Backwoods (26 page)

And the same thing would’ve happened to
me,
he thought with a shiver.
If my rifle hadn’t fallen, if
it hadn’t discharged when it hit the ground and scared them off,
they would have killed me, too.

“That’s what animals do,” Moore said. “That’s
what they are now, what the retrovirus has done to them. It’s made
the most primitive, predatory areas of their brain grow in size and
dominance. It’s made them animals.”

“And we’re the prey,” Andrew whispered,
aghast.

Again, Moore nodded. “Exactly.” Abandoning
the books scattered on the floor, he approached his daughter,
hooking his hand beneath her arm to pull her onto her feet. “We
need to keep moving.”

As much as Andrew wanted to get the hell out
there and find Dani, he found himself bristling. “Give her a
minute, will you?” he said, planting his palm on Moore’s shoulder,
jarring his grip on Alice loose. “Lucy was her friend. She’s
grieving.”

“Lucy was a Siamang,” Moore replied drolly,
shrugging away from Andrew’s hand. “And she’s not grieving. She
doesn’t know how.”

“Bullshit. She knows how to cry. Not an hour
ago, both of you stood in the hallway at the barracks, acting like
it was some kind of miracle.”

“It
was,”
Moore said simply.

He reached for Alice and again, Andrew caught
his arm, stopping him. “You know that thing wasn’t just a monkey to
her. You taught Lucy to play Candyland. I doubt it was so
you
could sit around and play with her. Yeah, it might’ve
all just been part of your experiment, but still.”

His voice abruptly faltered.
Wait a
minute,
he thought, remembering the soft spot in Lucy’s skull.
Her brain grew too big for her head.
That’s what Alice had
told him.
It’s part of his experiment.

He’d felt similar soft places along Alice’s
own scalp.

The medicine makes new nerves grow,
Alice had told him
. It fills in the missing places in my brain.
It makes the electrical signals get to the right places.

“It’s the same,” he whispered in horrified
realization. “You gave that shit to
Alice?”
He gave Moore
enough of a shove to send him stumbling back a step. “The same
virus you put inside Lucy? Inside O’Malley? Are you out of your
mind? She’ll turn into one of those…those things!”

Moore reclaimed his footing, then bared his
fists, squaring off against the younger man. “In small enough
doses, your body can regulate the virus on its own. I used Lucy to
calculate those proper doses to correct the neurological defects
that caused Alice’s autism. Look at how much progress I’ve
made.”

“Progress?” Andrew nearly spat the word.
“You’ve been carving holes into her skull!”

“She was crying,” Moore snapped back. “You
saw her—crying and laughing. Crying over
you,
and laughing
because it’s the first time in her entire life that she’s shed
tears at the right place and time. Do you have any idea what it’s
like to be autistic? To have an autistic child?” He managed a bark
of laughter. “No, you don’t. And spare me your bullshit, half-assed
sympathies about how you can only imagine how hard it must be,
because you
can’t,
Mister Braddock. You have no earthly
idea.”

He shoved his forefinger out, pointing to
Alice. “Look at her. She’s not grieving. She’s disassociated.
Whenever she’s challenged too hard to think or feel or reason, this
is what she does—she tunes out, turns off, disappears somewhere
inside of herself so deeply, there’s no way to reach her. Nothing
you can say, nothing you can do, not until she wants to, not until
she chooses to emerge from this self-imposed psychological
exile.

“By the time she turned three years old,
she’d stopped smiling. She’d stopped laughing. She didn’t cry, she
wouldn’t look at you when you called her name. It was as if
something somewhere inside of her had come unplugged, some vital
electrical circuit that made all of the other circuits in her brain
work properly. And without it, she became a hollowed out shell, a
life-sized, living, breathing doll.”

His brows furrowed and the corners of his
mouth wrenched down in a frown. “Autistic catatonia, that was her
diagnosis. She was so developmentally disabled and neurologically
impaired, the doctors told us the most she could ever hope for was
a lifelong regimen of medications. Do you know what it was like to
hear that, Mister Braddock? To hear that your child is going to be
afflicted with the mental capacities of a nine-month old infant
for the rest of her life?
To know that although you may have
won a Nobel Prize for unraveling the secrets of the human body’s
immunological processes, you couldn’t offer the same insight or
capability to benefit your own flesh and blood?”

His voice had grown ragged and strained, his
eyes glossy in the dim light. “Do you have any idea what that’s
like to know your daughter will never look at you and be able to
say
I love you,
not just because she can’t find the words,
but because she
can’t feel it?
It’s hell. An unending,
relentless life sentence in hell. It drove a wedge between me and
my wife from which we never recovered. She left me. And when she
did, she took Alice with her. Less than a year later, she had Alice
institutionalized.”

“Gallatin,” Andrew whispered. The state
hospital he’d seen in the photograph in Moore’s scrapbook.

Moore nodded. “Yes, Gallatin State Hospital.
They stopped calling it a
lunatic asylum
some years ago when
it was no longer politically correct. Do you know what Alice’s
treatment there consisted of? Regular bouts of electroconvulsive
therapy—electroshock. She was forcibly administered electrical
currents through her brain that triggered seizures and loss of
consciousness, because the state of Massachusetts said this would
make her better. And there was nothing I could do to stop
them.”

Jesus.
Stricken, Andrew looked down at
Alice. She remained oblivious to them, her gazed fixed somewhere
across the room, her hand draped lightly against Lucy’s
blood-dampened fur.

“Last year, Prendick came to me on behalf of
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” Moore said. “He
promised me that they could get Alice out of there. By that point,
she’d been incarcerated for nearly three years. I would have done
anything, traded my own life, to get her out of that place. I don’t
expect you to believe me, much less care, but it’s true. I had been
battling nonstop in court to have Alice released. Prendick promised
me he could have her set free in a day. And all I had to do was
agree to work for them.”

“And you did,” Andrew said.

“You’re damn right I did. And I’d do it
again—a thousand times, whatever it takes, if it meant fixing
Alice. I don’t give a flying fuck about anyone or anything in this
entire compound except my daughter.” Shoving Andrew aside, he
marched back toward Alice. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to
get her out of here before we end up carcasses strung up and
eviscerated in a tree.”

“But the roads,” Andrew said. “You can’t
leave. Prendick said—”

“Prendick’s the one behind this entire
operation,” Moore said without even pausing in his stride. “It was
in his best interest to keep everyone trapped here.” He spared
Andrew a glance. “Or at least believing that they were.”

“Wait.” Andrew watched him catch Alice by the
hand and pull her unceremoniously to her feet. Like a puppet, she
complied, her expression neutral. “What about Dani Santoro? We
can’t just—”

“She’s a soldier,” Moore said. “Given my past
association to this point, I don’t have much sympathy for her.”

“She’s a mother.”

“Again, given my past association
,
I
don’t have much sympathy.”

“But I don’t know the way to your office,”
Andrew said. “We can’t leave without her.”

Moore uttered a sharp laugh. “There is no
we,
Mister Braddock, except for me and Alice.
You
do
what you have to.”

He tried to march Alice out of the playroom
and furious now, something inside of Andrew snapped, just as it had
that long-ago day in North Pole, Alaska, when his father had smiled
at him in the front lobby of the Pagoda Chinese restaurant and told
him he’d be marrying Lila Meyer. Fists balled, he went after Moore,
grabbing him smartly by the sleeve and whirling him around.

“Dani has two kids. Her son is Alice’s age.
His name is Max,” said he said.

With a frown, Moore tried to pull himself
loose. “Shut up and get your hand off me.”

“He makes straight A’s and this past year, he
dressed up like a soldier for Halloween.”

Moore’s brows furrowed. “I said shut up.”

“That’s what she said he wants to be when he
grows up, a soldier like his mother. Because just like Alice
idolizes you, Dani’s boy worships the ground she walks on. Because
just like you, Dani’s a good parent who’d do anything for her
kids.”

“Shut up!” Moore shoved Andrew away from him,
sending him floundering backwards.

“As much as you love Alice, Dani loves her
kids, too,” Andrew said. “She doesn’t deserve to wind up like
that.” He cut his eyes toward the mangled, mutilated remains of
Lucy. “Please. If you won’t show me the way to your office, at
least tell me how to get there. Please.”

Something in Moore’s face faltered at this,
that cold and unaffected exterior momentarily softening. “Alright,”
he said at length, his voice strained and terse, as if it pained
him to speak. “Follow the corridor beyond the storeroom to your
right, then take the second hallway off it to your left. Take it
until it forks to the left, then take that hall all of the way down
to the next right. Four doors down, the left hand side of the
hallway. Room number one twenty-seven.”

“Thank you,” Andrew said.

As he turned to leave, Moore clapped a hand
against his arm. “They’re inside the building,” he said, his voice
grave and oddly gentle. “She’s already dead, son.”

Andrew frowned. “I’m not your son,” he said,
jerking free of Moore’s grasp. “And you’re wrong.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“
Dani!”

Ten minutes later, hopelessly lost in the
belly of the laboratory building, Andrew turned in a clumsy circle,
screaming his damn fool head off.

“Dani,” he cried again, his voice hoarse,
bouncing off the white-washed walls, industrial-grade linoleum
floors and ceiling tile panels. He’d tried to remember Moore’s
directions, had muttered them over and over again to himself after
he’d left the storeroom, but had lost track of just how many rights
he took before hanging a left, or down which corridor he was
supposed to turn when.

One twenty-seven.
He remembered the
office number Moore had given him, but to that point, all of the
doors he’d seen had looked alike and non-descript, and those that
had been numbered all seemed to fall in the one
hundred-eighty-something range.

At some point along the way, the emergency
lights had winked out, plunging the house of pain into abrupt and
absolute darkness. Whether the back up generator had given out, or
something more sinister had happened, Andrew didn’t know. But he’d
frozen, eyes flown wide, gripped with an overwhelming, child-like
fear of the blackened hallway, the unshakable certainty that
something was out there, screamers hunkered down and lurking,
watching him.

Once he’d snapped out of that initial,
terrified paralysis, he had inched his way forward. Now, still
submerged in darkness, he swung the pistol back and forth in one
hand, panning his aim nervously ahead of him. With the other, he
fumbled along the nearest wall, using it to guide him.

“Dani,” he shouted out again. His voice cut
short when he felt his foot connect with something heavy, solid and
semi-soft on the floor in front of him, almost like an oversized
sand bag.

What the fuck?
He danced to the left,
nearly falling over in panicked fright. His heel settled again onto
something firm but yielding underfoot, lumpy enough to trip
him.

“Jesus,” he yelped as he crashed onto his
ass, sitting down hard against the floor. The pistol jarred loose
from his hand upon the impact, and he heard a loud clatter as it
hit the floor, then skittered away, unseen.

Shit!
He groped blindly for it for a
long, desperate moment before uttering a frustrated cry and
slamming his fist against the floor. “Shit!”

Only his fist didn’t hit the linoleum tiles.
Instead, he hit that heavy, motionless lump beside him again, and
this time he felt the coarse texture of heavy fabric, heard it
rustle as he struck.

Shit,
he thought, realizing what he’d
tripped over, what was sprawled on the floor beside him.

A dead body.

He scrambled back until his back hit the
wall, and sat there, gasping for breath, teetering on the verge of
panic-stricken hyperventilation.
Not good, not good, oh, this is
not good at all.

Clapping his hands over his mouth to keep
himself quiet, he strained to listen for any tell-tale snuffling or
rustling sounds.
Because if there’s a dead man on the floor,
chances are, whatever killed him is still somewhere close
by.

Though he didn’t hear anything, he remained
rooted in spot another moment or two, trying to make sure. Now
without a gun, he wouldn’t stand a chance against one of the
screamers even in the best of lighting conditions, let alone in the
dark.

I’ve got to find that pistol.

Forcing himself to move, Andrew crept forward
on his hands and knees, hands outstretched as patted down the
length of the soldier’s body. Near his feet, he felt the cool press
of metal, and felt a momentary thrill as he grabbed for it,
thinking it was the nine-millimeter. Instead, it was some kind of
cylindrical shaft, somewhat heavy despite its slim circumference.
A flashlight,
he realized.
I’ll be damned. This guy had
been carrying a flashlight.