He returned his fixation to Maggie, who once again knelt in front of him as she traced the line of Marsten’s thighs beneath denim with her fingertips. The Lady turned her gaze upon the two below her, leaning forward to better see the show.
“But Maestro—”
“We’ve recast our relationship, Simpson,” said Marsten without taking his eyes from Maggie’s efforts. Then he leaned back, his right eye closed, his left dully staring beneath its rictus lid at nothing. “Don’t push your luck.”
Dismissed by Marsten, Simpson stared down at Maggie. Part of him appreciated her enthusiasm. Most of him was simply repulsed. He turned around and exited the courthouse, its sights and sounds and smells left gratefully behind him. He had bigger fish to fry.
* * *
Stavros heard the prowler before he saw him. The scraping of the tin against the brick veneer of the store, the crunching of glass underfoot. A smallish man with something over his shoulder. A pack or … the prowler’s eyes found him and both men froze.
No man, Stavros realized. A boy.
A boy reaching into the right pocket of his jeans.
“Hey, drop it!” shouted Stavros. He felt the adrenaline surge into his veins. In the half-second he shared eyes with the boy, he decided he wasn’t taking any chances. Barcak in the grocery store had taught him that lesson.
Stavros jerked his 9-millimeter up and shot at the wall just over the boy’s head. The intruder dove into cover behind a long gun case.
“Stand back up! I want you where I can see you!”
Stavros stooped low behind the counter, awaiting obedience to his command. Instead, amid the dying echoes of the pistol shot, he heard shuffling sounds from the boy’s hiding place.
Silence, except for that. The boy was crawling behind cover. Coming nearer.
“Stop what you’re doing, damn it! I will not hesitate to shoot you, son!”
Stavros backed away from his position, tracking the boy by sound behind the cover of counters with the barrel of his 9-millimeter. Already the initial charge of euphoric energy he’d felt with the adrenalin rush was beginning to fade.
“Who are you and what do you want?” asked the scientist. Something arced up and over the counter to his right. He turned his pistol to follow it and shot wildly, the bullet slamming the door facing that led to the back of the store.
Brownish-blonde hair ducking.
“Stavros, stop firing that damned weapon!” yelled Lauryn, scrambling into cover herself.
“There’s an intruder! A boy—”
Lauryn heard an umph! and the crash of bodies and boxes. Two quick smacks of someone’s jaw being hit left and right, and when she chanced a glance, she saw Stavros’s weapon skitter across the cluttered floor of the gun shop.
“Help!”
Then all was quiet. Lauryn got to her feet and stepped forward, gun held in both hands.
“Stay back!” piped a voice that couldn’t be old enough to drink yet. “Stay back or I’ll cut his throat!”
“Stay back, stay back!” Stavros yelled.
“Not gonna happen, son! Let him go and stand up and I won’t shoot you. How about that?” Lauryn said, edging closer. She glanced down, careful to step between the debris on the floor.
“Lady, I’m not kidding!”
“Neither am I.”
“What are you doing?” demanded Stavros.
“Shut up, Stavros,” she said edging around the corner of the gun counter. The boy was on top of the scientist, a small knife at Stavros’s throat. Oh, for the love of…
The boy looked up.
“What do you want here, son?” asked Lauryn, the gun leveled firmly at him.
“First, I’d like to not get shot.”
She could see the hand holding the knife was trembling. He was as scared as his hostage.
“Okay, I can make sure you don’t get shot,” she said, her voice as calm as water on a windless day. “But first, you have to put down the knife.”
His eyes bored into hers. They looked wild. Desperate. Capable of anything.
“You first!” he said.
Lauryn took half a breath. The wrong answer could get Stavros killed. A small knife can cut a carotid artery as easily as a big one can. And the boy was pressing his blade hard enough to dent Stavros’s skin.
“What do you want, son?” whispered the scientist. “Whatever it is—”
“I’m in a friggin’ gun shop. Figure it out, genius!”
The boy’s eyes never left Lauryn. She released her breath slowly, her pistol stock-still. “Listen to me, son—”
“Stop calling me that! I’m nobody’s son!”
Lauryn blinked. “Okay, my apologies. What would you like me to call you?”
“Name’s Colt.”
“Colt…”
“Just Colt. That’s all you need to know.”
She watched his eyes start to dance around, looking left and right for any way out that didn’t involve his getting shot.
“Listen to me, Colt. No one wants to hurt you. But you’re the one who’s got a knife at my friend’s throat, there.”
“He shot at me!”
Even upside down with a Swiss army knife at his throat, Stavros managed to look incredulous.
“I didn’t know your intentions! And the last time I—”
“Hey!” shouted Lauryn. Good thing her finger was along the barrel and not on the trigger. She might’ve just shot them both. “Listen, s—Colt. I’m going to put down my pistol on the counter here. And you’re going to put down your knife. Deal?”
Colt’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s not a trick,” she assured him. “Just a show of good faith. But listen to me … and look into my eyes so you know what I’m saying is true … if you harm him, I’ll pick the gun up before his blood hits the floor and put a bullet right in your forehead. Do you believe me?”
Colt’s eyes widened.
“Good. Now, here goes.” Slowly Lauryn placed her .40-caliber on the top of the display case. She left the barrel facing Colt. “Now, you.”
The boy swallowed and looked down at Stavros. What he saw was someone as scared, if not more so, than himself. Not a member of the biker gang. Not a prisoner in the bus barn. Not an Exer.
Somebody like me, he thought. Where the hell am I?
Swallowing hard, Colt pulled the blade from Stavros’s throat and carefully stood up, arms wide to show he really meant no harm. He placed the Swiss army knife on the counter facing Lauryn’s pistol.
“I don’t know you people,” he said by way of explanation. “I don’t know where I am.”
A strange thing to say, thought Lauryn. “It’s okay,” she said, making no move to pick up her weapon. “We don’t want to hurt you.” Glancing to the floor, she said, “Stavros, move this way. Come stand by me.”
“Don’t try anything!” shouted Colt, backing away a step. His feet wanted the door. His eyes wanted the knife back.
“We won’t,” Lauryn said, helping Stavros to his feet. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
The boy clearly didn’t believe her. There’s a look to him, to the hardness in his eyes, that’s older than his age, Lauryn thought. She’d seen it before. Echoes of abuse, of trust betrayed.
“I’m sorry if I scared you.” The mea culpa came from Stavros. “You scared me, too.”
“Hey, dude, some old man points a gun at you for no reason, you’d pull whatever you were carrying, too.” But Colt’s feet had stopped fidgeting and his tone was mollified, not malicious.
Laughter, barely muted and slightly mocking came from Lauryn. “Yeah, old man.”
Stavros shot her a look that began with the letter F.
“I thought you might be the prisoners,” said Colt. “I saw them come in here before. I thought I’d waited till they left, then I ran into you … I … I just wasn’t sure. You know about them?”
At his mention of Marsten’s minions, Lauryn’s eyes flattened. “Yeah, I know about them,” she sa
id. “I used to work at the prison that housed them before all this happened.”
The look in Colt’s eyes softened further. Like he almost wanted to believe her. Take her words at face value. Then, looking past her, his eyes went wide again and Lauryn tensed, her eyes flicking to her pistol, her fingers ready to grab it up again. She followed his stare and turned to find Megan standing in the doorway to the back room, holding a suspicious, growling Jasper straining at his rope-leash.
“What’s going on out here, M—”
Then Megan stopped short as her eyes found Colt’s.
Everyone in the room was still for a moment. Only Jasper’s gravelly warning was audible. “The boy of my dreams,” whispered Megan. Jasper woofed, sniffing at the air in Colt’s direction.
A smile crept across Colt’s face, pulled into place by the spreading crimson in his cheeks.
“What?” Lauryn asked. “What did you say?” She’d heard her daughter but didn’t understand. What did Megan mean?
“He’s the boy I was dreaming about last night,” Megan answered. Her eyes, soft and appraising, never left Colt.
The boy’s smile widened.
“Oh,” said Lauryn, her gaze moving from one teen to the other. Jasper, at least, seemed wary and Lauryn gave him a mental pat on the head for that. Good boy. She glanced at Stavros, perhaps seeking affirmation that their situation was suddenly much more dangerous … only not in a way that involved guns or knives. Instead, she found amusement and the smug look of karma’s-a-bitch on Stavros’s face.
“Great,” she said. “Just great.”
Stavros’ Journal: Tuesday, late morning.
We’ve spent the whole day scavenging, and while they finish up in the back, I’m taking a few minutes to record some thoughts. Gotta keep my voice down, though, because…
Who is this Colt, anyway? What’s she mean by taking him in like that? I mean, we’ve got enough to worry about.
And the boy’s behavior earlier, when he attacked me—it got me thinking. What motivated that attack? Self-preservation, I assume. I’d fired a gun at him (which I still think was totally justified, by the way). But let’s think about that a second; his reaction, not my action. Let’s cast the bones on that and see what they tell us.
Colt chose to approach danger rather than flee it.
Hypothesis: He felt attacking me was safer than trying to get out of the store. Hmm, interesting that I said it that way. Felt rather than reasoned. Something inside Colt compelled him to action. Not his rational, thinking self. There wasn’t time for that process.
Did he act on impulse, then? What does that mean, exactly: “act on impulse”? To be moved to action randomly? I refuse to accept that. Even Jazz isn’t random—it just sounds that way. Maybe it means to be moved to action irrationally? Perhaps, in the purest sense of that word irrational, given that his action wasn’t thought through first. Or was there something driving him to attack me without calculating the odds? Something literally irrational by its nature—but not random.
Something more primal. Something that knows what it needs intuitively, without consideration of consequence or price. Motivation to action just is, compelled by the most basic of needs: self-interest.
Are you familiar with the concept of the lizard brain? In the 1950s, scientists started studying the limbic portion of the brain. Emotions live there and as a result, so do your moods. The lizard brain is where all the fun stuff happens—the three trauma responses, fight, flight, and freeze, as well as the fear of death that motivates them; and the two basic survival appetites: feeding and f—, um, fornication. Some refer to the lizard brain as the home of the Six F’s.
Huh. There’s that magic number again.
Remove the capacity for rational thought—strip the conscience your mother lectured you on and the fear of consequence your father beat into you—and you become motivated entirely by your lizard self. An amoral being pursuing appetites for food or sex or whatever makes you feel satisfied, feel good, without regard for the long-term effect. We saw this every day when the Titanic of the world was still sailing along, blissfully unaware of approaching Icebergs Glenn, Helen, and Ilene.
A woman goes to a bar looking for something, maybe she’s not sure what, has a few too many beers, and wakes up the next morning in bed with a man she’d normally stand on the far side of an elevator to avoid. Everything was consensual; let’s take the other off the table for the simplicity’s sake. He didn’t put anything in her drink. She was in control of her own actions right up until the point when she didn’t care anymore. She can’t believe what she’s done and might even claim—quite understandably and truthfully—to have no memory of the decision-making process that led to her lying naked next to Bubba. Beer goggles are a lizard brain’s best friend.
She feels remorse, self-loathing, shame. She promises to never let it happen again. It’s all streaming through her frontal lobe while she makes lame excuses to herself and puts her clothes back on—these are characteristics of the moral self—the socially indoctrinated self, if you will—reasserting its dominance over the lizard brain. Yet, at some point in the future, she’ll choose a similar path of need-indulge-regret, and the process will repeat itself. Maybe through an overindulgence in ice cream or a shopping spree she can’t afford. But it’ll happen again. It’s in her DNA, after all.
Is this the process that’s been short circuited in the Serenity Six? Building on previous research, I targeted the expression of the HTR2B gene, and that led to my therapeutic trials. Controlling that gene helped me regulate the most basic of human motivations to curb impulsiveness—to add those three deep breaths of consideration of consequence between knee-jerk “need to act” and irrevocable action.
I adapted the genetic make-up of Peter and the others, expecting the results I achieved—at first. What I didn’t see coming is what I suspect happened in five of the six cases.
Theory: The lizard brain reestablished control over—and ultimately rejected the changes—I wrote into the HTR2B gene. Rejected them so vehemently, in fact, that the subjects’ DNA not only rewrote itself over those changes, but did my therapy one better—it went too far in the other direction.
Hypothesis One: The lizard brain not only decreased expressions of the HTR2B gene, it obliterated the gene altogether.
Hypothesis Two: Or perhaps the lizard brain—merely defending itself and the natural law that created it—changed the nature of the HTR2B gene. Enlisted it as an ally rather than kill it as an enemy.
Either way, now the ability of the remaining Serenity Six to curb their own appetites—to do what we all learn to do by the time we’re five years old by submitting to the will of the social norm—is gone.
Poof!
They’re like walking, talking appetites, driven only by their own fear—self-interest’s favorite emotion—and their need to feed themselves. With food. With sex. With destruction. With whatever their little amoral hearts desire.
To fix that, I’d have to know—specifically—what rebelled against Serenity. What tiny lizard god of human natural law did I so piss off that the little bastard saw the need to crank Peter and his cronies up to eleven?
Before I sat down to record my thoughts, I asked Colt what prompted him to circle around the store and attack me instead of just running away. He looked at me like I’d asked him why he sneezes. Then he just shrugged and walked away.
I don’t think that boy likes me.
But maybe his non-answer is the answer. Maybe his rational brain couldn’t fathom my question. Maybe his lizard brain didn’t want to answer it, to reveal any clues as to how it does what it does.
My instincts tell me Colt’s and Peter’s actions are related through that lizard brain we all share. If I can just figure out how.
Stop laughing at me, you bone-rattling sonofabitch. Stop looking so goddamned smug.
Eamon Stavros
Part 2
Across the City
Chapter 8: Tuesday, evening.
&nbs
p; “How many times do I have to say it? Not no, but hell no.”
Lauryn wouldn’t even look at Stavros as she spoke. But her hand sliced the air with each “no” to indicate the discussion was over.
“I don’t think you understand why this is necessary,” the scientist said.
“I don’t think you understand English.”
It’d been like that all afternoon. With the prisoners roaming around, they’d agreed to stay put at SSI Guns & Ammo until dark. It seemed like the safest place to be—somewhere Marsten’s men had already been. And that’s where agreement ended between Lauryn and Stavros.
“My research—I’ve explained it to you as best I can. I’ve—”
“Take that condescending tone out of your voice,” breathed Lauryn. “And your research—none of that matters now. All that matters is surviving till the world rights itself again. And going into the lion’s den is no way to do that.”
Stavros sighed, his shoulders sagging. He sat down at the table they’d set up in the back of the store and stared at an empty Fritos bag.
“Something happened,” he said quietly. Maybe if he explained it a different way, maybe she’d understand. “Something perverted my research into what’s happening with Peter and the others. Whether it’s something inside them working against my therapeutic approach or something from the outside … I don’t know. What I do know is that to counteract it, to control it, I have to get one of them back in a laboratory environment. And I can’t do that alone.”
Lauryn rapped her knuckles on the table opposite him, a tired and impatient look on her face. This was the third time today he’d come back at her with this. The third time he’d tried to enlist her in his crusade to make a lab rat out of Marsten and the others again. It was getting old.
“Listen to yourself. The world’s a swampy shitpile, and you want to throw on a white lab coat and run tests? With what? No power grid, no Internet, no… ‘Get one of them back in a laboratory environment,’” she sneered in an affected academic accent. “You remind me of my father—with enough prayer, anything is possible. Only your prayers are chemical formulas.”
Ironheart (The Serenity Strain Book 2) Page 7
