Chronic fear f-2

by Scott Nicholson

  “It all makes sense,” Mark said, and his newfound rationality was even more unsettling than his earlier rage. “You and CRO and the feds get rid of Briggs, who was in everybody’s way and uncontrollable. You take over, and Burchfield ties everything up with a nice bow so it looks like Seethe and Halcyon never happened. And the work goes on without a hitch, except now you’ve got all the backing you ever wanted and you’ve got your test monkey where you can keep an eye on him at all times.”

  “No, Mark, that’s the Seethe talking-”

  “Of course it’s the fucking Seethe talking! That’s what I am. That’s what I do. That’s what you’ve turned me into. You didn’t need a fucking Monkey House, all you needed was a monkey.”

  His roar caused her to shrink away, and she considered opening the door and taking her chances on the grassy shoulder. But she was his only chance. She loved him so much, she could never abandon him when he needed her most.

  Even if he didn’t know it.

  When you loved somebody, you lifted anchor and rode the tsunami with them.

  Mark drove with purpose, the route apparently still clear in his mind although she only dimly recognized the scenery. She wondered how many times he might have driven out here, seeking answers as the lesions in his brain pulled apart all the memories and experiences that had shaped his life and made him Mark Morgan.

  Alexis risked a glance at his profile, the sheen of his moist forehead, his unkempt hair, his curled upper lip. How much of my husband is still left in there?

  He fell silent after his eruption. His mood swings were getting more erratic by the minute. She’d miscalculated terribly. The Halcyon she’d been administering had not been helping him. Instead, it had only masked his deterioration and allowed her the placebo of helpfulness.

  He turned off the highway onto a narrow, crumbling access road. Visible through the surrounding pine trees was a chain-link fence running parallel to the road. It was topped with barbed wire. Alexis strained to see beyond it, but the foliage was too thick.

  Still, she knew they were approaching the Monkey House.

  “I was telling the truth,” she said quietly, trying to sound reasonable.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “If I was working for the government, do you think they’d let you kidnap me? Wouldn’t I be far too important to take the risk of your killing me? And would I have told you about the lab raid?”

  Mark glanced in the rearview mirror. Then he shook his head. “Here’s the deal. They need you, but they need me, too. Right? You know how the brain processes it, the theory behind it, the molecular structure, but I am living and breathing the shit. I am Seethe.”

  They came to a steel cable strung between two poles embedded in concrete. Beyond that was a gate set in the fence, tangled with honeysuckle and poison sumac. It hadn’t been used in a long time.

  Not since the cleanup a year ago.

  Mark stopped the car, collected the gun, and motioned her out. When they were both standing by the steel cable, Mark said, “In there’s where it all happened.”

  “There’s nothing here, Mark.”

  “Then you don’t need to worry, do you?” He knelt and rolled up the leg of his athletic pants, revealing a holster strapped inside his ankle. He slid the gun into it and smoothed his clothes.

  Alexis followed him through the weed-choked entrance to the gate. Beyond it was a stand of scrub pines, and in a clearing was a blackened circle, a few piles of masonry rubble, and deep gouges in the red clay. A dented “No Trespassing” sign leaned to one side in the center of what had once been the Monkey House. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “That’s what happened to the people we used to be,” Mark said. “That’s where we died and didn’t know it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Butner was a small town about fifteen miles north of Durham. It had been known as Camp Butner during World War II, an army training facility that later became a home for injured veterans. The town of nearly six thousand people had maintained that institutional identity ever since, housing several prisons, a federal correctional facility, some state agency headquarters, and the largest mental hospital in North Carolina.

  Forsyth had driven himself to Butner after leaving Burchfield in Winston-Salem. He could have used Abernethy and the limo, since Burchfield planned to spend the night at home, but Forsyth didn’t want anyone to know of his movements, especially the Secret Service.

  He was just exiting I-85 when the cell phone rang and he had to fumble through several jacket pockets to find it. “Forsyth here.”

  “Scagnelli.”

  “Do you got anything?” Forsyth didn’t bother with correct grammar when he was away from the press.

  “No. They headed out to the Research Triangle Park, and I figured they were working with somebody out there. Thought I’d get lucky and they’d lead me right to the secret lab.”

  “You might as well expect a wild hog to grub up a truffle and drop it on your dinner plate,” Forsyth said. “You ought to know by now that ‘secret’ means everybody don’t know about it.”

  “Well, the Secret Service has a Twitter account. That’s hardly a good way to keep secrets.”

  Forsyth knew Twitter was some kind of Internet thing, and he was happy to stay away from it. As far as he could tell, all it did was get people in trouble when they said things they shouldn’t.

  “You don’t have to worry about what the Secret Service does. You’d better be worrying about what Dominic Scagnelli does. Don’t forget who you work for.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “Because you work for me. Where are the Morgans now?”

  “They’re walking around an abandoned lot. I checked out the property on my laptop. It’s owned by CRO Pharmaceuticals but apparently it was shut down after a fatal industrial accident last year.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Morgan worked for CRO. Real high up the ladder, a guy just doing his job. And he gave it all up to become a cop?”

  “No, he gave it up for his wife. He just didn’t know it at the time.”

  “Women. They sure know how to fuck up a good thing. The most selfish creatures on God’s green earth.”

  Forsyth winced a little. He’d been married once. He’d lain his lovely Louisa to rest fifteen years back, and he’d never found her equal. He was content to finish up his time here and be reunited in heaven with his monogamy still intact.

  Scagnelli sputtered on, the amphetamines fueling his tirade. “After the nuclear holocaust when all the dust settles, first will come the cockroaches, and then some cats will pussyfoot out of their holes. And then a few women will crawl out of the rubble. If ever you want to learn about self-preservation-”

  “Did the Morgans see you?”

  “Of course not.” Scagnelli sounded offended, which was exactly what Forsyth intended. “He looks a little jittery but otherwise they’re just hacking through the weeds like they’re looking for a way inside the fence.”

  “Monitor them but don’t take no action.”

  “What if they find something?”

  “There ain’t nothing left to find.”

  “Okay, I’ll just send you a text.”

  “Why don’t you Twitter it?”

  “Tweet.”

  “Whatever. Or ram it up a carrier pigeon’s butt and have it sing ‘Dixie’ on the way over.”

  Scagnelli laughed, taking Forsyth’s gruffness for folksy humor. Forsyth could tell Scagnelli was underestimating him. Just the way he liked it.

  He clicked the cell phone dead and turned into the parking lot of Central Regional Hospital. It had once been named Umstead Hospital after one of the state’s endless series of mental-health reformers dating all the way back to Dorothea Dix, whose own namesake hospital was nearly dead.

  Two and a half centuries of meddling in people’s heads and they still ain’t got things right.

  The hospital was two storie
s at ground level, although it was set on a gentle slope that allowed for a lower floor at the back end of the building. The flat roof and glass facade suggested a 1990s-era design, back when architects didn’t realize how quickly their futuristic designs would look bulldozer-ready. The lot was relatively empty, since the hospital didn’t get a lot of visitors. Many of the patients were of the sort that no one wanted to acknowledge, much less spend time with.

  The assistant director was waiting by the front desk, wearing a crisp pants suit. She was of late middle-age, her hair white and fluffy, although her face was relatively unlined. She greeted him with a smile and shining blue eyes that suggested unflagging optimism in the face of her grim duties as a shepherd of the lost and hopeless.

  “Mr. Forsyth,” she said, shaking his hand like a man. “I’m a fan of your work. Except for that proposal to cut federal support for mental health services. I’m Paula Redfern.”

  “A real pleasure, Dr. Redfern. And about that-”

  “I know you’re a busy man, so let’s not waste your time. Besides, I don’t vote in your district.”

  As she led him down the hall and into the labyrinth, Forsyth found himself admiring her spunk as she described the various missions of the hospital. He liked the graceful way she moved, too, but he was wise enough to keep it on an aesthetic level, like a man watching someone else’s thoroughbred gallop through a meadow.

  “We focus on interdisciplinary approaches individualized to each patient’s desired therapeutic outcomes,” she said.

  “I ain’t sure what that means,” he said, “but your funding just went up a million dollars.”

  She laughed and kept on with the tour. Forsyth was pleased the hospital had honored his request to keep the tour private. Because every entity receiving public funding was now in intense competition with all the other entities, people grabbed any advantage they could. Everybody in the country was in favor of smaller government until it came time to take a pay cut themselves.

  “We’re not just a treatment center, we have research and forensic wings as well,” Dr. Redfern said. “UNC and Duke conduct research work here.”

  “I know a few researchers down this way,” Forsyth said. “As you know, I’m a close friend of Senator Burchfield’s and-”

  “I vote against him every chance I get, but I am sure he’s an honorable man in private.”

  They were entering the Acute Adult Unit, where psychiatric patients with little hope of release were confined. Dr. Redfern continued on with her chipper presentation in wholesale denial of the fact that the ward wasn’t much of an upgrade from the mental asylums of old. The main differences were better lighting and a diverse array of designer drugs, plus the fact that the public couldn’t pay admission to derive some cheap entertainment.

  Forsyth signed in with an armed guard while Redfern blathered airily about the “pathophysiology and psychosocial precipitants of mental illness,” getting an extra lift when she started in on “comprehensive community-based intervention modules.”

  The first patient they passed, a shuffling young man in paper slippers with a strand of drool dangling down to his chest, looked like he could care less what the community thought.

  Forsyth nodded at him out of rote politeness but the man simply took another sliding step away from reality and toward whatever mercy God granted the deranged.

  The patients in open confinement were largely clean and passive. A bald black man sat playing checkers with himself, although there was no board on the coffee table. A woman in street clothes stood looking out the barred window as if waiting for a bus that would never come. Another woman with palsy muttered to herself over and over, and it took Forsyth a moment to realize she was faithfully reciting the Gospel According to Luke.

  Then they entered the ward with the private rooms. These resembled regular hospital rooms, although through the doors of the unoccupied ones, Forsyth saw padding on the walls and restraint devices made of steel and leather. An occasional wail reverberated from a distant hellhole, a sound as lonely of that of a barn owl in the October night.

  “What’s your interest in Mr. Underwood?” Dr. Redfern asked.

  “One of those researchers I spoke of asked me to look in on him,” Forsyth said. “A cousin. Just between you and me, I suspect he’s afraid that sort of thing runs in the family.”

  A few howls stitched themselves together into a caterwauling melody. It wasn’t until the sounds repeated that Forsyth made it out. The old western folk song “Home on the Range.”

  “Mr. Underwood is one of our more…interesting…cases,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s clinging to a persistent delusion that he’s the subject of a secret government experiment. He was connected with a clinical trial during his college years, and one of the subjects died. Apparently the guilt and trauma lingered, triggering a latent schizophrenia.”

  Forsyth probed her a little in case David Underwood’s psychotic ramblings had aroused any suspicion. “I thought schizophrenia was genetic.”

  “There are certainly links,” she said. “But current research is focusing on neurobiology. Drug use could worsen such a condition.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Anything mind-altering or mood-altering.”

  Then they were outside the room from which the wailing came. Forsyth wondered if Underwood would remember him. But the great thing about a nutcase, nobody believed anything they said.

  They peered through a glass observational window. Underwood sat on a cot, hunched forward and staring at the floor. His hair was clipped close and his ill-fitting gown was draped over his gaunt frame.

  Forsyth noted that Underwood’s present circumstances were not that different from when he’d been held captive in Sebastian Briggs’s lab and used as a test monkey. The only thing that had changed since then was the name of the zookeeper.

  “Is he responding to medication?” Forsyth asked, making conversation.

  “He’s on several new antipsychotic drugs,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s also presenting anxiety and depression, and because he’s such a risk, I’m afraid he doesn’t have much hope for release. He’s got the major first-rank symptom of schizophrenia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The belief that his thoughts are controlled by an external force. In his case, he believes he’s been brainwashed by the government.”

  “I could make a grand joke of that, but it doesn’t look like a laughing matter,” Forsyth said.

  “Still, he deserves the same compassionate care that Central Regional aspires to administer to all its patients,” Dr. Redfern said, once again lapsing into a robo-cheerleader for her facility.

  “Of that, I’ve no doubt,” Forsyth said. He took one more glance at David Underwood and was surprised he didn’t feel a twinge of sympathy for the man.

  Too goddamned long in politics. Your heart is the first thing to go, and then you lose your soul. God help me. God help us all.

  “Did you want to see him personally?” Dr. Redfern asked, eager to please.

  “No,” he said, making a show of glancing at his wristwatch. “Is Darrell Silver available?”

  Redfern’s mood darkened a little. “Of course. Federal inmates under treatment place a particularly heavy burden on a facility like ours, as you can imagine.”

  Add another million to that funding request, Doctor. Maybe we should put you on Daniel’s staff. You would make a mighty fine health secretary and I’d bet you’d say whatever it took to make the administration look good.

  And being pretty don’t hurt a bit.

  “I understand Silver’s been charged with drug manufacturing and conspiracy,” he said.

  “This way.” Redfern led him down the hall and around a bend, passing rooms in which involuntary patients spent their time until the next dose, meal, or change of underwear.

  Alone with nothing but their thoughts. Satan has truly been loosed for a season and his millennium is coming up.

  Forsyth’s Pentecostal upbr
inging had softened a little in the face of political realities, melding into a more palatable fundamentalism as he became entrenched in Congress. Extremes of every kind tended to get blunted by the forge and hammer of the corporations, lobbyists, and party leaders.

  Still, he felt Armageddon was near-not in the literal sense of a climactic battle in the Middle East, but in a general erosion of the human spirit. Where others saw Satan’s armies attacking from the field, Forsyth believed Satan delivered destruction from the inside out.

  Just like those drugs, Seethe and Halcyon, did.

  Forsyth wondered if that was more than a coincidence.

  Redfern was blithely enumerating all the funding challenges in the face of rising costs and the threat that national health care posed. Forsyth mumbled assurances that one of Burchfield’s top priorities was to revise the landmark legislation, although they all knew that entitlements were nearly impossible to take away once people got used to them.

  Soon they came to a thicker door with a security camera and keypad. After Redfern logged in and was identified, they were buzzed into an antechamber where an armed and uniformed guard staffed a desk, surrounded by security monitors and alarm systems. Both of them had to sign another log, and then they entered a second door.

  The rooms on this floor were a cross between prison cells and hospital rooms. Another armed guard patrolled the hallway, a tall, sunburnt man who greeted Redfern by name and gave Forsyth a sideways grin.

  “Tell Senator Burchfield I’m voting for him,” the guard said. “I’ve voted for him in every election since he ran for the State House, and I’m not about to stop now.”

  “I’ll do that,” Forsyth said. “And thank you for your vital service here. Is Mr. Silver ready?”

  “In interrogation like you requested.”

  Redfern beamed in satisfaction at the show of efficiency. The guard led the way to the room as Redfern explained, “Usually lawyers meet their clients here, and if the inmates are deemed competent, they are sometimes asked questions by investigators.”