by Schow, Ryan
Enzo.
He liked that. He’d been thinking of it for the last few hours and it had a certain ring to it: Enzo Holland. When he looked up its meaning, he was pleased to learn the name was Old German and it meant giant. In addition to this being the name of the founder of Ferrari, it was also the name of a king in the 13th century Sardinia.
The name Enzo signified three things for him: strength, royalty and class.
“Dr. Enzo Holland,” he said out loud. The way it flowed so seamlessly off his tongue, it was a natural fit. And now it was his.
From that moment on, he was done with Wolfgang Gerhard. The man behind that name, and the name itself, would be no more. He was dead and it felt good.
Enzo Holland.
4
After arranging for a private jet, scheduling transportation from a small airfield in San Francisco to the tiny airport in Dulce, and making travel conditions for the comatose Abby, he took a scalding hot bath, drank some Scotch, then took his cat to bed. The animal curled up in his armpit and went to sleep. Its throaty purr was enough to soothe Holland’s restless soul. In less than a day, he reminded himself, his problem with the real Abby was going to be Dr. Frederick Delgado’s problem.
All he had to do was figure out what to do with Rebecca, then maybe see what he could do about Alice. The five year old was the epitome of self-reliant. The thing about a girl like Alice, a child, was if she wasn’t able to care for herself, he’d have to put her down. While he watched her sleep on the couch, he thought about it. About how to end her.
She was too dangerous anyway.
In bed, he winked in and out of sleep, nodding off into broken dreams, barely hanging on to the waking world. In that wavering space between consciousness and the dream world, he decided he didn’t need to kill Alice. He could merely put her in cold storage if need be. Or better yet, he could move the fake Abby from the lab into the San Francisco apartment and give the key to Brayden and Netty. They could baby-sit the fake Abby, Rebecca and the babies, and then Alice could do whatever she wanted so long as she didn’t kill any of them. And with that, he was finally pulled under where he slept so sound, he didn’t even dream.
5
Enzo Holland’s private flight to Dulce was quick and uneventful. The next few hours, however, were anything but that. That’s why having the proper amount of bourbon in his system was mandatory. It was a drink-once-then-drink-again kind of affair. Watching Abby sit strapped into her chair slumped over, permanently unconscious, he coughed out a bitter laugh.
This stupid little girl, he thought.
He took another drink, then said, “All the trouble you’ve caused me, and here I am going into the bowels of hell to save your life. What a laughable pair we make.”
He survived the SS, Adolf Hitler and World War Two. After Auschwitz, he was thrown into a prison camp where his own death was a forgone conclusion. He was a Nazi war criminal for heaven’s sake. One of the worst. And for a time, he was one of the most hunted men in the world. After he was smuggled out under the cover of the Red Cross, he survived the jungles of South America, employment with the CIA and eventually developed a cure to death. All these things he endured, all these things he triumphed over, and he was afraid of Dulce AFB?
This distraught stomach he had, it didn’t make sense. The apprehension he felt…where was this coming from? Rumors and conjecture? He’d heard the stories over the years, about Dulce, but the way conspiracy theorists can sometimes embellish on the already dark undertones of the truth, the impossible undertones, they were usually just that—conspiracy theorists.
What bothered him was that most conspiracies were founded on elements of the truth: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Oklahoma City Bombing, 9/11, the stock market crash of 2008, ISIS and their beheadings. How much truth was there in the Dulce rumors? He tried to put it out of his head, enjoy the flight.
So it was more booze. A fifteen-minutes-without-drinking break.
Then even more booze still.
He stared out the private jet’s small window, then back at Abby. That unrelenting bitch. “You never could just mind your own business,” he said. “Why couldn’t you just mind your own business?”
He flung the last drops of bourbon at her unconscious body. The amber liquid splashed her face. He almost threw the glass at her, too, but how would he explain that to Delgado? A huge part of him wanted to open the emergency hatch and toss her body into the unknown, let her rot where she landed.
The heat of rage filled him. He pulled his gaze away from her. Stared out the window for the remainder of the trip. And he drank.
When the plane touched down in Dulce, New Mexico, he was met by a Native American man in a cab. The driver’s face was like a worn leather seat, his black hair long and pulled back into a ponytail. A silver and turquoise clip held it in place. When he looked at Abby, he paused a minute.
“I’m a doctor,” he said, “and she is my patient.”
The cabbie just shrugged his sloped shoulders, as if to say, “Whatever man.”
“Help me get her into the cab,” Holland said. His voice slurred a little bit. The Indian grabbed her ankles while Holland took her under her arms. Together they hustled her out to the cab and put her in the back seat.
“What’s wrong with her?” the Indian asked. That his skin and breath smelled like sweat and alcohol was a cliché, but the truth. Alcoholism ran deep in some tribes, but he wasn’t one to judge. After all, he just nursed the mother of all hangovers by drinking more booze and getting drunk.
At the gas station, which was a stone’s throw away from the airfield, Holland was met by a man in a full-sized Chevy Blazer with dirt all over the windows, rusted brown paint and balding tires.
The guy got out of his truck, smiling, and he just looked at him. He was white, tall, and dressed exactly like a scientist: tennis shoes, super outdated jeans, ugly short sleeve button up shirt. This idiot, this grinning clown, Holland knew right away he wasn’t your everyday scientist. Most guys like this, if they cured AIDS or cancer, or discovered something they could name after themselves, they smiled the jovial way this guy was smiling. The scientists he knew, they never smiled for no reason.
“Forgive me if I’m star struck,” he announced. He reached out a meaty, soft hand and said, “Dr. Frederick Delgado, pleased to meet you.”
He took the doctor’s hand and said, “Dr. Enzo Holland, formerly Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard.”
“Formerly Dr. Josef Mengele.”
“You’re taking this serious, right?” Holland said, annoyed.
“Of course, of course. It’s just, you don’t get the chance to say hello to a hundred and four year old legend who looks…Jesus, thirty-years old? Man you look good! Pretty, too. No offense. I’m not a homo or anything.”
Technically he was a homo sapien, but Holland kept that to himself.
Delgado had to be in his late forties, and a genius, like him. But how was he this happy? It was not something he imagined anyone would feel if forced to spend their days working in an underground lab. And at Dulce AFB, of all places.
Holland and the cabbie hauled Abby off the back seat of the cab and put her flopping body into the back seat of the Blazer. When he was clear of Delgado’s sight, Holland slapped Abby several times, thinking she might wake up. If she did, on her own, he wouldn’t need Delgado anymore, and the two of them could just turn around and not be here.
She never even stirred.
“I want to make a deal with you,” Holland said, popping out of the truck. “I won’t ask you about aliens and cross species genetic manipulation and the hundreds of bodies rumored to be in cryo-stasis if you promise never to use that goddamn name again.”
Delgado’s spirit dampened.
“Which name?”
“You know the one,” Holland said. “I hate that name. Auschwitz is a closed door, the Nazi rule is over, and the Schutzstaffel are forgotten. What you people don’t get is
that seventy years have passed since the fall of Germany and I am not the sadistic beast I once was. Josef Mengele is dead. Science is my trade now. Genetics is my specialty.”
Delgado tried to save face, but at the same time, Holland knew he would owe the man a favor. Until he learned the price he was paying, Holland tried to shut his mouth. Not say anything offensive. It’s just, goddamn his head was swirling! And the sun was practically blinding him.
“What are you working on now?” Delgado asked. “This new you?”
“Cross-linking DNA between humans to make them a healthier, more perfect species. Basically I can heal all disease. You just have to become someone else for me to do it.”
“Ah,” Delgado said, smiling, “the Arian brotherhood lives on.”
Holland looked at the cab driver when Delgado said this. The cabbie shook his head. Pissed off at Delgado’s indiscretion, Holland went over, paid the Indian in twenties and said, “I want to apologize for my colleague.” He took the cash then got back on Highway 64 heading out of town.
“The Third Reich was primitive, with antiquated ideas,” Holland said. “Dr. Delgado, I am not a man of racial discrimination. Not anymore, anyway. I’m a man of science. A man with the means and the testicular fortitude to rapidly advance our species on a genetic level.”
“Hitler said the same thing.”
“Fuck Hitler.”
He laughed, then Holland laughed.
“Let’s go,” Delgado said as he climbed into his Blazer.
Holland followed.
Delgado fired up the Chevy, which rumbled loud and hard. The vibration sat in his shins, which eventually rattled everything up to his brains. Delgado slapped the truck in gear and got on Highway 64, which was unimpressive for a highway.
“Cracked motor mount, I think,” he said when he saw Holland’s gritted teeth. “Don’t worry, it ain’t far from here. Plus it’s only the idle that’s hard.”
The inside of the truck smelled like dust and cigarettes. Looking around, at the Chevy’s worn black leather and stained carpets, the truck was like everything else in Dulce: a damn relic of the past. Holland rolled down the window to let fresh air in, then looked in the backseat at Abby. She could be dead the way she looked.
“Dulce was basically built from the hollowed out remains of a mesa,” Delgado told him over the rumble of the engine. “A subterranean nuclear blast in the 1960’s. That’s how they got it into the earth. All this was government funded and conducted under the umbrella project Plowshare. They called this particular operation Gassbuggy. Not that I know exactly what in the blue fuck that means.”
With every sentence he said, Delgado would turn and look over at Holland. But only out of one eye. He was more like a tour guide to the Apocalypse than the foremost expert in the mind sciences and traumatic brain injury.
Holland was wondering, did he actually just say “blue fuck?” Is that the kind of thing he said while operating on…whoever the hell it was they were operating on down in that hole of a lab?
“Are you for real?” Holland mumbled. What he wanted more than anything right now was a hot shower and a cup of coffee, black.
Delgado looked at him sideways, like he didn’t hear him, and said, “Say what?”
“Nothing.”
It wasn’t long before they were near an unofficial entrance to what looked like the face of a mountain. He put an ID card to a reader, and the robotic metal arm blocking the entrance opened up. They drove into the mesa.
The second they were in the mesa, all natural light fell away and was replaced by a long network of overhead lighting.
“Places like this everywhere. Not just one entrance inside. The whole place is like some kind of hive, you know? Got a big old chute right up the middle for…you know…”
“Don’t talk about aliens,” Holland warned. “That was our deal.”
Delgado waved a hand at him, like the request was ridiculous, but he’d humor him anyway.
Some conspiracies Holland could handle, but start talking about aliens and something in him refused to listen. It wasn’t boredom or disbelief. It was the prospect of other life forms sharing the earth with regular humans that bothered him immensely.
“Not saying nuthin ’bout nuthin,” Delgado replied. “Just saying it’s there’s all.”
Holland didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he let it out. He was thinking, the sooner I get out of here, the better. True to the rumors, however, the roadways heading inside the mountain, they were giant tunnels with walls shined to the consistency of glass.
“Whole thing’s built like a wagon wheel. Five spokes go out on all sides. There’s labs, offices, housing…you name it. Imagine the Pentagon, but inside this mountain. And then imagine it going six really deep levels down and you get the gist of what we have here.”
Already the air inside the tunnel was cool. They weren’t doing more than twenty miles an hour, but they could go a lot faster if they wanted to. Holland couldn’t stop staring at the glassy walls.
“Dulce contracted out one of NASA’s tunneling machines decades ago. Bored this whole place out. Part of the magic is those things left behind polished walls. It feels just the way it looks, like glass. You get used to the shine.”
“What exactly do you do here?” Holland asked.
“Basically, I picked up where you left off. Mind control has advanced from the organic process of trauma-induced behavior modification to a more technotronic era. To a large degree my focus is on synthetic reproduction of certain brain functions. But having complete control over a subject’s every physical function is still a year or more away.”
“So, you’re using computers in mind control? Is that true?”
“Good question,” he said, turning left when he could have gone straight. “The way computer programs can record your voice in zeros and ones, translate it and generate perfect vocal reproduction, state-of-the-art computer programs can now read brain waves and make the same translation. Moving an arm, it’s just a signal from the brain to the arm. Blinking, farting, screwing. All just signals.”
“So you’re merging computers with the brain then?”
“Hell, yes,” he said, slapping the steering wheel. His excitement wasn’t infectious. “We’re hardwired man!”
“You haven’t gone remote yet?”
“Well sure. We got brain chips. But we’re talking ’bout complete remote control takeover of a body. That’s the goal, man. See, down on level six, the al—, I mean the”—and here he glanced over at Holland and made finger quotes—“alternative scientists, they found ways to peel apart unseen layers of a person. This is next level shit to you and me, but to the ‘scientists’ down there, they can even peel out the layer you and me call a soul. It’s called soul-scalping. So basically now we got organic robots. Not even clones, man. Empty vessels. So my division, the Mind Sciences Division on Level Four, it’s us trying to hook them up to a computer to give us nearly full functionality of the body. Once we get that down, we can go fully remote.”
“You have to be kidding,” Holland said. It was worse than he thought. The skin on the back of his scalp prickled, and for a minute, he thought about jumping out of the truck and walking out of there.
“Ain’t kidding at all. Take this girl for example. You said she died, right? But you brought her back to life?”
“Yeah.”
“How long was she dead again? An hour, two?”
“Days,” Holland said.
Delgado whipped his head over and said, “This one ain’t got a soul, man!” He had the look like he was hopped up on drugs. Grinning like a fool, he raised both eyebrows in hard arches.
“You don’t know that.”
“So how’s she even alive? And why isn’t she awake? You got yourself a real live zombie!” he said, slapping the steering wheel again. “Hot damn!”
“When was the last time you had a mental health evaluation?” Holland said. He finally decided to let the alcohol do the ta
lking.
“Every six months. I’m fine. It’s just, this place, you can’t be all puckered up in your butthole, dude. You have to chill, relax, just let all the weird shit breeze on by, less you want to go”—and here he made the universal sign for crazy by circling his forefinger around his ear—“you know, bat shit fuckin’ looney.”
Holland was thinking, it’s a little too late for that.
“I think I know what’s going on with your girl, but I don’t work in TBI anymore. It isn’t my foremost specialty.”
“Then why am I here?” Holland asked, getting pissed off.
“Because all that TBI crap—it’s old news down here. Our ‘scientists’ down on six, they’re light years ahead of that. Man, you want to know what’s wrong with her, give me a day or two to contact the doctor—”
“The doctor?”
“Yeah, that’s what we all call him. He’s like nothing you’ll ever meet.”
“Well I can’t wait to meet him—”
“Oh, you won’t. He doesn’t exist, but he does. I mean, you don’t know how he does the things he does, and even you would have a hard time understanding it with your open mind. But society? Oh man, if they got wind of this? Talk about your major conspiracies!”
“So what, you just want me to leave her here with you and go?”
“Gonna need that favor, man. No telling how long getting her right will take. Maybe a week if it’s just me, maybe two weeks. Difficult to say. The doctor, though? He’ll get her sorted out quick. If he agrees. Which he might not.” The look in Delgado’s eyes made Holland’s bowels coil. He felt sick, thinking of leaving Abby with some strange doctor, or whatever the hell he was, to diagnose something not even Holland could figure out.
“What’s the favor you need?”
“You’ll know when I need it, and not a minute before. That’s how it works, man.”
“If I won’t know until it’s needed, how will I know if I can even grant you such a favor?”
