Liquid fear f-1 Read online

  Briggs looked down at the dead man, who was beginning to exhibit some morbidity. “I’d hate to jog down the wrong path.”

  “Yeah. I can see that.” Kleingarten grinned, his lips greasy and cracked. “Don’t worry, I got your back.”

  That’s what I’m worried about. But I have another bonus waiting for you, Martin Kleingarten, a.k.a. Mr. Drummond.

  “Let’s make the place presentable, because company is on the way,” Briggs said, heading toward the steel door. By the time he entered the Monkey House, Kleingarten was dragging the body away with a scuffing of dead leaves.

  Briggs navigated the corridors between the rusted, hulking rows of machinery. In the original trials, he’d let the subjects run free, because they had been willing subjects with no reason to run away. This time, they would be wary. At least for a while.

  Once the Seethe set in, though, they’d be too busy turning on each other to worry about freedom.

  He walked the eighty yards to the back of the building where he’d had the cells constructed, employing Mexicans without visas who were only too happy to work for cash and who were unlikely to talk to authorities about the place. The surveillance system had been a little trickier, but CRO had called in some favors with allied companies and built it to Briggs’s specifications.

  The electricity and water connections had even been moved to the perimeter of the property, just beyond the fence, so that meter readers would have no reason to explore the grounds.

  From David Underwood’s cell came the plaintive strains of his theme song, “Home on the Range.” Every broken lunatic needed a theme song. But his condition wasn’t really David’s fault. He’d been Seething for two full years, and though Briggs had finally refined the Halcyon formula through persistent trial and error, David would go into the books as an experimental failure. Just like Susan Sharpe.

  Briggs could have monitored the cells from his office, but soon the Monkey House would be crowded, and he wanted to enjoy one last peaceful moment with his veteran subject.

  He tapped out the code on the electronic lock and eased the metal door open. The thousands of eyes glared at him from the walls.

  David was huddled on his cot, but his head lifted at the noise. “Mom?”

  “No,” Briggs said. “It’s Susan.”

  David pushed himself back hard enough to knock his skull against the wall. “You’re dead,” he said.

  “No, David. That’s the Seethe talking. That drug Dr. Briggs gave us. Remember?”

  The way David violently shook his head suggested that he did not, in fact, remember. “We killed you. Go away.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, David. I thought you liked me.”

  David balled his fists and jammed them hard against his eye sockets. “Go away, go away, go away!”

  “Okay, David. But our friends are coming. Roland and Alexis. And Wendy. Do you remember them?”

  “They’re dead, too-ooo,” David wailed.

  The poor man. If he’d had a stronger constitution, he might have resisted the Seethe. But the chemical worked on the primitive brain, and in that neurotoxic swamp of fear, there were few defenses. The world would find that out soon enough. It was time they all met the enemy within.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, David. Now get some rest, and if you’re a good boy, I’ll bring you some Halcyon soon and you can forget all about it.”

  David nodded and whimpered.

  Briggs closed the door. It was time to visit Anita.

  She wasn’t Wendy, but she would have to do for now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Do you think you can drive?” Alexis asked, looking at the final pill in her bottle and the apartment walls that now seemed like a prison.

  “Sure,” Roland said. “I’ve had a lot of practice driving drunk. This can’t be any harder.”

  He’d calmed down considerably, his jittery rage giving way to a placid, almost dull resignation in the wake of his final dose. Alexis studied the way he tended to Wendy, displaying a gentleness that masked the raging monster he’d been only ten minutes before.

  Despite her horror and shock, Alexis was impressed by the efficacy Briggs had achieved with his Halcyon formula. If the drug went legit, it could ease the suffering of many people, not just the military veterans that were the intended patients. Rape, car crashes, and random violence often created long-term debilitating effects on the victims, and if science could alter or suppress the impact of those memories, it would be a welcome act of compassion.

  But where was the boundary? How far into their heads could Halcyon reach, and how many memories, both good and bad, might be raked away with all the indifference of an orbitoclast jammed into an eye socket to peel away a frontal lobe?

  Wendy rubbed the circulation back into her wrists after Roland released her bonds.

  “He wants us to go back to the lab.”

  “What lab?” Roland said.

  “The Monkey House,” Alexis said.

  Roland looked from one to the other, then back to Wendy. “What’s she talking about?”

  Wendy stood shakily and took Roland’s hands. “Roland, you have to trust me.”

  He nodded without conviction. “I always trusted you, Wendy.”

  “He doesn’t remember,” Alexis said. “Not like we do.”

  “Are we going to forget, too?” Wendy asked.

  “We’re on staggered schedules,” Alexis said. “Briggs must have counted on one of us freaking out at any given time.”

  She was thirty-five minutes from her final dose. She didn’t want to think of the sprawling, open-ended nightmare that lay beyond that last pill.

  Briggs must have been so close back then. If Susan hadn’t fallen down those stairs, Briggs would have been hailed as a genius.

  Of course, the success would have been a keystone to Alexis’s own career, especially if she’d coauthored the research. The amygdala was the secret center where fear, sex, and food combined, a mysterious and complex stew of electrical connections and chemistry that offered endless opportunities.

  It should have been mine. And now I’ll lose everything.

  “So we go to this Monkey House,” Roland said. “Then what?”

  “We find Anita,” Wendy said.

  “This is getting confusing,” Roland said. “Who’s Anita?”

  “Roland, please,” Wendy began, face creasing in anger. Wendy was two hours from her final dose, and if the cortisol rush was already invading her, she might become a liability. And Alexis wasn’t sure she wanted more liabilities.

  We learned how to deal with liabilities ten years ago. You always have to get rid of the weak link in the chain.

  “Roland, I know this is hard to understand,” Alexis said. “But you’ve just taken a drug that suppresses traumatic memories. That’s why Wendy wants you to trust her.”

  He shook his head. “I feel more or less normal. There was…something in Cincinnati, and I had to come here.”

  “You didn’t come here,” Alexis said. “You were lured. Shepherded by Sebastian Briggs.”

  “You’ve lost me,” he said. “Monkey House, Briggs, Anita. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  Wendy limped to the wall, favoring her right leg. She removed a charcoal sketch pinned against the drywall with thumb tacks. She carried it to Roland, who peered at the nude figure.

  “That’s Anita,” Wendy said.

  “She was with us in the trials,” Alexis said. “You, me, Wendy, and Anita. And the real David Underwood. Whatever happened to David?”

  “Don’t forget Susan,” Wendy said.

  Bitch. Wendy Leng had always wanted the project to fail. First she’d tried to coerce Roland, and when that didn’t work, the little yellow slut had mated with Briggs. That was a violation of every ethical code in the book, and some that were unwritten.

  “We don’t talk about Susan,” Alexis said. “No matter what. Susan didn’t happen.”

  “Am I going to have to
tie you up?” Roland said to Alexis.

  She could feel the tension and anger gripping her face. “You’d have to carry me to the car, and the neighbors might notice. We don’t need cops.”

  Roland shrugged. “I have a feeling they’re after me for something anyway.”

  “Come on,” Wendy said, leading the way to the door. “We have to save her.”

  The early-evening sunlight cast ocher and orange light into the trees. Alexis shielded her eyes against the glare. The parking lot was like an alien landscape, the windows of the cars glittering needles of fire.

  “This way,” Roland said, pushing past Wendy. “But one of you better know the way to the lab or we’re lost.”

  “I do,” Alexis said. She glanced at her watch. “But only for eighteen more minutes or so.”

  She wasn’t sure how well Briggs had timed the doses. In the original trials, both Seethe and Halcyon had reaction times that varied by a couple of hours. And each subject had responded differently.

  If he’d been working on the formulas for ten years, there was no telling what sort of refinements he’d made. And part of her, a sick, grasping, ambitious part, knew she should have been there.

  Halcyon has evident value, but what about Seethe? Wouldn’t you love to play with that one? Exploring the most primitive impulses of the brain would open up limitless avenues of research and knowledge. What would the bioethics council think of you then, when you were the one pushing the boundaries?

  Fuck the council. I’d dose their asses and laugh while they Stooge-slapped each other with their journal publications.

  Oh, yes, “Seethe” had been a good name for it. She could almost feel the blood boiling in her veins.

  She looked at the last pill in her hand. All she had to do was get rid of Wendy and Roland, and she could have Wendy’s pill to herself. It might grant her a window of opportunity to synthesize the Halcyon and perhaps break its formula.

  Then it would be Alexis Morgan and not Sebastian Briggs who would change the world.

  And maybe I can trick Wendy and Roland into getting rid of Briggs for me.

  “Lex?” Wendy said.

  Alexis pulled herself from the murderous reverie and looked down the flight of steps. Roland was already behind the wheel of a blue sedan, and Wendy was standing beside the open passenger-side door.

  Time was already slipping away.

  But maybe there would be a better chance later.

  From the back seat, as Roland pulled onto the highway following her directions, Alexis asked Wendy for a piece of paper. “I don’t remember the road names, but I can draw a map from off the highway,” she said. “Then it will be up to you, Wendy. Roland and I won’t be much help.”

  Wendy turned, her frightened eyes just at the level of the seat. “What do we do when we get there?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Roland said. “We’ll think of something, babe.”

  Wendy touched his arm with affection, and it triggered a rush of feeling inside Alexis.

  Mark. How could I have forgotten him? Are the drugs already changing me that much?

  “Can I borrow your phone?” she asked Wendy.

  “No calls,” Roland said. “These people seem to be one step ahead of us, all the way. We can’t trust anybody right now.”

  “I need to call my husband.”

  Roland glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t know you were married.”

  He’d been at the wedding. They’d all been acquaintances then, if not friends, bound by a force they couldn’t define. Now Alexis understood their involuntary denial-the Halcyon had dulled their awareness, but the memory of the original trials must have hibernated deep in their unconsciousness. They were like survivors of a bloody war in which they still weren’t sure which side had won.

  “Mark can help us,” Alexis said. “He’s got sources at CRO that can-”

  Roland nearly ran off the highway as he slammed on the brakes and pulled to the shoulder of NC 501. Impatient homebound commuters blared horns as they passed.

  “Goddamn, Roland, you nearly killed us,” Wendy said, with the bickering familiarity of a long-time couple.

  But Roland was nearly over the seat, reaching for Alexis. She shrank away. The Halcyon was supposed to suppress the rage and fear, but cracks showed in Roland’s face.

  God, what if the compounds are merging? What if it all clashes together in a hot ball of crazy?

  “CRO?” Roland said. “Who the fuck is that?”

  Alexis shrank out of his reach, not trusting him. “You know. The pharmaceutical company.”

  “They killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl in Cincinnati.” Relief and confusion battled for control of Roland’s face, but neither could beat the anger that pinched and contorted it.

  “Keep moving,” Wendy said. “Lex is about to take her dose, and we’ll lose her.”

  “Those guys are in on it somehow.” Roland turned his attention back to the steering wheel and spun back into traffic. “Hell, it’s starting to feel like everybody’s in on it but us.”

  Mark? He couldn’t.

  But Alexis had images of him meeting with defense officials, lobbying the health committee, moving in mysterious orbits that were always a little too complicated to explain. She’d taken it as the dedication of a career-driven husband, but maybe her own career had clouded her perception.

  And one image froze in her mind, like a still frame from a movie that summed up the entire plot and theme: Mark shaking hands with Burchfield, an ambitious eagerness in both their eyes and a smug, conspiratorial air.

  She couldn’t be sure when she’d seen that. It could have been after a meeting of the bioethics council or it could be simply a fantasy, but it screamed at her so insistently that it became the truth.

  The bastard.

  She didn’t know what he’d done, but she was going to kill him. Wendy’s voice pulled her from the self-inflicted pain as she realized she’d been digging her fingernails into the flesh of her wrists hard enough to draw blood.

  She looked down at the wounds and found she was able to focus.

  “Two minutes until your pill,” Wendy said. “You’d better give me those directions.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Mark parked half a mile from the Monkey House property, pulling the car into the concealment of the roadside pines, whose late-afternoon shadows stretched toward darkness.

  He’d never been there, but he’d overhead the plans for its security system. It was one of a dozen facilities on the company books, although it had been mothballed and listed for sale since the 1980s. However, the price was too high, even for the booming Research Triangle Park, which meant no danger of a serious offer.

  The revived Monkey House project had been pitched as “Burchfield’s baby,” which suggested only a few close allies were in the loop. But maybe Burchfield was careless in his arrogance, and Burchfield was not without enemies who would be watching his every move.

  Enemies both in and out of government.

  The Glock had been almost a joke, one of those little macho tokens that were supposed to make corporate executives feel like big shots. Mark had even licensed his handgun, which diminished the locker-room points at the racquet club. He’d only had it out at the range three times. It had made him uneasy to even store it in the closet, and he never thought he’d actually be concealing it, fully loaded.

  He’d insisted on a newer model with an internal locking system, because he wasn’t comfortable with the series of trigger safeties. Now he only hoped he didn’t have to use the gun at all.

  Mark had dressed in leisure wear, taking a cue from the jogger. Workout freaks could be seen just about anywhere, in all hours and types of weather, without arousing suspicion. People merely turned away with slight resentment as they touched their own soft bellies and made useless, silent vows to get themselves fit.

  Mark didn’t run, though. He needed to get the lay of the land
first. Two compact research complexes stood to the west of the property, glassed entrances giving way to brick, windowless structures. Mark had seen dozens of them as a CRO exec, and the shiny prescription medications with inventive names often grew from well-lighted but tediously mundane operations in such featureless buildings.

  To the south, the orange glow of Raleigh was just visible against the horizon, a state capital that was more sprawling than metro. Sunset brushed the top of the pine forest to the west, an area that industrial development had yet to claim.

  CRO couldn’t have chosen a more remote, yet easily accessible, location, which made him wonder how far back they’d been planning the need for secrecy. There was a cartoon he’d once seen of a gorilla standing amid a crowd of briefcase-toting businessmen in suits, with the slogan, “If you want to hide, hide in plain sight.”

  He didn’t have any sort of plan besides finding Alexis and getting her out of there. He tried not to think about the fallout, but he was shocked at how little he now cared about his career at CRO.

  Alexis. When in hell did you become the most important thing in my life?

  The undergrowth scratched at his face, and vines that he hoped weren’t poison oak whipped at his ankles. The forest canopy blocked the dying rays of the sun, which slowed his progress but helped him feel less vulnerable and exposed. He found a road of crumbling pavement that appeared to run parallel to the property, and he followed it where the walking was easier. If any vehicles approached on the access road, he would be able to hear them and hide in the woods.

  A minute later, he came upon the sedan with the tinted windows parked just off the road, pulled into the weeds in a halfhearted attempt at concealment. It was a Lexus, not the kind of car someone would use for off-road exploration.

  So Briggs has got company besides me.

  The road widened ahead and Mark entered the woods again. Foot-high grass and small saplings thrust up through the asphalt beyond the fence, a sign that the complex had not been used much. The front gate was likely monitored, which meant he’d have to find a way through or over the fence.