Chronic Fear (23 page)

My wife’s fault. If not for her, I’d have heard Scagnelli sneak up on us.

Scagnelli lowered the binoculars after the last round of gunshots.

“I believe that was the last one,” he said. “Right, Mark?”

Mark and Alexis sat side by side on a sunlit boulder, a little away from the creek and perched on a ledge so the cabin was visible in the valley below. Scagnelli had taken their weapons, and Mark’s restlessness caused him to twitch. Memories of the Monkey House danced in his head like primitives around a bonfire. He wanted to leap from the boulder and run screaming through the trees, raging at the intense awareness of sunlight and breath and the rushing water and the crisp, naked rocks.

But that final shred of self, the vestige of his ego, hung like a spark in the darkness, the lone, distant star in a rapidly dimming universe.

Alexis.

He forced his hands to quit shaking, gripping the slack fabric of his pants.

“Only three,” Mark said, the words feeling strange on his tongue, as if language were a lost thing. “There were only three gunmen.”

“He needs the Halcyon,” Alexis said to Scagnelli. “Please.”

Scagnelli pointed the AR-15 at her. “Did your husband really expect you to use this? Looks to me like Seethe turns you into a goddamned idiot. But that’s good news for me. People pay dearly to turn themselves into idiots.”

“You have both the Seethe and the Halcyon now,” Alexis pleaded. “Just give him a few sips of the Halcyon, and then go.”

“Yes, I have both. I’m not sure what the hell I have, except two tickets to paradise. Or hell. But why should I help your husband?”

Mark wanted to tell her to shut up, but language was lost in the Seething storm of his skull.

“Because,” she said. “Seethe and Halcyon are useless without us. We’re the test subjects. We’re what happens.”

“Plenty more where you come from.”

“Sure, if you want to wait a decade. A lot of people want those drugs. Powerful people. If you stay with Daniel Burchfield, you’re going to lose a lot of money.”

Scagnelli chuckled, turned for a quick squint through the binoculars, and said, “Who says I’m working for Burchfield?”

“He’s had a taste. He’s motivated. And he’s infected enough to crave the power it will give him.”

“So, what’s the problem? Burchfield’s going to be president. I’d say being on his team is a good thing.”

Mark gauged the distance between him and Scagnelli. Twenty feet. Semiautomatic rifle. He’d get hit, for sure, probably four times.

He raked his knuckles across the rough skin of the boulder. The pain felt good, an echo of the Monkey House where it had saved his life.

Pain is your friend
.

And, in the deepest truth of existence, pain was the dominant story. It was the core truth, maybe even the entire point, of life.

Suffering.

When people invented God, they invented suffering. And God was the relief from suffering.

Death was deliverance.

But on this Earth, God was pain.

Or pain was God.

Scagnelli’s bullets wouldn’t hurt him. They would just be part of what already
was
, the story of Mark Morgan’s pain.

His wife’s words came to him as if through a fog on a hidden lake full of slithering leviathans.

“You can do better,” she said, and Mark wasn’t sure if the words were meant for him.

“I’ve considered it,” Scagnelli said. “But the way I look at it, six people know what this stuff is. Two of you are here, Wendy and Roland will probably be coming out of the cabin any minute now, and Darrell Silver is probably on the run to New York or San Francisco or wherever else the drug culture will give him a home.”

“You forgot Wallace Forsyth,” Alexis said.

Scagnelli took the vial from a pocket of his cargo pants and held it to the light. He gave it a little shake, and the rattle reverberated in Mark’s head like a stone bounced down an elevator shaft. Mark ground his fist against the boulder, drawing blood until the sound went away.

“Your fundamentalist friend took the express elevator,” Scagnelli said. “Guess he couldn’t wait to get his wings and harp. But I’ll bet God has a special floor for former politicians, don’t you?”

“That vial was nearly full,” Alexis said.

“Yeah, and I can’t waste another pill. And I can’t waste one drop of Halcyon. So your dear, sweet husband will just have to ride it out.”

Scagnelli was talking as if there would be a future, and Alexis was playing along. No way could Scagnelli let them live.

No way
Burchfield
would let them live.

Mark scraped his knuckles back and forth, rasping his flesh open, and the pain was like fire, but it was also ice. He narrowed his focus to the expanding pain and allowed it to fill his skull.

The monkey brain says, “Ease the pain.”

He took it up like a chant, his own personal mantra as he danced around the bonfire of war, the bonfire of harvest, the bonfire of the kill. His muscles coiled as he soaked in its macabre heat.

The monkey brain says ease the pain, the monkey brain says ease the pain, the monkey brain says ease the pain
…

Voices came from the cabin door below, calling his name, and when Scagnelli turned toward them, Mark exploded off the rock.

He was half-right.

Scagnelli hit him with only two rounds.

Alexis froze when Mark leaped at Scagnelli, but the shots from the AR-15 broke her daze before the chill had a chance to settle deep.

Mark grunted in pain, and the groan rolled up into a roar of animalistic ferocity as he slammed into Scagnelli, knocking him down the embankment. The AR-15 flew away and skittered across the leafy ground before thumping into a gnarled root.

Scagnelli cursed, fishing into his cargo pants for his pistol, but Mark was on him, clawing, wallowing, and snarling.

Mark fought with desperation, but Scagnelli was ruthless and experienced, punching Mark twice in the neck and causing his head to snap to one side. Alexis resisted the urge to join the battle, knowing she’d be no good in close combat anyway.

Get the gun.

She slipped on the damp leaves, tumbling into the ferns and low tangles of doghobble and Virginia creeper vines. She dragged herself forward, clawing in the dark mud, the flesh of the ancient mountain giving way beneath her fingers.

Kill or be killed.

The Monkey House flashed in her mind, only a moment—
the bloody metal tool in my hand
—and then she reached the rifle. Mark said it contained thirty rounds, which meant it had plenty more to go.

She heaved the thing to her shoulder but couldn’t get a clean shot. The barrel swayed back and forth before her as she wilted from exhaustion and anxiety.

“Shoot!” Mark bellowed, a plaintive note in his cracked voice.

That was when she saw the two crimson blossoms on his back, spreading fast through his tan shirt.

Scagnelli bucked and kicked, nearly throwing Mark from atop him, but Mark curled his fingers like claws and jammed them into the killer’s collarbone, sinking in to grip the man’s meat.

Mark moved his face near Scagnelli’s, and Alexis aimed at the man’s torso. Mark drove his mouth forward and sank his teeth into Scagnelli’s cheek, ripping away a chunk of flesh.

Mark turned toward Alexis, eyes gleaming and crazed, a strip of pale gristle linking him to Scagnelli, who screamed and stopped fighting long enough to reach for the wound.

“Shoot!” Mark shouted again, and this time it wasn’t a request, it was a decree from hell, issuing from that bloody, grinning mouth that had kissed her so often.

Oh, my God, he’s ENJOYING it.

And this was Seethe, condensed to its purest essence.

The thing she’d fought to preserve.

The secret she wanted to possess.

From the bottom of Pandora’s blackest, bitchingest box.

“Do it,” Mark snarled, and she wondered if she meant
him
, if he was begging for an end to his suffering.

Scagnelli’s hand made it into a side pocket and she saw the metal target guide of his pistol.

“Druh-drop it,” Alexis said, but she didn’t even convince herself.

Mark thrust an elbow into Scagnelli’s kidney, slowing the draw, but more of the gun slid into view. Then she saw the bulge of the barrel tilting up in his pants, and then came a muffled explosion.

Mark rolled away at the sound. The bullet had struck a tree three feet to the right of her, head high, and Scagnelli could shoot plenty more.

If she didn’t shoot first.

She wasn’t sure if she kept her eyes open or not, but she remembered Mark’s words—
squeeze once for every shot
—and before she stopped, her finger was numb.

Scagnelli lay on the ground, moaning, his limp fingers still dug into his pocket, although they’d gone slack around the gun’s grip. She didn’t know how many bullets he’d taken, but the one that mattered most was just below his heart, the stain on his green T-shirt growing larger with every weakening surge of his pulse.

“Finish him,” Mark wheezed, and now she could see the two wet blotches in his own abdominal cavity, creases of meat below his ribs.

“No,” she said. “That’s murder.”

“You can do it. Just like in the Monkey House.”

“I didn’t kill anybody in the Monkey House, goddamn it.”
Her rage shifted from Scagnelli to her husband.

Even in his pale, depleted state, a vicious sneer twisted Mark’s lips. “Do you want Seethe or not? If he lives, then it’s Burchfield’s. Sooner or later, it’s Burchfield’s.”

Scagnelli’s eyelids fluttered, and he seemed to come around long enough to focus on her face. He smiled, and it was the arrogant benevolence of Sebastian Briggs, the populist solicitude of Senator Daniel Burchfield, the false piety of Wallace Forsyth.

All mirrors, all the things that she’d become.

Seethe had made her just like them.

Mark was right.

Not only could she kill Scagnelli, but she would love it.

The next best thing to suicide.

The only question was whether her husband should be next.

She staggered to Scagnelli and stood over him, his blood seeping down to feed the organisms in the soil. His arm gave one final spasm as he tried to make it operate the pistol, but he finally sagged in acceptance.

“Just doing my…job,” he wheezed, causing the wound in his chest to gurgle.

“Me, too,” she said, pointing at his head and squeezing the trigger four times in rapid succession.

Alexis heard Mark laughing behind her, and the triumphant sound mutated into a moist, ragged cough. She ignored him, bending to fish through Scagnelli’s pockets until she found the vial of pills.

Mark wouldn’t keep her from them this time.

She smiled.

Seethe is mine. As it was meant to be.

To do it right and make it look good, she’d need to use Scagnelli’s pistol to kill her husband. Someone was going to reconstruct the scene using advanced forensic techniques, and lying would only tell half the story.

Facts are troublesome things. But they’re the currency of knowledge.

And knowledge is the price we pay to ease the pain of ignorance.

“Lex!” Wendy said, stepping from the shadow of the forest, with Roland and a strange man standing beside her. Both were armed.

Alexis fought the rage that wanted to claim her face, that screamed at her to raise the AR-15 and empty the rest of the clip, that owned her deepest and most intimate core.

Instead, she smiled as if glad to see her old friend. “Wendy!”

Roland rushed to Mark’s side, while the strange man in the camouflage vest looked from Alexis to Scagnelli’s corpse, trying to connect the two. His pistol was pointed skyward, but at a crisp angle that suggested he could lower and fire in the blink of an eye. Alexis let the rifle drop and the man relaxed a little.

“Mark’s been shot,” Alexis said, giving Wendy a quick but desperate hug, already building the lie in her head.

As they gathered over her husband’s unconscious form, Alexis slipped the vial into her hip pocket.

Mine.

“Gundy, where the hell are you?”

Harding’s voice sounded tinny coming from the Selecta’s tiny speaker, or perhaps it was the vast sky and towering trees that made the CIA field director seem diminished and far away.

Gundersson sat on a rock, peering down on the cabin, wondering how many rounds had stuck in the rounded pine logs. “Why didn’t you send choppers, Chief?”

Harding fell silent, and then cleared his throat. “You know that would draw attention. They have press, even out in hillbilly country. Send helicopters overhead and every phone in the county starts ringing.”

“You could have had agents here in twenty minutes.”

“We have protocol and chain of command, Gundy. We can’t just—”

“Chain of command. And who is pulling
your
end of the chain?”

“Just stay on the scene. Federal agents are less than an hour away, and we have a damage-control team in place, too. Don’t worry, this will get a creative cover story, and your career is well on its way. Couldn’t happen to a more qualified officer, if you ask me.”

Gundersson watched Alexis tending her husband’s wounds. Roland had volunteered his shirt for bandaging and was busy ripping it into cotton strips. Wendy knelt over Mark as well, applying a cool compress to his forehead.

“These agents who are coming,” Gundersson asked. “Are they ours?”

“Of course. You know the CIA doesn’t play well with others.”

“Neither do I.”

Gundersson terminated the call and limped to the creek, electric streaks of pain shooting from his wounds. The water rushed away in a thundering, constant volley, a sheer drop of thirty feet between two massive towers of granite worn slick with time. The pool at the bottom was skimmed with violent froth, and the water beneath it was black with the promise of sunken secrets.

He dropped the Selecta into it, and any sound it might have made was lost in the rush of a current hell-bent for the sea.

Joining the others, he said, “My SUV is a mile away. It’s parked on a logging road.”

“We’re parked on the driveway,” Alexis said, packing cotton swathes around Mark’s two abdominal wounds. The man was deathly white, and he occasionally groaned in pain.

“We can’t risk it,” Gundersson said. “We’ve got company coming.”

Roland gave a rough laugh. “If
these
were the good guys, I can hardly wait.”

“We need blankets, to keep him warm,” Gundersson said. “They’re flesh wounds, but if he goes into shock, he won’t last long.”

“How do we carry him a mile through this terrain?” Roland said. “Roll him up like a burrito and play ‘pack mule’?”

“Something like that. One thing’s for sure, you don’t want to wait for medivac. You guys got targets on your backs.”

“We’ll tell them everything,” Wendy said.

“Shut up!” Alexis’s outburst was brittle in the peaceful woods, silencing the birds.

Roland touched his wife’s hand, and Wendy looked at Gundersson.
Our little secret.

“I’ll go to the cabin and get blankets,” Gundersson said, not giving anyone a chance to question his leadership. “Then we’re heading out.”

Alexis fished a bottle of water from her backpack and put it to her husband’s lips. “Drink this, honey. It’ll help ease the pain.”

“What’s that shit?” Roland said.

“Water.”

Gundersson navigated the animal path back down the mountain, limping on his wounded leg. He wondered if the chicken-thieving fox had used this route on its nightly excursions.

He’d heard a legend that if you killed an animal, you took on its aspects and traits. The predator became its prey.

Wendy hadn’t mentioned her painting, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to carry it back.

Some people said art was timeless, and all art was worthy and had a place in the world.

But Gundersson didn’t believe that.

Some forms of human expression didn’t deserve an audience.

No, some just plain needed burning. And he had a lighter in his pocket. What was one more campfire?

Somewhere out there, Senator Daniel Burchfield was smiling at a camera or shaking hands with a geriatric widow in a wheelchair, promising a secure future built on a strong America.

All while standing on bones and bloody lies and a mountain of ruthless ambition.

Gundersson would go back to the CIA when this was over, when the spin cycle had rinsed away every corpse and every stray bullet, when Burchfield’s mourning for Forsyth ended in primetime melodrama and the selection of a running mate just as ruthless. Gundersson would be there in the shadows, gathering information and keeping a watchful eye.

Maybe he was still an idealist, but he believed in freedom, even if he had deep doubts about his country and its kings.

If Seethe and Halcyon had taught him anything, it was that you had to stand guard most faithfully against the enemy within.

The path opened before him, and he became a fox on the prowl.