“What killed it?”
“We weren’t completely sure at the time, but it looked emaciated, for lack of a better description. It was barely an inch long but it was wrinkled, as if it could have grown more. We decided that the dog’s brain was too small. Once the specimen died, it began to decay and created an infection, we were sure that was what killed the dog.”
“So you tried it on something bigger?”
“Yes! You see, the property of the dig belonged to a very rich Colombian man. He claimed to be a farmer, but none of us were allowed to go further onto his farm than the dig site. And he always had armed guards. Supposedly, they were they to protect us from the cartels in the area, but considering Andres Moreno was the cartel there, it was mostly to keep us where he wanted us.”
Sydney’s head was pounding. “Why would this South American drug lord just listen to two American scientists and hand them money and equipment?”
“Moreno is...well, he’s crazy.”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black, Syd thought ruefully.
“I can tell you more about him later. Unless you would rather hear about him than what happened to the first human we implanted with a spore?”
“No, by all means, tell your story.” Sydney knew there was more to the story but she back-burnered it for now. It seemed less important than the creatures lodged in people’s brains.
“We didn’t ask who the subjects Moreno brought us were. We just knew they weren’t good people. No one involved with Moreno was.”
Sydney grumbled to herself. Ironic.
“We used a pair of forceps and inserted the spore through the subject’s nasal cavity. We used the same basic entry path that doctors used to use for a lobotomy.”
“What happened?”
“Except for a broken nose and black eyes, he was fine. But, twenty-Eight days later, the subject began experiencing nightmares, nosebleeds, headaches and dizziness.”
“Then?” Her voice sounded hollow and haunted.
“Then nothing. He died. We performed a sort of informal autopsy and found similar results as we did with the dog. Except the specimen was larger and the arms more deeply embedded in the brain.”
“What was going wrong?”
“We didn’t know if the specimens had been in stasis too long. Or if for some reason the hosts weren’t compatible.”
“Apparently, you didn’t give up.”
Doc laughed at her joke. “Of course not. We did what any good scientist would do. We performed more trials. We tried five more times before we were successful.
Doc’s voice softened but Sydney didn’t know if his regret was over the suffering of the subjects as they died or their failed experiments—but she could guess. “That one didn’t die?”
“No. He lived for a while,” Doc grinned, returning to his excited state. “He didn’t die after the spore hatched. That’s what we were sure was happening around day twenty-eight. He had the nosebleeds, the headaches, the paranoia, and dizziness. For a couple of days he was angry and irrational bordering on violent. Then he just shut down. He went catatonic. He stopped eating. He soiled himself and he didn’t speak. We didn’t intervene. We needed to see what happened. Eventually, he succumbed to starvation and dehydration. But we had made it further than all the other trials before.”
“What was different about this guy?”
“We opened him up to see. The specimen had grown much larger than previous versions but it still looked underdeveloped. Our means of study were limited and we were mostly guesses. But, we began to look at the part of the brain the appendages were embedded in. It was rooted into the prefrontal cortex and we tried to compare the subjects. Considering that part of the brain is responsible for higher thinking we looked at the intelligence of the subjects. The accountant was educated the others were simple thugs. It seemed to be the most obvious difference between them. Doc shook his head sadly, “By the time we came to the conclusion that the more developed the prefrontal cortex the more developed the specimen we had wasted twenty-five of the spores.”
Xander
The next morning Xander woke up to the sound of his phone ringing. He jumped and yelped at the pain in his neck, stiff from sleeping awkwardly on the couch. He scrambled for his phone with his heart slamming in his chest. It had to be Rabbit. “Hello,” he croaked.
“Wake up, pretty boy.”
Xander almost rolled his eyes. Only someone as rough and ragged as Rabbit could call Xander a pretty boy. “Have you found something?”
“Of course. I’m not just calling to chat. Open the fucking door.”
“OK, I’m coming.” He climbed off the couch and nearly fell over the table.
“What’s going on?” Shay asked groggily but coming slowly awake realizing something was up.
“Rabbit has something.”
She and Zak stumbled out of bed and threw on their clothes as Xander headed for the stairs pulling on his jeans at the same time. The cold concrete of the floor bit into his bare feet but he ignored it and sped up when someone banged on the door. The site on the other side of the door stopped him in his tracks. Rabbit stood on the doorstep holding a bruised, dirty and clearly dazed Pandaren by the scruff.
“Holy shit,” Xander breathed.
“Get the fuck out of the way before someone sees me with this stinking asshole.” Xander backed up and Rabbit pushed Pan inside and kicked the door shut behind them. “Get me a chair and some rope or something.”
“Just tie him to the support beam there,” Xander nodded to the same structure he and Sydney had used to restrain Connor. Rabbit pushed the zombie-like Pan to the ground and dragged him to the pole. Once Pan was secure they both stood watching him—he didn’t even try to struggle.
“Where did you find him?” Xander asked. Shay and Zak were silent but close by. He could see the dirty look she was giving Rabbit but luckily the big biker was ignoring her.
“He was lurking around in the subdivision in the back. Is this who you’ve been looking for?”
“Uh, not really, but he is probably even better than who we were hoping for.”
Rabbit shrugged his mountainous shoulders and Xander scowled at him. He smelled like leather and body odor. For him to call Pan stinky was saying something. The man hadn’t changed much in the years since he had last seen him. He still had dirty blonde hair and a long beard. The only difference was his gut was bigger and there was a new patch on his leather jacket, he had moved up in rank. “We’re even now, right?” he asked Xander.
“Sure,” he nodded. Without another word, Rabbit turned and stomped out of the garage.
“God, I hate that asshole,” Shay finally spoke, making her way closer towards Xander and Pan.
Zak was on her heels. “I don’t even want to know who that guy was, but I do want to know who he is,” he nodded towards Pan.
“Shay, Zak—meet Pandaren.”
“The guy you left in Vegas?!” Shay stared at the guy on the floor with wide, shocked eyes.
“Yep.” Xander hurried into the office and returned with two chairs. He gave one to Shay and took the other for himself after shrugging at Zak. “Sorry, man—I only have two.”
“I’ll get one from the apartment,” he rolled his eyes.
Xander didn’t wait on Zak to return before he began asking Pan questions. “Are you OK?” By the look of him, he wasn’t. Half of his face was a healing purple bruise and his clothes had blood stains on them. He looked pale and emaciated too. And Xander felt more than a little guilty for Pan’s condition.
“I don’t know,” Pan muttered staring off into space.
“Uh, have you been to a doctor?”
“No…”
“How did you find us?”
“I don’t know…”
“Well, you’re here,” Shay joined in with the interrogation. “You found this place—half way across the country—somehow.”
“But I don’t know how.”
“Were you following a
tracking device?”
Pan stared at him as if he had started speaking a foreign language. “How would I do that?”
Good question, Xander realized. “Do you know if someone put a tracking device on you?”
“I don’t know. When?”
“When everything changed?”
“How would I know?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Pan seemed more confused than the rest of them.
“Why did you come for Sydney and Xander?” Zak asked, joining them again.
“I just...I don’t know. I felt like it was what I was supposed to do.”
“Even though Syd hit you in the head with a tire iron?” Xander raised a brow at him.
“It...helped.”
“Getting hit in the head helped?”
“Yeah. Before everything was...on fire. Everything was...dizzy? After, my brain didn’t hurt so much anymore.”
“That makes no sense at all,” Zak whispered to Xander and Shay.
“So you decided to come to Chicago?” Xander asked him.
“Yeah. It felt right. I needed to be with Sydney.”
Xander knew he didn’t mean with Sydney. And he didn’t think he meant to hurt her either. “How did you get here?”
“I hitchhiked—I think.”
Shay, Zak and Xander looked at each other. That had to have been a rough trip. No well-meaning person would have picked up someone looking like Pan did. “OK,” Xander nodded. “Once you got to Chicago how did you find the garage?”
“I...heard Sydney.”
“What do you mean?” Shay asked.
“I don’t know,” Pan moaned. “I heard her. In my head. When I was asleep.”
“You dreamed about her?” Xander asked.
“Yeah. And when I was asleep I walked here.”
Zak shuddered. “How long have you been near the garage?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been hiding. Since he was here.”
“Who?” Xander narrowed his eyes at Pan.
“Him. The one with the bloody bag. In the van.”
Xander’s blood turned cold. “You saw the guy who took Connor’s head?”
“Is that what was in the bag?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess so.”
“That was days ago. Where have you been all this time?”
“With the kid…”
“What kid?”
“The one in the white pajamas.”
Xander stared at him in confusion until what he said made sense. “The kid who thinks he knows karate. The one who lives behind here?”
“Yeah.”
Xander closed his eyes and ran a hand across his mouth. There was no way that family would let Pan stay with them. “What did you do to them?” Pan seemed calmer than he had been before he attacked him and Sydney, but he still didn’t seem right. His eyes darted around as if he was searching for an answer on the floor but he didn’t find one and his eyes never quite focused. Xander didn’t know what to say and once Shay realized what he already had she groaned softly and put a hand to her mouth. Xander didn’t see a way the family could still be alive, they wouldn’t have willingly let Conner hideout in their house.
Zak spoke up again. “So, you basically feel Sydney, right?”
Pan licked his lips. “Kind of...”
“Well,” Zak shrugged. “Looks like we found our tracking device.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Sydney’s head was pounding and she was feeling ill. Both from the energy it was taking to focus on what Doc was saying and from the pain in her head, and it didn’t help that she had plenty of caffeine in her system but no food. She rubbed her temples before returning her attention to the doctor. “How did you get the spores to America?”
Doc sighed and looked angry again. “By this time, Andrew and I both were out of a job so we were entirely dependent on Moreno and he knew this. We tried to explain to him that we needed subjects with more developed, more active, prefrontal cortexes. He knew we wanted to go to the States where it would be easier for us to blend in and find subjects. Moreno tried to take the spores and hide them from us. He wanted to have control over them so that he could control us.”
Doc peeled his banana and spoke between bites. “He didn’t get all of them though. I managed to save one.” Sydney had a feeling this was not going anywhere good. “We needed to get back so that we could study the life form out from underneath Moreno’s supervision. And, I knew I needed an intelligent subject to be host for this one chance I had. So, implanted the spore in Andrew.”
“Jesus…” Sydney whispered.
“Self-testing isn’t unheard of. Jonas Salk,” he offered, as an example.
Sydney wanted to point out that self-testing and testing on your partner were two entirely different things. But, she wisely decided to not say anything. This man is an egomaniacal lunatic, she thought bitterly. She wasn’t a psychiatrist, but she knew there was no way this was going to end well for her. Doc saw her as a subject, an object, a test to be studied and manipulated. When he was done with her she would be in pieces in his lab. “How did that get you back to the States?”
“It took a lot of bargaining, reasoning, and convincing, but finally Moreno agreed to sneak me back into the country. I explained that if I didn’t go back to consult with other scientists I would never be able to help Andrew. I had convinced Moreno that Andrew became a host by accident. I’m not sure he ever entirely believed Andrew’s implantation wasn’t on purpose. But he did believe that he could remove it once it was healthy enough and I could transplant it into him.”
“And Andrew didn’t refute your story? I can’t imagine he was very happy about what you had done.”
“Oh! I put him in a medically induced coma. He couldn’t disagree at all.”
“You were OK with doing that to your friend?”
“I knew that he would agree with me and probably do the same thing if he had the opportunity. But, I couldn’t let him wake up. I needed time. And the larvae stage slowed down if the host was unconscious.”
Syd swallowed and tried to keep her voice even. “So, Moreno just let you go?”
“Well, he wasn’t happy about it. But he finally agreed. He knew I didn’t have any other spores so I still needed him and his money. I managed to convince him it was a divine plan,” Doc scoffed.
She wondered how he could have infected so many people here if he hadn’t been allowed to take more with him. “Did it work?”
“What?”
“Infecting Andrew. Did it work?”
“Oh, yes,” Doc breathed almost orgasmically. “Yes, it did.”
“Where do I and the others come into this whole scenario?”
“From the time it hatches it takes six months for the Dyian to reach maturity.”
“The Dyian?”
“That’s what I call them. It’s the Quechuan—the Incan language—word for god. We don’t have a record of Quimbayan language, so I went with the closest option.”
“And by reach maturity, you mean…”
“Yes, to reproduce.”
And that’s how he infected us all, Sydney realized. “Why me? Why Connor and Randall?”
“I needed subjects that that were the most likely to be successful. I did not have the resources to waste more spores. So, I tried to find subjects that I knew would have the most developed, most active prefrontal cortexes. It’s not been proven yet, but there have been numerous studies that show individuals who play videogames and are heavily involved with technology often have the highest performing activity in this area of the brain.”
“You mean you picked me and the others because we played video games?” Sydney’s supposedly higher functioning brain certainly didn’t feel like it was running at its best right now.
“That’s not the only reason. I could have chosen any number of subject groups that show higher brain function, other scientists and engineers, for example. But, the added bonus of the ‘gamer
circles’ is they are often less social. They tend to be younger and less likely to have spouses and children.”
“How did you choose which of us you were going to infect?” Her voice sounded as empty as she felt.
“I paid an admin from the E4G convention to get me a list of names of people who had only bought one ticket, then I did some googling. The ones who didn’t appear to have families and ones who worked from home were my first choice. I simply emailed you offering a chance to beta test a new, top secret game.”
Sydney looked down at the counter and shook her head. How could it have been that easy? Whenever she imagined how she had ended up in her current condition she pictured nighttime kidnappings, or car chases. She had wanted to believe that she had fought hard to save herself. But, knowing that she had simply been tricked, that her own naivety and gullibility had led to her downfall was almost too much to bear. “Who was I? What was my name?” she asked, meeting Doc’s indifferent gaze.
“Ah, well, now, I don’t think that is necessary for you to know.”
“What does it matter?’
“Oh, it matters plenty. It will only cause you undue stress to think about an identity you don’t even remember. When I implanted the Dyian in you, you became someone—something—new and a new name and identity seems appropriate, don’t you think?”
“No!” Sydney had to grip her seat tightly to focus and remind herself that she needed to maintain control.
“Pardon me?”
“I just mean that not knowing is worse. I don’t know if I have a family. I don’t know if someone misses me.”
“And what would it serve for you to know that there was?”
“I—It...just would.”
“No, I don’t think so. Plus,” he shrugged after a moment. “I don’t remember what your name was,” he chuckled dismissively.
Sydney wanted to climb over the counter and strangle the so-called doctor. “So, what now?” she asked, trying not to sound angry.
“I would like to run some more tests. I’m not sure why the implantation didn’t work in your case. I suspect that the spore just didn’t hatch, or that it had some physiological problem that prevented it from growing…” he trailed off thoughtfully.
Don't Let Them Find You (The Dyian Series Book 1) Page 30
