Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  The Zodiac Killer. The Babysitter. The Phantom.

  Three more marvelous names to add to our marvelous serial-killer names list.

  The Zodiac killed as many as thirty in San Francisco.

  The Babysitter (who bathed each of his child victims after murdering them) had claimed a dozen in Detroit.

  The Phantom strangled half a dozen girls in Washington, DC.

  All three men had written letters to the authorities—teasing them for not being able to solve the case. Promising more death.

  Castillo’s bosses figured my father was warning something big was going to happen in San Francisco and Detroit and Washington on July 4. Something awful.

  Something having to do with SHARDHARA.

  • • •

  Turns out, just before he’d died, Henry’d bragged to Castillo that the other guys were heading west already. San Francisco, maybe. It made sense (if the Zodiac thing was a genuine lead of some kind). And when Castillo asked his bosses about Shardhara, they told him it was outside his “need-to-know” status but that he should keep an eye out for any references to the word moving forward. They weren’t all that excited, apparently, about Castillo’s having found Henry.

  Or about the leads (my leads! But Castillo didn’t tell them that) on Salem and Sherwood Forest. They didn’t care. And from what I could tell, they weren’t even asking about me yet either. Still didn’t know I was with Castillo, or simply didn’t care.

  It was apparently now all about the guys heading west.

  Castillo’s bosses wouldn’t tell him anything beyond that. They just told him the situation was “grave.”

  Then they told him to keep an eye out for a canister of some kind.

  You know, the kind of thing you might transport a deadly biotoxin in.

  Why had my father put “Shardhara” on the card? Was he implying that whatever had happened in that Afghanistan village was somehow gonna happen here? All that death?

  I said something like, Wow.

  Castillo said something like, Uh-huh.

  • • •

  I asked Castillo what was up with: “I also gave birth to the 21st century.”

  He said nothing, but I wasn’t buying it, and eventually he admitted it had “something to do with Jack the Ripper.” My dad sure had a thing for Jack the Ripper.

  So what was THIS message? What did it mean?

  • • •

  There’s this famous quote attributed to Jack the Ripper:

  “One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.”

  It’s made up. It’s not in any of the letters he wrote to the police. It’s just one of those quotes that gets attributed to someone famous on the Internet, and off you go. The whole “If he didn’t say it, he should have.”

  The quote captures the idea that Jack the Ripper was a sign of things to come—the recreational violence, the media exploitation, the replacement of God with Self.

  My father’s variation, “I also gave birth to the 21st century,” was both a nod to Jack and also a reference to things to come—the rise of psychopaths, the government’s deception, the replacement of God with a gene splicer.

  • • •

  Castillo yawned, a long groan that turned into a half-formed thought.

  He said: Gotta nail these little monsters. . . .

  Little monsters?

  I could tell he regretted the words right away. He even apologized. Not the Sizemore kid, he said quickly. Not you. I meant the other guys.

  Sure, I said. I told him not to worry about it, but then he got all pissed. Guess I’d made him feel bad or something. He was all: Sorry if it “offends” you, but it is what it is. He told me how he’d tracked down some major Bad Guys over the years. Guys who’d killed for religious fanaticism or Greed or Power or even Duty. And that he understood those guys. Their motivations. But not these guys. Not the Henrys or Teds of the world. Not guys who dressed up like clowns. Or kids who dragged around nurses who’d been dead for days. Either the original versions or new. Guys who killed for FUN. He said THESE guys made no sense. These guys had become only monsters to him.

  You’ve killed people, I said. Are you a monster?

  War’s different, he replied.

  I asked if he thought I was a monster. Some clone. Evil incarnate.

  Then I shared with him something my father had told me the night he’d left. That he and DSTI had taken one of Dahmer’s cells and retrained it to become, like, an egg cell. Then they’d fertilized that egg with another one of Dahmer’s cells. Never been done before. Other clones, the egg cell comes from an outside donor and affects the DNA by as much as 2%.

  But I was 100% Jeffrey Dahmer.

  In genes only, Castillo agreed. I guess that’s how it works.

  Then he said: So what? So, you’ll be tall and blond and probably need LASIK. And? Good for you. I wish I was tall and blond. So you’re maybe genetically prone to being an alcoholic, so what? Go to AA meetings and keep away from alcohol. So you’re genetically prone to, what, being gay? Good. You’re not being raised in the sixties. Fall in love with whoever you want and live happily ever after.

  I asked: And the murder? The death? The corpses?

  Castillo couldn’t even look at me. I never said . . . , he tried. I’m not saying you’re like Henry.

  I told him I didn’t want to, you know, hurt people. I didn’t ever even THINK about hurting people. I didn’t care whose blood was running in my veins. (I’m not sure I really believed that last part. I think maybe I just wanted to hear what it sounded like. Like maybe saying it out loud would make it true.)

  I told him I now understood why my father had done all this.

  First with all the other boys and then, as the years went on, more directly.

  With me. His own “son.”

  He’d wanted to explain the terrible thoughts in his own head.

  He’d wanted to prove that the bad thoughts (THE THING ON THE BED, etc.) were all in his blood, that he didn’t have a choice. So he took the most terrible person ever and raised him like a normal boy to see what would happen. To prove that the genes, the blood, that Nature would win.

  I told Castillo I wasn’t some disgusting monster.

  He said: I know.

  Do you? I asked. Do you really?

  Castillo didn’t reply.

  Well, don’t feel too bad, I said. To tell the truth, I’m not totally sure either.

  • • •

  We both lay in the silence for a long time. I was full-blown shivering now. Pulled the quilt out and wrapped it around me. The AC had stopped grumbling but now there was this constant drip drip drip sound somewhere deep inside the unit. Hypnotic. Maddening.

  Through clenched teeth I told Castillo I wanted to find my dad. Right now! I was maybe trying out a two-second tantrum at the same time. But Castillo wasn’t buying any of it. At all. And told me that unless my dad was in San Francisco (which is where everyone thought some of the clones were going with a vial of that supertoxin), I was basically shit out of luck.

  Then he told me I could look for him alone if I wanted.

  As in, I could leave now if I wanted to.

  My first thought was a thought of rejection. But he wasn’t saying this as a jerk, I quickly realized. I could see it in his face. He seemed genuinely on my side all of a sudden. Like whatever I needed, he was OK with right now. Regardless of his mission or how I might still be able to help. Maybe he wasn’t proving such a robot after all. But . . .

  Alone? I needed his help. And he knew that too.

  We’ll look after San Francisco, he promised.

  And again, like most every time Castillo says stuff, I believed him.

  I told him I wanted to, at least, START now. To do more research. Like he was always talking about. Do my homework and understand my prey and all of that. I needed to, God help me, understand my dad even more than I already did.

  I told Castillo I needed some books on Jack the Ripper.<
br />
  He nodded.

  Maybe I’d “find” my dad—figuratively, I mean—in 1880s London.

  This is the prospect I held on to as I closed my eyes again and listened for the next series of drips.

  • • •

  You hear his blood. From fifty miles away, you hear it. Like . . . like some steam-driven contraption of rusted machinery forgotten yet still humming and rattling. Now moving over the chain-link fence, the night’s chill roiling across your whole body, you’d been following the other one. But the sound of his blood is gone now this is another drip drip droplets like trickling rubies. So many out there you realize and here is one more churning chunking away just inside this door. Kill the Other first, the man. Then your brother, blades drawn, slams your body against the door—

  • • •

  The motel room, like, exploded.

  I swear to God, I thought the whole world had just blown up.

  I flung up out of bed in the dead of night. Watched the motel room door bouncing off the wall. Pieces of the doorframe splintering out in a hundred directions.

  There was something standing at the end of my bed.

  Enormous. Black. Misshapen. Something glinted in its hands.

  The first thought I had was, The Black Dress Lady. The Thing on the Bed. She’d found me. Followed me. And she was totally what I saw for half a second. The big huge cartoon eyes. Vacant. Dead. The face the color of a shining skull in the yellow light from outside.

  Then I realized it was a man. Dark not just from the room’s shadows. It was as if he were not really there at all but still half in the dark from which he’d sprung.

  The dark man was just standing there. Staring at me.

  My father came to mind.

  Then Castillo started shooting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I cringed against the wall, curled away from the gunshots.

  And from the man standing there.

  Then, just like that, both were gone. The doorway now empty.

  Castillo had somehow rolled from his own bed across the floor and was now behind mine. Gun pointed at the door. He asked if I was OK and then told me to keep quiet. He’d slid over the foot of the bed toward the doorway. Kept low to the window, clinging to the same darkness the other guy had just retreated to. He told me to get behind the bed, while looking out into the parking lot outside.

  Then he cursed and ran out the door. Yelled back for me to stay put.

  Forget that.

  I immediately found my glasses and then started crawling around in the dark, getting my shit together. When Castillo got back, we’d go. That was that. There was no way I was gonna stay another minute in that motel.

  The guy, whoever it had been, was Evil. Pure and simple. I could feel it surging through my entire body. Icy. Trembling like thousands of worms in a dark grave. We HAD to go. Besides, I knew Castillo couldn’t stay here. Not after gunshots. He’d been worried about the cops since Day One. He sure as heck didn’t want to talk with them tonight.

  I was right. Castillo returned, tried shutting the broken door, which bounced back freely on its newly busted hinges. He seemed quite pleased I was already good to go. Asked if I was OK.

  What was that? I asked.

  Who, Castillo corrected me.

  • • •

  This particular who/what question continues even to today. Though it largely goes unspoken, because arguing too much on if this “dark man” was technically a man or a “thing” is directly related to whether or not Jeff Jacobson, technically, is a thing or a man. Which, out of common courtesy to me, folk around here generally avoid debating.

  • • •

  I can tell you only what we now know.

  Who/what came to our room that night was constructed in a DSTI lab just like me.

  Constructed as a special type of weapon for the United States military.

  A biological weapon. A life-form weapon. And 100% human. (Technically.)

  I’m now gonna oversimplify a process that took a team of men almost twenty years and a hundred million dollars to accomplish. Like Frankenstein’s monster, but instead of body parts stitched together from a dozen different corpses, the geneticists at DSTI had cobbled together the DNA from a dozen different serial killers. 10% Bundy + 8% Gacy + 15% Fish + 10% Dahmer, etc. Until 100% of a “full” person.

  We’ve been breeding dogs and horses this way for thousands of years. Crafting this special hybrid of human wasn’t, in the simplest explanation, that different. And once the government had these specimens blended together, the scientists even “tweaked” them a bit more. Not much different than someone on steroids or ADD meds or birth control. The specimens were gestated in special incubator tanks to whatever age and size the company wished. Raised and trained, but kept in the vats to reduce decomposition. During this state, DSTI also amplified the aberration of their XP11 strand—the one that controls violence. (The gene already way off the genetic charts even for us “one-source” clones!) DSTI also modified their genetic codes for hearing, strength, metabolism (to control the body temperature), skin pigment, etc.

  The original idea was to send these special killers into unique zones of conflict. Deep into enemy territory. Underground bunkers and tunnels miles beneath the earth. During testing DSTI discovered that these men had a unique—and rather fortunate—ability. They could sense one another. The way twins sometimes know when their “double” has been hurt or is experiencing a particularly strong emotion.

  And not just one another. They could, it was soon realized, somehow sense other killers. Including men who had absolutely nothing to do with Project Cain. But somehow (I describe it as a sound) they could find these men who’d killed, wanted to kill, etc. And then eliminate them. Field tests were run. These specimens were first assessed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Philippines and Colombia. Then in Iran and Pakistan. Then the United States.

  Later I learned that when Castillo had been captured and tortured somewhere in Iran (thus the scars), it had been one of these men who’d freed him. (Castillo did not yet really remember this, but it would soon explain his nightmares.)

  And as far as what really happened when Osama bin Laden was killed, why there is no real evidence of his body, or what happened to the crashed American helicopter or the half dozen Special Forces operatives who died that same week on “other missions” . . . that is a story best told by Ox.

  • • •

  Two more things about these special men made by DSTI.

  1. They were not crafted from the DNA of the original serial killers. They were crafted from the DNA of us clones. DNA that, in some cases, had been modified to create more violent specimens.

  2. There was more than one.

  • • •

  But the night that the dark man attacked our room, Castillo didn’t know any of this. And it was not yet a memory he was willing to take on. So he ignored the guy completely and told me he’d have to deal with the cops now and for me to go to the Waffle House down the street. I did like I was told and got the heck out of there.

  But I never even got to the Waffle House.

  I’d almost reached it when Castillo pulled up with the car.

  Get in, he said. I think we’re screwed.

  • • •

  “Screwed” was not exactly the word he used, but you get the idea.

  Also, he was totally right.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  DSTI had put tracking chips into their clones.

  Standard operating procedure. Inserted just beneath the skin in the feet. Little metal pellets the size of a fat grain of rice. Protecting specimens worth more than a million dollars apiece. Castillo figured the dark guy had been sent to find me and had probably tracked me with one of those.

  The solution?

  We broke into this vet’s office.

  • • •

  I hid in the shadows, terrified, while Castillo busted the alarm, opened the back door. There were just four dogs caged inside,
barking as one, and loud enough to wake half the state. Castillo made me find them treats while he looked around some.

  Five minutes later, the dogs were totally chowing and Castillo was testing something called a DR 3500 Digital Navigator Plus. The vet’s X-ray machine.

  Then I was up on the table.

  The alternative involves cutting, Castillo said.

  He knew this from experience. Apparently the six boys who’d first escaped had cut theirs out at Massey. Placed them in the shape of a smiley face (two eyes, nose, three for the mouth) with the head drawn in blood on the Activity Center’s pool table. There’d been a dead counselor next to the face.

  My father, Castillo figured, had told them the chips were there.

  He didn’t tell me, I said.

  • • •

  My father hadn’t told me because I didn’t have a chip implanted.

  Neither did any of the dozen clones my father had personally adopted out into the world.

  He didn’t want DSTI to know where they were.

  He wanted us all completely free.

  Almost.

  • • •

  Castillo X-rayed my feet first. Nothing. Took another two dozen close digital shots of different body parts. Hands. Legs. Neck. More whole lot of nothing. I wondered out loud if he were giving me cancer. If they find you, Castillo said, that won’t matter. Then he took another dozen X-rays, I figure. I stayed quiet. He couldn’t find anything. No tracking devices. At least nothing metal. I asked Castillo how it had found me, then. (I tried not to think about the dreams I’d been having. The visions. The blood sounds.) He, Castillo corrected again. And also, he had no idea who this guy was either.

  • • •

  We slumped across from each other on the office floor. Castillo with his back against the desk and his legs out. Me all cross-legged. Each of us had a dog resting at our side. Piles of treats on the floor between us.