Scott Nicholson - Liquid fear

“On top of the CRO money?”

“You want insurance. I have the Halcyon formula. And as long as I have Halcyon, I’m safe. But I’m only safe as long as everyone involved knows that. So I need you to tell our bosses.”

Kleingarten nodded, eyes shifting as if he were processing that information. “I get it, Doc. You want me to give a report on you, tell CRO you have the formula in your head, something like that? So word gets around?”

Briggs looked down at the dead man, who was beginning to exhibit some morbidity. “I’d hate to jog down the wrong path.”

“Yeah. I can see that.” Kleingarten grinned, his lips greasy and cracked. “Don’t worry, I got your back.”

That’s what I’m worried about. But I have another bonus waiting for you, Martin Kleingarten, a.k.a. Mr. Drummond.

“Let’s make the place presentable, because company is on the way,” Briggs said, heading toward the steel door. By the time he entered the Monkey House, Kleingarten was dragging the body away with a scuffing of dead leaves.

Briggs navigated the corridors between the rusted, hulking rows of machinery. In the original trials, he’d let the subjects run free, because they had been willing subjects with no reason to run away. This time, they would be wary. At least for a while.

Once the Seethe set in, though, they’d be too busy turning on each other to worry about freedom.

He walked the eighty yards to the back of the building where he’d had the cells constructed, employing Mexicans without visas who were only too happy to work for cash and who were unlikely to talk to authorities about the place. The surveillance system had been a little trickier, but CRO had called in some favors with allied companies and built it to Briggs’s specifications.

The electricity and water connections had even been moved to the perimeter of the property, just beyond the fence, so that meter readers would have no reason to explore the grounds.

From David Underwood’s cell came the plaintive strains of his theme song, “Home on the Range.” Every broken lunatic needed a theme song. But his condition wasn’t really David’s fault. He’d been Seething for two full years, and though Briggs had finally refined the Halcyon formula through persistent trial and error, David would go into the books as an experimental failure. Just like Susan Sharpe.

Briggs could have monitored the cells from his office, but soon the Monkey House would be crowded, and he wanted to enjoy one last peaceful moment with his veteran subject.

He tapped out the code on the electronic lock and eased the metal door open. The thousands of eyes glared at him from the walls.

David was huddled on his cot, but his head lifted at the noise. “Mom?”

“No,” Briggs said. “It’s Susan.”

David pushed himself back hard enough to knock his skull against the wall. “You’re dead,” he said.

“No, David. That’s the Seethe talking. That drug Dr. Briggs gave us. Remember?”

The way David violently shook his head suggested that he did not, in fact, remember. “We killed you. Go away.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, David. I thought you liked me.”

David balled his fists and jammed them hard against his eye sockets. “Go away, go away, go away!”

“Okay, David. But our friends are coming. Roland and Alexis. And Wendy. Do you remember them?”

“They’re dead, too-ooo,” David wailed.

The poor man. If he’d had a stronger constitution, he might have resisted the Seethe. But the chemical worked on the primitive brain, and in that neurotoxic swamp of fear, there were few defenses. The world would find that out soon enough. It was time they all met the enemy within.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, David. Now get some rest, and if you’re a good boy, I’ll bring you some Halcyon soon and you can forget all about it.”

David nodded and whimpered.

Briggs closed the door. It was time to visit Anita.

She wasn’t Wendy, but she would have to do for now.

“Do you think you can drive?” Alexis asked, looking at the final pill in her bottle and the apartment walls that now seemed like a prison.

“Sure,” Roland said. “I’ve had a lot of practice driving drunk. This can’t be any harder.”

He’d calmed down considerably, his jittery rage giving way to a placid, almost dull resignation in the wake of his final dose. Alexis studied the way he tended to Wendy, displaying a gentleness that masked the raging monster he’d been only ten minutes before.

Despite her horror and shock, Alexis was impressed by the efficacy Briggs had achieved with his Halcyon formula. If the drug went legit, it could ease the suffering of many people, not just the military veterans that were the intended patients. Rape, car crashes, and random violence often created long-term debilitating effects on the victims, and if science could alter or suppress the impact of those memories, it would be a welcome act of compassion.

But where was the boundary? How far into their heads could Halcyon reach, and how many memories, both good and bad, might be raked away with all the indifference of an orbitoclast jammed into an eye socket to peel away a frontal lobe?

Wendy rubbed the circulation back into her wrists after Roland released her bonds.

“He wants us to go back to the lab.”

“What lab?” Roland said.

“The Monkey House,” Alexis said.

Roland looked from one to the other, then back to Wendy. “What’s she talking about?”

Wendy stood shakily and took Roland’s hands. “Roland, you have to trust me.”

He nodded without conviction. “I always trusted you, Wendy.”

“He doesn’t remember,” Alexis said. “Not like we do.”

“Are we going to forget, too?” Wendy asked.

“We’re on staggered schedules,” Alexis said. “Briggs must have counted on one of us freaking out at any given time.”

She was thirty-five minutes from her final dose. She didn’t want to think of the sprawling, open-ended nightmare that lay beyond that last pill.

Briggs must have been so close back then. If Susan hadn’t fallen down those stairs, Briggs would have been hailed as a genius.

Of course, the success would have been a keystone to Alexis’s own career, especially if she’d coauthored the research. The amygdala was the secret center where fear, sex, and food combined, a mysterious and complex stew of electrical connections and chemistry that offered endless opportunities.

It should have been mine. And now I’ll lose everything.

“So we go to this Monkey House,” Roland said. “Then what?”

“We find Anita,” Wendy said.

“This is getting confusing,” Roland said. “Who’s Anita?”

“Roland, please,” Wendy began, face creasing in anger. Wendy was two hours from her final dose, and if the cortisol rush was already invading her, she might become a liability. And Alexis wasn’t sure she wanted more liabilities.

We learned how to deal with liabilities ten years ago. You always have to get rid of the weak link in the chain.

“Roland, I know this is hard to understand,” Alexis said. “But you’ve just taken a drug that suppresses traumatic memories. That’s why Wendy wants you to trust her.”

He shook his head. “I feel more or less normal. There was…something in Cincinnati, and I had to come here.”

“You didn’t come here,” Alexis said. “You were lured. Shepherded by Sebastian Briggs.”

“You’ve lost me,” he said. “Monkey House, Briggs, Anita. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

Wendy limped to the wall, favoring her right leg. She removed a charcoal sketch pinned against the drywall with thumb tacks. She carried it to Roland, who peered at the nude figure.