by Mike McCrary
“Does this make any sense?” Dr. Peyton asks.
“Understand the words, not sure why you are saying them.” Murphy hands one glass to Dr. Peyton, one to Agent Thompson, then takes a slug straight from the bottle.
Dr. Peyton and Thompson trade looks as Murphy walks toward the closet on the other side of the room with bottle in hand. Dr. Peyton moves toward the closet getting closer to Murphy. Thompson hates this. He follows her with a hand on his shoulder holster inside his jacket.
“Murphy,” she says.
“Pardon me, good doctor. Getting dressed for my day.”
“Ignore me if you want,” she says, “but you need to hear this.”
Murphy puts on a new shirt, feeling her eyes look him over.
“We, my company, took some findings from the old CIA MK-Ultra program. We integrated those with new ideas based on our own research, adding improved technology, medicine, bleeding-edge psychiatric treatments. We created advanced direct neural overlays. We were able to alter neuropathways using transcranial magnetic stimulation. There was a blend of psychographics, biometrics and AI as well.”
“Losing me, Doc.”
“Sorry. I need you to know that our work had purpose. Thoughtful purpose. Safe. Humane. Our goal was always to help people.”
“Yeah, you said that already.”
“I’d like you to understand—”
“Fine. You’re an amazing, caring person.”
“Please—”
“Doc? Peyton, is it?” Murphy says. “You do brains, and my brain is warm garbage. Please, let us step away from the bullshit, and explain what the hell happened to me.”
Her eyes close. Wounds still fresh and tender.
“I promise this is relevant. We had higher goals of working with the overcrowding prisons. Trying to help youth struggling with social and legal issues stemming from childhood abuse. Trying to help the mentally ill.” Murphy can hear her passion for her work. “It was all a new, radical form of therapy. Helping heavily burdened minds shift to a better state. A better place for the patient and for society. There are endless applications. Possible relief for people struggling with all kinds of neurological issues. What if we could cure Parkinson’s by overlaying damaged neurons?”
Peyton looks to Thompson.
Even the hard-ass Thompson is moved by the emotion behind her words.
Silently she mouths, tell him.
Murphy steps out from the closet. He’s changed into gray jeans, a black T-shirt and some high-dollar sneakers. He likes this new uniform he’s recently adopted. Murphy stands looking at them, waiting, not sure where this is going and not sure he wants to know. He rubs the devil tattoo on the inside of his forearm. Looks much better. The clear film has been removed.
Thompson clears his throat. “And that, right or wrong, is where you come in.”
“Yes, please, between the two of you, locate the damn point,” Murphy says.
“Markus Murphy. Decorated Marine. Quickly caught the eye of some big, important folks who thought you’d be a good fit for their dirty deeds.” Thompson drinks from the glass of whiskey Murphy gave him. Makes an approval face. The good stuff. “Unfortunately, you’re also someone who played a little fast and loose. By fast and loose I mean violent and psycho. A remarkably skilled killer, but psychotic, nonetheless. You were locked up at the USDB in Leavenworth. Doing life, sadly.”
Murphy hears the information but has no recall.
He doesn’t fight it either.
Everything Thompson says feels like it makes sense even though he can’t see a single frame of it play in his mind. His words ring true as any known fact would. Statements that cannot be argued.
It makes another part of Murphy want to throw up.
“You were the perfect test subject.” Thompson smiles.
“Perfect? Flattering as hell.” Murphy taps his finger against his lips, mocking Thompson. “Could have sworn I heard something about this kindly woman digging in my skull.”
“You signed up for this.” Thompson shrugs.
“Going to need more than that,” Murphy says, moving in fast.
Thompson places a hand on his gun again.
The large man guarding the door clears his throat, adjusting his grip on his weapon.
“Hovering around 70%,” Dr. Peyton says, waving them off. “We had completed some early trials. Done well with some test subjects—easier subjects. Fewer psychological issues to sort out than you.”
“Touching.” Murphy takes a swig from the bottle, pushing past them toward the door.
“You were the perfect benchmark.” Dr. Peyton speeds up. They’re losing him. “We knew if we could help you, if we could make you good—for lack of a better term—then we knew we had reached the top of the mountain. You were on death row. It was a chance to live longer.”
“So what went wrong, big brains?” Murphy steps toward the man blocking the door.
“What makes you think anything went wrong?” Thompson asks.
“Well, my memory is shit, you seem slightly on edge, and—oh yeah—why the hell would anyone release someone as dangerous as I apparently am out into the world?” He gestures around the room. “Shouldn’t I be chained up in a lab? So, one more time with feeling, what the hell went wrong?”
“With all major scientific studies, funds are needed and lots of it,” Peyton says. “We were well into our work when the money dried up. That’s when they approached us.”
“Who’s they? Wait. I’ll take a stab.” Murphy resets. “Guessing the same organization ass-bucket here works for.” Murphy pushes his chin toward the man guarding the door.
“If ass-bucket means valued CIA employee, then you are correct,” Thompson jumps in. “The CIA funds many entrepreneurial endeavors ranging from tech to medical. Unlimited funding with strings they don’t bother mentioning.”
“You’re no scientist. She said former agent. So…” Murphy looks Thompson over. “Guessing that makes you a former ass-bucket—current dickhead—and you made the introduction between the ass-buckets and the genius, big brain, mind benders.”
Thompson nods, setting his drink down.
“They told us they’d be hands off,” Dr. Peyton says.
“They lied,” Thompson adds.
“They do that.” Murphy turns back to the man guarding the door.
“Necessity made us stupid. They told us what we wanted to hear.” Dr. Peyton stands next to Thompson. “They had their own team of scientists. Teams of everything. They took our work, our processes and worked on their own agenda. They took our research without our knowledge and worked in a separate location. They did sloppy work.”
“They did the opposite of Dr. Peyton.” Thompson looks Murphy up and down trying to get a read on him. “Instead of taking a killer and making him nice, they took nice folk and mixed them up in a blender with a psychopath.”
“Wait. Other people are going through this?” Sadness creeps into Murphy. Compassion he couldn’t imagine accessing not long ago. “Why?” Murphy blinks away the unsolicited emotion.
“They wanted, much like the old MK-Ultra days, assets crafted in a lab that could be perfectly placed and unleashed,” Thompson says. “Better than any field agent. These people would be truly undercover. Even from themselves. They wanted—”
“On-demand killers,” Murphy says.
He lets his own words hover in the air.
Peyton looks him over, thinks, then taps the screen of her tablet.
Murphy’s tattoo tingles, and a moment later his eyes light up. A mental reset.
“Great. Really fun.” Murphy claps his hands loudly, blowing up this moment of thoughtful reflection. “So, you overlaid some Mr. Nice Guy neural pathways with my badass brain?”
Dr. Peyton nods.
“Super neat.” Murphy looks around. “Still, why are we here?”
Peyton looks away. Doesn’t want to tell him.
Even Thompson looks to his shoes.
“What? Who fa
rted?” Murphy asks.
Big silence.
“Spill it, kids. What don’t you want to tell me?”
“There’s been a problem.” Peyton’s voice breaks.
“Big one,” Thompson adds.
“The people the CIA worked on have escaped.” Peyton looks down. “They’re out loose in the world, and we can’t find them.”
“And Murphy?” Thompson sighs. “The side they used to blend with these people. The bad side? The psychopath? That’s 100% the old you, buddy.”
Chapter 11
“You’re the alpha,” Thompson says.
Murphy feels himself peel away.
Floating, no longer a part of the room.
He wants to remove the urge to feel anything. Become untethered from himself. Wants to be anyone but what they say he is. Guilt hits him like a sledgehammer. Not sure why, he did nothing wrong. Still, he fights feeling responsible no matter how unreasonable that might be.
The whiskey burns the good burn as he takes a cleansing a pull from the bottle.
Dr. Peyton talks to him.
So does Thompson.
Their lips visibly move, but Murphy cannot connect any of the words to their source. The sounds of their voices enter his ears, but they only skim the perimeter of his thoughts. Their tone, the words, buzzes like flies around rotting meat.
Thompson places one hand on each of Murphy’s shoulders.
Murphy slaps them away, landing a flat palm into Thompson’s chest like a battering ram. Thompson stumbles back, bounces off the wall raising his hands in a peaceful gesture. Murphy considers dropping him to the floor. Takes a swig from the bottle instead.
The man guarding the door raises his weapon.
Murphy smiles, wagging his finger at him like a child who’s spilled some juice. Murphy’s feeling himself come back to the room. Shaken free from the haze. His mind sharpens.
He’s back online.
“Murphy, we need you.” Dr. Peyton moves closer. Her words now landing. “You are the only one who knows these people better than we do. They are part you. Please, will you help us find these people?”
“I need you to get all the way off my back with that help us shit.” Murphy stares hard into the eyes of the man guarding the door. Murphy can taste the man’s fear. “Also need you to move away from that door, my man.”
“You with us?” Thompson asks. “Or against us?”
Murphy wants to run. No idea where to but anywhere but here.
“This can get damn ugly, damn fast,” Thompson says, “but it doesn’t have to. We can offer you things. More like we can offer you everything.”
Dr. Peyton never takes her eyes off Murphy.
She’s studying everything he does. Murphy breathes in deep through his nose, exhaling long and steady through his lips. Maintaining a loose grip on control. His appetite for bloodshed rising by the second. That voice is back. The annoying spectator calling out at the back of a room. A lone voice of reason begging for a better solution.
“They’re out there.” Peyton tries to talk him down. “We’re not even sure how many.”
“We’ve got a lead on one of them.” Thompson keeps his hand on his gun.
“Moo-ove,” Murphy singsongs to the man guarding the door. Cocks his head. “Do I have to count?”
The man steps back, leveling his weapon on Murphy’s face.
“Really, guy?” Murphy scrunches his nose. “I have to count, right?”
“Murphy, there’s something else you need to know,” Peyton says.
“Oh, I’m sure.” Leaning in, Murphy places his forehead on the barrel of the gun. “One…”
The guard’s eyes bounce to Thompson then back to Murphy.
“Love it if you just said you wanted to help out. Be cleaner. Easier,” Thompson says. “We both know you can take that gun away from him.”
“Only want mine back.” Murphy clucks his tongue. “Two…”
“Pretty sure you’ve already thought up three ways to kill all of us.”
“Four, actually, and a fifth is looking pretty cool.”
“Ya know that pain you have in the back of your skull?” Thompson asks. “Remember what happened when you tried to leave the room last time?”
Murphy stops cold.
“Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. That pain? It ain’t stress or some seasonal sinus thing.”
Dr. Peyton now drinks her first sip of whiskey.
“You complete piece of shit.” Murphy’s knuckles pop. “What did you do to me?”
“Look, you can keep counting. You can snap this big boy’s neck, then kill me and kill Dr. Peyton any way you please. But if you walk out that door?” Thompson locks eyes with Murphy. “You’re going to die.”
“Well then.” Murphy keeps his head on the barrel of the gun, rolling, tilting his face toward Thompson. “Listening ears are on.”
Thompson grins. “It’s real simple.”
Murphy twists the gun away from the guard. Flicks it across the room, then cracks him over the head with the whiskey bottle. In a single move, Murphy pulls his Glock away from the guard’s belt before his body hits the carpet.
Light on the sights turns green.
“New plan.” Murphy presses the barrel between Thompson’s eyes. “Dr. Peyton and I have a drink downstairs. She seems slightly less full of shit than you. Besides…”
He nods toward the bottle spilling whiskey into the guard’s face.
“This room sucks now.”
Chapter 12
The hotel bar is a monument to money and those with money who enjoy the drink.
Light bounces off the endless hanging glass and chrome that stretches up to an unseen ceiling somewhere in heaven. The aggressively attractive staff is dressed in black tie no matter the day or the time. A picture window frames a normally gorgeous view of the park. Today, it shows the picture of growing unrest outside the hotel.
Dr. Peyton and Murphy sit at a large, circular booth fit for six.
Murphy picked a spot in the white leather across from her. One that’s far enough away for her to feel comfortable, but still close enough to be heard over the smooth electronic ambient beats cascading from unseen sources.
Whiffs of sizzling steak drift in from the restaurant just off the bar. The smells draw him back. Not sure to what, but the sights, sounds and smells do take him to a better place.
Toward happiness, even.
The waitress jolts him out from his thoughts, dropping off two whiskeys—neat.
Murphy didn’t bother telling her what brand, only requesting the most expensive the bar has to offer. He doesn’t particularly care. Murphy isn’t completely sure if he enjoys the high-end or the cheap stuff. This is more about the size of the bill that’s headed toward the Texan sitting at the bar. He waves to Thompson and the large man who once bravely guarded the hotel room’s door, but now sits with his pulsing head wrapped in a bar towel full of ice.
“Thompson is an impossible human being, no question,” Dr. Peyton says. “But with you, he’s being an asshole on purpose.”
“Adorable.”
“All of this is part of testing you. All of it. Seeing how you perform out in the real world. Seeing how you responded at the run-down motel room, contrasting that with this high-end hotel, and also your interactions while working at that bar. Studying how you reacted to Thompson pushing your buttons. Monitoring those reactions. These are the things we cannot replicate in a lab. Part of you responds to things differently than the other side of you.”
“You enjoying this? Because I’m not.”
“Thompson’s right.” Dr. Peyton takes a sip, keeping her eyes on Murphy. Uneasiness noticeably present. “We don’t really have time to burn. Like an answer from you.”
Are you with us?
Like he has a choice.
“Let’s make the words count then. I have a few questions, as you might imagine.” Murphy downs his glass. Circles a finger for more. “There’s the umbrella topic
of what the fuck, but we’ll put a pin in that one. Let’s start with a softball. What the hell did he mean by I was going to die if I walked out the door?”
“Okay.” She takes another sip, chooses her words. “We were in the final stages with you, before the escape, a stage that was meant to last weeks, perhaps months, but definitely not days.”
Murphy softly taps his finger on the wood of the table.
Patience fading.
Stabbing stare.
“Like I said, we didn’t know what you’d do out in the world, okay? Thompson called it releasing a grizzly into an orphanage. And to be perfectly honest, you didn’t do so great in the early tests. So…” She sips again. “We installed a fail-safe of sorts.”
“And that is?”
The waitress drops off a new drink for Murphy.
“There’s a small, microscopic device installed at the base of your skull. Advanced nanotech detonation tech that can be activated if we ever—”
“Need to blast out the back of my head.” Murphy downs the second drink and circles for a third. “If or when I become an unnecessary evil.”
She nods.
“Sweet baby balls,” Murphy says.
“Such a bad idea putting whiskey in the room.” Dr. Peyton shakes her head. “Thompson’s, for the record.”
“Best idea he’s ever had.” Murphy shifts gears. “How did they get my brain? How does that happen? I mean how’d the big bad CIA get me into the ones that escaped?”
“Not as simple as uploading one personality to another.” She considers, then motions for another drink as well. “It’s more than complicated.”
“Talk to me like I’m five then.”
“Like I said before, we instituted a remapping of neural pathways.”
“Give me the protein, Doc.”
“We had access to your files.” She looks for the new drink to arrive “To the work you did in the military and the CIA. Detailed accounts of everything so we would know what questions to ask you. Where to dig.”
“Okay.”
“So, we interviewed you. We did it to understand you better. See how a troubled mind truly works. We recorded you talking about what you were thinking during the things you did. About how killing made you feel. How you mentally processed the pain you inflicted on people. Managing a void where remorse and morality would normally reside.” She takes the glass from the waitress, downing it much like Murphy. “Carefully curated, layered, psychological questions. Hours, perhaps days’ worth of your mind spilled out for us to examine. Careful, detailed questions you answered while we mapped your neural pathways.” She takes a breath. “The protein, as you say, is highly advanced, targeted medication coupled with sleep deprivation, constant repetition of your thoughts layered, for lack of a better term through—”
