Legion

by Robert Swartwood

  Hogan took another sip of his coffee and went back to scanning the menu specials. “Take a look.”

  Zach opened the file. There were two pages inside, including a glossy photo. The photo was black and white and, judging by the angle and slight graininess, was taken by a traffic cam. It gave a pretty good view of the woman’s face, enough so that they were able to match it via facial recognition. From there they found her name and all her information.

  The waitress returned again. “You guys ready?”

  Hogan gave her another smile. “Believe it or not, we still haven’t decided yet.”

  The waitress forced a smile sprinkled with fatigue. “Take your time.”

  All of this Zach was faintly aware of. He had sensed her presence and tilted the folder so the waitress couldn’t see its contents. Then he had moved the glossy photo behind the two papers and skimmed the paragraphs. After the fourth paragraph he paused, closed his eyes. He felt his pulse quicken. He closed the folder and looked up at Hogan.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  thirty-five

  We drive for maybe an hour or two in silence, again taking secondary roads. The night wears on and the black starts to fade as the sun gets closer and closer to clocking back in for a new day.

  Mom rides with me in the back. She doesn’t have the cane she had back at the cemetery. Stroke, David had said, and I had felt awful for missing out on this important piece of family news. Only now it seems she hasn’t had a stroke.

  Eventually we start winding our way up into the mountains. We pass a few homes, a few trailer parks, and keep going up and up. There’s a parking area near the top of the mountain, a kind of look out, and this is where Eli stops. He parks the Buick so it’s pointed toward the valley and shuts off the lights and the engine and just sits there for a moment, staring through the windshield. Then he takes a deep breath and turns to look at us.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a cigarette.”

  He takes my lighter and gets out of the Buick and lights himself one of the Parliaments. Ashley steps out of the passenger side and meets him around the front of the car for her own smoke. Mom smiles at me, then turns to open her door.

  I reach across the backseat and touch her arm. “Did you really have a stroke?”

  The smile fading from her face, she shakes her head.

  “Then why the cane at the funeral? Why the limping?”

  “Cover.”

  “Cover for what?”

  “That’s what your father and I need to explain to you.”

  We get out of the car, and the morning is cool but not nearly as cold as it was back at the playground. Eli and Ashley are smoking in silence. Mom moves to the front of the car and leans against the hood. I look down into the valley, at the thousands and thousands of houses and lights scattered below like glass shards, and finally clear my throat.

  “Okay, so what’s going on? Why are we here?”

  Eli stares at me for a long moment, inhaling on his cigarette. Despite what Mom just told me inside the car, I expect him to blow my questions off, so I’m surprised when he motions with the cigarette down into the valley.

  “Down there was where you were conceived. Where all you kids were conceived.”

  “Gee, Pops, I always wondered when you and I were going to discuss the bird and the bees. Unfortunately you’re about fifteen years too late.”

  Eli takes a final drag off the cigarette, drops it to the ground. “I’m gay.”

  “What?”

  “I’m gay. I always have been. Marta, however, is not.”

  He indicates Mom when he says this, but still I shake my head and hold up a hand.

  “Wait a minute. Who’s Marta?”

  Mom says, “I am.”

  “But that’s not your name. Your name is—”

  “We had to change our names. We had to change our identities to keep ourselves and you kids safe.”

  After everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours, for some reason this news shocks me the most. My entire foundation—everything I’ve built since I was a child—has begun to tremble and shake and might soon crumble completely.

  I notice Ashley is standing off to the side, distancing herself from the rest of us. She’s watching to see what my response will be, but I don’t have one.

  “My name isn’t Frank Smith,” the man who I’ve always thought of as my father says. “It’s Eli Craig. I know I’ve never been a good father. I’d tell you how sorry I am—how I wish things had been different—but something tells me you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “You might be right,” I say. Then, turning to Mom or Marta or whatever she’s called: “What about you?”

  She smiles again, only this time it’s forced. “I always wanted children of my own. Granted, I thought it would be under different circumstances, but I’d like to think I was a good mother to you children.”

  “You were,” I tell her, not so much to make her feel better but because it’s true. “At least, the few times we saw you. Why did you split all of us up?”

  “To protect you,” Eli says. “It’s the same reason we constantly moved ourselves around the country. We couldn’t risk having them find you.”

  “Them,” I say. “You mean the people trying to kill us?”

  Eli nods. “Marta and I were doctors, once upon a time. I graduated from Harvard. Marta graduated from MIT. We both studied genetics and met when we were hired by Matheson.”

  “Who’s Matheson?”

  “Dr. Oswald Matheson. He was heading a privately funded study regarding autism. As you know, autism is a disorder in neural development. Nobody is one hundred percent certain what causes it, but it seems that the genetics become mutated in the womb. And what Matheson wanted to do, ultimately, was find these cells in the sperm and egg stage and eliminate them completely.”

  “That’s possible?”

  “Anything’s possible. It all depends on how hard you work for it. Also on how much money you have to spend.”

  “So this guy Matheson, he was trying to cure autism.”

  “Initially. A new investor soon entered the picture. This investor brought a huge amount of capital. We didn’t know much about it except that we were being paid even more—over six figures, with a promise of bonuses if we met our goals. There were dozens of other researchers. We were all sequestered to different areas. Marta and I were partnered up. Research subjects were brought in, women in their late teens, early twenties. They were pregnant. We saw them once a week, performed tests, then sent them on their way.”

  “Who were these women?”

  “Volunteers, as far as we knew. Some of them were already pregnant by the time they came to us. Others we artificially inseminated.”

  “And the tests?”

  “Standard tests, checking up on the mother, though we also focused on the development of the fetuses. We were keeping an eye on the genetics as closely as possible, waiting to catch any mutations.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The women began giving birth.”

  “That’s pretty standard with pregnant women, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but these women were having more than just one baby. They were having twins, triplets, quadruplets. Some surrogates even had sextuplets. An isolated incident would not have meant much—women can have sextuplets naturally, after all—but it began happening more and more.”

  “You suspected genetic manipulation,” I say, not making it a question.

  Eli nods. “It certainly wasn’t natural.”

  “What happened to the babies once they were born?”

  “Experiments were done. Nothing harmful, mind you, but we did check to see if there was any detection of mutations in their cells. Quite honestly, sometimes mutations take years, even decades, to form, so it wasn’t an exact science. In fact, looking back on it now, it wasn’t science at all. If anything, it was the stuff of science fiction. Not that it’s n
ot possible, but the work we were doing, it was too ambitious.”

  “But these babies, what happened to them?”

  “They eventually ended up going to couples. At least, that’s how it was explained to us. Mostly rich couples, those who couldn’t have children of their own or who didn’t want to go through the normal channels of adoption. Matheson had found a way to ... expedite the process. These couples became benefactors that helped continue our work. Plus there were enough surrogates lined up that every week we had new births. Most of the babies weren’t in the facility more than a few weeks before they were adopted.”

  “And what happened to the surrogates?”

  “At the time,” Marta says, “we believed they were volunteers. We were told these women signed up to be in the program. They were being paid quite a bit of money to give up nearly a year of their lives, away from their families and friends.”

  “What do you mean, away from their families and friends?”

  Eli shifts his weight leaning on the car, lighting another cigarette. “It was part of their contract. They stayed at the facility twenty-four-seven. They had their own rooms. They had TV, books, magazines, music, whatever they wanted. The only stipulation was they couldn’t contact their families or friends. No phone calls. No letters. Nothing. Only until their part in the project was complete, when they were done and the babies were delivered, could they leave.”

  “They were prisoners?”

  A hesitant glance between Eli and Marta.

  Marta says, “As it turned out, they were. In fact, we all were, though none of us knew it at the time. But we—the doctors and scientists—we were free to come and go as we pleased. We had houses and apartments. We had boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives. Some of us even had children of our own. We all were required to sign nondisclosure forms. We were forbidden to discuss the project even with our families.”

  “So what happened?”

  “One of the girls,” Eli says, “one of the first girls we ever treated, came back to us. Maybe three years had passed. She looked ... different somehow, but I knew it was her.”

  “How did she look different?”

  “Tired. Exhausted. Scared. You see, most of the girls we saw at first were young and so full of life. They knew what they were getting into, but they also knew the money was worth it, so they put up with the secrecy. So what if they couldn’t see or talk to their families and friends for nearly a year? Once they left, they would have more money than they would ever know what to do with. For them, it was worth it. At least, it was until they realized it was all a lie.”

  “What was a lie?”

  “The girl, the one who had come through before. I recognized her immediately. Her name was Beth. She acted like she had never seen me before. Actually, she acted like she wasn’t even allowed to speak. She hardly answered any of my questions during her first checkup besides nodding or shaking her head. But I knew she knew the drill, so I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  “I was in the room, too,” Marta says, “and I sensed the same thing. It just seemed ... odd. Truthfully, I didn’t think girls could be in the project more than once. I even brought this up to Eli, who went and asked Matheson the next time he was in.”

  Eli nods distantly. “I asked him, and he nearly tore my head off. The thing about Oswald Matheson, he’s a genius, and like most geniuses he never liked being questioned. It’s something we all came to learn pretty quickly. Even in his office, he had this quote hanging on the wall from the poem ‘Ozymandias’—‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ He always joked he liked the quote because his name, too, was Oz, but I believe he truly thought he was unconquerable. He was quite possibly one of the most brilliant men in the world. But here I went and questioned him and he didn’t like it one bit. He even went so far as to threaten to throw me off the project, which, as you can imagine, was the very last thing I wanted to have happen. Not with all the money I was making. The work, to be honest, was easy, once we had everything squared away. The girls came in, we did our manipulation of the genes, performed checkups every week, and then waited nine months to see the results.”

  Ashley speaks for the first time. “Were they all clean births?”

  Eli drops his cigarette to the ground, right on top of the other one. “No, I’m sorry to say they were not. Sometimes we lost a few of the babies. Only twice did we lose one of the mothers, but in those instances we managed to save the babies. For the most part, they were all clean, and both the girls and the babies were healthy.”

  “Except for this girl who had been there before,” I say.

  Eli nods again. “It took a while, but we finally got the story out of her. Actually, it was Marta who got the story out of her.”

  “Yes,” Marta says, “it took a few months before she finally confided in me. She was scared. More scared than she seemed that first day we had seen her after all this time. As Eli said, nearly three years had passed. She told me after the first time they hadn’t let her go. Instead she had been taken to another facility somewhere across the country. There she had been made to go through the same process. The promise she had been given before—all the money—was a lie.”

  “Jesus Christ.” A slight churning starts in the pit of my stomach. “Who are these people?”

  “Bad people,” Eli says, lighting himself another cigarette. “Evil people.”

  “But when these girls signed up to be in the program, wouldn’t at least one friend or family member know about it?”

  “You would think. But as it turned out the girls were runaways. Matheson and his people picked them up off the streets, fed them, clothed them, made sure they were healthy, then asked if they wanted to partake in an important scientific study for a lot of money. Of course many of the girls were skeptical at first, but they all ended up agreeing. And those that didn’t agree, well, in the end I believe they ended up in the study anyway.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We found out the truth,” Marta says. “It took a while, and it took quite a bit of investigating, of looking into files we were forbidden to access, but Eli and I soon learned the truth. How these rich couples were not just any rich couples, but all part of something called the Inner Circle. We have to assume the group still exists, and if so, it’s a very wealthy, powerful group that controls much of our global economy. And this isn’t just in our country, but all over the world. It seems like they want to build a new Roman Empire. Which I guess explains, then, why our project was renamed what it was.”

  Ashley steps forward, just a little, no longer keeping herself apart from the group. Speaking for a second time in a long while, she asks, “What was the project named?”

  Eli blows smoke from the corner of his mouth, staring straight at me as he answers her question.

  “Legion.”

  thirty-six

  Ashley folded her arms across her chest. It was cold out, yes, but the true reason was a chill had suddenly raced down her spine. As outrageous as this story seemed, she knew it was true. She felt it deep in her bones. Otherwise how could so many of the deaths today be explained?

  “If what you’re saying is true,” John said, “it’s been over thirty years. How can something like this remain secret for so long? Some nut job shoots up a school and the next day conspiracy theories run rampant all over the Internet.”

  “These people,” Eli said, “are more powerful than you can even imagine. Believe me, we tried bringing this to the press several times. Each time the reporters we contacted ‘accidentally’ died.”

  John raised an eyebrow. “Say what?”

  “Over the past thirty years we’ve been in contact with three reporters from top newspapers. One died in a car accident right after speaking with me. Another had a brain hemorrhage and died in his apartment. The third died from a food allergy—a food allergy, I should add, which some family members later claimed the reporter didn’t have, or at least wasn’t even aware of. Don’t you
see? These people control everything.”

  “But what’s the point? It’s been thirty years already. If these people are so powerful, why keep it such a secret?”

  “We still aren’t sure,” Marta said. “But from what we’ve been able to piece together over the past two decades, they’re working toward something. What that something is, we have no idea, but it’s something big. Something massive.”

  Eli sighed, blowing smoke through his nose. “I strongly believe that at the beginning Matheson had his heart in the right place. But then someone caught his ear and he got involved in ... whatever this whole thing turned out to be. Making babies wholesale for couples who couldn’t have their own children was one thing. But making babies so that they could eventually be mainstreamed into the general population was another.”

  “Wait,” John said. “Back up a sec. What are you talking about babies being mainstreamed into the general population?”

  Marta said, “What we learned is that there are other facilities around the country, around the globe, where many of these babies went. There they were raised to be soldiers, brainwashed into following this idea of Roman culture. It was almost cult-like. No—it was cult-like. When they became young men and women, some even in their late teens, they were placed in schools, or colleges, or the military or navy, or even into the general workforce.”

  “How many?”

  “We don’t know. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Your guess is as good as ours.”

  For a long time nobody spoke. The sky was beginning to brighten more and more, the dark purple off on the horizon giving away to dark pink.

  Eli was staring curiously at John. “You get it now, don’t you?”

  John said nothing.

  “Isn’t it obvious now why we kept you kids apart? Why your mom kept moving you around the country? Why Marta and I divorced?” Eli laughed. “Of course, we weren’t even legally married in the first place.”