Project Cain (34 page)

Ted was in the room watching the whole thing like he was just watching reality television.

Williford tossed the empty can across the room.

He said: You’ll get used to it. Even start to like it, I bet.

I coughed up more beer. Tried to stop choking. I thought:
Extreme for—

He stopped me. He told me that they’d had him drinking by the time he was ten. That they’d wanted a genuine alcoholic just like THE ORIGINAL. He moved behind me again, but kept his hand on my face. He said: Of course, you’re just really a baby, aren’t you? Still wet behind the ears with formaldehyde and whatnot. New and improved insta-clone.

His fingers moved slowly over my chin, forced their way into my mouth. He gave me crap for being only, like, eight years old technically. (My father, I assume, had told them about that. What else had he confided to these killers?) Jeff Williford said this made me even less of a real person than he was, since
he’d
lived a legit eighteen years.

I agreed with him completely but still couldn’t hear any more. He was preaching to the choir, and the choir just wanted to die. I begged him to stop talking.

He told me to relax. It didn’t matter when I was technically born.

He said: You’re still one of us. Right here and right now, you and I are exactly the same.

He said: We are one.

I’m . . . I tried talking.

He said: You’re what, Jeff?

I’m
nothing
like you, I said.

He grabbed my face in both hands.

He said: All evidence to the contrary.

Then it got bad again.

Real bad.

•  •  •

I know part of this is an exercise in putting into words what happened to me.

By writing it down, making it more real, it becomes something else.

Something I can eventually even understand and accept. Move on from.

But I’m still not ready to do that yet. Someday, maybe.

I don’t know.

•  •  •

I lay curled on the concrete floor again. Everything hurt. The cold damp floor against my face was the only feeling that wasn’t burning, piercing.

They sat with me now, the other boys from someone else’s life.

The ghosts born in my head for too many years.

James and Matt and Ernest. (
Now the souls gathered . . .
)

Curtis, Tony, and both Stevens. (
From every side they came . . .
)

I’m sorry, I said.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

They’d never spoken to me before.

Now they did.

They’d told me apologies were unnecessary.

They called me brother. Whispered to me for hours.

Konerak even stroked my hair in the darkness.

Be brave,
he said.

There was a hole drilled into the back of his head. I could see it.
Long ago someone had injected hydrochloric acid into the frontal lobes of his brain while he was still alive. Someone had wanted to make Konerak a “zombie.”

Be brave,
he said.
Castillo is going to find you.

Be brave. Castillo is going to find you.

I heard the door open.

Konerak and the others were gone. Returned to the underworld . . .

(
My heart longed, after this, to see the dead again.
)

Who you talking to? a familiar voice asked.

It wasn’t Castillo.

•  •  •

You hear their blood. From down—

•  •  •

—a long hallway. My father is working in his office, and I am left alone to explore. Find somewhere new, a doorway, a hallway never noticed before, like the hidden door of a secret room. Come with me down that long dark hall. Bright color glowing at the end like gold almost. Come with me to the door, hold our hands up to the security panel and watch the door open. Inside are the tanks ten feet high—five, ten, two dozen—in four neat rows across the whole room and each one glowing like gold, the liquid inside shining. There is something in each tank, something floating. Walk up slowly to inspect the closest tank. There’s a man inside and he is naked. His skin is dark gray almost. Place our tiny hands against the warm thick glass of the tank. Inside the tank, eyes open. Gray hands move against the glass to mirror my hands.

We meet for the first time.

The dark man and I.

This is only a memory.

But I somehow knew he was close again.

•  •  •

The dark man found the house on the third day.

I saw none of it. I don’t remember much of that time.

I’m told he killed Al and Ted and Jeff Williford.

I can almost picture him doing this, but these are images I chase away quickly.

I can tell you that when he was done killing them, he came for me.

•  •  •

I think I’d been tied or taped again or something to a chair. It’s all . . . I don’t know.

I remember the sounds of screaming.

I could almost hear his thoughts again. The REAL killer.

The dark man.

Pictured him chopping into Albert, ripping away that muscle and weird fatty stuff inside. Almost as if I were doing it myself. I imagined David and heard gulls screaming. I imagined my father being torn in half. I welcomed the enclosing darkness.

Soon, I prayed, I would see nothing else.

I remember feeling the thing/man standing right behind me. Breath hot and wet against my shoulder blades. The warmth off his body. Several jagged nails moving slowly under my chin.

Stuck in the chair, this killer behind me.

It seemed sort of silly now. All of it. I’d been wrong.

There was no real Jeff Jacobson. Or Jeff Williford.

Or Jeff Dahmer for that matter either.

There was only Cain.

Death manufactured in laboratories, mined from physical evil.

I waited to die.

Then, what I thought was warm water splashed over my back and soaked the top of my head. It wasn’t water.

Because the table beneath me turned red. Like a magic trick. Like a sorcerer’s spell. And the red on the table was blood, I realized, and my silhouette—my own head and shoulders—instantly appeared on the table between the spatter.

All sound vanished. Then something like thunder filled the room, pierced my ears.

THIS is Death,
I thought. Not squished birds or frozen boys or graveyards.

I felt great weight fall against his body and then slide away again.

I heard more thunder.

Gunshots.

Something touched my face, lifted my head.

The light above burned my eyes, and I crept back into the darkness again. The burn from the ropes slackened suddenly. Then nothing.

I felt myself being lifted from the chair.

Like flying.

I forced one eye open.

It was Castillo.

•  •  •

castillo (noun)

Spanish word for “castle”

(1) a fortified stronghold; (2) a place of security or refuge

I
woke. For all I knew I was back in my own house in Haddonfield. Or maybe, at worst, it was still the night my dad left. The night Castillo had arrived. And all the rest, all of it, the most terrible of it, had been a nightmare. I had imagined the whole thing.

But my entire body ached a thousand different ways. And a man stood at the end of the bed. Fading like another ghost. It was not Castillo or my father. Maybe the world was nothing anymore but half-formed ghosts. Maybe that’s all I was now too.

Coming into focus again, a small black man. A face I knew. A
real
face.

You’re safe.

It was Ox I was looking at. But Ox hadn’t spoken.

The voice had been Castillo’s and I tried turning to it.

Take it easy, his voice said.

I slowly took in the rest of the room. Sparse. Bare walls, a cot, rusted metal desk.

You’re safe, Castillo said again and then tried to get me to focus. I tried concentrating on his face. He looked totally exhausted, sorrowful. I didn’t need a mirror to see what Castillo was looking at. As well
as Castillo was trying to hide it, I could see in his eyes.

I was broken. I’d been messed up pretty bad.

Castillo told me we were at Ox’s place. Somewhere we’d be safe for a little while.

Castillo confirmed that my father was dead, and I didn’t let him know I somehow already knew that. That I’d seen/felt it happen in my own mind/body. It still hadn’t sunk in yet, and I stayed quiet as Castillo recounted what had happened.

How he’d found my dad at Winter Quarters and was bringing him out when the same man from the motel showed up. The dark man. He’s the one who killed my father. Who stabbed Castillo, too. (All of this familiar in the back of my mind as some sort of half-formed dream-memory.)

When he finally returned to his own car and found it all busted up and me gone, Castillo called his bosses finally. Told them Dr. Jacobson was dead and that he’d found one of the canisters.

Then he told them to let out more of these supersoldier things. These men who could somehow find the boys so easily. He understood this now too, I think. The link between us all. Something in our blood. Synthetic or whatever. Told them
he’d
now “vanish forever” if they’d find the boys and tell him where. Otherwise he was going to the press with everything.

His bosses accepted, and when the dark men found Al and Ted and two Jeffs, they called Castillo as promised and he was ready. Castillo was too late to save three of the boys. (By choice or not, I still don’t know. Don’t want to.) But he killed his second dark man.

Castillo told me there was now just one more thing to take care of, and then it’d all be over.

I knew then he was going back to DSTI.

•  •  •

I said: They’ll just kill you, too.

Castillo figured they were going to try soon anyway. This way maybe it was on his own timetable. His terms. He thought it’d help.

I told him I wanted to go too, but he wanted none of that. He told me I needed time in a real hospital with real people who could help start putting me back together again.

But it was more than just the cuts and punches and other stuff. More than whatever psychological damage I had to carry now. Castillo let me know it was something else.

His eyes led down to a bandage on my arm. The bandage was not for cuts or anything.

It was, it turned out, for the black stuff on my arm.

The same stuff Henry had been covered in.

The same stuff Ted and Jeff had too, according to Castillo.

Turns out my “allergy medications” were not for allergies.

They were for something else.

•  •  •

Dolly, the famous cloned sheep. Remember her? He lab name was 6LL3. She died at only six years old. Most sheep live to twelve. But there were giant black tumors growing inside 6LL3’s chest. And her legs already had arthritis. She couldn’t stop coughing blood.

So they euthanized her.

In the biopsy they found surprisingly shortened telomeres, the parts of the cell connected to age. The scientists figured these midget telomeres had been passed on from the “parent,” who’d been six years old when the DNA was taken.

So, genetically, Dolly was already six years old the day she was born.

Weird, huh?

•  •  •

To officially get all the numbers straight.

I developed in a vat at DSTI for close to two years.

I have the physical appearance and development of a sixteen-year-old.

The chromosomes I was made from were thirty-three years old. (The age Dahmer was when they took tissue samples from his brain and made me and Jeff Williford and others.)

I was born eight years ago.

So, best I can figure I’m forty-one years old. (In clone years, I mean.)

Whatever.

I try not to think about any of this.

I will avoid celebrating future birthdays.

•  •  •

The original plan was that Castillo was going back to DSTI to get rid of DSTI’s scientists and his own bosses once and for all. Also, to get me the medications I needed.

I asked about the other kids, those who might still be at Massey or DSTI, and Castillo told me they weren’t my problem but promised if there were any kids left, he’d get as many as he could.

I didn’t think that was a good enough answer. I wasn’t the only one who needed to be saved and protected from these people. I was, however, the only one who could really help do something about it. So I told Castillo I could help.

Castillo said I’d already done more than anyone else (I suppose I was getting credit for helping to find most of the missing clones), and even Ox piped in about how he and Castillo could handle things now. I was supposed to just hide out with Ox until Castillo got everything taken care of.

I lifted my hand. It was shaking. The nails worn to nubs. But I got it up there all the same. I said: It’ll be easier to handle it with this.

What’s that? Castillo asked. He leaned back, curious. Half smiling, even.

I wiggled my fingers. Five keys, I said.

DSTI’s security system.