by Steven James
“Yeah.” I give her a quick kiss.
“Kiss me and I’ll dislocate your other shoulder,” Kyle tells me. Then he taps a finger thoughtfully against the air. “But at least then you wouldn’t notice the first one so much. So there is that.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Okay, so before I go, I’ve got one for you.”
“You’ve got one?”
“A riddle: I’m twice as old as I used to be when I was half as young as I am now. How old am I?”
For months he’s been trying to trick me with math or logic problems. Doesn’t always work out so well.
“That one’s easy. It would be whatever age you are, so you’re the same as me. Seventeen.”
“Yes. And I’m seriously glad you’re still seventeen and not dead.”
“Yeah.”
“It would have totally ruined my night.”
“Mine too.”
“Text me.”
“I will.”
A little while after they leave, Dad comes home and checks on me.
“I’m good,” I tell him. “Anything serious with that call?”
“Call?”
“The dispatch code. I heard it at the hospital. Was it a suicide?”
“Scarlett Cordova accidentally overdosed on some over the counter drugs.”
Scarlett is a year behind me at school. “Is she alright?”
“She will be. Gave everyone a scare, though.”
“How do they know?”
He looks at me curiously. “How do they know what?”
“You said she accidentally OD’ed. How do they know it was an accident?”
“There were three other kids there with her when it happened. It was during some kind of drinking game. Her parents were gone. Good thing she’s alright. Lucky girl.”
“There’s a lot of that going around tonight.”
“A lot of what?”
“Luck.”
“I guess maybe there is.”
After telling me one more time how thankful he is that I’m okay, he heads to his room and I climb into bed, hoping that even with the aching shoulder I’ll be able to get some rest.
Instead, I find myself caught up thinking about who that boy might have been and what the blur might mean.
He’d reached out to me, just like the girls in my earlier blurs had done.
It’d been too late to save them.
Maybe if we were lucky one more time, it wouldn’t be too late to save him.
CHAPTER SIX
THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS
12 MILES OUTSIDE OF GATLINBURG, TENNESSEE
Dr. Waxford unlocked the gate, swung it to the side, and turned onto the dirt road that, by design, had no sign on it.
After locking the gate behind him, he drove the two miles up to the research facility that the Department of Defense had recently renovated for him.
He parked, then went to the front door and placed his hand on the vein recognition reader to verify his identity.
Vascular biometrics, or palm vein recognition, is even more accurate than retinal scanners or fingerprints. And, since blood flow is required, the hand has to be attached to the arm for the reader to identify you, so it’s nearly impossible to fake.
You couldn’t just cut off someone’s hand to get their fingerprints or remove an eyeball to use in a retinal scanner—both things Henrik Poehlman had done to people in the past when the circumstances dictated.
An unpleasant business.
The door swung open and Adrian passed through the lobby, entering one of the long, narrow hallways interspersed with research rooms on either side.
Well, to his mind they were research rooms; to the men inside, they were solitary confinement cells.
Ten were currently occupied. More would eventually be filled as renovations were completed on the Estoria Inn’s third and fourth floors.
Though it was the middle of the night, Adrian didn’t mind being called in. Actually, he preferred coming in at this time. After meeting with Henrik, he would stay and get some work done on the new drug he was developing.
The oversight committee’s meeting was coming up in less than two weeks and he needed to verify and quantify his findings before then.
His studies were going to make a profound and lasting difference.
In fact, they would transform the way the entire justice system functioned.
All for the greater good.
All in the name of providing appropriate punishment to those who deserved it.
He approached room 113, where he kept the man who’d killed eight people in the northwoods of Wisconsin.
Adrian paused by the door and peered through the one-way mirror.
Despite the time of night, the bright fluorescent lights in the subject’s room were on as part of his sleep deprivation therapy.
The design of the room was based on the “white torture” techniques perfected by the Iranians.
The subject is placed in a completely white room. He’s dressed entirely in white, served white food on a white plate. No colors. No exterior windows. No sounds.
The sensory deprivation and isolation help distort the passage of time.
Using these techniques you can get someone to break without beating him, without waterboarding him, without inflicting any physical harm on him at all.
Not that Adrian was necessarily against those things when they were justified, but they weren’t always necessary.
Not when you had other, less intrusive but just as effective means at your disposal.
The glass on the other side was chipped, but not cracked.
During the hours when this man wasn’t medicated, he’d tried desperately to break the mirror to get free, but the glass was far too thick for that.
In fact, Adrian had provided the subject with a steel chair—white, of course—just to see how he would use it to try to escape. All part of his research while he tracked the downward spiral of the man’s mental ability.
Rather than removing all hope of escape, Adrian found it more effective to create the illusion that getting free was a possibility. This kept the subjects’ mental capability intact and it allowed for a deeper emotional letdown when he found himself unsuccessful in his efforts to get away.
Some people might have claimed that it was cruel to taunt the subjects like that, to provide them with an object that, at first glance, appeared helpful for an escape, but turned out to be useless in the end. To Adrian, however, it wasn’t a way to taunt the men, but simply a way to evaluate how the different treatment strategies affected their mental states.
And it was far less cruel than what these men had done to their victims.
Now, Adrian observed subject #832145 staring into the corner of the room, muttering to himself.
Curious, he turned on the audio feed from the room to find out what the man was saying.
Something about a boy and blood. It sounded rambling and incoherent, but it was all being recorded. He would analyze it later.
He might have to monitor things to make sure this man didn’t slip too far into madness.
After you lose all touch with reality you’re no longer aware of the break. You think you’re fine and that everyone else is crazy. There is relief. Until then, though, things can be very terrifying.
And, really, that’s what Adrian was going for.
Terror.
Suffering.
Justice.
In fact, a continual recognition of their mental states, of their situation, was essential.
It was a vital aspect of the punishment our legal system strove for.
Subject #832145 would be in solitary confinement here for decades, perhaps for the rest of his life, and because of the treatment he was receiving, it would seem like much, much longer than that.
All at once, the man turned and looked at the one-way mirror as if he could see Adrian on the other side. With the whites of his eyes completely dyed black with Henrik’s special t
attoo ink, it looked like two holes had been drilled into his head.
He hissed, and then went back to talking to himself.
The subject couldn’t get out of that room and there was no way for him to know that anyone was watching, but still, Adrian found himself taking a slight step backward.
Of course he was safe, though. The lock on this door was electronically controlled and could only be opened from inside a secure room down the hall.
As he was reminding himself of that, he got a text from Henrik: I’m on the lower level. By the fly room.
There was no cell reception up here in this remote part of the mountains, but since uninterrupted communication was so vital for them, Adrian and Henrik used radios and advanced satellite phones that even allowed them to text and to have video chats.
All paid for by the Pentagon, which had a vested interest in their work.
After one more curious look at subject #832145, Adrian continued past the kitchen and descended the stairwell to the rooms in the basement.
This is where most of the actual research took place.
Henrik stood at the end of the hall waiting outside the room containing the Tabanidae, more commonly known as horse flies, or deer flies.
Painful bites but not deadly.
No poison, no venom, just torn skin.
Then, once they’ve scored the flesh, they suck out the blood that pools into the wound.
Adrian kept ten thousand or so in there—even with the computer analysis that monitored their daily population fluctuations, it was obviously difficult to keep track of the exact number.
Insects process the passage of time differently than larger species, like humans, do.
When he originally proposed his funding request, Adrian had compared things to a science fiction or action movie slow-motion sequence during which the bullets or knives are flying at the hero and he’s able to watch them slice through the air and easily step out of their way before they hit him.
During the initial meeting with General Vanessa Gibbons, Adrian had told her that to the Tabanidae, the world appears to pass by at a much slower rate than it does for Homo sapiens. “That’s why it’s so hard to catch or swat flies—because they have, for all practical purposes, more time to respond and escape.”
“And you can replicate this effect in people? This morphing of time?”
“Yes. And I’m steadily improving my techniques.”
By better understanding how flies and other insects processed time, Adrian was able to design ways—through drugs, sleep deprivation, isolation, and environmental manipulation—to make it seem like more time was passing for his subjects than was actually the case.
That was the key to his research.
That was the ultimate goal.
All for the greater good.
He passed the surgery room containing the intracranial electrodes and brainwave sensors, then the room where the tattooing took place, and came to Henrik.
He was an imposing man, broad shouldered and thick chested. As a former police officer he’d seen too many guilty people get off on technicalities. He shared Adrian’s ardor for justice.
“I like this room.” Henrik was staring through the window at the dark swarm. “I’d have to say it’s my favorite one here.”
“Even more than where you do the tattooing?”
“That’s a close second.” He tapped the glass. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be stuck in there.”
“You could always find out. The door is right over there.”
“I’m not that curious.”
“Who would be? So, you texted me that you wanted to talk.”
“We lost Zacharias.”
“Where was he last seen?”
“Philadelphia.”
“Hmm. That’s his third visit there.”
Henrik finally shifted his attention from the flies to Adrian. “My people had eyes on him when he entered an office building downtown, but he must have slipped out another door because they never saw him leave.”
“And what about those young men and women who have the hallucinations?”
“Besides Daniel and Petra, it’s not clear who else they’ve located. Although, if our sources are correct, there are two others out there.”
“Four in all.”
“Yes.”
“It’s been six months since—”
“Yes, but Zacharias has skills and whoever’s funding him is good at hiding their tracks.”
“And Petra?”
“I have two people in place. They’re ready to take her whenever you give the word.”
Normally, Adrian wouldn’t have resorted to such extreme measures, but everything depended on continuing this research, and once they’d procured the senator’s daughter, they would have the leverage to make sure that happened.
“Alright,” Adrian said. “I’ll let you know when to have them move in. Meanwhile, do whatever it takes to find Zacharias.”
“I will.”
“And see what businesses have offices in that building in Philadelphia. I want to know if any of them might be funneling money to him.”
“We looked into it, but I’ll check again.”
Adrian nodded. “Good.”
“By the way, I understand we have a new arrival coming in soon?”
“We’ll be processing him on the sixteenth.”
“Will you be trying out the Telpatine on him?”
“In time. Until then, keep your needle ready. I’ll make sure we have enough ink to do both eyes.”
“I always enjoy that part.”
“I know you do.”
After Henrik left, Adrian observed the Tabanidae flying into the glass, instinctively trying to get out.
Such a powerful thing, instinct.
Always, always compelling organisms to try to be free.
Just like the subjects with their steel chairs.
The readings on the counter beside the door noted a dip in the flies’ population.
He tapped at the keys and lowered a slab of rotting beef into the room.
Let them feed.
Let them breed.
The maggots would rejuvenate their numbers.
The flies swarmed onto the meat, covering it almost instantly, just like they did with the subjects when he locked them in there, unclothed, as part of their treatment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SATURDAY, JUNE 8
I wake up slowly, caught in a wrestling match with my dream, trying to will myself free from its clutches.
Trying and failing.
It’s as if I’m reliving last night’s accident over and over again.
It’s all there: the boy, the truck, the headlights slicing through the forest.
But in my dream I’m surrounded by a thick blanket of darkness that comes alive and turns into thousands of bats, all winging their way around me, their leathery wings and clawed feet brushing and scratching across my face, my arms, my hands.
I duck and swing at them, trying to get them to leave me alone. But they crawl on me, get caught in my hair, bite at my skin. I cry out. And then all at once, they’re gone.
It’s pitch black, yet somehow I can see that boy standing in the road.
It’s a dream.
It follows its own rules.
Then I’m sprinting toward him.
But I’m too late.
Here in my nightmare, the truck hits him. There’s a sickening crunch and a spray of blood, and then a lifeless mass in the road.
Suddenly, I’m there beside him, kneeling over his broken body.
A few bats return and stalk across his face as he stares with unblinking eyes at the night. I brush them away and as they scatter, he tilts his head toward me.
His hollow stare unsettles me.
Even though someone with his injuries couldn’t possibly have survived, he whispers to me, his voice thick and wet from the blood dribbling from his mouth, “He never meant to go. It all began right here.
Follow the bats. Find the truth.”
I tell myself that it’s not real, that none of this is real, that all I need to do is wake up and all of this will disappear.
It’s all a dream.
Just a dream.
Then the scene plays itself out again.
But this time, at the end, the boy’s words become living things. They take form and turn into bats themselves, circling up past me into the night—fanged, newly formed creatures escaping into the darkness.
And at last I’m able to stir, to free myself.
I open my eyes.
Instead of sitting bolt upright in bed like people do in movies but almost never do in real life, I lie there taking short, shallow breaths, trying to relax the tight, anxious muscles in my chest.
Sweat drenches the neckline of my T-shirt.
I blink against the sharp morning light cutting through my window.
The images recede like a tide washing back from shore, but the emotions don’t go away and I feel a deep, primal weight of sadness and loss.
For the boy, for myself. I’m not sure which.
My room is on the second floor, and as I get out of bed I can hear Mom downstairs in the kitchen putting dishes away.
I check the time.
8:02.
Both my shoulder and ankle are stiff, so I opt for some of the meds the doctor gave me.
As sore as I am, it’s awkward getting dressed, but I manage to change clothes and snug up my left arm into the sling. Then I head downstairs toward the living room.
Mom must hear me coming, because while I’m still on my way down the steps, she emerges from the kitchen, drying her hands nervously on a dishtowel.
“Daniel. How are you?”
“I’m alright. What time did you get in?”
“Just after three. Are you really alright or are you just saying that?”
“Nicole asked me almost exactly the same thing last night.”
“That’s because we both know you pretty well.”
“I’m fine, Mom. Really.”
She wrings that towel in her hands. “Your father had to head to work. He wants you to call him this morning after breakfast.”
“Okay.”
She eyes me for another moment as if she’s not sure if she should believe me or not that I’m okay. Then she finally puts on a smile, joins me on the stairs, and offers me a hug.
