Liquid fear f-1 Read online

  Liquid fear

  ( Fear - 1 )

  Scott Nicholson

  Scott Nicholson

  Liquid fear

  CHAPTER ONE

  The rain fell like bullets.

  David Underwood blinked against the drops. Darkness pressed against both sides of his eyelids and the air smelled of burnt motor oil. The salvo of rain swept over the expanse of a lighted billboard.

  “Need a lawyer?” read the emblazoned pitch, followed by an alphabet soup of advertising copy that swam in David’s vision. The sign was upside down.

  He was flat on his back, looking up, his clothes soaked. He couldn’t lift his head. The rain beat tiny tattoos on his face and crawled along his skin in sinuous trickles. The surface beneath him was hard and cold. He let his head tilt toward the right and he saw a cluster of distant lights.

  Buildings. A town.

  But which town?

  And, the bigger question: who was he this time?

  He tested his fingers. None were broken, though the knuckles were sore. Maybe he’d been in a fight. Or mugged and left to leak fluids onto the pavement.

  Underwood. David Underwood.

  That was his name. The one he’d been born with, not the name they’d given him. Whoever “they” were.

  He focused on the billboard. It featured a bland, stern face. No doubt the attorney, desperate to cash in on the misfortunes of others.

  Injured in a car crash? Worker compensation claims? Product liability lawsuit? The bottom of the ad heralded a toll-free number.

  David wondered if he owned a cell phone. He usually didn’t, but sometimes they gave him one, slipped it into his jacket pocket with prepaid minutes.

  Prepaid minutes. That was a laugh. “Pay as you go” was the name of this game.

  The rain must have been pounding him for a while, because he lay in a puddle. And it was summer because he wasn’t shivering. A car horn blared, probably fifty feet away, and tires spat white noise across the wet asphalt.

  They were coming for him again. They were always coming for him. Or else they already had him.

  He moved his lips, mouthing the words “Need a lawyer?”

  The car hissed onward, weaving in the gloom, its twin taillights like the eyes of a retreating dragon.

  With a groan, he rolled onto his side, cheek chafing against crumbled tar. He wore no hat. A wristwatch adorned his left wrist and he snaked his arm near his face. The LED numerals flickered red.

  11:37. Nearly noon or nearly midnight, it was all the same. Constant darkness.

  Unless it was time for the next dose.

  The rain spattered and drummed around him in staccato fusillade. Constant war, the earth versus the sky. Us versus them. David Underwood against himself.

  A nudge to his back.

  He didn’t have the strength to fight them this time. No running left in those freighted legs. No direction safe. All avenues took him back to the Research Triangle Park in the heart of North Carolina.

  Home-the place of no escape.

  He closed his eyes and flopped to one side, hoping they would make it quick this time.

  “Home, home on the range,” he sang.

  The nudge again, this time to his shoulder. “Hey, get up.”

  Swim, swim, swim. His head went nowhere. He tried to smile, his last act of will, his final defiance. But his lips were useless clay.

  “Are you okay?”

  A woman. But which one?

  “I think I need a lawyer,” he said, though he wasn’t sure his mouth moved.

  Hands explored him, angled his head from side to side. The fingers were strong and sure.

  “Can you move your arms and legs?” the woman said.

  He nodded, or at least dipped his chin.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  Here. Out. She must be new to the program. There was no “out” and everywhere was here. The universe was their lab, the world their maze, and the cheese was the disease.

  The cheese was the disease. Probably a nursery rhyme in there somewhere, a modern retelling of “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Maybe he had a new song.

  David licked his lips and they tasted of chemicals. Rain in the city got scarier every day. Why did they even bother with the program anymore?

  Civilization would accomplish the mission, given time. But time was money and money was energy and energy was power. Maze opening onto maze, forever and ever, amen.

  She tugged at the collar of his jacket, sopping his head into the puddle like a biscuit into weak gravy. “Sit up, David.”

  She knew his name. They were getting smarter, all right. Changing the flavor of the cheese. He dared not open his eyes, but he couldn’t resist.

  He could never resist.

  He blinked water from his lashes. Her face was a fuzzy pale moon and her naked body was glistening. He blinked again. Squinted. Focused. Which one would it be?

  Her. Who else?

  He clawed at the concrete, digging to bury himself alive in the wet, filthy soil of the city. Back to the nothingness of the womb. A tomb of cool, welcoming clay, not of hot, harboring flesh.

  He had rolled and scrabbled about five feet across the abrasive surface when she called again. “David.”

  The word was an echo of childhood scolding. He wanted to cover his ears, but that would slow his crawling escape. The buildings slid into focus now, the lawyer gazing down from the billboard with poisonous solicitude.

  Against the foggy sheen of silver-gray that lay across the night air, the windows of a waffle house projected a beacon of cigarette smoke, cholesterol, and safety in numbers. His soaked jacket pressed against his back, water streaming from his hair. It was long, past his collar, in a style and length he hadn’t worn in years. Not since college, which was the last stretch of his life he clearly recalled.

  He crawled toward the smell of fryer oil and coffee. A bare foot appeared beneath his chin, the burgundy nail polish chipped, a raw scar along the arch.

  “David, it’s me.”

  Craning the cinder-block weight of his head, his gaze went up the plump calf and higher. Did he know that skin? Or was all skin a stranger, even the skin he now wore as David Underwood?

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” The words fell from above, as brittle and bracing as the rain.

  Of course he remembered her. His eyes traveled higher, up her young, plump legs to the dark patch of hair between her legs, then up to her belly where the blood ran in a thick rivulet.

  He couldn’t bear to see her face, which was haunted by the ghost of all abandoned fears. Traffic hissed in the distance, like rows of long reptiles entwining in venomous ecstasy.

  He raised himself to his knees, head spinning, distant buildings the ancient cliffs of an alien planet.

  Waffle house. Its squares of smeared yellow light promised some sort of security. Normality. Greasy reality. But first he had to get past her.

  “They’re coming for us.” She reached her hand toward him, fingers pale and slick as maggots.

  His stomach lurched. Dry, acidic air rushed up and abraded his throat. He had nothing to vomit. The hand touched his shoulder, and David found himself reaching up to her, surrendering. His arm was like a roll of sodden newspapers.

  They’ll get you anyway. They always get you.

  Or maybe they had you from the start.

  She helped him to his feet and he swayed, blinking against the rain. Car headlights swept over them. Two giant shadows loomed on the brick wall at his back.

  Eyes everywhere.

  He jerked free of the woman’s grasp and ran blindly away from the swollen and indistinct shapes. His legs were limp, disobedient ropes but still he fled.

  Rubber squealed on pavement, the shriek
of a hungry leopard. Car doors opened, rain ticked off the metal roof, and the engine mewled.

  “David!” the woman screamed.

  They had her, but David didn’t care. That was exactly what they would expect: for him to play hero again.

  He hadn’t saved her last time, and Susan was going to die again, but it wasn’t his fault.

  He plunged toward the dark, wet wedge between buildings, willing his legs forward. His heart knocked mallets against his temples. Sharp-toothed things would be waiting in the darkness, but they would be the lesser of two thousand evils.

  A kinder, gentler evisceration, because those monsters would do it from the outside in.

  Not from the inside out, like the people from the car would.

  Her shriek rose against the oppressive sky and shoe soles spanked the asphalt.

  “Stop!” someone shouted. Were they really dumb enough to think he’d obey them at this point? After all they’d done to him, all they had taught him?

  After what they had made him become?

  He ran into the alley, assaulted by the odors of rot, bum piss, and motor oil. A chain-link fence, ripped and curling away from its support posts, blocked his escape.

  David clutched the links, praying for the strength to climb. He dug the tip of one shoe into the fence and launched himself up. He slipped and hung as though crucified for a few seconds, time enough for one deep breath before collapsing.

  He lay with his face against the fence, the links imprinting blue geometry against his cheek. He listened, waiting.

  Rain, tick tick tick.

  No footsteps, no shouts. No car engine.

  They had taken her. And spared him.

  No. That’s just what they wanted him to think. That he was safe, so the next game would be even more disturbing.

  Or maybe they wanted him to cower, to doubt, to face his monsters alone.

  With them, you could never be sure.

  Fear was their tool and his drug.

  He whimpered for his next pill and the blissful fog of amnesia.

  This was who he was.

  Whoever he was.

  And he was home, home on the range.

  He kissed the fence, and it kissed back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dr. Sebastian Briggs turned away from the monitor, content that David Underwood was sufficiently broken for the moment. The subject would be ready for his next dose of Halcyon shortly.

  David let out a tired wail from behind the metal door in the back of the factory.

  “Home on the range,” Briggs whispered.

  David was the good soldier, the one who had offered himself for the chronic, ongoing experiment, whether he knew it or not. The other subjects had finished-or at least survived-the clinical trials, unaware of their contribution to science, their crime forgotten.

  But Briggs hadn’t forgotten. Roland Doyle, Anita Molkesky, Wendy Leng, and Alexis Morgan had gone on to lead regular lives. Briggs hadn’t let them escape completely, though, because the world was merely a larger Monkey House, and the experiment had never ended, because they carried it inside them.

  He’d watched them and tracked them. Wendy, especially.

  The girl, Susan, hadn’t been his fault, although he’d been stuck with the blame. It had taken a decade for him to restore his reputation, but luckily his backers were less interested in publishing in peer journals and more interested in tangible results.

  Soon, though, his colleagues would understand who among them had achieved an evolutionary leap in emotional engineering.

  He meandered through the maze of cells until he reached the main section of the Monkey House. It had changed little since the original trials, and the rows of conveyor belts, metal storage canisters, steel tables, drill presses, rusty farming implements, and thermoforming machinery added to that sense of a frenzied inner city. Alleys and crevices broke off from the main boulevards, where the scarred vinyl flooring marked years of industrial traffic. Here and there, broken sorting machines and hydraulic arms were stacked in schizophrenic sculptures, hoses and wires dangling.

  His backers had kept the property, a former tractor factory that had been haphazardly renovated for the original trials. The limited-liability company listed in the Register of Deeds office had been dummied up until it was four layers removed from the true owners-CRO Pharmaceuticals.

  Briggs appreciated the seclusion, and although the Research Triangle had grown rapidly in the meantime, twenty acres of pine forest and a chain-link fence separated the massive brick building from the surrounding parcels.

  Instead of the cornfields and soybean fields that once sprawled in the Piedmont belt between Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham, high-tech companies and research firms like IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, and Cisco Systems had placed labs or headquarters here.

  While a complex body of world-changing research and development was underway in a sixty-mile radius, Briggs considered himself the heart of the beast, a man who held the keys that would unlock the human mind’s potential.

  A pager buzzed on Briggs’s belt. The metal framing, high flat ceiling, and thick block walls inhibited cell-phone signals, and neither Briggs nor his backers wanted to be vulnerable to wiretapping or signal hijacking. The pager meant someone was ringing in on the satellite phone, and Briggs hurried to his office to plug the phone into an antenna that snaked its way up the side of the building and into the North Carolina humidity.

  “Hello,” Briggs said.

  “It’s done,” the voice said.

  “Good. He’s the farthest away, so it was important to start with him. How is he?”

  “Out like a light. Whatever this stuff is, you ought to get a patent for it.”

  Briggs didn’t appreciate the humor. Life and death were serious matters. “Do you have the identification?”

  An exasperated chuff came from the other end. “Everything just like you said. I even wrote those initials on the mirror. You ask me, this is a whole lot of trouble for nothing. I could roll him in the trunk and have him on your doorstep in eight hours.”

  “Nobody asked you,” Briggs said. His backers insisted on using this particular operative, but Briggs planned to remove all witnesses eventually. He just wasn’t sure he could tolerate the man until that happy day.

  “Okay, they told me to do it your way.”

  “No fingerprints, nothing to connect you back here?” Briggs asked.

  More exasperation. “You and me, Doc. We got to have a talk soon.”

  “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

  “Is that some kind of code or something?”

  The man could dish out humor but couldn’t appreciate it. “Can I ask you something, Mr. Drummond?” Briggs said, using the fake name Martin Kleingarten had given him in a clumsy attempt at subterfuge.

  “I’m on the clock,” Kleingarten/Drummond said.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  Silence. Briggs thought of those hundreds of miles of electromagnetic radiation beaming between him and the low-orbit satellite before bouncing to Kleingarten/Drummond in Cincinnati. Silence took just as much energy to broadcast as words did.

  “I’m not afraid of nothing,” came the answer a few seconds later.

  “Every intelligent man has a deepest fear. Think.”

  “Right now, I’m afraid I won’t get paid, because you guys are playing a weird game. The things you’ve asked me to do, it don’t sound like business to me.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Drummond, your work is critical to a major scientific discovery. The ‘game,’ as you call it, is part of the work.”

  The man answered, but Briggs’s attention had been diverted to the monitor, where David Underwood sat on his cot, peering between his fingers at the images flickering on his walls. Briggs had gone with the Susan Sharpe tape, an oldie but a goodie, to complement the footage from David’s collegiate surroundings in Chapel Hill. The montage of images kept David trapped ten years in the past.

  As usual, Dav
id couldn’t quite look away, because Briggs had conditioned him to crave the psychological trauma. But Briggs couldn’t take all the credit. Most of it belonged to Seethe, but the world would find that out soon enough. The hard way.

  Kleingarten/Drummond spoke again and snapped Briggs back to the conversation. “What was that?”

  “What’s your greatest fear, Doc?”

  “Easy. Not being feared.”

  Briggs clicked off without another word and turned his attention to his computer. Most of his records were on a removable hard drive that could be erased in the event of an emergency. Years of meticulous notes, copies of journal articles, and chemical formulas were stored on a system that an Internet connection had never touched. He’d never trust off-site storage, and he knew they were watching.

  In the Monkey House trials, though, he was a traditionalist, making personal notes on a sheet of paper pinned to a clipboard. Such entries brought back so many memories, and memories were his passion.

  Beside the date, he scrawled “No change in subject” in the same bad handwriting for which he had been scolded as a child.

  He glanced at Wendy’s self-portrait hanging on the wall, a gift from a happier era. So close.

  In an uncharacteristic bout of giddiness, he drew a leering smiley face and devil horns on the chart. In the days ahead, he would relive some wonderful memories.

  And destroy a few others.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Morning arrived with bloody rags in the sky and sputtering fire in Roland Doyle’s heart.

  He squinted at the pink light penetrating the window. His head hurt, but that was nothing new. In Roland’s life, a headache was as reliable as the sun, the moon, and the next drink.

  He didn’t believe in predestination, but he had come to accept inevitability, even to embrace it. Whether those repetitive choices were made on his own or through the whim of some puckish and bemused God, the end result was the same.

  Let’s go with you, God. You’re a fine fucking fall guy. Never around when I need you, but never around to bitch, either.