Liquid fear f-1 Read online

  She felt buoyant and energetic, though she knew it was serotonin and cortisol pumping though her body, kicking adrenaline from her kidneys. The neurochemicals could so easily turn, amplified by the Seethe, but the Halcyon seemed to be suppressing the worst of the impulses. She welcomed the nullifying tug of the cocktail, maintaining an academic awareness as she rode above her own sick impulses.

  She ran her hands along the equipment-the connecting pins, bolts, curved edges of blades, swivel joints, and loose steel plates with serrated edges from welding jobs. The tangle of farming equipment was knotted so tightly that she couldn’t extricate any pieces, so she was forced to keep going toward the sound of the voices.

  Alexis had no plan, only determination.

  How many of us were there?

  Mark, Roland, Wendy…

  Were there others?

  Susan?

  “Susan?” she said aloud. “Are you here?”

  She bumped into a wobbling wire-framed cage, and something heavy fell, crashing to the floor inches in front of her feet.

  She scooped it up. It felt like a plow blade, about eight inches long, with a short metal tube on top where it attached to the frame.

  Alexis swung it like a battle ax.

  It felt goddamned good.

  And familiar.

  “All right, Doc, where are the keys?” the man was saying.

  “Put that away, Kleingarten,” Briggs said. “You kill me, you don’t get anything.”

  “I ain’t killing unless I have to.”

  Alexis remembered the man had a gun. Was it last night, or ten years ago? She couldn’t be sure.

  All she knew was that Briggs was the boss. Briggs had the pills, and she needed pills.

  Pills for what?

  Dr. Sebastian Briggs had something she craved. An image flashed through her mind, a memory or a fantasy. A computerized image of the compound’s cellular structure.

  It should have been hers. She was there. And if…whatever happened…hadn’t happened, she would have joined the ranks of those who’d made revolutionary leaps in science. Pasteur, Curie, Salk. Except instead of curing diseases of the body, she’d have healed the mind.

  The most broken part of the human race.

  Alexis crawled under a long conveyor belt, careful not to let the plow piece drag on the concrete and give her away. Her heart thudded and the fine hair on the back of her neck prickled.

  Instinct.

  Despite all her study, all her research, all her books and papers and experiments, she’d not learned a thing. There was no higher mind. It always came down to kill or be killed.

  And Briggs needed to die.

  “You need to die,” Kleingarten was saying, not twenty feet from her. “But not right now. Tell me where you keep all your bottles of witch’s brew. Or is it barrels? To get a U.S. senator down here, you must have some major inventory.”

  Alexis peered between two oversized tractor tires, the rotted rubber mingling with the chemicals, dust, and petroleum of the factory air. Kleingarten’s bulky form was between her and Briggs, silhouetted by the dim glow of high-tech equipment. When he moved one arm, the barrel of his gun glinted.

  The bank of monitors spotlighted Briggs as if he were a stand-up comedian. He stood in his cage, shirt open, hair unkempt, seemingly calm despite the gun pointed at him. Behind him, Wendy was splayed in a chair, naked except for her panties circling one ankle.

  The scene brought back memories of another time, but it wasn’t a cage, it was a university office, a sunlit room, when Alexis had swung open the door to report on Halcyon only to find Briggs and Wendy writhing on his desk. She’d slipped out without Wendy noticing, but Briggs had heard the door and had flashed Alexis a smirk as he thrust inside his willing, moaning partner.

  This could be you, that smirk had said. And Alexis had been tempted. Because that would have bought her access to his research, and the secrets would be hers.

  But her anger at Briggs and disgust at Wendy shifted to something else when she saw what was playing on the monitor behind them.

  Wendy and Roland held Susan’s naked, bloody body.

  And there was Alexis, on the screen, approaching them, snarling, face twisted, eyes glittering.

  In her hand was a jagged piece of curved metal She squeezed the handle of the broken plow blade.

  Almost like this one.

  But what’s happening? Susan’s here now, so how could she be on TV?

  “Turn it off, Doc,” Kleingarten said. “It’s making me want to puke.”

  “We learn from the mistakes of the past,” Briggs said. Wendy moaned, stroking one of her breasts.

  On the screen, Alexis lifted the weapon.

  Under the conveyor belt, she raked the plow blade across her forearm, the searing stripe of pain bringing a moment of clarity.

  M ark was right. Pain worked.

  On screen, drops of blood fell from her weapon, Roland’s and Wendy’s faces were stretched and bright with anticipation, Susan’s eyes widened as she denied what was about to happen.

  It really happened.

  Before the jagged metal fell, the screen exploded, and the gunshot boomed throughout the factory. Briggs shouted, and Wendy stirred in the chair but didn’t get up.

  I was supposed to do something.

  Kill somebody.

  Yeah.

  She eased out from beneath the conveyor belt, took five silent steps forward as the shot’s echo died away, and swung the plow hard and high. Kleingarten was fixated on Briggs and the shattered monitor, and he was likely deaf from the resonating din. Or else he’d forgotten he was trapped in a mechanical graveyard with a bunch of rampaging monkeys.

  Either way, he was vulnerable, and the vulnerable always died first.

  The tip of the plow dug deep into the base of his skull, just at the top of his spinal column. He barked an “Urp” and spouted a couple of gushes of blood as he pitched forward.

  She hauled the blade out of him and lifted it again, to smash him and smash him “Lex!”

  She froze, blinking and trembling. “Mark?”

  “You’re Seething, remember?”

  Pain. Something I’m supposed to remember about pain…

  She looked at the dim outline of the makeshift ax in her hand. A clot of brain and hair clung to its tip.

  Then Mark had her, and she struggled to raise the ax-He bit me, the motherfucker! — and then he slapped her hard and she dropped the weapon. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

  “Lex! Where’s the other pill?”

  “They killed Susan.”

  “You killed her, Alexis,” Briggs said. “You haven’t lost your magic touch.”

  Mark slapped her again, and she came around, not all the way, but enough to remember where she was. Mark jammed his hand in her pocket and pulled out the pill bottle, flipping the cap away.

  She thought she was supposed to do something, but all she could think about was the lurid home movie Briggs had made, and how they’d all staged a murder scene.

  What a weird fucking research project. Pretend to kill somebody so Briggs could measure their neurochemical activity.

  Mark shoved the pill in her mouth and ordered her to swallow it.

  Mark was right about the pain, so maybe he was right about this.

  She swallowed, and he held her as she glanced at the cage. Briggs stood behind Wendy, who looked lost in another world, or in some twisted fantasy Briggs might have planted.

  On some of the smaller video monitors, shapes moved and flitted.

  More people?

  “It’s okay, honey,” Mark whispered, holding her close. “It hurts, but it’s okay. It’s up to you now.”

  “Turn on the goddamned lights and open the door,” Roland said. “Nobody else move.”

  He held Kleingarten’s gun in his fist, and Alexis wished she’d killed him while she had the chance.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Roland was sick of these fuckers.

>   He didn’t know how many bullets the gun held, but he figured there were plenty enough for all.

  He remembered everything now. Especially how that bitch Alexis had made him take the pills. Telling him forgetting was a good thing.

  No, he’d rather feel alive, even if the truth hurt.

  “Do it!” he yelled at Briggs. “I’m not like your other monkeys. I don’t jump every time you slip them the banana.”

  “Easy, Roland,” Briggs said, and Roland was pleased the doctor sounded a little scared. The smug bastard’s cool was only an inch deep, about as far as his shriveled little pecker could penetrate.

  Roland’s finger tightened around the trigger as Wendy moaned, oblivious to everything. The sight of her sweat-slick skin confused him, and he didn’t like confusion. No, he was a fucking monkey with a hard-on for revenge.

  Roland fired, and Briggs’s computer exploded.

  “My data!” Briggs yelled.

  “Open!” Roland roared as the report echoed off the concrete walls.

  “Okay,” Briggs said, unconsciously pulling his shirt closed as if that would offer protection from a bullet. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a key ring, digging a key into the hasp lock.

  Roland swiveled the gun at the Morgans, but they were staying put, raking at each other’s wounds, bleeding and crazed in the faint light.

  The lock popped free and Briggs swung the door open. “Now the lights,” Roland said.

  He felt great, better than he had in years. Seethe was like booze and sex and cocaine rolled into one. Why the fuck was that bitch Alexis trying to keep it from them? Probably wanted it all to herself.

  Probably wanted to fuck Briggs, too.

  Hell, everybody else was.

  Wendy.

  “Turn on the lights,” Roland said, not even bothering to raise his voice. As Briggs worked the switches on the security system, Roland entered the creepy cage and knelt beside Wendy’s chair.

  “I know what happens when you lose control,” Roland said to the beautiful woman. “Hell, that’s the story of my life.”

  Her eyelids fluttered. “Roland?”

  “Yeah, babe. We’re getting out of here.”

  “Don’t do it, Roland,” Alexis said. “We need Halcyon or we’re going to do terrible things, and remember all of this. And what we did to Susan.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You’re going to lose it. You might Seethe forever.”

  “I’ve been Seething since before I was born. This is just how God made me, and that’s goddamned good enough for me.”

  The lights began blinking on, stinging Roland’s eyes. All their faces were pale. He picked up Wendy’s clothes and dropped them on her lap.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Make Briggs give us the Halcyon,” Alexis said, standing outside the cage and holding her husband with fierce desperation. “You can go crazy if you want, but we still have to deal with this.”

  Roland felt the rage flood him, and he saw Susan’s bruised and blood-spattered body, and then he imagined Alexis with a bright red hole in the middle of her forehead.

  But you can’t bury the past. Halcyon just helps you lie to yourself, and I already know how to do that.

  But he could tell he was getting angry, so he kicked the base of Wendy’s chair. He grunted in pain. He might have broken his big toe, but it felt good.

  That was the trick behind it all. God invented suffering because the world had no meaning without it. And without pain, you had no need for God, because you didn’t need relief. Pain served a higher purpose, maybe the only purpose.

  And pain felt kind of good when you got used it.

  At least it was always there when you needed it.

  “All right, Briggs, give them their monkey juice, before I get tired of playing Mr. Nice Guy,” he said, his jaws tight.

  Briggs moved to an old industrial locker beneath his computer and fumbled with the key. He opened it and brought out a plastic bottle about the size of a quart jar.

  “That other stuff, too,” Roland said, loving his pain. “The Seethe.”

  Briggs brought out a pint of clear liquid in a glass jar.

  “That’s all?” Alexis said.

  “He’s got to have more,” Mark said. “He promised Burchfield enough Seethe to dose an army.”

  “You think this is easy?” Briggs said. “You, better than anybody, Alexis, should know you don’t just cook up this stuff in a bathtub like a meth redneck.” He lifted his hand to indicate the equipment in his office. “Look what I’ve had to work with. And now my data’s destroyed. I’ll have to reconstruct it from memory.”

  “I think you’re holding out,” Roland said. “And I don’t give a shit who ends up with it, as long as it isn’t you, and as long as you never put any more of it into Wendy.”

  “He’s got more,” Mark said.

  “CRO can shove it up their asses,” Roland said, forcing himself to focus on Wendy, who was struggling to slide one slim leg into her pants. “Now, give me the key to the front door and open the gate, and if I have to come back here, I’m going to be a little unhappy.”

  His heart felt like a bottomless black hole. But that was okay. It was deep enough to swallow anything.

  He took the key from Briggs and put his free arm around Wendy. “Come on, babe.”

  They limped a few steps in the direction of the main entrance, Roland walking backwards. He debated locking the three people in Briggs’s cage, and his money would be on Alexis to be the last one standing. That was one cunning bitch.

  “Look out!” Alexis yelled, and he dodged on instinct.

  Briggs was a blur of movement, and the glass jar hit Roland’s shoulder and bounced to the floor, shattering, its liquid seeping out and soaking into the concrete. Roland pulled the trigger twice before he even thought about it.

  Briggs gave a grin, winked at Wendy, and then he collapsed. The shirt hadn’t stopped bullets after all.

  The plastic bottle busted open as Briggs dropped it, and dozens of green pills rolled across the floor. One crunched under Roland’s foot as he escorted Wendy past the rusting equipment.

  He thought about collecting a few pills, but decided he’d rather take his chances with madness rather than the sick brain candy of Dr. Sebastian Briggs.

  “Did you kill somebody?” Wendy murmured.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

  One thing he did remember. He sure as hell wasn’t David Underwood.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Alexis frantically gathered the pills as they rolled across the floor.

  She couldn’t believe this was all the Halcyon Briggs had manufactured. She fought an urge to kick his sorry corpse.

  “My head’s clearing a little,” Mark said. “But my tooth is killing me.”

  “The gas has lower efficacy than the other forms. You’ll make it.”

  “Yes, Dr. Morgan.”

  “Help me pick up these pills.”

  “I have to let the others out first. If they haven’t eaten each other’s livers, that is.”

  “That’s not funny.” She glanced at the bloody plow blade.

  “How are you doing? Is the Halcyon working?”

  “Barely enough.” You fucker. You’ll probably tell CRO everything. And all this could be mine.

  “You look okay. I can leave you alone for a minute, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  As Mark jogged off, she retrieved the plastic bottle and began dropping pills in it-tick tick tick.

  She wondered how long the Seethe would run through her system without the Halcyon suppressing it. It could be hours, or it could be days-or maybe the rest of her life. As far as she could tell, she was the only one who’d been injected with the serum form, though God only knew what David Underwood had gone through or how long he’d been imprisoned in the Monkey House.

>   Briggs probably had a backup hard drive somewhere. And he’d probably been too paranoid to move data off-site, so it would be here somewhere.

  She glanced at his face and the blank eyes staring past the world. Then again, secrets to Seethe and Halcyon might be locked in the dead vault of his brain.

  Her eyes kept going to the plow blade and she recalled how it had felt driving the tip through Kleingarten’s skull. She’d never felt so alive and powerful. And she could have that feeling a long time, if she cracked the formula.

  Fear is its own kind of pleasure. Up there, it all gets cross-wired.

  A few of the pills had rolled into the pool of Sebastian Briggs’s blood. She fished them out, wiping them one by one, and slipped them into her pocket. She’d retrieved most of the pills by the time the others returned.

  Anita stood between Burchfield and an unsettled Wallace Forsyth. Mark was supporting a pale skeleton she recognized as David.

  “You killed Susan,” David said, upon recognizing her.

  Alexis glanced at the blade. As the Halcyon eased, she didn’t want this transitional feeling to end-that cliff edge of awareness, the black abyss on one side and the peaceful plateau of forgetfulness on the other.

  Two kinds of oblivion.

  No choice, really.

  “No,” she said. “She died of fright.”

  Anita nodded, closing a couple of buttons on her blouse with shaking fingers. “Yuh…yeah. It was a fake experiment, David. It was make-believe.”

  Burchfield looked subdued and embarrassed. He cleared his throat and attempted to sound authoritative, but he failed. “This is official property of the U.S. government, Dr. Morgan.”

  “Shut up, Senator,” Mark said, pointing to the monitor bank. “The cameras recorded your behavior. Fox News will love it.”

  “Are you threatening me, Morgan?”

  “Just playing by your rules.”

  “Where is it?” Wallace Forsyth said in his tremulous, hoarse voice. He sounded a century old. “Where’s the Seethe?”

  It’s mine, you bastard, and you better put the fear of God in you, or I’ll get there first.