Project Cain (6 page)

Castillo pulled over at a Dunkin’ Donuts, made me sit in the car while he made some phone calls. Guess he wanted to talk in private.

He let me keep hold of his smartphone (he had, like, four of them!) to keep looking at my dad’s moronic notes. To maybe figure something out. But I couldn’t look at them anymore. They were just too crazy. So while Castillo talked a few feet away, I just kept scrolling back.

Back, back.

As fast as my thumb could go. He’d taken hundreds of images.
Not only of the journal entries but also more stuff he’d found in my dad’s special room. Pictures of criminals. Pictures of boys. Charts. Records. That old map of London I’d seen. One of someplace called Whitechapel. Then another map, I think, of somewhere called Shardhara. Ringed with different-colored circles, and with numbers.

Back. Back.

I went too far.

•  •  •

The next images were pictures of the Massey Institute.

Castillo’d been there all day before coming to find me, and he’d seen everything in person. I feel blessed that I only had to look at the pics.

The first was a destroyed office I recognized immediately as my father’s. Everything smashed. Something on the table I couldn’t quite make out. Something wet and dark.

Back. Back.

The game room at Massey. Its Activity Center. I’d been in it a hundred times. It was a pretty cool room, actually. Something for the students there. Pool table and giant TV. A foosball table and a bunch of couches. Shelves filled with board games and graphic novels and books. We had a lot of our meetings there. Like, group talks and stuff.

Except in these pictures the room was different.

There were strange white lumps all over the room now. And as I thumbed through the pics, sometimes there were a couple of lumps in the picture, and sometimes it was just one white lump real close. Lying on the floor or even one on the pool table.

Lumps covered in sheets. Sheets stained red.

And then I finally figured out what I was looking at.

You too, I bet.

W
hen I added up all the different bodies in all the pictures, I counted ten. (The two other people killed that night I did not see pictures of.) Strewn around that room. Each one murdered just the night before. I’d spent that same night afraid and angry in my room. How had they spent
theirs
?

I could make out their shapes perfectly now. These lifeless bodies. Leg here, the shape of a shoulder or head there. A couple of the covered bodies were so small.

The carpet caked with dried blood. The walls streaked with it. Castillo’d taken one picture where someone had written curse words on the wall and drawn a big dick. Even
that
was in blood.

It was like Castillo had a blood app on his smartphone.

I closed the pictures and tossed the phone back onto the empty car seat next to me.

My whole body was shaking.

What happened there?
I kept thinking.
What happened?

And:
How much worse might it have been if summer term hadn’t just started?

And:
How could my father be involved in something so awful?

Castillo eyed me from the distance, looked concerned. Probably thought from my body language I was getting ready to start freaking out or something. I looked away and tried to pull myself together.

Good luck with that. I mean, I still had 0.00 idea what was going on. Or what Castillo was really doing standing over there, who he was
really
talking to. What would
really
happen to me next? I tried listening as hard as I could to what he was saying. Even tried reading his lips. Nothing.

Sure, he’d seemed upset about DSTI jerking him around and holding back info on him. And, well, yeah, sure he
said
he wanted to help and all, but I just kept replaying all my father’s warnings of DSTI, and I easily imagined Castillo was even now talking to them. Deciding what to do with me, and they were probably telling him to bring me in immediately. Or telling him to take me a couple of miles deeper into the Pine Barrens and shoot me in the head with that gun of his. Make me VANISH.

I’d known my dad for sixteen (OK, technically
eight
) years, and I’d known Castillo for about two hours. Let’s just say I now started to look around to, like, escape or something.

There was the doughnut shop’s parking lot. Abandoned video store. Gas station. Street heading deeper into the woods, into nowhere. Carpet store. Closed hair salon. Auto parts place. My eyes ran down the street, and I wondered how far I’d get before he caught me. I’d take my chances with the police. I’d . . .

Any escape fantasies ended without my even putting my hand on the car door handle. Really, what was the point anyway? My father’s last words to me echoed in my brain. Any fear or anger I’d just felt now
gave way to sudden and total despair. Despair to the one essential truth beneath/behind all the others:

The truth of what I really was.

•  •  •

I suppose if I’d found out I was secretly a wizard or the lost son of a Greek god, it might have gone differently. But that’s not what I was. I was something that left bloody lumps in the Activity Center.

•  •  •

We were heading south back toward Philadelphia. I knew DSTI/Massey was in this direction and asked Castillo if he was taking me there. If he’d said YES, at this point I really wouldn’t have cared. I was already tired of worrying about it, and I just wanted to get things over with one way or the other. I was also holding out some with the idea and hope that my father would be there.

But Castillo shook his head and told me he’d just contacted some people to help start getting information. Said it was time to get to work. Help me find “your little friends.” It was a total slam. He knew they weren’t my friends. Not even David, really. I’d never even
met
half of them. It was just his way of letting me know he thought I was just like they were.

A worthless piece-of-shit killer.

•  •  •

The first place we looked was the King of Prussia Mall, the biggest mall in the whole United States and about fifteen minutes away from DSTI and the Massey Institute. Both are just north of Philly, and many of the students lived nearby. Castillo’s plan was to check out a couple of the local shopping areas and schools and convenience stores and paintball fields (because I’d told him Henry liked paintball). Castillo commented
that people, when they’re hiding, usually stick to the places they know best. (Guess he was right. It’s what I’d done. Now, of course, I didn’t even care where I was anymore.)

I didn’t think there was any way my dad was hiding out at some mall or paintball field, but maybe the other guys were. Or some of them. Or
one
of them. And just maybe my dad was with them.

During our drive toward the mall, Castillo got weird. Out of nowhere, really, he started making these threats. Calmly told me that if I ran away, he’d catch me and drive me straight to DSTI; if I called for help, he’d catch me and drive me straight to DSTI; if I went to the cops, made a scene or whatnot, the
cops
would drive me straight to DSTI.

Which was kinda messed up. I’d just told the guy I
wanted
to help, so why’d he now think I was gonna run off on him? Maybe he’d figured out I was thinking about making a run for it at the Dunkin’ Donuts. And then I realized the whole do-you-wanna-help-me stuff had all been just for show. To keep things more pleasant. If I’d told the guy NO, he would have just dragged me to his car anyway. I was a prisoner. The prisoner who’d agreed to my new prison.

Halfway to the mall, he stopped at an Old Navy store in Cherry Hill. Said he was gonna get me some clothes and told me to wait outside in the car.
Or I’ll catch you and drive you straight to DSTI
. I assumed this followed every sentence now. He got out of the car and headed into the store alone.

I snuck a look at his back as he crossed the parking lot. Hadn’t really looked at him all that much since we’d met. Mostly kept my head down, my eyes everywhere but his. He was a pretty big guy. Not really tall (I’m a couple of inches taller at just over 6’), but you could tell he’d worked out quite a lot. Solid. He was about midthirties, I guess. Kinda
moved across the parking lot like he was walking a gladiator pit. Not a single wasted step or movement. He was dark-skinned. His hair was black, messy, medium length.

I, now that I comprehended 100% that I was his prisoner, hated him and his stupid back and looked away.

I tried to sleep. The summer-morning sun was warm and nice on my face through the windshield. I could hear the lives of normal people going on just outside. Car doors shutting, soft morning voices.

With my eyes closed like that, I could almost pretend to be somewhere else entirely.

Anywhere
else. Anywhere NORMAL.

I tried not to think about my dad.

Then I even tried not to think about me.

•  •  •

Castillo came back in, like, ten minutes with two full bags: jeans, a bunch of T-shirts, and a sweatshirt. Everything either blue or dark gray. And the most generic styles they carried too. Even if I were literally holding in my hands right now the clothing he’d bought, I couldn’t describe it. He’d even bought a baseball cap. It was also blue, with an American flag on it. He told me to put it on. I looked like a total moron but did not have the balls to tell him so. If I did, he’d probably just drive me back to DSTI. A stupid Old Navy cap was now apparently life-or-death. And with the way Castillo was looking at me, I kinda got it for the very first time.
Everything
was now life-or-death. Mostly death.

•  •  •

I’d heard of the “Mark of Cain” but did not yet understand what it meant until the King of Prussia Mall. In the Bible story, when Cain
kills his brother Abel, God “marks” Cain for the crime and then exiles him to a faraway land called Nod. Like most people, I always imagined God had, like, tattooed “KILLER” on the guy’s forehead: “BAD NEWS.” “LOSER.” “PARIAH.” “MURDERER.” That kind of thing.

And as we walked through that ridiculous, teeming, terrible mall, I felt that exact same mark blazing hot and bright on my whole face. That stupid Old Navy hat couldn’t change that. Every single person I passed, hundreds and hundreds, was looking right at me. Even without looking at them, I could still feel their disgusted stares. Their horror. They could see the mark on me as clearly as if I were holding up a sign.

KILLER.

At any moment I expected some housewife to start screaming her head off. Maybe a couple of college guys to kick my ass until the cops showed up.

Jeffrey Dahmer is alive and well and wandering the King of Prussia Mall!

Just outside GameStop. Walking by Auntie Anne’s Pretzels.

Looking for someone to kill.

MONSTER.

My new plan, my thought going into the mall, was to call Castillo’s bluff. Find out if he’d really just drag me back to DSTI and maybe find out how much of a captive I really was now. I was gonna jump up on a table in the middle of the food court and rip off my new cap and shout at the top of my lungs:
Help! This guy has kidnapped me and put this stupid hat on me to fool you. My father, a very famous scientist, is missing. I need to find him now. Please help me. Call the cops. Something! Someone . . .

Instead I kept my mouth shut, face down, just staring at the floor.
Moved as quickly as possible and hung close to Castillo’s back as he marched through the whole mall, like, fifteen times. He kept asking me to look around. To see if I recognized any of the three boys I knew.

I hadn’t. But, really, what did he expect?

I’d just managed to pass four thousand people and not look at a single face.

•  •  •

Next stop was a couple of paintball places: Paintball Country and ALLSTAR Paintball. Places Henry had mentioned a couple of times.

Castillo gave me a fifty at each and told me to rent equipment. He’d tossed the Old Navy cap and picked me up a Flyers one at the mall. This was not done because I thought the Old Navy cap was lame. No, it was only done to change my look. Make it harder for someone (DSTI? The government?) to track my day.

My hands were shaking like crazy when I handed the money over.

Castillo set us up at one of the picnic tables in the waiting area and told me to just keep reloading my rented paintball gun with pellets while he looked around for Henry. Must have seen a hundred people in five minutes. It was the summer and pretty crowded with kids and families and stuff.

Again, I felt like everyone was staring at me. Staring at my mark of Cain.

Mark of Cain XP11. The clone FREAK.

But they weren’t. They had their own friends and families and discussions and things to worry about. They didn’t pay any attention to me at all.

If anything, it seemed like people were actually staring at
Castillo
.

First, he’s a couple of years too young to look like my dad. I guess
that’s what we were trying to pretend to be or something. But it wasn’t that. It was just that he didn’t fit somehow. He looked too, well,
mean
. Even though he was trying hard to act all casual and stuff. Hiding behind his shades, trying to not look interested. He still looked like he could F you up in a hurry and in a dozen different ways.