Liquid Fear (23 page)

Alexis frantically gathered the pills as they rolled across the floor.

She couldn’t believe this was all the Halcyon Briggs had manufactured. She fought an urge to kick his sorry corpse.

“My head’s clearing a little,” Mark said. “But my tooth is killing me.”

“The gas has lower efficacy than the other forms. You’ll make it.”

“Yes, Dr. Morgan.”

“Help me pick up these pills.”

“I have to let the others out first. If they haven’t eaten each other’s livers, that is.”

“That’s not funny.” She glanced at the bloody plow blade.

“How are you doing? Is the Halcyon working?”

“Barely enough.”
You fucker. You’ll probably tell CRO everything. And all this could be mine.

“You look okay. I can leave you alone for a minute, huh?”

“Sure.”

As Mark jogged off, she retrieved the plastic bottle and began dropping pills in it—
tick tick tick
.

She wondered how long the Seethe would run through her system without the Halcyon suppressing it. It could be hours, or it could be days—or maybe the rest of her life. As far as she could tell, she was the only one who’d been injected with the serum form, though God only knew what David Underwood had gone through or how long he’d been imprisoned in the Monkey House.

Briggs probably had a backup hard drive somewhere. And he’d probably been too paranoid to move data off-site, so it would be here somewhere.

She glanced at his face and the blank eyes staring past the world. Then again, secrets to Seethe and Halcyon might be locked in the dead vault of his brain.

Her eyes kept going to the plow blade and she recalled how it had felt driving the tip through Kleingarten’s skull. She’d never felt so alive and powerful. And she could have that feeling a long time, if she cracked the formula.

Fear is its own kind of pleasure. Up there, it all gets cross-wired.

A few of the pills had rolled into the pool of Sebastian Briggs’s blood. She fished them out, wiping them one by one, and slipped them into her pocket. She’d retrieved most of the pills by the time the others returned.

Anita stood between Burchfield and an unsettled Wallace Forsyth. Mark was supporting a pale skeleton she recognized as David.

“You killed Susan,” David said, upon recognizing her.

Alexis glanced at the blade. As the Halcyon eased, she didn’t want this transitional feeling to end—that cliff edge of awareness, the black abyss on one side and the peaceful plateau of forgetfulness on the other.

Two kinds of oblivion.

No choice, really.

“No,” she said. “She died of fright.”

Anita nodded, closing a couple of buttons on her blouse with shaking fingers. “Yuh…yeah. It was a fake experiment, David. It was make-believe.”

Burchfield looked subdued and embarrassed. He cleared his throat and attempted to sound authoritative, but he failed. “This is official property of the U.S. government, Dr. Morgan.”

“Shut up, Senator,” Mark said, pointing to the monitor bank. “The cameras recorded your behavior. Fox News will love it.”

“Are you threatening me, Morgan?”

“Just playing by your rules.”

“Where is it?” Wallace Forsyth said in his tremulous, hoarse voice. He sounded a century old. “Where’s the Seethe?”

It’s mine, you bastard, and you better put the fear of God in you, or I’ll get there first.

She reached for the plow, but there was a green pill beside it. She pinched it and slipped it into her mouth as Mark moved toward her.

“Don’t!” he yelled. “You don’t know if it’s Seethe or Halcyon!”

She swallowed as he jammed his fingers between her lips. She wanted to bite him, but she decided she’d hurt him enough.

Restraint. Must be coming down.

Mark yanked the bottle of pills from her.

She glanced at the blade again.

Ah, shit. I love this man.

They’d dressed their wounds as best they could, using Briggs’s emergency first-aid kit. Alexis’s arm was the worst, and as Mark cleaned it with water and a gauze pad, she made little growling noises that scared him. He only hoped the pain was enough to keep her tamed.

His tooth was still throbbing, sending colossal waves of pain through his jaw, but he clung to its rhythm like a boat riding out swells.

“This has to be worked out between CRO and the government,” Burchfield was saying, although no one was listening to him. Anita was tending to David, who was slumped in the leather chair.

“Alexis,” Forsyth said. “The Lord spoke to me back there in the dark. The devil is in them pills. And I don’t think they can be trusted with either corporations or governments.”

“That’s why we’re keeping them,” Mark said.

“We’re all on the same team,” Burchfield said. “And if what I experienced is any indication, Briggs was onto a winner.”

“No,” Mark said. “The Seethe is gone. I looked around, and unless he had off-site storage, that jar was all he was able to synthesize.”

“Briggs didn’t go anywhere without our knowledge,” Burchfield said. “We’ve tracked him with GPS since the beginning. Picking you up at the airport was the only time he’s been out in three weeks.”

Mark pointed to the wet blotch in the concrete, where the liquid fear had mingled with old oil stains and Kleingarten’s blood. “Good luck cutting that up and isolating it, because that’s all we have left.”

“I’m back, honey,” Alexis said. “But you’ll have to tell me what happened.”

Her eyes almost looked normal. Still, there was something in them that inspired him to nudge the bloody plow blade away with his foot.

“Give us the Halcyon, then,” Burchfield said. “That’s an order, in the name o f national security.”

“These people need it,” Mark said, waving at Alexis, David, and Anita. “We don’t know how long the Seethe will last.”

“Just one pill,” Burchfield said, glancing around the floor to see if Alexis had missed any. “We can analyze it.”

“A drop of the devil’s blood is enough to pollute the whole ocean, Daniel,” Forsyth said. “Nobody should have to see what I saw in my head.”

“If there’s a hell, that’s the only place it could exist,” Alexis said.

Mark was relieved to hear her sounding like her old self. Hopefully, there would be no permanent damage.

Still, she was capable of murder. Whether that was an instinct, or a deep, essential part of her personality, was for the shrinks to decide. Or maybe God.

“Here’s the deal, Senator. You pull strings and get all this covered up.” Mark nodded at Anita and David. “They take the Halcyon as long as they need it. And when my wife is confident they’re all normal again, you get what’s left.”

Mark had no intention of letting anyone have those pills. Not the government, not CRO, not Forsyth, not even his wife. No one could be trusted with the power to change people’s minds. There was no “better living with chemistry,” only the lying and the dying.

“All right,” Burchfield said, somewhat wary but probably recognizing he had little bargaining power besides brute force, and his hired muscle was currently a cold, stiffening corpse. “We’ve got four dead. An industrial accident with limited exposure should work. CRO will have to sacrifice the property, though, because we’ll have to turn it into an EPA brownfield site.”

“Why should we believe you?” Alexis said. “What if you called in the CIA and had then search for the formulas? What if this stuff is too addictive and you find you can’t resist?”

Burchfield glanced over the damaged monitors and equipment as if measuring the evidence that might implicate him in the conspiracy. “Things happened here that are best forgotten. I have my enemies, too. We’re all in the same lifeboat on this.”

“Fine,” Mark said. CRO’s board of directors would squeal, but given the possible collateral damage, they would hold their tongues and take it. Not that Mark gave a damn. He was finished with CRO, one way or another.

“She killed Susan,” David said, his mind apparently stuck on one track.

Anita stroked his hair and began singing in a soft, angelic voice. “Home…home on the range…where the deer and the antelope play…”

David joined in, wailing in his atonal style, but he was smiling.

Fuck
, Mark thought.
So that’s the bottom on Seethe and Halcyon.

An elevator that goes up and down until the cables snap.

I hope you don’t get there, Lex.

He kissed her. “Better get you to a doctor.”

“Your face is a mess,” she said. “That tooth looks like it hurts.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The things you do for love.”

She touched his face, and she was placid, gorgeous, determined, the same woman he’d married. She must have already forgotten the worst. “And I’d do anything for you.”

“I believe it.”

She nodded. “I wonder how Roland’s doing.”

“He seems like he can take of himself.”

“He’s Seething, honey. All bets are off.”

“Yeah.” He himself was married to a lunatic serial killer. The odds were lousy, but he was all in.

“Where are we going?” Wendy asked.

Her head was resting on his shoulder, and despite the chemical stink and the lingering factory smell, Roland liked it. She belonged there.

“Anywhere away from hell counts as heaven,” he said. He had to use little tricks to keep himself focused, jabbing at his wounds or biting his lip until it bled. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other curled in a fist.

Once, when the image of Briggs slobbering on Wendy’s naked thighs flashed, he’d wanted to pull over, drag her by her hair, and beat her brains out.

But he got over it.

That’s what you do when you love somebody. You get over it.

“You feeling okay, babe?” he said, kissing the top of her head.

“Better. But it all seems like a dream.”

“We’ve got a different dream now.”

“There at the last…in the cage…”

“Forget it.”

“Briggs wanted me to remember something—”

“Forget it.”

She snuggled closer, and she was warm. He was on I-40 and the midnight traffic was sparse, mostly truckers. He couldn’t help but wonder what might be stored away in the long trailers, hidden from view, and how many other potions might be getting shipped around the world.

“I’m glad you came back,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t have much choice.”

The gun was jammed in his waistband, and he liked the feeling of power there. It was new and strange, something like control. But he knew control was an illusion.

A memory flashed of digging through the wallet in Cincinnati and looking for photos of David’s family. He wasn’t sure if the memory was real or imagined, but it had been driven by some deeper impulse. Or maybe something beyond him, a god that might have knitted itself back into existence from the lost, gray vapor.

He remembered. That was good. He had a chance.

“We never really talked about having kids,” Roland said.

“We haven’t talked about a lot of things,” Wendy said.

“Maybe we ought to change that. The talking, I mean.”

She turned to him and her lips were close. “Remember that time in the park, when you picked those roses for me, and that park attendant came running over and yelling?”

He didn’t remember, but he laughed a little and said, “Yeah. That was something.”

“I still have those roses, pressed between the pages of the Manet book you gave me. You know I love my Manet.”

That was funny, because he’d bought her a book of Gaugin, but maybe one weird French painter was as good as another when it came to storing keepsakes.

He smiled. If he could remember a name like “Gaugin,” then maybe his brain wasn’t too full of holes. He’d piece it together eventually.

He turned his face to kiss her.

“You love Manet, and I love you,” he said. “Looks like we’re in for a hell of a ride.”

One day at a time,
they said in his recovery program. But sometimes it was a second at a time, because fear only needed the blink of an eye. Everything else took longer.

He headed west, away from the sunrise and false hopes and bottled nightmares, and toward the endless road of memories that awaited them.

THE END