Project Cain (2 page)

So I guess he got exactly what he wanted.

Because when I opened the door, the very first thing I saw was the dead guy.

B
efore I get to the dead guy, I should maybe first cover who my father is. What he
does
. The special things he knows how to do. It won’t completely explain the rotted corpse hidden in our house, but it will, I hope, maybe explain it
some
.

•  •  •

I always took comfort in knowing what my father did for a living. You’d be amazed how many kids don’t. I’ve met them on soccer teams and at summer camp and stuff. These guys who have NO CLUE what their parent’s profession is. They maybe know it’s just a generic office job. Something to do with, like, some stupid phone or insurance company.

But me, I could just say “He’s a scientist,” and everyone understood
exactly
what I meant.

I’d leave out words like “important” or “famous,” but I always knew they were there too. I knew he’d given lectures at places like Harvard and Stanford and that he routinely met with big people in politics and stuff. And that he was a big boss at work and all. I’d grown up with the sense that he was SMART and IMPORTANT and POWERFUL. Even without these adjectives, I always said it with great pride: HE’S A SCIENTIST.

Funny, in the end, that it was actually me who had no idea what my father was really up to.

WHAT I
DID
KNOW

For more than twenty years my dad worked for a company called Dynamic Solutions Technology Institute. DSTI. They are (
or were
) a private biotechnology company that specializes in the “development of therapeutic, pharmaceutical, and cell-based solutions.” (That’s from their website.) In short: They messed around with genetics/DNA. Fifty years ago, men like my father figured out how to modify DNA using a complicated process called
genetic engineering
to cut specific genes out of one place and stick them into another. Maybe to make cows bigger or corn more yellow or even to turn germs into cures. That kind of thing.

WHAT I
DIDN’T
KNOW

DSTI got most of its research money from the US military. And the US military doesn’t need or want yellower corn or bigger cows. Doesn’t even need or want clones of Albert Einstein or Kobe Bryant or John Lennon. The US military wants WEAPONS. It wants KILLERS. And so, thanks to my dad, that’s exactly what it got.

•  •  •

The United States has been at war since December 7, 1941.

Every single day for more than eighty years, we’ve needed our military to kill.

Not one other nation on Earth can claim that distinction.

During this time, America has fought in more than twenty-five different countries and has directly killed more than fifteen million people. Five million more than the Nazis.

During this time, America spent more money on weapons than the rest of the world combined.

You’d think most of that money would be spent on jets and soldiers and bullets, etc., but it’s not. Most is spent on RESEARCH.

It’s spent inventing and testing new ways to kill people.

•  •  •

Half of all federal research dollars goes to the US military.

Fifty billion dollars a year. The same amount Washington sets aside for the research of medicine, energy, the environment, transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture
combined
.

And, believe it or not, that’s nothing. Nickels and pennies.

An additional five
HUNDRED
billion—money outside this general military-research fund—is spent on weapons research
directly
by the four military branches.

Five hundred billion dollars a year! EVERY year.

The military gets most of this money from their special “BLACK BUDGETS.” These are funds set aside for projects so highly classified that regular people don’t get to know what they’re working on. So highly classified that journalists aren’t allowed to find out. Congressmen and senators don’t know either. The president, too. Seriously. In the name of “national security,” even the president of the United States doesn’t know what these military scientists are working on.

That’s why they’re called “Black Budget” projects.

Because they happen “in the dark,” where no one can really see what’s going on.

And that’s where they made us.

•  •  •

Have you ever thought of killing someone?

Have you ever thought of murder? Rape?

Tell the truth.

Now just imagine if that thought never ever went away.

That’s exactly the kind of person DSTI was looking for.

•  •  •

A pitch-perfect ear, speed, math skills, a good jump shot, IQ, daily emotions, suicide potential, language skills, strength, spatial perception, etc. Each chromosome of human DNA carries a million different strands with specific instructions on what that person’s genetic makeup will be. You’re BORN with the ability to learn a song by ear on the first try. You’re BORN with a mind that can comprehend general relativity and quantum mechanics. You’re BORN with the ability to throw a football better or worse than those other guys. Sure, you can take music lessons or maybe get counseling or attend summer football camps and get a little better in any of these things. But at the end of the day, the foundation of what you are is already locked into your body’s genetics. If the ability is not already in your genes, you will NEVER write songs like Mozart or Paul McCartney. You will NEVER understand the universe the way Stephen Hawking can. And you will NEVER throw a football like an NFL quarterback.

Nature outplays Nurture almost every time. Like Paper overwhelms Rock.

And geneticists, men like my father, have mapped most of this nature out.

One particular location, a single gene strand labeled XP11, is where they now look for the killers. If you’re looking for the future superstars
of murder, an aberration in XP11, apparently, is the nature you need. Basically, when there’s a glitch, a very rare glitch, on this one specific gene, it indicates and influences a chromosomal itch for various degrees of aggression and violence. Scientists and psychologists sometimes even call it the “Anger Gene.”

The GOOD NEWS is that the body knows the “Anger Gene” is a negative trait and provides its own antidote; actually counteracts the mutation naturally during pregnancy, providing code in the DNA that can fix this violent abnormality so the person grows up NORMAL and the Anger Gene is healed.

The BAD NEWS is that the genetic antidote (aka a chromosomal allele) for this dangerous mutation travels only on the X chromosome. Remember much from biology class? Females are born from XX chromosomes. So, they’ve got a 100% chance of having a cure for any aggressive mutation. Men, however, are XY. So we’ve got only a fifty-fifty shot of having the natural cure for an overly aggressive XP11 strand. And the other 50% are shit out of luck.

That’s NOT to say boys have a fifty-fifty shot of having this Anger Gene, but, rather, that in the rare instance (2%) that we DO, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance of overcoming it.

Still meaning that half the world—the male half—is hereditarily predisposed to violence.

Guess you can say it’s in our blood.

•  •  •

80% of all suicides.

95% of all the people in prison.

95% of those who commit domestic violence. 95% of those who sexually abuse children.

99% of rapists. 99% of spree killers. 99% of family annihilators.

99% of Death Row inmates.

Males.

Sorry.

•  •  •

To study this XP11 gene, my father and his colleagues went straight to the top.

They got their DNA samples off well-known killers. The most violent ones they could find.

SERIAL KILLERS.

Those who kill and kill again. Not for money or power or revenge. But because they
enjoy
killing. Maybe the killer starts with someone they know but very quickly moves on to strangers. Safest that way. Some woman who catches their eye at the supermarket one evening or some kid they notice while driving around the neighborhood. They do this over the course of months or even decades sometimes. Five victims, a dozen, fifty. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the rush that comes when they feel the ultimate power over their helpless victims. That feeling of playing God.

DSTI mostly got this DNA from those killers who were still alive, but sometimes they collected it from guys who were long gone. Dead, executed.

DNA kinda hangs around for a long, long time, and you can get it from just about anything. A flake or two of skin, old blood samples, a hair follicle off a brush. Just like in
Jurassic Park
. But instead of raptors and T. rex, DSTI collected and built murderers.

The operation’s official name was C-XP11.

Everyone just called it “Project Cain.”

•  •  •

Some days, I would rather have been born a raptor.

•  •  •

It all probably sounds a little far-fetched. Stupid, even. Believe me, I know. But what if I told you an Air Force research lab in Ohio recently admitted to secretly working on bombs filled with synthetic pheromones/aphrodisiacs to make enemy troops “turn gay,” and also on methods to create giant swarms of bees? Or that the Navy spent twenty million dollars teaching bats to carry explosives? Or that over the past forty years, the United States military has publicly admitted to working on everything from invisibility and time travel to ghosts, weather control, mind control, LSD bombs, talking dolphins, sound weapons, and telekinesis? And that’s just what they’ve
admitted
to. Now imagine what they haven’t.

Project Cain was just another one of those.

•  •  •

The dead body in my father’s room had been dead for a long time.

You didn’t need some forensic expert to figure that out. It looked like something my father had dug up for its DNA, not someone he’d killed. (I would later find out this was exactly the situation.)

He’d just told me, hours before, that DSTI’s experiments had pretty much all been focused on famous serial killers, so I assumed this was simply one of them. WHO, however, I had no idea. There have been hundreds of serial killers. For all I knew it was the actual body of this Jeffrey Dahmer guy.

[Note: I did not yet know that Dahmer had requested to be immediately cremated upon his death. Or that his wishes had NOT been fully carried out. Because his brain and other tissues had been quietly saved and sent to the University of Wisconsin for analysis. I did not yet know that
Dahmer’s father fought in court for years to have these destroyed also.]

Whoever this was, the decayed carcass was stuffed in a special box made of metal and tinted gray glass that was plugged into the wall and cold to the touch. The box hummed a little, just like our freezer in the garage. Instead of frozen steaks and chicken, though, this thing contained a dead guy. The legs all folded over the chest and face and stuff so that he would fit in the box. He looked like something a ventriloquist might pull out. Mummy old. Shrunken, brown. Alien. Strands of hair sprouting like gray weeds around its shoulders. Nasty, dirty, rotted cloth all intertwined in the bones. He wasn’t even all that scary-looking, I kept telling myself. Just weird. Just weird . . .

I walked fully into the small room. The space was like one of those side displays at a museum, the small dark exhibit rooms you always seem to walk into alone. There were several file cabinets, a couple of monitors and laptops. A small desk with a row of notebooks filled with my father’s writing. I didn’t read them then. There were some notes on my father’s desk about people named Bundy and Tumblety and Garavito. Maps of London and Central America. None of it made any sense.

I had to assume this body was one of those men. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know
anything
anymore.
How long has this nasty thing been in our house? What has my father done to get this?
The longer I stayed, the more I could feel the corpse’s sunken black eye sockets peering at me from beneath his folded-over legs. Eyes that might have joyfully planned and watched the brutal murder of dozens.

So I didn’t stay. I got out of that room as fast as I could go and pushed the secret door back into place, and locked it again. Stumbled away backward down the hall. Hearing things in my head I shouldn’t hear. Imagining the worst things.

That shriveled corpse on the other side maybe prying himself free from that cold box. Maybe now pushing slowly off the table, dragging himself across the floor and up against the other side of the door. The skeletal hand moving against the inside wall. Long brown nails clawing at the door to lift himself up fully. The rotted skin and filthy burial shroud hanging off cold dry bones. Those endless eye sockets glistening like imploding black stars in the dark room. Fingers now taking hold of the latch . . . I swear, I could hear it turning.

I put my hands to my ears. I think maybe I was screaming.

•  •  •

I slept in the house alone that night. Tired and furious and confused.