Project Cain (29 page)

I asked: And the murder? The death? The corpses?

Castillo couldn’t even look at me. I never said . . . , he tried. I’m not saying you’re like Henry.

I told him I didn’t want to, you know, hurt people. I didn’t ever even
THINK about hurting people. I didn’t care whose blood was running in my veins. (I’m not sure I really believed that last part. I think maybe I just wanted to hear what it sounded like. Like maybe saying it out loud would make it true.)

I told him I now understood why my father had done all this.

First with all the other boys and then, as the years went on, more directly.

With me. His own “son.”

He’d wanted to explain the terrible thoughts in his own head.

He’d wanted to prove that the bad thoughts (THE THING ON THE BED, etc.) were all in his blood, that he
didn’t have a choice
. So he took the most terrible person ever and raised him like a normal boy to see what would happen. To prove that the genes, the blood, that Nature would win.

I told Castillo I wasn’t some disgusting monster.

He said: I know.

Do you? I asked. Do you really?

Castillo didn’t reply.

Well, don’t feel too bad, I said. To tell the truth, I’m not totally sure either.

•  •  •

We both lay in the silence for a long time. I was full-blown shivering now. Pulled the quilt out and wrapped it around me. The AC had stopped grumbling but now there was this constant drip drip drip sound somewhere deep inside the unit. Hypnotic. Maddening.

Through clenched teeth I told Castillo I wanted to find my dad. Right now! I was maybe trying out a two-second tantrum at the same time. But Castillo wasn’t buying any of it. At all. And told me that
unless my dad was in San Francisco (which is where everyone thought some of the clones were going with a vial of that supertoxin), I was basically shit out of luck.

Then he told me I could look for him alone if I wanted.

As in, I could leave now if I wanted to.

My first thought was a thought of rejection. But he wasn’t saying this as a jerk, I quickly realized. I could see it in his face. He seemed genuinely on my side all of a sudden. Like whatever I needed, he was OK with right now. Regardless of his mission or how I might still be able to help. Maybe he wasn’t proving such a robot after all. But . . .

Alone? I needed his help. And he knew that too.

We’ll look
after
San Francisco, he promised.

And again, like most every time Castillo says stuff, I believed him.

I told him I wanted to, at least, START now. To do more research. Like he was always talking about. Do my homework and understand my prey and all of that. I needed to, God help me, understand my dad even more than I already did.

I told Castillo I needed some books on Jack the Ripper.

He nodded.

Maybe I’d “find” my dad—figuratively, I mean—in 1880s London.

This is the prospect I held on to as I closed my eyes again and listened for the next series of drips.

•  •  •

You hear his blood. From fifty miles away, you hear it. Like . . . like some steam-driven contraption of rusted machinery forgotten yet still humming and rattling. Now moving over the chain-link fence, the night’s chill roiling across your whole body, you’d been following the other one. But the sound of his blood is gone now this is another drip
drip droplets like trickling rubies. So many out there you realize and here is one more churning chunking away just inside this door. Kill the Other first, the man. Then your brother, blades drawn, slams your body against the door—

•  •  •

The motel room, like, exploded.

I swear to God, I thought the whole world had just blown up.

I flung up out of bed in the dead of night. Watched the motel room door bouncing off the wall. Pieces of the doorframe splintering out in a hundred directions.

There was something standing at the end of my bed.

Enormous. Black. Misshapen. Something glinted in its hands.

The first thought I had was, The Black Dress Lady. The Thing on the Bed. She’d found me. Followed me. And she was totally what I saw for half a second. The big huge cartoon eyes. Vacant. Dead. The face the color of a shining skull in the yellow light from outside.

Then I realized it was a man. Dark not just from the room’s shadows. It was as if he were not really there at all but still half in the dark from which he’d sprung.

The dark man was just standing there. Staring at me.

My father came to mind.

Then Castillo started shooting.

I
cringed against the wall, curled away from the gunshots.

And from the man standing there.

Then, just like that, both were gone. The doorway now empty.

Castillo had somehow rolled from his own bed across the floor and was now behind mine. Gun pointed at the door. He asked if I was OK and then told me to keep quiet. He’d slid over the foot of the bed toward the doorway. Kept low to the window, clinging to the same darkness the other guy had just retreated to. He told me to get behind the bed, while looking out into the parking lot outside.

Then he cursed and ran out the door. Yelled back for me to stay put.

Forget that.

I immediately found my glasses and then started crawling around in the dark, getting my shit together. When Castillo got back, we’d go. That was that. There was no way I was gonna stay another minute in that motel.

The guy, whoever it had been, was Evil. Pure and simple. I could feel it surging through my entire body. Icy. Trembling like thousands of worms in a dark grave. We HAD to go. Besides, I knew Castillo
couldn’t stay here. Not after gunshots. He’d been worried about the cops since Day One. He sure as heck didn’t want to talk with them tonight.

I was right. Castillo returned, tried shutting the broken door, which bounced back freely on its newly busted hinges. He seemed quite pleased I was already good to go. Asked if I was OK.

What
was
that? I asked.

Who, Castillo corrected me.

•  •  •

This particular who/what question continues even to today. Though it largely goes unspoken, because arguing too much on if this “dark man” was technically a man or a “thing” is directly related to whether or not Jeff Jacobson, technically, is a thing or a man. Which, out of common courtesy to me, folk around here generally avoid debating.

•  •  •

I can tell you only what we now know.

Who/what came to our room that night was constructed in a DSTI lab just like me.

Constructed as a special type of weapon for the United States military.

A biological weapon. A life-form weapon. And 100% human. (Technically.)

I’m now gonna oversimplify a process that took a team of men almost twenty years and a hundred million dollars to accomplish. Like Frankenstein’s monster, but instead of body parts stitched together from a dozen different corpses, the geneticists at DSTI had cobbled together the DNA from a dozen different serial killers. 10% Bundy + 8% Gacy + 15% Fish + 10% Dahmer, etc. Until 100% of a “full” person.

We’ve been breeding dogs and horses this way for thousands of
years. Crafting this special hybrid of human wasn’t, in the simplest explanation, that different. And once the government had these specimens blended together, the scientists even “tweaked” them a bit more. Not much different than someone on steroids or ADD meds or birth control. The specimens were gestated in special incubator tanks to whatever age and size the company wished. Raised and trained, but kept in the vats to reduce decomposition. During this state, DSTI also amplified the aberration of their XP11 strand—the one that controls violence. (The gene already way off the genetic charts even for us “one-source” clones!) DSTI also modified their genetic codes for hearing, strength, metabolism (to control the body temperature), skin pigment, etc.

The original idea was to send these special killers into unique zones of conflict. Deep into enemy territory. Underground bunkers and tunnels miles beneath the earth. During testing DSTI discovered that these men had a unique—and rather fortunate—ability. They could
sense
one another. The way twins sometimes know when their “double” has been hurt or is experiencing a particularly strong emotion.

And not just one another. They could, it was soon realized, somehow sense
other killers
. Including men who had absolutely
nothing
to do with Project Cain. But somehow (I describe it as a sound) they could find these men who’d killed, wanted to kill, etc. And then eliminate them. Field tests were run. These specimens were first assessed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Philippines and Colombia. Then in Iran and Pakistan. Then the United States.

Later I learned that when Castillo had been captured and tortured somewhere in Iran (thus the scars), it had been one of these men who’d freed him. (Castillo did not yet really remember this, but it would soon
explain his nightmares.)

And as far as what
really
happened when Osama bin Laden was killed, why there is no real evidence of his body, or what happened to the crashed American helicopter or the half dozen Special Forces operatives who died that same week on “other missions” . . . that is a story best told by Ox.

•  •  •

Two more things about these special men made by DSTI.

1. They were not crafted from the DNA of the original serial killers. They were crafted from the DNA of us clones. DNA that, in some cases, had been modified to create more violent specimens.

2. There was more than one.

•  •  •

But the night that the dark man attacked our room, Castillo didn’t know any of this. And it was not yet a memory he was willing to take on. So he ignored the guy completely and told me he’d have to deal with the cops now and for me to go to the Waffle House down the street. I did like I was told and got the heck out of there.

But I never even got to the Waffle House.

I’d almost reached it when Castillo pulled up with the car.

Get in, he said. I think we’re screwed.

•  •  •

“Screwed” was not exactly the word he used, but you get the idea.

Also, he was totally right.

D
STI had put tracking chips into their clones.

Standard operating procedure. Inserted just beneath the skin in the feet. Little metal pellets the size of a fat grain of rice. Protecting specimens worth more than a million dollars apiece. Castillo figured the dark guy had been sent to find me and had probably tracked me with one of those.

The solution?

We broke into this vet’s office.

•  •  •

I hid in the shadows, terrified, while Castillo busted the alarm, opened the back door. There were just four dogs caged inside, barking as one, and loud enough to wake half the state. Castillo made me find them treats while he looked around some.

Five minutes later, the dogs were totally chowing and Castillo was testing something called a DR 3500 Digital Navigator Plus. The vet’s X-ray machine.

Then I was up on the table.

The alternative involves cutting, Castillo said.

He knew this from experience. Apparently the six boys who’d first escaped had cut theirs out at Massey. Placed them in the shape of a smiley face (two eyes, nose, three for the mouth) with the head drawn in blood on the Activity Center’s pool table. There’d been a dead counselor next to the face.

My father, Castillo figured, had told them the chips were there.

He didn’t tell me, I said.

•  •  •

My father hadn’t told me because I didn’t
have
a chip implanted.

Neither did any of the dozen clones my father had personally adopted out into the world.

He didn’t want DSTI to know where they were.

He wanted us all completely free.

Almost.

•  •  •

Castillo X-rayed my feet first. Nothing. Took another two dozen close digital shots of different body parts. Hands. Legs. Neck. More whole lot of
nothing
. I wondered out loud if he were giving me cancer. If they find you, Castillo said, that won’t matter. Then he took another dozen X-rays, I figure. I stayed quiet. He couldn’t find anything. No tracking devices. At least nothing metal. I asked Castillo how it had found me, then. (I tried not to think about the dreams I’d been having. The visions. The blood sounds.)
He
, Castillo corrected again. And also, he had no idea who this guy was either.