Scott Nicholson - Liquid fear

She was already naked from the waist up, and her breasts looked like they had tiny bite marks on them, though it was hard to see in the bad light. Briggs was breathing heavily, and Kleingarten noticed some sort of harness on his head, reared back so the lenses were pointed up.

Night vision. Why the hell didn’t I think of that? Must be slipping in my old age. Yep, definitely time to retire.

As he edged closer, the doc flung the woman’s pants to the side and stroked the insides of her thighs. “Just like old times,” Briggs said, his voice husky.

And that’s when Kleingarten saw what was playing on the main monitor.

The scene was of the same factory, but it wasn’t dark. He recognized Roland, Alexis, and Wendy, though they were clearly younger, leaner, and wearing filthy clothes. They were closing in on a naked woman he didn’t recognize. She looked eighteen, chubby but short, maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet.

And she was plenty wet. Even in black and white, Kleingarten could tell it was blood.

The chubby teen turned and tried to climb up an empty tool tree that resembled a pegboard, but her own blood caused her to slip. Roland was the first to grab her, but Wendy was right there. The camera zoomed out, and Anita stood to the side, naked and also damp with blood, her hand stroking between her legs as she watched. Wendy yanked the girl by the hair until she turned to face her attackers.

“This is why I’ve always loved you,” Briggs murmured as he licked Wendy’s legs. “A woman who can do something like that, she deserves a little scientific observation.”

Kleingarten was sickened. He’d killed people, sure, but that was for money. Most of the time, anyway. To do shit like this just to get some jollies…

But he couldn’t look away, as on the screen the younger versions of the Briggs monkeys grabbed the bleeding woman, Roland on one side and Wendy on the other. And as gorgeously perverted as Anita was, it was the woman approaching the victim that sent a chill up Kleingarten’s spine.

Dr. Alexis Morgan, the suave, polished, educated big shot, grinned as she stood over the cowering teen. Her lips moved, obviously giving a little lecture, probably some horseshit learned from Briggs. The eyes of the three were wide, bright, and crazed, like that picture of Charles Manson where the swastika was carved in his forehead.

Alexis held a thick and pointed piece of machinery in her hand, and something dark dripped from it.

She lifted it as the teen struggled, but Roland and Wendy held the girl tight. Roland punched the girl in the kidney and the fight seemed to go out of her.

Kleingarten thought a soundtrack must have come on, because he heard the victim moaning, and then he realized it was the Slant. Briggs was doing something to her, and she loved it, because she was watching the screen and purring like a hooker on the clock.

Jesus. This Seethe is some powerful shit. Fucks you seven ways to Sunday without a rubber.

As Alexis jabbed the piece of broken metal at the teen, a blur of movement came from the left side of the screen and slammed into her, causing her to drop the weapon. Alexis and the man wrestled, and then Kleingarten recognized him as the albino monkey, David Underwood, only he was a hundred years older now.

It sounded like the Slant was having an orgasm inside the cage, and Kleingarten had had enough. He aimed his Glock between the bars at the top of Briggs’s head.

Fuck. If I kill him, I won’t be able to get out, and I don’t know where he’s keeping all his joy juice.

On the screen, Anita wallowed on top of David, laughing, and Alexis had retrieved her jagged weapon. This time the chubby teen just closed her eyes.

Everybody onscreen looked as happy as sharks at a seafood buffet, except the person about to get killed.

“Party’s over, Doc,” Kleingarten said.

Alexis had taken the first pill right away, and an inner voice said to go for the second one, too. But the longer she could hold out, the better.

Even if it means Mark…

Mark what?

She felt along the row of machinery. It was the assembly line where the plows were pieced together, and she could picture the rusting machinery beneath her hands. It hadn’t changed in all those years, as if the junk had been left as a museum to their No. That didn’t happen. And if you think for a second that we really killed Susan, we don’t have a chance.

She heard talking on the far side of the factory, where Briggs had once kept his office. The man who’d turned out the lights was yelling at Briggs. The man was making a big mistake, but he’d find that out soon enough.

There’s something I’m supposed to do.

She reached for her arm and found the throbbing wound.

Pain.

She gouged the wound and remembered Mark, her husband, waiting back there somewhere in the dark, counting on her. He’d been dosed somehow, too, even though he wasn’t part of the original trials.

She felt buoyant and energetic, though she knew it was serotonin and cortisol pumping though her body, kicking adrenaline from her kidneys. The neurochemicals could so easily turn, amplified by the Seethe, but the Halcyon seemed to be suppressing the worst of the impulses. She welcomed the nullifying tug of the cocktail, maintaining an academic awareness as she rode above her own sick impulses.

She ran her hands along the equipment-the connecting pins, bolts, curved edges of blades, swivel joints, and loose steel plates with serrated edges from welding jobs. The tangle of farming equipment was knotted so tightly that she couldn’t extricate any pieces, so she was forced to keep going toward the sound of the voices.

Alexis had no plan, only determination.

How many of us were there?

Mark, Roland, Wendy…

Were there others?

Susan?

“Susan?” she said aloud. “Are you here?”

She bumped into a wobbling wire-framed cage, and something heavy fell, crashing to the floor inches in front of her feet.

She scooped it up. It felt like a plow blade, about eight inches long, with a short metal tube on top where it attached to the frame.

Alexis swung it like a battle ax.

It felt goddamned good.

And familiar.

“All right, Doc, where are the keys?” the man was saying.

“Put that away, Kleingarten,” Briggs said. “You kill me, you don’t get anything.”

“I ain’t killing unless I have to.”

Alexis remembered the man had a gun. Was it last night, or ten years ago? She couldn’t be sure.

All she knew was that Briggs was the boss. Briggs had the pills, and she needed pills.

Pills for what?

Dr. Sebastian Briggs had something she craved. An image flashed through her mind, a memory or a fantasy. A computerized image of the compound’s cellular structure.

It should have been hers. She was there. And if…whatever happened…hadn’t happened, she would have joined the ranks of those who’d made revolutionary leaps in science. Pasteur, Curie, Salk. Except instead of curing diseases of the body, she’d have healed the mind.

The most broken part of the human race.

Alexis crawled under a long conveyor belt, careful not to let the plow piece drag on the concrete and give her away. Her heart thudded and the fine hair on the back of her neck prickled.

Instinct.

Despite all her study, all her research, all her books and papers and experiments, she’d not learned a thing. There was no higher mind. It always came down to kill or be killed.

And Briggs needed to die.

“You need to die,” Kleingarten was saying, not twenty feet from her. “But not right now. Tell me where you keep all your bottles of witch’s brew. Or is it barrels? To get a U.S. senator down here, you must have some major inventory.”