Brood (14 page)

But no sooner does she ask herself that question than the darkened, indistinct blob of atmosphere begins to rush up the stairs as if propelled by a fierce wind. Cynthia brings her arm up to shield her face, but she cannot stop staring at whatever it is that comes toward her.

It's Alice! Little Alley-Oop, racing toward her like a funnel of demonic smoke. Her teeth are bared; her eyes are dull and pitiless. When she is a couple of feet away, she stops, lands on her feet two steps below Cynthia, and assumes her normal form: a little under sixty inches of seemingly normal human flesh, bone, and hair, dressed strangely…she is wearing a shapeless blue dress; her feet are in wobbly old woman's shoes.

And then a voice within Cynthia says, in a squeaky, almost hysterical tone:
Idiot, if God had wanted you to have children, you woulda had 'em. So now look at you! Over your fool head, as usual.

Whose voice is that?

Not Alice's, not little Alley-Oop's. The ghostly little girl just stands there, smiling faintly, little wisps of smoke still drifting around her. But then, with the suddenness of a leopard that must strike quickly for its prey, the little girl grabs Cynthia by the wrist.

“No!” Cynthia screams. In her terror and confusion, she momentarily loses her purchase on the stair, and she slides down three steps. Her vertebrae bang against the hard wood. And now that squeaking sound again. What is her mind telling her this time?

Except it is not coming from within her. Like a night sky dazzling with little red stars, the eyes of fifty or more rats are closing in on her. The sound of their little pink feet scuttling on the wooden steps. They are as organized as an army, and in no great rush. Cynthia scrambles up and races to the door. She turns the handle. She doesn't know why. The door is locked.

Except now it isn't. Thrown forward by her own momentum, she hurtles into the hall of the house, stumbling over her own feet. Quickly, she turns and slams the door behind her, locks it. She hears the rats scratching on the other side. Some are peeping peacefully, some are squeaking peevishly, and a few are actually screaming. The scream is like that of a terrified old woman.

Driven by motherly instinct, she races to the second floor, and then to the third, to Alice's and Adam's rooms. Their beds are empty, but the closets are open, and the dressers are open too, each and every drawer. Someone has been here and grabbed half the clothes the twins own.

D
o you know why I've asked to see you?”

“No. Not really.”

“That's funny. We've been sitting here for several minutes.”

“I know.”

“And yet you've shown no curiosity.”

“I didn't think it was my place. You asked to see me. Isn't it up to you to say why?”

“You're a bit of a pain in the ass, aren't you”—Cal Rogers, with his ferocious iron-gray crew cut, bulging forehead, and mouth as tiny and tight as an asterisk, makes something of a show of glancing at the folder on his desk—“Mr. Keswick. Dennis.”

Dennis feels a little release of tension. That Rogers is pretending to have forgotten his name is definitely reassuring. If Rogers is stooping to little mind games, it means that he is uncertain—uncertain if Dennis has done anything wrong, uncertain about what he wants Dennis to do next.

“I don't think of myself as a pain in the A-double-S, sir,” Dennis says. He looks around Rogers's grim little office. Other parts of this unacknowledged Borman and Davis facility are spotless and hypermodern, germ-free and airtight, with something of the spacecraft in its design and eerie remoteness from earthly life. But Rogers's office is strictly middle management, windowless, with a faint odor of Fritos in the air and a desk that looks as if it had been acquired from some fly-by-night mortgage broker after the bursting of the latest real estate bubble.

“How long have you been working for us, Dennis?” Rogers asks, folding his hands on the desk and leaning forward, suddenly switching gears and perhaps hoping to appear friendly.

“Not very long.”

“Three months, yes?”

“If you say so, Cal.”

“And how long have you been with Borman?”

“Let me tell you something here, Cal. To you, I'm…what? Muscle? A goon? You've got my résumé right there in front of you. Why don't you look at the record of my education? If I had gotten a break here or there, maybe a little support on the old home front, I'd be back there running trials. Look at the transcripts, why don't you?” Dennis knew he was going on at length here, knew he was probably turning the gas higher under the pot of hot water he was already in, but this was his great subject, the wound his mind kept circling: He could have been a real scientist rather than a fucking errand boy! “Chemistry, biochemistry, it's all there. Do you think you and the rest of the smocks are doing something that only you, only the precious ones, the chosen ones, can do?”

Rogers remains calm. He's already been briefed—meaning warned—about Keswick, about his bitterness, the rage that rises out of him like methane. But Dennis is too valuable to let go; he delivers the live bodies that make the research possible.

Rogers smiles, but that only incites Dennis more. “Medical school. There were a lot of med schools that would have accepted me. But it takes money, and I was broke. And it takes people who believe in you, and my parents did not give a you know what about me, and talking to them about education—you might just as well have told them you needed a hundred bucks to go out dancing with Tinker Bell.”

“Well, you're still a young man,” Rogers says. “Are you considering med school for your future?”

“Too old, and you know it.”

“You're making a good salary now, Dennis. You must have some savings.”

“I do all right.”

“And Borman and Davis has a program for its employees. I'm not sure you're aware of it. Dare to Excel?”

“I'll bear it in mind, Cal.”

“You'll want to talk to Dave Pritzer, over in HR.”

Dennis decides to deploy his beloved blank stare.

“Dave will walk you through the application process,” Rogers says. There is a little tremor of uncertainty in his voice. Knowing where the weakness is in a person is a source of great strength for Dennis. It's like splitting logs: You look for a crack, a fault line, and that's where you bring down the maul's blow—voilà! Firewood.

“I've got a lot going on, Cal. You want to tell me why you asked me to come in?”

“Three things, Dennis.” Rogers linked the pointer finger of his right hand onto the crooked pointer of his left. It made him feel better—now, and always—to enumerate things. It suggested a grand design, and it projected authority. “You're aware of the directive regarding Mayor Morris's son.”

“Ah. The elusive Dylan,” Dennis says.

“Well, just make sure you keep in mind that His Honor would be furious with us if anything happened to that boy.”

“We've been over this,” Dennis says.

“Two.” Now two fingers from the right hand are hooked onto the left pointer. “We've lost one of our subjects. The boy you brought in last week from the Upper West Side.”

“He escaped?”

Rogers's eyes open wide for an instant, and his head snaps back, as if recoiling from the unspeakable horror of the thought of one of the subjects making his way out of the facility and back into the world. “Oh, no, not escaped. Expired.”

“Really? What happened?”

“We're working on it. But we need to step up operations a bit. We want a substitute for him—it was frustrating because he was, right off the bat, yielding some very exciting results. But the thing is, we're expanding the whole project. The more we learn about these creatures, the more we are…I don't know what the word is here. I think I'm going to say
inspired.
Yes, we're inspired by what we are finding them capable of. We're bringing in new teams of researchers, we're expanding hours.”

“Yes,” Dennis says. Despite having his guard up, he is allowing himself to feel just a little bit collegial. In his heart, he is a team player, and it is his great misfortune, or so he believes, that his work has been mainly freelance, without coworkers and the camaraderie and intellectual stimulation that he imagines would be his if he were working inside this very building, if the powers that be would somehow find it within themselves to overlook his spotty credentials and recognize his intelligence and his dedication.

“I always thought there was a lot more we could be doing with this than coming up with another product to increase sexual health in older men.” Dennis doesn't like even saying
sexual,
and he clears his throat, as if the word has left a weird taste behind. “I think people are having all the sex they should be having anyhow—they don't need to be taking pills or drinking something to be doing it to each other more.” He cannot help adding that, although he knows full well that very few people agree with him, especially here in a laboratory where all the smocks are chasing after a formula that can turn a limp ding-dong into solid rock.

“Well, aren't you the quick study,” Rogers says, unaware of the condescension in his tone. “You're absolutely right. There are many, many possible applications we are evaluating, everything from the cosmetic to the lifesaving. Needless to say, we are all completely excited. The only damper on the whole enterprise is that we must do it with a degree of confidentiality. A high degree, actually.”

“Like complete secrecy,” Dennis says.

Rogers dismisses the candor with a wave. “Our path to figuring out just how to use the biochemistry we have here would have been a lot easier if a couple of conditions had been met.” He looks at his hands, realizing he has already used both of them for the first countdown, and proceeds without visual backup. “First, if we'd gotten wind of this mutation a bit earlier and had had a chance to work with some of these little creatures before they matured, that would have been extremely helpful. But, alas, that was not the case.”

“Some of them are still pretty young,” Dennis says.

“Yes. And some have delayed maturation. Those twins who you were meant to collect for us.”

Dennis nods.

“The ones you let get away.”

“I'm working on it. I know where they live. I mean, you know, I have to be careful. I can't just grab them in broad daylight.”

“Oh, I'm sure you have all kinds of little tricks up your sleeve, Dennis. Just make sure you do it.” Rogers glances down at the folder again. “Twisden. Adam and Alice. We have reason to believe they are potential genetic gold mines. While they were in school, they exhibited virtually no antisocial behaviors. We have obtained records that track them through their various foster homes, and they were obedient, well mannered; one foster parent even described the boy as
meek.
Yet they have both done well athletically. And their parents were extreme cases. The mother, as you know, quite literally destroyed our Slovenian friend from whom they got their treatments. Of course, you can never be sure, but our hunch is that these twins may have the perfect balance. They have the hybrid vigor we are hoping to duplicate but are still human enough so we can get whatever we come up with approved. If we could reproduce what is running through their veins, it would save us a year, maybe more. And a lot of hassle with the FDA.”

“I'm on it,” Dennis says.

“We're already getting amazing results. We're turning our rats into damned geniuses. One shot of blood taken from those kids, and the rats are solving mazes thirty to forty times faster than the control group. Those idiots in Washington have made it tricky for us to get primates for our work, but we have our ways. And the results we've gotten in our chimp trials have been very exciting. Tumors shrunk. Thirty-five percent increase in connectivity between brain cells. Signs of aging reversed. Frankly, I can hardly wait to take it myself.” He smiles. “And the way we've been working—round the clock!—we're all going to need it.”

Dennis swallows. It's breaking his heart to hear all this. He should be in the lab, not in some fricking truck wrestling stinky teenagers.

But Rogers does not recognize the distress in Dennis's eyes—or if he does, he chooses to ignore it.

“You know, a lot of this would not have been necessary if we could have made use of the original research done by this Dr. Slobodan Kis, in Slovenia. But he was murdered, and shortly after his laboratory was dismantled; all traces of his work vanished. Government job, no doubt. We think his papers were burned, but perhaps they're somewhere on the bottom of Lake Bled. We sent people over and…” Rogers shakes his head sadly. “It's as if the man never existed. No one will say a word—no one ever worked with him or studied with him. It's like the Soviet Union in the 1940s. The man has simply been eradicated, purged, removed from the human alphabet. So we're on our own.” He sighs, maybe self-moved by what he perceives as the trials and tribulations of his own life. “Onward and upward with R and D. Right? The good news is we've got a team of truly great and just altogether dedicated researchers working on this.”

“Yes, that is good news,” Dennis says, folding his arms across his chest.

“That's why we're going to need new subjects and plenty of them as soon as possible. Luckily, there are a lot of those little creatures in this city. Mainly they are homeless, living like animals in our parks, making messes, just being a nuisance—and, frankly, on their way to becoming more than a nuisance. You've seen it yourself, I'm sure. As they mature, they can go from mischief to violence, and we certainly don't want to be in a position where we have to hunt them down with high-powered rifles like a bunch of ranchers in Utah protecting their sheep from packs of coyote. I don't think that would look very good on the six o'clock news. You understand?”

“Yeah. Sure. That's point number two. You want me to step it up. But you said there were three things. What's the third?”

“The third is you, Mr. Keswick. You.”

“Me?”

“You were seen coming here on your own at night. You were seen spending a lot of time here for some reason that had nothing to do with your job or with Borman business, lurking like a criminal just outside the perimeter of our property. We don't want that. Not from you. Not from anyone. It draws attention. We are going to have all the attention anyone could ever want once we roll out the drugs we are going to synthesize from our work here. But until then, we don't want any attention. None whatsoever.”

Dennis opens his mouth, prepared to defend himself against the insinuations—hell, they were a lot more than insinuations; he was being accused, he was being threatened. But Rogers raises his left hand—relieved now from its counting duties—to silence him.

“This is more than a matter of your ability to follow the regulations, Mr. Keswick. This is an existential issue that goes straight to the heart of our ability to maintain security and fulfill our mission. If you are unable to comply with these very reasonable expectations, you will, without further warning, be terminated. You understand? Do you? Do you fully understand what I am saying to you?”

Dennis slowly nods. He fully understands. He understands that he was caught on CCC when he visited the site; he understands that despite his services, the smocks think of him as a goon who can easily be replaced, and he also understands that when Rogers (and the Borman brass that stand behind him) says
terminated,
he's not talking about a pink slip and two weeks' severance pay. He's talking about the real kind of severance, the kind in which, say, your head is severed from your body.

Adam stands in the tub adjusting the temperature of the shower. He frowns because the water pressure sucks here in this ramshackle apartment on Riverside Drive—it's worse than the worst of the foster homes Adam drifted through over the two years between his parents' deaths and his aunt Cynthia adopting him.

He winces. Thinking of Cynthia makes him feel bad for a moment. He knows she is worried. Oh, well, there's nothing to be done about it…

The water temperature is right, or at least as right as he is going to get it. He looks down and sees the water pooling over the drain, which, as Rodolfo warned him, is clogged with hair. There's an economy-sized bottle of Liquid-Plumr on the side of the tub, but when Adam picks it up, he can feel it's empty.