Chronic fear

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Alexis figured she’d better just play along.

The pistol was in the seat between them, but she ignored it. Mark was in the gray T-shirt and baggy athletic pants he called his “Dirty Harry warm-ups,” and he wiped at his forehead as if cobwebs had collected there. He focused his gaze on the road ahead with an intensity that alarmed her.

“Class end early?” she asked.

“I was on call.”

“Is that part of the training?”

“Everything’s part of the training, honey.”

Even his voice was slightly off, a clipped monotone that he might have used if talking to himself. She glanced at the mock police radio that had been installed below the dash. Wires had been ripped from it and the handset was lying in the floorboard in three pieces.

“Nice of them to let you take the car home,” she said.

“We’re not going home.”

She glanced at him, but he didn’t blink. “I have to be back in the lab this afternoon.”

“They’ve been watching the house.”

“We don’t know that, Mark. We have a lot of research that corporate spies would love to get their greedy little paws on. I think the lab raid was about something else, not Seethe.”

“It’s always about Seethe.”

They had crossed Franklin and Rosemary streets and were heading into the suburban outskirts of Chapel Hill, where Colonial-style homes were tucked behind fences beneath old oaks and towering pines. They passed a county patrol car coming from the other direction, but it didn’t slow, much less follow them.

“Where are you going?” Alexis asked.

Mark’s hands tightened on the wheel until his knuckles were white, and he looked at her for the first time since he’d insisted she get in the car. “You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Where it all started.”

A second surge of panic rolled through her. A hundred stories and images fought for attention, but they were like broken strips of film reassembled at random: the original Monkey House trials, where she’d been nothing but a diligent graduate assistant; the trials themselves; and one bloody and battered face-had she been part of that?

No. Remember it the way it happened. You were Briggs’s assistant and that woman fell down the stairs and struck her head. A tragic accident and nothing more.

But the fresher waves of memories were harder to fend off. The events of a year ago had been carefully reconstructed, both externally and internally, and they stirred beneath a gently roiling surface. If Mark took her back to the Monkey House-or what was left of it-then they might rise in a psychotic tsunami and sweep away the levees and bulkheads of her defenses.

And nobody wanted the truth, least of all her.

“Mark, we can’t do that. They might think we know something.”

“Do we?”

“They’ve split us all up. Anita’s hanging by a thread. David’s locked away. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wendy and Roland are out of the way, too. Maybe their move to the mountains wasn’t voluntary.”

She glanced at the gun. She couldn’t risk provoking him in this state. The effects of Seethe could spin him in several unpredictable directions, and she realized how foolish she’d been in thinking she could treat the unknown.

I’m just as arrogant and deranged as Sebastian Briggs.

The realization stunned her because she’d been acting through a coherent scientific method. But if she couldn’t trust her own motives and thought processes, how could she be confident she was doing the right thing? Maybe Briggs had been his own guinea pig, the first subject of the Monkey House trials, and his contamination by Seethe had led to his later madness.

God, what if I’m running past the fun-house mirrors myself? What if Seethe and Halcyon changed me in ways I can’t even recognize?

“Lex?” Mark said, his tone normal but concerned. He took his right hand from the wheel and, for a moment, she had the image of him grabbing the gun and putting the barrel to her temple. Instead, he gave her a reassuring stroke on the forearm. “What do you remember about that night?”

“Just like we told each other. Briggs tricked us into coming back to the Monkey House and then he tried to kill us. But the federal agents got there first. There was an explosion and four people died.”

“And we took the last of Briggs’s Halcyon. They thought it was all destroyed, but we had it, didn’t we?”

Her pulse accelerated, and she wondered if the lie would somehow show on her face. “You flushed it. You didn’t trust anybody with it, even me.”

He looked at her, dangerously ignoring the lunchtime traffic on the highway. “I can’t remember. I might have given it to you. I love you, remember?”

He squeezed her arm with passion, but then the grip tightened until it hurt. She moaned and tried to pull free, but he dug his fingers into her soft flesh. He yanked her closer and the car swerved, causing car horns to blare around them.

“You’re sick, Mark. Seethe did something to you. You don’t see it, but you’re changing.”

He shoved her away and she bounced against the door. As he regained control of the cruiser, he took an exit ramp onto I-40, heading west.

“Why in hell should I believe you?” he said. “You think I don’t know you’ve been in bed with them ever since Briggs revived the experiments? You think I didn’t see the hunger in your eyes when you thought you could steal his work? And the goddamned government had you right in their sights, because they saw it, too. How goddamned hot for it you were.”

Her lungs hurt and she could barely force air into them. Paranoia. He’s cracking apart and he doesn’t even know it.

“You’re not making any sense, honey,” she said. “You said yourself the government was watching us.”

“No, not ‘us.’ Just me. You’re right about one thing. I’m changing, and I can’t think straight anymore.” He pounded the wheel with one fist. “If only I could think straight, I’d figure this out.”

The interstate traffic moved steadily, with consistent spacing. Otherwise, Mark’s erratic driving might have drawn more attention. As it was, the weaving combined with the car’s official appearance kept other motorists both well away and near the speed limit.

“Slow down and pull over,” Alexis coaxed. A neurochemist by profession, she’d had her share of psychology classes. The first step was to calm him and then maybe he’d listen to reason.

If the Seethe exposure had permanently affected him, then he’d become more unstable by the minute, especially if his amygdala was hyperstimulated by anger or fear. And her Halcyon supply was on the middle shelf of the refrigerator back home. If she could get him there in one piece, they might have a chance.

“I have to know what happened,” Mark said.

“The Monkey House is gone,” she said. “The explosion caused a toxic spill and they had to level it.”

“Maybe, but the truth is there somewhere.”

“But we don’t even know how to get there.”

“I do. I remember more than I ever admitted.” His face was dotted with sweat, his jaw tense, eyes wide and lit by a manic gleam.

“How could you remember, Mark? Halcyon wiped most of it away.”

“That’s what they all say.” He cast a demented grin. “But since you’ve been dosing me with Seethe, it’s all coming back to me.”

She covered her mouth with her hand. “Honey, honey, honey,” she whispered, scared and sad.

Signs of paranoid schizophrenia, manifesting as sociopathic rage. One of Briggs’s suspected outcomes of end-stage exposure.

And not just “suspected.” Desired.

They exited a side road into the Research Triangle Park, and the first of the glass-and-steel research and manufacturing facilities came into view.

“It all makes sense,” Mark said, and his newfound rationality was even more unsettling than his earlier rage. “You and CRO and the feds get rid of Briggs, who was in everybody’s way and uncontrollable. You take over, and Burchfield ties everything up with a nice bow so it looks like Seethe and Halcyon never happened. And the work goes on without a hitch, except now you’ve got all the backing you ever wanted and you’ve got your test monkey where you can keep an eye on him at all times.”

“No, Mark, that’s the Seethe talking-”

“Of course it’s the fucking Seethe talking! That’s what I am. That’s what I do. That’s what you’ve turned me into. You didn’t need a fucking Monkey House, all you needed was a monkey.”

His roar caused her to shrink away, and she considered opening the door and taking her chances on the grassy shoulder. But she was his only chance. She loved him so much, she could never abandon him when he needed her most.

Even if he didn’t know it.

When you loved somebody, you lifted anchor and rode the tsunami with them.

Mark drove with purpose, the route apparently still clear in his mind although she only dimly recognized the scenery. She wondered how many times he might have driven out here, seeking answers as the lesions in his brain pulled apart all the memories and experiences that had shaped his life and made him Mark Morgan.

Alexis risked a glance at his profile, the sheen of his moist forehead, his unkempt hair, his curled upper lip. How much of my husband is still left in there?

He fell silent after his eruption. His mood swings were getting more erratic by the minute. She’d miscalculated terribly. The Halcyon she’d been administering had not been helping him. Instead, it had only masked his deterioration and allowed her the placebo of helpfulness.

He turned off the highway onto a narrow, crumbling access road. Visible through the surrounding pine trees was a chain-link fence running parallel to the road. It was topped with barbed wire. Alexis strained to see beyond it, but the foliage was too thick.

Still, she knew they were approaching the Monkey House.

“I was telling the truth,” she said quietly, trying to sound reasonable.

“We’ll see about that.”

“If I was working for the government, do you think they’d let you kidnap me? Wouldn’t I be far too important to take the risk of your killing me? And would I have told you about the lab raid?”

Mark glanced in the rearview mirror. Then he shook his head. “Here’s the deal. They need you, but they need me, too. Right? You know how the brain processes it, the theory behind it, the molecular structure, but I am living and breathing the shit. I am Seethe.”

They came to a steel cable strung between two poles embedded in concrete. Beyond that was a gate set in the fence, tangled with honeysuckle and poison sumac. It hadn’t been used in a long time.

Not since the cleanup a year ago.

Mark stopped the car, collected the gun, and motioned her out. When they were both standing by the steel cable, Mark said, “In there’s where it all happened.”

“There’s nothing here, Mark.”

“Then you don’t need to worry, do you?” He knelt and rolled up the leg of his athletic pants, revealing a holster strapped inside his ankle. He slid the gun into it and smoothed his clothes.

Alexis followed him through the weed-choked entrance to the gate. Beyond it was a stand of scrub pines, and in a clearing was a blackened circle, a few piles of masonry rubble, and deep gouges in the red clay. A dented “No Trespassing” sign leaned to one side in the center of what had once been the Monkey House. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“That’s what happened to the people we used to be,” Mark said. “That’s where we died and didn’t know it.”