Curse (Blur Trilogy Book 3) (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Dr. Waxford wound his way along the road, climbing higher into the Great Smoky Mountains.

He and his team had made great strides in the last couple of years, but the loss of the research facility in northern Wisconsin last December had slowed things down—that is, until they located this old hotel here in this remote part of eastern Tennessee.

Actually, the site was ideal. It was isolated and lay at the end of a one-lane road that had hardly been used in years.

Back in the 1950s when a new highway was built that wrapped around the other side of the mountain, it took the tourists and other businesses with it. The hotel owners went bankrupt and the property went into foreclosure.

Rumored to be haunted, the Estoria Inn had sat empt
y
for decades and was being reclaimed b
y
the forest when Adrian and his team started renovations. Most people, even those in the nearb
y
towns, had forgotten that this place even existed.

And none of them knew what kind of research was happening there now.

Which was probably a good thing.

Fortuitousl
y,
the Estoria was also less than an hour drive for the h
yp
notherapist Adrian sometimes brought up to implant suggestions in the minds of his subjects after the
y’
d been put into a deep trance.

When you pay a hypnotist enough, you can get him to implant any suggestions that you want.

Despair.

Depression.

Loneliness.

They can all be the tools you use in the service of the greater good.

We’re on our phones searching Internet news sites for recent obituaries when the X-ray results come back.

No broken bones.

The ankle is only sprained. The shoulder will recover. It won’t be ideal for the basketball camp, but at least it’s not my shooting arm.

The doctor gives me a sling to keep the shoulder in place, then explains what I already know: It’s going to be very sore for a while and I’ll run the risk of it coming out of its socket again unless I’m careful. “You’ll need to keep your arm in that sling for the next four to six weeks.”

“Oka
y.
Thanks,” I sa
y,
but I know that’s not going to happen.

This camp is a huge deal and missing it isn’t an option. At least a dozen Division I coaches will be there recruiting players and it’s my best chance to get the attention I need for a scholarship offer.

Although I’ve had some interest from a few Big Ten football coaches, honestly, I’d rather play college basketball. Way fewer injuries. Less time lifting and more time actually playing. Besides, I don’t really have the size for college football—not to mention my mom worrying about me less, which is a bonus.

While the doctor calls Dad to bring him up to speed and also get permission to give me some pain medication, I touch base with Mom to make sure she knows I’m alright. I decide that it’ll be best to explain about the blur in person, so I don’t bring it up.

Finally, the doctor hands me the meds, along with a prescription.

On their way to see me at the hospital, Kyle had picked up Nicole from her place, so now we swing by to get my car from the road out by the lake where I left it earlier.

Somehow, the logging company has managed to get the logs far enough to one side to allow cars to get past.

Being here brings everything back again and I can’t tell if it’s just my imagination, but my shoulder seems to throb more as I remember what it was like to get hit by that truck.

My attention shifting from one thing to the next.

That slipstream again.

All those unnoticed slivers of reality curling right past me.

But now, the ones branded with pain are coming to the forefront.

I ride with Nicole, who drives m
y
car so I can rest m
y
shoulder.

Kyle follows us back to my house in his vintage Mustang.

Even though it’s late, we search online again for a little while, but we still can’t find anything about kids who’ve recently died—at least not any that match the age of the boy in the road.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s still alive.

He might not have died recently. After all, the girl I saw burn up in my blur back in December had actually died in the 1930s.

As it turned out, I’d learned about her story and seen her picture years ago when I was nine. Then, just before Christmas, my mind threaded some clues together and showed me what it might have looked like when the lantern she was standing next to caught fire to her nightgown and ended up taking her life.

I’d forgotten all about her.

When the memor
y
came back, it brought a flood of other grisl
y
images with it because the da
y
I first saw her photo I’d been present when a killer struck, but I’d blocked it out.

They say trauma can do that, that it can rip the fabric between your conscious and your subconscious mind.

My problem is that the rip keeps getting bigger.

My friends get word from their parents that they need to take off and I tell them goodnight.

“See you tomorrow?” Nicole says.

“Yeah.” I give her a quick kiss.

“Kiss me and I’ll dislocate your other shoulder,” Kyle tells me. Then he taps a finger thoughtfully against the air. “But at least then you wouldn’t notice the first one so much. So there is that.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Okay, so before I go, I’ve got one for you.”

“You’ve got one?”

“A riddle: I’m twice as old as I used to be when I was half as young as I am now. How old am I?”

For months he’s been trying to trick me with math or logic problems. Doesn’t always work out so well.

“That one’s easy. It would be whatever age you are, so you’re the same as me. Seventeen.”

“Yes. And I’m seriously glad you’re still seventeen and not dead.”

“Yeah.”

“It would have totally ruined my night.”

“Mine too.”

“Text me.”

“I will.”

A little while after they leave, Dad comes home and checks on me.

“I’m good,” I tell him. “Anything serious with that call?”

“Call?”

“The dispatch code. I heard it at the hospital. Was it a suicide?”

“Scarlett Cordova accidentally overdosed on some over the counter drugs.”

Scarlett is a year behind me at school. “Is she alright?”

“She will be. Gave everyone a scare, though.”

“How do they know?”

He looks at me curiously. “How do they know what?”

“You said she accidentally OD’ed. How do they know it was an accident?”

“There were three other kids there with her when it happened. It was during some kind of drinking game. Her parents were gone. Good thing she’s alright. Lucky girl.”

“There’s a lot of that going around tonight.”

“A lot of what?”

“Luck.”

“I guess maybe there is.”

After telling me one more time how thankful he is that I’m oka
y,
he heads to his room and I climb into bed, hoping that even with the aching shoulder I’ll be able to get some rest.

Instead, I find myself caught up thinking about who that boy might have been and what the blur might mean.

He’d reached out to me, just like the girls in my earlier blurs had done.

It’d been too late to save them.

Maybe if we were lucky one more time, it wouldn’t be too late to save him.

CHAPTER SIX

THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS

12 MILES OUTSIDE OF GATLINBURG, TENNESSEE

Dr. Waxford unlocked the gate, swung it to the side, and turned onto the dirt road that, by design, had no sign on it.

After locking the gate behind him, he drove the two miles up to the research facility that the Department of Defense had recently renovated for him.

He parked, then went to the front door and placed his hand on the vein recognition reader to verify his identity.

Vascular biometrics, or palm vein recognition, is even more accurate than retinal scanners or fingerprints. And, since blood flow is required, the hand has to be attached to the arm for the reader to identify you, so it’s nearly impossible to fake.

You couldn’t just cut off someone’s hand to get their fingerprints or remove an e
ye
ball to use in a retinal scanne
r—b
oth things Henrik Poehlman had done to people in the past when the circumstances dictated.

An unpleasant business.

The door swung open and Adrian passed through the lobby, entering one of the long, narrow hallways interspersed with research rooms on either side.

Well, to his mind they were research rooms; to the men inside, they were solitary confinement cells.

Ten were currently occupied. More would eventually be filled as renovations were completed on the Estoria Inn’s third and fourth floors.

Though it was the middle of the night, Adrian didn’t mind being called in. Actually, he preferred coming in at this time. After meeting with Henrik, he would stay and get some work done on the new drug he was developing.

The oversight committee’s meeting was coming up in less than two weeks and he needed to verify and quantify his findings before then.

His studies were going to make a profound and lasting difference.

In fact, they would transform the way the entire justice system functioned.

All for the greater good.

All in the name of providing appropriate punishment to those who deserved it.

He approached room 113, where he kept the man who’d killed eight people in the northwoods of Wisconsin.

Adrian paused by the door and peered through the one-way mirror.

Despite the time of night, the bright fluorescent lights in the subject’s room were on as part of his sleep deprivation therapy.

The design of the room was based on the “white torture” techniques perfected by the Iranians.

The subject is placed in a completely white room. He’s dressed entirely in white, served white food on a white plate. No colors. No exterior windows. No sounds.

The sensory deprivation and isolation help distort the passage of time.

Using these techniques you can get someone to break without beating him, without waterboarding him, without inflicting any physical harm on him at all.

Not that Adrian was necessarily against those things when they were justified, but they weren’t always necessary.

Not when you had other, less intrusive but just as effective means at your disposal.

The glass on the other side was chipped, but not cracked.

During the hours when this man wasn’t medicated, he’d tried desperately to break the mirror to get free, but the glass was far too thick for that.

In fact, Adrian had provided the subject with a steel chair—white, of course—just to see how he would use it to try to escape. All part of his research while he tracked the downward spiral of the man’s mental ability.

Rather than removing all hope of escape, Adrian found it more effective to create the illusion that getting free was a possibility. This kept the subjects’ mental capability intact and it allowed for a deeper emotional letdown when he found himself unsuccessful in his efforts to get away.

Some people might have claimed that it was cruel to taunt the subjects like that, to provide them with an object that, at first glance, appeared helpful for an escape, but turned out to be useless in the end. To Adrian, however, it wasn’t a way to taunt the men, but simply a way to evaluate how the different treatment strategies affected their mental states.

And it was far less cruel than what these men had done to their victims.

Now, Adrian observed subject #832145 staring into the corner of the room, muttering to himself.

Curious, he turned on the audio feed from the room to find out what the man was saying.

Something about a boy and blood. It sounded rambling and incoherent, but it was all being recorded. He would analyze it later.

He might have to monitor things to make sure this man didn’t slip too far into madness.

After you lose all touch with reality you’re no longer aware of the break. You think you’re fine and that everyone else is crazy. There is relief. Until then, though, things can be very terrifying.

And, really, that’s what Adrian was going for.

Terror.

Suffering.

Justice.

In fact, a continual recognition of their mental states, of their situation, was essential.

It was a vital aspect of the punishment our legal system strove for.

Subject #832145 would be in solitary confinement here for decades, perhaps for the rest of his life, and because of the treatment he was receiving, it would seem like much, much longer than that.

All at once, the man turned and looked at the one-way mirror as if he could see Adrian on the other side. With the whites of his eyes completely dyed black with Henrik’s special tattoo ink, it looked like two holes had been drilled into his head.

He hissed, and then went back to talking to himself.

The subject couldn’t get out of that room and there was no way for him to know that anyone was watching, but still, Adrian found himself taking a slight step backward.

Of course he was safe, though. The lock on this door was electronically controlled and could only be opened from inside a secure room down the hall.

As he was reminding himself of that, he got a text from Henrik:
I’m on the lower level. By the fly room.

There was no cell reception up here in this remote part of the mountains, but since uninterrupted communication was so vital for them, Adrian and Henrik used radios and advanced satellite phones that even allowed them to text and to have video chats.

All paid for by the Pentagon, which had a vested interest in their work.

After one more curious look at subject #832145, Adrian continued past the kitchen and descended the stairwell to the rooms in the basement.

This is where most of the actual research took place.

Henrik stood at the end of the hall waiting outside the room containing the
Tabanidae
, more commonly known as horse flies, or deer flies.

Painful bites but not deadly.

No poison, no venom, just torn skin.

Then, once they’ve scored the flesh, they suck out the blood that pools into the wound.

Adrian kept ten thousand or so in there—even with the computer analysis that monitored their daily population fluctuations, it was obviously difficult to keep track of the exact number.

Insects process the passage of time differently than larger species, like humans, do.

When he originally proposed his funding request, Adrian had compared things to a science fiction or action movie slow-motion sequence during which the bullets or knives are flying at the hero and he’s able to watch them slice through the air and easily step out of their way before they hit him.

During the initial meeting with General Vanessa Gibbons, Adrian had told her that to the
Tabanidae
, the world appears to pass b
y
at a much slower rate than it does for
Homo sapiens
. “That’s wh
y
it’s so hard to catch or swat flie
s—b
ecause the
y
have, for all practical purposes, more time to respond and escape.”

“And you can replicate this effect in people? This morphing of time?”

“Yes. And I’m steadily improving my techniques.”

By better understanding how flies and other insects processed time, Adrian was able to design way
s
—through
drugs, sleep deprivation, isolation, and environmental
manipulation—to make it seem like more time was passing for his subjects than was actually the case.

That was the key to his research.

That was the ultimate goal.

All for the greater good.

He passed the surgery room containing the intracranial electrodes and brainwave sensors, then the room where the tattooing took place, and came to Henrik.

He was an imposing man, broad shouldered and thick chested. As a former police officer he’d seen too many guilty people get off on technicalities. He shared Adrian’s ardor for justice.

“I like this room.” Henrik was staring through the window at the dark swarm. “I’d have to say it’s my favorite one here.”

“Even more than where you do the tattooing?”

“That’s a close second.” He tapped the glass. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be stuck in there.”

“You could always find out. The door is right over there.”

“I’m not that curious.”

“Who would be? So, you texted me that you wanted to talk.”

“We lost Zacharias.”

“Where was he last seen?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Hmm. That’s his third visit there.”

Henrik finally shifted his attention from the flies to Adrian. “My people had eyes on him when he entered an office building downtown, but he must have slipped out another door because they never saw him leave.”

“And what about those young men and women who have the hallucinations?”

“Besides Daniel and Petra, it’s not clear who else they’ve located. Although, if our sources are correct, there are two others out there.”

“Four in all.”

“Yes.”

“It’s been six months since—”

“Yes, but Zacharias has skills and whoever’s funding him is good at hiding their tracks.”

“And Petra?”

“I have two people in place. They’re ready to take her whenever you give the word.”

Normally, Adrian wouldn’t have resorted to such extreme measures, but everything depended on continuing this research, and once they’d procured the senator’s daughter, they would have the leverage to make sure that happened.

“Alright,” Adrian said. “I’ll let you know when to have them move in. Meanwhile, do whatever it takes to find Zacharias.”

“I will.”

“And see what businesses have offices in that building in Philadelphia. I want to know if any of them might be funneling money to him.”

“We looked into it, but I’ll check again.”

Adrian nodded. “Good.”

“By the way, I understand we have a new arrival coming in soon?”

“We’ll be processing him on the sixteenth.”

“Will you be trying out the Telpatine on him?”

“In time. Until then, keep your needle ready. I’ll make sure we have enough ink to do both eyes.”

“I always enjoy that part.”

“I know you do.”

After Henrik left, Adrian observed the
Tabanidae
flying into the glass, instinctively trying to get out.

Such a powerful thing, instinct.

Always, always compelling organisms to try to be free.

Just like the subjects with their steel chairs.

The readings on the counter beside the door noted a dip in the flies’ population.

He tapped at the keys and lowered a slab of rotting beef into the room.

Let them feed.

Let them breed.

The maggots would rejuvenate their numbers.

The flies swarmed onto the meat, covering it almost instantly, just like they did with the subjects when he locked them in there, unclothed, as part of their treatment.