Cain's Blood (13 page)

“Zombies?” Jeff said.
Ox shook his head. “Wasn’t that crazy. The dead were dead. The old
woman was simply insane. hollyman said he wanted to pull the trigger
himself. Spooks wouldn’t let him. They took the woman away, told hollyman and the others to make it look like the Taliban had taken out the
village. Burn it all, clear out the IeDs. They did. And all the while, he
said, the Spooks were collecting samples.”
“Samples?”
“Air samples. Dirt. Water. Tissue and blood from the dead. Spent
half the day collecting what they needed, then burned as ordered. The
bodies, fields, livestock, dogs, everything.”
“What did he think it was?” Castillo was trying to shake the images
now painted in his head.
“What do
you
think it was? he said they’d tested something. Something biological had been used on these people. he didn’t know what
it was, but he said he’d never seen nothing like it in his whole life. Said
the woman, the woman’s eyes . . . not even in his nightmares. hollyman
was his detachment’s senior medical sergeant. he’d seen plenty to have
nightmares about. But this  .  .  . Said he’d burned
things
that day. Not
people.
Things
.” Ox’s voice trailed off.
“Anything else?”
Ox shook his head. “That’s it, man. I don’t . . . you know.”
“you know how I can reach him? Would he talk to me?”
“Gone, man. Two years now.”
“Dead? how?”
“Benelli M1014.” It was a standard-issue combat shotgun.
“Suicide?” Castillo thought again of the “suicides” and “accidental
deaths” at DSTI. how easy to put scare quotes around those words
now. “Or do you think they . . .”
“he wouldn’t be the first.” Ox brought his beer back up and finished it. “It’s been open season on scientists for fifty years. We in the
golden age of chemistry and biology, man. More than three hundred
Iraqi scientists been clipped since we showed up. Accidents, bombings,
suicides. . . . More recently, it’s been the Iranians. Check and see yourself which Iranian scientist was mysteriously blown up, misplaced or
poisoned this month.”
“But that’s our enemy. you’re talking the united States government
eliminating u.S. civilians.”
“‘Civilians,’” Ox beamed. “There you go again. Men who design
weapons aren’t civilians. Don’t care whose team their on. you want dead
Americans, go to bioweapons. It’s been a decade of those DNA guys
going down. how’d that line go?
The truth is out there
.”
“American scientists were killed?” Jeff gulped. “By the government?” Castillo knew the boy was thinking about his father. After everything he knew, everything the man had done to him, the kid was still
worried about his
padre
. Amazing.
Ox made a gesture as if he’d been a magician revealing something
hidden in his hands. “DNA expert Dr. David Schwartz stabbed to death
in Virginia. DNA expert Dr. Don Wiley, harvard man, shows up floating in the Mississippi. DNA expert Dr. David kelly, who worked for
the u.S. Navy, found dead after somehow slashing his wrists
and
throat
and then dragging himself a half mile away from his home. DNA expert
Dr. franco Cerrina found dead in his lab at Boston university: Cause
of death still unknown. DNA expert Dr. John Clark, guy who ran the
lab that made Dolly the Sheep, and spoke out against cloning afterward,
was found hanging in a remote cottage. Bioweapons expert Dr. John
Wheeler found dead in a Delaware landfill. Bioweapons expert Dr.
robert Schwartz found murdered in his home in Virginia. Bioweapons
expert Bruce edwards Ivins, of the united States Army Medical research Institute, found dead from an apparent overdose. Of
TYLENOL
!
No autopsy was permitted. Look it up yourself. you think it’s the, what,
the french killing all our guys? Islamic sleeper cells? Like I said: LSD
guy not the first. And sure as shit won’t be the last. More to the point:
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,
TEN
times is Clear-the
fuck-Out.you alright, Castillo? you lookin’ a little puzzled.”
“I’m fine.” Castillo looked at Jeff, then back to Ox. “for the record,
I don’t own a Benelli M1014.”
“
Entiendo
. What else you need?”
“I don’t know yet.” Castillo stared out over the outfield, tried to
clear his mind. “But this helps. If I need to—”
“you contact me anytime, Castillo. you know that.”
“Thanks.” Castillo stood to leave.
“how’s my girl kristin doing?”
“She’s fine.”
Ox shook his head. “you aren’t together no more.”
“Never were.” he tapped Jeff to move. “Come on.”
“yeah, right.” Ox smiled in memory. “you know, I still do that ghost
routine of hers sometimes. Just to talk to familiar faces. how sad is that?
Talking to ghosts.”
Castillo sighed. “you ever think sometimes
we’re
the ghosts? That
those other guys are all back home now mowing the grass or watching
TV or some shit? And we’re the ones who never made it back?”
Jeff had risen slowly beside him.
Ox studied them both again. Nodded his head.
“yeah,” he said. “All the damn time.”

oon, the man whispers, a promise, and steps toward his bench of tools.
A rusted kerosene lantern casting fluid shadows along the cave wall
behind, shadow grotesque as the man hunches unnaturally under
the low ceiling. Others in the adjacent tunnels, holes, their foreign

jibbering dim and whispered like prayers beneath the hum of generators and

exhaust fans. It smells of piss and sweat and blood someone laughs. Two emptied
chairs beside the dark stains of torture pooled below each the two bodies already
dragged away and only their heads remain propped on the small wood table
watching. The man chooses his favorite scalpel to make more shallow incisions
along the chest and genitals peels the flesh. Cursing, damning, pleading but
the words are garbled sounds not words at all anymore. Glare angrily from the
open eye the other swollen over and crusted in dried blood. No. Don’t do this.
Still, the man steps closer and presses his thumb against the mouth to push
back the upper lip. Writhing in the chair, the blood-soaked ropes holding tight
screaming as the blade raises. Brings the scalpel once more to the gums. Then to
the body again. Then the gunfire erupts in one of the tunnels and sound echoes
like thunder. Drops the wet scalpel onto the table beside the two heads. Watching. Someone shouting somewhere, the sound of a man dying. The man with
the scalpel is holding a rifle, arguing, afraid. Other shapes bursting into the
room. One body lifted into the air and then, like a black ghost, rises a meter
off the ground. Blood splashes across the cave’s gray-brown rock. Something
else now stirred in the shadows. A thin, dark shape that drifts like smoke. You
scream.

Castillo jerked up straight in his bed, gasping for air. Scanning the
dim room.
The cave was gone. The black thing was gone. The man.
The man.
his own scream still echoed in his memory. reality reemerged,
quickly and in huge swathes. Awake. real. room. Motel. Back in the
u.S. Pennsylvania. Just a dream. Nothing’s there. No one’s there.
Nightmare.
Still, his hand remained jammed in the bag by his bed, wrapped
around the pistol he kept there. his heart pumping a million beats a
minute again. he touched his free hand to his chest.
Calm down. Calm
down.
his mind fought for the words, the specific words to help. his
own frantic breathing filled the whole room. Nothing coming to mind.
Think! Focus!
he looked across the room to the other bed.
The boy, Jeff Jacobson, lay there. head turned asleep.
Maybe I didn’t really scream out
. Maybe he imagined that also. he
let go of the gun. Pressed his hands against his face. Opened his palms
enough to let the unsteady breathing pass through.
“Strange man, escape this spell and bethink thee now of thy native land, if
it is fated for thee to be saved . . .”
The quote finally came to mind, and he said it to himself again and
again alone in the dark. his hands found his chest. ran along the scar
tissue rigid and embossed beneath his T-shirt.
he thought of getting up. Tossing on the light. Waking the boy up.
Someone to talk to.
But the boy wasn’t a boy.
he was a clone.
And the clone of Jeffrey Dahmer.
A monster. And it was best to let monsters sleep.
Castillo checked his watch. 2300. he’d only been asleep thirty
minutes. he needed another couple hours at least. he lay back down.
focused on his breathing.
Sleep.
Shake off this trance . . .
The nightmares almost never returned twice in the same night.
Almost never.

mily led Allison into the apartment slowly on purpose. She
didn’t want her little sister to miss a thing. It smelled musty,
like sex, like a dirty gym locker room. Like too many boys.
Allison had paused in the doorway, and emily took her arm
to gently lead her beyond her warning instincts. The door shut behind

It had been a couple months since she’d last seen Allison. ever since
emily’d moved out of the house, or been tossed out, or whatever it was
that had happened, they weren’t that close anymore. But a simple phone
call was all it had taken. A big sister inviting her old pal over to watch a
video and grab some pizza. Allison said yes almost immediately. She was
a nice person that way. Always had been. Pretty, too. even prettier than
emily remembered. Grown her hair out long and straight, which the
boys would like, for sure.

Two of them, Al and Jeffrey, were watching TV again. Al liked to
bite. Jeffrey was the only one who hadn’t yet done her, or her roommate, actually. he liked boys, it seemed. So he, John, and Ted had gone
across the hall one night. Surprised the thirty-something chode who
lived there. That had been too funny. The nurse, Ms. Stacey, sat between them on the couch, the head tilted slightly to one side. her eyes
were bare, dark slits, the whites behind still fluttering wildly. They’d
opened her stained flannel shirt all the way again so that both her tits
hung out freely.

None of the three seemed to have noticed when emily entered the
room. “That’s Jeff and Al. Ms. Stacey,” she introduced her sister to them
anyway. “And John, of course.”

Slumped in the room’s other chair was a boy dressed as a clown.
his red and blue makeup was smeared and patchy, his collar stained a
dark red where his chin rested on the top of his chest. A bag of Doritos
rested on his crotch. A huge, red, puffy ball dangled over one eye from
his lopsided hat. he turned sluggishly as they entered the room and
tracked their movement deeper into the apartment, his red lips listlessly
forming into a moronic smile.

“hey.” A low voice from the kitchen behind them. “you’re late. This
her?”
“Allison,” emily smiled, led the girl forward. “My baby sister. Ain’t
she the sweet sweetest li’l thing?”
“Sweet, sweet.” The boy laughed. he looked older than the others
by a few years. Long, wavy dark hair and incredible blue-green eyes.
Like turquoise almost, and always changing depending on the room’s
light. “But she ain’t no baby, is she?” These incredible eyes roved unhurriedly over her sister while he bit at his lower lip. “What up, Allison?”
he said. “I’m Ted.”
Allison had lowered her head.
The dried blood on the kitchen floor looked like any other stain.
“you being mean to my friends?” asked emily.
“No, I . . .” her sister’s voice trembled. “I . . . nice to meet you.”
“That’s better.” Ted stepped closer, grinning with a distinct, and
totally fucking, hot smile emily had grown to recognize.
This was gonna
be fun, fun, fun.
how they’d come together was simple enough. Some
kid named Al had friended her on facebook six months before. Another
smartass on the web who liked sending her dickpic Snapchats and private IMs about wanting to rape soccer moms while their daycare brats
ate happy Meals and waited for him to finish. Joked about blowing up a
mall, sending body parts flying in an unholy rain of Payless shoes, Abercrombie boxers and blood. rOfL.
Then, one day, this guy sends an email and says he and a buddy
are heading to Ohio. Would she be cool if they stopped by to party
some? They’d bring some pot or X, he said. The kid was probably way
younger than he was pretending, but she wasn’t past hooking up with a
high school boy. emily wrote back: Sure. WTf?
But it wasn’t just Al and a buddy who showed up at her door.
It was five guys.
And they’d taken their time with the two girls. emily and her roommate, kim.
Days.
“Nothing to be afraid of, right?” Ted was saying to Allison. “your
sister said you were pretty cool. She sure got the pretty part right.” he
touched the side of Allison’s face. “fourteen, huh? No kidding. you a
party girl? you wanna party like your sister here?” he winked at emily.
emily liked Ted the best.
ever since the first time he’d fucked her. raped her. Made love.
She didn’t know what to call it. his hands closing so tightly around her
throat as he’d forced her to the living room floor. The life and air leaving her body as one. her roommate’s frantic screams, muffled with duct
tape, so very close, other shapes moving above them both.
Then emily had looked into his eyes and seen it: Nothing. No rage,
not even amusement. Nothing. Thrusting into her like a piece of machinery, the blackness of death spreading over more of her teary-eyed
vision. The guy honestly didn’t care if she lived or died.
She’d never cum so hard in her life.
he’d known it when she had and laughed. Then he’d squeezed
harder until everything went black. She’d awoken hours later when he
was doing her again. “I thought you were dead,” he’d smiled.
Oh, yes.
emily liked Ted the best.
And Ted wanted more. Always wanted more. More than her or her
roommate.
emily knew who to call.
Allison. her sister.
Pretty, perfect Allison. Ms. School Play, and Ms. Cheerleader
Squad, and Ms. honor roll. fourteen. Another fucking Taylor Swift
clone. The good girl. Princess of the known world. At least according
to their mother.
Not
the screwup. The stupid one, the druggie, the slut
who’d had the abortion. College dropout. Nineteen years old and working second-shift food services at Walmart. Princess of Nothing.
until now. Because now, now she’d finally found her king of Nothing.
She’d heard of Badge Bunnies and Buckle Bunnies, girls who got
wet for cops and cowboys and such. A few, she now understood, got off
on guys who hurt people. killed. And these guys claimed to have some
shit that would kill, like,
thousands
of people. She could hardly sleep, she
was so fucking turned on.
I’m a Blood Bunny,
she thought. Grinned.
Oh, Mom, if you could see us now.
“What was that?” Allison asked, her eyes grown wide like one of
those anime cartoon girls.
emily giggled. They could all hear kim in the bathroom again,
thumping and mewling in the tub.
“Come on.” Ted put his arm against Allison’s back. “I’ll show ya.”
Down the hall, the sounds became more distinct. The strange gargling noise, the slow and steady ThuMP of something hitting a wall.
“emily?” said Allison.
The bathroom door was open a crack, and Ted pushed it back with
one hand, positioned Allison to look within. It was dark inside, the hall
light barely illuminating the smears of blood surrounding the bathtub,
black against the shadowed tile floor, the wall.
ThuMP. Movement in the tub. The body shifting back and forth
in the darkness.
“Not sure how much she really feels,” emily said behind them as
she peeked in on her roommate. “She’s so far down the k-hole.”
She’d been amazed how easy it was to buy ketamine on the street.
Totally like the boys told her. These guys knew about everything.
ThuMP.
“The cuts are below the elbows and knees,” she told her sister, “so it
was easy to stop the bleeding.”
“easy?” Ted laughed. “Like hell.”
“Well,” said emily. “easy enough.”
“yeah,” he agreed. “I guess it was.”
One of his hands held Allison against the doorframe, keeping her
from collapsing.
“What . . . what did . . .” Alison fought for the right words. “emily?”
“Shhh, sexy. Don’t you worry about any of that,” Ted told the girl as
the thing in the tub burbled and flopped. “We were just having a little
bit of fun is all. you like to have fun, don’t you? No? your sister told us
you were a fun girl.”
“fun, fun, fun. When did he take her lips?” emily asked.
“I don’t know. After you left to get her, I guess.” Ted shook his head.
“That crazy retard’ll eat anything.”
Albert had already taken so much. The hands, feet. Both breasts. An
eye. emily did not understand why. She just thought it was kinda funny.
She did not yet understand that Al was a clone of Albert fish, who’d
fried in an electric chair way back in 1936. That he’d earned names like
The Werewolf of Wysteria, The Brooklyn Vampire, and The Boogeyman sixty years before she’d been born. That he’d raped, murdered,
and eaten as many as a hundred children. Sent letters to his victims’
parents describing every detail. “‘how she did kick, bite, and scratch,’”
one letter reported. “‘It took me nine days to eat her entire body.’” Al’s
facebook profile had had none of this. LeT’S PArTy, Al had written.
Sure, she’d written back. And then she’d given her address. Now this.
“kinda wish they’d left her alone,” Ted concluded.
“I like her like this,” another voice said behind him. “Better time.
This the sister?”
“yeah.” Ted turned. “Say hi to Allison.”
“Proof of God, she is.”
“yeah, for sure,” Ted agreed. “Allison, this is henry. he’s a good
guy.”
“you going first?” the new boy asked.
ThuMP.
“Nah.” Ted smiled. “Go ahead. A promise is a promise.”
“Cool.” henry took hold of Allison’s arm.
“Back in one piece,” Ted reminded him.
henry puckered his lips. “you got it, Captain America.”
Allison turned to her sister and started to speak, but no words came
out of her mouth. A rasp of breath as henry pulled her down the hall
toward the bedroom. She struggled some, but not enough that it would
matter.
“I’m gonna watch,” emily said.
“Like hell. What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Ted’s face
looked frustrated, angry.
“Not a prob,” she said and pulled out her cellphone. “Gimme a sec.”
his pupils had dilated, eyes grown almost completely black. Like
something dead.
“hey, Mom,” emily said into the phone, waving the boy away. “It’s
me. yeah, hey, listen. yes, I know it’s late. But, hey, Allison’s over here.
yes. I don’t know. But she’s pretty upset about something.”
Ted grinned.
“No. you should probably come over.” emily rolled her eyes.
Muffled screams trickled from the end of the hall.
My dear little sister. Another Princess of Nothing.
“yeah, Mom,” emily said. “We’ll be waiting for you.”