Scott Nicholson - Chronic fear

Their marriage had remained solid through the crazy travel schedules and their hectic careers, but the past year had taken its toll. Alexis missed her romantic, goofy, ambitious husband, who had been replaced by this tight-jawed, nervous gun freak. The man she’d married had somehow become a stranger.

One more casualty of the Monkey House.

“Here’s all the homeland security you need.” He took a weapon from the closet that looked like a machine gun from a war movie and spoke in an instructional tone, as if she might actually have to use it one day. “This AR-Fifteen is the perfect weapon for home defense. Flip this little knob here-that’s the safety-and then just press the trigger as fast as you can. You have thirty bullets. This little baby can really clear a room.”

The gun repulsed her, or maybe it was Mark’s sudden glee as he cradled it. “They wouldn’t be that brazen, would they? To break in here?”

“They broke into your lab, right? And they didn’t find what they were looking for, because you aren’t hiding anything, right?”

Alexis glanced away from his intense stare. “Right.”

“So they’re not going to believe you have nothing to hide. That means they’ll keep looking.”

“Why won’t they just leave us alone?”

“Because Burchfield tried to buy me off,” Mark said. “Wanted me to join his security team or take an advisory role. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ and all that.”

“Yeah. And I’m sure my job offer from the CDC was just a coincidence, too. Maybe I should have taken it. Then I could be teaching teens about the dangers of mood-enhancing drugs.”

“You know the problem with that? The word enhancing. There’s no way to talk about drugs without making them sound good.”

Alexis knew about enhancements. Mark didn’t. She’d hoped her refinement of the original Halcyon formula would allow Mark to be able to turn his anger off and on. That was one of the big flaws in Briggs’s synthesis of Halcyon that had resulted in Seethe-Seethe turned the tap all the way open and every nightmare in Pandora’s box would bust free at once. And then only Halcyon could close the tap by suppressing memory and emotional response.

She hadn’t mentioned the other possible source of the surveillance, because Mark didn’t know about Darrell Silver, the underground chemist she’d hired to develop her version of Halcyon. Silver had delivered the one batch in liquid form, saying he needed more time and more money, but he’d been arrested for dealing drugs two months ago. From the outside, it looked like just another dopehead getting busted, and Silver didn’t know anything about the drug’s provenance.

But she didn’t know what records or chemicals he’d left lying around, or whether he was clever enough to use her as a bargaining chip if someone pressed. Some of his charges had been federal because he’d been trafficking across state lines. But despite his obvious genius, his basic personality was childlike and innocent, failing to comprehend why The Man would frown upon the act of spreading joy and escape from the square world.

While Silver would never question her motives, he also might be tempted to brag about the fine craft of drug manufacturing. Brilliance rarely kept its illumination cloaked.

But Silver’s loss meant she was alone. Despite her frantic research, and the measured doses of Halcyon she’d been slipping Mark, he was disintegrating, and she was afraid she’d lose him to Seethe forever.

But Mark wasn’t just the test pool, he was her husband. She had to keep reminding herself of that fact.

“It could be much worse,” she said. “I hate to think where we’d all be if Briggs had turned Burchfield loose with Seethe.”

“Why haven’t you been honest with me?” he asked. He still held the AR-15, although he’d lowered it to his hip. She couldn’t read his expression. When he was Seething, his lip or eyelid would tremble, but at the moment he seemed utterly calm.

And that was scarier than his blind rages.

“What are you talking about?”

“You must be doing something, or nobody would bother raiding your lab.”

“Mark, I told you I was done with that.”

“And you got rid of all the Seethe and Halcyon? Not holding any back?”

Why did he still blame her for sneaking some of the Halcyon pills from the Monkey House? She was sure the molecular compounds had beneficial uses. The chemicals themselves had done nothing wrong, because compounds didn’t possess morality. It was Briggs’s twisted use of them that was evil.

Mark had forced her to flush the pills down the toilet after he’d discovered them hidden in her jewelry box, but he didn’t know about the single pill she’d given to Silver for analysis.

“The doses you found were the last ones,” she said. “I promise.”

The lie had mutated for so long that it now felt like the truth, and she wondered if a similar evolution had justified Sebastian Briggs in his sick research. But Mark wouldn’t understand her work, and he would never accept her help voluntarily. Especially if that help came in the form of Halcyon.

But he also wouldn’t accept that he’d changed since the Monkey House. The Mark that had gone in had not come out.

And his only hope-their only hope-rested in Alexis’s race to synthesize a better form of Halcyon, one that wouldn’t wipe his mind of all he’d been.

But the race had been interrupted.

Somebody knew.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Roland opened his eyes and, for the hundredth time since his last drink three years ago, wondered why God didn’t grant exemptions for control freaks, the cowardly, and the foolish. At times he’d been all three, and he still wasn’t sure he understood the Serenity Prayer and which things he could actually change without fucking them up. All he knew was that he was grateful to be here and to be sober enough to struggle with it.

He was sitting in his rocker, laboring over a laptop, but the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountain evening stole his concentration. And his gaze kept roaming over to the painting Wendy was working on.

Well, it roamed over Wendy a lot, too.

She was wearing a thin cotton blouse, off-white and splotched with multi-colored stains, and Capri pants that accented her petite Asian shape. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she looked more like a teenager than a woman soon to enter middle age.

“That’s pretty cool, sweetie,” Roland Doyle said.

Wendy frowned and stepped back from the canvas, brush in hand. “Anything looks good in this light.”

Which was true. It was the kind of sunset that cast the world in perfect pink, the ultimate rose-colored glasses. Flaming clouds billowed over the forest in the west while the coming bruise of night claimed its turf to the east. The wet, loamy aroma of the forest added to the magical dusk, and a more fanciful person might have imagined faeries and sprites would come spilling out at any moment.

But Roland didn’t care for games of the mind. He’d played enough of them.

“Personally, I’d go in for some cadmium yellow,” Roland said. “It’s getting a little bleak.”

What he really meant was maybe she should try some new subject matter. For the past year, she’d been indulging in surreal and claustrophobic imagery, jagged and dark shapes full of menace. It was how she chose to deal with the Monkey House experience, but he hoped she would shut that door for good and paint over it with the thickest layer of black.

He had, as best he could.

But then he was the only one who seemed to remember much about it. For Wendy, it was bottled up and stored in a sick wine cellar of the soul, its fermented pulp turning to slow poison.