Project Cain (38 page)

I mean, I suppose that was Ox’s intention. Or Castillo’s plan or whatnot.

But it wasn’t mine.

And this is exactly when all the alarms went off.

The whole building lit up. Flashing lights and piercing electric sirens.

I jumped out the van door and dashed back into DSTI.

I was not going to leave Castillo.

Ox jumped out of the van too and made to stop me, but I was already scanning my hand and in the door before he’d gotten halfway to me.

Behind me he shouted for me to stop. I let the door shut in his face.

He could do his smash-wire thing if he wanted, but I knew it’d take a while.

I was alone in DSTI now. And I needed to find Castillo.

•  •  •

Inside, the hallways flashed. Emergency lights blinking in every corner.

The walls blushed red like they were covered in blood.

A detached electronic voice neither male nor female came over the building loudspeakers.

“WARNING. EMERGENCY. LEVEL THREE. EMERGENCY. PLEASE REPORT TO SAFETY STATIONS IMMEDIATELY. WARNING. EMERGENCY. LEVEL THREE . . .”

And so on.

As if all of DSTI were under some giant microscope and were being watched by some other person as part of a cosmic experiment. Like we were ALL part of the experiment.

An experiment of Good and Evil.

If so, I wonder what they’d have concluded.

•  •  •

I dashed through the dark flickering hallways.

I already knew where he wasn’t and so tried the other part of the building.

I found Castillo in the Command Center.

It was the building’s largest room. Oversaw half a dozen different laboratories and housed a hundred large monitors and a table large enough for fifty people.

The whole room was encased in special floor-to-ceiling glass.

Soundproof. Bulletproof.

Secret
-proof.

And the entire room was also filled with billowing puffs of purple smoke.

Through the glass I saw the thick vapors curling and rolling in every direction. I couldn’t even see fully into the room. Just these shapes moving within the smoke. Maybe half a dozen bodies. WHO, I yet had no idea. Those people who’d agreed to meet
Castillo, I supposed. People from the Army, from DSTI.

My hand couldn’t open the door. Its scanner light wasn’t even working. (I found out later that Castillo had shot it from the inside, locking everyone in.)

I raced the perimeter of the whole room, turned the corners. Hit another hallway. There was no other way in. I moved along the side of the thick Plexiglas again. Ran my hand along it. Trying to figure out what was going on inside.

Castillo appeared then. Stepping from out of the mist to stand against the glass.

He looked strange. Lost.

He collapsed. Put one hand against the translucent wall.

In the other hand he held a canister. No bigger than a soda can.

One I recognized. One that another Jeff had shown me.

Castillo let it roll out onto the floor and into the room.

His eyes were red and something else.

Something horribly wrong.

Something Evil.

I pictured the people in Shardhara ripping one another and themselves into pieces.

And I was glad I could not really see the dark shapes moving in the mist behind Castillo.

I crouched down next to the glass to be closer to him. Put my hand up against his. The glass was cold to the touch.

He turned, his back against the glass, his fingers still up against mine.

Then that purple smoke covered him completely and his hand slowly pulled away.

I couldn’t see at all anymore what was happening within all that smoke. I thought about just sitting there, waiting for the police or government or whoever to show up and arrest me. But it wasn’t just about me anymore.

There were ten kids waiting just outside who needed to get as far away from police and government and whoever as quickly and completely as possible.

Castillo had sacrificed himself for us.

Buying time, I guess. Or maybe just taking out all the major “Bad Guys” at once with, ironically, a weapon of their own creation.

The least I could do was get up.

I pulled myself to my feet.

And walked out of DSTI forever.

•  •  •

As to WHY Castillo opened up that canister in the room, you’d have to ask him.

That’s his story to tell.

I know the stuff he released is called IRAX11 and that it was developed at DSTI by my father and his colleagues.

I know the people in that room included Castillo’s boss, a couple of mercenaries, and several scientists who’d worked at DSTI. I know that most of them had been involved with Project Cain from the beginning and that it was not the most innocent group of people in the world.

I know that Castillo probably found the irony of their end fitting.

Testing their own experiment on them and all, I mean.

I know that, partially, Castillo wanted to find out what HE was
really
made of.

Like we all do.

O
 x is convinced the world is going to collapse on itself pretty soon and that we’ll go back to the Stone Age or something. Part of me kinda hopes he’s right. He and some other folk live on a hundred acres. Somewhere secret. Another property tucked away for special needs and even more remote than the first. They had more than enough room and supplies for a dozen kids, including me. And whenever we find another kid, they’ll have room for him, too.

It’s good here. Not a single scientist for a hundred miles in any direction.

•  •  •

For a week all the news channels reported how Captain Shawn Castillo, a decorated vet suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, had taken his paranoia and delusions out in a killing spree at a small research facility in Pennsylvania.

The dead list was all scientists and “consultants.”

Castillo hadn’t really killed any of them.

They’d done that all themselves. To each other.

Thanks to the IRAX11 poison.

Still, Captain Kristin Romano, the doctor who’d once treated Castillo, was interviewed by several stations. “Terrible delusions,” she told them. “A tragic reminder for this country to remain committed to advancing the clinical care and social welfare of its veterans.”

Yes, she was lying.

Castillo is alive. He lives here too.

All the news stories about
his
death were a total falsehood, of course. These same stories claimed my father had died
at
DSTI that same day and that Castillo had shot him and some others in this work-rampage shooting thing.

Just part of the story invented by the government to cover up all of it.

A story that allowed us to vanish forever.

•  •  •

Just not
completely
vanish.

Castillo has all my father’s notes still, and together we’ve even managed to find a couple more clones these last months. Clones my father had adopted out to parents who—well, to people who’d done bad things for money. Those kids are safe now also.

They’re here too.

And if anything bad ever happens to any of us, about a hundred newspapers and serious bloggers are gonna get a shitload of data and photos and facts—info about serial-killer clones and dead employees and abused children and bioweapons tested on civilians in Afghanistan.

Not all of it.

No one would believe all of it.

But enough of what happened that the right people might.

•  •  •

Kristin supported and nurtured the lie to protect Castillo and me and all the others.

Because she knew it was a lie that might help keep us all safe. A “deal” the government could maybe live with.

Mostly. Maybe.

Kristin visits here whenever she can. She talks to us. Helps us.

She’s always afraid of being followed. And she should be.

It’s been six months, but you never know.

Maybe someday they will come for us all.

•  •  •

There are two missing pieces to the puzzle of this story that I will try to explain as best I can, but don’t expect too much. To me these pieces are also still missing.

1. The Dark Man. Monster. Supersoldier. Bio-drone. Son of Cain. So many names I’ve heard used these last six months. But call them whatever you will, it doesn’t really matter. There is still this question of how I was hearing/seeing their thoughts and actions. Hearing the blood of the other clones through these dark men somehow. Some kind of psychic/mental/chromosomal/spiritual link between all of us, I cannot deny. That was real. How it worked—I don’t think even the scientists at DSTI or my father understood that. I learned that David Spanelli (one of the original six clones we’d been looking for) had been murdered by the Dark Man somewhere along the Jersey Shore and that what I’d imagined during my vision of his murder, when I’d dreamed of the beach, had not been that far off from what really happened. I know that part of me had been standing outside our motel room that night for just a second when we’d been attacked.
How, again, I just can’t explain. But it had happened.

2. Why did my dad leave clues in his journals that only I could solve? Did he want me to help him free the clones or stop him or . . . I’ve long since stopped worrying about this. I think the clues in his book made sense to me only because he and I shared a life for a while. For eight years, I figure. Eight years he’d included me in his world, and that had happened to include certain places and movies and pieces of art, and that’s that. Many of the doodles I still don’t understand at all. And I never will. Because the images probably weren’t for me. They were for him. And I knew my father only enough to figure out a few.

•  •  •

One thing I’ve learned from all of this is that there aren’t answers for everything.

Science and logic and facts can’t cover all of it.

Sometimes stuff just can’t be explained.

•  •  •

I am sorry my dad is dead.

And, more than I should perhaps, I still both love and miss him.

•  •  •

Kristin is the one who suggested I try writing all this down.

Another step in a long process. To both remember and forget.

To come to terms with MY ghosts now.

To understand more about WHAT I survived. WHO I am. WHY I am.

The “Clone who Lived.” Piggy #10. The boy behind tank number two?

My name is Jeff.

For now, that should be enough, really.

Because that’s the thing at the end of all of this. At the beginning too, I suppose.

I’m me. You’re you.

And I’m not gonna let someone else tell me who I “really am.”

Not the counselors or newspapers or geneticists. Not my father.

I’m not even gonna let ME tell me that.

We are like little pieces of paper floating in the wind.

Extreme for Life.

But not powerless or accidental. Not something tossed carelessly into the air, not something that may fall or may fly depending on the whims of pure chance. Nor something hurled with purpose by another’s intrusive commanding hand either, our destinies somehow preset only by the stars above or some blood within.

Once airborne, WE choose the paths to follow. The currents to chase, elude.

Because WE’RE ALL CAIN.

And we’re all Abel, too.

No, it won’t be from some blood test that I figure out who I really am.

I’ll figure that out by the choices I make. I’ll figure it out later myself.

We all will.

You too.

A
uthor Don DeLillo once described a book in progress as a hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, dragging itself across the floor, noseless and flipper-armed, drooling, etc., wanting love until fully formed by the writer. The writer, however, is not the only one made to endure this insistent child care. And raising two books (
Project Cain
and brother
Cain’s Blood
) at the same time, all those extra hands/eyes/minds/hearts are much appreciated.

Special thanks to: Jason Sizemore and
Apex Magazine
, who first carried my Cain fetus; Foundry Literary & Media’s Peter McGuigan and Stephen Barbara for suggesting twins and becoming steadfast godfathers, and Katie Hamblin and Matt Wise, the lads’ favorite/coolest babysitters; the devoted fostering of Megan Reid and Stacy Creamer, and Kristin Ostby (who discovered this peculiar child in a blanket on her doorstep and still cared for it as her own). To family and friends who’ve supported the process throughout (one son finally asking: “Will you
please
stop talking about Jeffrey Dahmer?”), in particular Mary for encouraging, and accommodating, my own lengthy and selfish parenting of the Cains.