Project Cain (24 page)

In the name of science. For the betterment of man. Et cetera. Et cetera. To understand what caused aggression, violence, evil. Isolate it. Cure it. Control it. Then to one day unleash it again.

The Cain Gene.

Was it really only a matter of the chromosomes floating around in our blood?

If so, I wasn’t stupid. I’d read enough Warhammer paperbacks and watched enough Syfy channel to get the big picture. And if fiction ain’t your thing, I’d heard what they’d found at Shardhara. I could EASILY imagine biological weapons that would infect the enemy with a murderous hate so bad they’d turn and kill one another. Or provisional injections of rage to boost aggression and strength in battle-fatigued troops.

No wonder the Department of Defense was running the show.

Castillo appeared around the corner, moved casually toward the car.

He got in and started the car to pull away. Looked kinda mad again and didn’t say a word.

I assumed Hitchcock had been a total bust. So I apologized.

For what? Castillo frowned. You just found another clone.

•  •  •

The kid’s family was still alive and everything.

C
astillo recognized the boy from his picture.

The picture of Gary Ridgway, I mean.

The original Ridgeway had fifty CONFIRMED kills in Washington state and was suspected of another forty. Mostly preyed on runaways and prostitutes and kept their bodies hidden in various woods so he
could “visit” them again later. When he was sixteen, he’d stabbed a little kid because he’d “wondered what it was like to kill someone.” He was in jail in his seventies now.

His clone was a hundred yards away.

Like father and son, Castillo said. A “spitting image.”

Castillo’d been trained to look at a photo once and know the person by sight immediately. Seriously. Our government trains people to do stuff like this. Castillo said he’d found terrorist guys who had gotten nose jobs and face-lifts and totally changed their hair and beards. One guy, he said, had been disguised as a
woman
for two years, and Castillo claimed he’d slapped the guy in his nuts when they’d found him. Castillo was messed up.

OK, the idea, the plan, the strategy, was to wait THEM out. Whether or not THEM was three guys now or seven, Castillo didn’t know. But he knew they’d killed the Albaums and probably some others along their way west.

And—thanks to me—we’d gotten to Sizemore first.

IF they were working from the same “list,” IF they knew Sizemore was a clone, they’d eventually show up. Or maybe even my father. Eventually . . .

Castillo said: The problem with TV shows is that they make it seem like stakeouts involve parking the car outside a house and staring at it until something happens. But neighbors eventually notice strange cars sitting on their street and dial 911. So we had to be somewhere else when/if the “shit went down.”

There were two empty houses to choose from. Both for sale. One was directly across the street from the Sizemore house. The other was down the street on an adjacent cul-de-sac. (FOR SALE! REDUCED PRICE!
MOVE-IN READY! ) Castillo said: I love this housing market.

He explained that sometimes overseas the soldiers would have to commandeer a house.

Castillo said: I am half prepared to do that here, too. I think he was tired of all of it too.

Instead we waited until it was two in the morning, and he broke into the cul-de-sac house. The house was empty, furniture removed, the last owners long since having moved on. As Castillo had surmised, the top right back bedroom window looked out perfectly over OldeGate Lane.

He set down the recently purchased foldout chair and a bag of groceries. He’d left the car three blocks away, with plans to move it to a new street each day.

I told Castillo we were gonna get busted but he just shook his head and tossed me something.

It was a paperback.
The Pillars of the Earth
. Something about building a Gothic cathedral in England. What’s this for? I wondered out loud.

Castillo said: You said you were a reader. He positioned his new lawn chair at the back window. Unless you wanted a romantic thriller, he said. That’s all the store had.

I flipped through the book. It was, like, eighty thousand pages long and weighed fourteen pounds. I had the feeling Castillo had bought it only because it was the biggest one they’d had. Guess he thought we were gonna be in an empty house awhile.

Castillo watched me, looked like he wanted to say something, and then turned to look out the window again.

So here we are, he said. I walked over to behind the chair and asked NOW WHAT?

Castillo said something corny about us being lions hunting and all.

I kinda thought he might even be warming up to me.

•  •  •

We were in that stupid horrible house a couple of days. The first day was the worst, as we just sat and watched another house. Castillo never talked. We ate peanut butter sandwiches and cold hot dogs quietly together. Every so often I took watch for a couple of hours so Castillo could get some sleep. I’d just stare out the window at a house where nothing ever really happened.

Once, the big thrill of the day, I saw the kid’s mom drive out to do some food shopping. I didn’t really get a good look at her. The thing I most noticed was that she had those stupid little family decals on the back of her prerequisite SUV. The cartoon dad with his little golf club, cartoon mom with her little shopping bags, big brother holding a basketball, and then little cartoon Gary. The youngest son. Smaller figure than the first but another basketball.

As she pulled away, I got this funny idea of another figure next to Gary’s sticker. Another figure just like Gary’s small one. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another.

Fifty, a hundred, cartoon stickers of Gary Sizemore running up over the first family and filling the whole back of the windshield. All perfectly identical. Not a single difference between them.

My dad and DSTI could have done that. Easily.

The next day I actually saw the real boy, little Gary Sizemore, play basketball in the driveway for a bit. Not an imaginary sticker but another flesh-and-blood freak my father had made.

•  •  •

Note: DSTI could—and did—produce clones of various ages. Any age they wanted, really. If they wanted a normal baby (which is what this Gary Sizemore had been), they could make one of those. This was the easiest way to make a clone. Implant the egg into one of their, say, Ukrainian girls (not that a girl from any other country wouldn’t do just as well) and wait nine months in the—relatively speaking—traditional method. Now, if they instead wanted to, for whatever reason, make one
older
(which is what I was), they had two options: (1)
start
the embryo in a biological host (i.e., a Ukrainian woman) and then extract the embryo to incubate in a special vat of liquid for almost as long as they wanted, or (2) speed up gestation through artificial means while in the vat and make the clone come out at—by physical size and appearance and physiological development—four years. Or fourteen. Or (in some very rare and expensive and horrific cases) thirty.

•  •  •

Castillo told me that half of all adoptions in the United States occur through private arrangements. Seventy thousand babies a year trading hands that no one really knows anything about. Kids just like ME. How easily it might have been ME we were now watching. Adopted out to some unsuspecting family. Maybe even a family that was paid to abuse me. Jeffrey
Sizemore
of Hitchcock, Indiana. How easily Gary could have ended up as Gary Jacobson from Jersey. All us little clone babies. Nothing more than a dozen cosmic coin flips.

•  •  •

So when I wasn’t looking out the window at “what-might-have-been,” I mostly read the book Castillo’d picked up for me. (A gesture I appreciated.) It was actually a pretty good book because it had
stuff about the Hundred Years’ War and witches and the plague. But it was also, like, a thousand pages, and made me sleepy. I slept on the floor in the upstairs room behind Castillo and his chair.

Other times, I just wandered the empty house. Tried imagining what the family who’d lived here had been like. What furniture had been in each of the now-empty rooms? How old were the kids? If there’d been any. Did they have a dog? Were they a NORMAL family with a mom and dad and kids? Or one more like mine? An imaginary mom. A mad scientist. A test tube. Some cells from the world’s most loathed serial killer.

I explored each room a dozen times, running my fingers across bare walls where once there’d hung pictures and knickknacks, their ghostlike outlines now imprisoned in muted stains. What had the pictures shown? My own house back in Jersey had been turned just as empty and ghostlike.

Eventually I found the house wasn’t so empty after all.

Eventually I found that THE WORST was still coming.

•  •  •

While most of these two days proved a blur of reading and sleeping that felt like a month, here are some moments that stand out. Some are good and some bad. Honestly it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference anymore.

•  •  •

On the second night, I talked with Castillo.

I told him what I knew about Dolly the cloned sheep. That the scientists made her from a cell that’d been taken from another sheep’s mammary (a fancy word for tit), and that there was this singer once named Dolly Parton who was famous for having really big tits. So the
scientists called the sheep Dolly. He got my point. The most significant experiment of the last hundred years, the scientific advancement that brought man closer to God than any other before or since . . . was a tit joke.

I wondered from what Dahmer cell they’d made me. I did not wonder this out loud. And I tried really, really hard not to wonder very long.

To change the subject, I voiced to Castillo that I thought we were totally wasting our time. That the guys were never going to come to the Sizemore house. Castillo just told me “never” was a long time and to be patient. He reminded me that he’d hunted that terrorist guy two years.

So then I told Castillo about Mendel and his experiments with hawkweed. Castillo made some joke about Mendel having big tits. But I continued. My father might have been a crazy bastard, but he’d definitely spent good money and time teaching me all sorts of science stuff. I figured it was the least I could do to help Castillo understand what a waste this was.

I told him that after his famous pea experiments, Mendel had also worked on another plant, called hawkweed. Why hawkweed? Well, a famous biologist in Germany read Mendel’s paper on peas and wrote to him, said he’s gotta give this hawkweed stuff a try. The guy was, like, the only real biologist who ever wrote to Mendel. Said he’d experimented with hawkweed before and even sent Mendel some seeds to help get him started. Nice.

The hawkweed didn’t work, however. The plant had/has a very weird “reproductive pattern.” Random. Even makes clones of itself sometimes, instead of true offspring, just to keep things interesting. Mendel’s notes and ideas on heredity suddenly made 0.00 sense. He
wrote a paper and admitted to the whole world he couldn’t repeat his pea experiments with the new plant. He admitted he could be wrong about everything.

My dad said this German guy set Mendel up. The guy wanted Mendel to fail. Wanted him to understand you can’t predict shit.

Castillo got my point again but told me to give him a break.

Then he said: You done good, man. Getting us this far. Really.

Hawkweed, I replied.

My implication was that you can’t predict shit. I probably hadn’t gotten us any farther than we’d been a week before.

Castillo just turned back to the window. Maybe, he agreed.

•  •  •

That was the same night I saw Konerak Sinthasomphone.

•  •  •

I did not yet know who Konerak Sinthasomphone was.

Like Richard Guerrero’s, his was a name I’d have to learn later. (Soon, actually.) That night, he was only a face I recognized. Completely. One I’d seen a dozen times before in various forms. In the treetops and skyline of some new city. In the wallpaper pattern of some hotel lobby. A face that, this night, had slowly once again filled the whole world.