Scott Nicholson: Liquid fear

He hadn’t saved her last time, and Susan was going to die again, but it wasn’t his fault.

He plunged toward the dark, wet wedge between buildings, willing his legs forward. His heart knocked mallets against his temples. Sharp-toothed things would be waiting in the darkness, but they would be the lesser of two thousand evils.

A kinder, gentler evisceration, because those monsters would do it from the outside in.

Not from the inside out, like the people from the car would.

Her shriek rose against the oppressive sky and shoe soles spanked the asphalt.

“Stop!” someone shouted. Were they really dumb enough to think he’d obey them at this point? After all they’d done to him, all they had taught him?

After what they had made him become?

He ran into the alley, assaulted by the odors of rot, bum piss, and motor oil. A chain-link fence, ripped and curling away from its support posts, blocked his escape.

David clutched the links, praying for the strength to climb. He dug the tip of one shoe into the fence and launched himself up. He slipped and hung as though crucified for a few seconds, time enough for one deep breath before collapsing.

He lay with his face against the fence, the links imprinting blue geometry against his cheek. He listened, waiting.

Rain, tick tick tick.

No footsteps, no shouts. No car engine.

They had taken her. And spared him.

No. That’s just what they wanted him to think. That he was safe, so the next game would be even more disturbing.

Or maybe they wanted him to cower, to doubt, to face his monsters alone.

With them, you could never be sure.

Fear was their tool and his drug.

He whimpered for his next pill and the blissful fog of amnesia.

This was who he was.

Whoever he was.

And he was home, home on the range.

He kissed the fence, and it kissed back.

Dr. Sebastian Briggs turned away from the monitor, content that David Underwood was sufficiently broken for the moment. The subject would be ready for his next dose of Halcyon shortly.

David let out a tired wail from behind the metal door in the back of the factory.

“Home on the range,” Briggs whispered.

David was the good soldier, the one who had offered himself for the chronic, ongoing experiment, whether he knew it or not. The other subjects had finished-or at least survived-the clinical trials, unaware of their contribution to science, their crime forgotten.

But Briggs hadn’t forgotten. Roland Doyle, Anita Molkesky, Wendy Leng, and Alexis Morgan had gone on to lead regular lives. Briggs hadn’t let them escape completely, though, because the world was merely a larger Monkey House, and the experiment had never ended, because they carried it inside them.

He’d watched them and tracked them. Wendy, especially.

The girl, Susan, hadn’t been his fault, although he’d been stuck with the blame. It had taken a decade for him to restore his reputation, but luckily his backers were less interested in publishing in peer journals and more interested in tangible results.

Soon, though, his colleagues would understand who among them had achieved an evolutionary leap in emotional engineering.

He meandered through the maze of cells until he reached the main section of the Monkey House. It had changed little since the original trials, and the rows of conveyor belts, metal storage canisters, steel tables, drill presses, rusty farming implements, and thermoforming machinery added to that sense of a frenzied inner city. Alleys and crevices broke off from the main boulevards, where the scarred vinyl flooring marked years of industrial traffic. Here and there, broken sorting machines and hydraulic arms were stacked in schizophrenic sculptures, hoses and wires dangling.

His backers had kept the property, a former tractor factory that had been haphazardly renovated for the original trials. The limited-liability company listed in the Register of Deeds office had been dummied up until it was four layers removed from the true owners-CRO Pharmaceuticals.

Briggs appreciated the seclusion, and although the Research Triangle had grown rapidly in the meantime, twenty acres of pine forest and a chain-link fence separated the massive brick building from the surrounding parcels.

Instead of the cornfields and soybean fields that once sprawled in the Piedmont belt between Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham, high-tech companies and research firms like IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, and Cisco Systems had placed labs or headquarters here.

While a complex body of world-changing research and development was underway in a sixty-mile radius, Briggs considered himself the heart of the beast, a man who held the keys that would unlock the human mind’s potential.

A pager buzzed on Briggs’s belt. The metal framing, high flat ceiling, and thick block walls inhibited cell-phone signals, and neither Briggs nor his backers wanted to be vulnerable to wiretapping or signal hijacking. The pager meant someone was ringing in on the satellite phone, and Briggs hurried to his office to plug the phone into an antenna that snaked its way up the side of the building and into the North Carolina humidity.

“Hello,” Briggs said.

“It’s done,” the voice said.

“Good. He’s the farthest away, so it was important to start with him. How is he?”

“Out like a light. Whatever this stuff is, you ought to get a patent for it.”

Briggs didn’t appreciate the humor. Life and death were serious matters. “Do you have the identification?”

An exasperated chuff came from the other end. “Everything just like you said. I even wrote those initials on the mirror. You ask me, this is a whole lot of trouble for nothing. I could roll him in the trunk and have him on your doorstep in eight hours.”

“Nobody asked you,” Briggs said. His backers insisted on using this particular operative, but Briggs planned to remove all witnesses eventually. He just wasn’t sure he could tolerate the man until that happy day.

“Okay, they told me to do it your way.”

“No fingerprints, nothing to connect you back here?” Briggs asked.

More exasperation. “You and me, Doc. We got to have a talk soon.”

“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

“Is that some kind of code or something?”

The man could dish out humor but couldn’t appreciate it. “Can I ask you something, Mr. Drummond?” Briggs said, using the fake name Martin Kleingarten had given him in a clumsy attempt at subterfuge.

“I’m on the clock,” Kleingarten/Drummond said.

“What are you afraid of?”

Silence. Briggs thought of those hundreds of miles of electromagnetic radiation beaming between him and the low-orbit satellite before bouncing to Kleingarten/Drummond in Cincinnati. Silence took just as much energy to broadcast as words did.

“I’m not afraid of nothing,” came the answer a few seconds later.

“Every intelligent man has a deepest fear. Think.”

“Right now, I’m afraid I won’t get paid, because you guys are playing a weird game. The things you’ve asked me to do, it don’t sound like business to me.”

“I assure you, Mr. Drummond, your work is critical to a major scientific discovery. The ‘game,’ as you call it, is part of the work.”

The man answered, but Briggs’s attention had been diverted to the monitor, where David Underwood sat on his cot, peering between his fingers at the images flickering on his walls. Briggs had gone with the Susan Sharpe tape, an oldie but a goodie, to complement the footage from David’s collegiate surroundings in Chapel Hill. The montage of images kept David trapped ten years in the past.

As usual, David couldn’t quite look away, because Briggs had conditioned him to crave the psychological trauma. But Briggs couldn’t take all the credit. Most of it belonged to Seethe, but the world would find that out soon enough. The hard way.