Chronic fear

CHAPTER THIRTY

Mark’s headache was getting worse.

Luckily, traffic thinned as they left the interstate and began the winding climb up into the mountains, but every sweep of oncoming headlights hit him like a sheet of battery acid laced with jalapeno. Closing his eyes didn’t help, and he couldn’t risk encasing his head in a jacket to muffle the external stimuli.

No, that’s just what they would want me to do. I have to stay awake.

Alexis glanced from the driver’s side once in a while, but Wallace Forsyth, who was in the passenger’s seat, hadn’t spoken in the past hour. In the seat behind them, Mark wondered if they’d devised some plot behind his back, perhaps to wait until he was asleep and take the gun away.

“You look bad, honey,” Alexis said to his reflection in the rearview. She was calm, but the greenish dashboard lights revealed the strain in her eyes.

“I am bad,” he said. “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“Please take the Halcyon.”

“Right. Like I’d trust something cooked up by your hippie sidekick?”

“No, it’s not like that,” she said, and her pleading tone disgusted him.

Amazing how you could live with someone, sleep with someone, for years and then one day realize you didn’t know a thing about them. The stranger you loved was the strangest of all.

“What’s it like, then, Lex? What’s the latest reality you’re trying to pitch?”

She glanced at Forsyth. It was just a glance, and though Mark could only see the back of her head and a faint flick of her eyes in the mirror, he knew.

“You haven’t been the same since the Monkey House,” she said. “The Seethe exposure has been eating away at you. The rage, the headaches, the paranoia. I know it’s hard for you to see from the inside, but it’s happening.”

“Oh, yes. Nice sales pitch. Such sincerity. And you want me to see a shrink, right? Get help just like Anita did.” He leaned forward, letting the barrel of his Glock rest on top of the front seat. “But we know what happened to Anita, right?”

“She was different.”

Mark punched the gun against the seat, causing Forsyth to jerk a little. “Of course she was. Because she wasn’t lucky enough to be under the care of Dr. Alexis Morgan. The only one besides the dear dead Sebastian Briggs who is an expert on Seethe and Halcyon.”

“We’ve never had Seethe.”

“Why should I believe you? You lied to me about hiding Halcyon, you never told me you developed it, and you lied to me about the CIA stealing your research.”

Forsyth finally spoke. “She didn’t know we were after it.”

Mark laughed, and the air rushing up from his abdomen was sour and painful. “You’ve probably been working with her since the bioethics council. But it’s all going to fall apart soon. The two of you have been planning this little reunion for quite a while, I’m sure. But I’m crashing the fucking party.”

Alexis slowed the car, and Mark noticed they’d entered the rural foothills, the two-lane highway flanked by tall hardwoods, an occasional farmhouse dotting the side of the road. Mark had spent summer vacations in these mountains as a child, swimming on Watauga Lake, riding the Tweetsie Railroad steam train, and hiking on Grandfather Mountain. In the night, the destination took on a foreboding aspect, as if all the secrets of the Appalachian Mountains had grown deeper with no one looking.

“How much farther?” Mark asked.

“Maybe two hours. It’s beside the Unegama National Wilderness Area.”

So Roland and Wendy had found a hollow hidden deep in the land of legend. That made sense, considering they had played hide-and-seek in the Monkey House so well. And they would be waiting, because all of them had a hand in it. Sure, his wife was the one who’d been dosing him with Seethe, but they were all watching, waiting, eager for him to crack.

But I’m not going to crack. I’m the only one who remembers, and if I’m gone, they win, Burchfield wins, CRO wins, and Seethe wins. I can’t let that happen.

Mark shoved Forsyth’s shoulder. “So, what do you think of the doctor’s theory? If Seethe is causing us to lose it, why are you so rational?”

“I draw my strength from the Lord,” Forsyth said, evenly and quietly, barely audible over the hum of the tires on asphalt.

“If you’ve got a direct line to God, then tell me this: why would He turn Seethe loose on the world?”

“It was prophecy.” Forsyth continued staring straight ahead, not giving in to the exhaustion that probably haunted his old bones. “‘And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.’”

“Falling back on the Bible. The coward’s way out.”

“I can’t judge your soul, Mark. But that day is coming.”

“So, what do you think, honey?” Mark said to Alexis. “Could Seethe be the cause of his religious delusions?”

“Seethe creates individualized responses, based on unique brain chemistry-”

“Shut up and give me the vial.”

“Are you going to dump it?”

“After what happened in the Monkey House, I’d say you’re the last person who should be dispensing little pills.”

“What you said happened…it didn’t happen.”

“You killed him, Lex. You bashed his brains in with a hunk of metal. I saw it. Hell, I see it almost every time I close my eyes.”

She shook her head. Forsyth reached across the front seat and touched her arm, a conspiratorial motion that caused rage to ripple up Mark’s spine.

“Forgive him, for he knows not what he does,” Forsyth said.

Mark put the tip of the barrel against the top of his wife’s spine. “Give me the vial.”

She slowed the car, fished it from her pocket, and held it up. He snatched it away and flicked on the dome light. He shook it once, like a maraca, and struggled with the lid.

“Goddamned childproof caps.”

Finally, he popped it open. Forsyth had turned and was looking over the seat at him. Alexis kept glancing in the rearview.

Mark rolled a few pills into the palm of his hand. They were larger than the Briggs concoction, unmarked, with no hard coating. They were plain white and looked as if they would crumble if he squeezed them.

As a drug-company executive, he hadn’t spent much time on the production end, but pills with such shoddy development were considered counterfeits. They were dangerous primarily because pills might cost only pennies to make, but drug companies claimed they need huge markups to offset the cost of research. Companies like CRO feared only one thing-cheap and plentiful drugs that did the job. Luckily, Congressional members like Burchfield were only too happy to adopt protectionist policies while slipping campaign contributions into their war chests.

But the politics of greed were far removed from this simple choice before him. Did he trust his wife, or did he believe what his admittedly confused mind was telling him?

He rolled down the window, and the moist rush of the mountain air filled the car. He could fling the pills into the ditch and be done with them, at least until Darrell Silver cooked up another batch.

But he’d already tried to push Halcyon out of his life. He seemed intricately bound to it, a junkie who even in abstinence was defined by his habit.

If Alexis had dosed him with Seethe, wasn’t Halcyon the only alternative besides madness?

“I love you, Mark,” Alexis said.

What’s behind door number three?

As far as he could tell, he loved her in return.

And if he could think clearly, maybe he could rediscover what love meant.

And wasn’t that worth a little risk?

He slipped one of the pills into his mouth.