Castillo shrugged, leaned back in the single chair he’d set up at the window. “They’ll come.” He turned to Jeff and winked. “Maybe.”
Jeff smiled, tapped his head against the wall. “I knew it.”
“Give me a break, kid.”
Jeff made a cracking noise with his mouth.
“Hey,” Castillo said. “You done good, man. Getting us this far. This close, I mean. Really.”
“Hawkweed,” Jeff said.
Castillo turned back to the window. “Maybe.”
• • •
Castillo rested in his chair with his eyes closed, his own book opened and resting on his chest. He couldn’t sleep. Two, four hours he’d been trying. But nothing, as he’d struggled before. Years ago. He’d been fighting insomnia all week. Maybe since DSTI. Each night, another hour less than the night before. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he really had slept. Time had gotten funny. Always did when he was on a mission.
He’d tried counting slowly to relax, like they’d first told him when he’d returned to the States. But he’d gotten up to a hundred four different times with no dice. Then, he’d continued to the deep breathing exercises and meditations he’d learned from Kristin. Imagining his feet in the ground, rooted in the soil, growing out, drawing on the healing power of the earth, releasing his “negative energies.” What kind of soil? the pacifying voice on the meditation CD had asked. And he’d always thought: Sand.
And, now, he thought of her.
So he tried reading again instead, but the words his eyes settled upon were all dark words, the passages filled with more doubts than solace:
The gods bestowed courage on me, and power to break through ranks, sowing evils for mine enemies. Such a one I was in war. But farming was not agreeable to me, nor house-keeping, which nurtures noble children. Rather, battle-equipped ships were always loved by me, and wars, and well-polished javelins, and arrows, mournful things, which are objects of shuddering to others. But to me these things were dear, these things heaven placed in my mind; for different men are delighted with different employments.
He was left staring at the flat white ceiling, searching a mental file of a career, a whole life, devoted to an idea. And for that same life, he couldn’t articulate what that idea was anymore. Fifteen years. “Nor did my noble mind ever set death before mine eyes; but having leaped on far the foremost with my spear, I slew whoever of hostile men gave way to me. . . .”
Am I any different? Any different than Jacobson? Than Henry?
“But to me these mournful things were dear . . .”
He breathed deeper, his whole body and spirit pleading for sleep. Sleep. To sleep. “What dreams may come must give us pause . . .” There was no “may” about it. What dream would come? The Cave? The Boy? Or the latest one, the one with Jeff ? (I bite.) Each nightmare no more, no less terrible than the last. Which one would tonight’s restful death bring?
As if to answer, he heard Jeff step into the doorway behind.
“Yeah?” he leaned back to see him.
“Castillo?”
“Yeah, what?”
“Sorry,” came his soft voice from the hall’s darkness.
“No prob. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I . . .” Jeff poked his head into the room. “Got tired of sleeping.” Slowly, carefully. “How much longer are we staying here?”
“Don’t know.”
Jeff nodded, considering. He’d leaned back against the door frame, still half in the hall.
“Why don’t you go read your book or something?” Castillo said.
“Already read it twice.”
Castillo scratched his head to awaken. “Well, read it again, I guess.”
“Ox seemed pretty cool.”
“Yeah,” Castillo agreed, curious as to where this was leading. “Can be.”
“Why’s he called Ox?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Why don’t you—”
“Where’d you meet?”
Castillo leaned forward. “Afghanistan. Ten years ago.”
Jeff thought about that. “What’s the ghost thing he said?”
“ ‘Ghost thing’?”
Jeff stepped farther into the room. “Um, talking to ghosts.”
Castillo searched the ceiling for an answer. “Something someone taught some of us.”
“Kristin?”
“How do you—”
“Ox asked about her.”
“Oh. Yeah. Her.”
“Is she the girl on the phone?”
“No,” he lied. There was no reason to involve her any more than she had to be. “She’s, she was a doctor. Psychiatrist. Worked mostly with soldiers. Most of the guys . . . You can come back home with a lot of bad memories. It’s her job to help get rid of them.”
“Were you one of those guys?”
“I was. Am.”
“What do you mean?”
“Guys come home angry a lot. Always looking for a fight that never comes. Sucks. Guess I don’t drink nearly enough, so it got to me pretty good. You come home with regrets, people you let down. Talking to them is the best thing, but sometimes . . . Well, sometimes you can’t talk to them. One way or another, a lot of ’em aren’t around anymore. So, she had this exercise where we’d try to face these regrets, these ‘ghosts.’ Instead of letting them haunt you, you kinda meet ’em head-on. Talk it through. I don’t know.”
“Does it work?”
“Some.”
“You did it? You . . . you talked to ghosts?”
“In a way, I guess.”
“Did they go away after?”
“The ones I talked to.”
“Who’s Shaya?”
Castillo jolted. How in God’s name . . .
“You, um, kinda talk sometimes when you sleep,” Jeff explained. “Who is she?”
“He was someone I knew in Afghanistan.”
“Did something—”
“Not something I talk about.” Castillo studied this boy.
Castillo knew that half of the other clones had been systematically abused, molested, neglected. Injected with varying levels of serotonin, dopamine. Tweaked and modified. It seemed that Jeff had not. His test group had been slated to be raised in a loving environment. An environment tolerant of his passive nature, of his possibly emerging homosexuality. The end result was a kid who was polite, curious, and sharp. Yet he’d still been crafted from the DNA of one of the worst serial killers in history. Castillo knew such men were often gifted socially. They could mimic and master, for a short time, social norms. They could use them to their advantage. Is that what Jeff is doing? Was he merely waiting? Pretending? Was it only a matter of time? Where did the fabrication end and the true boy begin?
Jeff stared right back. “War’s stupid.”
“War’s simply the unfolding of miscalculations.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Something I read once in college. Basically means war’s stupid. Comes around when people reach bad conclusions.”
“Is it pretty terrible over there?”
“Sometimes.” Castillo’s mind tried to replace his instant remembrance of Shaya (what they’d done to him, what he’d done . . .) with other thoughts. The “good” ones. “I’d be lying if I told you it wasn’t also fun sometimes, too.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Some of the guys, I guess. Funny shit they do, say. The landscape, sometimes. Some of the locals you meet. I don’t know . . .”
“What’s your favorite memory?”
“Memory? Hell . . . couldn’t even guess. Don’t have one.”
“Then you can make one up.”
Castillo smiled in the dark room. “Fine. Early. October ’01. Hell, the dust of 9/11 was still settling over New York. We hit ’em outside of Mazar-e Sharif. A thousand Taliban, back when they were still fucking dumb enough to amass like that. They had a couple ZSU-23 antiaircraft cannons, pair of T-55 tanks, and good fields of fire. Go
od defensive position, but not dug in too deep yet. We’d partnered up with a local warlord in the Northern Alliance who’d brought along a thousand guys of his own. Only way in was across an open field. ’Bout eight hundred yards. And we wanted all of us over at once, so we came in on horses.”
“You making this up?”
“Does it matter?”
“Nope. Horses?”
“Ayup. Like real live cowboys. Or Napoleon or some shit. Six hundred guys on horses. To buy us some time, our side was hitting the Taliban positions with 14.5mm machine guns and M-30s. Artillery. Even had a couple of old T-55 tanks. Bad guys came back with Soviet mortars and those damn ZSU-23s.”
“Loud,” Jeff said.
Castillo nodded, smiled again. “Yeah. And bad. The 23s, there’s nothing left if one hits you. We went in six waves of a hundred men each. Crashed against the Taliban position. Hundreds of Afghans yelling ‘Charge’ in Dari. Allahu Akbar. ‘God is great.’ You know? Christ, I was twenty.” He chuckled, turned to look out the window into the night. “Like I said, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t any fun.”
“So, you liked it? Over there, I mean.”
“I liked being good at something.”
“Killing people.”
“That’s not all we did . . .”
“But you did.”
“Yup.” At this point, there was no reason to fight the discussion. “But it was never something I wanted to do.” He realized it was a lie as he said the words. There had been times . . .
The boy must have seen something in Castillo’s look to make him drop it. “You still think Ted and the rest of the guys are coming here?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What happens when you catch them?”
“Then . . . Then it’s over.”
“You gonna turn me over to them?”
“DSTI? Don’t know. But this will end soon.”
“I could run away. You’d still let me, yeah?”
“Then what? You’re fifteen years old.”
“Sixteen. And I’d manage.”
“Yeah.” Castillo shook his head, imagined the road Jeff was choosing. “People seem to. Here . . .” He handed Jeff his book.
“What’s this?” The boy stepped closer, reached out a hand.
“Chapter called ‘A Gathering of Shades.’ It’s about how to talk to ghosts.”
Jeff riffled through the pages inside. “Thanks.”
Castillo did not reply and turned slowly back to the window.
• • •
Jeff ran away the next night.
Castillo’d sent him out the back door to buy some more food and water when it got dark. It was a bullshit errand, but Castillo must have recognized Jeff was rapidly losing his mind in that house. Cabin fever. Cain fever. And Jeff was more than happy to seize the escape. He also thought he was rapidly losing his mind, but he wasn’t so sure that being stuck in the house was the problem. The nearest convenience store was two miles away. By the time Jeff reached it, he’d decided to just keep walking. He had the forty dollars Castillo had given him. He figured that was enough to do something. Get a bus, or walk to the next town and figure out what to do then.
It had probably been an hour. He didn’t know. Cars kept passing in the night. Black things filled with black shapes he couldn’t see. A hundred people going God-knew-where. Just pairs of headlights racing past. It was colder than he’d first thought.
He would get back east and find his father. Because that man had more explaining to do. A hell of a lot about when and who and where. But mostly a whole lot more about why.
He didn’t need talking ghosts for that. He needed his goddamn dad.
It was another mile before he realized he hadn’t a single clue about how to find him.
All those journal pages and weird cartoons and “murder maps” and computer printouts and Castillo’s little phone calls—they were all about finding the other kids. Not kids—clones. None of it was about his dad. The guy who’d basically told him to fuck off and die. Discarded him like a piece of trash blowing beside the street.
He stopped to shove tears away from his eyes.
• • •
“Where the hell were you?” Castillo asked.
Jeff did not respond.
“You get the water?”
“Fuck off,” Jeff said.
WORK TO BE DONE
JUNE 09, THURSDAY—WILDWOOD, NJ
David stared toward the ocean from the balcony, any view of it blocked by the umpteen enormous houses between. He couldn’t even hear them, the waves. Instead, a couple of gulls cawed beside an open dumpster behind the pizza place.
He could also hear the others in the next room. Dennis and Andrei watching TV.
And, also, the girl they’d picked up on the boardwalk a couple hours ago. They were all in her apartment, which was half a dozen blocks from the beach. She was still crying.
“Yo!” Dennis called out above her. “Get in here.”
Soon this will be over, David told himself. Somehow, someway.
He wanted out. Didn’t care anymore if he was really the genetic clone of Son of Sam, some balding douche named Berkowitz. It didn’t matter that his dad roughed him up some, called him stupid a little too much, or that he’d been prescribed access to porn and violent movies by a bunch of evil doctors working for the military. None of that mattered. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. Not really. Or be around those who did. He only wanted to go home. Boring old Pennsauken. Play some Xbox. Maybe even make some microwave popcorn and watch a funny Will Ferrell movie with his asshole dad. Maybe, even, look into that church thing.
David trudged back into the living room. The TV was on. Some countdown on VH1 about the fifty most “Outrageous Moments” in rock-and-roll history. The girl was hog-tied on her stomach over the wicker and glass table. Her clothing, which they’d cut, hung in dangling shreds. Andrei was naked, too.
“I’m gonna get some pizza,” David said.
“Later.” Dennis looked up from the girl, smiled. “Later.”
“I’ll be right back,” David sustained. Down the steps, down the street, forget the car, just keep walking. Down the whole Atlantic if he had to. Call his dad to pick him up. Would he? “Kinda hungry, is all.”
“What about you?” Dennis laughed and smacked the girl on her bare ass. “You hungry, bitch?”
Andrei grinned, his hand working between his own legs.
The apartment door opened.
Andrei jumped up. “Hey!”
“Who’s that?” Dennis jerked up from the couch, lurching toward the hallway. David also turned with the noise.
The door had already shut again.
And something crept in the shadows within the hallway, then glided deeper into the apartment. A blur of darkness, no more.
Then Dennis gagged suddenly, blood spurting from his mouth. No, his entire neck. His hands clutched for his throat as the blood jetted out from between his fingers and sprayed the white walls and tiny paintings of lighthouses. The boy’s head sloped back, half attached to the yawning neck beneath. His body toppling after it to the floor.
Something sleek and black slid away from him further into the room. A man—obviously, what else could it be? David asked himself—scurried low across the floor like, if David had to say, a gigantic insect, a four-legged wriggling thing.
Andrei suddenly lifted several inches off the floor, too quickly to see exactly how. His naked body jerked, a choked scream gurgling in the blood that sputtered from his mouth. David saw the wide tip of a blade exiting his stomach, then steadily lifting, carving, up to the soul-patched chin. Andrei’s eyes, wide and glazed, tracked the knife’s slow progress as his breath rasped and wheezed, then stopped. The body was tossed to the ground.
David looked toward where he’d left his backpack. Thought of getting his hands on the canister. Jacobson had told him to just open it early if it ever looked like they were going to get caught. Instead, he stood frozen as the dark m
an next killed the girl. Drove one of the blades into her back so hard that the glass table shattered and she fell through to the carpet beneath. The man wiggled the blade free from the floor.
Then came for him.
And, so, the decision to open the canister was never really his to make.
“Wait! What . . . ?” David started a half-formed question.
Two blades replied.
The boy spilled to the ground, suffocating slowly, the blood and air releasing together in cadenced surges from his severed throat. It sounded almost like the ocean.
His killer had already withdrawn to the front door. Stopped over the dead girl for an instant, considered her nude form, but continued ahead.
His other brothers were still out there somewhere. His fathers waiting.
And there was still much work to be done.
I KILL PEOPLE
JUNE 10, FRIDAY—HITCHCOCK, IN
Castillo shook him awake.
Jacobson! Jeff !
“What?” The boy rubbed his eyes awake, stirring from where he’d fallen asleep on the floor.
“Lion time.” Castillo nodded out the window.
Jeff pushed himself up and stepped beside him.
“See the blue car? Pulled up five minutes ago. No one’s gotten out yet.”
“It’s them!” His voice groggy.
“Relax. Relax. Haven’t seen anyone yet.”
So they waited another ten minutes. It felt like an hour.
“What’re they doing?” Jeff asked.
Castillo watched.
Eventually, the car door opened. A man stepped out. A teenager.
“Jacobson?” Castillo murmured.
Jeff caught himself moving back from the window. He recognized the kid completely.
“That’s Henry,” he said.
Castillo nodded. “Go and get the car.”
“What?”
“The car. Right now.” Castillo handed him the keys. His voice hadn’t changed at all. If anything, Castillo sounded even calmer than usual. “It’s close to where we were the first day. Remember the spot? Good. Bring it to the top of the street. On Ashbridge. OK? Keep up top.”
“Yeah. But . . . I—”
“Right now. Albaum’s family was killed in minutes. I’m not letting that happen here. We’re not. Go!”
Cain's Blood: A Novel Page 18