Chronic Fear (17 page)

But at least you still own what happens in your head, right?

He walked faster.

At least for now.

Alexis had only been to Darrell Silver’s lab once, when the hedonistic young chemist showed her his plan for refining Halcyon. He’d offered her a beer, which she declined, and he proceeded to pop one himself as he escorted her into the hidden recess where he’d installed his state-of-the-art equipment. Now, as she entered the former gas station, the greasy and musty aroma evoked memories of Sebastian Briggs’s Monkey House.

“Darrell?” she called as she entered. The front door had been unlocked and she figured he would be waiting in the residential portion of the structure. She tried the light switch and the room stayed as dark as the falling dusk beyond it.

Alexis fished her keychain from her pocket and flicked on the attached penlight. She navigated the leather couch, the bowed shelves that were packed with vinyl records, and the strange alabaster sculpture that suggested a marine mammal. A gaping rectangle of darkness, oozing cool, metallic air, heralded the garage she remembered from her long-ago visit.

“Darrell?” she called again.

“Down here,” he called from somewhere below.

A dim wedge of reddish light beckoned her. She knelt to see the narrow metal ladder that led down to Silver’s workspace. The equipment was gone, but the stainless-steel fixtures remained, a few lighted candles on top of them. Silver sat in a swivel chair, holding a cigarette and smiling up at her. The candle flames bobbed as he waved.

“Been a while, huh?” he said.

“You’re out of prison.”

“I had a good lawyer.”

“I shouldn’t be here. If they see us together…”

Silver shrugged. He was wearing a button-up white shirt, a change from the rock band T-shirts he always wore. “You can leave any time. No biggie.”

“You said you had something for me.”

He snorted. “Yeah, some ‘groceries.’ Don’t be so uptight. Come on down.”

Alexis squinted into the darkness around her, wondering if anyone was hiding in it. She resisted the urge to flick the penlight around the garage. She’d have to trust Mark to watch her back, just like always.

Alexis went backward down the ladder, wondering if Silver was looking up her skirt. She turned off the penlight when she reached the concrete floor of the small chamber. The candles cast mesmerizing chimeras of yellow and black along the concrete walls.

“The place has changed,” she said.

“The feds seized everything, Doc,” he said. “You know how those fuckers are.”

She rubbed her arms, feeling a little claustrophobic in the cramped lab. Despite a thorough cleaning and a paint job, the maintenance well still held the ghosts of all the vehicles that had been serviced from its depths. “So you finished the second batch?”

“No need to talk in code,” he said. “We’re among friends.”

“Where’s the Halcyon? I need it.”

“Ah.” Silver gave his goofy grin. “I didn’t figure that stuff could be addictive. That puts a whole different spin on things. But I didn’t tell you about the offshoot. You’ll love this: tenocyclidine with extra fluorides.”

“Fluorides.”

“You know. Every chemical compound has a flip side, scramble the molecular structure, kinda like an echo. I played around with it and came up with a shit-kicking version.”

“You extrapolated it?”

“Like a superduperfied version of angel dust.” Silver spoke rapidly, excited about sharing his subject with someone who spoke the same language. “An analogue of PCP that blocks your glutamate receptors. PCP was a bitching pain blocker back in the good old days, but the side effects…whoa.”

“Hallucinations, paranoia, schizophrenic delusions, rage. I know all about it.”

“Heh. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve been getting wet yourself.”

“Getting wet?”

“Yeah. They used to dribble the liquid on a cigarette. But you can snort it or carry it like a rock crystal. Versatile.”

Alexis was uneasy, trying to comprehend what he was saying. “It’s a dangerous dissociative drug.”

He gave a casual wave of dismissal. “This new version would blow that shit out of the water. You’re noodling around with neurotransmitters and they all run through the amygdala, right? I’m surprised you didn’t see it yourself.”

Alexis was, too. Briggs must have made the same extrapolation, linking the glutamate inhibitors with the role of serotonin and dopamine. She’d been so fixated on existing compounds that she hadn’t made the leap into drugs that couldn’t exist.

Darrell Silver, the scruffy, boyish savant who didn’t even know the rules, much less play by them, was able to see without his vision being clouded by knowledge. That was a particular kind of genius Alexis would never possess.

But she sure as hell was going to possess Seethe.

“Did you produce any of it?” she asked, disguising her envy.

“I had some precursors lying around but they got seized. Give me a little time and I don’t see any problem. Spinning off the fluorides might be a little tricky, though.”

“We can go over the chemistry later,” she said. “You’ve made a very valuable discovery.”

Silver ignored her obvious impatience. “So I hear. No need to go baking up sheets of acid at two bucks a hit wholesale when I can auction Seethe to the highest bidder.”

Goddamn. Somebody got to him. He knows what he has.

There wasn’t time for negotiation. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Darrell. These guys are willing to kill.”

Darrell gave a stoner laugh. “I used to hustle nickel bags in Needle Park. I know all about killing for a fix.”

“I’ll pay you double. But I need the Halcyon.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Silver fished around in his pants pocket as if looking for change. He came out with a tiny slip of rolled-up paper.

Alexis thought for a moment it might contain the revised chemical formula, but Silver jammed the paper into his mouth and leaned the tip toward a candle. He inhaled as the sweet, cloying odor of marijuana filled the maintenance well.

“I know you’re in with them,” Alexis told him. She didn’t want to tip her hand, but she also didn’t want to waste more time. Mark was running on fumes, and if she didn’t get him some Halcyon soon, he might drift into a rage and kill them all.

“There are a lot of ‘thems’ running around, man,” Silver said, taking another hit and holding it in his lungs a moment before blowing it toward Alexis with a flourish. She waved the smoke away, her eyes stinging.

“Well, you know you can’t trust them, and you know I need you,” she said. “I wasn’t the one who turned you in.”

“Here’s the deal,” he said. The marijuana must have been “superduperfied,” too, because it had already relaxed him and he talked more languidly. “I got to have some cash. Lots of it. I’m heading for Canada. My lawyer thinks I can beat this rap, but I don’t want to be locked in the loony bin for years while the wheels of justice are grinding.”

“They didn’t bust you for the drugs,” Alexis said. “They busted you for Halcyon.”

“That shit’s not even on the books. I could patent it and sell it legit, but I don’t want to hang around, if you know what I mean.”

“This is bigger than you know.”

“Tell me about it, Dr. Morgan. I’ve met some very interesting people lately. And I’m not talking about the nuts in the psycho ward. I’m talking about the nuts at the top of the tree.”

Alexis wondered if Mark had entered the building and was listening from above. He’d dropped her off a block from the lab and promised he’d be watching. Of course, he was watching because he didn’t trust her, not because he wanted to protect her.

She lowered her voice. “I can get you twenty thousand.”

Silver giggled and took another hit of weed. “Doc, if I am going to be in exile, I want to live like one of these deposed dictators. I’m not going north to hunt caribou and sleep in an igloo.”

She jangled her car keys. “My car, too.”

“That’s better. But somebody else made me an offer today. Six figures.”

“CRO,” she blurted out.

“Hey, I’m a dealer,” he said, crushing out the joint on the tabletop. “No names. Sudden amnesia. I deliver and forget it.”

“Do you have the new Halcyon here?”

He lifted his palms in supplication. “They picked the place clean. They didn’t even leave a crumb for the mice. Not to mention the roaches.”

“I can meet you here in an hour with the money.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dr. Morgan. I know you gave me an A in neurochemistry, but I don’t owe you any favors. I need to go with the high bidder here.”

Alexis felt her own surge of anger and wondered if it was anything like what her husband experienced when the Seethe took control.

No. I’m in charge of my emotions. If the Monkey House trials proved anything, it’s that I can survive.

Even if no one else does.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll have to do this the hard way.” She raised her voice. “Mark!”

Silver let his eyelids droop and shook his head sadly. “Man, everybody’s watched too many Coen Brothers movies.”

“Mark!” Alexis shouted again, the name slapping off the concrete walls.

Mark’s face appeared in the opening above the ladder. “Found a friend,” he said.

He gave a grunt of effort and then Wallace Forsyth’s wizened face emerged from the gloom.

“Hello, Alexis,” Forsyth said. “I see we’re both still engaged in the pursuit of happiness. But I think Mr. Silver there is happier than any of us.”

“Dude, did you get busted?” Silver said to the older man.

Forsyth tried to smile but his face curdled as if he’d smelled something unpleasant. “I’m too old to play hide-and-seek.”

Mark stuck his hand into the lighted space so that Silver could see the gun pointed at him. “Give Alexis what she wants.”

Silver giggled. “Hey, Dr. Morgan, you have a well-trained husband there. A regular monkey on a leash.”

“He’s quite capable of murder,” she said. Her coldness must have made an impression on the stoner, because his mouth fell open and he blinked rapidly.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “That’s the real bitch of the drug business these days. Used to be just people helping each other feel good, with a little spending money swapping hands. Now it’s all guns and gangs and fucking conspiracy theories.”

“Great,” Mark said. “A hippie with a conscience. I thought you said this guy had a brilliant scientific mind. I think he’s sampled a little too much of his product.”

“Please, Darrell,” Alexis said. “Your life is in danger.”

Silver glanced at Mark’s gun.

“Not just from him,” Alexis added. “But from the people who put you in the hospital, the people who got you out of the hospital, and the people who don’t trust either of those people. None of us are safe.”

“Shit, Doc, you’re higher than I am.”

“Give me the Halcyon.”

Silver looked up at the two men crouched on the garage floor above. Forsyth nodded at him and said, “Give them what they want.”

Silver slid off the table and knelt over a tiny steel drain in the center of the maintenance well. The concrete was sloped so that liquids would flow to the lowest point and presumably be carried to the building’s sewer pipes. Gallons of burnt motor oil, radiator fluid, and dirty water had probably swirled down the drain over the years.

Silver ran his fingers into the metal grid and twisted it. The drain fell open with a clunk. “Drug dogs couldn’t smell it down here,” Silver said. “Plus, they’re not trained for this shit, whatever it is. They only do illegal drugs.”

Silver ran his hand into the drain, digging and pushing until he was elbow-deep in the opening. After a moment, he pulled his arm back and held up an orange plastic vial.

“Every four hours or else,” Alexis said.

“What’s that?” Silver said, still kneeling on the floor.

Alexis took the vial and climbed the ladder. Mark moved Forsyth aside so she could join them on the garage floor.

“Hey, what about my money?” Silver shouted, his voice echoing up from the well.

“We’ll mail you a check,” Mark said.

“Seriously, what am I supposed to do?”

“I’d stick with Plan A and ride the Caribou Express,” Alexis said. “After the heat dies down, I’ll be in touch.”

She left him as he fired up another joint, muttering to himself that nobody knew how to mellow out anymore. “Go easy on that Halcyon,” he said. “It’s my best work.”

Outside, Mark said to Forsyth, “We’ve got a road trip planned, and since we can’t leave you here, and I’m not ready to kill you yet, I suppose you’ll have to come along.”

“I understand,” Forsyth said. “It’s not like I had plans. Besides being vice president of the United States, that is.”

“Give me your cell phone.”

Forsyth fished inside his jacket and gave his BlackBerry to Mark. They walked up the street, keeping well off the pavement to avoid the passing headlights. Alexis hurried after them, wondering how she’d convince Mark to take one of the tablets.

The car was parked on a gravel service road outside an electrical substation. When they reached it, Mark waved Forsyth into the backseat. Then he flung the BlackBerry into the briars surrounding the substation fence.

“We can’t have your pizza delivery boy using GPS to track us,” Mark said as he slid into the seat beside Forsyth.

Alexis started the engine, turned on the headlights, and pulled onto the highway, heading west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Roland had the dream again, the one in which he was running through a maze and the jagged metal sides of it were closing in. Something terrible was chasing him, and it wasn’t a creature of bone and blood that might be fought and defeated.

No, this was a texture, a spongy, nameless dread, something that would overwhelm him and consume him in its gray depths.

Even as he fled, he suspected that whatever waited ahead wasn’t so welcoming, either. But he could only flee in one direction, and he was about to turn that last terrible corner—

Roland awoke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding.

He stared up into the darkness for a moment, acclimating to the physical world and the cool spring night. Gradually, his senses settled and he was aware of the curtains shifting softly by the open window, the dim red glow of the alarm clock, the faint smell of mildew caused by the mountain humidity.

He listened for Wendy’s breathing, still nearly paralyzed from the nightmare, his muscles quivering. The unease had accompanied him on his escape from his sleeping mind, and he half expected that odd spongy texture to drop from the cloaked ceiling and cover his face.

Roland reached out in the darkness to touch Wendy, but her side of the bed was empty. He rolled toward her until he came to the edge of the mattress. “Wendy?” he whispered.

He sat up, feeling for the night table. After retrieving the revolver, he stood with the sheet wrapped around him. They hadn’t made love, so the sheet was dry and cool. But lately love had become something that wasn’t just made, it was jammed together with a frenzied desperation.

“Wendy,” he whispered again.

His mind raced down several avenues, all of them dead ends. She might have gone for a glass of water, but the bathroom was dark, no light showing in the crack beneath the door. No lights were on downstairs, either. If she were in the cabin, he’d easily be able to hear her.

That fucking liar.

He wasn’t sure which liar he meant, Wendy or the agent who called himself “Gundersson.” Roland hadn’t completely bought the agent’s story, but he figured the best approach was to play along while the truth revealed itself.

But the truth was a moving target.

And people could lie to themselves better than they could lie to others. Especially drunks like Roland.

There was another possibility, the one Gundersson had hinted at, of those “powerful elements” who might also be keeping an eye on them. Who might even abduct or kill them.

Unless Wendy is already on their side
.

He crept down the dark stairs, the sheet trailing behind him. From below, he probably looked like a mad ghost, Hamlet’s father made restless with betrayal.

The moon was high enough that it cast a blue glow over the couch, table, and refrigerator. Roland tiptoed to the door, ears straining for any sound. A porch board creaked outside.

He pointed the gun to the ceiling in a “ready” position and quietly opened the door. Easing it ajar, he put his face against the jamb to survey the porch.

Wendy stood in her bathrobe, painting by the light of the moon. The canvas he’d damaged earlier was now clotted with dark pocks of acrylic. She stabbed the brush against the canvas, dug the tip into the paint on her palette, and drove more color on with a wet slap.

Roland checked the perimeter of the yard. Moonlight illuminated skeins of silver mist that clung to the mountains. The world looked ancient, a faraway fantasy land where monstrous beasts might roll out of the fog and magic ruled the moment.

“Wendy?” he whispered.

“Shh,” she said. “I almost remember the secret message.”

“What secret message?”

“If I keep painting, I might uncover it.”

Roland stepped onto the porch, wondering if Gundersson was watching from the concealment of the forest. The “powerful elements” might be watching as well. If he turned on the porch light, they would be exposed.

Wendy painted in a trance, dipping and jabbing, dipping and jabbing, a change from her usual broad, measured stroke. It almost looked like calligraphy, the small splashes arranging themselves around the perimeter of the canvas.

“That’s not the monkey,” Roland said, coming up behind her, attracted by her body heat. He hugged his sheet more tightly around his shoulders, keeping the gun concealed beneath his opposite armpit.

“It’s the key to the Monkey House,” she said, voice vacant.

“I thought you didn’t remember the Monkey House.” He checked the woods again for movement. If not for the strong scent of the acrylic paint and Wendy’s body, he might have still been dreaming. Her flesh smelled raw and pungent, like a wild animal’s. She hadn’t smelled like that since…

Since the last time we made love.

“How long have you been out here?” he asked.

“How much of what you told Gundersson was true?” For the first time, she spoke with distinct clarity, as if finally aware of his presence.

“Most of it,” he said.

“And about me and Sebastian Briggs?”

“Who the hell knows? Briggs scrambled our memories. But I’ve been piecing it back together as best I can.”

She turned, her robe falling open. She was moist from more than the mist. Wendy occasionally painted in the nude, claiming that if models could strip for class, so could she. She swayed as if slow-dancing with her palette and brush.

“Briggs told me something,” she said. “It’s all I can remember from that night.”

She hadn’t been with Briggs long in the Monkey House, maybe fifteen minutes in the dark. He might have seduced her—
no
, Roland thought,
assaulted her, not seduced her
—in such a short time, but it’s possible their relationship had been deeper eleven years ago, during the first Halcyon trials. She hadn’t talked about it back then, and he was foolish enough and deeply enough in love not to press her on it.

“Briggs was going to kill us,” Roland said. “We did what we had to in order to survive.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were onyx, her pupils glinting amid her oval Asian face. “No, it was something to do with Seethe. He showed me.”

“Showed you?” Roland found himself staring at the inner curves of her exposed breasts, where a discolored spot suggested a bruise. Someone had been playing rough.

Wendy pointed to the canvas. “Letters. Shapes. He arranged them in a diagram.”

Roland strained against the dimness and now saw more of a pattern to her markings. A series of curls and short slashes were clotted against the canvas, covering the original form of the huddled figure, as if she were belatedly tattooing it.

It was difficult to discern the new markings, aside from their damp thickness, because the weak light blended the colors into browns and tans. But he made out what looked like a C and several crooked H marks.

“You’re trying to spell something?” he said, recalling the “CRO” initials of the drug conglomerate that had been Briggs’s financial backer. Those initials had been in the motel room where he’d awoken to find a corpse in the bathroom. He still didn’t know who she was or who had really killed her. And he still wasn’t fully convinced of his innocence.

“No.” Again she shook her head, and the dangling cotton belt of her robe brushed gently against the porch. Besides the insects and the distant tinkle of the creek, the night was still. The mist around them seemed to thicken.

“You suddenly remember something from a year ago, but you don’t remember what it is,” he said, feeling his anger and mistrust rising.

“Something you told Gundersson jarred my memory,” she said. “When you said Sebastian took me to his office.”

He lowered his voice, unconsciously squeezing the barrel of the pistol. “Nothing happened in the office.”

“Sebastian showed me a piece of paper. It had markings on it, letters. He took my hand and guided my fingers over them, again and again.”

Roland didn’t know what angered him more, her referring to him as “Sebastian” as if he were an old friend, or the image of the scientist’s filthy hands on her flesh as he leaned over her. He took a couple of steps closer to the canvas. Now he could see another set of symbols.

“I thought he was…playing nasty…but he was teaching me,” she said.

They were skewed and uneven, but the patterns appeared to be a set of linked hexagons. An F tilted to one side, and an S wound like a sick snake across the center of the painting.

“Did Briggs tell you what these were?” Roland asked.

Wendy stood back and studied the marks as if she had just painted over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “It looks like graffiti,” she said.

“But you were painting from memory.” Roland understood how absurd that statement was. “Memory” no longer had any reliable meaning for the Monkey House survivors.

“The key,” Wendy said. “That’s what he kept saying.”

The key
.

A fine steam rose from her flesh, heat leaving her body and rising to merge with the mist. He went to her and closed her robe. The gun bumped against her hip.

“Maybe it’s a code of some kind,” Roland said. “All this secret-agent shit, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But why would he tell me?”

Because you were his little pet, his plaything, his lover.

But he couldn’t think that way, because then he’d start raging, and the Seethe would rise from its slumber and own him. “He couldn’t trust Alexis or Mark. David and Anita were already head cases. And he knew I hated his guts.”

She turned her back to him and studied the painting. He pressed himself behind her, one arm wrapped around her stomach. The back of her neck smelled like the forest, wild and green and filthy with rot.

“The key,” Roland said. “Whatever it is, we can’t let Gundersson find out.”

“I still don’t know what it means.”

That’s when the pattern coalesced into something both familiar and frightening, as Roland recalled his rudimentary high school chemistry. The markings represented a diagram of a molecular structure, and the letters were the elements from the periodic chart.

Briggs had wanted to store the diagram in a safe place, in case he needed to recall it later. Maybe Wendy wasn’t exactly safe, but she was a data storage unit that no one would suspect. Because she was the artist of the bunch, the least interested in nuts and bolts and how things fit together but the one most visually adept. And the only one Briggs could trust.

And now Wendy had unearthed a compound that half a dozen people had died to control. Wendy had drawn a secret chemical formula.

Wendy had drawn Seethe.