen different treaties banning research and development of biological agents, it still operated biological-agent research facilities. More than one hundred sites across the nation. Including two dozen major universities. All them bitches making something. When the Manhattan Project scientists finished the world’s first atom bomb, they started a second project: injecting plutonium directly into hundreds of American men, women, and children. Their mission was to study the effects of exposure to atomic weapons. Their very first test subject was a civilian who’d simply had a car accident near the lab. Ten years later, these same scientists were dropping light-bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis in the New York subway system, to see how effective biological weapons would work on a large population. Within four days, a million New Yorkers were infected.”

  “What’s Bacillus subtilis?” Jeff asked.

  Perfect, Castillo thought. Exactly the kind of exchange that could get Ox going back in the field. If Ox really truly knew anything that could help, it’d work its way out soon.

  “Common flu bug. No biggie. Practice, brother. They love to practice. Ten years later, the Senate confirmed that more than two hundred populated areas in America were deliberately contaminated with biological agents between ’49 and ’69. San Fran, D.C., Key West, Minneapolis, St. Louis. Everywhere, man. The CIA had forty different universities and drug companies working on this. More ancient history, but you’ll connect the dots easy enough. Then on to MK-ULTRA: covert drug tests secretly given to military personnel, mental patients, whores, and the general public to study if psychotic drugs were a potential weapon. LSD, heroin, morphine, mescaline, Mary Jane, whatever. Keeping brothers high 24/7 for weeks to see what would happen.” He looked at Jeff. “They teach you anything about Tuskegee in school?”

  “I don’t go to school. I . . . but, yes, I know what Tuskegee is.”

  Ox tilted his head, curious. “OK, Private, what you know about it?”

  “Scientists got a bunch of poor farmers, African-Americans, in the South and gave them fake treatments for some disease. They could have cured them, but let more than a hundred die to see what’d happen.”

  Ox nodded in approval. “Not bad. How you know that?”

  “My dad’s a scientist.”

  Ox looked at Castillo, who held up his hands in surrender.

  “His dad’s most definitely a scientist,” Castillo confirmed. He watched Ox trying to make heads or tails of the boy’s role. Maybe should have left Jeff waiting in the car. But maybe he secretly hoped Ox would figure it out. ALL of it. Because at present his only confidant in the world was the teenaged clone of Jeffrey Dahmer.

  “Well,” Ox said, “it wasn’t any old scientists. It was the U.S. Public Health Service, and they infected hundreds in Guatemala also, most of them institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission. The infected were even encouraged to pass the disease onto others as part of the study. And today, white people have the balls to laugh when black folk claim the government is secretly sterilizing the brothas through fast-food chicken franchises.”

  Castillo shook his head. Was it possible . . . ?

  “We could do this all day, man, but you get the point. Take your pick. Project Artichoke. Project Paperclip. Third Chance. QK-Hilltop. Project Derby Hat. Chatter. Camelot. Montauk. MK-SEARCH. MK-NAOMI. MK-OFTEN.” He’d put his beer down between his feet and was marking them off on his fingers faster than Jeff could count. Castillo had heard the list before, a part of the man’s go-to script, but he listened to it quite differently this time. Knowing that “Project Cain” or “CAIN XP11” could be somewhere someday in the roll made the others real for the first time. “Project 112. Project SHAD. DTC Test 69-12. H.R. 15090. Big Tom. Fearless Johnny. The Philadelphia Experiment. Program F . . . have fun brushing your teeth tonight, son. . . . Operation Whitecoat. Ancient history, I know. Need something more current? More relevant? OK. How ’bout chemtrails. Or HAARP. Or Plum Island. Or SharDhara. . . . But we won’t find out the real truth about those until years from now, when it’s finally been declassified. When someone’s too damn old to worry about being silenced and finally talks. When it’s old news. When there’s worse things to think about. Memories are short, man. Agent Orange, who gives a shit? That’s Woodstock, man. Ancient history. Gulf War syndrome? Again, who gives a shit? Twenty years ago already. DX111. Fuck, brother.” He turned directly to Castillo. “How ’bout all the stuff they tried on us. Pyridostigmine bromide, NAPP pills, organophosphate pesticides, depleted uranium, Khamisiyah. We had this talk before, you and I.”

  “We have,” Castillo agreed. The battlefields and soldiers of his career had been crammed with experimental drugs and materials.

  “Volunteer army, who gives a shit, right? Bury our shit another ten years and it’ll sound like we’re bitching about mustard gas at Meuse-Argonne. It wasn’t until 1995 that we learned four hundred Americans had been injected with plutonium to see what would happen. There was an apology. Always is. The U.S. apologized for the experimentations on Pedro Campos in 1994. Apologized for the LSD tests in 1995. Apologized for Tuskegee in 1997. Apologized for Guatemala in 2010. How long before they apologize for what they done to us, man?”

  “Or us?” Jeff said.

  Ox looked at the boy. “You’ll be dead first, little man.”

  “Hey, dude.” Castillo’s whole body tensed. “Come on. Give us a break.”

  Ox held up his hands in apology. “Sorry, sorry. But listen, both of you now. You remember MK-ULTRA, the LSD tests. Check it: Dr. Frank Olson was the acting chief of the Special Operations Division during the whole project. Man knows the experiments are, what’d you call it, ‘morally questionable’ and so he up and quits. Maybe plans to go to the New York Times or Mike Wallace or some shit, right? Thing is, a few days later it’s reported Olson’s committed suicide by jumping out a thirteenth-story window. That there’d been LSD in his system. Course, his family does not believe ANY of this and fights for the truth for the next forty years.”

  Castillo could only think of the late Dr. Chatterjee, DSTI’s most recent suicide.

  Ox continued. “When Good Guy Olson’s body was finally exhumed in 1994, the medical examiner termed the death a ‘homicide’ and pointed to cranial injuries that indicated Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window.
Of course, the United States apologized for that too and then paid his family $750,000. You understand yet? What they’re willing to do? These fucking people. You think a dozen, a hundred, kids matter to these guys?”

  “I don’t,” Castillo agreed. “So tell me about SharDhara.”

  “Secondhand info, brother. All I got.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Hollyman. SFC Hollyman. Met him through a guy I knew down at the VAMC in Miami. It was hinted Hollyman, who’d spent some time at the hospital, might be a guy I wanted to talk to. Total nutball was the official consensus, but my buddy knew my ideas on what a total nutball is can be different than other people’s, so . . . I track this guy down. Company B, Second Battalion, 7th. Took a while but we eventually get talking. Or drinking. I don’t know, you know how it goes. Anyhow, eventually he comes around to SharDhara. Like that’s all he’s been wanting to talk about the whole time anyway, you know. Dancing around it, ‘classified’ blah blah, all those rounds and war stories, waiting to get to SharDhara. He dropped with a small team in ’08. Six guys escorting a couple spooks straight out of Langley. Real Black Ops bullshit. SharDhara was a village, typical backwoods shithole. Taliban mostly. Sub commander, maybe twenty fighters. Local IED depot. Hollyman figures it’s a standard hit and go, right. Blow the IEDs, maybe pop the sub commander and then outsy. Then he’s ordered to pull on the old NBC.”

  “Like a Hazmat suit,” Castillo explained for Jeff. “Nuclear Biological Chemical. For possible WMDs like sarin or mustard gas. But that’s not what this was . . .”

  Ox shook his head. “Hollyman said the village was, and I quote, ‘All fucked to holy hell.’ ”

  “How?” Castillo and Jeff exchanged looks again.

  “Everyone dead,” Ox replied. “Everyone. Whole damn village. Bodies shredded by a hundred bullets, folks hacked to bits. Missing limbs. Ripped apart. Bitten. Men and women raped. They couldn’t make sense of it. Some kinda Taliban reprisal, they thought, but the Taliban were as dead as the villagers. Kids dead with knives, what looked like self-inflicted wounds. Found one survivor. An old crazy woman they found in one of the huts. He said she was eating the dead. Just sitting on the floor, eating the bodies that surrounded her.”

  “Zombies?” Jeff said.

  Ox shook his head. “Wasn’t that crazy. The dead were dead. The old woman was simply insane. Hollyman said he wanted to pull the trigger himself. Spooks wouldn’t let him. They took the woman away, told Hollyman and the others to make it look like the Taliban had taken out the village. Burn it all, clear out the IEDs. They did. And all the while, he said, the Spooks were collecting samples.”

  “Samples?”

  “Air samples. Dirt. Water. Tissue and blood from the dead. Spent half the day collecting what they needed, then burned as ordered. The bodies, fields, livestock, dogs, everything.”

  “What did he think it was?” Castillo was trying to shake the images now painted in his head.

  “What do you think it was? He said they’d 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 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. But this . . . Said he’d burned things that day. Not people. Things.” Ox’s voice trailed off.

  “Anything else?”

  Ox shook his head. “That’s it, man. I don’t . . . you know.”

  “You know how I can reach him? Would he talk to me?”

  “Gone, man. Two years now.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “Benelli M1014.” It was a standard-issue combat shotgun.

  “Suicide?” Castillo thought again of the “suicides” and “accidental deaths” at DSTI. How easy to put scare quotes around those words now. “Or do you think they . . .”

  “He wouldn’t be the first.” Ox brought his beer back up and finished it. “It’s been open season on scientists for fifty years. We in the golden age of chemistry and biology, man. More than three hundred Iraqi scientists been clipped since we showed up. Accidents, bombings, 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. You’re talking the United States government eliminating U.S. civilians.”

  “ ‘Civilians,’ ” Ox said with a laugh. “There you go again. Men who design weapons aren’t civilians. Don’t care whose team they’re on. You want dead Americans, go to bioweapons. It’s been a decade of those DNA guys going down. How’d that line go? The truth is out there.”

  “American scientists were killed?” Jeff gulped. “By the government?” Castillo knew the boy was thinking about his father. After everything he knew, everything the man had done to him, the kid was still worried about his padre. Amazing.

  Ox made a gesture as if he’d been a magician revealing something hidden in his hands. “DNA expert Dr. David Schwartz stabbed to death in Virginia. DNA expert Dr. Don Wiley, Harvard man, shows up floating in the Mississippi. DNA expert Dr. David Kelly, who worked for the U.S. Navy, found dead after somehow slashing his wrists and throat and then dragging himself a half 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, 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, found dead from an apparent overdose. Of TYLENOL! No autopsy was permitted. Look it up yourself. You think it’s the, what, the French killing all our guys? Islamic sleeper cells? Like I said: LSD guy not the first. And sure as shit won’t be the last. More to the point: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, TEN times is Clear-the-Fuck-Out. You all right, Castillo? You lookin’ a little puzzled.”

  “I’m fine.” Castillo looked at Jeff, then back to Ox. “For the record, I don’t own a Benelli M1014.”

  “Entiendo. What else you need?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Castillo stared out over the outfield, tried to clear his mind. “But this helps. If I need to—”

  “You contact me anytime, Castillo. You know that.”

  “Thanks.” Castillo stood to leave.

  “How’s my girl Kristin doing?”

  “She’s fine.”

  Ox shook his head. “You aren’t together no more.”

  “Never were.” He tapped Jeff to move. “Come on.”

  “Yeah, right.” Ox smiled in memory. “You know, I still do that ghost routine of hers sometimes. Just to talk to familiar faces. How sad is that? Talking to ghosts.”

  Castillo sighed. “You ever think sometimes we’re the ghosts? That those other guys are all back home now mowing the grass or watching TV or some shit? And we’re the ones who never made it back?”

  Jeff had risen slowly beside him.

  Ox studied them both again. Nodded his head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “All the damn time.”

  NIGHT TERRORS

  JUNE 06, MONDAY—HARRISBURG, PA

  Soon, the man whispers, a promise, and steps toward his bench of tools. A rusted kerosene lantern casting fluid shadows along the cave wall behind, shadow grotesque as the man hunches unnaturally under the low ceiling. Others in the adjacent tunnels, holes, their foreign jibbering dim and whispered like prayers beneath the hum of generators and exhaust fans. It smells of piss and sweat and blood, someone laughs. Two emptied chairs beside the dark stains of torture pooled below, each of the two bodies already dragged away and only their heads remain propped on the small wood table watching. The man chooses his favorite scalpel to make more shallow incisions along the chest an
d genitals, peels the flesh. Cursing, damning, pleading but the words are garbled sounds, not words at all anymore. Glare angrily from the open eye, the other swollen over and crusted in dried blood. No. Don’t do this. Still, the man steps closer and presses his thumb against the mouth to push back the upper lip. Writhing in the chair, the blood-soaked ropes holding tight, screaming as the blade raises. Brings the scalpel once more to the gums. Then to the body again. Then the gunfire erupts in one of the tunnels and sound echoes like thunder. Drops the wet scalpel onto the table beside the two heads. Watching. Someone shouting somewhere, the sound of a man dying. The man with the scalpel is holding a rifle, arguing, afraid. Other shapes bursting into the room. One body lifted into the air and then, like a black ghost, rises a meter off the ground. Blood splashes across the cave’s gray-brown rock. Something else now stirred in the shadows. A thin, dark shape that drifts like smoke. You scream.

  Castillo jerked up straight in his bed, gasping for air. Scanning the dim room.

  The cave was gone. The black thing was gone. The man.

  The man.

  His own scream still echoed in his memory. Reality reemerged, quickly and in huge swaths. Awake. Real. Room. Motel. Back in the U.S. Pennsylvania. Just a dream. Nothing’s there. No one’s there. Nightmare.

  Still, his hand remained jammed in the bag by his bed, wrapped around the pistol he kept there. His heart pumping a million beats a minute again. He touched his free hand to his chest. Calm down. Calm down. His mind fought for the words, the specific words to help. His own frantic breathing filled the whole room. Nothing coming to mind. Think! Focus!

  He looked across the room to the other bed.

  The boy, Jeff Jacobson, lay there. Head turned asleep.

  Maybe I didn’t really scream out. Maybe he imagined that also. He let go of the gun. Pressed his hands against his face. Opened his palms enough to let the unsteady breathing pass through.