Neuropath (28 page)

'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 shapes 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.

'Isn't this fucking
wild?'
she said. 'I mean all the energies flying around, all the boundaries being broken! How fucking wild is that? I can remember what I was like. I mean, the thought of doing something like this was just… just… I'd have a heart attack!'

Neil gasped in her sudden silence.

'But now! What a fucking trip! I'm 5000 fucking wet!'

Her form detached itself from Neil's shadow. She was standing. 'Anything goes,' the white-and-rose smear said. 'You can see that, can't you, professor? Here, now…
any-fucking-thing
.'

Thomas began shaking.

'This is silliness, Jess,' Neil said. 'What do you think—'

The black blot swung toward Neil's bound outline. A gunshot, loud enough to crack plaster.

Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my…

'Neil?' Thomas heard himself croak.

'Watch this,' Sam said, as though she were a seven-year-old about to do a bicycle trick. Her form moved, spilled like sheeted snow, converged with Neil's darker shadow. 'Watch, professor.
There
… There it goes… that feels good. Can you see it, professor? Imagine Nora
… Imagine
?

'Please,' Thomas said.

'Fucking wild,' she mumbled. 'Oh, God,'—surprised laugh—'I'm gonna come already. Watch me, professor. Watch me, unnngh…'

The running blood had become acid. His eyes screamed, yet he couldn't tear them away from the slurry of light and dark jerking before him. Sam cried out, a primal voice for primal ears, then everything became still, save for the fluttering of anguished eyelids.

'Intense,' she gasped. 'Fuck me. Did you see that? Bammo, and he's still
so fucking hard
. No wonder Nora couldn't get enough!' For an instant, he thought he glimpsed her looking up, searching the ceiling with her eyes. 'Oh, yeah… I think I got another one. How many times did your wife say she usually came? Three? Four? What do you say, professor? Wanna watch me toss another load?'

'No.'

Laughter. 'But of course you do! I can see your boner from here. You guys are made for this stuff. Sex and violence. Juice and penetration. Horror versus fantasy, and fantasy wins! Christ, even
Gerard's
got a fucking hard on…'

Another gunshot.

More blood he couldn't wipe away, pooling in the spoons about his eyes. Little more than a thicket of overgrown color, Sam and Neil began rocking again. The chair creaked. 'Just so fucking wild,' he heard her murmur. 'So hot! No fucking wonder so many men are rapists…' Though he couldn't see her, she became Cynthia Powski sucking on her bottom lip. 'But it's not the same, is it? I mean, if I were a guy and you were chicks, it would be
more
, wouldn't it? The buzz would be bigger…'

An oval appeared like light from beneath ice, and he knew she was watching him, her eyes vacant, lethargic. 'Maybe,' she said without a whisper of self-consciousness, 'when I start with the knives…'

Shadows behind a widow's veil. Breaths, a male and female counterpoint, wheezing between the creak of floorboards.

'Even so,' she gasped, 'it's unfuckingbelievable…' Her voice was doped with pleasure, her words bunched like flannel between compulsive breaths. 'I mean before… I was… well, not a prude… but, you know—like everyone else. Stuff like this… like murder and fucking just freaked me right out. So guilty I couldn't pass a fucking bum without digging through my purse! I just… just wasn't built for this job. And I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. To be a spook. A real world Lara Croft… I wanted to be strong!'

The sound of wood complaining beneath rocking bodies, air puffing through slack lips.

'I remember… it was the strangest thing. After the operation… I woke up… and suddenly I just didn't give a shit. It was like I'd been cringing… cringing my whole life… skulking like a beaten dog, and then… I could really breathe
deep
, you know? Like… those first days of spring… or that first line of coke. And I realized:
people
… People were my problem. I went to bed worrying about people… went to work worrying about people—I even worried in the fucking shower! I'd think… Why did I say that? or… Why did bitch-face look at me '
\
that way? or… What if Tom tells Dick… that I fucked Harry? Cringing. Wringing my hands. Catching my breath. Worry-worry-worry…

'But
now
… hmm. Now everything is…' Pale lines bucked against crowded shadows, and she cried out. 'What can I say?' she continued, talking as though to catch her own drool. 'Anything goes, professor…
Anything
.'

There was nothing to see but pain, the bite of blood, his brow crimping to his cheek as though his eyes had become greased marbles. Even so, it was as if a great palm pressed his face back and to the side, his temple to the wall, away from the horror his ears could so plainly see. Sam. Sam.

The creaking stopped. 'Getting close, doc?' she cooed, her voice mother-tender. 'Why is it… you all look… so lovely the moment just before?'

A faint slapping sound, relentless beneath the chorus of three humans breathing.