Liquid Fear (2 page)

Dr. Sebastian Briggs turned away from the monitor, content that David Underwood was sufficiently broken for the moment. The subject would be ready for his next dose of Halcyon shortly.

David let out a tired wail from behind the metal door in the back of the factory.

“Home on the range,” Briggs whispered.

David was the good soldier, the one who had offered himself for the chronic, ongoing experiment, whether he knew it or not. The other subjects had finished—or at least survived—the clinical trials, unaware of their contribution to science, their crime forgotten.

But Briggs hadn’t forgotten. Roland Doyle, Anita Molkesky, Wendy Leng, and Alexis Morgan had gone on to lead regular lives. Briggs hadn’t let them escape completely, though, because the world was merely a larger Monkey House, and the experiment had never ended, because they carried it inside them.

He’d watched them and tracked them. Wendy, especially.

The girl, Susan, hadn’t been his fault, although he’d been stuck with the blame. It had taken a decade for him to restore his reputation, but luckily his backers were less interested in publishing in peer journals and more interested in tangible results.

Soon, though, his colleagues would understand who among them had achieved an evolutionary leap in emotional engineering.

He meandered through the maze of cells until he reached the main section of the Monkey House. It had changed little since the original trials, and the rows of conveyor belts, metal storage canisters, steel tables, drill presses, rusty farming implements, and thermoforming machinery added to that sense of a frenzied inner city. Alleys and crevices broke off from the main boulevards, where the scarred vinyl flooring marked years of industrial traffic. Here and there, broken sorting machines and hydraulic arms were stacked in schizophrenic sculptures, hoses and wires dangling.

His backers had kept the property, a former tractor factory that had been haphazardly renovated for the original trials. The limited-liability company listed in the Register of Deeds office had been dummied up until it was four layers removed from the true owners—CRO Pharmaceuticals.

Briggs appreciated the seclusion, and although the Research Triangle had grown rapidly in the meantime, twenty acres of pine forest and a chain-link fence separated the massive brick building from the surrounding parcels.

Instead of the cornfields and soybean fields that once sprawled in the Piedmont belt between Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham, high-tech companies and research firms like IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, and Cisco Systems had placed labs or headquarters here.

While a complex body of world-changing research and development was underway in a sixty-mile radius, Briggs considered himself the heart of the beast, a man who held the keys that would unlock the human mind’s potential.

A pager buzzed on Briggs’s belt. The metal framing, high flat ceiling, and thick block walls inhibited cell-phone signals, and neither Briggs nor his backers wanted to be vulnerable to wiretapping or signal hijacking. The pager meant someone was ringing in on the satellite phone, and Briggs hurried to his office to plug the phone into an antenna that snaked its way up the side of the building and into the North Carolina humidity.

“Hello,” Briggs said.

“It’s done,” the voice said.

“Good. He’s the farthest away, so it was important to start with him. How is he?”

“Out like a light. Whatever this stuff is, you ought to get a patent for it.”

Briggs didn’t appreciate the humor. Life and death were serious matters. “Do you have the identification?”

An exasperated chuff came from the other end. “Everything just like you said. I even wrote those initials on the mirror. You ask me, this is a whole lot of trouble for nothing. I could roll him in the trunk and have him on your doorstep in eight hours.”

“Nobody asked you,” Briggs said. His backers insisted on using this particular operative, but Briggs planned to remove all witnesses eventually. He just wasn’t sure he could tolerate the man until that happy day.

“Okay, they told me to do it your way.”

“No fingerprints, nothing to connect you back here?” Briggs asked.

More exasperation. “You and me, Doc. We got to have a talk soon.”

“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

“Is that some kind of code or something?”

The man could dish out humor but couldn’t appreciate it. “Can I ask you something, Mr. Drummond?” Briggs said, using the fake name Martin Kleingarten had given him in a clumsy attempt at subterfuge.

“I’m on the clock,” Kleingarten/Drummond said.

“What are you afraid of?”

Silence. Briggs thought of those hundreds of miles of electromagnetic radiation beaming between him and the low-orbit satellite before bouncing to Kleingarten/Drummond in Cincinnati. Silence took just as much energy to broadcast as words did.

“I’m not afraid of nothing,” came the answer a few seconds later.

“Every intelligent man has a deepest fear. Think.”

“Right now, I’m afraid I won’t get paid, because you guys are playing a weird game. The things you’ve asked me to do, it don’t sound like business to me.”

“I assure you, Mr. Drummond, your work is critical to a major scientific discovery. The ‘game,’ as you call it, is part of the work.”

The man answered, but Briggs’s attention had been diverted to the monitor, where David Underwood sat on his cot, peering between his fingers at the images flickering on his walls. Briggs had gone with the Susan Sharpe tape, an oldie but a goodie, to complement the footage from David’s collegiate surroundings in Chapel Hill. The montage of images kept David trapped ten years in the past.

As usual, David couldn’t quite look away, because Briggs had conditioned him to crave the psychological trauma. But Briggs couldn’t take all the credit. Most of it belonged to Seethe, but the world would find that out soon enough. The hard way.

Kleingarten/Drummond spoke again and snapped Briggs back to the conversation. “What was that?”

“What’s
your
greatest fear, Doc?”

“Easy. Not being feared.”

Briggs clicked off without another word and turned his attention to his computer. Most of his records were on a removable hard drive that could be erased in the event of an emergency. Years of meticulous notes, copies of journal articles, and chemical formulas were stored on a system that an Internet connection had never touched. He’d never trust off-site storage, and he knew they were watching.

In the Monkey House trials, though, he was a traditionalist, making personal notes on a sheet of paper pinned to a clipboard. Such entries brought back so many memories, and memories were his passion.

Beside the date, he scrawled “No change in subject” in the same bad handwriting for which he had been scolded as a child.

He glanced at Wendy’s self-portrait hanging on the wall, a gift from a happier era. So close.

In an uncharacteristic bout of giddiness, he drew a leering smiley face and devil horns on the chart. In the days ahead, he would relive some wonderful memories.

And destroy a few others.

Morning arrived with bloody rags in the sky and sputtering fire in Roland Doyle’s heart.

He squinted at the pink light penetrating the window. His head hurt, but that was nothing new. In Roland’s life, a headache was as reliable as the sun, the moon, and the next drink.

He didn’t believe in predestination, but he had come to accept inevitability, even to embrace it. Whether those repetitive choices were made on his own or through the whim of some puckish and bemused God, the end result was the same.

Let’s go with you, God. You’re a fine fucking fall guy. Never around when I need you, but never around to bitch, either.

The Blame Game was one of Roland’s favorite pastimes. It wasn’t whether you won or lost, succeeded or failed, lived or died, so long as you found someone or something to blame. Wendy had served the most often, but he’d filled her up and moved on.

And despite his secret hope that he’d beaten alcoholism on his own, through willpower and courage, the simple truth was the craving had been lifted by the very God he was now cursing. That God wasn’t a bearded white geezer in the sky, but something large and mysterious, and Roland actually hadn’t probed too deeply for fear that it would prove to be nothing but vapor.

And maybe this was the proof that God had been an elaborate fantasy.

His fingers trailed between the cool sheets to the other side of the bed. The pillow smelled of a woman’s shampoo, but his olfactory sense was as unreliable as the other four. She might have left in the night, or even months ago.

No, she would be there, she
had
to be there, and he would use her as a temporary painkiller, the latest contestant in the Blame Game. Whoever she was.

“Asleep?” he whispered, but the syllables still scratched his raw throat. Roland rolled toward her side of the bed and opened one eye. The blankets were smooth, his hand naked and alone.

The walls were cheap pine paneling, the curtains the deep mottled beige of unbleached linen. The gypsum whorls in the ceiling were cracked, long strands of dusty cobwebs dangling and swaying.

He drew a deep breath and the air tasted of Febreze and Lysol, the sprays fighting a losing battle with cigarettes, beer, and urine. Another motel room, although Roland had no idea of its city.

Indy? Last I remember, I was tooling through the Crossroads of America, the land of Peyton Manning and chili cheese fries.

He sat up with a groan, and the blood increased its sluggish course around his brain. His skull felt as if it were gripped in the mouth of a hungry
T. rex
. His tongue was a carpet that had been stomped on and then vacuumed dry. His heartbeat staggered and pounded in a familiar arrhythmia.

The bedside table would reveal a suicidal potion. Socrates cheerfully chose poison over the admission of defeat. When logic failed the Athenian philosopher, death seemed a reasonable alternative to putting up with more bullshit. Hemlock was his vehicle, but Roland preferred a slower-acting brand.

He’d always been a goddamned coward.

The headache suggested a white wine, something cheap from Southern California. Wine could have chased vodka or, if he’d felt sufficiently masochistic, Everclear.

Unlike many alcoholics, Roland had never suffered from denial. From the first sip on, he always knew exactly what he was doing.

Except, of course, for anything that happened during the blackouts.

The nightstand contained no empty bottles. An alarm clock blazed red numerals that said 9:35. Above it loomed a lamp, its battered beige shade held together by a strip of masking tape. An empty ashtray was the only other item on the table.

“Honey?” he croaked, going for the generic, because no specific name floated up from the mist in his skull.

Cincinnati.

The room felt like Ohio. Maybe it was an underlying muddy-river stench to the air, or perhaps it was the taint of coal-fired power plants. As a salesman for a company that made supplies for advertising signs, Roland might be in town to service major clients like AK Steel, the Kroger Company, or Proctor & Gamble.

Whether it was neon, adhesives, banners, or 3-D lettering, Carolina Sign Supply could meet every outdoor advertising need, no matter how garish. The slogans swam together like eels in his gut.

Roland swung his legs over the side of the bed. He wore a pair of black boxers that featured a clown face on the front, the bulbous red nose marking the fly. Roland slept naked when a woman was with him, so he could be pretty sure he’d been flying solo the night before.

Of course, he might have ended up at one of the local watering holes or topless joints. In that case, all bets were off. He wasn’t the type who paid for companionship.

At least not in cash. For the rest, he’d trade his fucking soul and not bat an eye.

But the other side of the bed was unruffled. He had definitely slept by himself. His battered leather briefcase, which held his sample notebooks, was parked by the nightstand, his pants tossed on the floor.

A few coins had leaked from his pants pockets and glinted like dirty ice on the gray industrial carpet. He had undressed carelessly, his shirt tossed over the arm of a vinyl chair.

The bathroom door was ajar, a bar of light leaking from the opening. He wondered if he had vomited, bent in homage to the porcelain idol. His stomach fluttered up a wave of acid, though no nausea lingered.

Headache isn’t too bad, either. Must be getting back in the groove.

And blackouts are a good thing, when you get right down to it, because who wants to remember shit like that? Maybe God has a little mercy in Him after all.

The air was cold on his bare chest, shrinking his nipples to red points. The air-conditioning must have been set on “igloo,” because spring had been pushing hard to get winter the hell out of the way.

His face itched and he put a hand to his chin. Stubble, three days’ worth, at least.

Roland wondered how many appointments he’d missed, how many clients had called the home office asking about the sales rep who had scheduled a visit. Sometimes the benders went on for a week or more, but since taking the job with Carolina Sign, he’d been dependable.

The company had known of his past. The background check had turned up the DWI, two drunk and disorderly charges, the vandalism, and the court judgment against him in the civil suit brought by his estranged wife.

In a bit of undeserved serendipity, the company’s general manager was a recovering alcoholic who had shepherded Roland into a twelve-step program. “White chips and second chances,” Harry Grimes, the GM, had said.

What do you think about third chances, Harry? Or is this the fourth?

He bent to pick up his pants, blood rushing to his temples. He wondered if he’d spent all his money. Once, while living with Wendy, he had maxed out his credit card in a two-day stretch, $10,000 flushed.

The worst part had been the waiting, knowing Wendy would open the envelope, pull out the bill, and see the itemized stupidity. Wendy was past waiting, though, exhausted from serial second chances, and the separation agreement showed up in the mailbox before the credit card bill.

His pants looked relatively clean, so he probably had avoided crawling on his hands and knees, at least on the sidewalk. Keys jingled in his pocket. He fished the wallet out and flipped it open, thumbing through the leather folds. A couple of hundreds and some twenties.

Maybe he’d made a late-hour cash withdrawal from an ATM. He couldn’t imagine giving up a drinking bout while he still had some green.

The phone rang, its brittle bleat like a spear to his skull. The home office? A client? Escort service? Newfound-and-already-forgott en drinking buddy? The choices were endless and all were terrible.

Maybe it was Harry. As Roland reached for the phone, he realized there wasn’t a single person left in the world whose voice would cheer him, who would dispense kind and supportive words, who wouldn’t bring suspicion and disapproval to bear.

The phone was cold against his ear. “Hello?”

“Mr. Underwood, you requested a wake-up call at eight,” said a tired, smoke-strained female voice. “We tried three times but received no answer, so we assumed you had checked out.”

“Sorry, you must have the wrong room.”

“My apologies,” she said, though her tone suggested the exact opposite. “Is this room one-oh-one?”

Roland retrieved the rubber-flagged keychain that lay beside the alarm clock. “Right number, wrong person.”

“Sir, all check-ins require photo ID. The night clerk has ‘David Underwood’ in room one-oh-one.”

“Sorry, there’s no David here that I know of.” Unless he’d brought home a drinking buddy by that name. In which case, pitiful, hungover David was sleeping either under the bed or in the bathtub.

The clerk’s voice grew sour. “Either way, Mr. Underwood, checkout is ten o’clock.”

“Hold on a second,” Roland said, before the clerk could hang up. “What time did I…what time did David check in?”

He actually wanted to ask what
day
, but he didn’t want to arouse additional suspicion.

“We have it at seven ten. There’s a surcharge for having additional people in the room, Mr. Underwood. If you’d care to stop by the desk on your way out—”

“Never mind.” He had checked in last night, apparently, although the idiots had gotten his name wrong.

His barebones expense account covered a rental car, meals, and lodging. Extra charges would draw the attention of Carolina Sign’s purse-handlers, who, as in every other American business, were tasked with extracting nickels from the worker bees while shoving stacks of Hamiltons toward management.

Actually, the confusion might benefit him in the long run. Let “David Underwood” foot the charge and let the bitchy desk clerk deal with the inaccurate billing. One problem, though: his twelve-step program was built on rigorous honesty, both with himself and others.

But the twelve steps had apparently failed him. He had a roiling stomach and jangling head to prove it. The only steps he had taken were those that led down the basement to hell.

Funny, though, his mouth didn’t taste of liquor. Maybe he’d burned away his taste buds.

As he got up to shower, the wallet tumbled to the floor. Some of the plastic cards slid free of an inner sleeve. His driver’s license portrait glared at him, eyes startled wide by the examiner’s flash.

Roland had been dismayed when the examiner listed his hair as “gray.” The gray was there, sure, but he still thought of it as dark brown. He was only thirty-four, after all, even if half of them had been hard years.

He was sliding the license back into place when he paused. The license was the wrong color, issued in North Carolina. He’d registered in Tennessee to avoid excessive auto insurance.

Yet there was his face. His height was listed at five feet ten, just as he’d fudged it by an inch, and his weight, 205, was lower than his actual weight at the time. That was before the twelve-step surrender, back when dishonesty was a second skin. Now, healthier and without the boozy bloat, he weighed 185, but it had taken two years to bounce back into shape from the decade of hard drinking.

It was possible he’d updated his driver’s license after he’d settled near Raleigh. But he would have remembered something like that. He had been abusive, but he couldn’t have killed
all
of his brain cells.

And if he’d wandered into a driver’s license office during a blackout, chances were good he would have been denied a license and escorted to the nearest drunk tank.

One other problem with the license bearing his face: the name listed on it was David Wayne Underwood.