by Alex Myers
“I suppose that’s the reason,” Jack said as he sat on a dry spot on the porch. “I’m having a little trouble adjusting to things here.”
“Thought you said you were from these parts.”
“Well, not really.”
“It seems like it’s as good a place as any. You running short on funds, need a loan?”
“Money’s not the issue here. It’s the people.”
“Uppity, you mean?”
“I was thinking backwards.” He regretted this as soon as he said it; after all, Murphy was practically a hermit. He changed the topic. “Have you ever thought about time travel?”
Murphy looked at Jack for a minute, and Jack could see his mind whirring, trying to put together the words ‘time’ and ‘travel.’ Then he said in a calm even voice, “Time is too slow for some, too fast for others, and too long for those who grieve.”
“Good God, Murphy! Where the hell did that come from?”
“I’ve thought about traveling back in time nearly every day since I lost my girls. I would give anything to see my wife Belle, to hold my little Anna . . . but I know that it’s nothing but a chimera, some silly woolgathering of a delusional mind.”
Murphy looked like he was going to get sentimental again so Jack broke the silence. “You still having trouble with your hydro-generator?”
“Yes, I am. I could use some help. You like science?” Murphy asked.
“I like my coffee strong, my physics quantum, and I’m a firm believer in the theory of gravity.” Jack laughed.
“Well, let me put on a pot and we’ll get after it.”
CHAPTER 10
February 1856
Williamsburg, Virginia - The SAC Plant
“Why have I never seen this side of the plant before?” Abner Adkins asked.
“You’ve never needed to see it.”
“I’m your lawyer and acquisitions specialist.”
The old man laughed condescendingly. “You advise us what to steal from companies least likely to sue us.”
That was one way of putting it, but Adkins liked to think of himself as a more integral part of the organization. He continued, “Do they know they’re going to die?”
“A better question would be ‘Why do you care?’ I don’t recall hiring you for your moral compass.”
Thump, slide, thump, slide—Winston Creed’s cane and dragging foot were the metronome of death for the men behind those walls. The cane was almost a living entity with its heavy carved Alpaca silver lion’s head, crooked handle, and hardened ebony shaft with a weighted lead center.
The odors of sweat, urine, and feces mixed with more astringent, acidic smells dug into Abner’s sinuses like an icepick. They passed thickly glassed windows in the otherwise brick wall that revealed small rooms. In each room a man lay in an unpadded barber’s chair, with hefty leather straps around their legs, arms, and neck restraining any movements. Adkins and Creed continued to walk down the dimly-lit hallway.
“How many prisoners do you have in the facility?”
“Volunteers.”
“Excuse me?”
“Open your ears. I hate repeating myself. I simply will not tolerate it. I said they are not prisoners, but volunteers.”
Cowed, the lawyer continued. “How many volunteers do you have?”
“Twenty-seven. Another four from South Carolina and three from Georgia are coming next week.”
“How much do you have to pay the prison system for each man?”
The older man looked at him with one eye and curtly said, “For a lawyer, you’re not very smart. I don’t pay them—they pay me fifty dollars a head to take the reprobates off their hands.”
“This is an arrangement you worked out with the prisons?”
“Lord no, this was an executive order from Doughface himself?”
“Franklin Pierce? President Franklin Pierce—a Yankee?”
“The most Southern Yankee we could hope for. I sit on his Southern Advisory Consul.” He paused and looked at the lawyer with impatience. “You don’t get the irony of it, do you? And to think you came highly recommended.”
Adkins’s face flushed with anger; he wasn’t used to anyone speaking to him this way. If this heartless son of a bitch and his partners weren’t paying him a thousand dollars a month plus expenses, he wouldn’t put up with his condescending ways.
“The Southern Advisory Committee,” the old man continued. “Good Lord! It’s almost Southerners Against Compromise. SAC? Who the hell do you work for?”
“Southerners Against Compromise, the SAC. I apologize. You named the committee for President Pierce?”
“He thought of it. Like I said, it’s the divine hand of God at work.”
There was a boiling death scream muffled by thick heavy glass. The sound reverberated off the walls and died as a whimper.
“How are these men not missed?”
“They are all currently serving life sentences in federal and state penitentiaries. They have no family or friends to speak of.”
“Which, I suppose, is not surprising.”
“Exactly. They are a burden on society and, for fifty dollars a man, we are more than happy to help out—it’s our civic duty.”
“At what point do you set them free? Is it a certain length of time? A certain number of experiments?”
“No one leaves here—not alive.” The finality in the old man’s voice made his skin crawl. “There's too much to test—acidotic eyedrops, food poisoning, sensory deprivation—yes, now there’s something exciting. In one month of working with a man, we got him to strap a bomb onto himself and light the fuse, following our directives right to the bitter end.”
“How could you defend against such a suicide attacker?”
“You couldn’t. We’re learning more every day. We have two other men nearly conditioned. Strap a bomb under their jackets and we could send them anywhere— even to the White House.”
Chills ran down Adkins’s spine. The White House? These men were highly motivated and deadly serious. He might already be in too deep.
“We’re here,” the older man said and rapped on room number six’s iron door with the carved head of his cane. A skeletal, birdlike man opened the door wearing a white smock gathered at the waist by a leather belt.
“This is Doctor Ayelett Klarner and he’s been waiting to get started.”
The doctor stepped aside, letting the two into the double-sized room. There were three unpadded barber chairs with three men secured with heavy leather straps. The men had their heads shaved and locked in place with a metal harness that had four sharpened thumb-size screws. Two screws bore into the back of their half-shaven heads and two more nearly impaled their temples. Their mouths were held impossibly open by a bridle-like bit that pulled down on their lower jaw to the point of breaking. The men’s eye’s darted side to side, trying to see what was about to happen to them.
“The first experiment will concern the Portuguese Man-of-War, Physalia physalis. We acquire the jellyfish-like creatures in the Gulf Stream off the coast of the Carolinas. They float in groups of a thousand or more, so we have no problem gathering them up, and this is their concentrated venom.” The old man put his cane in the crook of his arm and held up a milky vial of liquid.
“We soak hard brittle planks of Spanish cedar in the venom and place pieces in a fragmentation bomb. When the black powder explodes, splinters carrying deadly toxins fly fifty feet in all directions. Experiment two will be similar, except we will be using venom from the spotted eagle stingray, Aetobatus narinari, found off the coast from Georgia to the tip of Florida.”
Two of the bound men struggled against the restraints, both bleeding from the temples where the screws from the head restraints dug in. The third man lay motionless, eyes fixed on a distant point, a slight smile on his face.
The old man with the cane continued. “Tightly packed around the wood planks is thallium sulfate.”
“Rat poison?” the lawyer asked.
<
br /> “Much more concentrated, but yes. In powdered form spread by the explosion, it should leave a toxic cloud fifty yards in diameter.”
“Why do we need these bombs?”
“Because we are in the terror business.”
“I thought we were in the manufacturing business.”
“We are in the business of not having our rights and property seized and directed by Yankees. The public doesn’t have the stomach for terror and with just enough applied, and in the right places, they will back off Dixie. We want to get them to the point where just the threat of violence will become as potent as using it.”
“So everything is to support this?”
“Everything is an adjunct to this. We already make money. Spain and France will take as many as we can produce and for a substantial price.”
“What is he for?” The lawyer motioned with his thumb in the third man’s direction.
“We’ve never tested thallium sulfate on a human before. I will have Dr. Klarner first disburse thallium alone, then to our other two volunteers thallium with Man-of-War extract, then thallium and the stingray venom.”
The two more lucid prisoners struggled to no avail. They moved, thrashed, and tried to talk without the aid of their jaw and with only half of their tongue.
The first man, the one who didn't struggle, was still smiling as the doctor gave him two snorts of a substance that looked like talcum powder into each nostril. He was in his late thirties, tall, gaunt, and ill-formed, with an enormous Adam’s apple. He had a bony head, smallish ears, and a malignant pallor. The only thing moving on the man was the up-and-down bobbing of the enormous lump in his throat.
“Thallium sulfate in liquid form could possibly poison an entire city's water supply. We’re just not certain how fast it works and what the toxicity level is for humans. We’ve tried it on plenty of dogs and cats—just not a human yet.”
“What do you mean by volunteer? Did these men and the others really consent to being poisoned and such?”
“Technically . . . no. Almost none of the bastards can read, and those who can choose what they think is a chance at freedom—freedom over a firing squad or the gallows. What no one realized was how efficient we would become in our work of killing.”
“I would like to take a look at those contracts.” Adkins’s was shocked by the sheer electricity of the panic rolling off the other two men.
The man in the middle was a full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bullnecked pig of a man. His hair was a mess of long matted gray curls.
The third man was just a boy, with fleshy full lips, wide-spaced eyes, and abnormally long eyelashes. He was what one would call wispy.
“He's right pretty, ain’t he?” the old man said. “ I already used him up. He cried and screamed like a little girl, begging for his life . . . you can see how well that worked out for him.”
“You, you?”
“Yes, but the good Lord knows I did not enjoy it. I did it to break his spirit.”
Tears rolled out of the corners of the boy’s eyes and he moaned in a little boy’s voice.
“Are these people all murderers?”
“No, I told you they are volunteers. Are you going soft on me?”
“Of course not.” He was.
“Sir,” Dr. Klarner said. “Volunteer one is starting to react.”
“Excellent,” the old man said, consulting his pocket watch. “I clock that at less than three minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, this is good. Start the thallium on the other two.” The old man thumped his cane like a heartbeat as he moved closer to the first man. The patient was unchanged except for red splotches on his cheeks and forehead.
“Look at his eyes,” the lawyer said.
They were still distant and unfocused, but the whites were starting to fill with blood.
“I am simply jubilant,” the old man said as he leaned over the patient and their faces were only inches apart. Then it happened.
The man who had been silent and inert jerked his head up in a cacophony of sound and movement. He punched up with such force his jaws snapped at the hinges. The violent upwards thrust dug deep trenches in the side of his skull. His forehead struck the forehead of the old man, causing him to bolt upright, fly over backwards, and slam against the tile floor.
The patient convulsed up and down, side to side, until eventually his head broke free. Deep furrows sprouted bright blood and sent spray around the room. The old man on the floor lay unmoving and the lawyer assumed him dead.
The breaking of the jaw had freed the man’s tongue from the bridle-bit and it flopped preternaturally long around his face. Then with a great grunt from the man's mouth, a foamy fountain of blood erupted like a volcano spewing lava.
The old man stirred and looked around the bloodied room for his cane. He found it, snatched it, and struggled to his feet. Once standing, he raised the black mahogany cane over his head and brought it down across the forehead of the dying man. The forehead gave way like a ripe melon. The room was quiet.
Finally the lawyer spoke, “That was the humane thing to do.”
The old man turned to him surprised. “You think I did this for him?” the old man asked, wiping his cane on the man's prison smock. “I did this because he angered me. How dare his audacity. Does he have no respect for what we're trying to accomplish?”
The lawyer kept his mouth shut. Before today, he not only liked the money and influence that came from working with these men, but he’d believed in the cause. He believed in Southern supremacy, and with that, he meant white moneyed Southern supremacy. Looking around the bloodied room and the two remaining prisoners struggling and pleading, he suddenly wasn’t sure of this commitment.
“I think I've had more than enough for today.”
“Like hell you have, boy. We’ve just started—unless you think I've hired the wrong lawyer.”
He knew how important the next few seconds were to his career. He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight. He took a long time to answer.
The old man stared at him with disgust.
“No, you have not.”
“I'm sorry—I could barely hear you.”
“I said no, you have not hired the wrong man. But why am I here? I'm a patent lawyer.”
“Are you so ignorant that you don't recognize intellectual property when you see it?”
“I thought I was going to be working on a patent we . . . ah—stole.”
“That’s correct, but all of that is for all of this,” the old man said with a wave of his cane.
“Shall we continue?” Dr. Klarner asked.
“Not we—him.” He pointed to the lawyer.
Both the doctor and the lawyer looked to the old man for clarity.
“And I want you to start on this one.” He brought his cane down on the boy’s shin with a loud snap. His eyes went wild with pain and fright.
The doctor brought over the tray with the rubber syringe and a greasy blackened splinter of wood. “One half squeeze in each nostril, and try not to miss. We do not need this dust floating around the room. Then insert this splinter into the patient’s neck.”
The lawyer looked to the doctor for support, but his eyes were cast downward. He looked to the old man who waited impatiently. “I want you to know I'm an independent contractor,” the lawyer said. “I come and go as I please.”
“Certainly, if it helps you sleep at night.”
Some smelly, nasty thing rose up from the middle of his heart, but instead of rejecting it, he embraced it. Abner Adkins had been at a crossroad only one other time in his life and that was back on a farm in Norfolk. Then, he thought he was committing evil for love . . . this time he was doing it for everything else that was important.
He took the bulb off the tray and moved to the boy. The young man was crying and begging for his life with his eyes. Looking him dead in those begging eyes, Abner Adkins inserted the tip of the bulb into the boy’s nose and sq
ueezed.
The man with the cane, Winston Creed, had just gotten the commitment he needed.
CHAPTER 11
February 1856
There Might be Truth
Nearly a week had passed since Jack had first seen Frances Sanger. After asking a few people, he learned more about Frank Sanger’s daughter. No one he spoke to had ever actually talked to her. They mentioned her good looks and her business acumen, but they also mentioned her aloofness, her reticence. People mentioned the fact that she was reputed to be a prude and that she was divorced. One man said she was “cheated on pretty bad” and that she just needed to be left alone. Every day he would watch the big house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.
It was nearing the end of another day and Jack had resigned himself to the job at hand—chipping and removing the quartz-glass wall from the entrance to the lagoon—when he heard a voice behind him.
"I must say, Jack Riggs, you are getting good at being a ditch digger!” Jack turned to see Frances Sanger leaning against a fencepost chewing on a piece of straw.
"Wow,” he said. “You popped up out of nowhere!” There was some force in her that was irresistible to him. He paused to stare at her; though he had planned every word he wanted to say to her, now that she was here, he was speechless. “I thought our initial meeting was quite interesting.” How much more lame can I get, he thought.
"I meet interesting people all the time."
She was yanking him; time to yank a little back. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”
She drew herself up and squinted. “What have you heard?”
“I’ve heard you don’t meet many people at all; I’ve heard that you’re generally aloof.” He smiled, and thought he had to stay on the offensive with a woman like this. Keep her slightly off-balance.
There was a gleam of interest in her green eyes. “Well, they’re wrong.” It looked as though there was element of truth that struck a chord with her.
“You know what I mean—about our meeting being interesting.”
"I'm not sure that I do. Why don't you explain what you're trying to say?” She pulled the straw out of her mouth and held it up to the sun. Her green eyes reflected the light, and a sly grin played across her face.