Project Cain (22 page)

I told him I thought that too.

It was the group heading west that Castillo was most worried about. He ran his finger along Route 50. He said: There are murders and disappearances all over the country, but if I wanted to draw a straight line down Route 50 today, I finally could.
This
, he tapped the map. This is the fresh game trail. The blood trail. You ever gone hunting?

Isn’t that what we’re doing now? I asked.

Castillo made a noise that sounded like a laugh but wasn’t.

He asked of I’d figured out any more of my dad’s notes.

I had.

•  •  •

But I stalled. Had to. Yes, I HAD figured some stuff out. After my nightmare, my hallucination, my trance, whatever the heck you want to call it, I’d locked myself back into that motel room and had gone through my dad’s notes again. Terrified to ever sleep again. Fearful of where I might wake up or what I might see when I did. And so I’d looked at the list I’d made at Subway, cross-referencing with the
atlas Castillo had left me. And I’d found some stuff, but . . .

But giving this info to Castillo meant possibly finding more clones.

More little Edward Albaums out there.

Or Richardsons or Sizemores or Whatevers.

More kids to find and lead straight back to the slaughterhouse.

•  •  •

Castillo asked me again if I’d figured out anything more.

I admitted, Maybe. (And just
maybe
, I thought, some good could come out of this.)

The guys who’d escaped from DSTI hadn’t stopped at this kid’s house randomly. They’d been SENT there. I knew this as clearly as Castillo did. It was the big elephant in the diner.

The very first night, Castillo had read it in my father’s journals:
My dad wanted the clones free.
All of them (all of us). And he’d probably SENT those kids to find Edward Albaum. Just as he’d first sent them to find Albert McCarty and
his
dead family.

Had my dad told these guys to kill the families? Had he told them to kill the clone kids who wouldn’t play their game properly? Or had he simply left that decision up to the six boys?

How many other families were going to be visited this week?

Had the things I’d seen in my nightmares been only in a nightmare, or some kind of premonition of what was to come? Or a memory? And if so . . . could I still stop these guys? Were these killers just working from the same list of names I had?

I told Castillo I thought maybe the black bird might be Hitchcock, Indiana.

The Birds
is this famous Alfred Hitchcock movie. It’s way too slow, like most old movies, but there are still one or two cool scenes. My father and I watched it together one night. He said it was a classic I should probably know. He even made popcorn.

Castillo found Hitchcock, Indiana, on the map. It was right on Route 50. It was right on his growing “trail of blood.” He told me to go on, so I told him about the monkey.

The monkey and Salem, Illinois.

What monkey? He’d pulled out his phone to thumb through the images.

Gilronan, I explained. The monkey with the graduation cap.

Castillo thought it would make more sense if a Salem reference featured a witch’s hat instead of what-I-thought-was a graduation cap. Because, you know, the Salem witch trials. But that would not in ANY WAY have explained the monkey. I decided it best not to tell Castillo he was being stupid.

Instead I just explained that Salem,
New Hampshire
, was a small town where John Scopes went to high school. Now, Scopes was NOT a serial killer. Not at all. He was a high school science teacher who got famous when he was arrested for teaching evolution to his class. This was against the law in Tennessee in 1925. (A law which remained in Tennessee until 1967, currently one of only two states where it’s legal, thanks to a
new
law in 2012, for teachers to present the Garden of Eden as a truth, and evolution as a disputed guess, if they want to.)

The trial was called “The Scopes Monkey Trial.” And the guy who
eventually prosecuted Scopes in court for teaching about evolution just happened to be a guest speaker at Scopes’s own high school graduation when Scopes was a teen. This was, like, ten years before the trial. Total coincidence. This man’s name was William Jennings Bryan. He’d been the presidential candidate for the Democrats three different times and had lost each time. He thought Charles Darwin’s evolution theory was nonsense and that people really came from the Garden of Eden.

He believed in Cain.

At the famous Scopes Monkey Trial—famous because the whole country was watching to see if Science or Religion would win—William Jennings Bryan claimed he actually remembered Scopes in the Salem audience that graduation night ten years before and that the younger Scopes had been laughing and basically being an ass.

Castillo seemed impressed that I knew this. Or disturbed, maybe. I tried explaining that my dad was a scientist and that this was the kind of stuff we’d talk about. I’d remembered Scopes and the Bryan guy, but I’d needed Castillo’s phone to look up where Scopes went to high school and confirm: Salem, New Hampshire.

Salem,
Illinois
—however—right near Route 50, and right on Castillo’s growing “blood trail.”

Castillo asked if I thought the pics might be clues just for me. I shrugged and Castillo mirrored the move perfectly as I did it. Kinda funny. (Castillo wasn’t so bad.)

He asked about the other cartoons, and I admitted I hadn’t a clue on the rest yet and that I needed more time.

Castillo decided we’d maybe head first to Hitchcock. Said he’d need to get on his laptops to check if any Sizemores lived nearby. Worst
case, he said, we’re totally wrong and we can cross off one more town.

On the way he wanted to stop at that park outside McArthur, Ohio. It just happened to be where that mom and her two kids had vanished. Castillo said: Maybe we’ll find something. Killers sometimes return to the sites of their crimes.

Then he said: Nice job, man.

I figured I’d cash in my “nice job” coupon right away and maybe ask just one more question.

More like REQUEST #1, I suppose.

Screw Hitchcock.
That’s what I wanted to say.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about this Sizemore kid or the other clones either. Let’s just keep looking for my dad instead.
But I didn’t have the balls to say it. Instead, needing to say
something
, I just asked if I could order some more food.

Castillo said: Yeah.

I’d done good. I thought he was maybe even starting to like me.

Didn’t yet realize he was absolutely terrified of me.

•  •  •

For the record, the jury found Scopes guilty. It took them all of eight minutes. Scopes quit teaching and went to work for some big oil company. Back then, Religion won over Science. Now, it seems, Science just does whatever the hell it wants. Maybe Tennessee wasn’t/isn’t so backward after all. Maybe they just saw where the world was headed.

T
hen we’re at the park. Goebel Park in Ohio. Just a little community woodlands and playground. It was night. Early morning. Two days before, a mother and her two children had maybe vanished here. Their minivan had been found a few miles up the road, nose-down in some creek.

I wandered around while Castillo walked the playground and picnic area. He was tense. Worried the cops and news vans would swarm back anytime. Apparently the whole place had recently been crawling with reporters and volunteers and ROTC guys from Ohio University, all looking for this family.

Ashley Nelson. And her young kids, Michael and Cassie.

I could almost picture them at the park. Maybe a blanket on the picnic table and some cheese sandwiches or something. A couple of toys spread out. A Frisbee or something maybe tossed around together while killing some time on a warm afternoon.

And then maybe THEY show up. A carload of kids. One of them maybe dressed as a clown. Then things get bad, and “killing time” takes on a whole new meaning.

It was easy to imagine. Too easy.

It was, I realized, basically the same park from my dream. The park where the “Woman in the Black Dress” (sic “THE THING ON THE BED”) was swallowing up all the children with her evil. The same long plastic slides and planked bridges and turrets and swings. The same chunky mulch and narrow trees, and benches and shelters. The same dark shadows of night spreading in every direction. I expected to look up and see her at any moment. To feel the cold tender touch of her blackness first coiling around my feet, legs.

But I saw nothing.

It was just another park, of course. Any park. Every park.

How could I possibly recognize it? It would be like recognizing the faces of dead people you’d never really met, right?
Ha!
Maybe I
had
been here before. Thirty years before, even. Parts of me. Maybe. I shook off the terrible thought, the thought that my whole body was just some organism carrying the memory of another. I moved deeper into the park.

Castillo warned me not to get too far, told me we were leaving soon. I waved him off, kept walking. Needed to get away from the growing night shadows ever winding around the equipment and trees.

Found myself moving toward a small skateboard pit just beyond the playground. There were no lights. But something was there. Something warm and bright cutting through the vast gloom. I found painted asphalt, a concrete half-pipe, and a couple of bars. Graffiti, chipped and old, where someone had written band names and “POSERS” and someone had written “WAX MAN” and drawn a weird picture.

But the biggest graffiti, the source of the unnatural luminance, ran along one whole side of the half-pipe. It was a big carroty fluorescent paint that glowed in the dark like a living thing.

It blazed:
EXTREME FOR LIFE
.

•  •  •

EXTREME FOR LIFE. I stood staring at those words awhile, thinking about what it meant. EXTREME LIFE would have been simple enough for any skate park. Extreme sports and lifestyle and all that stuff. It meant “to stay radical and colorful and dangerous and loud and outrageous.” And I’m sure that’s how most of the skaters here took it. But the “FOR,” I think, added something else entirely. Something that whoever’d spray painted this message however many weeks, months, or years before had meant for the whole world to see. Or maybe just for himself or herself. It meant, I think, to fight FOR life. To be radical and colorful and dangerous and loud and outrageous FOR life. Not taking it for granted. Call it carpe diem or YOLO or whatever. This person embraced life, was mad for it. It meant don’t take one minute of life for granted. It meant DON’T EVER BE AFRAID OF THE DARK. A challenge. And a promise, too.

•  •  •

I stared at those simple words a long time. Memorized every line and curve of each letter. Until, by the time I walked back toward Castillo again, I could feel its power still burning within me.

I even moved in deliberate, slow steps through the swings and stopped to shove the swing bridge that connected the two halves of the huge castle swing set. Watched it sway back and forth in the darkness. Darkness I no longer feared. I was almost daring it, HER, to even try coming for me.