Liquid Fear

by Nicholson, Scott

  “He’s not contagious, is he?” Kleingarten said.

  “His disease is internal and self-inflicted, poor man.” There was no irony in Briggs’s tone. “Hopefully our research can one day help him return to society and lead a productive life.”

  They stooped and lifted the naked man, who was half-conscious, eyelids fluttering. They walked him to the rear of the facility, and as they drew closer, Kleingarten saw the series of rooms were rigged with surveillance gear and outfitted like hospital rooms, with small observation windows in the heavy steel doors. The sterile, brightly lit environs were a stark contrast to the murky, dusty factory floor.

  Somebody had spent more big money back here, which meant they expected big payback.

  That was something Kleingarten could wrap his head around.

  “Here we go, David,” Briggs said as they came to the last door on the right. The door was ajar and Briggs nudged it open. The walls were covered with images of eyes, hundreds, maybe thousands, every color, shape, and size. Some were artistic, others clipped from magazines, a few blown up to monstrous proportions.

  Just entering the room made Kleingarten woozy. If this poor guy was staying here as a “guest,” it was no wonder he’d gone monkey-shit mad.

  Kleingarten let Briggs finish the job of leading David to a small metal cot covered with clean linens. Aside from the wall art, the room was mostly bare, with the exception of some video monitors and speakers secured in the upper corners of the room, enclosed behind metal grates. A stainless-steel toilet and sink were bolted in place, like in a prison cell, except there was no mirror above the sink. The walls were covered in a thick white vinyl material, bradded into place, and it would take a sledgehammer to bust through.

  Glints in small recesses revealed camera lenses, and the hundred-square-foot room stank of new carpet and chemicals. Kleingarten imagined the white background made a pretty good projection screen, and here and there were smears of blood, as if David had tried to beat and scratch the images away.

  “Nothing to fear, David,” Briggs said, sitting the man on the cot. “You’re home.”

  David emerged from his catatonic state long enough to smile. “Home, home on the range,” he spoke-sang, about as musically as a manhole cover grating across pavement. The tortured melody was made even more haunting by the echo in the building.

  “That’s right, David,” Briggs said. “Home on the range.”

  The doc exited the room, closing the door behind him, and a wave of relief washed over Kleingarten. He’d killed a few people in his day, old-fashioned, honest, hands-on killing, but he’d never been this unnerved.

  “Aren’t you going to lock it?” Kleingarten asked.

  “That would defeat the purpose of the experiment,” Briggs said. “They have to want to be here.”

  “And it doesn’t have anything to do with that joy juice we’re sticking in people?”

  Briggs sighed and stared off into the distance, as if envisioning a better future for everyone, where people danced in meadows and ate fruit and didn’t worry about the beasties roaring in the night or inside their own heads. “Surrender is the first step to victory.”

  Kleingarten was going to have to conduct a little more research on this guy. He doubted if CRO knew what they’d turned loose.

  The game had changed a lot in the fifteen years since Kleingarten had taken the field. In the old days, power was power. You got hit, you hit back harder.

  In this crazy-assed twenty-first century, though, knowledge was power, and if Kleingarten learned more about what was going on than anyone else involved, he might make this his retirement project. He hadn’t really enjoyed cutting up that whore in Cincinnati. The thrill was gone, and when the focus faded, a fatal mistake was sure to follow.

  Yes, it was time to get out. A few more paydays and then maybe a rice plantation in Thailand, or a little cottage on the beach in Puerto Rico, or whatever the hell they did in Madagascar.

  He followed Briggs back to the ape-cage office, and Curious George told him he’d wasted half an hour in the lab. Briggs slid open a desk drawer, and Kleingarten saw a recent color photograph of Wendy Leng.

  So, you’re hung up on her? Good. It’s about time you showed me something I could use.

  Briggs touched the photo tenderly for a moment, then nudged it aside and withdrew some documents and maps.

  Smart egghead. If you sent out e-mails or phone calls, anybody could be listening.

  CRO wouldn’t get its hands dirty but wouldn’t have any problem keeping an eye and ear on the doc from the safety of a computer somewhere.

  That was one of the tricks of the Information Age. You didn’t always have to outsmart people. Sometimes you could out-dumb them.

  “Roland Doyle will be the most difficult,” Briggs said. “He’s always been my problem child.”

  “Is that why we did that ‘David Underwood’ thing with the fake IDs? To help him remember?”

  “Roland has serious identity issues. He loves himself as a drunk, and when you take that away, he doesn’t know how to deal with himself. He’s a man of unreliable character. But one thing you can always count on with Roland—anytime there’s trouble, he comes crawling back to the ex.”

  “The Chinese woman, right?” Kleingarten said it just to see the reaction in the doc’s eyes. It was a mixture of anger, lust, and jealousy.

  He’d seen idiots fall in love with hookers and heroin addicts and AIDS sluts, and he never failed to be amazed at the shit guys let their dicks do to them.

  “She was actually born in Tibet, and we could engage in a political discussion about that, but we both have work to do.”

  “Okay. I bring the four people and then I get the bonus? All done?”

  Briggs frowned. “Yes, but I’m afraid we’ll lose one.”

  “Lose one?”

  “Anita Molkesky will finally succeed in the one thing she was put on Earth for, which is to destroy herself. Her final cry for attention. But she’ll need the others to help her with her mission. Bring her first.”

  “What do I use? You just want me to kidnap her?”

  “She’s already broken, Mr. Drummond. All you have to do is sweep up the pieces and bring them to me.”

  “She’s been talking to shrinks. It might be trouble.”

  Briggs broke from his dark reverie. “Don’t worry, you’ll be paid for that one, as long as you bring in the others.”

  “Do I look worried?”

  Briggs smiled, back to his usual self. “No. Not at all. You know the way out.”

  The doc turned to his bank of high-tech gear and flipped some switches and triggered the front-door lock. As Kleingarten wended his way through the skeletal machinery, he heard the strains of the old cowboy ballad, “Home on the Range,” once sung by Willie Nelson, who wasn’t a whole lot better than David Underwood at carrying a tune.

  The music was concentrated in the area of the holding cells, and Kleingarten shuddered as he pictured David Underwood in that brightly lit room in front of all those eyeballs, with a dope-headed hippie droning on about where the buffalo roam. He told himself he was only hurrying because he was on the clock and headed for retirement, but he knew that was a lie.

  The Monkey House was not a place anybody stayed too long if they wanted to keep their marbles.

  It wasn’t until he was in his Jeep and headed toward Chapel Hill that he realized he’d been humming.

  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

  He punched up the radio and blasted the tune from his mind with ordinary, idiotic pop-rock, where there were plenty of discouraging words.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Damn, Wendy, never there when I need you. Some things never change.

  Roland had been lucky enough to find the last working pay phone in the mountains of Virginia, at a run-down gas station where the pumps turned numbers on dials to tally the bill. Roland had made change inside, drawing a long look from the cigar
ette-huffing woman behind the counter.

  He wondered if he looked suspicious as he staggered toward the phone. He was running from something, but that was nothing new. However, this one felt bigger than all those other forgotten failures.

  And that damned David Underwood driver’s license stared at him as he stood at the counter. He had to remind himself again that he was Roland Doyle, and in forcing the name into his brain, Cincinnati came back in a rush.

  Hell of a week. Fall off the wagon, kill a woman, and turn into somebody else. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would happen to me.

  “Can I help you, sir?” It was the woman from the counter, who’d taken a break from her cigarette break. She’d rolled the sleeves of her Jeff Gordon racing jacket to her elbows.

  Roland realized he’d been leaning with his head against the phone, idly fingering the change slot. He might have been muttering to himself, because the words “Monkey House” spun around his skull like the metal ball of a roulette wheel. “I’m fine.”

  “You sure don’t look so hot.”

  “A little touch of the flu,” he said.

  The woman jumped back as if the virus had wings. “You can keep it.”

  “I’m not contagious,” he said. Insanity is only catching in a crowd.

  “You ought to take something for that,” she said, retreating to the safety of the store and its carcinogenic atmosphere.

  Roland took the vial of pills from his pocket and held them aloft. “Got it right here. Just what the doctor ordered.”

  He looked at the vial’s label and then checked his watch. Ten minutes to go. Until what? How many had he taken?

  More importantly, how many did he have left?

  Three.

  The thing that would happen if he didn’t take the pill was already building inside him. It was like a black tsunami, a force that would crush all thoughts and sweep away the foundations of all that made him Roland Doyle.

  And as fucked up as Roland Doyle was, it was all he had.

  He dropped coins in the slot. As he tried Wendy’s number again, a dark Lexus with tinted windows pulled alongside the pumps. The car had that suspicious sheen of officialdom, though the plates were standard Virginia issue. Roland let the phone ring seven times, just for luck, before he gave up.

  No one had moved from the car, though a large, hand-painted sign by the road said “Self Serve Only.”

  Could be anybody. Or it could be him.

  Now why did I think that? And who is “him”?

  Roland wondered if this was how schizophrenics thought just before they slid into an episode. Just clued in enough to know they weren’t thinking quite right, but unable to escape their own buggy thoughts. He headed for his rental car, determined to be casual, though his legs wanted to break into a run.

  He was sweating and lightheaded by the time he slid behind the wheel. He’d be in Chapel Hill at about the time he’d have to make a decision about the last pill. First he’d find Wendy, and maybe they could call their friend, the chemistry professor. He knew the professor’s name but couldn’t summon it. All he remembered was her glittering blue eyes, a beauty mark on one side of her chin, and sweeping auburn hair.

  And someone else.

  Susan? Was that her name?

  He pulled onto the road, driving carefully, afraid of weaving and drawing police attention. He couldn’t afford to get arrested, not like this. He’d only been driving a couple of minutes, five miles under the speed limit, when the dark Lexus gunned past him on the left.

  Guess they had enough gas after all. Must not have been THEM, whoever they are.

  But it could have been. He could run from a murder scene, but he couldn’t run from whatever had happened ten years ago, and he couldn’t hide from himself. Whoever he was.

  He tried to concentrate on Wendy, because she reminded him he was Roland. As long as he had her, he couldn’t turn into David Underwood.

  He had met her as an undergrad in Wilson Library, literally bumping into her at the DVD archive, a popular destination of budget-minded students. She was looking for anything zany and breezy and he’d had a craving for a big-bug science-fiction movie.

  They’d been one of those cases of “opposites attract,” which they both should have taken as a warning, but the attraction hit hard and they never had a chance. The Tibetan artist and the Rocky Mount trailer-trash boy trying to make good.

  It sounded like a quirky rom-com. Both struggling financially, they’d found ways to improvise, including showing up at artist’s receptions to scarf down cheese and grapes, and they’d also sold their own plasma. Then they’d accepted that offer to serve in the experiment.

  The experiment. Me, Wendy, that professor. Wasn’t there some more people?

  He had a headache so he went back to picturing Wendy, standing in the brilliance of a sun-splashed room, painting naked, breasts swaying sensually as she danced with the brush.

  Then his vision shifted to what she was painting—Susan after what they’d done to her—and he nearly drove off the road.

  He popped open the vial with one hand and swallowed the pill even though it went down like a bone.

  God, please don’t make me see that again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Eshelman School of Pharmacy was one of UNC’s education and research wings, part of a complex that had grown over the years to connect the university with Memorial Hospital.

  Mark had taken a few classes there to augment his business degree, because even as a teen he’d understood where the money of the future would be flowing. That was where he’d met Alexis, who was already working on her doctorate.

  Now, entering the brick building, he saw how little the building had changed—the same uncomfortable benches, waxy potted plants, and somber portraits of past benefactors. That stood in stark contrast to how much he’d changed in the interim. He’d worked so hard to showcase his maturity to Alexis that he wondered if that was when he’d first become an actor and his life a role scripted by others.

  He knocked on Dr. Ayanadi’s lab door, even though he’d called ahead to make the appointment. The doctor opened the door, smiling and extending a brown hand. His jet-black hair was cut in a bowl shape, and his thick glasses were held in place by hairy ears. “Mark Morgan, my successful pupil.”

  “I only got a C, remember?”

  “Yes, yes, but you’ve gone on to bigger things. Most of my C students are pushing lunch carts in the hospital.”

  “I married well,” Mark said.

  “That you did. And how is Dr. Morgan?”

  I wish I knew. “She’s busy with the bioethics council. You know how much she hates politics, but somebody’s got to fight for what’s right.”

  Ayanadi nodded. “But you didn’t come here for a philosophical discussion. You sound worried.”

  Mark glanced around the small lab. Most major research was conducted off campus, in the RTP, but tenured faculty like Ayanadi were given personal-sized labs, mostly to support journal publication and justify grant requests. Ayanadi, though, had a modern electron microscope and gleaming gear that Mark didn’t recognize, which clashed with the chipped counters and 1950s-era sink.

  “What do you know about Sebastian Briggs?”

  Ayanadi’s dark eyes narrowed. “We don’t like to speak of him around here. That could have been bad for all of us.”

  “It might be bad for all of us now.”

  “Mark, I appreciate CRO’s contributions to our research, but we always must keep the business and the personal separate. We can be friends but a researcher avoids the appearance of favoritism.”

  “I’m not here for CRO. I’m here for my wife.”

  Ayanadi glanced wistfully at the papers and computer near his microscope, as if he’d rather be lost in routine. He sighed and said, “As you know, Briggs was something of a maverick. Early on, his flamboyance was…tolerated, because he brought in grants and published a few significant articles at a young age.”<
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  “I’ve read the records,” Mark said. “I need to know what’s under them, the stuff that got cut out.”

  “Even now, we must avoid that. Surely your wife told you more than I could.”

  “She doesn’t remember. It seems like nobody remembers. It’s either the biggest case of collective amnesia since the Holocaust or somebody’s hiding something.”

  Ayanadi moved around Mark and closed the door. “Very well. I will tell you the rumors, but I must warn you, I have no evidence to support any of this, and you know how much that repels me as a scientist.”

  “I promise, Doctor, I won’t dispute any of your conclusions. I have some of my own that nobody would believe.”

  “Briggs received doctorates in both psychology and neurobiology. We don’t get many of the softer sciences in this building.”

  “Softer skulls” is what you mean. The touchy-feely doesn’t go well with the numbers racket. “He was running experiments.”

  “You’ve seen the records. He used student volunteers, and while it’s not unusual to use students in the early trials of drug testing, Briggs apparently conducted what one might call a ‘bait and switch.’”

  “Pretending he was testing one drug on paper while he was actually running something else?”

  “Yes. Hardly uncommon, sadly, in the history of therapeutic drugs. Our branch has been just as complicit in some of the horrors of modern psychiatry, such as insulin shock therapy and the designer drugs of the fifties and sixties. And it’s likely Briggs would have gotten away with it if not for Susan Sharpe. But I imagine your wife has told you about her?”

  Mark was about to nod out of habit but realized he would get more information by acting ignorant. He’d never heard of Susan Sharpe. “She doesn’t like to talk about that.”

  “We still aren’t sure what happened, but we’ve pieced together a trial with six participants. Your wife, of course, was both a participant and Briggs’s graduate assistant. Though who knows whether her participation was voluntary.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “That was a traumatic experience, and I think she blocked it out.”