Project Cain (28 page)

I approached slowly. Castillo saw me, tried waving me back away, but I just kept moving closer. I had to see.

Death had been hovering just out of sight for weeks now.

It was time we officially met.

•  •  •

My relationship with Death prior to all of this, prior to watching Henry bleed out on that stage:

1. I had been brought to a grave and told my mother was buried there. For a long time, I thought that was Death. Just not being HERE. Being somewhere else. In the ground. In Heaven. Whatever.

2. At a summer camp once, a boy named Collin kept picking up caterpillars and pulling them apart. The big fuzzy ones. He’d just hold them between his two hands and pull. Kept laughing the whole time too, like it was the greatest thing ever. I told him to stop. He wouldn’t. I got crying pretty good and the counselors eventually got involved. Collin acted like he didn’t know it was wrong, apologized, and was off playing again in ten seconds like
nothing had ever happened. The counselors talked to me for, like, half an hour, like I was the one who was the freak. A small pile of dead caterpillars at our feet. For a long time, I thought that was Death. Something that was done TO you.

3. About four years ago, we were living in Bryn Mawr and this older kid from the neighborhood was on drugs and stuff and spent the night out in the woods stoned in the middle of winter and got hypothermia. My dad and I were there when they pulled his half-frozen body out of the woods. There were all these police and stuff, and everyone was there. The police lights flashing against the newly fallen snow. His body was covered. My dad said he was in a coma. The next day, my dad said they had to cut off his feet and hands to try to save him. Couple of days later, my dad said the kid was dead. This was Death now too. Something that just happened.

OK, one more Death Story. The incident with the bird.

I’d never given the whole thing much thought after the day it happened. But these Project Cain days, I was thinking about it all the time.

It’d gotten into our house when I was younger. Flapping all over the place, confused, scared, trying to get back out, and my dad was trying to chase it out with a blanket. I was just a little kid. I thought it was funny. Exciting. I kept running around the house. Making too much noise. Jumping around in my pajamas kinda thing. Being a little kid, you know. Well, as I was running around, this bird, it, like, swoops down for the opened door. I mean, it’s a foot away from freedom.

And then I stepped on it.

Not on purpose. I will go to my grave swearing that. But it happened. One in a million, right? Chance. Or Fate. Or an “On Purpose” I will never, ever, ever recognize. But I somehow stepped,
stomped
, right on it. Felt it squish beneath my bare toes. Warm and soft. Blood and guts burst onto the carpet. Tiny drops. I’d never screamed so loud in my life. (I have since.)

I remember looking up and my dad just staring at me. His face. Horror. Shock. Fascination. I don’t know. Now, of course, I get why he was staring at me like that. I’d just ruined everything, maybe. Ruined the “perfect” nurtured environment he’d created for me. Or maybe this was just the opportunity he’d always been waiting for. To see the true MONSTER hidden inside his clone.
Would I pick up the bird? Play with its exposed intestines? Would I run outside and immediately stomp another bird?

No. THIS monster ran to his room and cried himself to sleep.

•  •  •

Henry was dead. There was blood everywhere.

I mean EVERYWHERE.

It was like he’d exploded.

And there was weird black stuff all over Henry’s stomach that wasn’t blood.

I didn’t know what it was.

Castillo was on his phone. Talking to his people. He put the phone away and bitched about me being out of the car.

I’d stopped moving toward the stage but I could see the woman now.

Now that Death and I had met more formally, he was everywhere.

She looked bad. Dirty. Her skin was odd colors. Bad colors. I think she’d been dead for a while. I asked: Is that . . .

Castillo told me it was one of the missing nurses from Massey. One of the two that had vanished the first night with my father and the six boys. He confirmed that she and Henry were both dead.

I asked Castillo why he’d shot him.

Castillo explained that Henry had a knife, that he’d thought the nurse might still be alive and Henry was gonna kill her. He explained that he’d only and purposefully hit him in the shoulder and didn’t expect it to be such a damaging shot. Then he cursed at me.

I just stared at the two bodies. Perfectly level with my view of the raised stage.

Castillo said: Look, Jacobson, I ain’t gonna apologize for this shit.

Castillo said: Henry gave me no choice here. I just did what I was trained to do.

I looked up from the two bodies to Castillo.

I said: So did Henry.

W
e crashed in some motel in east Missouri. It was afternoon. Castillo lay on his back in his bed, fully dressed, staring up at the ceiling. I was in my own bed kinda freezing my ass off. Maybe from the room’s AC, which was clearly broken, the unit frequently humming and rattling like a living creature nested across the room. Mostly I thought I had a cold or something. Felt just awful, really.

I’d spent most of that whole day hiding at the end of the street, waiting for Castillo to finish up with the people he worked with. They’d eventually come to the park. Cleaned up everything. Henry and Nurse Stacy, too. Just as if none of it had ever happened.

Here we were, just a few hours later. Castillo looked upset. I was used to seeing him mad, but this was different. He looked kinda sad. I asked him what was wrong. I expected him to say something about killing Henry. That he was upset about that, which I honestly think he was.

Instead he sat up, passed over his smartphone to me. On it was a picture I hadn’t seen before.

A picture of a notecard.

Words written in my father’s handwriting.

A notecard and words smeared with blood.

ShARDhARA

ZODIaC BaBYSITTeR PhaNTOM

Independence Day

I also gave birth to the 21st century

Castillo’s government contacts had just sent this to him.

Pictures from some crime scene.

They’d already confirmed it was my father’s handwriting.

•  •  •

The AC started shuddering so bad, for a minute it felt like the whole room was shaking.

Shardhara?

I asked Castillo where they’d found the card.

Just outside of Indianapolis.

He’d wanted me to see just the picture of the notecard, but I thumbed back to the previous picture. I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.

Something spread all over a bed. Black stains everywhere. Mostly red, however. I think it was a woman I was looking at. I saw hair. Wet with blood.

I cursed, slammed the phone against the wall. Castillo lunged up to take the phone back from me. Too late, I said, and gave the phone back. I asked: Who is she?

Just some woman, he said and added that the card was next to her when they found her.

Had my father done this? Had he just written the note? Had he really
killed this woman? No, not just killed her. Butchered her . . .

For so long now I’d clung to the possibility that my dad had really nothing to do with this. That he’d just been another victim in all of this.

But not a killer himself. Not . . .

It was getting harder and harder to make excuses for him. To pretend like I didn’t know what Castillo knew. That my father was behind (in front of?) all of this.

He was the one calling the shots.

And people were getting killed.

Castillo asked: You OK?

Yeah, I lied again.

•  •  •

Castillo tried to move on from the woman and focus on the card my dad had written. Turns out all three names on the card were serial killers from specific cities. Three serial killers who’d never been caught. NOT clones, because no one ever figured out who these guys were.

The Zodiac Killer. The Babysitter. The Phantom.

Three more marvelous names to add to our marvelous serial-killer names list.

The Zodiac killed as many as thirty in San Francisco.

The Babysitter (who bathed each of his child victims after murdering them) had claimed a dozen in Detroit.

The Phantom strangled half a dozen girls in Washington, DC.

All three men had written letters to the authorities—teasing them for not being able to solve the case. Promising more death.

Castillo’s bosses figured my father was warning something big was going to happen in San Francisco and Detroit and Washington on July 4. Something
awful
.

Something having to do with SHARDHARA.

•  •  •

Turns out, just before he’d died, Henry’d bragged to Castillo that the other guys were heading west already. San Francisco, maybe. It made sense (if the Zodiac thing was a genuine lead of some kind). And when Castillo asked his bosses about Shardhara, they told him it was outside his “need-to-know” status but that he should keep an eye out for any references to the word moving forward. They weren’t all that excited, apparently, about Castillo’s having found Henry.

Or about the leads (my leads! But Castillo didn’t tell them
that
) on Salem and Sherwood Forest. They didn’t care. And from what I could tell, they weren’t even asking about me yet either. Still didn’t know I was with Castillo, or simply didn’t care.

It was apparently now all about the guys heading west.

Castillo’s bosses wouldn’t tell him anything beyond that. They just told him the situation was “grave.”

Then they told him to keep an eye out for a canister of some kind.

You know, the kind of thing you might transport a deadly biotoxin in.

Why had my father put “Shardhara” on the card? Was he implying that whatever had happened in that Afghanistan village was somehow gonna happen here? All that death?

I said something like, Wow.

Castillo said something like, Uh-huh.

•  •  •

I asked Castillo what was up with: “I also gave birth to the 21st century.”

He said nothing, but I wasn’t buying it, and eventually he admitted it had “something to do with Jack the Ripper.” My dad sure had a thing for Jack the Ripper.

So what was THIS message? What did it mean?

•  •  •

There’s this famous quote attributed to Jack the Ripper:

“One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.”

It’s made up. It’s not in any of the letters he wrote to the police. It’s just one of those quotes that gets attributed to someone famous on the Internet, and off you go. The whole “If he didn’t say it, he should have.”

The quote captures the idea that Jack the Ripper was a sign of things to come—the recreational violence, the media exploitation, the replacement of God with Self.

My father’s variation, “I also gave birth to the 21st century,” was both a nod to Jack and also a reference to things to come—the rise of psychopaths, the government’s deception, the replacement of God with a gene splicer.

•  •  •

Castillo yawned, a long groan that turned into a half-formed thought.

He said: Gotta nail these little monsters. . . .

Little monsters?

I could tell he regretted the words right away. He even apologized. Not the Sizemore kid, he said quickly. Not
you
. I meant the other guys.

Sure, I said. I told him not to worry about it, but then he got all pissed. Guess I’d made him feel bad or something. He was all: Sorry if it “offends” you, but it is what it is. He told me how he’d tracked
down some major Bad Guys over the years. Guys who’d killed for religious fanaticism or Greed or Power or even Duty. And that he
understood
those guys. Their motivations. But not these guys. Not the Henrys or Teds of the world. Not guys who dressed up like clowns. Or kids who dragged around nurses who’d been dead for days. Either the original versions or new. Guys who killed for FUN. He said THESE guys made no sense. These guys had become only monsters to him.

You’ve killed people, I said. Are
you
a monster?

War’s different, he replied.

I asked if he thought I was a monster. Some clone. Evil incarnate.

Then I shared with him something my father had told me the night he’d left. That he and DSTI had taken one of Dahmer’s cells and retrained it to become, like, an egg cell. Then they’d fertilized that egg with another one of Dahmer’s cells. Never been done before. Other clones, the egg cell comes from an outside donor and affects the DNA by as much as 2%.

But I was 100% Jeffrey Dahmer.

In genes only, Castillo agreed. I guess that’s how it works.

Then he said: So what? So, you’ll be tall and blond and probably need LASIK. And? Good for you. I wish I was tall and blond. So you’re maybe genetically prone to being an alcoholic, so what? Go to AA meetings and keep away from alcohol. So you’re genetically prone to, what, being gay? Good. You’re not being raised in the sixties. Fall in love with whoever you want and live happily ever after.