by Schow, Ryan
Maybe they were still happening.
As a defense attorney, looking for signs of abuse was second nature in many of her cases. She looked for scars, bruising and evidence of untreated injuries that healed wrong. With Brice, she watched the movement of her fingers and her arms; she studied the line of the woman’s nose wondering if it had ever been punched and broken. In spite of being exceptionally pale, what Christine could see of the woman’s skin and bones looked to be in perfect order.
She stuck out her hand and, with a hollowed stomach and an awfulness so emotional it was effecting her physically, said, “Hello, I’m Christine Kennedy.”
With her thousand yard stare, the woman simply looked at Christine’s hand then, nearly unresponsive, said, “Brice O’Brien. Mr. Bundy said you would provide specific details necessary to our arrangement, as well as the initial deposit.”
In a cheap leather briefcase she bought this morning, she was carrying several recent photos of Savannah Van Duyn, as well as Atticus Van Duyn’s residential address and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in stacks of hundreds, fifties and twenties. Just holding all that information on Atticus’s child wrecked her so deep she felt cut off from any road back. What she was doing was permanent and terrifying, and it would most likely condemn her to hell for all eternity.
“As you know, Ms. O’Brien, I’m one of the managing members at the Virginia Corporation, and though I know your services from the human inventory your various international offices supply our group, Warwick did not have the time to tell me about this particular branch of Monarch Enterprise’s service.” Lying through her teeth—something she perfected years ago—she said, “He said you would satisfy me with the more intimate details of your operation.”
The woman paused to consider this the same way a computer pauses long enough to compile and compute data for a given task. Then, as if the uncanny, inhuman glitch never happened at all, Brice offered an unconvincing smile and—in perfect Stepford fashion—said, “Please, follow me.”
The two women walked down a featureless concrete corridor reminiscent of high rent self-storage warehouses. The clicking of hers and Brice’s heels echoed in the stagnant air. Brice stopped at a large door, punched in a four-digit key code, then opened the door and walked inside. Christine stepped inside as a network of offensive fluorescent lights illuminated the space. The rectangular room was at least thirty feet long by twenty feet wide and was covered wall to wall by industrial looking coffins. And not the decorative ones. These were just boxes with numbers spray painted on the sides. The walk space between them wasn’t generous. On the wall beside the light switch was a hanging clipboard with names and times. On closer inspection, Christine saw the names corresponded with the coffin numbers and what she was looking at was a feeding schedule.
Oh God, a feeding schedule?
“This is where we store them,” Brice said. “It helps keep the amnesic walls in place.”
“Store who?”
Brice shot her a quizzical look, almost like the woman was receiving error messages in her mind. Christine flinched, her mouth unable to move. Brice walked to the nearest box, unclasped the lid, which sat on hidden hinges, and opened the coffin. Inside lay a small girl, her eyes wide open, red and vacant. She couldn’t be more than thirteen. Her mouth gave the slightest spastic twitch. Her cracked lips parted ever so slightly, but then withered shut without remark. Like she had a treat she was unwilling to give up. Christine smelled urine. She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl, or stop the look of fresh horror on her face. Then, when Christine lifted her gaze to take in what appeared to be dozens more coffin-sized boxes just like the girl’s, the truth dawned on her: there were live human beings stuffed into every single one of them. No, not human beings. Children.
“It’s not time yet, sweetheart,” Brice said to the girl in a voice that sounded different, kinder, so very, very human. A tear formed in the girl’s eye, drifted down her pale cheek. Brice closed the lid, clasped it shut. “Box therapy supports dissociation by keeping the host’s multiple-personalities separate, which is critical to creating and sustaining untraceable assassins.”
“Untraceable?”
“In the early fifties the OSS, now the CIA, was working on creating soldiers who would not break under interrogation. They wanted super soldiers. Project BLUEBIRD and Operation ARTICHOKE showed us the best way to be impervious to interrogation was to fracture the mind and create multiple personalities who could operate independently of each other.”
“I thought multiple personalities didn’t exist anymore.”
“Just because someone says something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean they’re right.”
“They can be created then?”
“When a person is broken through intense, inhumane trauma, the mind’s natural response is to create a new personality to better handle the trauma. Although this is commonly known as multiple personality disorder, the proper classification is Dissociative Identity Disorder. For our purposes, one personality is cultivated to commit the crime while another is programmed to emerge under interrogation and remember none of it. Neither knows the other exists, so no secrets are revealed. Not with a polygraph machine, not under torture, not ever.”
“So you’re trying to break them first, and then—”
“Shape the new personality to our liking.”
“How can you guarantee a new personality will appear? Or that you can shape it to meet your requirements?”
“That’s a longer discussion than I’m willing to have today. Just know this is old technology long perfected. Our government has had it for more than sixty years now. Prior to World War Two, the mind sciences were developed and catalogued primarily by Russian and German scientists.”
“Okay,” she said, dragging out the word. Then: “Tell me about our boy.”
“We’re preparing him now.”
In another room half the size, Christine was taken to the shirtless boy. He was a teenager, skinny but strong looking. The brain-teaser of a room they housed him in flustered her eyes. Wall to wall, including the floor and the ceiling, there were black and white checkerboard tiles. She tried to shake off the dizzying ache, fought to focus her eyes. Sitting in silence in the center of the room, strapped to a metal chair bolted to the floor, was the boy.
He wore oversized white underwear, his back to her, his bare feet planted firmly on the floor. Leather restraints, much like they used in the days of the electric chair, kept him from escaping.
On both his right and his left were separate DVD players. Wires ran from the DVD players to what looked like a pair of virtual reality glasses. Sitting on top of the DVD players were two separate iPod players, one for each ear. Each of his ears had an ear bud inserted. To Christine it looked like Alice in Wonderland meets Hellraiser. She couldn’t fathom what was happening to the boy in that moment, but every thought felt more nauseating than the last.
“On his right side, he is watching a rapid-moving series of violent images and listening to a collection of classical music. His right ear hears calmness and beauty and he associates it with images of violence and death. On his left side, he is receiving images of nature, serenity, beauty, but his ear is aching with the rapid fire beat of heavy metal music. His eye sees nature, but the association is chaos. Violence brings about peace while peace brings about chaos. His mind cannot handle the contrasting images matched with the contrasting genres of music. In this room, this process incites the splitting of the mind. The more complete the division of the brain’s hemispheres, the more stable the separate personalities are. This is just one of many effective tools we use to both break the mind and keep the personalities from integrating.”
“And that’s bad? Integration?”
“We cannot guarantee our services unless our assets can withstand the most invasive of interrogations. This means the walls between the personalities, or the alters, must be impenetrable. If the walls come down, if successful integration occurs, our subjects becom
e useless.”
“Wouldn’t it be best just not to get caught?”
“Yes. But if one of our assets is caught, they must be able to withstand even the worst forms of interrogation, including torture.”
Something didn’t make sense. She was trying to connect the dots, but Christine’s brain couldn’t make the leap. “So how does he know how to manage the different personalities? The boy?”
“There is a conductor alter, an internal program with knowledge of all the alters in the boy’s system. This alter manages the personalities. The program’s name is Gem.”
“Gem?”
“Gem is the conductor alter we use in every one of our children. Even in the boys, Gem is a distinctly female alter. She oversees system operations. She’s our point of contact. She’s not the host personality but the controlling mechanism for the entire system.”
Looking at the boy, seeing just one physical entity, Christine could barely fathom the idea that inside him were what amounted to several different people.
“How many personalities does he have?”
“His specialty is assassinations, so he holds several fully functioning personalities, each created to perform separate but critical tasks, each created to protect the system, and our clients’ anonymity.”
The two of them stepped into the hallway. Brice shut and locked the door behind her, leaving the boy alone with his trauma. The human part of Christine, admittedly a small part of her, couldn’t help feeling bad for the child.
5
“Does it hurt? I mean, is he in pain?”
Christine knew it was a stupid question when she asked it, but she couldn’t stop thinking of the boy. How fragile he looked. How…enslaved.
“He was born into this role in life. Pain is a normal condition.”
“Do you really believe he thinks this kind of treatment is normal?”
She wondered, did he even know he was experiencing something horrific? That it didn’t have to be this way? Was his mind even capable of reaching such a conclusion?
The barrage of questions seemed to render Brice instantly, perfectly still. Almost like a robot whose functions were flipped off by a switch. Startled by the woman’s inhuman reaction, Christine stopped breathing. She blinked hard twice, wondering what tricks her brain was playing on her that this woman could defy humanity in such bold fashion.
Then Brice spoke, her voice tight, her body wrought with tension. “This boy is not programmed to think, therefore he can make no such distinctions. He does not know love, satiation, kindness, safety or friendship, therefore he has nothing to measure his life against. He does not know he is human. Nor does he aspire to be anything other than exactly what he is.”
“And when he’s no longer of use?”
Her expression was as cold as the concrete floors beneath her feet. “We incinerate him, of course.”
Hearing this, bearing witness to Brice’s frightening lack of emotion, and knowing a person can be mentally broken without signs of physical abuse, Christine suddenly, and with horrifying clarity, understood.
“You’re like him, aren’t you?”
Christine instantly regretted asking the question. Then, she tried not to shrink from the haunted look etched upon the woman’s wonderfully sculpted face. She reminded herself she was not in court, this was not a trial and to not push so hard. But she had. One look into Brice’s eyes and she knew she crossed a very uncomfortable line.
Those eyes of hers, they bore a hollowed indifference that could only be described as glacial. Christine was held hostage by the glare. Startled. Needling into her big, prying brain was the notion that this woman wanted to kill her for even thinking such a question, much less giving voice to it.
Christine took a clumsy, involuntary step backwards. She was about to say something when…
“Warwick was smart enough to never ask such questions,” Brice said, her voice a half-octave deeper and monotone.
“Maybe he should have,” she replied, fighting not to sound so small. From her days as a trial lawyer, Christine’s instincts had her combating fear by being brazen. Now it was all she had left. “I’m a curious person. I’ve got curious tendencies, and I won’t apologize for them.”
Brice O’Brien’s eyes were two gaping black holes, two violently still orbs that sucked greedily at the oxygen around Christine’s soul. The pull on the woman’s gaze was palpable, swift and inescapable. Then something in her demeanor shifted, became animated. Life flooded into those otherwise vacant eyes. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, they looked more blue looking than black. And that expression! Christine’s entire body responded with a flash of goose bumps and the fervent need to pee.
A grin materialized from the woman’s slash of a mouth. Like the grin of a rapist, or a serial killer. Where Brice once looked right through her, she now bored her blue eyes into the very depths of Christine’s being. Her mouth moved, and she whispered to no one, “I don’t trust her.”
Her mouth moved again, a different voice, a lower whisper: “None of us do.”
The mouth moved yet again, the voice different, quieter still. “Tell her to go away. He’s coming.”
Louder, now fearful, the mouth said, “No.”
All of this was happening right before Christine’s eyes, like some kind of nightmare puppet show unfolding. Christine bristled with such instinctual terror she could hardly make heads or tails of it. In that moment she felt her bowels start to loosen. Fighting them, she felt her feet backing up on their own. She heard the voice in her mind telling her things had definitely gone wrong.
Something in the woman’s eyes shifted again. Her gaze pinned Christine down with so much weight and heat she was struck with the instinct to run for her life.
Her face and voice stripped bare of emotion, she said to Christine, “We don’t like you.”
Christine’s brain stopped working right. Her eyes absorbed everything, but they failed to interpret what they were seeing with any kind of certainty. She looked over her shoulder. They were alone. Alone!
“Who’s we?” Christine heard herself say. “You said, ‘We don’t like you,’ but there’s just the two of us.”
“Yes.”
“But there’s more,” Christine said. Not a question; more a statement of understanding. “Like the boy, there’s you, but inside you, more personalities exist.”
“Stone neither likes nor trusts you.”
“Who’s Stone?”
“Our Delta alter. He’s in charge of assassinations. He’s eager to speak with you.”
“Gem?” Christine asks, hesitant, scared. Gem, the system’s control alter.
“Yes?”
Oh shit! She’s like the boy!
“That’s okay,” Christine said. The shaking in her heart reached her hands in the form of tremors. She clenched the one not holding the briefcase in order to hide the shaking. “I appreciate the tour, and your hospitality. Here’s the information Warwick asked me to give to you, and the initial deposit.”
Brice didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. Then slowly, ever so slowly, the ends of her mouth formed a creepy grin that never quite reached her eyes.
“Tell her to go,” Brice’s mouth said. “Tell her to go faster.”
There was an urgency in her voice, almost panic, that made Christine set the briefcase on the ground, then turn and walk so fast she was practically jogging. When she burst from the dimness of the converted bunker into the bright, warm sunlight, she kicked off her heels, grabbed them and sprinted for her car, not caring how foolish she might look, or if anyone saw her.
Brand New Bestie
1
Entire days have passed and I’m officially depressed. It’s not the kind of depression I want to take pills for, although Margaret made the suggestion through my father and he told her no more pills no matter what. And it’s not the kind of depression that has my father holding vigil just in case I get too close to a straight razor or a full bottle of aspirin. What I’m suffe
ring from is the kind of depression that comes from not knowing. From being forced to wait for a life-saving decision. It’s the kind of depression that has me chewing through the walls, and treating everyone around me like crap.
Can Gerhard heal me or am I going to die?
Dammit, I need to know!
Twice Margaret has come to see me and twice I wouldn’t let her in my room. Knowing she would try to pick the lock, I stole all the keys to our doors and stashed them in my underwear drawer. Earlier this morning, outside my locked bedroom door, she got insistent so I said, “Your scumbag writer needs his muse, Margaret.” When exactly she left, I wasn’t sure. All I know is I haven’t heard a peep from her in hours and it’s been a freaking blessing.
Netty called a couple of times but she hasn’t come to see me because she wants to spend her final hours with her father. He’s going into federal custody any day now, so she’s kind of a train wreck, which really blows for her since she loves the holidays, especially Christmas and now it will never be the same. Together we’re a steamy mess. Together we’re flammable.
I tried to call Damien last night and this morning, but he’s not calling me back. When I called his house last night around dinner time, Kaitlyn’s mother answered and was polite enough to tell me he was working long hours as an intern at some posh Sacramento law office. Apparently she’s not in an insane asylum. I asked how Kaitlyn was doing and she put the girl on to answer for herself.
