He crossed the parking lot onto weed-covered dirt and finally reached the fence. Fingers of his free hand wrapped the links separating him from a deeply shadowed hill of weeds and an empty exit ramp. No blood on the fence or ground that he could spot. He thought about jumping it. Then his training kicked back in, and he shoved personal emotion aside.
“That’s it,” Castillo said, catching his breath for the first time since springing awake. “Cops and robbers ends now.”
He’d shot the man. I must have put at least two into the fucker. He backed from the fence, tucking the pistol in the front waist of his jeans, keeping his fingers around the handle. Police would arrive in two, maybe five, minutes. He lowered his head, hurried past the other rooms.
“Hey,” someone dared from one of the darkened doorways. “What the hell’s—”
Castillo turned to the voice, and the man stalled midsentence. “Bunch of kids took off that way,” Castillo said, waved toward the fence, moving past toward his room. “Firecrackers, looks like.”
“Goddamn kids,” the man’s voice trailed after him.
You have no idea, Castillo mused. But had it been one of the “kids”? One of his targets? Couldn’t have been, moved too fast. Something worse?
He darted back into his room, pulled the door shut behind him. It bounced back freely on its newly busted hinges. “Get your—”
“Good to go,” Jeff said in the darkness. He’d already pulled his own bag together and was working on Castillo’s. “Thought you’d want us moving,” he added, looking over his glasses. His hair was tousled and pillow-shaped. He looked all of ten years old.
“Thought I told you to get behind the damn bed,” Castillo said. Still, he couldn’t help but smile. The kid was smart. Never complained. Eager to learn, to always do the “right” thing. Any parent would be thrilled to have a kid like this. Does any of that other shit matter? That these same cells once ate dead flesh and fucked skulls?
“I just thought—”
Castillo looked away. “Thanks, man. Good idea. You all right?”
Jeff nodded. “What was that?” he asked.
“Who,” Castillo corrected, even as he noted that the boy had also felt the guy’s wrongness. “I don’t know.” He crossed the room, pondering. Baffled. Something about their enemy, something still somewhat outside the periphery of his memory. “We’ll talk about it later. I’m gonna have to deal with the local cops now. There’s a Waffle House about half a mile that way. Go.” He grabbed his wallet and fished out a twenty. “Buy breakfast. I’ll get there as soon as I can. OK?”
“OK.”
Castillo smiled again. No questions, no back talk. The kid did as he was asked so easily. He’d have been a good soldier in another life. “You sure you’re not hurt or—”
“I’m good,” Jeff said, lowered his head, and grabbed his book bag. “Um, how long will you be?”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
“Sure.” Jeff skirted the broken door and stepped into the sickly buttery light. “Thanks, Castillo.”
Castillo half shut the door behind him and flipped on the light to check the room again. He saw where the door frame had taken a bullet. He finished tossing the rest of his own things into his bag. Some clothes. The Murder Map. Pictures of the family recently murdered in Delhi, Colorado.
He pulled out his cell and made the call.
“Castillo.” It was 3:00 a.m., but Colonel Stanforth’s voice was clear and alert.
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t expect to hear back from you so soon. What’s the situation?”
“Don’t know, sir. I think one of them might have tried to kill me tonight.”
“But I’m talking to you, ain’t I, kiddo?”
“You are, sir. I gave chase, but he escaped.” Castillo pictured the dark shape sweeping into the room. Something glittering in its hands. Knives, he supposed. But something else was off . . . the guy’d moved like a ghost, floating across the darkness toward him. Again, familiar. No! It’d been toward the boy, Castillo now realized. Toward Jeff. “Real Hollywood, sir. Son of a bitch kicked in the door. Big blades twirling. Woke up in time. Pretty sure I dropped him, but—”
“Castillo,” Stanforth stopped him. “Where are you?”
“Illinois. Town called Olney.”
“Fine, fine. Locals on the way?”
“Affirmative. I took a couple shots at—”
“Clear out. We’ll, ah, clean up with you off-site. And . . .”
“Yes, sir.” Castillo stopped packing, really focused on the call for the first time. Something he’d noticed again in Stanforth’s voice. “Sir? Come again?”
“You alone, Castillo?”
“Yes, sir,” he said quickly, adding feigned surprise to his reply. What did Stanforth mean? Jeff ? Impossible.
Unless . . . Goddamn. The tracking chips!
He’d completely forgotten about the tracking chips. Jacobson’s hidden clones didn’t seem to have them or the gang at DSTI would have already collected them all. But Jeff was something different—Jacobson’s adopted son. He was official, just like the six who’d cut theirs out before going rogue. Would Jacobson have implanted a chip in his own son? Castillo’d never even considered it. But now the chip had led DSTI straight to them both.
Damn, damn it! Stupid, Castillo. You fucked up bad.
Stanforth asked again: “No one else was with you tonight?” Castillo heard the confusion in his commander’s voice.
“No, sir,” Castillo said.
“Olney,” the colonel repeated. “You know what, Castillo, cancel that last. Hold until they arrive, is that clear?”
“Who arrives?”
And just like that: The Turn. The one Castillo’d always secretly expected but never dared imagine would actually happen.
“Buy some time with the locals. I’ll get someone out as soon as I can to help clean up.” Stanforth laughed—a terrible, forced sound. “Don’t worry about it, kiddo,” he said. “You’re doing fine. We’ll get this mess sorted out soon enough. Hang tight. We’ll be right there.”
“Thank you, sir,” Castillo said and hung up. “Asshole.”
It was over. All of it. He’d heard it in the voice, the instructions.
Stanforth had just decided to sell him out. If he waited for whoever showed up, anything could happen. He’d be in THEIR control. No better off than Jeff Jacobson or Edward Albaum or any of them. He’d trusted Stanforth with his life for twelve years and now couldn’t dare give him another fifteen minutes.
He grabbed his bag and stepped out the door.
The world waiting outside somehow even more yellow. More diseased.
IV
Stochastic event n.
From the Greek stokhos for “an aim” or “guess”
(1) an event based on random behavior;
(2) scientific principle which asserts the occurrence of individual events cannot be predicted, although measuring the distribution of all observations usually follows a predictable pattern
Let us here devise his mournful destruction
And let him not escape us.
Do not think that, while he is alive,
these things planned will be accomplished.
For he is knowing, now.
THE ODYSSEY
LIABILITY
JUNE 11, SATURDAY—GLENMOORE, MO
They broke into the Glenmoore Animal Hospital twenty miles away from the motel in Olney. Jeff watched in the shadows while Castillo hacked the alarm and opened the back door. There were just four dogs caged inside, barking as one and loud enough to wake half the state. Castillo told Jeff to find them treats while he looked around some. In five minutes, the dogs were quietly munching biscuit mounds and Castillo was testing something called a DR 3500 Digital Navigator Plus, the clinic’s sole X-ray machine. In another ten minutes, Jeff was up on the table, looking skeptical. “The alternative involves cutting,” Castillo said. “Trust me on that.”
; They x-rayed his feet first, which was where the other boys had had their chips injected. Nothing. They took another dozen close digital shots of different body parts. Hands. Legs. Neck. Nothing.
“What if I get cancer?” Jeff asked halfway through.
Castillo repositioned the machine’s floating tube stand. “And if they find you, will that matter?” He took another X-ray. Jeff stayed quiet for the rest of the undertaking.
“You’re clean,” Castillo told him. He seemed disappointed, like Jeff had done something wrong. “Can’t find a damn thing.”
“How did it find me?”
“He,” Castillo corrected again. “They. I don’t know.” Castillo deleted the images, had already tossed the clinic’s two laptops and a box filled with various canine drugs to make it look like a routine break-in.
They now slumped across from each other on the office floor, Castillo with his back against a desk and his legs outstretched, Jeff cross-legged. Each had a dog resting at his side, piles of treats on the floor between them.
“What now?” the boy asked.
“What now? What now . . .” Castillo distractedly scratched at the dog nestled beside him.
“You gonna quit? The mission.”
“If those have become my orders, sure. Don’t know if they are yet.”
“But you’re not answering your phone. Is that, like, legal? Won’t you get in trouble?”
“Already am. They know you’re with me. I don’t know how. But they do. I can probably talk myself out of that.” He shrugged. So damn tired. “The real problem is that their objectives keep expanding. And never mind me. I think it may have gotten beyond what even Stanforth can do. That’s the real danger. If he feels he’s lost control of this thing, he’ll fucking torch all of it. Including me.”
“And me.”
Castillo would not deny it. “Remember the Albaums?”
“Edward Albaum. Serpent Mound.”
“Right. Their names came over the feed a couple hours ago. They were reported dead last night.” Castillo eyed him from across the room. “House burned down. Fire started in the garage. Old paint cans. Community in grief. Etcetera, etcetera.”
“Burned down? But the bad kids killed them before we even got there.”
“Seven days ago.”
“Did . . . did DSTI burn their house down?”
“Someone did,” Castillo said. “I’ll bet lots of adoptive parents vanish soon and that DSTI’s missing some more employees at this year’s Christmas party.”
“God,” Jeff said. “Can these people just do whatever they want?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that mean for us?”
“That your dad was right. You’re a liability. A lot of people are now. I’m one now too, it seems. I get a feeling that if they catch either one of us . . .”
“What do we do?”
“Maybe we’re not a ‘we’ anymore. Maybe it’s time for you to just go your way, and I’ll go mine. What do you think about that?”
Jeff looked away.
“I don’t like it either,” Castillo said.
“You don’t?”
“Nah. I think if we went our own ways, you’d be dead in about forty-eight hours tops. I might last a couple weeks.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll need to check in again eventually. I know enough to be dangerous to them. I have enough skills, maybe, to still be of value. I’ve been loyal for fifteen years. I just . . . You heard about what happened in SharDhara. All anyone should care about today is that these guys got ahold of some bad, bad stuff. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe if I can find them, I can still clear this up.”
“My dad gave it to them, didn’t he? This ‘stuff.’ ”
Castillo looked back at the boy, struggled for the next words. “I don’t know. Don’t care. If we don’t find it, many people could die. Everyone assumes from the Ripper note they’ll be in San Francisco on the fourth. And, or, D.C. and Detroit. That’s three weeks. But I don’t think we have that long to make my bosses happy.”
“Couldn’t you just find them on the Murder Map again?”
“Sure, sure. But mostly I’d be chasing dead bodies for the next three weeks. Likely off Route 50 now, and we were always one step behind them anyway. Maybe we get lucky again. Henry was the only one going for the Sizemore kid. The rest, he said, were probably already in California. It’s a start, I guess. And a ‘start’ is fine when you have months. There’s just not enough time to do really anything. Just . . .” He closed his eyes, mumbled to himself in thought.
Jeff waited, and he thought Castillo had maybe fallen asleep.
But then his eyes sprung open again. “Fuck,” he grunted. “Yeah . . . Still, I think our best way out now is through.”
“What do you mean?”
“Means I need to stop bitching and finish the damn mission. Regardless of the time crunch, I gotta fuckin’ ‘fix’ things.”
“Find the other guys?”
“Yup. And stop whatever’s supposed to happen July fourth.”
“Find my dad.”
“Yeah, that, too. And I think if we do all that, then . . .”
Jeff chuckled.
Castillo smiled back. “Right? Just catch all the bad guys. Save the world . . .”
“Then maybe they’ll leave us alone?”
Castillo looked down and spoke at the dog. “Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?”
“So, then. . . . What do we do?”
“Beats the shit out of me.”
“Oh.”
“Need to sleep some first, I think. It’s been . . .” Castillo rubbed at his eyes. They felt like bare slits. “Crash here an hour. Then we’ll get moving again.”
“West.”
“Might as well. Let’s try to get some sleep first, OK?”
“Oh.” Jeff reached into his book bag. “Here.” He handed back the worn copy of The Odyssey.
“You’re done with it?”
“Sure. And you, um, like to read it sometimes before you sleep.”
Castillo reached for the book, smiled wearily. “Try to tell myself it relaxes me.”
“Does it?”
“Mostly. Obviously, not always.” He tucked it aside. “Not even gonna try tonight.”
“Did she give this to you?”
“Who’s that?”
“Kristin. She gave you this book, didn’t she?”
Castillo closed his eyes. “Yeah, she did.”
“You guys used to date?”
“Get some sleep, Jacobson.”
“Thought so. How come you—”
“She was already married.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
Jeff slumped down on his side, reached out to pet a napping dog. “Good night, Castillo.”
“Hey . . .” Castillo opened his eyes again.
“Yeah.”
“Where would you go to meet girls?”
“I’m probably gay, remember?” Jeff made a silly face. “How would I know?”
Castillo smiled back. “Dude . . . seriously: Where? She . . . Kristin said some of the guys would be looking for girls. Specifically said Ted. Two days ago, they found the body of Emily Collins. Cops are saying she and some unidentified boyfriend butchered her whole family. Where would they go to pick up girls?”
Jeff thought about it. “Toss over your phone.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I know a way to meet girls.”
Castillo got up from the floor. “Facebook,” he said.
Jeff mimed a slow clap.
YOURS TILL DEATH
JUNE 11, SATURDAY—RIVER GROVE, IL
[From the journals of Dr. Gregory Jacobson]
June 11—What a dance I am leading. The papers now carry the story. Perhaps this attention is what she has been missing? She is never satisfied. No details have been released yet, only that the authorities suspect a “serial killer.” Ha ha ha. La police, ne t’a pas encore trouvé? [50W Parma
drive, rebeca] I gave birth to the twentieth century. I’ve given birth to the twenty-first also the others called again today. Something troubling. Wanted to talk. It is because they are alone. So very alone. I know. Do I now destroy what I have created? Or will they destroy the creator? Either may still satisfy. What lies behind and before each of us is a tiny matter compared to what lies within. Iacta alea est. When I initiated the XP11 project, I feared this. Today, after all the tests and reports, splicings, mechano-synthesis and STR markers, I wholly embrace it. Reason, Observation, Experience—the Holy Trinity of Science.
This one was prettier than the others. When he cut her, he thought of the Buddhist monks who practice Asubha Bhavana, meditating in isolated graveyards, mounting fresh corpses bloated with putrescence. Contemplating the body’s true foulness, seeing ourselves as we truly are. The spit and snot. Tears. Piss trickling down her legs. Putrid, soft, yellow-brown-colored shit. The bile of her vomit as she puked in fear. The sweat on her skin. Lymph slick. Inside, the synovial fluids greasing her joints, the mucus and phlegm lining the insides of her throat and stomach. And the blood. Always the blood . . . For a hundred dollars, she danced for him. “I’m Misty,” said she. “Tumblety” was the name he gave. What do I do? They say I’m a doctor now. Ha. Ha. She touched herself for him in a dark motel room while he watched TV. Five hundred dollars more. Her real name was Gail, Abigail, and where once there was an alluring girl, a pretty smile, the teeth were now broken, jagged and bloody, gaping fetid sockets. He found two rotting wisdom teeth still lurking in the back of her mouth. Her hair, highlighted and long like an Olympian goddess, had, an hour before, lain across his waist. Now it was sticky with bloody stumps at the ends from where he’d torn it out. The tight, tanned flesh across her young stomach, once stripped, became dripping meat. Her mesentery, like a baby’s blanket over her intestines, slips between his fingers. It reeks. She reeks. Long legs are nothing but bones. They are painted in blood and graying flesh is stuck to them. Breasts are no more than fatty tissue and two bags of saline. Where once there was an alluring girl . . . Another illusion that baits such unspeakable things. In one sutra he knows, the female bodhisattva becomes a rotted corpse to release her lover from his lust. In another, a woman gouges out her own eyes for the same purpose. Sweet sweet Abigail. He held her liver, uterus, and heart, fingers pushing through the membranes that held each in place, like reaching into a pumpkin to make a jack-o’-lantern. Her intestines spilled more vomit and fecal matter over his lap, then squirming in his hands before he lay them across the floor. Samvega, the monks call it. Samvega. The dreadful awakening that surely comes from such sudden awareness. He understands that it is all an illusion. He understands that science is one thing, wisdom another.
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