The Experiment of Dreams (23 page)

“Come on, Ben. We’re finally here.”

Ben leaned to rise, but fell back on his ankles.

“I want to sleep, Emily. I’m so tired.” The words came out choppy and harsh, lumpy in his throat on the verge of a breakdown. “I’m so tired Emily, I can’t … I can’t …”

“Shhh.” She put a finger to her lips. “I know, baby. You’re in pain, but it’s just a few more steps. Everything is going to be all right.”

She reached down and held out a hand, and he looked up at her. The cabin was before him, and he was powerless to stop the magnetic pull it had on his life—his body, his mind.

He lifted a hand and locked eyes with Emily, offering her, with his last bit of strength, his hand to take, his soul to have if she so desired.

And she took his hand, his soul, his life.

Her body was as bright as the sun as she pulled him up on wobbly feet. Blood rushed from his head, and for a second, everything went dark before returning impossibly bright again.

“Can we go inside?”

“Of course we can go inside; that’s why we came all this way. This cabin is ours; it belongs to us. It always has. We’re home, Ben … we’re home.”

All he could do was follow her. The fact that Ben was no longer questioning reality—never questioning Emily—was what made him insane.

They passed the flowerbeds, with the sweet fragrance of jasmine. Emily reached out and opened the door, and a flood of warm air washed over his body. The inside of the cabin was just as Ben had always imagined. The front room was large, sharing the space with the kitchen, where a large fireplace roared with flames. The furniture, floor, and walls were all a light colored wood and smelled deeply of pine. A variety of knickknacks decorated the walls and surfaces:
Home Sweet Home
signs, and freshly cut flowers in vases. An assortment of blue glass jars lined the windowsills on either side, producing various shades of tranquil flowing blue along the floor when the sun shone through them.

At times, his vision became fuzzy, like looking through a piece of smoky glass. Other times his vision cleared to see everything in such vivid detail that the image seemed burned in his retina, and grew brighter with his pulse. The sparkling array of dazzling colors spread to the periphery of his vision, slowly encompassing everything he saw. The colors were jagged, with patches of grey and black, and soon he wasn’t sure if he could count his fingers if he held his hand before his face.

Just as his vision dulled, it popped back with an unbelievable crispness that was beyond anything he could comprehend.

Then he saw the man and jumped, his back hitting the door.

“Jesus!” he shouted.

The man in the woods was there, in the cabin, in the corner of the living room, sitting on a wooden chair beside the cast iron stove. He sat rigidly upright with his back to Ben, his spine straight as a board and his palms resting on his knees.

Emily’s face contorted. “Ben, I need you to—”

“BEN,” the man’s voice boomed.

The words seemed to emanate from the room itself, vibrating the very rafters and foundation of the cabin. The man did not move, did not budge. Dust particles in the air were stagnant around him, as if he sat in a bubble where time did not exist.

Ben let out a groan and fell over. His back slid down the front door. His hands covered his ears. The words of the man resonated so deeply, with such an echoing force, that his eardrums throbbed on the verge of bursting, like grapes pressed between two fingers.

“BENJAMIN.”

“F-F-Fuck!” Ben sputtered. His eardrums rang, and he wasn’t sure if he felt blood on his palms.

Emily didn’t move. She stared at the man through narrow eyes. “What are you doing here?”

The man didn’t answer.

“Ben,” she looked down at him with his head tucked between his knees. “Ben, look at me. You have to make him go away.”

He looked up at her with huge bloodshot eyes. “I … can’t. You …” He spoke, but the ringing in his ears made his words sound muffled.

“No, Ben, I can’t; but you can. You have to get rid of him. Now!”

When Iain returned, Michael was standing outside the car, just as he had left him.

“The cabin is desolate. There’s no movement whatsoever.”

“Are there any cars? Anything?”

“Nothing. The place looks vacant. The front door is open just a crack.”

“Did you go inside?”

“No.”

“What’s the plan? Do we move in now or wait until morning?”

Iain didn’t hesitate. “We move in now.”

Michael grabbed the duffel bag and walked closely behind Iain. Their shoes crunched the gravel underfoot, sounding deafeningly loud in the stillness of the night. The walk was short, and soon Michael could see the outline of the cabin bathed in the moonlight. He wished they had packed a second set of night-vision goggles.

They approached the side of the cabin and crept up to one of the windows. Michael looked in, but couldn’t see anything.

“It’s vacant.” Iain whispered, and motioned to the next window.

They circled the house, looking in every window. Two of the windows were shattered, the floor covered with broken glass and matted with shriveled, rotten brown leaves. They stopped a few feet from the front door.

Iain, with his night vision goggles, whispered to Michael that the inside of the cabin was desolate of furniture or any semblance of a functioning home. It was an old and dilapidated wooden shell of a former house. Many of the walls were covered with graffiti, and thin sheets of wallpaper hung from the walls like decomposing flesh. Empty liquor bottles, food wrappers, and cigarette butts littered the corners of the rooms. Michael feared they might encounter a group of drifters.

“Let’s go in,” Michael said. “If he’s not here—and I’m starting to think there’s no reason for him to be here—we have a long drive home, and a lot more searching to do.”

Iain nodded, and they moved to the door. Iain tightened the leather gloves over his fingers and unholstered his silenced pistol. Michael did the same with his pistol, clicking the safety off.

Iain nudged the door open and stepped inside. Michael followed. After only a few steps, Iain came to a halt, putting his fist in the air. Michael stopped mid-stride. Iain motioned to the corner of the room. Michael squinted, leaning forward.

My God
.

He could just make out the shape of a male body lying among broken beer bottles and rotten leaves, facing the wall. A dirty matted blanket—tattered and weathered—lay draped over his body.

They moved forward, one step at a time.

The person did not stir, did not move.

Iain leaned over the body. “It’s him,” he whispered.

Christ
, Michael thought.
I’m too late
.

Was this really Benjamin Walker huddled on the floor? There was no backpack nearby, no jacket, no gear, no possessions—nothing. Just a motionless man in the corner of a cold room, seemingly part of the clutter and debris, covered with an old blanket and laying on a bed of decomposing leaves.

Iain knelt down and took the glove off his left hand, pressing two fingers to the side of Ben’s neck. “He’s alive,” he said. “Barely.”

Michael let out a sigh, careful not to be audible.

“Stay here,” Iain whispered. “I’ll check the rest of the house.”

Michael listened to the floorboards creak as Iain left. The boy was so still—too still. Michael wanted to scoop him up and run.

When Iain returned, he said, “There’s nobody here,” and fished three glow-sticks out of the duffel bag. He bent them in the middle to snap the vials of hydrogen-peroxide inside and shook them to mix with the diphenyl-oxalate and fluorescent dye. He dropped them on the ground. They illuminated the room in fluorescent green, enough light for Iain to remove the goggles. He turned back to the body on the floor. It was Benjamin Walker all right.

“Iain, I—”

“It would be simple,” Iain cut him off, “just to leave him here. A drug addict found dead. Simple. Easy. However, we’ve shown our faces in town, and people know we asked about this cabin. We could bury him nearby, but if someone reports him missing, and say, a security camera happened to spot him at some stage of his journey, and the police start asking around and following his trail—well, that wouldn’t be good for us.”

“Iain, listen—”

“We have to take him far away. But, first things first: we have to give him the injection. Michael.” He turned to face the man eye to eye. “Why don’t you get the hypodermic? I think you should be the one to do the honors.”

“Iain, it doesn’t have to be this way.”

“Doesn’t have to be this way?” Iain looked incredulous, the green light from the glow-sticks casting bizarre shadows over his face. “This is the only way it can be, Michael.” He snapped.

“No, Iain, it isn’t. It wasn’t the only way back in Drapery Falls, and it isn’t the only way now. We’ve made so many mistakes—too many mistakes. We don’t have to kill him. He doesn’t deserve to die like this. We can save him. He’s an innocent man.”

“Innocent? Is that really what you think? Are we talking about the same person here, or has your mind become so warped as to believe—”

“Iain!” Michael startled even himself. “There
is
another way, and if you would just listen for one goddamn second!”

Iain shut his mouth.

Michael took a deep breath, composing himself. “There is another way. I’ve been talking to Dr. Wulfric, and—”

“When did you talk to Dr. Wulfric?”

“Over the last few days, and just now back at the car. He called when you left to check this place out.”

Iain’s stare was unflinching, like stone, but Michael knew the man well enough to decipher the tiny nuances in his persona: the veins pulsing in his neck, the glazed look in his eyes—genuine, unadulterated, anger.

“Dr. Wulfric has a solution. He can make a serum that will flush the Nano out of his body for good. A cure. It will be gone forever. There’s still hope for Ben; he can have a new life, a fresh start.”

“We tried that already with Ethan, and look how that turned out.”

Michael didn’t say anything.

“Jesus, man.” Iain scoffed. “Do you think I don’t know? Do you think Mr. Kalispell doesn’t know?”

“What—”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Iain swung a heavy right hook, cracking Michael square in the jaw. Michael’s knees buckled, and the pistol he was carrying slipped from his hand. He dropped to the floor and his head bounced on the ground.

Ben sat hunched over, looking up at Emily. The air in the room was becoming still, the roaring flames in the fireplace slowing to a fraction of their speed, and then the flames froze in motion, like a snapshot. Emily stared at him—into him.

Then he blinked and the room wasn’t there anymore.

He was on his feet, standing in a … a … cave? A breeze and plenty of sunlight came in through an open passageway leading outside the mountain, infiltrating the cave with dry cool air. The ground and walls were solid rock, and the cavity was spacious. A battered man sat before him in a chair, wearing tattered cloth robes. He was screaming and crying out long words in a language Ben couldn’t understand. Next to the man was a pile of bloody hair. The man’s scalp and face looked as if fistfuls had been cut away with a blade.

Another man stood with his back to him, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder and a sidearm attached to his belt. The man wore a mixture of military fatigues and dust-covered robes and scarves. He turned.

“Michael, are you sure you—”

Ben looked down, rather his head moved without his control, and he saw his thick hands—hands that were not his own—covered in tight, fingerless gloves, resting on an automatic rifle slung over his chest.

His body moved fast. He felt the cold metal of a knife handle on his fingers as his other hand gripped the little hair left on the man’s head. The man cried out in a squeal, and the blade of the knife sunk deep and sliced from one side of the man’s throat to the other. The cut was calculated and precise, and hot blood sprayed over Ben’s hand and forearm. Ben stared, watching the man gurgle and foam at the mouth. A few moments went by and the man no longer moved. Red saliva dripped from his lips and trickled down to form pools in the hollows of the rock floor. Ben tore a piece of cloth from the man’s robe and turned his back while cleaning the blade of his knife.

He walked to the opening of the cave, scanning the clear blue horizon cut jagged along the mountain range far in the distance. Down at the base of the cave opening, the rest of the team had finished searching the slaughtered guards and were busy disposing of their bodies. They buried the corpses under rocks and stuffed them into crevices, where they would decompose to dry bones among the dust and sand and sunbaked reptiles, never to be seen again. The desert was a thirsty beast, never satiated over the blood of men.

The soldier in the cave with him, a young Iain Marcus, gathered his equipment and joined him at the mouth of the cave. “Let’s roll,” he said, and just as Ben’s assumed body began to move out of the cave, everything changed.

He was no longer in the mountains; he was in an operating room. There was a person strapped to a gurney before him, and two men wearing white lab coats stared intently at a computer monitor beside the bed. His body felt different, not as spry as before. Ben tried to move but couldn’t. He was not in control of this body. He stood behind the two doctors.

His mouth opened and spoke, “How is he?”

One of them answered. “Hear those beeps?” Ben could hear beeping coming from the heart monitor. “That means he’s alive,” the tired voice said.

“BENJAMIN!”

He was back in the cabin, his hands clawing at his ears. Time had not changed, had not moved on in his absence.

“What … what’s happening! Oh Christ, what do you want? Who are you?” Ben yelled at the back of the man’s head.

“Don’t talk to him, Ben! Don’t listen to a word he says! He’s a liar if he speaks!”

There were other sounds in the room now, mumbled words and shoes dragging over the plank floor. Ben looked about, but saw no one. The voices were far off, muffled shouting; a scuffle had broken out.