Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  Sam glanced out the windshield. 'They'd scramble a tactical team,' she said simply. When she looked back, her eyes were bright with indecision—and admission. They would kill Neil.

  She knew it as well as he did.

  'If Neil dies,' Thomas said, 'so does Frankie. You're my only chance, Sam.'

  'We can't do this, Tom,' she said, blinking away a tear.

  'Fucking A,' Gerard muttered in obvious relief.

  Thomas held her gaze, stared deep into eyes that were only beginning to discover him. She was strong, he knew.

  Strong enough to do the right thing, even if it meant sacrificing the man she loved. Or his son.

  'But I wasn't asking,' Thomas said. He reached past her arm, punched the horn.

  The surrounding woods seemed to shriek with reverberations.

  'You did not just do that!' Gerard sang. 'No fucking way!'

  Visibly shaken, Sam stared at the cottage. All three of them held their breath.

  Thomas saw a shadow bend before one of the golden windows, pull aside the sheers.

  It was him, etched in warm interior tones, peering out across cool evening gloom. Neil. He seemed something not quite human, as though he stared through a portal, breathing a different, brighter atmosphere. Then he vanished. Moments later, the cabin went dark.

  Fear like a warm bath.

  'I guess we do it your way,' Sam said. Her smile was at once sad and fatalistic. She pulled her automatic and turned to Gerard. 'I'll go round back. You keep the front covered. When I give the signal, we both go in, got it?'

  'So you're just going to let this prick pull our strings li—?'

  'Do you got it?'

  'Got it,' Gerard grunted.

  She turned to Thomas, her eyes bright with fear and excitement. 'You stay here,' she said, then she disappeared out her door. Thomas watched her sprint through the trees, keeping her head low. Kicking up leaves, she crossed a shallow clearing, then hooked around to flank the structure.

  Nothing matters.

  'You're a fucker,' Gerard muttered as he shouldered open his door.

  'And why's that?' Thomas asked—numb words.

  The agent stared at him with wide, honest eyes. He looked different in the gloom, contradictory, as though the skin of a handsome man had been stretched across something doughy and stupid.

  'Because you flickered us.'

  Thomas watched Gerard shuffle sideways, using the Mustang for cover, then dash toward the cottage. He disappeared in the shadows where the porch jutted from the log walls, but not before Thomas caught a glimpse of grim panic on his face.

  They were terrified, he realized. They were agents, and they were terrified. In his mind's eye, he saw Sam coughing blood in his arms, accusation like a fading light in her eyes.

  Nothing matters!

  Thomas pushed open his door, stood and straightened. The evening air was surprisingly cool—hard, even. The smell of charcoal tinctured the bitter of pinched leaves. For several moments he simply scanned the cottage and its damp environs, as though looking for a pet or a real estate agent. Gerard, who had climbed onto the porch and now edged his way to the front door, was hissing something. Even though Thomas couldn't hear him, his expression was clear enough.

  Are you fucking crazy?

  Blinking, Thomas looked down to his shoes, tried to shake the styrofoam out of his legs. Then he simply walked up the steps.

  'He won't shoot me,' he murmured to Gerard oh his way to the entrance. 'He's my best friend.'

  'And he's my favorite uncle,' the agent hissed. 'Now get back in the fucking car!'

  'He won't shoot me.'

  Thomas came to a stop before the screen door, breathed deeply. He rapped his knuckles against the ratty wood frame.

  'Neil!' he shouted. 'I know you're in there! It's me…' He swallowed against his racing heart. 'Tom.'

  Silence.

  Flat against the wall, Gerard stood poised with his automatic, waiting for the door to open.

  'Neil! It's me! Goodbook. I've come alone. I've come to talk!'

  Thomas peered into the murky interior beyond the picture window, probed the shadowy depths, did everything but lean his head against the glass. 'C'mon, Neil. For fuck's sake, man. It's me.'

  The porch light flashed on, rendering the panes opaque. Thomas saw his own reflection stumble backward, saw his face float pale against watercolor-black, bent and pinched in the glass.

  What are you doing?

  The inner door swung into darkness, and Neil leaned out to push open the screen door. He wore cargo shorts and a skin-tight T-shirt. His feet were bare, his toes dirty. For an instant, everything seemed horrifically normal.

  'Hey,' Thomas heard himself say. His smile felt both natural and genuine, even as he watched Gerard raise his gun in the shadows. Oblivious, Neil scowled with you-idiot good humor.

  'Goodbook? How th—'

  'Freeze!' Gerard hissed, pressing his gun-muzzle to Neil's temple.

  'Noo?' Thomas cried, expecting a shot.

  Gerard glanced at him, and Neil grabbed his wrist, thrust the gun away. There was a crack and a flash, and the upper screen-door window shattered. The two men grappled. For an instant, they looked like drunken dance partners, then they fell backward into blackness. Thomas heard grunts and blows, took an unsteady step toward the doorway. The blackness had transformed them into warring animals. Wood-scoring claws. Growls. Frenzied exertions. Spittle whistling through clenched teeth.

  Shaking, Thomas edged into the room. Oh-my-god-oh-my-god…

  'Hit the lights!' Gerard suddenly cried. 'Jesus-jesus, hit the lights!' He sounded frantic—hurt.

  Thomas swept the walls with his hands. He could hear Sam call 'Danny? Danny?' from somewhere distant.

  He stubbed his finger against the switch. The room leapt into existence.

  'Uh, professor?' Gerard grunted. 'Could you wipe the mustard off your bud and help me out here?'

  Stunned, Thomas numbly fingered his blazer pocket, pulled out Mia's roll of duct tape. He was still blinking against the overhead lights. The front room was exactly as he remembered: an expanse of beaten hardwood floor ringed round by high-backed sofas and dark-stained cabinets. Yellowing needlework decorated the pale walls.

  A dead grandmother's room.

  Gerard had Neil pinned face-first, hands yanked to the small between his shoulders, across a tangled throw-mat. Shoes and boots lay scattered about them. The room smelled of tracked mud and old insoles, of swelling wood and blankets left out-of-doors. Before he knew what he was doing, Thomas had kicked aside a heavy Timberland and was helping Gerard tape Neil's wrists.

  'Logan!' the agent bellowed between deep breaths. 'Got him, Sam!'

  'Ookaay!' echoed from some distant room. 'Securing the rest of the structure!' Thomas heard excitement in her voice—even relief. He felt none of it.

  Gerard was hoisting him from the ground. Him. Neil.

  Thomas hit him—hard, like pounding a mattress in a fury. Once, twice, three times. It was strange. Almost like watching himself from over his own shoulder. Only his fists felt real.

  'Easy, professor,' Gerard said, staggering as Neil lurched. 'We need him in one piece. You need him.'

  Neil looked up, his eyes glazed. A line of blood spilled from his nose to his chin.

  'Goodbook,' he mumbled.

  Thomas felt his face crumple, rubbed his eyes against the rough wool of his blazer sleeve. This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen! He was supposed to be strong, but instead he felt like a little boy again, buckling beneath his father's drunken anger. 'Frankie,' he blurted. 'Neil… How-how could you?'

  Something ignited in Neil's eyes—that familiar predatory glint. 'What are you talking about? Frankie what?'

  'Nora I can almost understand. But my boy, Neil. How could you fuck with my boy?'

  'Frankie? No… No. I never touched—'

  'Don't fucking lie! Not now. Not in this. Don't. Fucking. Lie!'

  His voice pealed through
the room.

  Neil spit blood onto the hardwood floor. 'Goodbook, listen. I never touched Frankie. Why—'

  Thomas punched him again, screeching, 'Liar!'

  'He's not your boy!' Neil roared. 'Do you hear me? He's my fucking son! Mine! Why would I use my own son?'

  Thomas looked at his knuckles, at the blood smeared like model paint across the veined back of his hand. Something—some kind of wave—crashed through him, splashing all the strength from his limbs. His heart bobbed in his chest. He staggered backward, collapsed against a wall. Gerard, his eyes round with concern, was shouting something at him. Then blood and tissue exploded from the side of the agent's head, and he was slumping forward, falling through a crimson mist, bearing Neil with him to the floor. They landed near Thomas's feet, locked like dead wrestlers.

  Unable to scream, breathe, or think, Thomas looked to the lone figure still standing in the room.

  Sam.

  Sam hooked a toe beneath Gerard's body, rolled him off Neil.

  'Hi, doc,' she said, heaving Neil to his knees.

  'Jessica,' Neil replied, apparently unafraid.

  Propped against pine wainscoting, Thomas watched. Some part of him wanted to move, to run, but his body seemed as heavy as Gerard's looked. Like dead weight, he thought inanely.

  Sam scooped a chair from a decorative bureau and set it behind Neil. She hooked a finger beneath his jaw—apparently some kind of pressure point, because he grunted and hissed as she pulled and seated him. She smiled at Thomas.

  'Well, professor?'

  'I do-don't…' Thomas paused, scowled. His mouth and tongue felt like clay. 'I d-don't understand what's happening.'

  'No,' Sam said. 'I suppose you wouldn't. Disorientation is a common stress response. Especially when you're weak.'

  What was she doing? Had Gerard been a threat? Some kind of plant?

  Thomas watched as she hooked Neil's arms over the back of the chair and used Mia's duct tape to secure him. She then wrapped his ankles together. 'I was always proud of you,' Neil said to her as she worked. 'Back when those things mattered to me, I always regarded you as… well, my masterpiece.'

  She replied with the distracted air of a mother dressing her son. 'You might not think so a few minutes from now.'

  Neil smiled. 'I'm beyond anything you could do to me, Jess.'

  'Are you?' Sam asked. 'We'll see about that.'

  She swung her automatic toward Thomas. 'Your turn, lover boy. Stand up and turn around.'

  'Sam?' Thomas said. He pressed a palm to his forehead. 'Wh-what's happening? You k-killed Gerard. I mean you really fucking killed him,'

  Sam glanced at Gerard, slack and grey across the polished hardwood. 'I told the prick he should stay in New York. I had a feeling you were up to something.' She leveled the gun directly at Thomas's face. 'Now stand up, turn around, and cross your wrists behind your back. Otherwise it's beer and nachos with Jesus.'

  Somehow, Thomas found himself doing as he was told. He understood none of it.

  'She's, not who you think she is, Goodbook,' Neil said from his periphery. 'She's NSA, a product of the Flat Affect Neuroplasty Program.'

  Thomas understood the words well enough, but they were gibberish all the same.

  Sam? NSA?

  She slipped something sharp about Thomas's left wrist, pulled his right arm back, looped whatever it was about his left wrist around his right, then yanked it excruciatingly tight.

  'She's government owned and operated,' Neil continued. 'A radiosurgical psychopath.'

  The room seemed to contort and flatten about her smirking face. Neil's voice fell out of the narrowing corners. 'I performed the procedure, myself, Goodbook. Compassion. Guilt. Shame. I scrubbed her clean, old buddy.'

  'Sam,' he heard himself whisper, but he could taste no spit on his tongue.

  'Did you hear that?' she cooed close to his neck. He could smell the Aveeno moisturizer she used every morning out of the shower. 'I've been tweaked. My amygdalas have been stripped down to their predatory essentials.' She licked his ear lobe and whispered, 'Imagine being locked up and helpless with Jeffrey Dahmer.'

  The incomprehension evaporated. Thomas became afraid.

  'About a decade or so ago,' she continued, pressing him arm's-length against the wall, 'certain planners in certain quarters concluded the human race was trapped in a game-theory nightmare. The Great Scramble, they called it. For resources—peak oil and all that. For food in the face of environmental collapse. For stability in the midst of catastrophic, technologically driven social change. They ran scenario after scenario, and in every projection, the greatest liability turned out to be you.'

  She brushed some lint from his collar. Her smile was anxious and hopeful—another glimpse of the old Sam.

  'Well, not you exactly, but people like you. People who think with their hearts instead of their heads. In all the simulations, the only bargainers who survived were those who acted without sentiment. The idea was to create a shadow bureaucracy, to position flat affect bargainers at every level of the government and the military. But where to find them? Mother nature? Please. I mean, look at the Chiropractor. We couldn't have fuck-ups like that running the show, could we?'

  Somehow, Thomas had no difficulty with these abstract things. He could see it with B-movie clarity: the generals, the analysts, the money men, leaning over Scotches, exercising their God-given ability to confuse self-interest for natural law. 'So they turned to Neil,' he heard himself say.

  'They call us "Graduates",' she explained. 'People surgically unfettered by your stone-age biases. People capable of driving the hard bargains, who don't need to bullshit themselves when it comes to choosing the projection of US power over the dissolution of the Knesset, or Orinoco drilling rights over starving Venezuelans. People who protect their own, come what may. And thanks to us, America will survive to pick up the pieces, believe you me.'

  She raised her arm, struck him in the face with the butt of her automatic. Thomas toppled to the floor.

  She was taping his ankles together before he'd recovered his wits. 'Ordinarily I'd just pop you in the head and call it a day,' she was saying. 'But I figure I owe you one for yesterday afternoon.'

  Thomas could only stare in horror. To know someone was to know what to expect. People were as much trajectories as they were face, form, or voice. And here was Sam, impossibly, moving at right angles to who she was. It seemed she should be bleeding from the impact.

  'You're wondering how it's possible,' Sam said, grinning like a tomboy. 'I admit, I didn't think I could pull it off, what with you being a psychologist and all. I just assumed you would see right through me. But after sizing you up in Washington, Mackenzie insisted it would work. "Just be who you were before joining the program," he said. "All the old circuits are still there," he said. And wouldn't you know, the old perv was right: it felt more like… more like reliving than performing! Good thing I used to be such a twit…'

  Thomas blinked at the blood and tears, stared at her in numb incomprehension, at the trim manikin nose, the commercial-break smile, the cheek curved to no palm in particular. It was a beautiful face, he realized. It was ti beautiful face and it could do anything it wanted. Anything.

  She's going to kill us.

  He started struggling against the plastic cuffs and the tape. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck…

  Testing her handiwork, Sam winked. She lifted and dropped his taped feet, then turned to Neil, saying, 'And you have a few beans to spill, Doc. That was naughty, spiking the database the way you did. Mackenzie nearly had a stroke. He's a heavy smoker, you know.'

  Neil spit blood and laughed.

  Holstering her Glock, Sam slapped her hands together and surveyed her handiwork. 'All this domination has made me hot,' she said with a heavy breath.

  She shed her blazer and began unbuttoning her blouse. Blood pulsed across Thomas's face, wet strings that became more and more tangled in his eyes. No matter how much he blinked he could see nothing more than s
hapes and insinuations. She was standing over Neil now, a smear of white skin holding the blot of her handgun.

  'How about it, doctor?' she asked coyly. 'How much have you unplugged?'

  'Enough.'

  From the scissoring of limbs he could tell she had continued undressing. 'Your best friend here has a severe case of Franken-brain,' she said to Thomas. 'He's been tweaking and trimming for some time now, haven't you? No more fear. No more love. Of course you must still feel pain—too important a survival mechanism, that. But I'd be surprised if you cared about pain anymore. Mackenzie warned me that standard procedures would likely prove ineffective, that I'd have to be creative. "Try the eyes or the balls," he said. "Some reflexes must be intact."'

  Thomas jerked and twisted against the restraints, which seemed to tighten.

  Think-think-think-THINK!

  It was all adaptive wiring, he told himself, some circuits fixed by millions of years of evolution, others molded by a lifetime of coping with environmental and social circumstances. He was out of his depth, caught up in circumstances his brain could not process. For his entire life, everyone had always done what they should, more or less.

  But Sam. All her social circuitry had been amputated. Like Neil, she worked in the netherworld between trajectories, in a place neither described nor governed by the rules binding everyday human intercourse. And now she was deliberately acting against the grain, as a way to induce stress, confusion—as a way to punish.

  None of this means anything! It doesn't matter.

  'Sam?' he coughed as much as cried. Please don't…

  'I almost forgot,' the pale blur said. 'You love me, don't you? Awwwww… Isn't that what you said? "I love you, Sam?"'

  Thomas swallowed, screwed shut his eyes. It doesn't matter! 'Don't… Please…'

  Her voice seemed to wind up. 'All those times you imagined Nora getting fucked—like a knife in the heart, wasn't it? Now you'll see what it's like. You'll actually get to see your best friend fucking someone you love…

  'Think of it as therapy.'

  Heaving breaths. Spit flying from his lips. He opened his eyes, but could see only rose and sting, a bundle of shadows throbbing to the sound of spit.