Kristin had given Jeff his very own copy the first time they’d met. He thought of the last passage he’d underlined: “I must not be found sitting in tears. It is not well forever to be grieving.”
He smiled up at Castillo, and Castillo sat beside him without a word.
Jeff turned back to the lake.
They would have time for talk later.
Epilogue: Any Boy
Jack moved slowly across his big green lawn.
The thick grass tickled his bare toes, and he let each step sink his foot in fully before moving to the next. In one hand he carried a small plastic cup that Mommy had filled with goldfish crackers. The cheesy pizza kind he liked the most. In the other hand was a grape juice bag. The driveway was hot under his feet, and he walked quicker to his destination. The shade of the big tree where his dinosaurs were waiting. The big T-rex that was his favorite, and the new stegosaurus his dad had brought home.
He sat down carefully on the natural mound under the great big tree and carefully set his cup of goldfish on the ground. Looked around for any ants.
Across the street, Alec was playing with his mommy. Alec got mad if you called him Alex. Maybe they would play later. He wondered again if it would be funny to kill Alec. To drown him in the pool. Or hit his head with something until he stopped moving.
Alec and his mommy both waved from across the street.
Jack did not understand why he thought these things.
Later, no one else understood, either.
There was no history of psychopathic behavior or violence in his family. There had been no physical or mental trauma. His serotonin levels and glucose metabolism were quite ordinary. He was not adopted. He was not a clone.
His blood and thoughts were entirely his own.
He was just a normal boy. He was every boy.
Any boy.
Jack waved back.
Acknowledgments
Author Don DeLillo once described a book-in-progress as a hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, dragging itself across the floor, noseless and flipper-armed, drooling; wanting love until fully formed by the writer.
The writer, however, is not the only one made to endure this insistent childcare.
And raising two books (Cain’s Blood and brother Project Cain) at the same time, all those extra hands/eyes/minds/hearts are much appreciated.
Special thanks to: Jason Sizemore and Apex Magazine, who first carried my Cain fetus; Foundry Literary & Media’s Peter McGuigan and Stephen Barbara for suggesting twins and becoming steadfast godfathers, and Katie Hamblin and Matt Wise, the lads’ favorite/coolest babysitters; the devoted fostering of Megan Reid and Stacy Creamer, and Kristin Ostby (who discovered this peculiar child in a blanket on her doorstep and still cared for it as her own). To family and friends who’ve supported the process throughout (one son finally asking, “Will you please stop talking about Jeffrey Dahmer?”), in particular Mary for encouraging, and accommodating, my own lengthy and selfish parenting of the Cains.
Turn the page for a peek at Geoffrey Girard’s young adult companion novel
Available now from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
I sat outside on the balcony of the motel’s second floor, legs slipped beneath the lowest railing and dangling over the dozen rooms below. My fingers wrapped around faded cobalt-blue paint, arms stretched out fully in the warm summer dusk. The motel parking lot was still completely empty except for three other cars, and I think one of those might have even belonged to the manager.
Castillo was working in our room, just below. I had the sense he was getting kinda frustrated with the whole thing. He could talk about doing research for two years all he wanted, but it seemed like he was also ready to start kicking in some doors and finding some clones.
It probably didn’t help that I’d been so pointless with my dad’s notes.
I hadn’t been able to give Castillo any worthwhile information or feedback.
How could I? I hadn’t really even read that much of them, to tell the truth. Didn’t want to. When Castillo came back into the room with some food and I handed the laptop back, he’d asked me what I thought and if anything had come to mind, etc., etc. I just made faces like I was thinking really hard and said stuff like “Yeah, some of it did” and “I’d have to think about it.” I’m pretty sure he knew I was totally full of it. Worse, I had no idea what I was gonna say if he asked me again.
I didn’t know anything about Jack the Ripper. And apparently I knew even less about my own father.
I spent the whole rest of the afternoon lying on the bed, mostly staring up at the ceiling. Wishing myself asleep, away from my rambling gloomy thoughts. The room was clammy and getting smaller by the minute. I could feel its walls closing in on me. And it was cold. I don’t know how Castillo could stand it. My whole body was shaking at one point. I’d hoped Castillo might send me out for food again when it was dinnertime, but he’d bought stuff at lunch. Alas. Apparently bologna and bread, and water from the bathroom sink, was enough for lunch and dinner. So after my third bologna sandwich, I asked if I could get some fresh air.
Castillo eyed me suspiciously. It was a look I was getting used to.
I thought about saying something like “Hey, just think of it as another great opportunity for me to run away like you want me to” but didn’t. Instead I went with “I’ve been in this room, like, all day.”
I could tell he was trying to process this information, like he couldn’t understand why this might be an issue for someone. I was living with a robot. He said sure and told me to stick close. (Maybe he didn’t want me running off now, after all.)
Still, I got out of the room as quickly as I could. Castillo’d suggested I buy a soda or something from the main office, but I didn’t feel like walking that way. I hadn’t liked the way that manager guy had looked at me when I’d asked about the phone, and I didn’t want to give him another chance of giving me any crap. So I just wandered along the walkways a couple times and slowly passed the other rooms. Most every one of them was totally empty. As I passed, I turned a couple doorknobs and peeked between some curtains into the rooms. They all proved locked, all dark and empty.
But I hadn’t checked all the rooms on the second floor yet.
Halfway through, I’d decided to park it awhile. Just rest my elbows and head against the railing while kicking my feet off the ledge. Beyond the hotel I could see my Subway shop and streets and even the main highway heading east and west through Pennsylvania. I thought again of just picking one of those two directions (didn’t matter which) and going, but the thought didn’t last very long. Instead I watched other people heading these directions. Their tiny indistinct shapes inside the cars moving by at seventy miles an hour. I imagined what they were heading away from or toward. The options now seemed almost limitless to me.
I closed my eyes and really breathed fresh warm air into my lungs for the first time in what felt like years, but had only been a couple hours.
Felt the warmth of the concrete beneath my butt and legs, the strange chill that had latched on to me in the motel room slowly thawing away.
It was funny to think about the whole world just going on. I mean, when shitty things are going on in your life, everyone else just kinda carries on. Business as usual. All those people passing had no idea what was going on in the motel room below me. That some guy working for the government was trying to figure out where the teenage clones of serial killers had gotten to. That at a little-known technology lab in Radnor, Pennsylvania, walls were being cleaned of blood. That bodies there had been removed in the middle of the night.
A dozen people already murdered. Not that a dozen seemed all that much to me anymore.
Castillo’s Murder Map showed that close to forty people were getting killed every single day. Not by cloned teenage serial killers, of course. But by regular killers. Your normal everyday kinda murderer types. And the amazing thing to me is that it doesn’t really slow anybody do
wn. All that murder, I mean.
Sure, if it was something local, you might see it on the news and think and even say, “Oh, that’s terrible.” But that wouldn’t mean you aren’t going to work the next day or going to a new movie that same weekend or whatever. It was just another “Oh, that’s terrible.”
Forty people murdered every day, and everyone just kinda shrugs it off.
I wondered how many bodies it would take to make people really notice.
• • •
I opened my eyes again. The declining sun had begun turning more red on the horizon, and a black pickup had just pulled into the motel lot under its crimson glow. I watched the truck coast across the empty parking lot. Looked like a guy and a girl, maybe college age. She glanced up at me for a second as they pulled in front of one of the rooms on the opposite side of the motel.
I wanted to get back before Castillo got annoyed and came to look for me. Or before I had to admit he had no intention of ever looking for me. Neither option was too appealing. So I pulled myself up, watching the girl lean on the back of the truck while the guy went into the office. I moved toward the stairwell to get a better look. She seemed pretty enough from afar. The guy, short-haired with random tattoos spotting up both arms, opened up one of the rooms and yelled something I couldn’t hear at her.
I suppose I was being nosy, because instead of going down the steps like I’d planned to, I just continued walking slowly along the second floor to the other side. I’d moved away from the railing some so they wouldn’t catch me spying. Below, they unloaded two cases of beer and a couple of backpacks. She asked where something was, and he cursed again, even called her a bitch. Up close she was still pretty, but now I wasn’t sure if she was college age or not. Sometimes she looked no older than I was, but then again there was something in her voice that made her sound like she was, like, thirty. However old she was, she sounded tired to me. She sounded defeated. I figured it’s what I would sound like soon. If I didn’t already. Maybe the Subway guy had heard the exact same thing in my voice.
The two had vanished into the room. As the door closed, I heard the guy say something pretty crude about air-conditioning and her privates. She laughed, but even that had that same defeated sound I’d heard before.
I tapped the railing above their room and looked back toward the spot where I’d been sitting. I don’t know what I expected to see. Maybe myself staring back, I guess. Some kind of Alice in Wonderland mirror thing. I only know I felt like I wasn’t alone all of a sudden. I looked down to our room but the door was still shut. No Castillo. I shrugged off the feeling and started moving to the steps again. It was time to get back.
That’s when I noticed.
One of the doors behind me was now open.
• • •
Just the narrowest crack. Two rooms away.
I hadn’t noticed the opening when I’d passed, but I’d been focused on spying then. Don’t know if I’d even have detected it from that angle anyway. The only other cars in the lot were on the other side of the motel, our side. I suppose someone could have walked or taken a bus or . . .
I tried remembering whether or not I’d opened the door myself. My hands absently trying each door latch as I’d passed. I didn’t think so. It didn’t matter. I would just walk past the door and be on my way.
But I didn’t.
As I got closer to the room, the door opening seemed wider and wider.
And I’d gotten slower and slower.
The gap showed only total darkness on the other side. The smallest hint of a dark green curtain that, I assumed, covered the inside window.
There were no sounds from inside. I knew it was just an empty room, the door left open by some part-time maid days before.
I eyed the darkness within.
Anyone could have been on the other side looking back at me. Anyone at all.
I did not, I’ll admit, want to walk past the door and leave it open behind me. No way. So I moved my hand to the latch to pull the door closed, and instead found my hand on the door, applying pressure.
Pushing it more open.
“Hello?” My high voice vanished into the room like smoke up a chimney.
Nothing. My hand pressing more and more.
I saw blue carpet, the foot of an empty bed. Then the desk between.
It was just like the room Castillo and I were in, but everything was on the opposite walls. The room was empty. No one was here.
I put a foot into the room, my whole body now pressed against the door. My free hand searching for a light switch that I just couldn’t seem to find. Everything awash in shadows and the dusk’s red. Slowly peeked my head around the corner to see the rest of the empty room.
And then I saw her.
• • •
A woman.
Lying on the second bed, facing the ceiling.
She was wearing a long black dress. Her arms extended on either side like Christ, fingers hanging lifeless off the sides of the bed.
There was something wrong with her face.
It was too, too white.
She was wearing a mask of some kind, I decided. Its cheeks and lips painted dark, dark red. Redder than the sun. I could not see the eyes.
Until she turned.
© JASON SCHLOTMAN
GEOFFREY GIRARD graduated from Washington College with a B.A. in literature and earned an M.A. in creative writing from Miami University. He is the English Department chair at a private boys’ school in Ohio and the author of Project Cain, the YA companion novel to Cain’s Blood.
WWW.GEOFFREYGIRARD.COM
@GEOFFREY_GIRARD
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
DISCOVER MORE GREAT BOOKS AT
authors.simonandschuster.com/Geoffrey-Girard
Facebook.com/TouchstoneBooks
Twitter.com/TouchstoneBooks
We hope you enjoyed reading this Touchstone eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Touchstone
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Geoffrey Girard
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Touchstone hardcover edition September 2013
TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui
Jacket design by Ervin Serrano
Jacket photograph © Jeff Spielman/Getty Images
ISBN 978-1-4767-0404-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-0406-7 (ebook)
Contents
Epigraph
A Brief History of Cloning
Prologue: A Field Test
Part I
Theodore/7
The Land of Nod
House Call
Secret Room
Our Basest Traits
Plans Shared
Introductions
Your Best Bet
Ground Zero
At the Park
Part II
And the Monsters
Forms Not Found in Nature
What a Killer Looks Like
Jacobson Free
Research & Development
Night Terrors
Emily
The Murder Map
Another Son
Credentials
After Mrs. Nolan
Blood Trail
Part III
Getting Closer
Road Trip
Nightmares Shared
Like Lions
Work to be Done
I Kill People
Birth to the 21st Century
Need to Know
Familiar, Almost
Part IV
Liability
Yours Till Death
Rabbits
Just After Dark
Jeff Calls
Not Who I Expected
The Dark Men
Jeffs
The Eye of God
Ghosts
Kristin
Part V
The Wicked King
No More Talk of Shame
Unfolding of Miscalculations
Wer Mit Ungeheuern Kämpft
Human After All . . .
Welcome Home
Ongoing Investigation
Castillo Alone
Southwest of Eden
Epilogue: Any Boy
Acknowledgments
Project Cain Excerpt
About Geoffrey Girard
Cain's Blood: A Novel Page 31